‘What are you doing?’ I said reaching for it, ‘I need that.’
But he blocked it with his shoulders. ‘No need now - you must not use light in the dark. No light, no see.’
Off to the north the walls of the jungle rose up in a dark green cloud. It seemed it was moving slowly toward us. The last wisp of smoke rose from the old parchment and the map was completely incinerated.
‘I hope you remember the combination.’ Yin said with a smile.
‘Will you be coming with me?’ I said.
He was watching a monkey carrying her baby through the branches of the trees. ‘Yes my friend, ofcourse.’
‘But what do we do when we get there, what’s the point of going in?’
He patted me affectionately on the shoulder. ‘To take him back into the mountain, that is your task. When tonight comes you will know exactly what to do.’
‘But I don’t know, I don’t know a thing.’
He chuckled, ‘A man with no eyes is better than he who sees only blackness.’
‘Yin, I respect your proverbs but if you want me to do this right I need an explanation.’
His flashing eyes stared into the future; somewhere within the citadel of vines and banyan trees to the north lay our fate. Yin measured the course of the sun, it was beginning to decline in the west. ‘It must be almost three o’clock, yes?’
I looked at my watch - it was only half past two. I hoped to hell his other calculations were a little more precise.
By four o’clock we were on our way, I said goodbye to Sae and the blind dog who kept wagging his tail and trying to sniff where I was. I would have swapped our lives in a second. Armed with a bottle of water and a bunch of candles, we walked across the padi to the banks of the Nam Khan River, to a longtail moored in the mud. I watched the river sliding the other way toward the beautiful old capital; it seemed an age since it had borne me on its back. Yin revved the outboard, smiled at me and away we went. I glanced over my shoulder at Luang Prabang, the glowing gold spires licked in the last lustre of sunset, then I looked back at the surge of distant green rearing before us like a gathering storm.
I’ve never believed places are immured with a sense of evil - but something about the vastness of the jungle made me shiver despite the mild autumn air. It was cold on the water, I wasn’t sure if that was why I couldn’t stop shaking. After an hour or so we stopped to talk to some boatmen. I got Yin to haggle with them for a few cigarettes. The river snaked on from the last trace of crimson in the western sky. We were heading into blackness; the occasional bray of water buffalo and crickets as we passed close to the bank, our only bearings. But my pathfinder knew precisely where we were headed, he must have rehearsed this moment a hundred times in his patient head.
I was asleep when he nudged me awake, I woke to the boat scuffing over some rocks in mild rapids. They were probably no more than a few feet in depth as the boat fought to scale them, but they felt bigger, just like my awaiting foe. I felt like an actor who has to go onstage without a script, I’d had no preparation for what was to happen. So far I’d only been the puppet.
‘Nong Khiaw,’ he said darkly. I looked up to see a towering bridge and monstrous karst cliffs like hideous bookends on either side of the river.
‘How long was I sleeping for?’
‘Long time.’
I noticed he’d spread a blanket over my legs even though he was cold himself. It seemed he didn’t want to talk, god knows what was going through his head. Perhaps an hour later we stopped the boat. Something in the darkness changed its aspect, a sense of density, of prohibition. I couldn’t see much, there were only a few stars in the sky and the moon was on holiday. But then I saw it like a bad dream far above us, its shark-toothed jagged form. Black Dragon Mountain.
‘Oh fuck… fuck, fuck, fuck. I don’t think I can do this.’
He climbed out and motioned me to quickly follow, then to my horror he let the boat loose from the bank and pushed it out into the swiftly flowing river.
‘So they don’t know we’re here,’ he said apologetically.
I didn’t believe him, it was more a case that we weren’t going to need it. ‘Come, quickly,’ he whispered urgently.
In the skirts of the forest Yin lit a candle and knelt down on the ground, hands pressed together, lips moving in a steady incantation. ‘To the spirits of the wood,’ he said getting up stiffly.
