“Books,” said Chemda. “It would have contained, ah, books, parchments, wooden tablets, but they would all have been destroyed by time—”
“Yes.” Sonisoy gestured them to the side. “But stone can survive in great detail if it is buried. We have dug around this library in the past year, since our discussions with Monsieur Barnier, and, last week, we found these.”
He gestured over a heap of rubble. Beyond it was another pile of rubble, covered in dusty plastic.
Like a magician, Sonisoy swept the large sheet of plastic away. Jake stared. It was still a heap of nothing. They had come all this way to look at some ancient bricks.
“Uncle, I don’t—”
“Look harder. Use your eyes.”
Amid the rubble stood two larger pieces of stone: pediments, badly worn, with several carved panels; figures etched into the stone. Apsaras, garudas, the usual.
“So what?”
Sonisoy sighed in the breathless heat.
“These were special carvings kept in the special library in the intellectual heart of Angkor, the greatest city of its time in the world. They must tell a story—”
“You tell it to us,” Chemda said, “and fast. Please!”
“Of course.” He turned to his niece. “We all know the prophecy, don’t we? Every Khmer learns it: A darkness will settle on the people of Cambodia. There will be houses but no people in them, roads but no travelers.”
Chemda finished the prophecy for him: “The land will be ruled by barbarians with no religion; blood will run so deep as to touch the belly of the elephant. Only the deaf and the mute will survive.”
“So,” said Sonisoy, pointing to the pediment. “Here is the belly of the elephant. Here is the sea of blood.”
Jake knelt and squinted. He could barely see what Sonisoy was pointing out. Maybe that was an elephant, that could be an ocean, a ripple of water — or of blood. But now that he was close he could definitely see one thing. One thing was perfectly plain.
“My God, that’s a jar! From the Plain of Jars in Laos! This is a carving of whatever happened to those people? In Laos?”
“The Black Khmer. Exactly.”
Sonisoy was nodding; his bald head was sweating. He unwrapped his krama from his waist and dabbed his scalp, then he returned to the carvings: “When you told me of them last night, I thought of these carvings. Now it all makes sense. Here are people, Black Khmer, being drilled in the head, turning them into warriors. See, there, the drilling.” He moved his hand. “And you see the metamorphosis here, and here. From cringing peasant to proud Khmer warrior, when the skull is drilled. These are probably Vietnamese prisoners, decapitated, after the wars, the triumphs of the Khmer.”
That was also clear: a row of heads on the ground. The panel was surely showing a great military victory, by Khmers, Black Khmers, on the Plain of Jars. Jake grabbed a couple of photos; poor photos, yet still evidence. Khmers with trepanations…
But evidence of what?
Sonisoy intoned, “But here, see, in the next panel we see the jars and the weeping women. And the blood and the destruction, the burning of bones, a mass suicide. You see, it is a story, it is the story—”
“A story of what?”
“Who knows. But—”
A noise interrupted, a buzz of static. It was a two-way radio attached to Sonisoy’s belt. Jake guessed one might just need such a thing, to stay in touch, in such a vast place as Angkor.
Sonisoy unbuckled the radio and talked. His face grew dark, then darker. Angry. He gabbled, and stared at Chemda.
Then he said, “That was the gatekeeper, a friend. Warning me. Someone has spotted you. National police, they are coming for us right now, surrounding the temple—”
Chemda grabbed Jake’s hand. She yelled at her uncle: “How do we get out?”
“It’s too late, we need to hide—this way.”
They were about to be caught. The fear shrilled through Jake’s body, a fire siren in the night. Sonisoy guided them swiftly over fallen columns and rubble, through a small empty window that led to a dimly lit, elongated chamber, a virtual tomb of unaired heat.
The room was darkly concealed at the very heart of the temple, the bat-haunted core of Preah Kahn. The three of them pressed flat against the wall. Jake could feel the damp cold sweat of his own shirt. Chemda was next to him, her face a waxen and perspiring mask of unease, the heartbeat visible in her neck, pulsing rapidly.
What next?
They were successfully hidden, for the moment. But they were also trapped inside the cardiac darkness of Preah Kahn. Sooner or later they would be found, in a minute, or five, or ten. Jake was prey, a targeted man. He would go to jail. He probably wouldn’t make it as far as jail. They would find a reason to execute him. This was Cambodia. People died with a blink.
Jake stared at the temple wall opposite. The chamber was decorated with a stone frieze. He realized it was a series of smiling, floating, and completely disembodied female heads.
25
The she-demons stared. Jake could hear the police now: young male Khmer voices clacking orders at one another. A far wall was dazzlingly overlit by sun, then a shadow fleetingly shot across it: the shadow of a man. One of their pursuers.
“This way,” whispered Sonisoy. He gestured, low, beckoning. They followed. The stone corridors narrowed. A strangler fig tree loomed in the middle of a tiny light well, growing out of the architrave, its enormous roots like muscles and tendons grappling the stonework into submission, arm-wrestling the temple into dust. A spider hung sacred and scarlet, poised on a sunlit web.
They ducked. Another corridor, more voices. The policemen were flooding into the ancient maze of Preah Kahn: it sounded like a dozen, at least, climbing through the gopuras, patrolling the naga balustrades, pointing flashlights and guns into thousand-year-old alcoves where blind white salamanders feasted on the pristine darkness and scuttled from the hideous light.
Sonisoy’s shaved head was brightened by another shaft of sun, slanting through the broken roof. He glanced all around. Thinking — and gesturing.
“Along here—”
It was pointless. Jake felt the utter futility dragging like leg irons as they scrambled over the fallen columns and pediments and the cracked and tumbled bas reliefs. They were going to get caught. Death always caught up.
The young cops were engulfing the place, he could hear them everywhere now, those dark, high, clamorous Khmer vowels, clashing, unpleasant, stern and yet juvenile. They could not escape.
Abruptly, Sonisoy stopped and raised a hand. He was pointing through a stone window, at an open space. Great kapok trees loomed beyond a wall, like watchtowers around a concentration camp.
“See. The lions of the stairway, there—”
His gesture led Jake’s eye to a stone lion.
Sonisoy explained: “There’s a small path at the right of the lions, the stone lions, you see it?”
“Yes.”
“That path leads to the fourth enclosure and then it goes under a wall — we dug a tunnel to extract rubble.”
Jake leaned forward, excited: “So we go, we use the tunnel!”
“Wait!” Sonisoy hissed, quiet and urgent. Another clamor of male voices passed right behind them, just a wall away.
“Jake, you go, you’re the one they want. Chemda and I can stay here, get captured, nothing will happen to us—”
Chemda’s intervention was fierce: “If Jake is going I am going.”
“But, Chemda.”
“No!” Her eyes burned in the darkness. “I want to find the truth about my father. And I want to be with Jake.”