How We Play the Game in Salt Lake and Other Stories

by M. Shayne Bell

  “Bag a ptarmigan, and I will cook it,” Amphan said.

  Ptarmigan were flying in the willows by the Chao Phyra, fifty feet from the wall. One ptarmigan flew out across the drifts, fast, coming for the city. A gyrfalcon circled down for it. I took the ptarmigan in my sight and shot it. It fell, feathers burned by the light. The gyrfalcon flew up in a flutter of wings and began circling, warily.

  I was over the battlements, down the rope, buried to my waist in the snow. The women looked on wide-eyed. Sirikit had her bow. Amphan held the quiver. I pushed forward, gun in hand. The gyrfalcon would die before it could take our ptarmigan. I watched the gyrfalcon circling lower, watching me. Suddenly it let out one cry and flew across the Chao Phyra, past Thon Buri. The ptarmigan in the willows flew across the river. I got to the dead ptarmigan. Nerves made its wings twitch. When I picked it up, the women began shouting. I looked at them. Sirikit had an arrow to her bow and the string pulled back, taut. I heard the crust below the new snow break and saw white coming up out of the willows toward me. I jumped to the side, heard it fall past me, turned to face it.

  A Chin. He stood up slowly, smiling. “Give me bird and gun,” he said, gesturing with one hand, a kris in the other.

  We stood five feet apart in the quiet of the snow. The Chin’s breath had frozen his mustache to his thin face. He was no older than me.

  Other Chin yelled, suddenly, from behind me, from across the plains half a kilometer from the walls. Black arrows fell into the snow, and I did not turn to look. I shot the kris out of the Chin’s hand and ran for the walls. An arrow stuck to my coat by my right shoulder. I was at the rope. The women pulled me up and over the battlements. I still had the ptarmigan. I dropped it in the snow on the wall.

  Nuam would not let me turn to the battle. She kept trying to unbutton my coat. “Damn you, Narai, will you bleed to death?”

  The arrow had gone into my shoulder. It was black from being hardened in a fire, and stiff in my knotted muscle. I pulled it out with one quick jerk and fell to my back. Nuam sat me up, took off my coat, bandaged my shoulder in white cloth while I worked the flint arrowhead through the hole in my coat.

  The Chin were at the walls. Arrows were flying over the walls. Sirikit was shooting her arrows through a crenel in the battlements. “The light, Narai!” she said. Amphan and Nuam dragged the pot of oil to the battlements and dumped oil on two Chin climbing a ladder. The Chin screamed. One fell into the snow. The other clung to the ladder, clawing his face: it was cooked brown, crinkled, his eyes blind. He fell back and the ladder fell on top of him. I started shooting Chin: first the Chin with a second ladder, then the Chin with bows. The Chin below us ran. I let them: six Chin struggling away through the snow. The Chin who had asked for my bird and gun was stumbling north along the banks of the Chao Phyra. I had killed five Chin. Sirikit had killed two with her arrows. The oil had killed two more.

  It was over, again.

  Sirikit carried wood to the fire. Amphan dragged back the empty pot and lifted it onto the wood. Nuam opened a can of oil and dumped the oil in the pot. I sank down on the rampart and pulled on my coat. The ptarmigan was trampled in the snow. I kicked it out and thought of Chettha. We should not have been attacked while Chettha was in the Chin camp.

  Amphan took the bird, cut off its head, let its blood drain out over the wall. Then she cut open the bird’s belly and tore out the entrails. Nuam looked through them for the heart, gizzard, kidneys, and liver; she threw the rest over the wall for the gyrfalcons. The offal landed on a Chin’s face. Amphan shoved the meat on four skewers. Nuam salted the meat, and she and Amphan held the skewers over the fire. Sirikit was kicking through the snow for Chin arrows to put in her quiver.

  “Our babies will be Chin,” Nuam said.

  We looked at her. She was turning her skewers quickly.

  “The ghosts of the Chin we kill — they will be reborn here.”

  Sirikit shook down the arrows in her quiver. “If the Chin have ghosts, they’ll come back as rats in our sewers.”

  Amphan had wrapped a scarf around her face. She pulled down the left corner. “I’ve heard if a man dies outside his own land his ghost wanders the cities and hills of the new land, lost,” she said, “sometimes not believing he is dead.”

