Jake looked her way. Churned.
“Stubborn little Chemtik, always stubborn.” Sonisoy sighed and put a hand on Jake’s shoulder. “Just look after my niece. Please. OK? I’m going to run that way”—he gestured backward—“making a lot of noise to distract them, so you two will have a few seconds as they all come after me. Make sure you use those seconds—” He clasped Jake’s shoulder tighter, and said, “Then, when you get to the outside, just run, run through the forest, it goes a long way, right to a baray, Srah Srang, no one goes there, just villagers, locals, no tourists, no police — you can grab a ride to Anlong Veng.”
The nearest policeman was coming around the corner: Jake could hear the chink of rubble as black boots slid against the clitter.
Sonisoy gazed up at the half-revealed sky, his eyes worshipful and concerned, misted with sadness. “So, now, we split up, in three seconds, two seconds… ready?”
“Ready.”
Sonisoy ran noisily, left, out into a courtyard, shouting behind him.
“Chemda! Jake! This way!”
Immediately a chorus of excited voices responded — they’d heard him. Sonisoy kept shouting, leading, decoying.
Jake grabbed Chemda’s hand and they ducked into the sun, past the lion, down the terrace, down the steps, and onto the path.
There. The path evolved into a short tunnel, under the wall. They slid down the mud and scrambled through darkness and emerged into peaceful light, shattered by a sound.
A terrible scream.
The awful scream was so loud and eerie it seemed to silence the rasp of the jungle; it was the near-inhuman scream of someone being viciously beaten, or worse. And now the cops were calling, barking orders, continuing the hunt.
“Sonisoy—” Chemda’s eyes shone with the shock. “What did they do to Sonisoy?”
The scream echoed again: a man’s bellow of pain.
Jake was paralyzed, momentarily. He saw the repetition in his life: he was leaving someone behind, a broken body covered in blood, barely breathing.
But a fierceness entered Jake’s thoughts.
“They’ll do the same to us.”
He wrenched at her hand — she resisted, for a shred of a moment; then she shuddered, nodded, and they ran fast together deep into the jungle, hard along the path, running straight into this forest of noise and heat. It was a humid maze of green. Birds and monkeys catcalled like derisive hecklers. Insects hissed all around, whirring and angry; huge black wasps hovered and dived at their sweating faces; the sunlight flickered crazily through the green canopy.
They ran until they could barely walk, until Jake keeled to the side, gasping, heaving. Chemda hugged his neck, her warm, panting breath feathery on his skin; the two of them were hanging on each other’s shoulders, exhausted.
Then Jake looked up.
Ahead of them, beyond the last of the trees, was a waste of water, another sheet-metal expanse of baray, like a vast lido of mercury in the hot afternoon sun.
And maybe a village?
Seizing the opportunity, Chemda walked out onto the docile shores of the reservoir, where wooden shacks and some naked swimming children revealed human life. Jake followed, his heart still hurting from the exertions. Chemda was barefoot. Her ankles were bleeding. She curved and slipped her flip-flops on, and dropped her rucksack to the ground. Jake looked at the little bag; he had a similar bag on his back. All their possessions. Two pitiful rucksacks.
He picked up his and followed her. He felt a bleak sense of affirmation as they approached the village, Chemda ahead of him. They were certainly in this together now. She was his and he was hers. Whatever happened.
The village was so sleepy it was like someone had mortared the place with narcotic gas. Women lay on their sides on wooden platforms, dirty and barefoot, snoozing, yawning, breast-feeding babies, their kramas on their shoulders. Men sat with their backs against the banyans in the shadows, sleeping. Only the children and the roosters were alert.
An old man wearing a white loincloth came forward. He scrutinized Jake and Chemda; he asked her several curt questions; she replied. He looked like Mahatma Gandhi. His teeth were haphazard but his eyes were kind, and shrewd. The man watched as Chemda took dollars from her rucksack. Then he spoke.
Chemda translated his words for Jake: “There’s a pickup leaving here in forty minutes, taking fruit to Thailand. Through Anlong Veng. We can hide in the back.”
They had to wait. Jake was glad to wait. His legs were still aching from the run through the jungle, his mind still roiled by the hideous scream in the temple. What did they do to Sonisoy?
The old man led them to a clearing and a kind of communal table for the village. More chickens and children scampered in the dust. Five boys were playing with a shuttlecock down by the waveless waters of the baray, kicking it in the air.
Taking a metal jug, the man poured water in plastic cups for them both. It was cold and delicious. Jake drank it hungrily.
“Aw kohn.”
The old man smiled. His eyes held a spark of charm and friendliness, maybe even empathy for these two scruffed, muddy, sweating young people emerging with frightened faces from the jungle. He stood and retreated to the shade of a shack, then came back with a bowl of boiled eggs. He proffered them. Jake realized he had not eaten anything in almost a day. He gladly took one.
As he cracked open the egg he instantly understood his error: Chemda was staring his way, her eyebrows subtly raised. But it was too late. He’d have to eat it now. The rich and pungent smell emanating from the warm boiled egg told him what he was holding.
Balat. It was boiled duck embryo, an egg that had been fertilized and then left to grow for a fortnight or more: meaning there was a crunchy half-formed duck embryo inside. Jake peeled away the soft delicate shards of white shell, trying not to grimace. Sure enough, there it was, inside — the slimy bolus of egg and duck fetus: little feathers, brains, beak, claws, squidgy and gray, almost ready to be born, almost ready to fly, mixed in with the dark yellow egg pulp.
He couldn’t say no. These villagers were saving their lives. He didn’t dare risk insulting them. Closing his eyes, Jake put the egg in his mouth bit by bit, bone by bone, sensing the slimy crunch of the bird’s rib cage and the jellylike squidge of its half-formed brains between his teeth, like chewing silt. Jake shuddered and felt a kind of guilt, the guilt of a carnivore, and yet he ate. Because he was hungry.
“We’re ready—”
It was Chemda. Jake swallowed the last of the balat. And stood. A Toyota Hilux, unexpectedly clean and new, was backing into the clearing. Villagers were loading it with baskets of fruit: apples, mangosteens, papayas, purplish dragonfruit, and enormous durians, with their excessive green prickles.
Jake and Chemda climbed in. They lay on the bottom of the pickup, between the racks of fruit. The fetid, sweet, bad-sewer smell of durian was quite persistent, but they were concealed between the crates.
The old man threw some kind of tarpaulin over the load, and over Jake and Chemda. He whispered to them as they lay there, cowering in the darkness.
Jake said thank you. Chemda said aw kohn.
The pickup started. They were on their way.
The journey was long and hot, and Jake spent it watching Chemda sleeping. She was lying right next to him, and her eyes closed almost as soon as the vehicle accelerated away. He sensed her exhaustion. That’s why she could sleep in this fetid, cramped space, in the heat and the reek of the durians, as they rattled over the endless potholes of National Highway 67.