Samnang was not fooled. “You’re a dangerous woman,” he teased her. “You make us believe we’re stronger than we are.”
“I’m serious,” she said. “Climbing that tree wiped me out.”
“Yes, and I have two good legs,” he said, smiling.
From halfway up the stairs, their camp looked borrowed from the forest. The green hut was already surrounded by the tiptoe of grass. Their fire lay banked under gray ashes.
They heard Kleat arguing, high above them. One of the brothers, probably Doc, snapped back at him. The argument died away.
“Have I done the wrong thing?” she wondered out loud. Samnang knew what she meant. By disarming Kleat, she had made them defenseless. They were at the mercy of the brothers and the typhoon and fate now.
“You took the fangs from a serpent, and left him alive. It is up to him now, what he does with his poison. As for the others, their hearts are still uncertain.”
“The brothers treat you badly.”
“They blame me for their miseries,” Samnang said. “That is natural. I survived, you see. Their parents did not. They have poison in them, too. We must wait for them to decide what they will do with it.”
It was the closest he’d ever come to discussing the Pol Pot years with her. Molly waited for him to volunteer more, but Samnang added nothing. She could have asked him, but told herself it didn’t matter who he had been, only who he had become, this gentle old pilgrim.
They reached the top of the stairs and found that the others were long gone. They started in among the ruins, strolling slowly, and it reminded her of their mornings, before the dawn, at the crash site. She thought of the pilot, and then of the Blackhorse soldiers.
“They could have gone anywhere,” she said.
Samnang glanced at the ground. “Mr. O’Brian went this way with the middle boy,” he said. “Mr. Kleat went through there with the other children.” Children, he called them.
“The missing soldiers, I meant. Thirty years have passed.”
“We have a saying, ‘Don’t despair on the winding river,’ ” Samnang said. “Patience. They will reveal themselves to us.”
They went straight, following a once orderly avenue between the spires and temples and palaces. The tiles were split apart by roots and subterranean forces. The forest blocked their view. Rounding the flanks of monstrous banyan trees, they saw more trees, more buildings. Eliminate the trees, restore the order, and the city would still have been as complicated as a perfume. The canals and side streets and winding avenue formed a puzzle. If the architects had not designed it as a labyrinth, the city had accumulated a labyrinth within it. As they worked deeper into the ruins, Samnang began braiding grass into knots and bending saplings into
It was a kingdom of eyes, the enormous heads beholding their trespass. Molly tried to imagine the Blackhorse soldiers drifting through the ruins with her same hushed wonder, their rifles at the ready. There were a thousand hiding places in here, and she realized that the soldiers would not have left their bones in plain view. They were jungle fighters. They would have squirreled themselves away into the most unknowable spots, burying themselves wherever the enemy might overlook them. What chance did an untrained civilian have of finding them a generation later?
They came to a quadrangle in the center of the city. She and Samnang decided it had to be the center. Four avenues met here at a broad square, or park, mobbed with grass and trees.
In the middle of it all, dominating the city, stood a tower. It was a strange hybrid of a structure, both round and square. It had a dozen angular sides and as many levels, though they were really only one level ascending in a single, steady, candy-cane spiral. A staircase corkscrewed around the exterior, and doorways led off that. The tower rose into the trees. Parrots sailed back and forth to its upper doors.
Like in the canyon she and Duncan had found yesterday, its walls were carved with bas-relief. The tower was a giant storybook. Samnang recognized some of the images, here and there pausing to press his palms together and bend his head. He explained what he could, the scenes from the Bhagavad Gita and the stages—like the Stations of the Cross—of the Buddha’s enlightenment.
“This goes back to the beginning of my people,” he said. “But so much of it escapes me. The kings, the alphabet, the battles, I should know them. I’m Khmer. I do know them. Here.” He touched his heart. “But not here.” His head. “This comes from before the Angkor, long before.”
“Duncan thinks it could be two thousand years old,” she said.
“Yes, Duncan,” Samnang said. “He has made this his
“He said it might have been the model for Angkor Wat.”
Samnang looked at her. “Angkor and this place, or the Sistine Chapel or Notre-Dame, they are expressions of an idea. Like the statues of Buddha, or Michelangelo’s God with a white beard, magnificent attempts to imagine a face for what has no face.”
“Have you been to the Sistine Chapel?” she asked, hoping he might offer more of his past.
“In another lifetime,” he said.
She dropped it.
The green light kept dimming. Somewhere above their hemisphere of leaves and limbs, storm clouds were eclipsing a sun they could not see. Thunder rolled like a subway train.
There was a crack of rifle fire. One of the search parties had discovered the gate and the terra-cotta statues. The others would join them. “Should we go to them?” she asked.
“Are the statues something you want?”
“No. You saw the head. Those eyes. They’re terrible.”
“Then let us not suffer for their desire,” Samnang said. “We can stay here, deaf to the world. Anyway, we will see their treasures in camp tonight.”
They went on circling the base of the tower and came across a name. Carved in deep, square letters among the bas-relief it said C. K. WATTS. Underneath was a date: 8/20/70.
Molly looked up at the tower. The logic slid together. “From up there you could see the whole city,” she said to Samnang. “I think that’s where they went.”
“Among the birds,” said Samnang. “Certainly.”
She ran her fingers over the incisions. According to the ACAV map, the lost souls of the Eleventh Cavalry had pulled into the fortress on or around June 24. If the graffiti’s date was right, the soldiers had languished here, alive, another seven weeks or more.
The idea moved her. They hadn’t just burrowed into lairs to fight it out. They’d made their home here, and found time to roam among the ruins. One of them, at least, had passed beside the stories inscribed on this wall.
She looked to see if there was a special context for the name, and it was carved beneath a monstrous warrior, one of Duncan’s wrathful deities, with a tiger circling his legs. He wore a necklace of severed heads.
She snapped a picture of the name and the demon slayer. She doubted C. K. Watts ever knew this was a ritual slayer of ignorance. But what irony, an American kid with a gun and a knife, off course and vulnerable, unconsciously appealing for wisdom. More likely he’d been taken with the image’s ferocity.
“That makes four of them,” she said. “Him, plus the three dog tags.”
The tower reached into the middle canopy. The stairs stretched up and around, offering access to scores of gaping doorways. There would be a hundred and four of them, she remembered. Maybe she was getting the hang of the place after all.
“I think this will be of interest to Mr. O’Brian and Mr. Kleat,” Samnang said. “They will want to be here.”
She promised to wait at the base of the tower while Samnang went to find the others. He disappeared into a thicket of spires and trees in the direction of the rifle shot.
Her watch read 10 A.M. yesterday. The second hand crept. She tried to restrain herself. With her macro lens, she stalked a small white gecko with red spots.
But as the everlasting seconds dragged by, she chafed. The stairs lay right here before her. And the brothers might have shanghaied Samnang to carry down their plunder. Even if they released Kleat and Duncan to explore the tower, another hour or two could pass before they arrived. The afternoon was marching on. The tower might go unexplored until tomorrow. And tomorrow was a toss of the dice. It was senseless to wait.
