The years had flattened the writing. A kind of visual parity had overtaken the marks, making it difficult to say which inscriptions came last or first, or even to say which stretch of words or symbols went together with which others. Depending on how one grouped them, there were dozens of ways of reading the inscriptions. All of this only compounded his difficulties.
The monk had, some months back, cut a few words into the wall himself, in a blank area near its foot, discreet and permanently shaded from the sun. Mostly this was to test the tactile properties of the rock, the ease or difficulty with which the original inscriptions would have been made; and to see how the wall held a perfectly new inscription, in the hope that this might help him date the layers.
But perhaps he also did it simply to leave a few words behind, like the rest. His translated as “A lesser chronicler.” He wondered how the phrase might someday be overlain, misunderstood possibly, and taken up, perhaps, into something greater by that misunderstanding.
He folded the palm book and placed it, along with the thin, plain stylus, into the sheath he kept at his waist. The day’s transcribing was done. He would add these notes to the rest back at the temple.
For all the complications, he’d managed to give sense to some of the scrawlings. Most seemed addressed to the paintings that covered the rock fortress during Kassapa’s reign, particularly those of women, “long-eyed,” “golden-skinned,” whose essential features, judging by the inscriptions, were stillness and silence:
Those ladies of the mountain
They did not give us
The twitch of an eyelid
The paintings had been done after the fall of Kassapa, around 500, when his deposer, Moggallana, moved the capital back to Anuradhapura. Those living in the villages surrounding Sigiriya would have made the massive rock (and the wall at its base) theirs again, while the palace proper was converted into a monastery.
A few of the paintings, smaller ones, remained along the path spiraling hundreds of feet into the air, ascending the fortress’s edge. They would have survived for their location in the recesses and caves, which shielded them, along with the sentries of that era, from the elements.
There were also other inscriptions Darasa had at least partly interpreted, ones of a more mundane sort: declarations made between lovers, light rhymes, nicknames, and simple identifications (so-and-so from such-and-such). Amid these were the more significant ones, the ones he was after, carrying intimations of life in Sigiriya across the centuries. They dated as far back as 500, around the time of the death of Mahanama, the leading scholar of his era, and the primary compiler of the Great Chronicle (the Mahavamsa), a clerical history of the island covering the thousand years preceding his death.
Some of the graffiti spoke of noble families and their scandals, others of the lack of rice or meat, still others of populist discontent and the deposing of kings—and indeed of the fall of the fortress kingdom itself, to Moggallana, the rightful heir, apparently.
Darasa hoped these records might enrich the commentary he was preparing on the Great Chronicle. More to the point, though, what made the task pressing, was how they might inflect his contribution to the Lesser one (the Culavamsa), the still-living record of the kingdom. It had been accumulating in fits and starts from the time of Mahanama’s death up through to the arrival of the Dutch envoys thirty years ago. That arrival had disrupted the keeping of the record, and a handful of the most senior priests—Darasa, not yet 50, being the youngest of them—was charged with updating it, through a portrait of the most recent decades of the kingdom. When it finally arrived, he would say to himself sometimes, the light of the past, even the very distant past, must change the complexion of the present.
Interpreting the inscriptions was arduous and uncertain work. As was simply collecting them. He’d only begun to account for the many inscriptions carried by the architecture of the court and palace above. So he ascended again. This was his third trip. The monk left the mirror-wall behind and edged his way along the path. In the guard stations he passed several renderings of the Buddha, in bleeding shades of red, orange, and yellow. The path narrowed as it wrapped around the interior face of the fortress, which was hidden from both the entrance to the court and the nearby townships, partly by the thick forest at its base.
Further toward the top, the cliff turned sheer and the path narrow, in some places reducing to mere foot-holes. The shallow steps ascended at a radical angle, as a great height had to be scaled in the smallest distance. He leaned against the rock. At this height, already two hundred feet from the forest floor, the winds were muscular, death-dealing. He’d knotted the loose fabric of his robe to give the currents less to work with.
