The King's Last Song

by Geoff Ryman

  Sometimes, when the wind blows, the heads of the trees and the tallest reeds bow, and huge and blue, over the horizon, the peaks of the distant mountains show, gently pushing back clouds.

  Showers come, short bursts only. Pich leaps forward and shoves the notebooks into the plastic sacks.

  Sometimes, the rain is welcome, cooling. Luc turns up his head and lets it wash down over him, over the decks. It always seems to find more grit to send tumbling along the gaps between the planks, as if the rain bore dust with it. Luc looks down over his body. Every muscle in his body shows, lean, in strands. I always wanted to look like a Cambodian, thinks Luc, and now I do.

  * * * *

  One day, as rain pounds down, misting everything over, they hear the throbbing of a boat's engine.

  They both pause, listening.

  The boat is approaching them.

  The notebooks are already in a plastic sack. Pich ties them more tightly. He loads both the real book and the sack full of notes into a tourist's old rucksack. He picks up the gun, but his hand shakes. He lowers it.

  "Ah,” he says. “They know it's me anyway. There's no point shooting you."

  His eyes stare at Luc and seem to ask: what will you do?

  Pich climbs into the water. Luc watches him. There goes the Book, he realizes. It's only half translated. He's even taking the notebooks with him. He'll bury the Book, and the translation will remain incomplete. What happens if it gets lost or damaged?

  Luc sees the boat coming between reeds, through hissing rain, and suddenly the only feeling it inspires is fear. They will take him away, the Book will be gone, and they'll want to know why he is alive. Maybe they'll even accuse him of the theft. Complicity in the murder of the General.

  I'm not young; I'm sick; I don't want to go through any of that. Luc is scared to be alone. He looks out at the reeds and thinks he can see Arn, with the great book held safely above the water. They'll be too close soon. They'll open fire soon.

  Luc slips over the side of the boat and into the water. The water is lime green and smells of rotten reed. Yet after sunlight, it smells fresh. Water is Cambodia's blood. The Great Lake is Cambodia's pulsing heart. Luc takes a deep breath, and as if he were swimming in the Olympic-sized pool at the lycée, he shoots forward underwater into the reeds. He finds mud and scrub; a branch tears his leg; he shakes badly. He comes up for air. Sweat and water drip off him. He cannot see the boat, only ripples washing towards him. He ducks down again, using the reeds to pull himself deeper.

  A voice like a robot squawks. “Saom Pich! Come out!"

  Luc waits in silence.

  "Anybody on this boat, come out. Slowly and showing your hands, which must not hold any weapons."

  Luc waits. The men shout again. Then their engine starts up, and Luc takes a breath and lowers himself under the water. He lies back, forcing his head down into the mud.

  The engine sounds different under water, a bit like a pepper mill grinding. It chokes suddenly into silence, and very clearly, as if next to Luc's ear, there is a thunk as hull collides with hull.

  Gingerly, Luc raises his head by degrees. He doesn't want to stir the reeds or make a splash. He breathes lightly, shallowly, without a sound. The rain has lifted and now, through the reeds, dull sunlight is reflected on grey water. He hears heavy feet on their tiny deck.

  He thinks of the fishing, and the lamplight at nights, and the cleaning of the decks and hull, and going over the side every morning and every evening to wash, and he feels as if he is losing a home.

  Then there is a shout. “It stinks down there. It smells like somebody's died."

  "Is there nothing?"

  "No, it looks abandoned. Maybe it's a wreck."

  "Keep looking."

  They stay for hours. Radios squawk. More boats arrive. Luc gets a cramp and grimaces and, as silently as possible, tries to force his toes to curl downwards. Slowly he circles his feet, round and round underwater.

  He feels alone and afraid; even his mother's voice has deserted him.

  What if Pich has already gone, taking the Book and the translation with him? Then the Book will disappear and it will never be read. What is the point of hiding here then? What am I being loyal to? The Book? Saom Pich?

  You said, you promised, you said the Book would be number two from now on, you'd let it go whatever happened to it.

