Anna and the King of Siam

by Margaret Landon

  Mae Pia was called next. The unnatural light of pain, madness, or frenzy—whatever it was—seemed to burn still more brightly in her eyes. Her crude brown clothing was stained here and there with darker spots, and her face seemed to grow more colorless every moment. The examiners asked her question after question. The crafty wizards and witches put innumerable inquiries to her. She did not reply. Her lips, ashy pale, seemed to have been closed by a supernatural agency.

  Anna recalled her volubility and the impassioned song by which she had won for her mistress the acknowledgment of the Second King’s love. What had happened to her eloquence? Surely she could invent a story that would deceive this credulous audience prepared by the testimony of the Amazons to accept the fantastic. “Is it possible that she’s acting?” Anna wondered. She doubted it, unless Mae Pia were heavily drugged.

  At a signal an alarm gong was struck suddenly just behind the slave. The whole assembly started and Mae Pia, taken by surprise, turned to see what had made the sound. “Ha!” shouted Phya Phrom triumphantly. “You aren’t deaf! You can hear plainly! And you can probably speak, too.” The feeling of sympathy that had extended to all the supposed victims of the sorceress now turned against Mae Pia. The crowd stirred and muttered, and the judge condemned her immediately to the torture of the rack.

  But the yogi raised his bare arms on high and uttered a shrill cry. “Forbear! Forbear!” he cried so commandingly that it rang through the temple and arrested the movements of everyone in it. He turned to Mae Pia and placed his huge bony hands on her shoulders. He whispered something in her ear that seemed to move the girl, for she raised her eyes to his and they were filled with tears. Then she shook her head sadly, and laid her finger on her lips, apparently trying to make it clear to him that she could not speak. A sympathetic look kindled in the dark face of the yogi. He turned to the assembly and said, “This woman is not a witch and she is not even obstinate. She is powerless to speak because she is under a spell.”

  The tide of the feeling turned again to the prisoner.

  “Let her be exorcised then,” said Phya Phrom, accepting the yogi’s judgment without question.

  At this, the woman whom Anna had picked out as the queerest of the whole group, an old, toothless dame, drew out from her girdle a key and opened the wooden boxes. From them she took a small boat, a sort of coracle not unlike the boats used by the ancient Egyptians. Anna had seen boats similar to it in parts of Wales, made by covering a wicker frame with leather. Then she took out a long gray veil of some unusual material, an earthen stove, and some charcoal. From the second box she produced herbs, pieces of flint, the cast skins of snakes, feathers, the hair of various animals, human bones, short brooms, and a number of other things.

  With the charcoal and flint the old woman lighted a fire in her earthen stove. When it was red hot she opened several jars of what appeared to be water, and muttering incantations threw into them portions of her herbs, repeating over each a mystic spell, and waving a wand that looked like a bone taken from the arm of a stalwart man. This done she seated the prisoner in the center of the group of wizards and witches and covered her with a veil of gray stuff. She passed the short handbrooms to a number of the witches. Then to Anna’s intense horror she began to pour the burning charcoal over the veiled form of the prisoner. The other women danced around with wild gestures, repeating the name of Brahma and sweeping the coals off as fast as she poured them on. This was done without even singeing the veil or burning a hair of Mae Pia’s head. Afterward they emptied the jars of water on her, still repeating the name of Brahma. Mae Pia was then made to change to entirely fresh clothes of the Brahminical pattern. Her dressing and undressing were effected skillfully without disclosing her person at all.

  Once more the yogi laid his hands on her shoulders and whispered first in her right ear and then in her left. But Mae Pia still shook her head and pointed to her sealed lips. Then the oldest wizard, Khun Phikhat (the lord who drives out the devil), prostrated himself before her, and prayed with a wild energy of manner. Rising suddenly he demanded in a stentorian voice, full in the prisoner’s face, “Where did you drop the bunch of keys?”

  The glaring light of late afternoon illuminated the fine face of the Lao slave, as for the third time she moved her head from side to side in solemn assurance that she could not or would not speak. Some of the assembly began to whisper that the same witch who spirited the princess away had struck this poor girl dumb. The majority, unconvinced, grumbled that the judge ought to apply the rack. Anna herself was beginning to have the illogical conviction that Mae Pia could not speak even if she would.

  “Open her mouth and pour some of the magic water into it,” suggested one of the wise women. This was agreed to, and several stepped forward. One woman took hold of her lower jaw, one of her forehead, while a third stood ready with the water. Then as her mouth opened they fell back in horror, screaming, “Brahma! Brahma! Brahma!”

  “What is it?” shouted Phya Phrom half rising from his place. One of the women turned to him, her face green and sick. “Brahma! Brahma! The evil fiend has torn out her tongue!”

  Pandemonium broke loose. Immediately Mae Pia ceased to be an object of fear and dread and became one of pity, even—by some incomprehensible metamorphosis—of adoration. The transition from fear and loathing to compassion was so sudden that many of the men as well as the women wept at the thought of the dreadful mutilation to which the fiend had subjected the slave girl.

