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A Woman of Angkor

Page 27

by John Burgess


  Were the villagers really so ignorant of where this family had gone? I wonder. Perhaps Sovan’s agent was holding out for more silver for what was of course the crucial piece of intelligence. But he got no more silver, and Sovan got no more information. As far as my boy was concerned, Suriya could be anywhere.

  But that was cause for hope. Perhaps this girl, this now young woman, was living right in Angkor, a short walk from our house, or perhaps she was visiting from the provinces on this very day for this festival, as gentry often did. So here he was, searching through tens of thousands of people, with a bag of banana sweets to offer should the miracle occur and Suriya come to be standing before him.

  A gong sounded. Sovan turned to see novice priests shooing merry-makers away from the temple’s gate. Soon four men with drums emerged in procession, followed by a torch bearer and a dozen priests. Then came the thing the crowd was waiting for. It was a thick wooden shaft, as long as four men lying down in line, an arrow-straight, hollowed-out tree trunk, painted bright red. It was carried cradled in a large yellow cloth by ten stout bearers on each side. The crowd, men and women alike, let out a collective gasp. No one had ever seen one so large. You can imagine the kind of lewd jokes that people were soon making about the bearers’ burden.

  Two priests of senior rank splashed it with holy water. Then it was carried in procession across a field toward a tower made of bamboo scaffolding. The crowd followed in excitement, Sovan included. Below the tower, the thing was laid down on the grass. Village men tied it with ropes that hung from the tower, then pulled on the ropes. The great shaft began to stand up – and there was another round of joking in the crowd. The crowd drew near for a better look. ‘Keep that torch back!’ shouted a Chinese man who was helping set up. His strange accent made people laugh; the torch moved back only a bit, because without it no one could see.

  Then, on cue from a priest, the crowd knelt and put hands together as other priests splashed yet more holy water and chanted yet more prayers. May Heaven accept this gift, may it be impregnated, and in due course grant the gift of water to us people below, so that the soil in the Empire’s paddies might again be soft and fertile, that rice might grow anew and all people eat, that those people pledge to be eternally grateful and respond in myriad ways that would please Heaven.

  Now the crowd was pushed back, sometimes physically, by burly men hired by the temple for the purpose. Quiet was called and a priest held a small torch to the sky. He blessed it, then threw it to the ground. From that spot, fire raced in a line across grass to the base of the holy implement. Fire and smoke burst out there, creating a roar louder than any storm or waterfall, louder than anything Sovan had ever heard. The holy implement quavered for an instant, then came to life, leaving its bamboo berth, racing toward the Heavens, gaining speed and leaving a shower of flame and sparks behind it. People crouched, frightened and amazed, keeping their eyes toward the blaze of light moving up and across the bowl of night, still creating its din. It veered left and right, and people found courage to stand up straight and squint and raise hands to brows the better to see. Then it burst apart in a remarkable spectacle, sending great flames in every direction. There came a clap of thunder. So loud and sudden was it all that spectators dropped to the ground, hushed in wonder.

  As the last sparks drifted across the sky, shouts of Heaven’s glory echoed from the crowd.

  That was it. My boy got to his feet with everyone else. People began drifting toward the streets to go home, but Sovan went back inside the temple walls. There he said prayers at an image, one with a record of granting wishes to deserving supplicants. He left the banana sweets before it, untouched.

  On his way home, two things happened that bode well. The first was that he had no trouble walking past the girl who called to him again from the wine stall. The second was that when he crossed the bridge into the royal sector, he felt a drop of rain on his brow.

  31: Exile

  At the temple on the hill, I now had a routine. Each day I rose before dawn, bathed, then said devotions at the foot of Vishnu’s tower as the sun broke forth over the paddies to the east. I took the first rice of the day alone. The food brought to me was what the abbot imagined to be city-quality (I had spotted a new cook at the fire), but in fact it was not much different from what I’d eaten as a child and that became another reason why I took to this place.

