by John Burgess
Mr Chen smiled politely. ‘Lady, you’re asking me to lose money for the privilege of doing business with you.’
‘Mr Chen, a smart merchant like you – I imagine you’ve never lost money on a deal in your life. Thirty-eight weight of silver. You’ll regret it if you say no, I know you will. We pay on time and when word spreads that you’ve become a palace supplier, all sorts of people will come and want to do business with you.’
Chen surveyed the eyes of the men around him, and then said: ‘I suppose we would in fact...regret it.’
I continued: ‘Now tell me about honey.’
‘Deep-refined, comb-free. Eighteen weight per barrel.’
‘What size of barrel?’
‘The standard size.’
‘And each one full?’
By the time we left, I had agreed that the palace pantry would buy quantities of six commodities on a trial basis, starting the following week, and that I would buy some on my own account. Our usual suppliers would fret and whimper, of course, and maybe work behind my back to try to foil me. I would have to phase in any new arrangements slowly.
I must also say that I was thinking it was time to expand my private trading, and that this Mr Chen struck me as trustworthy, a possible future business partner. I had to expand, or I would have no money to fix the guesthouses up the hill – other projects like it had eaten up most of my previous earnings.
The merchants walked us back to the cart. I climbed on board, then called to Mr Chen.
‘There’s one more matter, sir. It would be a fine thing for the life of the spirit if someone found a way to repair the trail that runs up the hill. And it would make good business sense, don’t you think? Right now it’s too rough for anyone but the able-bodied. If it were fixed, more pilgrims would pass through your community here, people would stop into the local restaurants and shops on the way out.’
The sergeant had a faint smile on his face as we moved back toward the city.
‘I worry I was too hard on them,’ I told him. It was quite easy to talk to this man.
‘I think not, Lady Sray. They seemed to enjoy the give and take.’
‘They gave a little too easily, actually. I know what these things cost and they’ll be selling them at practically no profit at all.’
‘Perhaps they want something more from the relationship, Lady.’
‘You know something, do you, sergeant?’
‘Well, Lady, of course they want entrée to the palace. And also, perhaps help with what the Chinese ships have to pay to ply the Freshwater Sea. Every time they tie up somewhere, an official steps forward. A tax on this, a tax on that, and of course a lot of it is kept by the official himself. The rates have gone up now, what with the war with the Chams to pay for. So, I wonder if the merchants think that you might help them out with that.’
That made sense. But I didn’t like the idea of seeking out favours from palace officials.
When the cart entered the city, I asked the driver to go first to the shrine of Bronze Uncle. New wooden posts held his home up straight now; the roof thatch was thick and waterproof. Lamps burned to either side of the god, who gleamed from a daily buffing applied by attending acolytes. I knelt and gave thanks for a journey safely completed.
An hour later, when the cart reached the house in the palace compound, Bopa found energy that had eluded her for much of the trip. She jumped down and ran off, in search of friends and sweets. I was left alone with the sergeant.
‘You and your men were a great help to us,’ I said, searching for words. ‘We appreciate it and will send special food to your barracks.’
‘Thank you, Lady. You are kind.’
‘But...but what I would really like to say, Sergeant Sen,’ and here I paused, because I hadn’t meant to show that I remembered his name, ‘is...well, that I thank you deeply for what you did in the princely compound those years ago.’
‘We were only doing what anyone would have, Lady.’
‘Everyone would have, you say, but the other soldiers did not.’
‘No, but they weren’t offered free food and a pavilion to sleep in, were they?’
He made a deep bow, and moved to form up his men. I watched him go and decided that if I did have to have an escort next time I left the city, I would see that this man was in charge.
26: Unwanted honours
When I entered the house, Nol was eating from plates on a low wicker table, chewing in his quick, impatient way – food was always but fuel to my husband.
‘So you’re back, my dear wife,’ he called cheerfully, getting to his feet. He often proceeded as if there were no tensions between us, as if assuming that manner would make them go away.
Taking my hand, he declared with some formality: ‘I have news. I am to receive the Medallion of the Royal Order, First Class, for services during the campaign against the Siamese. His Majesty will personally award it in three days’ time at ceremonies to establish a new alms fund.’
‘My goodness! What an honour!’
‘Yes, I cannot deny it, and it’s one I do not deserve.’ He beamed again, having got out of the way the requisite statement of humility. ‘Now, palace seamstresses will come this afternoon to fit us for clothing for the occasion.’
