warrior, Nia thought; I will need to be able to do this like a warrior. He saw himself standing with one foot outside the howdah, firing his arrows.
The kamlaa peremptorily scooped him up and half-flung him onto the howdah. Prince Nia stumbled onto a girl’s heel; she elbowed him back. Nia’s face burned with shame. He heard older boys laugh at him.
Then the kamlaa said, ‘OK that’s enough, step back.’
The King’s nephew’s son tried to crowd in, but the kamlaa shoved him back. The higher prince fixed Nia with a glare and stuck his thumb through his fingers at him.
The elephant heaved itself forward, turning. Was the procession beginning? Prince Nia craned his neck to see. All he saw was embroidered backs. Nia prised the backs apart and squeezed his way through to the front. Two older boys rammed him in the ribs. ‘You are taller than me,’ Nia said. ‘You should let me see!’
The elephant came to rest, in no shade at all. They waited. Sweat trickled down the Prince’s back.
‘I need to pee,’ whispered a little girl.
Adults lay sprawled in the shade under the silk-cottons. Soldiers lay sleeping, wearing what they wore to battle, a twist of cloth and an amulet for protection. Cap-Pi-Hau scowled. Why didn’t they dress for the consecration? Their ears were sliced and lengthened, but they wore no earrings.
The musicians were worse. They had propped their standards up against the wall. A great gong slept on the ground. The men squatted, casting ivories as if in a games house. Did they not know that the King created glory through the Gods? That was why their house had a roof made of lead.
The afternoon baked and buzzed and there was not enough room to sit down. Finally someone shouted, ‘The King goes forth! The King goes forth!’
A Brahmin, his hair bundled up under a cloth tied with pearls, was being trotted forward in a palanquin.
The Brahmin shouted again. ‘Get ready, stand up! Stop sprawling about the place!’ He tried to look very important, which puffed out his cheeks and his beard, as if his nose was going to disappear under hair. The Prince laughed and clapped his hands. ‘He looks silly!’
Grand ladies stood up and arranged themselves in imitation of the lotus, pink, smiling and somehow cool. Category girls scurried forward with tapers to light their candles or pluck at and straighten the trains of threaded flower buds that hung down from the royal diadems.
The musicians tucked their ivories into their loincloths next to their genitals for luck. They shouldered up long sweeping poles that bore standards: flags that trailed in the shape of flames, or brass images of dancing Hanuman, the monkey king.
A gong sounded from behind the royal house. A gong somewhere in front replied. The tabla drums, the conches and the horns began to blare and wail and beat. Everything quickened into one swirling, rousing motion. The procession inflated, unfolded and caught the sunlight.
The footsoldiers began to march in rows of four, spears raised, feet crunching the ground in unison and sweeping off the first group of musicians along with them. A midget acrobat danced and somersaulted alongside the musicians and the children in the howdahs applauded.
Then, more graceful, the palace women swayed forward, nursing their candles behind cupped hands.
‘Oh hell!’ one of the boys yelped. ‘You stupid little civet, you’ve pissed all over my feet!’
Prince Nia burst into giggles at the idea of the noble prince having to shake pee-pee from his feet.
The boy was mean and snarled at the little girl. ‘You’ve defiled a holy day. The guards will come and peel off your skin. Your whole body will turn into one big scab.’
The little girl wailed.
Nia laughed again. ‘You’re just trying to scare her.’
Scaring a baby wasn’t much fun. Fun was telling a big boy that he was a liar when there wasn’t enough space to throw a punch. Nia turned to the little girl. ‘They won’t pull your skin off. We’re not important enough. He just thinks his feet are important.’
Nia laughed at his own joke and this time, some of the other children joined in. The older boy’s eyes went dark, and seemed to withdraw like snails into their shells.
Endure. That was the main task of a royal child.
Suddenly, at last, the elephant lurched forward. They were on their way! The Prince stood up higher, propping his thighs against the railing. He could see everything!
They rocked through the narrow passageway towards the main terrace. Nia finally saw close up the sandstone carvings of heavenly maidens, monsters, and smiling princes with swords.
They were going to leave the royal house. I’m going to see them, thought the Prince; I’m going to see the people outside!
They swayed out into the royal park.
There were the twelve towers of justice, tiny temples that stored the tall parasols. Miscreants were displayed on their steps, to show their missing toes.
The howdah dipped down and the Prince saw the faces of slave women beaming up at them. The women cheered and threw rice and held up their infants to see. No men, their men were all in the parade as soldiers.
Beyond them were their houses – small, firm and boiled clean in tidy rows. Planks made walkways over puddles. The air smelled of smoke, sweat, and steaming noodles. The Prince tried to peer through the doorways to see what hung from the walls or rested on the floors. Did they sleep in hammocks? What games did the children play?
‘What are you looking there for, the tower’s over there!’ said one of the boys and pointed.
Tuh. Just the Meru, the Bronze Mountain. They could see that any day. Its spire was tall, but everybody said that the King’s great new temple was taller.
The road narrowed into shade and they passed into the market. The Prince saw a stall with an awning and a wooden box full of sawdust. Ice! It came all the way from the Himalayas on boats in layers of sawdust. He saw a Chinese man press a chip of it to his forehead. He had a goatee, and was ignorant enough to wear royal flower-cloth. The Khmer stall-wife was smiling secretly at him.
The howdah slumped the other way. The Prince saw sky and branches; he steadied himself, clinging to the rail, and looked down. Beyond the stalls were ragged huts, shaggy with palm-frond panels. A woman bowed before a beehive oven of earth, blowing air into it through a bamboo pipe.
The air smelled now of rotten fruit and latrines. The Prince saw a dog chomp on the spine and head of a fish.
Splat! The little girl squealed in fear. Over-ripe rambutan had splattered over their shoulders. Overhead, boys grinned from the branches of trees and then swung down. One of the kamlaa took off after them with a stick.
Along the road, other people watched in silence.
One of them gazed back at Nia. His mouth hung open with the baffled sadness of someone mulling over the incomprehensible. How is it, he seemed to ask, that you stand on an elephant in flowered cloth, and my son stands here with no clothes to wear at all?
The man standing next to him was so lean