  In late morning most days, I walked down the hill to the town. Sometimes I passed a line of slaves making the ascent, carrying thatch and lengths of bamboo for work on the ruined guesthouses. The trip was easier now. Workers hired by the Chinese merchants had repaired the washed-out sections of the path.

  In the port, I checked in with Sergeant Sen to show that I was in good health and to chat a bit – truth be told, I did get lonely up that hill. Then I strolled through the open market and bought whatever minor things I needed. Sometimes I stopped at the merchants’ hall. Tea was brought out and Mr Chen and other of his countrymen sat down and passed the time with me, maybe opening with talk of the shadow puppet show at a shrine up the road. Of course the talk usually turned at some point toward the palace’s purchasing plans and the best source of such-and-such commodity.

  One day, I said: ‘You know, Mr Chen, if the palace is going to contract with a firm for the long term, we like to have seen its facilities.’

  ‘Then why don’t we go and visit mine?’ he replied, as I’d hoped he would. ‘Our main rice storage depot is just a short distance from here. Shall we call for your cart?’

  ‘Actually, I would prefer to walk.’

  We set off, Sergeant Sen trailing behind. A Chinese ship was tied up at a dock. My eye could not leave it. No matter how many times I saw these things, they seemed unnatural to me. Floating buildings! Water craft should be small, controlled just by a paddle.

  ‘You must be brave to go aboard that, Mr Chen. I can’t imagine staying on it for an hour, let alone the whole day it takes to get to China.’

  ‘A whole day?’ Mr Chen seemed amused, in his usual good-natured way. ‘We stay on it a lot longer than that, Lady Sray. The trip to China takes about two months.’

  ‘Two months! How can that be? China is just on the other side of the Fresh Water Sea.’

  ‘Perhaps the person who told you that did not quite understand, Lady Sray, and meant to say the Salt Water Sea. To get to China, first you sail the length of the Fresh Water Sea, then you enter the Great Dual Vector River and follow it to another river that is even larger, which brings you to the Salt Water Sea. Then you cross it – China is in fact on the far side of the Salt Water Sea. You don’t follow the shore, but head straight across the water. Sometimes you can’t see land for days and days at a time.’

  I couldn’t imagine that. It wouldn’t be this earth if there weren’t land.

  Mr Chen hastened to explain. ‘You can’t see land, but you always know it’s there, just out of sight. It’s like taking a long trip on land. You can’t see the village you’re going to – isn’t it so? But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. At the end it always shows itself.’

  ‘Still, two months is such a long time.’

  ‘Yes, but knowing that home’s up ahead keeps us going. And out on the sea on a calm day, with the sun shining down and every patch of the sky open to see, well, you can’t feel much closer to Heaven.’

  That sun was warming my head even then. I asked, cautiously: ‘Do you ever actually see Heaven out there?’

  ‘In the heart you do, Lady Sray.’

  I wondered briefly if for me it would ever be any other way. Then I put aside the thought. ‘Is China like the Khmer Empire? Same blue sky overhead?’

  ‘Oh, yes, it’s the same sky. But a different kind of people. For one thing, they wear clothes over their entire bodies.’

  ‘Really!’ It wasn’t entirely a surprise, though. I had seen figures dressed in that way on the teapot that my husband had sold in the first days of our new lives. But I’d never understood why. So I asked.
/>   ‘Partly...well, it’s just the custom, Lady,’ said Mr Chen, showing a bit of embarrassment. ‘You get so that you don’t feel yourself if you’re not covered up. But it’s also because it can get very cold.’

  ‘Like here, then! Not so different. Like on those nights after the winter solstice when the wind blows.’ In the heat of this day, it was hard to imagine that such nights existed.

  Mr Chen laughed again. ‘Consider, Lady, if the air were ten times or twenty times colder than what you just described. Sometimes it gets so cold that water turns to stone and white powder falls from the sky instead of rain.’

  ‘I can’t be!’

  ‘It is in fact like that. People shake and shiver like they have a fever. But they’re not really sick. They can solve the problem by covering their bodies, or by keeping moving so that their bodies make heat.’

