Anna and the King of Siam

by Margaret Landon

  “Well, well, how interesting!” said Phya Phrom Borirak, leaning forward with a sardonic expression. “If your friends know nothing about your escape, perhaps you’ll tell us exactly what did happen.”

  Tuptim looked at him with a direct simplicity that ignored his tone. “And if I tell you the truth, will you believe me and judge me accordingly?”

  The judge scowled. “I’ll order the bastinado applied to your back, if you don’t confess your crime right away,” he retorted with savage emphasis.

  Tuptim did not speak immediately. By the expression in her eyes and the alternate flushing and paling of her face it was evident to Anna that she was debating whether to make a full confession or not. Was there any use? Anna could almost read her thoughts. Phya Phrom’s cynical face seemed to defy her to convince him of the most elementary truth. Why try at all? What was there to be gained? Finally, with an air of decision, she turned toward Khun Thao Ap and addressed her.

  “My lady, Khun Phra Palat had nothing to do with my escape from the Palace. It’s true, as Simla says, that I admired him very much, but it’s also true that he didn’t know it. I had never spoken to him or communicated with him in any way while I was in the Palace. He didn’t know anything about my escape from the Palace until I was found in the monastery yesterday morning. Whatever I have done, he hasn’t sinned against his vows in any way, gracious lady. He is completely innocent! All the guilt is my own, as I shall tell you. I planned and carried out my escape myself without any help from people outside the walls because I was unhappy in the Palace and wanted to be free again. That was all.

  “I’ve always loved to be free. I hated to be locked behind these high walls and told to do this and go there and come here and do that. And sometimes in the night I couldn’t sleep for the misery of it. I would get up from my bed and begin to pray. When I prostrated myself before my image of Somdet Phra Buddha, the Chao, in the stillness of the night, thoughts of escaping from the Palace would come to my mind and distract me from my devotions. In the end I thought they were the voice of the holy Buddha himself, and they took complete possession of me. I couldn’t think of anything else. I came to believe that all I had to do was obey, and after that I began to plan ways of getting out. I didn’t talk about it with anybody, not even Maprang and Simla. And one night I thought the holy Buddha himself showed me how I could get away. So a few mornings later I dressed myself as a novice, and shaved off my hair and eyebrows—”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere!” interrupted Phya Phrom with satisfaction. “That’s what we want to hear. Tell us who bought the priest’s robes for you and smuggled them into the Palace! Was it your mother, or one of your servants, or your sister? And who shaved your hair and eyebrows? Speak a little louder, too!”

  Tuptim turned to look at the venal face of the judge, disdain coloring her dignity. “My lord,” she replied firmly, “I’m telling you what I did myself and not what anyone else did. I’m speaking the entire truth so far as it relates to myself. Beyond that I cannot and will not go!” A sudden flush spread over her face, making it very lovely.

  A little gasp ran through the courtroom. The judge shrugged his shoulders. “Go on, go on,” he urged. “Tell your story in your own way, then. We’ll find a means of making you tell us all we want to know in plenty of time.”

  “Dek nak!” (She is very young!) Khun Thao Ap spoke. Her tone was mild, but there was reproof in the words. It was obvious that the other judge had decided the case so far as Tuptim was concerned; without the evidence, he had found her guilty, and wanted to get on with the discovery of her accomplices.

  The sunlight streaming across the hall fell just behind Tuptim, revealing the exquisite transparency of her olive skin. With a look even more thoughtful and serene than before she continued: “At five o’clock that morning when the priests were admitted to the Palace, I crawled out of my room and joined the procession as it passed near my street on its way to receive the royal alms. No one saw me but Simla, and even she didn’t recognize me. She only looked wonderingly at me as if to ask why a priest came so near the houses of the Choms.”

  “That’s true,” Simla broke in eagerly. “I never even knew that Tuptim had run away until Khun Yai sent to ask why she was absent from duty so long, and then I began to think about the young priest I’d seen that morning near her house, and I began to wonder if he had something to do with her disappearance, but I didn’t guess that it was Tuptim herself. I saw her plainly, too, but without her hair she didn’t look at all like herself. So I don’t see how you can blame me for not knowing that it was she. I don’t think anyone could possibly have guessed. And when the women searched our houses for Tuptim I was afraid to say anything about the priest I had seen near her house for fear we’d be accused of knowing something about her escape, or maybe of helping her get away.”

