End of the Road

by Jonathan Oliver

  She must have seen the blade glint, for there is a hiss of breath.

  “I thought you might be a thief,” she says.

  “What could a thief rob from a place already thieved to every final clod of dirt?”

  “There is always one last bit of painted glass, one last talisman.” She closes the distance, her apparent fear set aside. “One last child to murder.”

  “Have you lost one, then?” There’s still room in my breast for softness, still room to be cut by another’s hurt.

  “It’s a season for losing children.” The luster of her lips and hair seems brighter than dawn’s light warrants. “You can only be passing by. Which way calls you?”

  “East, to Prachinburi.”

  “The same direction, then.” She gathers her braid in one hand, twisting it. “Might we not share company?”

  I have collected myself, spine straight, eyes clear. In the back of my mind phantom flies buzz. There is no escaping the noise. No battle-hardened veteran ever tells you it is the flies that haunt you most, over the cannon fire and your fellows’ screams, over the throb and burn of your own veins. “You would trust a strange soldier?”

  “When she is a woman, why not?”

  My alarm must have been immediate, for she laughs.

  “Even officers go bare-chested the moment they’re free from uniform. You remain as neat behind yours as a captain newly promoted and pledged to His Majesty.” Her head moves from side to side. “I’ll not pry – too much. I want only safety, for if you’ve survived the Phma you must be as fit to the business of combat as any man.”

  I should ask how she has been unscathed so far. I should ask from whence she came, and where she was going other than in the same vague direction as I am. But in the army I’ve been solitary out of need, and there comes a point where a person must hear another human voice or break upon the cliff-face of loneliness. My secret is already laid bare to her, so where’s the harm?

  We set out at daybreak, keeping parallel to but avoiding the road, for not all soldiers recently unyoked from duty are vessels of honor, and I’ve heard news of Phma stragglers along this way, ready to avenge themselves upon any Tai.

  She breaks open one of her bamboo tubes as we walk, and hands me half the sweet roasted rice. Her name is Ploy, a widow, and when she hears my name is Thidakesorn she smirks at the florid grandeur of it. “A princess’s name,” she says.

  “My parents had expectations.” Years living with an aunt who married upward, wife of a merchant grown wealthy on trade with the Jeen. So successful he’s sailed to the Middle Kingdom twice, and his fortune tripled by a wife shrewd with numbers and investment. She would tutor me, it was hoped.

  “Instead you took up the sword.”

  How do I say that I went to the capital to learn to be a lady and fell in love with the queen despite the hopeless stupidity of that; how do I say it was for this love that I fought and that when she fell it shattered me? How do I say that I resent the king’s continued life, for she was the braver of the two, the finer being, and that he did not deserve a wife as incandescent as she? So I seal my lips and pronounce none of these wounds. Better they suppurate than my shame be cast into the day.

  She may have the secret of my gender, but this is mine alone to nurse.

  The day brightens and Ploy acquires a clarity of features. Before, I thought her soft and plain; now there is an angle to her eyes and mouth I’ve failed to notice in the dim light. Sharp from nose-tip to chin-tilt. It does not make her beautiful, if such a comment may be leveled from someone as blunt-featured as I, but she would snag the attention and hold it fast. A little like the queen. The dead queen, whom I must not think about, whom I must bury under the blackest soil of memory.

  When I shut my eyes I see elephants draped in black and silver, trumpeting for death. I see the edge of a glaive passing through flesh and bone, opening a queen inside out.

  NOON CLAIMS THE sky with fingers bright and fever-hot. It is a month for rain, but I harbor a childish fancy that the season has upended for Queen Suriyothai’s demise.

  Between my waking delirium transmuting earth to a sanguine river and us stopping to drink from a pool, we hear the Phma.

  Away from the shields bearing the king’s crest, away from his banners and helms, it can be difficult to tell Phma deserters from our own men. Loinclothed and bare-chested like any Ayutthaya soldier, bearing much the same type of blade. There is a wild look to them that I can spot even as we take to hiding, and I wonder if the penalty for desertion is as harsh for them as for us. Harsher: victors can afford generosity that losers may not.