  But I know what it would mean to them. Luc remembers his imaginings of Cambodian schoolchildren hearing Jayavarman's words; of families reading at night, their pride glowing like the lamps

  I can't let the Book die.

  I don't want to be left here alone.

  He shivers in the water and his teeth start to click together with fever.

  "We'll take the boat back with us. Hitch it up."

  Pich has run off and left me alone and they will go off as well, and I'll be alone out here and there won't even be a deck to climb up onto. Luc's eyes sting. He is going to cry. He has no strength left. He has been stretched as far as he can go, and any moment now, he will just blubber out: help me, help!

  And pretend he has been held as an unwilling hostage all along.

  Then he hears a fluting frog call, something like a whistle.

  Pich. He's still there in the reeds. He's telling me that.

  Was it Pich? What if it's just a frog?

  I must be an idiot to be doing this; I need my head examined. Here are the Lake Police; they are on your side; they'll take you home, and everybody will be happy. You'll be safe; they WILL remember who you are; they WON'T have forgotten you. Sangha and Map and Yeo Narith and....and....he tries to remember other people. It is truly alarming that he has forgotten them. He gets distracted wondering how he could have forgotten, forgotten....the other Frenchman who works for....for....EfeeEFFee. What's the name of the school? He can't think. E F...

  The motors start up. With a sloosh and a slosh, the boats withdraw.

  Well, that's that then.

  Luc feels relief. He didn't have to make a decision. He can just stay with Pich. He can translated the Book.

  Five minutes. The frog keeps fluting.

  It's getting dark, it's getting cold. The little boy inside Luc comes all the way out, and he starts to sob. He starts to sob uncontrollably, and shiver, and he dry-retches with grief and confusion, as if he's five years old and just woken up from an anaesthetic in a strange place, a strange life he doesn't know.

  And suddenly, Pich has his arms around him.

  "Well done, Comrade. Brave Grandfather, well done. There, there, we'll get up on land, we'll get you warm."

  Pich pulls Luc's hair out of his eyes. “You stayed, Grandfather Luc. That means something. I don't know what.” Pich looks amused, and shakes his head, a tough, wry old smile.

  "Come on, my friend, we are now guerrillas together."

  True to his word, Pich pulls him up onto the bank. “Can you walk?” He helps Luc to his feet, and helps him hobble through scrub onto dry and dusty land. “It'll be hell when it rains,” he says. “Until then. Well. This is the life I'm used to. We are maquis, Comrade, resistance fighters. We fish, we sleep, we have water. And"—Pich holds up and shakes the notebooks and the heavy clanking bag—"we have the Book.” His face softens. “You can still work."

  He pauses. The wind is coming in off the lake, the reeds rustle, the lakeside is full of sounds so it's safe to make a noise. “It's me they'll shoot."

  Luc whimpers like a baby. He settles into the still warm ground and its bed of leaves. There's a shelf of cloud in the sky and the last of the golden light streams out under it. Luc realizes that he is warm and dry. Habit takes over. Out comes the pencil; Luc goes to the Book and suddenly he is in command and the world makes sense.

  h

  They live wild for weeks, Luc slipping in and out of fever.

  Some days he feels quite well. They have plenty to eat and drink. Pich looks at home. Luc lives in a kind of suspended state of reverie.

  War, thinks Luc, at its base, l
ife is a war, and without going through war, you don't know life.

  That thought keeps repeating over and over. Each time Luc is impressed by its clarity, its multiple implications, the blank truthfulness of it. The thought has the power to make him content with hunger and with sleeping on a bed of dried reed. Rousseau, was it? He can't quite remember.

  By evening he is often insupportably bored. Boredom tosses his head back and forth and yet he is so tired and sleepy that his eyelids droop down with the sun.

  He begins to shake all the time, day and night, a light, subliminal quivering. Once, in the Jura in France, Luc had seen a frozen river, and underneath a clear piece of ice he could see the river rippling. Him, now.

  Sometimes in his best hour, when golden light matches the Golden Book, striking it sideways so the incisions are so clear he can almost hear Jayavarman speaking, somehow then it is an acceptable fact that this translation will be his last act.