  Tuptim waited patiently for Simla to be through speaking and then continued: “In a few minutes I was outside the Palace gates. It was so easy that I was more sure than ever the holy Buddha himself was guiding me. But after I was out and on the public road I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t go home because I knew that my home would be watched. I hadn’t planned anything except how to get out of the Palace. I stood a few minutes thinking until I was afraid that people would stare at me and suspect something, and then I went straight to Wat Rachapradit and sat down at the gate. I sat there all day trying to decide what to do next. People came and went but no one paid any attention to me. Toward evening the great Chao Khun Sa came out and saw me. He asked me who I was and what I was doing. I didn’t know what to say and so I begged him to let me become his disciple and live in the monastery and wait upon him. ‘Whose disciple are you now, child?’ he asked kindly. And I began to cry because I couldn’t think how to answer. I didn’t want to deceive the holy man and of course I couldn’t tell him the truth. He turned to the priests who were following him and told Phra Palat to take me under his charge and instruct me faithfully in all the doctrines of Buddha. I hadn’t planned it. I hadn’t planned anything. How could I?”

  Her look asked Khun Thao Ap to believe this one incredible coincidence. “If you will ask his lordship, Chao Khun Sa,” she continued, “he will tell you that I didn’t ask to become a disciple of Khun Phra Palat, but only to become his servant and wait upon him. I don’t know why he assigned me to Phra Palat, except that Phra Palat is one of his favorite pupils. It seemed so very strange. But I only thought that the holy Buddha’s voice that seemed to tell me how to escape, had guided the great abbot in this also, and I was all the more sure that what I had done was right.”

  Her voice was very low, and there was a catch in it. “Then Phra Palat took me to the cell in the monastery,” she went on, “where he lived with several other nens whom he was teaching. But he didn’t recognize me. Not then or ever.” She hesitated briefly, and continued. “Not even though he had known me since he was a boy. His name used to be Daeng, and I had been betrothed to him by my family before I was brought to the Palace. But still he didn’t know me with my hair shaved off and in the yellow robes. He had put me out of his mind completely, anyway, when I was presented to the King. If he ever thought of me at all, he thought of me as gone forever beyond the wall of the Inside. After I was sent to the King, he entered the priesthood, and he studied so faithfully that he became the favorite disciple of Chao Khun Sa.”

  At the unexpected revelation of Tuptim’s former connection with the priest several of the women judges threw up their hands in astonishment, and the men grinned maliciously, displaying gums red with betel juice. Anna wondered briefly if Tuptim had not made a tactical error in being so frank. To her the story became more plausible by this admission, rather than less so, but apparently not to those who were to determine the girl’s fate. Tuptim saw instantly the line their thoughts had taken. Her lips, already pale, quivered.

  “Phra Palat,” she continued with simple earnestness, “whom you have condemned to torture and death, hasn’t sinned. He is innocent
of the sin you are accusing him of in your minds and innocent of complicity in my escape. I have told you, and I tell you again, that the sin was mine, and mine alone! I knew that I was a woman, but he never knew! If I had known all the things he taught me since I became his disciple, I couldn’t have done what I did. I wouldn’t have run away from the Palace. I know now it was wrong and that it was my own heart that whispered to me to escape and not the voice of the Buddha. I would have tried, O gracious lady, believe me, I would have really tried to learn to endure my life. I grew quiet and happy because I was near him, and he taught us every day. I can say the whole of the Divine Law by heart. Ask his other disciples who were with me and they will tell you that I was always modest and humble, and that he paid no more attention to me than to any of them. We slept at his feet at night. They didn’t know that I was a woman, and do you think I could have deceived them, living there in the same room with them, if I hadn’t deceived him also? Call them and let them testify to his innocence of the crime of which he is accused! Believe me, gracious lady, I no longer wanted to be his wife, or to be anything to him at all, but only to be near him where he could teach me.