The air was thick with mosquitoes, they didn’t take much interest in Yin. He wasn’t smiling anymore, there was something resigned in his solemn march into the trees. We paused by the web of a huge leopard spider the size of my hand; bur for the candlelight I would have walked into to it. Yin bowed to the arachnid and scurried deeper into the jungle’s heart, the brush of grass giving way to bamboo thickets and trees with sprawling, thigh-thick roots. The faint babble of the river had fallen away, without its course I had no idea where we were; I couldn’t even see Dragon Mountain above us now, the canopy was too thick.
My foot snagged in a tendril and I lost my balance and fell into a spiky palm. I was more concerned about the leopard spiders crawling across my face than the gash that appeared on my leg. Still, the refined pain in my shin replaced the dull ache of my ankle.
On we walked into the deepening forest, Yin moving pretty quickly for an old man. Without warning he stopped, held a finger to his lips and pointed up the hill; in the near distance I could see a weak luminescence in the towering banyan trees.
It reminded me of the green slime you used to buy in a toy shop and hold near a light until it glowed in the dark. Yin’s lower lip was trembling. There’s something disturbing about seeing a grown man full of fear, but to witness an old person is worse. Added to this I was already stricken with the fear myself, I didn’t need him baling out. I took hold of his arm and braced him. ‘Are you okay?’
He smiled weakly back at me.
‘Have you seen this before?’ I said. He couldn’t speak, he looked as if he’d been hit with an immobilizing ray gun. ‘Yin, it’s okay… what’s that light ahead of us?’ But my words fell on deaf ears. Just a frightened old man with a fool in the middle of a forest.
‘We’re nearly here,’ he said finally. ‘I’ve waited for this moment for forty years and now I feel fear.’
‘Well so do I, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.’
‘We should not talk any more. I believe they are waiting for us.’
Waiting for us?
We should have left then, fled to fight another day; ended the campaign just as the Yanks did. Alain, there’s no shame in retreat, I kept saying to myself, Skip and Sammy Casbaron wouldn’t want you to die as well… what’s the point? Instead, we moved closer to the trunk daubed in luminescent paint.
On closer inspection it was the rough illustration of a snake. I wasn’t surprised. My stomach began to turn in a tide of bile, I felt defenceless; if anything happened to Yin I was on my own, I would never find my route back the way we’d come. I swung around to my right, there was a noise coming from the east, a slow yowl, like an animal being cut open. It came again, but this time from another direction.
‘Yin,’ I stammered, ‘for God’s sake what is that?’
He threw up his hands, ‘I don’t know.’
It’s the children in the trees, I thought, but I said nothing. In an instant the reel of slaughter flickered through my mind’s eye; the open chest of my best friend, the hapless Swedes and Stretch pooled in their innocent blood; Lucan Maybury in his Bangkok apartment twisted about himself as the local press shot flash bulbs into his mutilated corpse. I felt a surge of adrenalin as my fist closed around the machete he’d given me and I ran after the king’s servant without another thought, to the next tree daubed in phosphorescence; a marker, an invitation.
‘Whatever they do to us remember the salt, Alain,’ he said des
perately, as if he was having second thoughts about his choice of student.
‘I remember everything,’ I lied.
We’d been steadily ascending the east face of Black Dragon Mountain for two hours now, the air heavy and stale as if nature’s goodness had been sucked out of it, a smell of encroaching decay. Then I saw the first of the burning torches in the distance, the ragged outline of a temple of stone, and I knew we’d arrived. I wasn’t going to run, it was too late for that now.
- 39 -
A voice called from the ruins. I stopped dead in my tracks, the previously static darkness now moving in a slow turn of bodies, the hiss of tongues reaching out to our scent. I felt Yin’s hand close about mine offering comfort. ‘Keep very still,’ he whispered, ‘Try not to be afraid.’
