The Reckoning

“Much more than that,” he said, “a destroyer of ignorance, a protector of the Way. A guardian, not just of a people, but of a whole cosmology.”

“A hill tribe?”

“Something this large? It’s the tip of an iceberg.”

She liked that, a tropical iceberg. “A city?” she said. Molly wanted this for him, whatever it was. All his years of humble, anonymous, lonely searching were coming together here tonight.

The truck arrived, adding more light to the display.

Doors opened behind the rank of headlights. She heard a curse, Kleat tripping on a root. Samnang materialized from the rags of fog. She snapped him pressing his hands together in a sampeah to the demon head. Then he kept on walking into the darkness.

Kleat joined them, wiping the humidity from his glasses. The circles under his eyes were discolored pouches. Molly had never seen him like this, his bluff vigor drained, that muscular face betraying frailty. He fit the steel rims back onto his face.

Molly lowered her camera. Edit. Delete. Kleat wasn’t going to be part of this story.

“Were you trying to have a wreck?” he said. “You took off like a bolt. Now look. You’re lucky it wasn’t worse.”

“The frogs,” she said. Now that the danger was past, she tried to make light of it. “We thought it might be a spring shower.”

Kleat peered at her from beneath his thick bone of a brow, then turned to the stone head. “It would be a lot easier to go around the rocks, not through them,” he said.

“Rocks?” Duncan said. “This could go back to the Funan empire, a thousand years before the Angkor regime. The time of Christ, of Rome. It’s practically a myth, like Atlantis or Babylon. Funan wasn’t even its real name. That’s the Chinese transliteration for “phnom,” or hill. It was mentioned in early Chinese travel accounts, lost fragments referenced in later accounts. And look, here we are on a hill.”

“Save it for the lecture circuit,” said Kleat.

Molly held her hand against the bright lights. Vin’s older brothers were scolding him for damaging the bumper. Luke lay piled asleep against his door.

“We didn’t come for this,” said Kleat.

“But this is what we’ve come to,” Duncan marveled.

“Irrelevant.” Kleat snapped it like a whip. “They’re waiting for us.” His dead.

She no longer thought of them as hers. In the holes, working the screens, gathering the facts, shedding blood on the airplane metal, she had felt a contract with the bones. Not anymore. The captain had not confiscated her camera, his way of protesting what his superiors were making him do. But the exile had stolen her pride of place. The bones were meaningless to her now.

There was a movement in the darkness, and Kleat aimed his big flashlight cop-style. Samnang appeared among the trees in his neat white shirt. He blinked at the lights.

“The boulevard goes on,” he announced.

Intent on the stone head, they had failed to notice the road beneath their feet. Even with roots and rocks shrugging up through its surface, it did resemble a Paris boulevard. Paved with stones, it stretched thirty feet from side to side, and extended off into the pit of the forest.

“Where does it lead?” said Duncan.

“Who knows? It goes on,” said Samnang.

“Then let’s keep going,” Kleat said. He clapped his hands. They returned to their vehicles.

“It could be nothing,” Duncan cautioned as they drove on. Molly could hear his hope. First the channel stones lining parts of the river, now the carved head and this decaying road.

She reached back and laid a fist on his knee. “But also it could just be something,” she said.

He closed his hands around her fist. His palms were wet. He looked dazed and childlike.

Chastened by his accident, Vin took it slowly, steering around big stone tiles tipped up by time. Fog curdled in pools. Enormous trees bracketed the road. Their seeds had taken root with time, and younger trees grew in the middle of the avenue, rupturing more tiles.

“Look how big around these monsters are,” Duncan said. “Things grow fast here. But this is old growth. Very old. I can’t believe the loggers haven’t plundered it.”

No spindly, fibrous sugar palms in here. No fields of grass. No paddies. No sky. The trunks were like columns of skycrapers, red and gray and black and tan. Their massiveness had the look of a great cosmic weight being held aloft. As they crawled over and around the roots and rocks, it was like sliding over immense tendons and slippery bone. She could imagine the ribs of Jonah’s whale.

The fog puddled in recesses as dark as side canyons. It hung like linen rags among the branches.

“Look,” said Duncan, his window wide open. His wobbling light picked out another carved face watching them. There were more. Half buried among the trees, big stone ganas—some with the heads of monkeys and hook-beaked birds of prey—loomed among the branches. Gods appeared, their eyes half shut, their mouths half smiling. The statues kept pace with their advance. They seemed aware. The smiles seemed too serene.

Molly struggled to get a feel for their welcome. Even the times she’d visited Super Max in southern Colorado to shoot portraits of mass murderers, there had been a sense of control. This was different. They’d landed among giants. Giants wearing the masks of good and evil.

“The city wall,” said Duncan.

It appeared ahead of them among the complex of vegetation. The closer they drove, the more it took shape, a long, high barrier of mineral colors in the night. It seemed to be forming from their presence, taking on detail out of their expectation of its details. The stone blocks were cabled with vines. The vines had fingers. Ferns grew from the joints.

“It must be twenty feet tall.” His breathing had tripped into high gear, Molly could hear it. Then she realized it was her own breathing.

She bent to see through the windshield mottled with gruel, trying to make out the parapets or battlements, whatever you called them. Gaps plunged like missing teeth, muscled open by fat towers of trees with bark as smooth as pigskin. There was no way to tell which was winning, the forest or the dead architect.

“Here we go,” Duncan said. “The gateway.”

A broad, crumbling tower straddled the wall, a tunnel running through its base. Faces crowned the tower, each staring sightlessly in a different direction. The tunnel lay at the center of their collective chest. One entered through the heart of gods. Vin flipped his light beams from low to high to low. The eyes stared down at them and then away.

Vin inched in.

“It’s the perfect traffic control,” Duncan remarked. “You could stop any invaders with a few rocks piled inside. In fact, I wonder if this tower’s rigged to drop its guts.” He cast around with his flashlight.

Molly had never suffered from claustrophobia, but the moment they entered, the walls seemed to close in on her. A sort of nausea gripped her. She felt physically sick. It went beyond that. She felt trapped, as if she were calcifying inside her skin.

They emerged on the far side and the feeling lifted. She cranked at her window handle for fresh air.

“You’re sweating,” Duncan said.

“No, I’m cold,” she said. But her face was dripping. Duncan laid his kroma around her bare neck, and it carried his body heat.

She had expected to drive into a city in ruins, but there was more road. Elevated upon a spine of solid, squared stone, a causeway ran in a straight line, bound on either side by vast pools of water that had degraded into swamps fouled with mangrove trees. Their serpentine roots breached and looped back into the water.

“You’re looking at the wealth of kings,” said Duncan. “Barays—reservoirs—with enough water to feed a whole people. This could be the prototype for Angkor. It could be the genesis for the very idea of Cambodia.”

They came to a gauntlet of stone cobras carved along the roadside. “Nagas,” Duncan said, identifying them. “Water snakes that figure in all kinds of Asian creation myths. From naga you get nagara, Khmer for ‘The City.’ ”