  “Then on Sunday morning those men,” she pointed to the two priests who still sat apart, “came to the cell to see Phra Palat, and it happened that I had overslept. The other novices had all gone out with the priest when I awoke. I got up thinking I was alone and began to arrange my robes when I heard a low, chuckling laugh. I turned and faced them, and instantly I felt that I was degraded forever.

  “Believe me, most honored lady,” continued Tuptim, growing more eloquent as she became more earnest, “I was guilty when I fled from my master, the King. That is true. I confess it freely. I am ready to suffer for it. But I never even contemplated the sin that I am accused of by those men. I knew that I was innocent of it and I begged them to let me leave the temple and hide myself, anywhere, anywhere, if they would only keep my secret. I told them that Khun Phra Palat had no idea who I was, or that I was a woman and that the other novices didn’t know either. But they only laughed and jeered at me. I fell on my knees at their feet and implored them, in the name of all that is holy and sacred, to keep my secret and let me go before the priest and the novices came back, so that none of them would be involved in what was my sin alone. But they only laughed louder than ever and mocked me more coarsely. They call themselves disciples of the Merciful One, but they would not be merciful. Not even for the sake of their friend.” Here she gasped for breath, while two large tears coursed down her cheeks. She gritted her teeth. “And then I defied them, and I still defy them for their foul thoughts and their cruel hearts!” She shook her manacled hands at the two priests.

  They looked at her unmoved, chewing their betel like cattle incapable of emotion. The judges listened in silence, an air of amused incredulity on the faces of several. Only Khun Thao Ap’s face retained its habitual sadness. She seemed to listen without scorn or prejudice, as if weighing Tuptim’s words in the scale of her mind. The court scribes were writing rapidly, to keep up with the flow of words.

  The girl was pale as she went on in a low tone: “Just then Phra Palat and his other disciples came back from their morning ablutions. I crawled to his feet and confessed that I was Tuptim. He recoiled from me to the end of the cell as if the earth had quaked beneath him. Anyone could have seen that he hadn’t the faintest idea who I was. I lay prostrate on the floor of the cell, overwhelmed with horror at the thought of what I had done to him. In a moment he came back close to me. He was weeping bitterly himself, but he begged me not to cry any more. The sight of his tears made me feel as if I were being swallowed up in a great black abyss. It was my selfishness that had brought him to this. Because I hadn’t thought, because I had done what I had done, had run away from the Palace and stayed on in the monastery when I could easily have gone somewhere else, I had ruined the life he had built for himself. He tried to comfort me as I lay there weeping. He said, ‘Tuptim, what you did was wrong. But don’t be afraid any more. We’re innocent. And for the sake of your love for me I’m willing to suffer even death for you.’” The room was hushed as the girl ended simply, “That is the whole truth.”

  Phya Phrom spat, a long stream of betel juice, red as blood. He spoke derisively. “Well, well, well. A pretty story, and you told it beautifully! Only nobody believes you, of course.” He spat again. “Now let’s go back to the beginning. Suppose you tell us who shaved off your hair and eyebrows, and brought that priest’s robe into the Palace for you.”

  The grandeur of the fragile childlike woman as she folded her chained hands across her breast to still it and replied, “I will not!” took Anna’s breath away. She had drawn near to Tuptim when she began her narrative, in order not to miss any of it. She had been so absorbed in it, and in admiration of Tuptim’s fearlessness, that she had been rooted to the spot, standing there mechanically. But the effect of Tuptim’s answer was startling. It went through the courtroom like a trumpet call, and it brought Anna suddenly to a full appreciation of the scene before her.

  Here was a girl of sixteen hurling defiance at the judges, knowingly, at her own risk, in an effort to save the man she loved and, no doubt, to shield Phim, her slave. Anna was never to think of the verse in the Bible, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” without seeing Tuptim so before her accusers. For they were her accusers, and not her judges. To make such a reply was to accept death. And not only death, but all the agonies of cunning and merciless torture. Tuptim knew it. Her refusal so startled the assembly that for a moment there was profound silence. The beauty and majesty of her slight figure facing the sensual men, the cold-faced women, were awe-inspiring.