The Komodos lumbered toward us, their enormous tails dragging across the roots and leaves. In the weak light of the stars I could see their tapering snouts and flickering tongues. I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted, I was back in the biopic of Alain Deschamps, watching myself onscreen from the comfort of a spring-loaded velvet cinema seat; couples sniggered nervously and ate popcorn, pinching one another and yawning as the film drew to a close. The final reel wheeled by in the projection room as the Hanged Man finally met his end in the cobra pit, half a key up his rear in a cigar container, the painted, plastic palms of the film set behind.
The lizards clambered over one another to get a better look at us, scales upon chain-mail scales, unhelmeted medieval knights. I was so close I could taste the rot on their breath. Yin clutched my hand even tighter as if seeking comfort himself now. ‘Are you bleeding?’ he whispered.
I let go of his hand and reached slowly down to feel my shin, my other hand clamped to the handle of the machete. Blood was still dribbling, in the humid air it hadn’t even started to coagulate. I nodded my head in response, my mind flicking through the random pages of every National Geographic magazine I’d ever read in a Doctor’s waiting room. What was it about Komodos and blood, did they eat humans?
Look what happened to the Hmong children.
Maybe that was just a ruse to keep people away?
No, Nathan saw a body in the morgue before it disappeared…
Nathan… I remembered his flip comment about dragons being able to smell blood from a mile away. A canine head came closer.
‘My leg’s covered in blood, we’ll have to run.’
‘No, too old to run, too tired.’
They gathered around us like an army of marauding orks, there must have been at least ten of them. Once in our life we take the initiative and turn the passive into the aggressive. As the largest of the dragons climbed over the ridged backs to reach me, I looked into its eyes, the flames of the torches playing within them like light skittering through whiskey tumblers. I waited till his talons reached over the head of another dragon bringing him level with my chest, then I brought the blade down on his skull, heard it slice into his eye socket, the squirt of his fluid all over my naked legs. He made a snarling sound and fell lifeless.
The animals waited an instant then began drawing inexorably toward us. It was pointless going any further this way. We hobbled blindly in the first direction away from the burning tapers. Off to my right I saw the fluorescent marking on the tree; we were successfully following our tracks.
We stopped for a second to catch our breath, searching the distance for the burning torches; I couldn’t see them, I couldn’t see anything. Gasping for breath, Yin bent over with his hands on his knees and looked at me, ‘You must go back Alain, it is not meant this way.’
‘But it’s suicide… pointless. I’ll never get into the mountain if I don’t get past them first. I never asked to be made a guardian, I don’t want it, do you understand that?’ My voice rose aggressively, I didn’t care who heard us, the silence of the jungle willing me on, ‘The only reason I came here tonight is because I wanted revenge for them killing my friend, that’s all. And my father.’
He shook his head as he tried to speak, ‘No Alain, you came here… because it is the path of your destiny. Remember the paintings on the wall of the temple, you cannot escape what‘s written but you can choose which painting to be in.’
As he spoke I tried to focus on the mural of the boy and the warrior flying across the stars on the back of the horse… anything but the hanged man and the figure with the firebrand heading into cave. Madman’s spit foamed around the edges of my mouth, my lungs were closing in on themselves like crushed plastic bags, I wanted to scream.
Then a voice spoke to me. A voice I knew very well.
She wore a thin white robe, it was faintly translucent and I could see her bosom through the material in the starlight, the long snake of her plaited black hair.
‘Come, everyone is waiting.’
Yin scowled at her and nodded his assent. Giselle must have been watching us all the time. She walked toward us, a pale knife of mist, the ghostly green paint glistening on the bark beside her. We watched as she stroked it with delicate fingers, drawing lines of luminescence down her beautiful face.
‘I’ve been waiting for you, for this night, for so long. We all have.’
My stomach tightened, the anger flashed once more through my fingers. ‘You and James? I suppose Judases should stick together?’
She deflected my insult as if I were no more than a child. ‘You’ve got it wrong, Alain. I don’t belong to anyone. We’re united in our common cause and there’s nothing that will stop us achieving it. That’s the way it’s taught, the way it should be. Everything will be clear to you soon.’ she said distantly.