  Ghosts again.

  Sirikit looked at me, hard. “Battle nerves and exhaustion, Narai.”

  Amphan wrapped the scarf back around her face and said nothing more of ghosts.

  A six-year-old girl climbed up the stairs with a handful of arrows she and her group had gathered from the streets. The children had become good at standing quietly after a battle and looking for the tiny holes arrows made in the drifts. Sirikit took the arrows. The girl stared at our meat and did not leave. Nuam swore, tore a ptarmigan’s leg from a spit, and threw it to the girl. The girl caught it and ran down the stairs, gnawing at the leg. “Cook it!” Nuam yelled.

  I wanted the meat. I wanted it now. I would have eaten it raw like the girl if Nuam had let me.

  A shadow fell across my face. Sirikit stood looking down at me. “How is your shoulder?”

  “Cold,” I said.

  She walked on, kicking through the snow, looking for arrows.

  Nuam handed me the ptarmigan’s liver. “It cooks fast,” she said. I ate it in one bite. I meant to eat it slowly, but I couldn’t.

  Taksin Naresuan ran up the stairs, out of breath, red-faced. We stared at him and at the bag of food he carried. “All the Chin are back,” he said. He knew things like that because he worked with the old men and women. “They will probably attack tonight. We sent the night watch to the east and south walls.”

  Which meant the day watch would stay up to guard the north and west walls. Amphan looked quickly into the fire. The cold was not easy for her. I did not ask Taksin about Chettha and whether he might stop the attack. Taksin had always laughed at Chettha and his plans.

  “The Chin must take Bangkok now, for food and a place to wait out the winter, or die in the cold,”Taksin said. He kicked snow away from the wall and sat down next to me. “The Chin advance was stopped at Chulalongkorn City.”

  I looked at him.

  “We had a message from Ayutthaya-by-the-Sea.”

  Sirikit sat down and took a spit from Amphan to help turn it over the fire. “Then the Vitmin have quit jamming the radio,” she said.

  “They’ve started quarreling with the Chin.”

  “The Chin did not get far,” Nuam said. “It’s only one hundred kilometers south to Chulalongkorn.”

  “They could not go far without Bangkok,”Taksin said. “They need our wheat. We could attack them from the rear. They were forced to leave part of their army here.” Taksin seemed pleased with this knowledge, pleased that all the Chin were back around our walls.

  “Will help come from Ayutthaya?” Amphan asked.

  Taksin shrugged. “It is sixteen hundred kilometers to Ayutthaya-by-the-Sea.”

  Nuam held out a ptarmigan wing to Taksin.

  He stood. “I won’t take your food. I came to bring you food,” he said. He reached in his bag for a loaf of bread and two carrots. Nuam gave her spits to Amphan and took the bread and carrots. Taksin swung the bag over his shoulder and looked out over the plains. “I can’t see their tank,” he said. I stood and pointed to a snowdrift. We had lost twenty-six men trying to pull the tank inside the walls and finally wrecked it, stripped it, and left it.

  Taksin looked at the stones of the river wall churning the Chao Phyra. Amphan handed me a spit with a ptarmigan wing, the back, the heart. These I ate slowly. Taksin accepted the wing from Nuam’s spit after he saw mine. He sat down by me to eat.

  I knew what it had cost the Chin to drag their tank to Bangkok to knock down our north river wall. Eight months before, the Chin had sacked Chiang Mai. I had gone with the army to drive the Chin back across the passes. The Chin fled north into the mountains and glaciers of Shan and Yunan. We followed them to the border. Once inside the mountains, I was assigned with f
orty-seven others to forage for the army. We had nineteen hundred men to feed.

  One day, we found the spoor of musk oxen: tracks by a stream, the soft underhair wool lining spring nests in the willows. Up a narrow valley we found a lake half free of ice where the musk oxen watered. The master hunter left me hidden in the willows and junipers that grew only on the south shore. ‘Kill three old cows,’ he said. ‘That is all the meat we can prepare before the army moves on.’ He and the others went down the valley after rabbits and ptarmigan.