  It is very far from being a bad or pointless act, even though his concentration wavers, and sweat sometimes drips onto the notebooks, or muddy pawprints smear them. When the pencils grow blunt, he gnaws the wood and sucks the graphite to make them sharp again. He paces himself, translating for only a couple of hours a day.

  When the heat of the day buzzes around him, he lies prostrate in the mud and feels chill goosebumps on the back of his arms though he is drenched with sweat.

  Then one day, he begins to quake. This is much more than a shiver. He rattles like a tall hotel in an earthquake. His arms dance all by themselves. He watches them dance. In confusion, he thinks he is at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. He'd gone there after all, and was a hippy; he's in the field rocking out, his arms going wild.

  Does he make up the following story?

  Pich goes away for a long time, days, and Luc thinks he's dying. He can feel the insects on his arms and he's sure that they've come to consume his body and drag him down into the mud for storage.

  Then suddenly Pich is next to him saying, “Okay my friend, I've brought you medicine. I told them my brother was dying and I begged at the hospital and they didn't recognize me because my face is no longer everywhere. Here. Here."

  Pich cradles Luc's head. “These are supposed to be taken with food,” he says and pushes a pill into Luc's mouth.

  Luc tries to be a good boy and swallow, but the pill sticks in his throat. He coughs. He's suddenly scared he will cough out his medicine and lose it, but Pich comes with water in his cupped hands. “Drink this."

  Luc slurps and coughs. He can feel the pill stick in his throat like a leech. More water comes. The pill goes down.

  Luc wakes up feeling better in the morning, but he is not sure he isn't making that up either.

  They begin to have conversations again.

  "The Americans were so stupid,” says Pich. “We never would have won without their help. Before they got rid of Sihanouk, we were losing. There were only four thousand of us. Then the Americans start bombing in ‘69. Three thousand bombing raids in one year, illegal. Then they get rid of Sihanouk because he was neutral. Vietnam and Cambodian Communists were nearly fighting a war with each other over Sihanouk. An American-backed coup against him was the only thing that could possibly unite us. By December 1970 there are four Vietnamese divisions fighting alongside Pol Pot. All of Cambodia joined us. The Americans are so stupid that they pick Lon Nol to rule. Lon Nol, head of the secret police, who was nuts. He's so crazy, he wages a war against peasants. All peasants. All you have to do to be shot by the police is be a peasant. Lon Nol kills thousands. You don't have a single Cambodian on the Lon Nol government's side outside of Phnom Penh!"

  He goes on shouting like this for some time, and Luc and Pich rock each other from side to side howling with laughter at the Americans.

  "Then in ‘73 they started bombing us again after the peace agreement! Two hundred days and nights of raids, half a million tons of bombs, and they called it a Peace Accord and wondered why everybody in Cambodia wanted the Americans out!"

  By now Luc's sides are aching with hilarity.

  Pich wags a finger. “Mind you, mind you, no one could be as stupid as the Cambodians!"

  They collapse helplessly against each other, propping each other up.

  "Pol Pot, he's got the Vietnamese fighting with him! Four divisions show up to make him king. But Pol Pot is crazy, out of his mind, so in 1971 the CPK Congress names Vietnam...” Pich has to stop and draw in a long breath. “And these are the actual words, ‘the long-term acute enemy'! Saloth Sar kills about a thousand trained, sensible, politically aware, intelligent Cambodian Communists because, only because, they've lived in North Vietnam. And he passes....oh!....passes the party over to twelve-year-olds. And he wins! And he wins! But only because the Americans were SO STUPID. He takes over the country. He's so incompetent; he kills a million people without even knowing he's done it! How do you kill one million people by mistake and not know?” Pich is shouting. “And now nobody, nobody in all of Southeast Asia, wants Communism ever again. They don't want socialism ever again! They don't want liberalism ever again. It all smells of death to them. So who was dumb and who was smart and who won? The Americans!"

  They howl again.

  "Sony billboards in Ho Chi Minh City!” Luc remembers the last time he was there.