  When they are gone Ploy murmurs, “I thought you’d challenge them, for are these not your sworn enemies and murderous animals?”

  “There were five of them, and one of me.”

  Her sneer is vicious. “If I needed confirmation you were a woman before, I would’ve required none now.”

  “What did you lose to the Phma?”

  “A family.” Her mouth tightens; she says no more.

  I study her more closely for signs of who she is or might have been. Widow says little, designates merely a specific sorrow. Strange that we will confess but one loss at a time – I am a widow, I am an orphan; how to say in one concise word I’ve lost everything?

  Evening approaches, and Ploy looks to me, asking of game and hunt. I mean to scavenge and work for food on the way, and point out that the army taught me to ambush enemy warriors, not edible meat.

  “You make an inadequate man.” She passes me her satchel. “I’ll be back.”

  I wait beneath a tabaek whose trunk is garbed in a purple sash. There’s not much of worth on me, but I smooth out the cloth as best I can and pour out a handful of rice for offerings.

  Ploy returns with frogs fat and glistening, her arms wet to the elbows, pha-sbai and pha-nung damp. “Tell me you can make a fire.”

  “That at least I was taught. You must’ve been very fast, or those frogs very old.”

  “And you do not know how to flatter anyone. How are you going to find a husband?”

  “By changing out of this into silk and silver.” I touch the edge of my helm. “By combing out my hair.” In truth I aspire to spinsterhood, for how do I explain the battle scars once all that silk is stripped away? Not evidence that I was wayward as a child. Marks left by a blade resemble in no way marks left by a switch.

  I sharpen twigs and skewer her catch. The meat is succulent, and she carries a jar of the best fish sauce I’ve had in months. I leave two crisped frog legs by the tabaek’s roots, among bruised flowers, for the tree’s spirit.

  The next village is empty too. I begin to think perhaps all the villages in my path will be unpeopled save by wraiths, that this is beyond death after all and I’m rotting beneath a fallen war-elephant – but I must not think so, for when I do the trumpeting and the cannon fire gain strength between my ears, and if those are bearable, the buzzing is not.

  Ploy is as disinclined as I to the sin of theft, and so we limit our looting to two rattan mats and some oil. We find a creaking riverside house and rest on its veranda back to back. I remain awake enough to know she slips away long before dawn. When the sun is up she comes back with two roosters. It was not a clean kill: blood everywhere, on her and them, their bellies ragged as if they’ve been chewed to death.

  She sets them down. “A wild dog must’ve been at them.”

  This time we’ve banana leaves to wrap the meat, and proper seasoning – sugar, garlic, coriander root. Afterward we find a rain jar and a coconut-shell dipper. No jasmine water to scent ourselves with, but I’ve been long crusted in sweat and filth, and Ploy is glad to shed her gore-stained clothes.

  She looks on, frowning, as I disrobe and breathe in relief to have the binding off at last. “How did you have those cuts tended without the entire army discovering you have breasts?”

  “I had patronage.” Her Majesty’s handmaids understood so simply a woman’s need to be in arms.

&n
bsp; Ploy produces yet another wonder: a pot of tamarind paste and turmeric. She bids me turn my back and spreads that across the width of my shoulder-blades, down my spine, in a bright tart-smelling lather. My breath catches once and she asks if there’s a wound as yet unhealed.

  “It’s nothing.” There is no way of saying that I’ve never had another woman’s hand on me so except that of kin; there’s no way of saying that her touch pulls the strings of my nerves taut, a note so loud in my skull that for a moment all else is mute.

  I make myself indifferent while she, nude, washes her clothing. But my eyes stray and my skin craves. Is it any wonder that the monks tell us earthly desire is a shackle, material lust a disease? Rest comes slow, and I am not even drowsing by the time Ploy steals away.

