by Alex Archer
She tightened her lips and tipped her head to the right again. “So why did you stop trying to kill me? Or not simply let that pair shoot me? Yes, I sensed something was going on and glanced back. And by that time one was down and the other’s body was falling, so I put it from my mind and concentrated on flight.”
Annja looked at her a moment. Too bad I didn’t get the gift of reading a person’s thoughts along with my magic sword, she thought. She hung her head loosely between her raised knees for a moment before answering.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “You could have shot me back there if you wanted to. I know you’re fast enough to have got a couple of rounds into me. For that matter you told me to come along with you when we ran. You let me follow. It would have been easy for you to have left me behind in the meat grinder back there.”
“Right,” Easy said. “I admit I’m still a bit unclear on the concept of why you leaped to the conclusion that I was guilty of all that sordid homicide.”
“Well, we’re after the same thing, aren’t we?”
Easy grinned at her again. “As we were in China,” she said, “and I didn’t notice either of us strewing corpses in our wake like a plague ship.”
Annja shrugged. “Well. You’re a criminal, frankly. You’re the world’s most notorious pot hunter—tomb robber. Given your disrespect for the law, how was I to know what was beyond you? Especially since you make such a show of going everywhere armed.”
“You’re a fine one to talk about that,” Easy said. “But as for my being a criminal—is Yangon officially apprised of your presence in the happy land of Myanmar, by any chance?”
Annja said nothing.
“Thought so. Do I need to point out how copiously you’re in violation of the SPDC’s laws? I doubt you’ve reported the deaths of your comrades, even poor Dr. Kennedy. That’s another slew of violations right there.”
Annja shook her head. “But the SPDC’s a brutal dictatorship,” she said, “and its laws are unjust.”
“Meaning, not to your liking,” Easy said. “You’re quick to condemn me for flouting laws I disagree with. Yet here you are, blithely doing the exact same thing.”
Annja, cheeks flushing hot, started to refute her. The words caught in her throat. She couldn’t say anything to that. Not without sounding like a jackass.
“But you’re desecrating valuable archaeological sites,” she said, “destroying context and stealing the priceless heritage of the local peoples.”
“Exactly what claims of ownership local peoples have to these artifacts are tenuous at best,” Easy said, “especially given that the artifacts were in the vast majority of cases left behind by some other group altogether. As often as not the local people’s contribution to the relics’ provenance was to move in and slaughter their creators wholesale. And how often do these local groups get to keep their relics, actually ancestral or not? Doesn’t the government almost always swoop in and carry them off?”
“Yes, but they’re official caretakers—”
Easy snorted. “So’s the Tatmadaw Kyee,” she said, “and you seem to have a firm grip on the kind of care they take. Are you really that sheltered, that you don’t know how often the artifacts you see in the museums, or even in crates in the basement, are replicas—often not even good replicas—of objects sold to government-favored private collectors?”
Annja said nothing. It was one of those things archaeologists weren’t supposed to talk or even think about. Just as abundant, irrefutable evidence of Mayan human sacrifice had been an open secret for at least a generation of anthropologists, at the price of ostracism and early-onset career death if they spoke aloud what they knew.
“And haven’t you read any of the documentation I’ve written? I’ve never disrupted context, Annja—you should know that if you’ve done your homework.”
“Well—” Annja sighed and shook her head. She knew she was right. But somehow she couldn’t muster the arguments to demonstrate the facts so that Easy would have to face them.
Somehow they didn’t seem to matter, right here, right now.
“Does anybody ever win an argument with you, Easy?” she asked wearily.
“You know, my father took to asking that very question, in the final few years before we stopped speaking to one another altogether.”
“So what now?” Annja asked after a few moments. The evening had congealed nearly to night. The sky was indigo with streaks of sullen red and green, and the evening chorus of bugs and birds and monkeys was just tuning up.
“If you’re on for a bit more of a hike,” her companion said, standing, “then let’s go along and meet the folks.”
