“Here.”
They had emerged from the woodland onto another flat meadow. And there were the large stone jars, in direct view.
The jeep parked. Yeng climbed out, smiling proudly: pointing. Jake looked at the fields and the shining rice paddies stretching to hills; a water buffalo, tethered to a wild magnolia, stared back at them, pugnaciously bored.
“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 take 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, whose dark face was lined with a smile. Tou repeated the question, and again Yeng gave his answer; 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 Mr. Samnang. He sad then, scared.”
He was pointing inside one of the nearest jars. The large, two-yard-high, very crudely carved vessels were made of some prickly stone, rough to the touch; Jake leaned over and stared into the fetid 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 moldering. 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 swiveled on the young man. He was smiling shyly. Anxiously. In the silent countryside with the solitary water buffalo 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 hear 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. There was a frown of genuine fear on his face. Jake turned.
Noises.
The silent countryside was silent no more. The trees bent, the sun glared, the noises grew. The water buffalo was straining at his tether. Loud car noises were coming toward them. Jake strained to see: then he saw. Rolling over a hill, maybe five kilometers away. Big white four by fours. Like the ones that had arrived at the hotel before dawn: dirty but new.
The police. Surely the police.
Tou said: “Now we run.”
7
The cold winds moaned and howled right outside Annika’s cottage. The sound was distressing, like anguished mothers were wandering along the derelict lanes of Vayssières, crying at 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 semiretired. As two single women in the macho world of archaeology, they had bonded almost as soon as Julia had arrived in Lozère.
Annika was graciously pouring the tea. Julia sat back and stared around the little cottage. She found her Belgian friend’s taste in decor consistently intriguing: the drawing, 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 farther along the wall. Hanging next to those wintry, Breughelish scenes were several prints of French cave paintings. Julia recognized the lions from Chauvet and the “sorcerer” of the Trois Frères. 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.
She was only fifteen when it had happened. As a special treat, as part of a long, unique 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 twenty thousand, even thirty thousand 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.