In previous eras, rope bridges had crisscrossed this part of the mountain, connecting various levels of the fortress on the exposed top, where the palace lay, to the plateaus, embankments, and interior caves below. As Darasa stepped from foot-hole to foot-hole, pressing his weight against the cliff, he wondered, as every person who had ever got to the palace above must have, how many would have lost their footing, been snatched by the winds, toppled from the bridges, only to expire in the coconut palms and shrubs below.
The sun descended from its apex just as he reached the top. The palace grounds had stood unoccupied for over four hundred years. It was a site for research only now, and so far, beyond the reach of the Europeans. Just as Kandy marked the southern stronghold of the kingdom, Anuradhapura, though more vulnerable, did in the north. Sigiriya lay safely between the two. It left Darasa free, in a less fraught space, to make sense of things, which was what monks of his rank chiefly did.
Scattered throughout the grounds were staircases of varying widths leading only into the sky, the surrounding structures long ago having been dispersed by the elements. Several well-preserved buildings with broad balconies lined the plateau’s far edge, each with eccentrically shallow stairs: sixty of them rising just ten feet.
The largest building, the palace proper, stood to the right, along the southern edge of the plateau, five stories high, each floor narrower than the one below. The inner wall had long ago collapsed, leaving behind a cross-sectional view.
The interior was mostly debris. The outer wall, facing over the cliff’s edge, was in better condition, but large patches of it had fallen away, leaving gaps of a leafy green—forest surrounded the great rock out to the horizon—against the pale gold of the remaining stone.
The vast quantities of rock had been quarried miles away and brought up the sheer walls by an elaborate system of pulleys. All supplies would have been carried on the backs of servants, dragging many to their deaths. The king himself would only occasionally be shepherded from the palace to the long rectangular pools at the foot of the rock, where members of the extended court, and further out, the priesthood, resided.
The walls were engraved with lions and other animals, alongside geometric patterns and what seemed an uninterpreted language. Darasa entered the ruins to finish recording these markings. They might shift the meaning, he thought, of King Kassapa’s description in the Chronicle, and perhaps send a sort of interpretive ripple through the ages down to the current regime and Darasa’s own king, Rajasingha II.
He climbed to the third floor of an adjoining structure to take down the exterior markings on the palace walls. The angular inscriptions seemed to him clearly more than decorative, patterned as they were with something like a syntax, though not of a language like Sanskrit or any of its descendants.
The more he studied it, the more the writing came to resemble not a language but a shorthand, one that would have been filled in contextually during Kassapa’s reign. On either side of the writing were elongated etchings, some of a creature that was a man below and a lion above, depicted beneath a broad parasol, and adjoining other images of palm trees and scabbards.
He copied down the three-inch-high script bounded by these drawings. On the fifth and narrowest floor, a pair of interior columns within the king’s chambers was simi
larly marked. He kneeled near one of the columns and transcribed the text that wound its way up to the low ceiling in a spiral. After finishing the other column, he sat against the wall and put away the stylus and the palm book. The day was not unusually hot, but an ordinary day was fiery in the midlands, far from the cooling seas.
The king would inquire about the commentary on the Great Chronicle the monk would prepare back in the Highlands, the core of the modern kingdom. He was sure of this. Rajasingha presented himself to the Sinhalese, and to the Europeans equally, as a champion of historical inquiry—perhaps he was—and, more certainly, of the notion of lineal rule of the kingdom tracing back to Kassapa.
The king would be even keener, naturally, to know what the committee of monks was preparing to add to the Lesser Chronicle about his own reign over the last decades. But here Rajasingha’s inquiry could not be direct. By tradition the clerical records were not to be interfered with. If influence were to be exerted, it would have to travel by subterranean channels.