“The folks?”
Easy nodded. “The Protectors of the Precious Elephant, who’ve guarded this mesa since the Bagan Empire fell to the Mongols seven centuries ago.”
25
“Many ages ago, the Kingdom of Bagan ruled over Burma.”
The speaker was a man severely shrunken by the decades, who probably hadn’t been big to start with. His face was full of seams and wrinkles. His white beard, though silky and growing to his navel, seemed to consist of about a dozen hairs.
Firelight danced on the faces of towering blocks of stone, and on the faces of the people clustered between them. These were anything but stoney—the assembled villagers were alive with eager curiosity and anticipation.
“In those years, many were the temples they built, and glorious. And none more glorious than the Temple of the Precious Wheel, and above it the crowning glory of the Temple of the Precious Elephant!”
The onlookers gasped and murmured in appreciation. They had to have heard this story a hundred times before. But Annja knew that, just as few people ever got tired of talking about themselves, fewer still got tired of hearing about themselves. And this was the story of the people of this lost jungle-clad mesa rising from the Shan Plateau.
The old man spoke in a nasal singsong—Mandarin, in fact. That appeared to be for the benefit of the outsiders—specifically Easy, who translated for Annja. The Protectors, as the people of the mesa called themselves, spoke a Burmese dialect. But either they all also knew Chinese, or they knew the story enough to know what was being said.
“For centuries Bagan ruled wisely and well. Then came the people from the north—the Mongols who ruled China. The princes and the leaders and the monks went away to fight with them. So great was the arrogant pride of Narathihapate the Great King that he led his armies into Yunnan to meet the enemy.
“That pride was the downfall of Bagan. The Mongols defeated the forces of the king. His own son murdered him. The Mongols invaded and conquered the land.”
He paused as if to draw breath, shaking his silver-topknotted head as if in weary regret of the follies of the past. And, if Annja was any judge, for dramatic effect. The old guy was a master storyteller.
“Those of the nobles and monks who had not left to fight, and fall, alongside King Narathihapate fled to the capital, where in due time the Mongols crushed them. Before leaving here our masters charged us to guard the holy places. Not against wood, nor wind, nor water—these things would work what they would work, and their working would in time help to hide this sanctum from the wicked.
“We were left behind to defend the sacred things from the hands of desecrators. And so we have—no Mongol who set foot upon the plateau lived to take the tale back to his khan. Nor has any foe since.
“Yet now we are beset from two directions at once. And so we face the most bitter fight of our history or the dishonor of defeat.”
The people rose to their feet shouting and waving their fists. I wonder what Phil would’ve made of them? Annja wondered. They were certainly isolated, simple tribal folk, to all appearances—preindustrial enough even for a purist like Dr. Kennedy. Yet far from being pacifists, they seemed eager to confront their lowland enemies. And not with protest songs and garlands of flowers, unless she misjudged their mood badly.
The village lay two or three miles
in from the edge of the steep-sided mesa, and about half a mile from the jut of rock on which the Temple of the Elephant perched. The ruins beside the plaza rose to a wat of impressive dimensions. It was so thoroughly shrouded in jungle vegetation that from any distance, or even from the air, it would seem nothing more than a natural hill. Annja knew that was probably why the ruin had escaped detection for so long.
The dwellings were perfectly integrated into the tangle of worked stone and riotous growth. The Protectors seemed to make no use of the remaining enclosures, whether to avoid desecration or from practical concern they might cave in at any moment. Instead they wove their huts in among them. These, too, were cunningly worked, incorporating living limbs and vines in the roofs and very walls, so that they were hard to spot until you were right on them. The villagers lived off fruit and small animals, and by working hundreds of dispersed garden plots so tiny and irregular that even from the air they wouldn’t scream out cultivation.
Obviously avoiding aerial detection hadn’t been part of the original intent, although the Protectors’ practices worked to an extent against it. After a century of aviation, though, Annja suspected the villagers had adapted to improve their overhead security. They struck her as smart, resourceful folk. Though she was no social anthropologist, she knew the study of these people and their society would be as fascinating and fruitful in its way as exploring the entire vast complex of ruins.