  In slow, grave tones the final question was asked—was the exorcism effectual? A small taper was lighted and put into the wise woman’s boat. The whole company followed her out to the borders of the stream to see it launched. The boat swept gallantly down the current, the feeble light burned brightly without even a flicker, until it was stopped by some stones that were set across the stream.

  The yogi raised a shout of delight, and the whole company echoed it with satisfaction. The answer was yes—the exorcism had been effectual. In accordance with the King’s instructions the trial was brought to a swift close. The prisoners were acquitted of any complicity with the devil in the abduction of the princess. Each received a sum of money and was set at liberty. The planks—damning evidence which showed so clearly that some person had scaled the Palace walls—were not brought into the trial at all. As the whole company set out for home, no longer in procession but each going his own way, they were left unheeded and forgotten where the coolies had dropped them.

  It was sunset by this time. Anna sent her syce home and remained behind under the tree to which her horse was tied. The yogi splashed back through the stream to the solitude of his unknown cave, to sleep by day and pray alone by night. Still the women lingered sympathetically about Mae Pia in the hall.

  Finally they were gone, and the slave who had been sitting dully on the floor stood up and came out. She caught sight of Anna under the tree and ran to her. She threw herself into the Englishwoman’s arms and laid her head on Anna’s shoulder. She made pitiful noises that Anna thought at first were cries of sorrow, but when Mae Pia raised her head she saw they were expressions of joy. There was nothing but gladness in the slave’s face. Anna was too shocked by the lengths to which Mae Pia had gone to save her mistress, to do more than embrace her with the tenderness a mother might feel for a brave and reckless child. She could not keep back the tears as she remembered how the princess had told her that Mae Pia was the finest musician in the North: Those bloodless lips would sing no more!

  Mae Pia’s two friends joined them and in whispers told Anna the rest of the story. Mae Pia had scaled the walls by means of the planks, pulling them up and over the first wall to use on the second. She had studied the Palace carefully and had chosen for her entry a dark spot between two gates on the river side. She had provided herself previously with the great bunch of keys—they did not know how she had come by them. She had opened the prison doors with them and terrified the Amazons. The wind that blew out the lanterns was her one great piece of luck. From
her early questioning of Anna she was able to go directly to the cell in which the princess was. It was true that she had had to drag the princess away by force. After assisting the princess to climb the walls on the inner side, she had sat on the top of the outer wall until she saw the princess safely down. The prince and his two friends had been waiting in a small boat at the river’s edge.

  It was the dark of the moon and they had had no difficulty remaining undetected. Mae Pia had dropped the keys to the princess to be thrown into the river. In vain the prince and princess had begged, entreated and pleaded with Mae Pia to come down from the wall and join them in their flight. She had refused to leave the two companions of her mistress alone in their peril. So at last, afraid they would be discovered and unable to persuade Mae Pia, they had turned toward the river. A small ship waited at its mouth to receive the princess and take her with her brother and his friends to Moulmein.

  Mae Pia had feared that in the terrible ordeal of torture to which she knew she would be subjected she might reveal the truth. So by one stroke of the dagger she had deprived herself of the power of ever again uttering a single intelligible sound.

  “But why didn’t all of you go with the princess?” Anna asked the women.

  “Because we were too many,” they answered, “and would surely have been discovered. And Mae Pia had promised not to leave us to bear the penalty alone.”

  There was nothing more to be said, nothing more even that Anna could do for them. Their plans were made. They were going down river immediately to Paklat where they would take the next boat for Moulmein to rejoin the princess. It was getting dark, but Anna could hardly tear herself away from the slave even to fulfill her promise to Lady Thiang. The head wife had nothing to fear and she could wait. At last there was no further excuse for staying. The women would be anxious to find a boat before it was too late.

  Anna untied her horse and mounted it. As she moved away Mae Pia raised her hands high above her head, and waved them to and fro. She was smiling. Anna smiled too, but faintly, for she was deeply shaken by the heroism she had witnessed that day.

  39

  THE SHADOW BEFORE

  Anna had decided to accompany Louis to England. It had taken her many months to reach this decision, but when it was made she felt relieved. The King rejected it completely, refusing even to discuss the possibility of her leaving Bangkok.

  “Mem, you are lazy! You are ungrateful!” he reproached her every time she brought the matter up. Why he should consider her ungrateful since he had never fulfilled his early promise to raise her salary, it was hard to say. “I have need of you,” he argued, and to him that was conclusive. It took her six months to win his grudging consent, and even then he would not permit her to go unless she promised faithfully to return in six months. This she could do only conditionally, for her health was so undermined that it was doubtful whether six months would be sufficient to recover it.

  Five years had passed since she had seen Avis, who was now twelve. Louis, who was only a year younger, needed to be placed in a boarding-school with a regular routine. An Oriental court full of enervating influences was no place for an English boy to spend his adolescence. She and Louis had been in the tropics ten years, hard years indeed for her, and they both needed the bracing air of a temperate climate.

  Against her going was the indubitable fact that her influence with the King was greater than it had ever been. Her quarrels with him seemed to have enhanced her position rather than otherwise. The three hours she spent with Prince Chulalongkorn every evening in the library of his new Rose Garden Palace were in themselves an inducement. He was not the impressionable child he had been before his period in the novitiate, but he still responded to her teaching. There was one occasion during the seven happy months that she taught him there which she was to remember often years later.

