The Thief

by Claire North

  He knows that he cannot keep running like this for long. What would he do if he were the seeker?

  He’d set up a cordon, the radius of a running man’s reach, let nothing in and nothing out. Setting up such a cordon around Bangkok was a challenge, the city too big; out here in the countryside, with two roads in and one road out, it is not so hard to do.

  At noon he hid in the shade of the matum tree. Grey fruits, not yet ripe, swayed in the branches overhead. A bird with a shaven head and extravagant tail feathers stared down at him, and cacked its displeasure at his presence for a while before losing interest and returning to the task of preening.

  He set his eyes on a range of low hills in the distance. The sun had burnt all the clouds away, and they seemed bare and harsh in this hot noontime light. As he neared, he could see the beginning of forest and scrub clinging to the low rise, green-grey leaves, spiny and broad, as if the palm trees of the south and the hardy evergreens of the north had met in this country and fused together in ultimate genetic victory.

  The path became harder as he neared the hills. The pain in his feet had reduced to steady throbbing; the throbbing was not good news. The aching in his head whispered of heatstroke yet to come, but he couldn’t waste time on puking, not now, not when Abhik was so close behind.

  At some hour of the early afternoon, he heard the sound of an engine, louder and clearer than even the cars that had sometime rattled across this mud-shaped land. He ran until he reached scrubby bushes which rose to his waist, threw himself down in their embrace, twigs snapping at his skin, a startled rodent racing from its lair. There he stayed as the engine noise circled once, then twice, then a third time overhead. His clothes were the colour of grey mud, his hair, his skin, all things caked in dirt, and that was probably what saved him.

  The plane turned and turned again, then flew on by, its spotters having seen nothing to report.

  He reached the edge of the low forest by dusk. The last few miles had been the longest, paths running out, fields growing to tumbled-over towers of tortured foliage. He fell beneath the shade of an acacia tree, heard the shrill night callings of the beautiful creatures that paraded through the day, their feathers vibrant golds and greens, their voices like the battle-cry of a barbarian granny, and for a few blissful minutes, Remy slept.

  The night was all about compensating for the day.

  He puked what meagre contents were in his stomach, then puked thin, white bile.

  He lay curled up in a ball, head pounding, arms shaking, his blanket a bundle of freshly fallen leaves, his skin twitching from the landings and departing of myriad flies. In the dark he thought he heard something large, panting, stir in the woods, and wondered whether tigers ever came this close to humanity, or if wild dogs slumbered. It would be simple to light a fire – but not yet. Not tonight. Not with Abhik’s men so close by.

  Shortly after midnight, by the rising of the moon, he heard voices in the distant forest. Sound travelled strangely in this place, carried on the leaf-rustling wind. He pulled his bed of leaves higher above his head until barely his eyes showed between their damp edges, and watched distant flashes of torchlight play in the woods before fading away with the sounds of men.

  Abhik Lee had a tracker; of course he did.

  It would have been foolish to expect anything else.

  Chapter 14

  He rose with the sun, having no alternative.

  A wild boar, furious and panting, sprang away from his den as he shook himself free, startled to discover that it had spent a part of the night near a creature bigger than itself. He wondered if anyone else would hear the commotion of that passing beast.

  As the sun climbed higher, so did he. Beneath a fallen tree trunk, he found a nest of nameless scuttling insects and collected a handful in a scoop of leaf to serve as breakfast. Hunger made them taste better; perhaps even good. The ones with long antennae about their head and little spots of brown across their carapace reminded him a little of prawns.

  A dip in the land hinted at water but the stream he found at its centre was barely an arm wide, a running trickle of nothing. He buried himself in it, turning his head against the flow to let the water run across his face, his eyes, into his mouth. He didn’t dare take his boots off for fear that his swollen feet would never get back inside.

  He wondered if he should stay here by this little stream, eating little insects, but looking back the way he had come, he could see too easily the muddy imprints where he had walked, the broken twigs he had snapped, the undergrowth disturbed, and so he kept climbing.