I couldn’t believe we’d ever been intimate. My teeth clenched so hard I thought one of them might shatter. ‘Whatever your twisted reasons are, you’ll pay for this.’
‘I’m sorry for all you’ve suffered. We should go.’ she said.
We threaded our way back through the trees toward the lighted tapers. Through the silhouettes of bamboo-shutes and giant ferns I could see the Khmer ruins, the air rank with the smell of putrefaction. I looked to Yin for a sign; he stared ahead blankly as we followed Giselle, his green eyes inscrutable as ever. It seemed we’d run in a blind circle, all along we’d been no more than fifty yards from the dragons.
High up in the massive branches of a strangler fig tree, perhaps fifty feet up, I saw a bamboo hut lit from within. A stepladder fell from it to within a few feet of the ground. Giselle removed her hood and shook her hair. In the glow of a taper her eyes flashed impossibly blue yet there was nothing but deadness within, an absence of compassion. Just as there must have been as they trussed him up beyond the neons of Khao San Rd, pumped him with drugs and dispatched his intestines all over his frame.
Around us I heard the sound of claws dragging across the rooted earth, the quickening rot of their teeth carried on the forest’s breath. Another figure in white darted across the darkness, a gun poking incongruously from the thin white material. He took Yin by the throat and motioned me up the ladder with his free hand. I walked toward him, looked into the cowl and spat. ‘You fucking coward, I should kill you now,’ I said.
James trained the pistol on my stomach. ‘You seem to be forgetting something,’ he jiggled the gun as if he were shaking beans in a coffee commercial, ‘by the time you lift that machete I’ve put a bullet in your gut.’
He must have doubted my sanity. I moved toward him an inch and he flinched backwards, ‘Don’t you want to know why we brought you here?’ Something mordant in the way he said ‘we’, their arrogance and superiority, as if they had known all along and plotted my every move. It burned my blood even more.
‘You didn’t bring me here, wanker, I came of my own accord.’
James tightened his grip on Yin’s throat as if to reassert his position. ‘Don’t be naïve, we were playing with the probability factors all the time; ofcourse you’d come. We di
rected you at every turn. Anyway, it’s not for me to explain, nor her.’
He looked at Giselle with thinly veiled contempt. In the dancing light of the fire his face looked waxen and ancient. How had I ever assumed he was just another middle class farang? Waiting patiently in the thickets of our conversation he’d silently bided his time.
‘Kristen, Zig and Stretch… you remember them? They were going to get married and Stretch had a daughter. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?’
‘Names on a snakes and ladders board, Alain, nothing else. If you’d failed to hitch up with them I would have climbed on the same bus as you. Wherever you went I followed.’
‘So you never came from Fulham?’ I said.
The sound of the creatures drew closer, I was almost beyond fear. I thought I could hear a muffled noise emanating from the trapdoor… Nathan? Sammy?
‘Ofcourse not.’ James said, surprised.
‘Why did you say Fulham then?’
‘Because you don’t like people from Fulham, do you, Alain? Bit free with your fists weren’t you as a twenty-something?’
‘I never told you that.’ I began to stammer.
‘You didn’t have to, there’s nothing we don’t know about you… nice dinosaur mobiles by the way.’
My legs went weak beneath me. I looked to Yin, his expression was calm and penetrating. ‘Don’t listen Alain.’ he said with dignity.
‘You’re bluffing.’ I said, trying to hold it together.
The crescent of a smile formed at the corner of James’ lips. ‘Really? Your Mother sits in her conservatory and makes her coloured dinosaurs. I’ve watched her… she’s quite attractive for an older woman. You had a problem with your flat, someone got in… remember?’ He pointed the gun at me to remind me it was there, ‘Don’t think much of your CD collection though. I mean, Buckley, Cohen, Dreadzone, The Clash? You’re living in the past.’
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