‘You said us?’
‘Why, yes. We will all be present at the ceremony. It is His Majesty’s wish.’
‘I wonder if…’
‘Don’t wonder anything, my dear wife! All will be taken care of.’ In his ebullience, he had failed to notice my distress. Then he turned to a maid and ordered that food be laid before me. I was suddenly no longer hungry, but I sat down on the floor at the table, because my husband expected it.
‘So!’ he said, settling back into his own place. ‘Your trip went well?’
‘Oh, yes....Bopa and I passed the night...at the Temple of the Trinity on the top of the hill by the port.’ My words came out in a halting way because I was thinking about the King.
‘And the naval wharf – did you see that? There are three new fighting boats, I’ve heard. They’re being fitted and will enter service next month.’ Nol was always proud of inside knowledge.
‘Yes, we saw them,’ I said, because my husband wanted it that way. ‘They, they were very impressive.’ Perhaps the King won’t award the medallion himself; he’ll go off and leave it to some priest to do.
‘Good! And our village? How was that?’
‘It’s a pretty place, pleasant and breezy.’ If the King does award it himself, perhaps we of the family will be seated well back from the throne. He won’t get a good look at me.
‘I hear you pledged some money to patch up their shrine.’
How would it be taken if we responded that the family would not attend? We could say we weren’t with the King during the Siamese campaign, and therefore we didn’t deserve to be at the ceremony.
‘Dear wife, are you listening?’
‘Yes. I’m sorry.’
‘I should have known. My wife goes out to the village just once and already they’ve got her feeling sorry for them.’ He laughed. ‘What did they do, bring out their cripples?’
‘They did nothing like that, husband.’ Sticking up for the villagers got me off my worries, partially at least. ‘They are hard-working people, and they will give half their labour to us and the palace. The shrine is in very bad condition and fixing it will be a small thing. They will provide the labour, we will provide the materials and artisans.’
The maid put food before me. I ate and answered more of his questions. I said nothing about having promised to rebuild the hilltop guesthouses.
The meal turned out to be the last bit of quiet that I got for many days.
When I stood up, word came that the chief palace seamstress and two assistants were waiting outside to take measurements. Bopa and Sovan were called, and for an hour we all took turns standing motionless while the seamstress ran string measures around hips and waists, from waist to ankles, calling off the numbers to
one of her assistants, then consulting on fabric, and later on neckpieces and armlets. You can imagine how delighted Bopa was. Then came the florists, and after that a priest from the palace who coached us on words and gestures of the rite. I could not keep my mind on the responses; I continued to worry over how to avoid going at all.
The next day was taken up with cleaning and purifying the house, and with fittings for silk garments that had been sewn overnight.
On the morning of the ceremony, the servants emerged early from their huts in the back, to help us all get ready. But at the door of the big house, they found a very flustered master Nol, standing alone. He gave them horrible news: the Lady Sray had taken seriously ill. From the door of my room, they peered in, frightened, and saw me lying shivering on my mat, clutching my bed linen to my chest. One of the maids hurried in and fussed over me, putting a folded cloth beneath my head, wetting my brow with water from my night drinking cup. She returned to Nol, and I could hear her whispering that it was all a mystery. The Lady was not warm to the touch. What illness this was only Heaven could say. This made Nol all the more worried, and he sent the girl off to bring a Brahmin physician. Bopa appeared, dressed and powdered and scented, her jewellery shining, and showed some disappointment on hearing about me. Was the ceremony going to be put off? Sovan knelt at my side to offer silent sympathy.
The physician arrived and examined me but he couldn’t ascertain the problem either. By now it was nearly time to leave for the palace. Nol pleaded that I try to stand up. Please – His Majesty will be waiting, he whispered. The ceremonial garments, the flowers are ready. Everyone is expecting you. But my response – how shamefully I behaved! – was to babble words that made no sense. Nol blanched, and for the first time he accepted that my presence at the rite was impossible. No doubt he began to feel afraid. Some malevolent spirit might take advantage and put this illness on a fatal course. He turned abruptly to the physician and told him in the firmest of terms that nothing, nothing must be allowed to happen to this woman his dear wife.
The poor physician did his best to reassure, and then, to show that something was being done, he prayed, took out a pestle and ground four kinds of dried twigs into some kind of yellow powder. He mixed it all with water and fed me a few drops at a time. Thirty minutes later, I seemed to be resting calmly. I opened my eyes. Nol bent close and I whispered that he must go to the palace with the children, that he could not stay back. I nodded. He smiled on me, relieved that my right mind was back.