  The shadow of the forest made moving easier, sheltered from the heat of the sun, but made navigating harder. He climbed, trusting only to motion, until he came to a ridge of spindly grey stones which rose above the top of the highest trees, and there, feeling his way along in search of an easy route, he found a path, narrower than a child’s waist but still distinctly a thing carved out with knives and boots, which snaked over the ridge of the hill and ran down the other side.

  He followed it a while until he came to a tiny fork, a bare disturbance in the way, and seeing it had already been disturbed by other feet before his, followed that.

  It curled a little down the way he had come, and he was almost ready to leave it when, pushing through an insect-crawling shrub, he came to a small clearing. Here, from a nondescript pile of grey rocks, the little stream rose where he’d earlier drunk, and there, carved in the same stone and decked with yellow and green lichens, were the faces of a dozen gods.

  Tallest among them, though a little shorter than Remy, was the smiling, beatific Gautama, his hair held high and his ears hanging long, hands together in a wai of greetings. Either side, smaller but no less worn or carefully carved, he glimpsed Vishnu and Krishna, Ganesh the elephant god and Kuanyin, goddess of mercy, standing together like a happy family, and in one corner, an arm sadly chipped off at the elbow, another saint with Indian features and a Buddhist robe, who wore about his neck the sign of the cross and smiled as contentedly as any on this hill.

  A woman sat before these icons. She squatted on her haunches, picking at a ravaged piece of fruit, her eyes wandering over the statues with no particular focus on any one divinity. Her head was wrapped in bright fabrics that swept back to a point; her neck was circled with metal bands that pushed her chin up high above her shoulders. Her teeth were stained black and red with betel juice, her wrists were skinny and old, her ankles narrow enough he could have wrapped his thumb and little finger around them and still had room to clench. At his approach her head turned up, revealing her stained smile, film-coated eyes. She squinted through the pinprick vision of her cataracts, saw a stranger, a shape without distinction, and grunted a sound which might have been greeting, might have been contempt. She couldn’t have been a day under seventy, yet somehow she’d made her way up here to eat fruit and rock back and forth before these ancient stones.

  Remy bowed, palms pressed together, asked her, “Excuse me, revered lady, do you know if there is somewhere I can trade for food around here?”

  She took so long to answer, he began to speak again, but she cut him off with a shaking of her head and a shifting of her weight from one foot to the other.

  “Trade, trade, nothing to trade,” she tutted.

  “I’m hungry; I need help.”

  “Help? Hungry? Nothing to trade – no, nothing to trade.”

  “Is there a village near by?”

  “Village? No, no village.”

  “Any people?”

  “Down the hill, down the hill perhaps. You should ask my son.”

  “Where is your son?”

  “There, there, over there.” She flicked one wrist back up the path, fingers flashing out like the tail of a horse swatting at flies.

  “Is it far?”

  “No, not so far, not so far.”

  “Do you…are you all right here?”

  “I’ve got fruit. You want fruit?”

  He looked at the half-eaten remai
ns and his stomach churned. “That’s very kind, but I’ll find my way.”

  He left her, praying alone to deity unknown.

  Chapter 15

  There was a downward path on the other side of the ridge, which turned into a scratch in the ground which dissolved into nothing.

  At the place where it dissolved, Remy stopped, looking for someone, something, a sign of human life. Birds shrieked in the trees, leaves flapping like sails. The wind was cold, the sun so hot that where it peeped through the foliage it burnt little marks on skin and earth. He listened.

  Something creaked between the trees.

  Someone cursed, their words lost to the breeze, but then they curse again: “Idiot, idiot, I told you to tie…”

  The wind carried the voices away.

  Remy turned, and kept turning, listening, looking.

  On his third rotation, he saw the elephant. It stood barely fifty yards away, where it had been standing all along. How, he wondered, could a creature so large, so ponderous, hide so well? It looked at him; he looked at it, its ears brushing thoughtfully against the insects that clung to its wrinkled side, its trunk twisting as if trying to chew the air.