  I looked to Mr Chen and thought that indeed I was talking to someone experienced and wise.

  We reached a large wooden building, with its own jetty in the back. Inside, Mr Chen showed me bag upon bag of rice stacked in neat order, too many to count. In an adjacent building, I was invited to inspect wooden boxes filled with chinaware, tea, bolts of silk and a few things I didn’t recognize.

  ‘It’s very impressive, Mr Chen. It must all generate a good flow of income.’

  ‘Yes, we can’t complain. We are blessed.’

  ‘And what type of charity do you support?’ I must confess that I wondered if he would now dissemble. The Trinity Temple had after all been allowed to fall into such disrepair. I had heard it said that Chinese loved their money like Khmers loved their children and wouldn’t ever part with it.

  But he answered: ‘Different kinds, Lady Sray. Hospitals, an orphanage. I will take you to one of our projects.’

  He led me a short distance through streets to a large pavilion at the port’s edge. At the door, a man who seemed to be in charge greeted Mr Chen in a most respectful way. The merchant knew his way around inside, and he gave me a tour. In one area, people from local villages laid on mats, tended by a Brahmin physician. In another, people stood in line to receive rice soup from a large pot.

  As we walked back, I said: ‘Mr Chen, I think it’s possible that the palace might give your firm rights to supply a quarter of its rice.’ I laid out possible terms.

  He listened, thinking, and I could tell something more was on his mind. ‘Those are very fair conditions,’ he said. ‘But I must tell you that we are often not able to move things to the Capital freely. The local magistrates put a tax on each sack we load on a boat. Sometimes they just hold things up, for no good reason.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because we’re foreigners, I suppose, and we have money. And no real rights to be here other than the magistrates’ forbearance.’

  ‘Mr Chen, I will see if I can do something.’

  It was time to return to the temple. Ten days earlier, the year’s rains had begun. Most days they fell late in the afternoon. For that I liked to be atop the hill, alone in the guesthouse.

  That night, I laid down on mats the novice had shaken free of dust when I was below. My mind turned toward what might have happened in the Capital in my absence. I was quite sure now that the King did not remember me from the estate those many years earlier, that his interest in me grew only from who I was now. Perhaps his interests would burn itself out naturally, perhaps the Brahmin would bring about a change of mind with teachings from scriptures. And of course there was the other question of the sensations that paraded through me uninvited.

  Whatever resolution was to come, it would take time, that was certain. I might have to stay here in the guesthouse indefinitely, both to wait out the King and to correct my own failings.

  I closed my eyes and fell asleep to chimes from the temple’s inner courtyard.

  I awoke to a presence in the guesthouse, somewhere to the side. It was curious – I felt no fear, and merely looked up into the darkness, wondering if this was how one met a divinity and how one should respond. This god moved very gently, with near-silent steps, and I felt a gentle surge of gratefulness, for family, for health, for wealth given me for no reason I could comprehend, for my existence at this time in the cycle of creation and decline.

  ‘Don’t you move!’

  The words were whispered, yet they sounded like a shout, and they paralyzed me. I waited tensely for more words, but I heard only more steps, this time heavy, making their way toward me. The god didn’t glide through the air, but made the house tremble like a human.

  I found my wits and got quickly to my feet. I felt more safe that way. In the gloom before me, I saw a young man.

  ‘Why are you here?’ I demanded.

  He sprang. His hands roughly twisted me so that he was behind me now, holding me immobile, a forearm against my throat. I went limp. What terror I felt! I had been seized and held this way only once in my life, that day in the clearing.

  ‘Take what I have,’ I whispered. ‘It’s there, in the bag, by the mat.’

  There was a pause. He seemed to have a knife in his other hand and to be summoning an awful kind of courage.

  Nol could not come to help this time. I knew suddenly I must act myself. ‘You would harm a woman in a holy place? So near the abode of the Blessed Trinity?’

  ‘Be quiet!’ It was a rough city voice.

