A Woman of Angkor

by John Burgess

  This was my life, then. I had a title now. I was Lady Sray. I no longer winced on being addressed with it, but I counted among my accomplishments my success in fending off suggestions that I be awarded another, higher-ranking one.

  Another twenty minutes passed. Then, as I was beginning to consider starting off unaccompanied, six spearmen came trotting in formation toward the cart, a sergeant in the lead. They lined up three to each side, and the sergeant spoke.

  ‘Lady Sray, I apologize for the delay. We are at your disposal.’

  I tried to hide my surprise. I knew this voice.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ I replied, without looking his way. ‘We are ready, and if you and your men are too, why don’t we get started?’

  ‘Yes, Lady.’

  The tip of the driver’s switch touched the oxen and iron-rimmed wheels began to turn. The cart crossed the bridge leading out of the royal sector, then turned to follow the avenue that led toward the city’s south gate. I made a show of taking in the sights: the central market, where I could no longer walk without people parting way; a silk merchant’s compound, where fan bearers and a tray of rice cakes and imported tea appeared in an instant if I called to ask about samples for the palace; a shrine where a request that a simple prayer be said at festival time caused twenty priests to scramble for the privilege.

  But what claimed my mind now was the sergeant, because he was the man who had been at the gate of the retainers’ compound during the siege eight year earlier, acting in that strange role of both jailer and protector. I wondered if he recognized me.

  Bopa was awake now, examining a painted thumbnail.

  ‘We’ll have a good time on this trip,’ I said to her. ‘You’ve never seen the Freshwater Sea, have you?’

  ‘No, mother. It will be fun, I’m sure.’ Another girl might have said that with some resentment in her voice. My Bopa was not that way. She was doing her best to live up to my hopes.

  At the south gate, our party drew a salute from a pair of sentries. Then we entered the forest that began near the city’s edge. This was a large, well-travelled road, its spirits known and friendly. A breeze spread a pleasant coolness across my shoulders and cheeks.

  From the corner of my eye, I watched the sergeant, who walked to the right of the cart. His hair was thick, like I remembered, cut short in the military way, bound in the back. He had that tiny tuft of hair at the centre of his chest. His arms hung loosely at his side. He was on duty, running a guard detail, and yet he walked like a farmer strolling home from a day in the paddies. I could not imagine him on a battlefield. Nor, really, his men. Normally spearmen were a frightening bunch, but these six seemed to draw from their superior a similar ease with life. I felt no need to shield my daughter from them.

  We passed the hillock atop which stands the ancient pyramid temple that is the grand relic of the Fourth Reign. After a bit, I called to the sergeant.

  ‘Sir, will you keep watch for distance marker number four? I am told there is a small track going off the road on the right just after it, and we’re going to turn that way.’

  ‘Yes, Lady.’ He gave no hint that he recognized me. But that would be the protocol.

  On his instruction, a man strode ahead around a bend, so we’d see it in good time, but a few minutes later he came running back, anxious. The sergeant conferred with him, then turned to me.

  ‘Lady, His Majesty’s procession is coming toward us, returning to the city. May I suggest that we stop and bring the cart to the side of the road?’

  What was this? My heart began racing. The King was not to return until two days from now. Mr Narin had told me so.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I replied, as if this were just some minor consideration. When the sergeant turned away, I whispered to Bopa. ‘We’ll stay inside.’

  ‘What…?’ Even my little girl could sense that this would not do.

  ‘We’ll just say inside. Nobody will know. We’ll be quiet.’

  ‘Mother, won’t the soldiers know?’ Normally, she took my guidance on everything.

  She was right. It would be so disrespectful to hide in here that the men would get to talking. So we climbed out of the cart, and got to the ground. I murmured a prayer, and then addressed some words to myself: I will keep my face to the dust. I have done this before on those rare occasions when our paths crossed and it has always been all right. I will steal no curious glance.

  I could picture what was happening down the road. The bearer of the royal fire coming into sight, then a retainer holding upright a staff atop which a gilded Shiva rode his mount, the Sacred Bull Nandi. Then men with trumpets and drums, then soldiers with spears, officers on horses and a clutch of whiskered Brahmins. Then a bedecked elephant, a profusion of red and silver parasols overhead. And on a gilded platform atop that elephant, the lord

  our King.

  Massed steps, horse snorts and the clank of soldiers’ equipment grew loud in my ears. Then came the scent of raised dust and the footfalls of the elephant. My eyes closed as the animal drew even with where we crouched. Trembling, I counted ten, then ten again, then exhaled in relief. I raised my head.

  I cannot say why, but my eyes refused to look to where they should have, to the forest leaves in front of me, or to my daughter at my side. They demanded to see the receding figure of the King, to view his broad shoulders, his bound hair, his jewellery, even if from the back. And so they looked, and what they saw caused a visceral shock: The King had turned full around atop his animal and was looking straight at me. Into those errant eyes of mine, even into my soul.