  For a moment neither moved, paralysed, it seemed by their own mutual surprise at being so encountered. Then a man, tiny and lithe, burst round the side of the elephant’s flank, a sack on his back and a stick in his hand, saw Remy and stopped. His head was shaven, his clothes were an explosion of colour, his trousers torn at the knees and crotch, badly re-patched and the patches torn again, but he didn’t seem to care.

  “Hey!” he said at last, when the silence grew too long. “Hey! Have you seen my mother?”

  The elephant driver’s name was Songnoom. He was his mother’s second son, king of the forests, master of his tribe. Where, Remy wondered, was the first son?

  (He ran away to be a monk; what a disappointment. It’s all very well seeking spiritual enlightenment, his brother would say, but how’s that going to feed anyone?! We shall never speak of this again.)

  Songnoom had a rifle. It was an ancient, rusted thing, a remnant of some war. Perhaps it had been cutting edge when first it fired in the Crimea, but each shot needed to be loaded, rammed home, the pan primed, and it was only good for shooting rabbits at very short range, and scaring strangers far from home.

  Now Songnoom waved it towards Remy – not the barrel, just the weapon as a whole, as if he himself was uncertain if he was intimidating an enemy or welcoming a friend on a lonely path. Like his mother, his teeth were stained red and black, but unlike his mother he had lost two as a young man and so chewed almost entirely on one side of his mouth, creating a pattern of streaks which faded to pink away from the mashed-up betel nut.

  At his command were seven other men, of whom two were brothers, four cousins and one they’d picked up as a child and brought along, and who suffered terribly for his lack of genetic bondage. He also had three elephants under his authority, which regarded the great turbulence of the humans about them with the patience of wily priests who have seen rebellion and heard the changing of the psalms, yet looked up and known the heavens never altered for man’s delight.

  Any impression that these men might be foresters or locals vanished at the sight of their antiquated arms, and the suspicion dawned – and how right you are – that these might well be traders of a less salubrious sort.

  (We peek into their packages and yes, oh yes! Sweet intoxicant poppy, the sap dried out into great beige bricks in the sun, wrapped in linen and sent on its way. This is not China – you will not be beheaded here for your practices – but still, still a risky business, the times being what they are! We cannot blame you for avoiding the road more travelled.)

  Questions: who are you? What are you doing here?

  Answers: I’m a traveller; I’m lost.

  And then, sensing perhaps their illicit goods, seeing their uncomfortable attitude: the British accused me of something I did not do. They hunted me all the way to Bangkok. I’m trying to get to the north, towards Vientiane.

  On foot?

  I don’t have any other choice.

  Silence in the forest.

  We have arrived at a tricky moment. These are not bad people, these smugglers, are they? How would we define “bad”? Songnoom loves his mother, and for that love would surely do anything to protect her, and if protecting her extended to killing strangers in cold blood, well then, surely that is not a “bad” act, in and of itself, merely the logical conclusion of our line of thought?

  We consider our options, balance the pros and cons.

  It is the game we play now, and the dice, when they fall, will not fall without some weight. “Chance” is a concept for children.

  Perhaps Remy too can hear the rattling of bones inside the case – a player of the game should always have an ear for such things – but what’s he to do? He calculates every move he might make, and they are few, and they achieve…nothing. His fate sits in the hands of a second son, his lips stained like ancient blood. Throw the dice, toss a coin, wait for it to land.

  Songnoom’s fingers drum against the butt of his rifle.

  Remy looks at the gun and realises he played the moment wrong. He appeals to the brotherhood of bandits, but in confessing that he is hunted, he also admits to being a prize.

  A voice calls out, “I dropped my spoon.”

