A Woman of Angkor Read online

  You can imagine how warmed was the Brahmin on hearing the prince suggest this pilgrimage. An expression of irreproachable virtue, flowing unsolicited from his charge’s mouth! In subsequent days, priest and prince discussed it many times. Of course the priest had some specifics to suggest. The journey must be performed with a heart full of piety, with prayers said at shrines along the road. A gift must be presented to mark the end of the feud. It should be a beautiful silver bowl. The Brahmin went himself to a smith in the market to commission its production, and composed a verse of reconciliation that was inscribed on its side. He also set the prince on a series of preparatory vigils in the Capital, and made sure that fellow Brahmins, and through them princes, were informed of the journey’s purpose. Indra would return to the Capital a peace maker. He would have shed his reputation.

  Do you understand, then? This was the pilgrimage that the prince began that morning in his palace compound, Nol and Sovan kneeling before him, me watching silently from behind.

  9: Fateful journey

  The pilgrimage to Chaiyapoom of course became known to every soul in the Capital later on. Retainers, slaves, virtually everyone connected to it – they all talked. Some became renowned purely on the basis of having been there. You will hear even today many versions of precisely what happened. I will tell you here what I believe to be true.

  None of what I know, however, came from the Brahmin. All through the rest of his life, he said not a word to anyone. We all have a decision that we regret more than any other, don’t we? Even priests. This was his, the decision to facilitate the visit to Chaiyapoom.

  I believe that he began to feel misgivings at the very beginning of the journey. His first concern was the size of the procession that departed the Capital. You see, people in the prince’s retinue were always trying to undermine the priest’s edicts against ostentation. Why had they come to serve a prince if not to bask in the rays of his glory? So they polished up the palanquin in hopes of obscuring its hand-me-down origins. They added bodyguards and a gong player to the travel group and soon a baggage cart was needed.

  Off they all processed that morning, off to play their role in events that Heaven had determined in time immemorial.

  In the streets, whoever heard the gong stepped aside to clear a path, knelt and put hands together. I don’t think many were fooled by the palanquin. But on it was a sight to behold – a prince with a body like a god’s, well-muscled in arms and legs, strong in the skills of war but putting them aside to make peace with an enemy.

  Eventually, with parasols floating overhead, the procession passed through the stone gate at the Capital’s north edge and took to a trunk road that traversed the open paddy land beyond. Planting was underway. You know that time of year, that sight – a sea of the brightest green seedlings, newly planted, motionless save for waves that a breeze stirs here and there. The potential for life, the start of a new cycle of renewal, villagers shouting to each other cheerfully across the fields, the sky clear, the sun shining down strong. And on that day, all this was at odds with the fate carried forward by the prince’s procession.

  The slaves made good time with their load. But by early afternoon, the job was taking its toll and they were relieved to see a small way station ahead, the first planned stop. The prince hopped from the palanquin and strode up the station’s steps. The concubine – her name was Rom – hurried right behind, startling the Brahmin. He went inside too, then in a minute or two, he emerged, looking troubled. The Prince and Rom were alone inside. It seemed that the Brahmin had been dismissed.

  It is a sin to judge others, but I must tell you that in the case of this Rom, everyone committed this sin, myself included.

  Our prince’s household might have been short of many things at this time, but not of concubines. He had four already, quite a number for a noble of his age and rank. Rom had arrived only a few days before, a large-eyed girl of stunning beauty, the physical kind, at least – skin like polished stone, perfect breasts. She had been summoned from a village to the south by the prince himself, though no one could say how he had come to know of her. Already she had established herself as senior of the concubines, cowing the others through words alone. Everyone in the prince’s household, in fact, was afraid of her, except the Brahmin, who, standing outside the inn, was only just now learning why perhaps he should be.

  After a while, the prince stepped out of the station, followed by the concubine. The palanquin slaves, resting on their hunkers in the shade of a gum tree, looked discreetly to her garment and hair. Each of them, no doubt, imagined having time on a mat with Rom. Such was her power over men, to make them do foolish, dangerous things. The slaves exchanged silent leers; Subhadra put a stop to that with a glower. Then he stepped to Rom, who was standing hands out, so that her maid could apply new colour to her palms.