  Then anger flamed in Phya Phrom’s face. “Strip her and give her thirty blows with the lash,” he shouted in a voice hoarse with fury. And to Anna’s shocked surprise Khun Thao Ap looked calmly on, not dissenting. Could she possibly be convinced of Tuptim’s guilt, or was she silent out of deference to Phya Phrom? Wouldn’t she insist that other witnesses be called, the novices who had lived in the cell with Tuptim, Chao Khun Sa, priests from adjoining cells? Surely she couldn’t shut her mind to the possibility that Tuptim was telling the truth!

  Before the Amazons could carry out the order there was an interruption. The crowd that had gathered thick about the windows and doors opened, and a litter borne by two men was brought into the hall. On it lay the mutilated form of the priest, Palat, who had just undergone torture in order to make him confess his guilt and that of Tuptim. But as the records of the ecclesiastical court stated, “It was not possible to elicit from him even an indication that he had anything to confess.” His priestly robes had been taken from him, and he was dressed like an ordinary layman, except that his hair and eyebrows were closely shaven. They laid him down beside Tuptim, hoping that the sight of her under torture would induce him to make some damaging admission.

  The next moment Tuptim was stripped of her scarf and vest, and bound to a stake. The executioners lifted their flexible cudgels of bamboo. The first blow laid open the girl’s thin back and delicate shoulders. Anna had told herself repeatedly that this was a case in which she could not interfere, since religious prejudice was involved. But it seemed to her later, when she thought back to the day, that she had lost all control over her actions. She had forgotten that she was a stranger and a foreigner, and as powerless as the weakest of the oppressed around her. She had known only that she must do something. She sprang forward. And she heard her own voice as if from a great distance commanding the executioners to desist if they valued their lives!

  The Amazons at once dropped their uplifted bamboos. “Why so?” asked the judge, who knew her well from previous encounters.

  “At least until I can plead for Tuptim before His Majesty,” Anna replied.

  “So be it,” said the judge, leaning back and helping himself to a fresh cud of betel. “Go your way. We’ll wait for your return before proceeding further.”

>   Anna forced a path through the curious crowd standing on tiptoe with necks outstretched trying to catch a glimpse of the accused. As she left the court she met the slave girl Phim, who followed her into the Palace, wringing her hands and sobbing bitterly.

  The King was in his breakfast hall. The smell of food made Anna sick and dizzy as she toiled up the lofty staircase, for she had not stopped to eat that morning before hurrying to the court. In spite of her faintness she walked quickly across the room toward the King, fearing that she might lose courage if she deliberated for a moment.

  “Your Majesty,” she began, and again her voice was not her own and the words seemed to come from a long way off, “I have just come from the trial of Tuptim, and I am convinced that she is innocent of the crime of which she is accused. She admits that she was wrong to run away from the Palace. But even in that there is one mitigating circumstance. She has just told the judges that she was already betrothed before she was brought to the Palace. If Your Majesty had known that, I am sure you would never have allowed her family to present her to you. She insists that Khun Phra Palat, the man to whom her family had betrothed her and in whose cell she was found yesterday, knew nothing about her escape or even who she was. I know that it sounds improbable. But Your Majesty is too intelligent to rule out the possibility that what is improbable may be true. I believe if you had heard her tell her story just now as I did that you would have been convinced that she was telling the truth. She says that it is sheer coincidence that Chao Khun Sa assigned her to Khun Phra Palat. If that is true, Chao Khun Sa will know. It’s the sort of statement that can be tested. And she says that she and Phra Palat are innocent of any relation except that of teacher and pupil. And there, again, her statement is capable of outside proof, since she was only one of several novices living in the same cell with the priest. Phya Phrom Borirak has ordered her put to the torture, but surely the truth can be found in other ways. Won’t Your Majesty order the court to forgo the torture until more witnesses have been examined? Or better still, considering the strange circumstances, won’t Your Majesty pardon both the girl and the priest? I am so convinced of their innocence that I feel justified in pleading with Your Majesty to prevent a miscarriage of justice, since Phya Phrom is prejudiced and a fair trial is impossible.” The effort had been too much. Her voice faded away, as did her strength. She sank to the floor near the King’s chair in a half faint. “I beg Your Majesty’s pardon …”