  “I’ve no appetite,” she says when I offer her chicken in the morning. Then she scrubs at her teeth with a khoi stick, rinsing her mouth over and over as though she’s swallowed unutterable foulness.

  We circle back toward the main road. For a relief we meet a family: two grandparents, their daughter and son-in-law, a buffalo-pulled cart laden with supplies and children. Ploy takes my arm before I can speak, introducing me as her husband. The breastplate and helm purchase respect and welcome; they share food with us and their spirits are high. Here is a family that went through war untouched by tragedy.

  I keep my words few, my voice low. I’ve allowed myself to speak freely with Ploy, and if I never trilled or chirped as some women do, still my natural pitch would have given me away.

  They would have missed it, and I might have too if not for the flies. That sound – I would know it anywhere. Gorge rising, I stride into the bushes; Ploy calls but she is muted, for black clouds close in about me, red eyes the size of longans, wings larger than open hands. When they disperse and my sight clears there are the corpses.

  Phma, by the color of their bandannas. A painful death, by everything else. Their bellies torn out, entrails wetting the earth, dense with ants and flies as though they’re both sweet and savory.

  The son-in-law has followed to see what’s afoot. “This wasn’t done by knife or arrow,” I say, turning to him. “Do you know of any blade that could make wounds so messy?”

  One look at the carcasses and he recoils. “I’m no fighter.”

  Ploy is not far behind him, and when she bears witness to this massacre she merely says, “A tiger.”

  “This close to the road?”

  “Who knows? It is justice.”

  “We could cremate them.”

  “A waste of oil.” She tugs at my hand. “Leave them for the worms. Were you reborn one, you’d have been glad of the gift.”

  I should like to think I haven’t been so heinous as to reincarnate so low, but then I was a soldier. We do not burn the bodies.

  At a river’s crossing we part company with the family, them turning south while we continue east. Ploy’s gaze follows them as they go out of our sight. “I wasn’t entirely truthful,” she says. “I don’t have a home left to return to.”

  “I know.”

  “You aren’t going to ask why I disappear after dark?”

  “You never ask why I became a soldier, or any of the hundred other questions you could’ve put to me.”

  She looks away, but her hand slides into mine. “Could there be a place for me in Prachinburi?”

  “There’ll be work.” I hesitate, this close to pulling my fingers away from hers, but they knit and there is an easy fit to our hands. “My grandmother might want another woman in the household. Toddlers running underfoot.”

  Her gaze lifts, fastens to mine. “We could see each other every day then.”

  My pulse races. It is a terrible affliction, to have your heart lurch this way and that at nothing more than another’s glance, another’s breath. “If you like.”

  “What a shame it is you aren’t a man.” Ploy’s smile is only one half edged; the other, perhaps, is turned inward to cut herself. “Then I could have married you, you’d have returned garnished with not just a rank but also a wife, and all this would have been so perfect.”

  THERE ARE A hundred breeds of madness, one of them called curiosity. Her naming of it has roused mine, and where before it lay dormant, now it is a frenzied thing, stirring in my skull, a thousand wing-beats in time with the cicadas and owls singing the moon up through pale clouds.

  A hundred breeds of madness, and I haven’t been sane for a long time.

  I resist it. I look at her face in the light as we draw nearer to my home, and become desperate that her taunt was truth – that I was a man, that the possibility she offered in jest could grow to actuality. But in Prachinburi I may not remain behind this garb. I must step out of it and return to pha-sbai that bares my shoulders, pha-nung that must have some gleaming thread to it. I must catch a man’s eye and hope he will find me worthy of dowry. And Ploy, being without kin to give her station and place, will remarry.

  This is only pretense: my hand in hers, and sometimes lying face to face as evening cools and dark comes, it is all make-believe. She wishes I were a man so I might provide her security and a roof; beyond that there is nothing.

  This terrible knowledge – that this is all we will ever have – it tears at me, it claws. Even the distraction of ghost elephants and ghost queens only I can see proves unequal to it. My monstrous desire eats; my curiosity waxes.