  ‘You should not have rushed into the dining area that way,’ he told her. ‘You should wait for instructions.’

  ‘I heard no objection from His Highness. He seemed to want me there.’

  She did not even do him the courtesy of looking down when she spoke! Everyone noticed. He tried again. ‘You can be sure that he dislikes that kind of behaviour. You would do better to follow the rules.’

  She shrugged, in a way that suggested the Brahmin should not be so sure he knew the prince’s thoughts better than she. She looked back to her hands. The maid, pretending she had heard none of this, applied more colour.

  Subhadra walked away, fuming again.

  A stallion had been brought to the station in advance, and the prince mounted it. The slaves lifted the empty palanquin, now so light that they smiled in unison, feeling they were carrying nothing at all.

  Late on the third day, the road began to climb and cut back on itself. The attendants whispered among themselves that it was a fine view they were getting from up here – the bend of a distant river, a provincial temple’s spire, more paddies full of those young green seedlings, and everything alight in the brilliant hues that the sun offers as a gift as it departs. The prince, atop his horse, seemed not to notice. Nor did Rom, dozing in space she’d demanded be cleared for her in the baggage cart.

  Soon there appeared ahead a long and tall ridgeline, broken by a pass, entryway to the Upper Empire. On its right was an old brick temple, surrounded by miniature wooden houses on stands, placed there as resting places for spirits that moved through the pass on their own travels between lands high and low. The party broke travel. Prince and Brahmin were shown to the head priest’s house for the night; everyone else laid out mats on grass by a stream. The travellers’ cook borrowed an ember from the temple’s fire to get a brazier going. Acolytes wandered out to sit with the travellers in air that was now charcoal-scented. Chaiyapoom? You’re a bit less than half way there, the group was told. Night fell, stars began to show themselves.

  In subsequent days, the party passed through landscapes that were strangely different from the flat, cultivated expanses of the Capital’s region. This place had hills with gentle contours, covered with waist-high grass, rivers that followed winding courses between those hills and sometimes flowed fast and noisily. Local people grew rice in flooded paddies near the rivers’ banks; in places, their fields extended up the slopes of hills, nurtured only by what water Heaven chose to provide as rain. The travellers wondered what kinds of spirits lived in these places. No chances were taken. Each time Indra paused at a roadside shrine to say the prayers of repentance required by Subhadra, one of the retainers made sure to leave offerings of rice and fruit on behalf of the group’s lower ranks as well.

  After five days, with monsoon clouds gathering overhead, a stone boundary marker bearing the Chaiyapoom name was spotted beside the road. The prince switched from horse to palanquin and continued the journey in that more dignified fashion. Everything from this point had been arranged in detail by a messenger who had gone ahead. The travellers passed through a small market town. Then, in a forest beyond, they rounded a curve and another process
ion came into view. This one was far larger, with perhaps one hundred attendants and guards. Four red parasols shaded its prince. Prince Teng!

  Indra got down and walked slowly forward, crouching just discernibly. He knelt and put palms together before the other prince, who sat on a very large palanquin and gave an offhand greeting in response. Subhadra watched silently from the rear, looking pleased, as if thinking that every so often his prince could do things correctly. But the sight made other members of Indra’s party feel suddenly unsure of their own standing. Their prince’s conveyance now looked small and battered, his parasols cheap and poorly sewn. And even from this distance, they could see that the other prince was a portly, diffident man and it pained them that their master, so strong and determined, so skilled with weapons, was the one who had to crouch.

  The formalities completed, the princes began talking in a more casual way. Water was brought in silver bowls and they drank. The portly prince mimed the shooting of an arrow. After a short while, Indra returned to his own palanquin, and the journey resumed, the host’s party in the lead.

