‘Is it safe?’
Tou nodded, leading the way. ‘No bomb here. Yeng say no bomb.’ The young Hmong man was almost running. ‘The Khmer Rouge took most of the remain in other place, but here you can still see some. In here. And here. And here. Soon this will be gone. They want to destroy this. But they wait because Yeng say people come here, last year. Still looking. American.’
Jake stepped closer:
‘Sorry?’
‘He say…’ Tou turned to the Hmong man, his dark face lined with a smile. Tou asked the question again, and Yeng repeated his narrative; then Tou interpreted: ‘Yeng say he was driver for them. Many days. He know the area, the bomb. So they hire him. Last year. American. Fishhook. Fishwork? Don’t know.’
‘They came here to examine the jars.’
‘Yes!’ Tou said. ‘Last year. See. Here. Look. Yeng say this is what they find. And this is what I tell Mister Samnang. He sad then, scared.’
He was pointing inside one of the nearest jars. The large, two metre high, very crudely carved vessels were made of some prickly stone, rough to the touch; Jake leaned over and stared into the foetid darkness of the jar indicated by Tou. His eyes adjusted.
Several human skulls stared back at him, sitting forlornly on the stone floor. Next to them lay a small pyre of burned bones, ribs or femurs, pelvic bones maybe: with the appearance of old, charred wood.
The skulls had holes in them. Like the skulls at Cheung Ek, smashed by the cudgels of the Khmer Rouge. But the holes here were at the front, smaller. And of course the skulls were much much older. Jake was no scientist, but he could tell these skulls were ancient – by the mouldering. Yet they were also preserved somehow. By lids, maybe? Some of the jars had until recently possessed lids – he had read that. The lids may only have been wrenched away, in the last few decades: by the Khmer Rouge, or by this mysterious American. Exposing the archaic remains within.
It was intriguing. But even so, these were just old bones and skulls. Why would the rediscovery of these bones provoke such emotion in Samnang, and how did it cause his murder?
Chemda was obviously working the same mystery. She was peering into the jars, talking quickly with Tou, in English and French. Maybe Khmer. Jake couldn’t quite follow.
‘Many people have speculated,’ she said, coming over to Jake, a little breathless. ‘Speculated that the jars were urns, funeral urns, for a civilization we do not understand, but this is nothing amazing. I don’t see why the communists got so excited by this. Or Samnang. It merely proves an existing theory – Tou – Tou -’ She swivelled on the young man. He was smiling, shyly. Anxiously. In the silent countryside with the solitary waterbuffalo still gazing their way.
‘Tou, ask Yeng what the Khmer Rouge found, why they were so drawn to this site – more than others?’
Tou shrugged. ‘I already know: I ask him that. He heard the American talking, he know some English.’
‘So?’
‘Thousand year ago. Many people here, Khmer people, black Khmer. They have… much war, many killing, many war. And then… then they… suicide themselves, kill themself. And they put each other in the jar. Like tombs, hide themselves. Kill each other and burn the bone.’
Jake intervened.
‘How did they establish this? The Khmer Rouge? The American?’
Tou pouted his ignorance, then turned, and asked in Khmer a question of the Hmong man – who was now glancing anxiously at the horizon. The old man shrugged and muttered. Tou interpreted.
‘We not know. But he know the people in the jar were Khmer. And the hole in the head… the skulls. They were… in the story I think. There is the Khmer curse… The Black Khmer?’
Yeng interrupted, unprompted, gesturing, and very agitated. A frown of real fear on his face.
Jake turned.
Noises.
The silent countryside was silent no more. The trees bent, the sun glared, the noises grew. The waterbuffalo was straining on his tether. Loud car noises were coming towards them. Jake strained to see: then he saw. Rolling over a hill, maybe five kilometres away. Big white 4 by 4s. Like the ones that had arrived in the hotel, dirty but new.
The police. Surely the police.
Tou said:
‘Now we run.’
Chapter 7
The cold winds moaned and wailed right outside Annika’s cottage. The sound was distressing, like anguished mothers were wandering along the derelict lanes of Vayssieres, battering on the ancient doors, searching for their murdered children. Here in the very middle of the Cham des Bondons.
This was Julia’s first visit to the Cham since she had been dismissed by Ghislaine last week. She was glad to be with Annika again, with her friend. Yet she was also, as always, unsettled by the surroundings. She couldn’t understand why Annika lived quite so close to the stones. The Cham was wonderfully atmospheric, but why choose to live in the only habitable cottage, in an otherwise abandoned village?
It was just a little too eerie.
Annika was crossing the low ceilinged living room, bearing a tray, with a pot of tea.
‘A habit I collected in China. Green tea. Cha!’
Julia’s friend was originally from Antwerp: she was a demure, wise and graciously elegant sixty-two-year-old Belgian. So her mother tongue was Flemish – but her English was nearly as good as her French. Annika was also an archaeologist, although semi-retired. As two single women in the macho world of archaeology, they had bonded almost as soon as Julia had arrived in Lozère.
While her hostess decorously tipped the porcelain teapot, Julia stared around. Annika’s taste in décor consistently fascinated her: the drawings, the paintings, the elegant sketches, the wistful etchings of winter scenes, of skaters and frozen lakes. Maybe from Belgium, or Holland.
Annika stood, and returned to the kitchen, to fetch some cake.
Taking advantage of the moment, Julia looked further along the wall. Hanging next to those wintry, Breugel-ish scenes were several prints of French cave paintings. Julia recognized the lions from Chauvet, and the ‘sorcerer’ of the Trois Freres. And there, on the far wall of the sitting room, a picture of the Hands of Gargas, from the Gargas cave in the mid Pyrenees: stencils of hands made on cave walls, by men, women and children: in the early Stone Age.
Sitting here in this weather-beaten cottage, aged thirty-three, Julia could still vividly recall the day she first saw the Hands of Gargas. In a way those hands were the reason she was here.
In her mind she relived the scene.
She was fifteen when it happened. As a special treat, as part of a long holiday in France, her mother and father had taken her to see the great ancient caves of the Dordogne and the Lot. Lascaux and Cougnac, Rouffignac and Pech Merle. With their famous and glowing cave-paintings.
There, confronted by these stunningly ancient tableaux – some painted 20,000 years ago, even 30,000 years ago – Julia had almost cried, ravished by their primeval yet timeless loveliness.
But that was only the beginning. After the Dordogne they had driven south, to the Pyrenees, to go and look at Gargas. And the Hands. And where Cougnac and Pech Merle had delighted, the Hands of Gargas had troubled her, and truly moved her.
They were just plain, simple, humble stencils of human hands: but they were so silently poignant, so piercingly mute. And so vividly new. It was as if a stone age family had walked into the cave just an hour before Julia, and placed their hands against the rockface, and blown the paint through a straw around the fingers, creating the stencil. Somebody had indeed lifted up a little child in one section of the cave – or so it was supposed by the experts – so the tiny infant hand could be stencilled alongside the adults’.