  Five days from Prachinburi and I give in.

  She makes no secret of leaving my side now. Always it takes the better part of the night, and her outing brings meat more often than not. Perhaps it embarrasses her to be good at the hunt; I convince myself this is her secret, and if so what injury can come out of my confirming it?

  Ploy is not difficult to follow. In those first evenings she might have been, when she stole away on light and cautious feet. Now her tracks are clear, as though she’s giving me a test of trust. My failing of it pricks at me, and I would have turned back if not for the sight of her prone by the river.

  She lies among weeds and roots, fainted or snake-bitten. I’ve never known myself for such quickness – even on the battlefield I was not so fast. Mouth parched with fear, I kneel by her, straining to see under a moon just half-bright.

  Bright enough to see her neck empty.

  Not a wound but a bloodless hole where her windpipe should have been. I dare not touch or probe, for who knows whether she will feel? But I’ve learned the fright-tales of krasue at elders’ feet; cut her open now and I will find the shell of Ploy hollowed of organs. Those have gone with her head.

  I lack the courage to stay and confront; I lack the courage even to flee. For she knows me, would recognize my scent.

  Ploy returns empty-handed this time, and I watch her mouth, her teeth, for flecks of gore and shreds of viscera. None to be seen; she may believe me gullible, but she is not entirely careless.

  The army taught me to put on a mask, and I do that now. The slightest change in my regard and she will realize; I address her much as before. Still some hint must have slipped through, for she asks me why I seem to dread homecoming so.

  “It’s been some time since I last saw them, and of my parents’ dreams for me I failed every one.”

  “Were you a son they would have been proud.” She puts her fingers to my jaw. “I say this not to taunt or mock you, but to say: it is not fair. It is not just. With what you’ve earned, you should be entitled to anything, and in your place a man would’ve had applause, honor, his pick of a bride.”

  My betraying body leaps to her touch, longs to lean into her arm. “The world is what it is. The army paid me well, so I’ll have something to show for it, something to give Mother and Father.”

  In Ayutthaya they would have me stay on, to advance from captain to lieutenant, and that’s what I would have done if Her Majesty survived. I would have been there simply for her, to protect her even if she would never have glanced my way. I would not have been here, with this creature, this krasue.

  Elders’ wisdom has i
t that they inherit the curse, generation to generation. And that may be. It may be true; Ploy could just be the victim of her aunt, uncle, parent. She gobbles up what she must – chicken’s blood, Phma innards. She may be as virtuous a woman as any other.

  But I cannot bring her to Prachinburi. There will be pigs butchered and she’ll hunger. There will be women in childbirth and the blood will summon her to consume mother’s insides and infant freshly born. So many things a krasue may not resist, so much evil just one may commit.

  Ploy’s mood grows tense as we approach Prachinburi, pendulating between elated and anxious. She wants to know if people will be kind to her, a strange widow with no origins; she wants to know if they will disdain her for knowing no letters. I tell her nothing and everything.

  Twice I crouch by her headless body, shaking. Twice I fail to kill it and kill her.

  “AFTER TOMORROW WE should be in Prachinburi.”

  She is combing out her hair. It isn’t as long as most women’s, and uncharitably I think that she must keep it short so it won’t tangle up with her intestines when she goes hunting. “Strange,” she murmurs, “I’ll miss this.”

  “Sleeping on the ground? Having no roof over your head?”

  Ploy swats me on the arm. I should flinch – I should clench my teeth on disgust. “I will miss your company. Just being with you, talking to you.”

  “We can do that there.”

  “That’s not what I mean and you know it.” Ploy ties her hair back. “I wasn’t entirely kidding when I said I would have liked to go as your wife.”

  “I doubt I could’ve kept up this deception for the rest of my days. Leastwise before my family.”

  “Not what I mean either.” Her brows knit. Oh, she has a way of frowning; before learning the truth of her nature that look would have made me do anything to ease it. “Do you mean to shame me by driving me to say plainly what no woman should?”