  ‘Heaven teaches that no person has the right to take the life of another unless in war or in payment for a serious crime.’ He squeezed harder, but some spirit showed me how to keep going. ‘May the gods find it in themselves to have mercy on you for what you intend to do. May your next life not…’

  Then he mouthed a single, pathetic cry and his grip loosened. I was tossed to the side, and he fled down the steps.

  Two minutes later, I stumbled weeping to the door of the priests’ sleeping pavilion. The abbot emerged, shocked, and I blurted out the basics of what had happened. He told the other priests to go quickly and search for this man and he sent a boy down the hill to fetch Sergeant Sen. By the time the soldier arrived, breathless from racing up the path, I had regained my composure and was sitting on a mat, drinking from a cup of tea.

  He was nonetheless horrified, and went straight to his knees. ‘I have failed in my duty, Lady! I will never again let you out of my sight when you are entrusted to me, on my honour!’

  Though the man with the knife was never found, I felt physically safe in the days that followed. Sergeant Sen was never more than a few steps away. His soldiers kept watch at various corners of the temple grounds. I felt safe, but the peace of mind I had come to associate with this place did not return. My mind wandered when I said prayers. I studied the words of my holy texts, but they made no impression. The sergeant would not let me go down to the port; I began to view the temple not as a haven but a jail.

  32: The precepts of Kingly congress

  All during this time, my husband was appearing in court on his usual schedule, but he was deathly worried. The King had not contested my departure from the Capital, indeed, had made no mention of it to anyone, but nor had he expressed acceptance of it. What was to be the permanent solution? This was on my husband’s mind each waking minute, and in some of his dreams too. There was, of course, the option of flight. We had done that almost twenty years earlier, and the tricks of the resulting existence had not been forgotten. But there were complications now, very large ones. For a start, there were our children, who would be unhappy in life on the run, and held to account if they stayed behind. Moreover, Nol’s parasol bearers would lose their livelihood, his artisans their work. There might even be blood retribution against those associated with us – such things were hardly unknown. And of course wealth and standing would have to be given up. I am sure Nol was honest enough to admit to himself that this was a consideration, though his many inner monologues on the subject would have noted that it was only one of many.

  The Brahmin too was anxious to put this issue behind. And then one day, Heaven chose to place
an idea in him.

  In times past, the divine realm had handed down the Ten Kingly Virtues as a set of broad principles concerning royal probity. It was up to the senior priests to draw up the precise, detailed rules by which these principles would direct the King’s daily activity. With each reign, the rules were refined to assure that they in fact reflected Heaven’s will. There was, for instance, a principle that the King’s body must be clean. Therefore, obviously, he must bathe only in pure water. But what constituted pure water? How far above the point in a river at which the royal bathwater was drawn could villagers be allowed to wash themselves? Or, dare we ask, urinate? Priests drew up rules on this principle and quite a long list of others: the King must avoid untruth and deception, he must provide for the sick and dispense justice fairly. He must revere the gods. And he must shun improper carnal practices. I have told you about the law that he must treat another man’s wife as a sister or as poison. But holy law is not only about the forbidding of things. For everything denied, a King must be granted something else. It was on this duality that the Brahmin’s idea rested.

  Now it happened that at this time thirty aged priests were about to open a convocation at a palace annex to discuss rules of daily royal existence. In previous months they had made their way through questions of cleanliness and happened now to be taking up the principle concerning carnal practice.

  Novice priests take the vow of celibacy but of course many of them allow those vows to expire when they grow older so as to marry and father children, for how else would they beget new generations of Brahmins? Most of the holy men at the convocation had chosen that route; they were patriarchs of some of the most powerful priestly families of the Empire. Thus they could discuss carnal practices with the authority of experience. I do believe that Subhadra was the only one in the group who could not. He had renewed his vows annually through his life as a priest. Perhaps this made him the most able to consider these questions objectively, to weigh a particular practice between King and Queen or concubine solely in terms of textual authority.

 

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