  An hour later, with a shower wetting their hair and shoulders, the slaves were pleased to see they were approaching a wooden lodge, built at the edge of marshland. Just as they reached it, the rain let up. Sunbeams shone through dispersing clouds overhead, transforming the area with dazzling greens and yellows. It was so stunning a sight that Indra’s slaves couldn’t stop looking and almost lost their footing as they lowered the conveyance by the lodge. The princes got down and stood admiring the scene, the host pointing out from between a pair of bodyguards something out across the reeds and mist-caressed water. Then the princes went behind the lodge in turn to bathe with water scooped from a large earthen jar; Indra’s retainers were shown to a set of small bamboo pavilions that had been specially built for them. After dark, the princes ate and drank together in the lodge’s eating hall, a bodyguard from Prince Teng’s detachment watching from each of the room’s four corners. The gong musicians performed. Most everyone who passed close enough to hear the conversation felt that the guards were unnecessary. The princes were taking a liking to each other.

  The next morning the two walked together into the marshland with their hunting bows and a detail of the host’s guards. Boys who had been sent out into the reeds flushed out wild water fowl and released a few more that they had captured for the hunt. The princes sent arrows aloft. Indra’s palanquin bearers were surprised that their master’s missed so often. They decided this was another courtesy to Prince Teng, who by even his own slaves’ accounts was no great shot. There was some small comfort for Indra’s men in knowing that up close, a scar would be visible on Teng’s face.

  In early afternoon, the princes left by palanquin for the estate’s palace. They arrived just after sunset, as two retainers stood at the gate with torches. From beyond the outlines of trees came the whisper of rushing water – a waterfall’s greeting. Indra’s slaves, exhausted, squinted in the darkness to see how grand a thing this country palace was. Soaring eaves, large windows and inlaid glass reflecting the torchlight suggested it was quite a place despite its isolation. The princes bathed, then, dressed in fresh sampots, they walked the short distance to a stone temple that was the estate’s principal place of worship. Carved gods gazed down on them from niches beneath a pyramidal peak. Inside the sanctuary, the princes gave thanks at Shiva’s linga for the safe journey and the hunting. Afterward, each member of Prince Indra’s party, slaves excepted, was given a chance to say devotions too, closer or farther from the sanctuary according to rank. Rom, however, announced that she had a headache and would say her prayers later. She instructed one of the portly prince’s servants to show her and her maid to their quarters immediately so that she could lie down. Subhadra overheard. He winced at such forwardness.

  The princes sat down in the audience hall for evening rice. There were no guards this time. Subhadra looked in briefly; trust and maybe even the glimmerings of friendship seemed in evidence. The silver bowl, the gift of reconciliation, was at Indra’s side in its wrappings, and would be presented when the princes finished their banquet. Servants laid out bowls of food and drink in the lamplight and Prince Teng launched into an explanation of repairs he planned to make to the estate’s irrigation canals, how much he’d have to pay hydraulic engineers to come up from the Capital, how his villagers were already trying out tricks to avoid the extra rice tax that would underwrite the work.

  What happened next was witnessed only because an attendant forgot to remove an empty water bowl and re-entered the hall to get it.

  It is painful for me to describe. Prince Indra reached under the mat on which he sat and took out something small. He leaned close to Teng as if to whisper to him, still drawing him in with pleasantries, and with a quick stroke, he slashed him across the belly with the thing in his hand! The man’s entrails suddenly burst out. It was shocking, the attendant said later – like startled snakes fleeing a hiding place! Prince Teng shrieked, and Indra then drove the thing in his hand, it seemed to be an arrowhead, into the prince’s eyes, first the left, then the right. Then across the throat. How can a man be so cruel? The victim somehow got to his feet, splashing blood, pressing at his escaping innards with his fingers. He stumbled a few steps, crashed into a post, then fell in a heap. Indra’s attention, however, was elsewhere – he was reaching behind a drape, and from it he took a bow, his war bow. Gandiva was its name. Two guards came racing in with spears ready. Indra sent arrows streaking the length of the hall, felling the men one, two. There was a pause, then the thump of many feet outside; the attendant who witnessed this had fallen to the floor now, immobilized by fear, but the prince ignored him. Because perhaps twenty armed men pushed into the hall, breathing hard, ready to fight. Indra simply stared them down along the shaft of another arrow.