  I could not break it off. What communication passed between us in those few seconds, I do not know, but it left me breathless and afraid.

  With great effort, I brought my head back to the dust. I murmured a desperate prayer. When finally I dared look up again, the King was gone but in his place was another unsettling sight: a palanquin, carried by eight slaves, on which reclined a woman, frightfully beautiful, wearing the green sampot of a senior concubine. This creature’s eyes found mine too, and held on them in the same possessive, demanding way that the King’s had, and across the face there flashed a message: I have seen, I will remember. It was Rom, of course. I remembered her from that first day in the prince’s compound.

  Finally the procession was gone. I rose and stepped behind the cart to compose myself. The journey resumed. The sergeant and his men displayed no sign that anything unusual had occurred; Bopa chattered a bit about the sights and sounds of the royal party, then began to doze again. In the gentle turning of the cart’s wheels, I sought calm for my soul. But how could I achieve such a thing? You recall how a certain ghost took up residence in the boughs above our old little home. I was convinced now that this same spirit was watching again, from the heights of a tree that at just that moment we were passing beneath, and that it was exalting. It had caused the eyes of His Majesty to look in a particular direction, and there to see me. How my mind churned; I barely noticed where we were going. His Majesty’s gaze had fallen upon me. But what effect would that have? The King must pass a thousand women a day. I would mean nothing among them. Before today he had seen me only once, when he was a boy, and only for a minute, maybe two. Over the years the memory would have faded, surely. Oh, how I tried to convince myself.

  Presently the stone distance marker came into view. A few steps beyond it, just as described by a clerk in the palace land office, a track wound off into the forest to the west. We turned onto it.

  Walking to the side, the sergeant asked: ‘May I know, Lady, where it is we’re going?’

  I was happy for the distraction. ‘A hamlet called Veya. I was told it’s about a half hour down this track. We’ll go and have a look.’

  ‘Do the people know you’re coming, Lady?’

  ‘Yes, I sent word ahead.’

  He seemed to approve of that. A woman of my rank arriving unannounced would throw villagers into panic.

  Now, what I wanted to ‘have a look at’ I in fact owned
– well, together with my husband. Ten days earlier, we had gained formal title, etched out on palm leaf. It was part of land vouchsafed to us by the monarch in recognition of Nol’s service in the ascent to the throne. About two thousand people lived in Veya hamlet and three adjacent settlements that were part of the grant. About fourteen hundred were of working age.

  Rounding a curve, the cart was spotted by a young man who’d been posted to watch. When the village came in sight to us, its people had turned out in full. Bopa and I climbed down and people went to the dirt in a simple country sort of way. It touched me, because it was how I and the girls in the orphanage had once bowed when the rich man arrived.

  I voiced thanks. The headman took a timid step forward and showed us to the hamlet’s public pavilion, where a lunch of grilled chicken, rice, cucumbers and cool water from a well had been set out in old but carefully polished bowls. We ate, though we were not really hungry, and each time I chewed, the headman watched from the corner of his eye, hoping for a hint that the food pleased me. Then everyone rose, and the headman showed us around the community’s grounds, to the bamboo and thatch houses one by one, to a mud oven where charcoal was being made, to the rice-husking place, the fishpond. Then he led us to the edge of the fields.

  ‘Lady Sray,’ he began, gesturing toward a far-off grove, ‘the fields out there, where the irrigation is not so good, those are ours, as it should be. These that you see right ahead will have the privilege of nurturing your family and the palace’s parasol pavilion.’

  Certainly the closer fields were well tended, with rice stalks a rich green and standing at half height, the dikes in perfect repair. Of course the contrast with the others was probably not quite so dramatic, but I was not about to go check.

  ‘We have organized two work teams to tend to your paddies,’ he explained. ‘One, with a foreman and forty-eight labourers, both men and women, will work them during the waxing moon. Another, with forty-six souls, will work the period of the waning moon.’

  The last stop of the tour was the village shrine, an old brick structure that stood perhaps as tall as two men. There we heard apologies for its diminutive size and its need of new plaster.

  I stepped forward and put a piece of silver in an offering tray. I lit a stick of incense from a glowing coal, and knelt in prayer. It was not the simple pious gesture it might have seemed. My prayer was essentially a long silent petition: By Heaven’s grace, may the King not remember who I am.

  When I was done, I turned to the sergeant.

  ‘Sir, I invite you and your men to say devotions as well. I will provide the donation.’

  While the men knelt, I took the headman aside, thanked him, and told him to have the plaster repaired and send the bill to me. He thanked me with such sincerity that I felt ashamed. Would this man be so deferential, I wondered, if he knew of events in a certain jungle clearing those years ago? As if by a spirit’s silent command, perhaps the spirit of the dead man, my tongue touched the gap far back in my mouth, where a tooth was still missing

  It was time to go. But at the cart, the headman had a question, which he posed after apologies for taking more of my time. Two days earlier, he said, village women were out gathering firewood to the east, just across the trunk road. They had seen some men working in a field, but they weren’t farmers. They were men in city sampots and they had long pieces of cord with wooden stakes at each end. They were planting one stake in the dirt, then stretching out the cord, and planting the other stake, and one of them was writing things down on a slate. It was the strangest thing, he said. The local women were too afraid to ask anything. But would I perhaps know what that was about?