Enthralled at hearing their own story, the villagers seemed to have forgotten the outsiders. Easy sat beside Annja. The younger woman was smiling and shaking her head.
“It’s ironic, you know,” Easy said.
“How’s that?”
“These people aren’t warriors, or at least, their ancestors weren’t,” Easy said. The bonfire, head high to Annja, gilded her face with ever-shifting highlights. “They’re descended from the builders of the temple complex.”
“I see.”
“Do you?” Easy said with a slight, infuriating smile. She had a tendency to show off, Annja thought.
Still, she’s smart and she’s spent time here. I’d better sit on my own ego, bite my tongue and listen up.
“They aren’t descended from the princes and priests,” Easy explained. “But rather, the architects and the master masons. The people who designed and physically built these enormous structures.”
“Oh.” It put an interesting spin on the story.
“They made the perfect caretakers, of course. Over time the other people who hadn’t run off to join the army or fled the Mongols probably wandered away or simply starved—this mesa won’t support a large population. These folks are just barely at the point of maintaining sufficient genetic diversity, although there’s intermarriage with tribes from the surrounding plateau. And people from here often go into the outside world, sometimes returning with spouses or at least children. They and their culture, and the whole wat complex, aren’t lost so much as hidden.”
Annja nodded. She’d experienced that before with the hidden Amazon city of Promise. But the Promessans had retreated from the world deliberately. Whereas they built a hidden civilization that was palpably more technologically advanced than the outside world, the Protectors seemed content to maintain traditional lifestyles.
“Don’t they have trouble when some want to leave?” Annja asked.
“Surprisingly, no,” Easy said. “They lose some that way, of course. But their culture keeps alive a sense of mission. I believe they’re awaiting the return of Gautama, or reincarnation of Vishnu, as Maitreya. Like a lot of Buddhists in this part of the world they mix their faith up with the mother religion pretty liberally.”
THROUGH THE COMPACT BINOCULARS Easy Ngwenya had handed Annja, the men in the dark green not-quite-uniforms and blue turbans looked like roaches climbing the cliff’s red face with the aid of piton-anchored ropes. The two women lay on their stomachs on a high point on the cliff 150 yards or so to the west. The invaders had found a groove worn through the rock so that they were able to climb at an easier angle. It was still a risky business.
But the Grand Shan State Army had no idea how risky it really was. Out of sight beyond the head of the cut a trio of small, wiry Protectors, wearing drab sarongs and headcloths, worked diligently at a tilted slab with pry bars and chisels. The red sandstone was prone to fracture along a plane—the same phenomenon that killed Patty Ruhle.
As Annja watched a flat piece of rock the size of a Volkswagen chassis suddenly shifted and broke free with a grinding sound. The Shans raised their turbaned heads to see doom accelerating down at them.
It smashed the top two men outright. The man right below turned and jumped down reflexively—a bad move, given that he was about sixty feet up. He bought himself about a second more of life. The stone slab was constrained in the channel the men had been climbing up. Banging off the sides in pink sprays of rock dust, it smashed two more men off. Then it struck an outcrop, bounced, went end over end away from the cliff.
That spared the half dozen men below it in the chute. However, it landed on two more waiting their turn to climb from the ground below. The more prudent turned and ran.
The Protectors, for their part, acted like pros. Reminding Annja of the football coach’s admonition to his players to “act like you’ve been there before” when scoring touchdowns, they didn’t indulge in any boastful triumphant display. They just turned to make their escape.
A Shan militiaman on the ground shouldered an RPG and launched a grenade toward the head of the narrow cut running down the cliff where the rock had tumbled. More by luck than wizard aim his rocket-propelled grenade struck near the top of the outcrop from which the defenders had levered the boulder. It went off with a white flash and a vicious crash that went like needles through Annja’s eardrums into her brain.
