approached.
It was darkening fast, it was nearly night. How long had they been driving? Chemda was half asleep, her head bobbing against the glass of the jeep window. Jake yearned to stop, to get out, to take a pee, to stop. But could they risk it? Maybe the police were just a few kilometres back. Maybe they were closing.
But they had to stop – so they stopped. For a second. In the middle of the dark jungle. Now it was truly night: and it was cold up here, in the hills. Jake walked a few yards into the dank and clammy darkness of the chattering forest, full of night sounds. Frogs croaking. A concerto of insects. Nocturnal howlings in the distance. He thought of the wild cats and strange jungle dogs he’d seen in Ponsavanh market.
He relieved himself. Trying not to make the mental association: all the blood, the blood in the muzzles of the dead jungle dogs, the blood on the floor of the hotel room: the man with a gaping throat, hung by his ankles to bleed out like a hoisted bush pig. Probably Samnang was killed by the police. But why? And why so cruelly? Was it really to frighten them? Surely murder and death was frightening enough.
Jake shuddered. Sometimes, despite his convinced and angry atheism, he could sense death approaching, like a black god, a god he didn’t believe in who yet still hated him. I got your mother and your sister, now you.
The moon was lonely overhead. Fireflies twinkled blue and green like shy and tiny ice-stars in the undergrowth.
He walked back to the car and Chemda talked, nervously, as they drove on. She was talking of ancient history: speculating about the remains they had found in the jars. Jake marvelled that he had forgotten about them. In the midst of it all he had mislaid that image: the skulls kept in the jars. The sad old bones. Reproachful. You left us behind.
No. He got a grip on himself.
No.
Chemda was talking about the prophecies of the ancient Khmer.
‘If the people in the jars, the people who made the jars, if they were Khmer . . . maybe they really were Black Khmer.’
‘And they are?’
‘The ancient Khmer: a cursed people. There are stories in the Khmer tradition of the earliest Khmers being a kind of terrible breed – no that’s the wrong word – of making a terrible mistake. Losing God. Losing faith. Becoming violent. What is the prophecy – Tou mentioned it.’
The jeep’s headlights were struggling against the dark and the mist of the mountain forest. Chemda remembered the words:
‘A darkness will settle on the people of Cambodia. There will be houses but no people in them, roads but no travellers; the land will be ruled by barbarians with no religion; blood will run so deep as to touch the belly of the elephant. Only the deaf and the mute will survive.’
Tou was silent, Yeng was silent. Jake nodded. He didn’t believe in prophecies, he didn’t believe in legends, he didn’t believe – he certainly didn’t believe in any kind of God, what kind of brutal God would allow all the terrors of the world? The Khmer Rouge? The death of children? His sister? But the skulls in the jar: they were certainly real; he had seen them, and the holes carved in their foreheads.
Why?
Chemda’s words echoed his thoughts.
‘It is highly suggestive. What happened on the Plain of Jars two thousand years ago? To the Black Khmer? Maybe they did something terrible – to their gods – to each other. That is the prophecy. That then is why they would be cursed. Ah. It could explain the legends.’
‘It’s like a kind of Noah legend, of a Flood. God wiping out the people as revenge.’
‘Yes,’ said Chemda. ‘And also no. And, ah, I still don’t know why this so upset Doctor Samnang.’
Jake turned from her and looked out of the viewless window. Out there it was cold and dark and chilling, like a sickening. The jungle was shivering. Feverish and clammy.
Where were they going to sleep? Were they ever going to sleep? Devil black darkness had descended on them, broken by the feeble beams of the headlights. They were churning mud now, deep gloopy mud. The fireflies twinkled. Above them shone the moon, bemused, like a disembodied head, like the pale round face of a grieving mother in a black Islamic headscarf. The jungle yawned and sucked. The mud sucked them further in. Further and further. And at last Jake fell asleep.
He dreamed of a man throwing a tennis ball. A tall dark man. A little girl picked it up. Her face was blemished with a vivid, portwine birthmark.
He woke with a startled pain. Tou was shaking him roughly awake.
How long had he been sparked out?
It was dawn. They were on the lip of a canyon: a long mist-churned valley stretched ahead, and led down to a flat expanse, with a kind of airstrip and a dilapidation of buildings: low cabins, concrete and steel – but tumbledown and old. And there were ruined roads, strangled with weeds, or so it looked from this distance.
Tou said:
‘The secret city.’
So they’d reached the American airfield, the old American base hidden in the mountains. The Secret City of the Raven War, where the secret American bombers took off, to drop their secret golden bomblets on the people in the plain.
He yawned, and felt a hit of nausea. Disorientation or altitude? He couldn’t tell. Rubbing the sleepy grit from his eyes, he got out of the car. Tou handed him a bottle of cold water.
Jake drank, thirstily, lustily. They had escaped – for the moment – but what now. And where was Yeng? And Chemda?
There. Down the road, in the clearing mist, between a clutch of Hmong dwellings, he could see Hmong men gathered: young men with guns and rifles and belts of ammo slung brigandishly over their backs. Hmong rebels. In the middle of them all was the slight, yet animated figure of Chemda, talking and gesturing.
That girl. She had grit and steel and guts and backbone and Jake felt, again, the stirrings of moral admiration not unmixed with plain desire. She was tough. A tough determined Khmer princess. Five foot two of royal Khmer energy. Her ancestors, Jake suspected, would have been proud.
Tou shook his head like something bad had happened.
‘What?’
‘Chemda ring her grandfather again. He say you go Luang. Then he save you.’ Tou pointed at the distant airfield. ‘The Stripe Hmong have plane, we can get you Luang, same same, no problem.’
‘OK, that’s good, isn’t it?’
Tou shook his head.
‘Chemda nearly cry. She not cry, but nearly. Sad.’
‘Why?’
‘People here know her face and they hear grandfather name. They tell her.’ Tou looked shyly at his own mudded broken trainers. Jake reminded himself to thank this boy, to thank this boy for saving their lives: but Tou was not for thanking, he was explaining everything: ‘Hmong lady she tell Chemda, she know her grandmother, royal Khmer lady, everyone know what happen to her. To grandmother. When the Khmer Rouge come to the Plain of Jars, in 19 . . . 19 . .