  I waited. Under the crusts of snow beneath the willows I found wild crocus and blue spikel shoots pushing up through the dirt. In two weeks the valley would be covered with flowers. In six, the flowers would be gone to seed. It was the way of things in the mountains north of Chiang Mai. I picked up a stone. Frost was flaking the stone apart, yet the stone was heavy and fit well in my hand. One brown streak ran a half inch across the stone’s surface as if a child had drawn on it and tossed it aside or as if some species of lichen could find food in only one straight crack of the stone and nowhere else.

  I looked up. The musk oxen had come. Two cows and a bull so old his coat had turned brown stood watch while twenty others drank at the lake. They stood five feet tall at the shoulder. Hair on their flanks, throats, and under their bellies hung long and black, covering their ears and tails. The pregnant females were shedding the soft wool under their hair. Horns curved around the sides of their heads, and a thick boss of horn grew across their foreheads.

  They came up dripping from the lake. I threw my stone. It fell short but startled them. I shook the willows. The bull began to snort and shake his head. The cows herded old females and yearling calves into the center of a circle of lowered heads and horns. The bull backed up and took his place, stoic. Such rings were a good defense against wolves but no defense against men.

  I unstrapped my gun and killed three cows. But as I looked at the musk oxen, I saw only their meat. Three musk oxen would feed us well for one meal — but twenty-three could feed us for three days. I could rest in camp. The soldiers were tired of rabbit and ptarmigan and caribou. I shot two more cows. The musk oxen began to run. I kept shooting till the master hunter knocked the gun from my hands. He had come back to watch me. “The army will push on tomorrow,” he said. “You will stay behind, in charge of a few others, to prepare this meat and carry it after us.”

  I looked at the ground. The master hunter shoved my gun in his belt and handed me a knife. “Gut them now,” he said. “Butcher them in camp.”

  Seventeen musk oxen lay smoking on rocks by the lake and in snow up the valley. I walked to the bull musk ox. Its burned hair and flesh stank. Its hair and wool made cutting it open hard. I pulled out the genitals and intestines, cut through the diaphragm, windpipe, and esophagus, pulled out the lungs and heart. The blood kept my hands warm till I stood up and felt the wind. I hurried to cut open another musk ox. It took three hours to gut all seventeen musk oxen. When I started for camp, only the viscera from the last three steamed.

  The master hunter sent four of us back with ropes. A transport could not reach the lake because of the snow. We dragged one young cow to camp. The carcass would dig down in the snow going uphill. We had to kick snow away from the musk ox, drag it three or four feet, kick away more snow. At the tops of hills and drifts the carcass would slide down the slope, pulling us with it. The hair would get caught on willows and in the buckles of our boots. Once in camp, we tied the hind feet together, hoisted up the musk ox with a winch, skinned it, and left it for the others to butcher.

  The master hunter sent me back with three different hunters after another musk ox. By evening, I had helped drag four musk oxen to camp. I could only sit in camp then, too tired to help with the butchery, but I wanted to go for another musk ox. “Eat first, at least,” the other hunters said. “Leave them,” some of the soldiers whispered. “He won’t make you stay behind, not with Chin in the mountains.” But I knew the master hunter would leave me, that the men he left with me would hate me. I finally convinced two soldiers to go up-valley, though it would be dark when we got back.

  But we did not have to pull another musk ox to camp. The two soldiers were slow, and I was first to the lake. When I got there, I saw a Chin. He was standing across the lake, very still. One musk ox was gone — dragged up-valley. I could see the bloody track of its carcass in the snow. The Chin drew a knife and raised it so that it glistened in the setting sun while he stared at me. With a sudden yell, he charged around the lake. I turned and ran. “Chin!” I yelled. The soldiers dove for cover behind drifts on either side of the path we had made dragging the musk oxen down-valley. The Chin was close behind me. I ran between the soldiers. The soldiers killed the Chin. They took his knife and his coat of wolves’ skin, and we ran to camp.

  All the men of camp spent the night preparing for attack but me. The master hunter had me card loose wool from the musk ox hides. I was through with the carding and packaging by midnight. “What have you learned?” the master hunter asked.

  I looked at the ground. “That three were enough.”

  The master hunter smiled and sent me to help prepare the camp. In the morning, he was killed. I was shot in the stomach with an arrow and sent down the frozen Ping and the Chao Phyra to Bangkok with the wounded. But because of the musk oxen, I knew what it meant to drag something heavy through snow. I knew what it had meant for the Chin to drag their tank to Bangkok.