Vaporized copper from the shaped-charge head and a shotgunlike spray of shattered rock blasted the nearest Protector in the back. He fell on his face thrashing. His comrades grabbed his arms to pull him away. The right one came off in his companion’s hand.
Annja jerked back from the binoculars. Beside her Easy grimaced.
“Hard luck, that,” she said.
“Maybe we’d better shift out of here, too,” Annja said. Although they’d been careful she realized with a sick shock she couldn’t be sure she hadn’t been spotted from the ground, although with the sun over their left shoulders there was little chance of a lens glint giving their position away. She also did not feel like betting her life that had just been a lucky shot.
“These aren’t helpless farmers, you see,” Easy said as they trotted back away from the cliff.
“No,” Annja said.
“But here’s the rub,” Easy said, “the cold equations. The Protectors have about a hundred effective fighters, including some pretty young and pretty old. The Lord’s Wa Army is bringing four times that number against them, the GSSA almost five.
“Our friends had every advantage in that ambush. Granted, that shows their skill—it’s part of the art of ambush, after all, knowing how to stack the deck in one’s favor. And a lucky shot by a Shan militiaman did greater hurt to our side than a well-conceived and executed ambush from the heights did theirs.”
Annja felt the corners of her mouth draw back in dismay. She had felt nothing but exultation over their victory, then grief for the loss of a brave man whom she didn’t actually know. What Easy told her now sat in her stomach like badly curdled milk.
“If they had modern weapons—and the sort of near infinite resupply it takes to use them in battle—the Protectors could dig in along the heights and stand both armies off forever. They lack such weapons—don’t like them, actually. They fear to use them lest they become dependent upon them to fight effectively.”
“And you agree with that?” Annja asked in surprise. Easy was well-known as a technophile.
Easy laughed. “Oh, yes. In this instance. They lack the resources to support that kind of war, having no income from the ever-lucrative drug trade, n
or the support of wealthy and delusional American fundamentalists—nor the likely support of shadowy U.S. government agencies.
“And anyway that kind of Gallipoli-style stand would work an even greater disaster on them. They could withstand anything short of a heavy artillery bombardment. Neither the Shan nor the Wa have such artillery. The Tatmadaw Kyee does in abundance. And the noise of protracted firepower-intensive battle would surely attract their attention. And I doubt I need to tell you what would follow then.”
“No,” Annja said. She looked at her companion. “So why the sudden interest in this place, anyway?”
Easy shrugged. “Coincidence, it appears. Truly. Marshal Qiangsha, the GSSA supremo, has taken it into his head that this would make an ideal base of operations for his drugs concern, as well as his war with Yangon. Unfortunately, Jerry Cromwell and his Wa have got the same notion. Of course, Cromwell has to have an additional bee in his bonnet—he’s declared the temples and all the relics within them are abominations in the eyes of the Lord and must be expunged.”
“Even though they’re mostly ruins?”
“Apparently they’re not ruined enough. Too impressive by half. So he wants to dynamite the lot and then use the mesa as a base to spread his brand of righteousness across the Shan Plateau and, presumably, all of Southeast Asia.”
“So he wants to do for this archaeological treasure what the Taliban did for the statues of Buddha at Bamiyan?” Annja asked, horrified.
“The very thing. A bit of an irony, that, really. He gets financial support from certain right-wing fundamentalist groups stateside because he claims to be battling Islamic terror,” Easy said.
“You mean he doesn’t fund his operations through drugs the way Qiangsha does?”
“I didn’t say that. Truth to tell, I don’t know. Still, one thing I’ve noticed about true believers of every stripe—being utterly and inalterably convinced that you know the real truth, the only truth and nothing but the truth doesn’t translate to decent behavior the way everybody thinks it does. Rather, once you start from the standpoint of unassailable righteousness, it’s no trick to rationalize any atrocity whatever, so long as you claim it’s directed against the wicked.”