For the moment, Darasa thought, the king might be occupied by more pressing matters—the intensifying Dutch raids from the south, and the more ambiguous, mature standoff with the Portuguese to the north—to bother much with this. Any sort of respite from his “vigilance” would be a relief.
The monk took a sesame ball from his satchel and ate in the heat, thinking of the trip back down the mountain, to the village temple where he’d spent these last nights.
■■■
Stagg rose from the desk and pushed open the bathroom door. He tugged on the beaded metal chain that hung at eye-level. The bulb hummed then flickered. It stabilized a faint white and revealed a mirror stained by a mist of toothpaste and a tiny oval sink ringed with millimeter-length hair. He put his hand on the hot water knob of the shower. But he was late. In the many months now since he’d started writing the pieces in earnest, stopping only when the scenes trailed off in his mind, he always was.
From the medicine cabinet he pulled an uncapped bottle of mouthwash, bright green, and gargled with his head held back while pissing into the stained bowl. The sound of disturbed water confirmed his position as the burn of alcohol grew in his mouth till he had to spit it out over the last trickles of piss. He dressed quickly in the clothes on the bed, sank his feet into loafers, and squeezed his laptop into a briefcase, a gift from Renna, that was stiff from underuse.
The air in the hallway was an improvement, cooler, smelling faintly of sawdust. The trip down three flights seemed longer than usual, and he caught himself limping slightly. His Achilles was sore, though he couldn’t think of when or where he might have strained it. Perhaps dragging the girl.
The foyer was flush with sunlight. It streamed through the glass doors and reflected off the concrete stairs outside and the glossy speckled tiling underfoot that smelled of disinfectant. For a moment everything disappeared in the glare.
5
“This is what,” thomas penerin said, studying the manila-foldered report on the last assault. “Jen Best. Found… Harth, right, well, that says almost nothing. This is what, then? For us.”
“I’ve seen a lot of girls now on that route,” Stagg said. “And no one’s turned up like this.” He picked bits of lint from his sock, which rested on the opposite thigh, his legs being crossed. “Maybe that doesn’t say much. Either way, though.”
“Not really, no. One way counts, Carl. The other is simple assault. Run-of-the-mill police work. We’d turn that over. Even a string of beatings—if that’s all it is, we’re wasting our time. So, does this woman, what happened to her, have anything to do with anything? Jenko, say. Or the elections—”
“Does it matter who wins anymore?” Stagg said. “Sometimes, for a few seconds, I can forget who’s president now. Which is crazy.”
“It matters,” Penerin said.
“A third of them voted last time.”
“And that’s what we’re trying to fix. We have to make it matter to them. Obviously it already does to the ones destroying everything. So as long as you work for me, as long as the government keeps picking up both our tabs, it’ll have to matter to you. So, from all the months you’ve been with us, Carl, can you tell me something?”
A sneer overtook Stagg’s face. “Look, this girl, she got seriously fucked up. But it looked like, to me, she was meant to live, the exact way she’d been fucked up. That’s it. She didn’t say a word, not when the police and the ambulance came either. They must have gotten her name after I left, or from something she had on her. I only know what you’re holding in your hands. And there’s not all that much in the report, beyond the few details I supplied. What’s there to interpret yet? Her empty stare? If it’s speculation—sure, a less-than-murderous ex, maybe. Or a warning for the check that bounced. Or just a dissatisfied customer looking for a refund. There was nothing obviously about… politics—the ‘State’—if that’s what you mean. That I can say.”
Penerin got up from his swivel chair. “Your impressions, even the faint ones, are why you’re here. If that’s all you have, then fine, that’s all. But did you check this against the earlier incidents? That at least could mean something eventually—that they’re definitely all related, if they are.”
“I wasn’t working here when they happened, though.”
“But the reports. Did you look them up?”
“This happened yesterday. No.”
“Then we need to check now.”
“I’m going to get something just from comparing names, images? I need to talk to her.”