  Smoke began to billow up from the grounds of Dusit Palace. We sat quietly to honor the dead. “One hundred and four today,” Taksin said, “with the heads of Chettha Dhanarat and three of his monks.”

  I looked hard at Taksin. He looked back as if I should have heard. “The Chin threw the heads against the east gate half an hour ago. Word of it came just before I left with the food.” He threw the bones of the ptarmigan wing over the wall and stood up. “It will be cold tonight. The old men say a front passed over us. It may snow tomorrow in Ayutthaya.”

  “Nahm kaang?” Amphan asked, the sudden cold that flows south off the advancing glaciers of Chin, Monglia, and farther north where the sea itself is ice.

  “Can’t you feel it?” He left, walking down the rampart to take bread and carrots to another watch.

  And Chettha was dead. He had not been gone two hours. There would be no peace. I would have to fight the Chin in the night, and I would have to keep fighting, and fighting.

  Nuam tore the loaf into four pieces, broke the carrots in two, and handed out the food.

  “So Chettha failed,” Sirikit said.

  “He was a fool,” Nuam said. “The Chin would never live with us and share our food. They would have killed us.”

  Amphan nodded. “They want all the lands, all the old cities — not empty lands the sea left us.”

  I looked up. “Chettha said it was a failure of the human spirit if he failed with us and the Chin.”

  Sirikit spat on the snow.

  But I remembered the old man, Chettha Dhanarat. I could feel his hands on my head, blessing me. I set down my food and put my hands on my head and held them there.

  “They did not give us enough food if we have to watch the night,” Amphan said.

  I looked up. I had food I could not eat. I took down my hands and handed Amphan my bread and carrot. The others stared at me. I stood and looked out over the battlements at the white plains and the clear, cold sky. By midnight, the temperature might drop to seventy degrees below zero.

  “May the Chin freeze,” Nuam said.

  Many would. Our guerrillas burned the Chin tents when they could, and the Chin had burned all wood outside the walls in a fifty-kilometer radius. We could still tear wood from the houses inside Bangkok.

  Sirikit uncoiled the rope and tied it around my waist. “I’ll go down for the Chin coats,” she said. “We need them in this cold.”

  Nuam and Amphan helped me hold the rope. Sirikit climbed down in the snow. I unstrapped my gun, and we kept careful watch. Nothing moved over the snow exce
pt gyrfalcons and snowy owls that fluttered away as Sirikit walked toward the bodies. The coats of the men we had dumped oil on were ruined. Sirikit took coats from five other bodies and tied the coats to the rope. We hauled them up. She collected two more. We pulled her up with them. She also brought three Chin knives, two quivers of arrows, a bow.

  The coats were of good bears’ or wolves’ fur. The sun had set, and it was night. I sent Amphan with two of the coats down the stairs to the children’s house. “Stay indoors with them till you hear shouting,” I said. She did not argue. Nuam went with her and came up with more wood for the fire.

  Nuam, Sirikit, and I put on Chin coats. We built up the fire. I took first watch. Sirikit and Nuam lay down by the fire and wrapped another Chin coat over their legs. They covered their faces so they would not breathe the straight cold air.

  When the cold hurt, I wrapped my scarf of musk ox wool around my face. Chettha’s monks had woven my scarf and shirt from the wool I had carded in Yunan. The moon came up, round and bright, surrounded by rings of color: orange, red, blue. It would be very cold. The moonlight made the white plains sparkle as if covered with the dust of jewels. A gyrfalcon flew across the Chao Phyra and out over the plains where the Chin camped.

  At 1:00 I built up the fire and woke Sirikit. At 5:00 it was too cold to sleep anymore. I sat up. Amphan was back, looking over the battlements with Sirikit and Nuam. “We let you sleep,” Nuam said.

  The moon was low, east of Bangkok. I stood up, walked stiffly to the wall.

  And saw the Chin.

  Hundreds of Chin stood on the plains, out of bowshot from the walls, open to the wind, quiet, pale in the moonlight, in their white furs. I unstrapped my gun.

  “Taksin woke me,” Amphan said. “They surround Bangkok like this — thousands of them, thousands of Chin.”

  The Chao Phyra had frozen in the night. “They will walk up the river,” I said.

  “The ice is new,” Sirikit said. “They will still try the walls.”