  ‘The usurper is dead!’ he declared, kicking at the body, which now lay still. ‘The temple, the paddies, the palace, the people of Chaiyapoom – by the authority of the Lord Shiva, I take possession of them all. My family’s rights, blessed by Heaven, are restored!’

  The men looked to each other. It took just an instant, I think – then they threw down their spears and pressed their faces to the floor.

  Roused by the noise, Subhadra hurried to the hall. Perhaps he was fearful his master had been attacked. But, seeing the body and the bow, he grasped what had happened. He froze. One can imagine his inner tumult. Those months of teachings, those long hours over the holy texts, the vigils – all to no effect!

  Rom stole in from behind and went straight to the motionless Prince Teng, whose torso was emitting a red pool onto the matting. She gazed down with ghoulish interest. Then, for just an instant, her eyes left the corpse and met Subhadra’s, and suddenly he understood who had placed the weapons in the room, and what she and the prince had been discussing in the way station that first day of the journey. She made an expression of mock surprise that he hadn’t known what was planned.

  He left the hall.

  Soon came another surprise: two large shapes emerging from the darkness beyond the estate’s gate, smaller ones alongside them. Grunts and voices and the clank of martial equipment. It was the forty members of Indra’s personal guard, with a pair of elephants forced to act as engines of war.

  Subhadra wandered the compound all night, it seems, looking more and more disquieted. He entered the estate’s armoury, and there spoke with Indra’s military commander, a man covered with war tattoos, by the name of Rit. This Rit seemed to know his way around; he did not hesitate at all in the way of someone new to a place. He was inspecting armour that hung on hooks on the pillars, putting hands to it, as if he recognized it. There were some words between priest and soldier, on the face of it fully civil and respectful, and after that Subhadra walked out, almost staggering, people said. And then the concubine Rom, seeming still to take pleasure in the priest’s distress, approached him. She said just a few words. But enough, it seems, to make the Brahmin realize that she too wa
s not a stranger to this place.

  My husband, of course, was also from Chaiyapoom. So, have I made it clear? Indra had in secret begun to reassemble the court of his late kinsman Prince Vira, who years earlier had been dispossessed of Chaiyapoom by Teng. Not the original people, because they were dead, but whichever of their children could be found to be still living. My husband, the concubine, the commander.

  This had all come about because six months earlier, Indra had had a dream. He had dreamt that he was standing in an audience room, and somehow he knew it was the Chaiyapoom estate’s audience room, and yet there was no one present. So he stepped outside and there he saw men and women going about the usual tasks of estate life. He felt he knew each of them, and yet he could not summon a single name. He was just stepping toward the first of them when he awoke. It was such a powerful dream that he consulted with a seer, the blind shaman Vibol.

  Have you heard of this Vibol? He passed most of his life as an ascetic in a straw hut on a hillside not far from Chaiyapoom. Every so often, he came to the Capital to consult with nobles for high fees, generally in secret because no one was willing to admit contact with the man. I can recall passing him once on the street. Due to his sightlessness, a boy led him by the arm. I have no doubt that he had true mystical powers, that he could contact the supernatural. I would guess that he was in league with some powerful, discontented deity, one that dwells in those Chaiyapoom hills.

  Vibol told the prince that the dream foresaw that he would take possession of Chaiyapoom. Those people whom the prince could not name in his dream were the children of the former household, placed in the dream in their dead parents’ positions. Those children must now be found and brought to your service, the shaman said, or the repossession of the estate could never take place. Vibol undertook to find these people, for an additional fee of silver, I’m sure. How he accomplished it I don’t know. Perhaps it was by dispatching agents, perhaps it was by supernatural means. In any case, Vibol later told the prince where Nol could be found, and the same for Rom and the commander. And each time the Brahmin was sent in ignorance to recruit these people. Vibol promised that their presence would please local spirits, who would then help in the seizure of the estate by such means as causing guards to fall asleep and dogs to fail to bark. All those things did happen that night.