  I had seen this happen in the city, and what generally followed was work elephants and masons and coolies. But rather than speculate, because a large temple going up so close at hand would change life in this village forever, I promised to ask and send word.

  The cart began rolling back toward the trunk road.

  ‘It was a pleasant village, sergeant,’ I said from my perch.

  ‘It was, Lady. The place and the people too. A very fine community.’

  ‘Well, now they can go back to their routines without the disruption of people from the city.’

  ‘I don’t think they’ll remember it like that, Lady. What they’ll remember is that you prayed at their shrine, and for so long. It made them happy. That’s what they’ll be talking about this afternoon.’

  He picked up his pace, to leave me to myself, but I found I didn’t want that.

  ‘How would you know, sergeant, what they’ll talk about?’

  ‘Experience, Lady,’ he said, dropping back to the side of the cart. ‘Most city people when they go to a village don’t pay them an honour like that.’

  ‘You’ve done a lot of these trips?’

  ‘Yes, quite a few, Lady.’

  ‘I’m sorry to take you away from more important duty.’

  He smiled at that. ‘This is my favourite, Lady. It gets me out of the city, to places I’ve never seen before.’

  ‘But I thought soldiers prefer something more exciting…’ I was enjoying this banter; I had forgotten for the moment about the King and questions of his memory.

  ‘I’ve seen enough of that, Lady. Escort duty will suit me fine for the rest of my days.’

  Bopa had begun to take an interest in the conversation, so I broke it off.

  The sights of the following hours were ones I remembered from childhood. Dry paddies, with the stubs of harvested rice stalks sticking up; a dog sleeping dead to the world in the middle of the road; a woman selling sweet sticky rice mixed with beans, cooked in sections of bamboo.

  Toward late afternoon, a tiny girl walking a flock of ducks toward their home pen forgot herself and drove them right in front of the cart. The fowl scattered beneath the oxen’s hooves, quacking up a din. How I recalled that kind of noise! The sergeant called quickly to his men and they all dropped their spears and ran in every direction to round the birds up. The scene turned comic, bringing a smile to my face. I wished I could jump down and take part in the round-up, and feel the soft feathers in my own hands again.

  When cart and escort continued on their way, the sergeant stepped over. ‘I’m sorry if we startled you there, Lady.’

  ‘That’s all right. It was a kind turn. That little girl would have had a lot of explaining to do if you hadn’t helped.’

  Two hours later, we stopped at an inn for the evening. I gave instructions to the owner to serve dinner to the soldiers and the cart driver. Bopa and I were shown to a separate pavilion. There we took our rice alone.

  24: The hilltop monastery

  Toward noon the following day, we arrived at a port. It was a collection of weather-worn houses and storage sheds arranged along a causeway that had channels of mud-brown water on either side. At docks by the buildings, water vessels were tied up. There was quite a selection, small sampans of the type found on any village pond but also huge things I had never seen before. Ships. They were great houses on water, really, with poles as tall as tree trunks rising from them. I was disappointed to see no sign of the Freshwater Sea. I sensed that it was somewhere off in the distance, down those channels of muddy water.

  In any case, our destination was not the port, but a temple atop a hill that Heaven had placed next to it. Straight on was the head of a trail leading to the top; a novice priest perhaps ten years old was waiting to lead us up.

  I turned to the sergeant. ‘There’s no reason for you and your men to go up, sir. Why don’t you all take a break down here? My daughter and I will be back by nightfall.’

  He nodded polite assent, but the novice seemed not to like the idea. He whispered something to the sergeant, who turned to me and said: ‘The holy boy says the trail is washed out in places, Lady, and he’s not sure you could get by on your own. He asks that I might go along to help.’ Having taken preliminary vows, the novice could not touch a woman, even if just to offer a hand.

  I had tried
. ‘Of course. If that’s what he thinks is required.’

  The sergeant asked for Bopa’s bag to carry, and she promptly handed it over. He sought mine as well, and it seemed impolite to say no.

  The climb commenced. The novice led, then came me, then Bopa and finally the sergeant, who kept his pace slow so as to maintain a proper distance.

  What a strange place this hill was. At the base, the trail was of soft, damp dirt, edged by thick greenery. A few steps higher, everything turned to rocks and gravel, with a few lonely shrubs struggling for livelihood. The ascent was steep and not friendly to city feet like ours.

  In places, the trail had been washed away by rainstorm run-off, as the novice had said. The sergeant lent a hand first to Bopa, then to me to help us cross. It was strong and confident, and I told myself that so were many men’s.

  After twenty minutes, we sat down to rest.

  ‘My feet, mother! These stones hurt so much.’