“We’ll do both,” Penerin said as he got up from his desk. “Anyway, here’s the thing. I have another watch here, from Henning, who’s seen prostitutes harassed or worse recently. I sent him a copy of the report this morning. He thought we should compare notes.” He walked past Stagg to the door that looked only a little like wood and gestured for him to follow.
At the end of an underlit corridor they came to a room of glass. The ceiling was painted a cool green. In the corner was a small desk with a fax machine and a printer. Three folding chairs were laid out around a coffee table in the center of the room. A South Asian sat in the middle chair, slender-framed, long-fingered. His eyes livened when he caught Stagg’s.
“This is Ravan, this is Carl,” Penerin said without gestures. Stagg extended his hand and Ravan received it happily, though without standing.
“So you’ve seen what I’ve seen, something a bit like it anyway,” Ravan said, still shaking his hand. His accent confounded. England was in it, but in a complicated way.
“Really there hasn’t been a case like this in months, in Easton,” Penerin said.
“But yeah,” Stagg interrupted, “I found a woman, beaten but not mugged. She lost nothing,” he said, scanning Penerin’s copy of the report. “Her bag, money, ID, everything was found on her. Just yesterday.”
Ravan pulled on the collar of his polo with two fingers. His sneakers were battered, offsetting the curiously sharp creases in his gray wool trousers. He turned his eyes to the floor and then quickly back to Stagg. “Lately there’s been quite a lot of this, in the more unpleasant parts of Henning, where I keep an eye out, the way you do here, I understand. Some even in the better places. Mostly it’s among the girls, the escorts, this.”
“And what’s ‘this’?” Stagg asked, staring at the heavy glass windows that were the room’s walls. There was a small speaker next to one of them, but the glass was untinted and non-reflective, ruling out interrogative uses for the room.
“This violence, that’s never quite fatal,” Ravan replied. “I’ve had at least four of these. You’ve had at least four, even if they were a while ago now. And the report you’ve sent—the physical description of the man is basically consistent with one running across most of the cases for which we have one. There is also the car, its make and color. An uncommon kind of green, actually. You’ll have to check further with her, but it sounds as if your victim is describing a vehicle from another case of mine. I’d have to kno
w more, of course, but I can’t help thinking she’s just the latest. The meaning of it, though, I’ve no idea.
“Some of the beaten girls have disappeared since. That’s worth keeping in mind. We can’t say, of course, if they’ve just left town, gone back to some relative or boyfriend or whatnot. That’s the thing with tarts, isn’t it.” He looked up at Penerin. “A couple of dealers, cocaine mostly, have been roughed up. Put in hospital actually. There have been a few firefights too, which have put them on notice. In a way, well, I tend to think it’s all had its use.”
Penerin shook his head with a resigned smile.
“Well, the police can’t be bothered with this at the moment, right?” Ravan said. “Bigger things afoot. That’s true. And there are certainly, visibly, less girls working now. That must be good. And it can’t not have something to do with this force that looms.”
“Force,” Penerin repeated the euphemism.
“Violence—its possibility,” Ravan said. “Mostly that’s been enough. Except when memories need refreshing, like this, maybe. And isn’t that what the police ordinarily provide? That possibility? Doesn’t someone always?”
No one said anything.
Penerin closed his eyes briefly, as if clearing Ravan’s words from his mind. “Carl is going to talk to Best as soon as he can,” Penerin said. “We’ll be in touch after, Ravan.”
“I think she’ll be out of commission for a while,” Stagg said as he stood. He shook hands again with Ravan, who seemed settled just where he was.
“Whenever you can get access,” Penerin said. “Maybe before she’s discharged if we’re lucky. She can’t disappear on us.”
Stagg and Penerin stood near the door. Finally Ravan got to his feet, almost reluctantly, and the three of them filed out of the glass room with the green ceiling.
6
A hundredth of the city’s substance voided, sixteen months in, and hardly any deaths.
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