  Our eyes turn, as does the whole forest it seems, to see the smuggler’s mother, moving well for a woman whose neck sticks out almost horizontally from her back, waddling down the forest path. Her lips still glisten with the remnant of consumed fruit, her fingers are sticky nectar to gathering flies, but her voice is clear and her feet are steady, for these are her hills, her forests, and though the young boys laugh at her and call her granny, she has known stories that they will never understand.

  A little gesture from her son, and those of his boys who were hiding knives in their hands and in their eyes, turn away.

  “I dropped my spoon!” she exclaims again, wandering towards the elephants. “I dropped it.”

  Remy moves a little away, ready to run as son and mother reunite. Songnoom flaps over his parent, Remy temporarily forgotten; helps her mount an elephant where she sits, tiny on its great back, as comfortable as a queen on her throne. Remy is heading away, slipping between the trees, but perhaps some tendril of filial piety, of honour or gentler thinking has been kindled in this smuggler, because as Remy turns to make good his escape, Songnoom calls out after him.

  “Eh!” he cries. “You want something to eat?”

  Chapter 16

  A picnic with smugglers and their mother in a forest.

  They laugh at how eager he is to eat until they see that it isn’t an act, a passing fancy, but the devouring of a man who might otherwise have starved to death.

  His clothes are ruined but still curious enough that the youngest of the clan, a boy of some fifteen years, trades them for an old shirt and baggy trousers that he was taking to sell. They are too small for Remy, but big enough that they merely look strange, not uncomfortable. They were too large for the boy anyway; where did he get them, we wonder?

  (Won in a race with his elder brother; which brother is not with the clan now, because he is slow at running and likes to gamble, and neither vice is acceptable in a streamlined business operation. The older boy will die in 1943 in Kuala Lumpa with a card sharp’s knife through his throat; the younger in 1945 when the Japanese retreat and chaos ensues. When he dies, he’ll be wearing a shirt patched with pieces cut from Remy’s clothes. So much for chance; so much for fate.)

  Remy offers to pay, a few coins, a bare handful for his meal, but the smuggler’s mother is sleeping now and something in the peaceful manner of it, the easy way she lies against the warmth of her elephant, which could crush her spindly form with a flick of its trunk, a bump of its side, and yet now waits as she peacefully slumbers – why, perhaps this sight stirs Songnoom to charity which he might not otherwise demonstrate, and so with a merry, �
�Good luck, foreigner!” he waves Remy freely on his way, to whatever fate might await him.

  So much for a picnic in the forest.

  Chapter 17

  Food, drink, a little sleep in the shelter of the trees. He takes off his boots at last, and his feet are swollen, raging red. He makes a nest between some rocks, starts a very small fire, tiny scraps of kindling, lies down to think.

  Where is Abhik Lee?

  (Five miles outside Nakhon Sawan, waiting for you to come to him, Remy, waiting for you to walk into his trap.)

  Where are Abhik’s men?

  (Three still scour the hill looking for you, less than four miles away, a tracker and his friends. They are the nearest and most immediate threat, but they have been diverted by the smuggler’s paths, tricked into thinking that perhaps you too have followed these routes. Another fifty men and women are circling this area, some on boats, some by bicycle, some not even aware that they are playing the game, but rather pieces played by pieces, given your description and told to find you out with no idea of why. Make no mistake, Remy, you are still in the hive, and the hornets are buzzing.)

  What will Remy do now?

  He lies back to think, while the sky fills up with stars.

  Chapter 18

  We look down from the sky above, and between the swaying leaves of the forest, whispering with the sound of a shingle sea, we do not see Remy.

  The tracker finds the place where he slept in the morning, but the fire died long ago and he left at sunrise, climbing bare rocks which leave no trace where a man might tell that his foot has fallen.

  For a while they follow, guessing at the fugitive’s most likely course, but to no avail.

  Remy Burke slips away, like breath.

  Three days without sighting.

  How far may a man on foot go in three days?

  Three miles an hour, fifteen hours a day at the very maximum, three days – one hundred and thirty-five miles.