  The prince and she had been talking about the life of Abraham Lincoln. The story of the great humanitarian was familiar to the prince from the constant references she had made to it through the years. He, like the other older pupils, had read the Emancipation Proclamation, and followed the course of the Civil War to its conclusion. On this evening Anna and he were talking about the tragic death of the President. It had made a deep mark on the young prince’s thinking. He leaned across the table, his eyes shining with a determination she was not to forget.

  “Mem cha,” he said, “if I live to reign over Siam I shall reign over a free and not an enslaved nation. It will be my pride to restore this kingdom to the original constitution under which it was founded by a small colony of Buddhists many centuries ago. They fled from Magadah, their native country, to escape the persecution of the Brahman priests and came to Siam and established themselves here under one of their leaders, who was both priest and king. They called the country they had chosen ‘Muang Thai,’ which means ‘The Country of the Free.’ Maybe some day I can change it back into ‘The Country of the Free.’”

  Anna looked at the ardent face of the boy in front of her and hoped that he would live to accomplish his dream. Even though his interpretation of Siam’s early history was faulty his plans for the future were good. He was steady and quiet. Unlike his father, who was half of the old world that was passing and half of the new, Chulalongkorn was all of the new. He was facing squarely into the future. This was partly Anna’s doing and she was glad. Whether there would be any kingdom left for him to rule when the time came was something that no one could have determined in that winter of 1867. There were the English in the south and west, and there were the French, always the French!

  In December M. Aubaret had made another great scandal. He was still determined to force the King to relinquish specific claim to Battambang and Siemreap. He had become convinced that not the King but the Kralahome was the obstacle to his purpose. The Kralahome stood inflexible against any weakening of the Siamese position. The consul had demanded, therefore, the removal of the Kralahome from the commission which was formulating Siam’s reply to French insistence. This reply was to be carried to France by the Kralahome’s son, Phya Suriwong. The King had answered that it was not in his power to remove the Kralahome since he was ex officio a member of the commission. This had infuriated M. Aubaret. He had had difficulty securing an interview with the King after that, and suspected that the King was putting him off until the embassy had sailed.

  On December 14 M. Lamache sent him word that the King would appear during the late afternoon on the commons outside the eastern gate of the Palace, going and coming from a nearby temple. M. Lamache would be there with three hundred of his soldiers in their best uniforms, drilling for a time, and then parading before the King. M. Aubaret, who had nursed his wrath to keep it warm, “happened” along and watched the soldiers at drill. He was still standing there casually, as if he had merely chanced to be passing, when the King and court emerged. The King was surprised to see the French Consul. He ordered his palanquin bearers to halt. “Why for have you come?” he demanded.

  The consul replied that he had only come on a pleasure stroll, but since His Majesty had so opportunely appeared there was a matter he did want to discuss with him, and perhaps this was as good a time as any. He drew a paper from his pocket and launched into a diatribe against the Kralahome, the burden of which was that it would be in the interests of both nations to have him replaced by someone less likely to disrupt the relations between them. Some of the listening courtiers reported afterward that M. Aubaret added in an aside that he had come to the conclusion a suitable person was available and he would be glad to supply His Majesty with the name when His Majesty agreed to the removal of the Kralahome. Finally, he bluntly threatened the King with war if His Majesty refused to comply with French demands in both the matter of the Kralahome and the Cambodian question.

  The King’s anger, as mercurial as M. Aubaret’s own, had risen instantly, obliterating for the moment his fear of the French. He had ordered the consul out of his way, refusing any discussion. M. Aubaret, fully aware of the ir
regular nature of his procedure, tried to close the interview with some show of good will. He extended his hand to the King but the King ignored it. Pretending not to be aware of the King’s action he then turned to a group of the King’s children, who were close behind their father’s palanquin, and tried to shake hands with them. They, too, rebuffed him with the haughty manner they as well as their father knew how to adopt.

  The consul turned and walked away toward the north, his hat in his hand, his head bent apparently in deep thought. After he had gone perhaps three hundred feet, he turned back, whether to try again or to apologize it was impossible to know. But by that time the King and the whole court had retreated within the Palace, abandoning any plan of going to the temple. The Bangkok Recorder commented on the incident:

  In view of what M. Aubaret has already done, we should not be much surprised to learn that he will take this occasion to “move heaven and earth,” as it were, to make it appear that His Majesty has in this affair insulted the Emperor of the French, and that it is a substantial causus belli—that a French army must be ordered forthwith to put “His Excellency the Prime Minister” out of the way, and thus remove every serious obstacle in the way of French domination in Siam. Why, the demand he made in that interview with the King appears to us tantamount to requiring him to cut off the right arm of the government—to pluck out its right eye and stop both the ears.…

  Within the Palace panic reigned. The astrologers, magicians, and wise men of the court were called. After consulting the stars and the oracles they said: “The times are full of omen. Danger approaches from afar. Let His Majesty erect a third gate on the east and on the west.”