  "Vietnamese client rulers!” Pich's laughter sounds more like a wail. “Rigid class system, stupid royal family bickering over who is king! We're right back at the beginning of the twentieth century! All that war! All those bombs! For absolutely nothing!” He's howling now with hilarity, and tears are streaming down his face.

  Luc's laughter has shuddered to halt. He marvels at this new extremity that their situation has brought them to.

  Pich snores in his sleep.

  He sometimes farts. He blames Luc and giggles.

  He talks about his sons, his little boys, and the games they play, and the toys he's made for them, and what they want to be when they grow up. He says calmly, “I will never see them again, and they will not be able to be educated because of what I've done. But they will be there. Long after I'm gone, they will be living and thinking and doing things. That's enough."

  * * * *

  Rainy season is mild that year.

  Some days it doesn't rain at all. Some afternoons it pelts down so hard that raindrops bounce back up from the ground.

  They use the rain as a curtain to hide behind. They slog farther inland to escape the advancing shoreline of the swollen lake. Pich hunches over the rucksack to stop the notebooks getting soaked.

  Luc remembers movies. He tells Pich the plots of movies as they walk, and that his favourite movie is Singin’ in the Rain. He sings him the song. He would dance, but his legs feel too scrawny and taut and he fears he will fall over. To please Luc, Pich says, “Oh, that is a very good song. Teach me the song.” By the end they both are singing it, but Luc has translated it into Khmer.

  Chanting in a monsoon

  Chanting in a monsoon

  My spirits are rising

  Remembering happiness

  With a smile on my face

  And happy smiling verses

  I'm chanting, chanting in a monsoon.

  To respond in kind, Pich tells him the entire story of Tum Teav. Luc already knows it, he has read it many times, but Pich saw the film version in which the King is a good guy (Sihanouk was in power then). So Pich recites it fondly, as a relic of a different age. The rain keeps falling. Pich holds Luc in his arms to warm him and stop him shaking.

  The morning air is close and heavy, and Luc can't breathe.

  "I cannot go back for medicine again,” says Pich and shakes his head.

  "Am I making this up too?” asks Luc.

  The only thing that makes him feel better is the Book. Luc lovingly strokes the notebook pages, his stomach turning over and over. “My hands won't write,” he says.

  Pich takes the pencil. “Then you tell me what it says."

  Luc lies bouncing on the
ground as if he's riding in a jeep; his teeth knocking together. He gasps for breath; but he keeps working.

  The leaves slip and slide and won't stay in place, and they get the packets confused, and the cut circles get separated from their supposed home leaves, and Luc weeps and weeps. “We've lost it, we've done it all wrong! It's not in order, it won't make any sense!"

  His voice trails away to a whine, his face screws up until eyes and mouth disappear and all that's left are strings of muscle.

  "Let's match,” says Pich. The storm clears. Calmly, methodically, Pich goes through all 155 gold leaves. “No, no, shush, be calm, don't let the sickness master you. No, shush. All you have to do is tell me what this circle says, okay? I'll lay them all out in order. Okay?"

  It helps. Luc calms down. He snuffles and wipes his nose, and his head aches so badly he has to squint, and his joints feel as large as oranges. All the leaves are laid out on the ground in order. Crumpled gold leaves are smoothed flat. All ten damaged circles are fitted back into what they think are the correct leaves. Slowly, moving through a fog of confusion, Luc finds their translations in the notebooks and corrects the leaf numbers.

  "I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” says Luc. “I've been silly. I'm sorry.” He's still crying.

  "No. You've done very well,” says Pich. He sits cross-legged as if in meditation, and both hands are held out as if to say: behold!

  "We've finished. That's all. That's why we're confused. They've all been translated. The Book is complete."

  "It's over?” Luc suddenly feels very vague, as if the world itself has ended.

  "Yes, yes, you rest, okay?"

  Luc lowers himself to the ground, and he feels like a little boy again. He says “Read them to me."

  "My eyes are not good,” says Pich.

  But Luc wants so much to hear them all in order. Pich goes back and forth through the notebooks. Sometimes he swaps leaf numbers in the notebook. “I think this April leaf belongs earlier."

  He tires and asks, “How long is this thing?"