There were at least two dozen of the fantastic creatures arranged along the roadway. Some had snapped off at the neck and fallen into the pools. Most were intact, rising higher than the Land Cruiser, their hoods spread open to expose multiple heads with fangs bared.
As they motored slowly through the dangling moss, the water stirred. Molly could hear it down there. On an impulse, she held her camera to the open window and fired blindly, triggering the flash. Her light ricocheted off the black water. The sound stopped. She looked at the LCD to see what her camera had seen.
“Anything?” asked Duncan.
It showed a bulge in the surface, less than that, a shadow, not even a shape. “Not a thing,” she said. “It reminds me of the bayous along the Gulf Coast.” Just the same, she rolled her window shut.
The causeway came to an end. The broad, flat vein of solid limestone fed back into the earth. Their sculpted road top turned to dirt, and they drove on.
“There are the others,” said Molly. The truck was parked at a crooked angle in a clearing between toppled pillars and scraps of fog. The men were busy unloading the vehicles.
She was glad to see them, for a minute. Then she caught sight of their guns. One of the brothers had a rifle slung over his back. Kleat had brought a pistol of his own. He wore it boldly on one hip.
Duncan whispered, looking around. “Where do we begin?”
She made herself part of it. “We’ll take baby steps. A little bit at a time.”
They had arrived at a terminus. There were no buildings or arches, only the end of the road. From here one climbed on foot. Behind them lay the pools. Before them, rising above their lights on three sides, squared stone terraces formed an arena of sorts. The sheer mass of stone, quarried and hauled into place, promised a kingdom. A set of stairs led into the darkness above. If there was a city, it would be up there.
They parked and dismounted, and, first thing, Vin received a rifle, too.
Kleat was stacking axes and shovels against a fallen tree. Molly stood five-eleven in her bare feet, taller than Kleat, to say nothing of the Khmers. But for a moment, faced with that gun strapped to his hip and all the other firepower floating around, she felt like a child among strangers.
“We thought you’d turned around,” he said. She saw him look at the scarf Duncan had placed around her neck. He made his assumptions.
“We’ll make camp here,” Duncan announced. He had a tent sack in his hands.
“Sleep?” said Kleat. “The sun comes up in two hours.”
“But the light will lag behind in here. That’s triple canopy above us. For now, we need to rest.”
“I will instruct the men,” said Samnang. He had no weapons Molly noted.
He held out his hand for the tent. It was an important moment. The old man with one leg was anointing Duncan, not Kleat, as their leader. He issued an order to the brothers, who took the tents and hurried toward the ledges.
Kleat carefully laid aside a shovel. Nodding his head, he measured the alliances. His eyes flickered at the brothers moving in and out of the headlights. He studied Molly. “By all means,” he said, “sleep.”
Molly went to the back of the truck for her mule bag, a huge black duffle made of ripstop nylon, to root for her warmest clothes. For a month, she’d smothered in heat so thick men fell over in it. Now the slight mountain chill had her trembling, even as sweat trickled down her neck. She wished her body would make up its mind, hot or cold. A mountain girl, she knew to layer clothing and find the equilibrium.
There had been no time to sort her laundry at the hotel before their farewell dinner. Unzipping the bag was like opening a dead animal. Bad smells rushed from the interior, and when she thrust her arm inside, the contents were still warm and clammy from the dig. She grabbed the first thing that came to hand, the Vicious Cycles T-shirt, and pulled it over her sundress. It smelled like a hunter’s buckskin with her body odor and weeks of soil and Off! Deep Woods cooked into the threads. Deodorant and regular mosquito spray only attracted the bugs, and she’d quickly gone native with the soldiers.
She pulled on a second shirt, then found her Gramicci climbing pants still bloodstained from her encounter with the cockpit metal. The canvas thigh was sewn back together with bright pink thread, prettier than the scar on her leg.
She wasted another minute rummaging for her toilet kit, but it was too dark to find it or, more likely, Kleat had not bothered to pack it for her. She’d have to brush her teeth with a twig. Maybe Duncan would loan her some toothpaste to use with her finger.
The Heng brothers were bustling along the terrace ledges above, farther away than she would have liked. Their lights looked small and moved rapidly up there as they assembled tents for the Americans. Molly guessed they would sleep in the back of the truck, and that would have suited her fine. But Duncan had won his showdown with Kleat, and she wasn’t about to scramble the outcome with any complaints.
She returned to the crisscross of headlights looking like a bag lady, the sundress half buried by shirts on top, toting her camera bag, pants, and a neoprene sleeping pad. Heading into the tropics, she hadn’t thought to bring a sleeping bag, and her final act before leaving the dig site had been to give her sheets to a Khmer family. She could manage with her own body heat for the next couple of hours. In the morning, she’d see what covering the brothers might spare.
“I’m ready,” she said.
Kleat had already started up the staircase to the tent ledges.
“In the morning,” Duncan promised, “it will all look different.”
14.
The birds woke her.
Her eyes came open.
She found herself curled in a fetal ball on the sleeping pad. In her sleep sometimes, her knees would pull up and she would roll onto her right side like this. It was an old arrangement of her limbs, an occasional habit. It happened in times of stress and signified surrender.
Not moving a muscle, she wondered,
With her higher shoulder draped with Duncan’s red and white
She went on hugging her knees, sifting for a clue. The long ride had pummeled her, that and the hard ground and scant sleep. She ached. Even the image of those ancient stairs rising up through the night could not budge her.
Her plastic Timex said 0730, military time. Kleat was right. Maybe they should have stayed awake. Three hours of sleep felt worse than no sleep at all.
She lay there, assembling the world. At this hour yesterday, they’d been starting into exile from the crash site. Last night they’d eaten dinner in a restaurant. The colors were vivid, the red lobster, the black dirt on the white tablecloth, the sunset. The details crowded in like eager children. The moonlit highway, the green grass, the silver stream, the frogs, the fortress walls.
But none of that explained why her body was afraid. Had she heard something in her sleep? Was there danger out there?
Her fetal curl was like an early warning device. She knew it all too well. There was no controlling it; she’d tried. The trauma posture would seize her in her sleep, a dream signal that something threatened. It stemmed from tension sometimes, or simply vague bad vibes. Usually it was just echo behavior, residue from Oklahoma. Boyfriends complained that they could not hold her at night. She would clench into an animal ball at the edge of the bed, as far from them as possible. It’s not you, she would explain in the morning, but then would explain no more. It freaked them out. They felt like monsters. One by one, they always left her.
Lying on her tent floor, Molly did everything in her power to stay in the moment and feel for any real menace. Recycling the past was a dead end. She’d been through it so many times with therapists. But memory has a mind of its own. This morning, spent and dull, with her bones arranged just so, she was too weak to stop it. From deep