He returned about four hours later, a new holder of the Medallion of the Royal Order, First Class. But I had to keep up the game. I said there had been terrible pain in my joints, but now it had let up.
Nol sat on the mat at my side and took my hand. ‘We thank Heaven that you are better.’
‘I am sorry, husband,’ I murmured, weeping. ‘I am sorry that I could not be there to share your day of honour.’
I could not simply resume my routine in the house. So I remained on my mat through the afternoon. Nol dismissed the physician, then sat by me and fed me more water with yellow powder, but no food because I told him there was nothing I could bear to eat. This was true, though it was due to the mortification that this deception had brought over me.
Evening set in. Nol remained at my side. I felt that after another hour it would be all right to sit up and ask for a text to read. With it in hand, I would say a full prayer seeking forgiveness.
I dozed, but then I was awakened by voices in the courtyard and the tramping of many feet. Nol rose to go check.
He returned hardly a minute later. ‘His Majesty is here!’ His face bore a look of sheer bafflement. The King had never come near this house. ‘He is concerned about your health.’
I groped for a response. ‘Our lord is kind. But there is no need for him to bother himself here. You may tell him that I convey my deepest thanks and hope that he will expend no more time on the health of someone so insignificant.’
Nol hurried out again. His muffled voice carried in; I strained to catch the words. Then he was in the doorway. Yet all I saw was the King, standing behind him, the godly face and shoulders bathed in the soft light of the room’s lamp.
I looked away; the breath had gone clean out of me. I rolled onto my side, turning from him, and gathered my arms about my breasts.
Nol spoke. ‘His Majesty wishes...’ He did not finish, because the King strode past him into the room.
There was a long silence, and then I heard the royal voice. ‘Your husband has worked so hard to establish and foster the reign. Now his wife has taken ill, so I could only come and express in person my wishes for your recovery.’
His voice was soft. I was left feeling the concern was entirely genuine. How could I have imagined that the first words this man would address to me, this man who had severed the arm of a prisoner, who had ordered the death of the holy elephant, would convey such emotions?
I found a response, which I delivered in a whisper. ‘Please, Your Majesty need not concern himself. A physician has come and through prayers and treatment I have recovered.’
‘Then why do you turn your back to me?’
A King is allowed to say anything, but this remark astonished me. ‘I am ashamed, Majesty. I have recovered, but I am still not in condition to be gazed upon by the royal eyes.’
‘Majesty,’ interjected Nol, ‘my wife, at this moment her senses are not...’
The King seemed not to hear that. ‘I have come to your house, Lady Sray. I cannot leave until I have seen with my own eyes that you are well again. Please, I ask you. Show yourself.’
Could he actually be asking, be commanding that? There was nothing I could do but roll onto my back. Eyes shut, I kept my arms across my chest, feeling some security in that. I lay still, and soon sensed the King’s breath nearby. He seemed to be kneeling by me. ‘If I may…’ he said, and then came the shock of his touch. One after the other, my wrists were taken, gently, my arms put to my side. Then the private darkness behind my closed eyes grew bright as he took the lamp in hand and held its flame above my face. It lingered there. My breath quickened. Presently the brightness grew dim; he was moving the lamp slowly down the length of my body. ‘Never, never have I…’ He was whispering to himself, like that. There was a long pause, and then I believe that his sense of shame caught him short. He put down the lamp and left the room.
27: Flight
In the days when we lived in the settlement behind the Pre Rup mountain-temple, men would sometimes call out to me as I passed by: come, pretty lady, give me a little love, be my sweetheart. For the most part it was harmless, the kind of attention that a certain kind of man, especially with some rice wine in him, pays to, I think, any passing women. It could happen even when I was walking with my husband. The certain kind of man seemed always to think there was nothing to fear from someone who was short and missing an ear. And, oh, Nol did always show him how mistaken that was. When a compliment came wafting my way, I used to try to hurry him along, though I knew it was too late. He would turn and initiate a confrontation, whether with stares, stern words or the occasional use of his fists. The other man always backed down.
So it was no surprise that in the hours after the King left our house, my husband wore the dourest of looks. His sovereign, his lord and patron, the man who had brought him out of rank obscurity – now in the role of a wine stall idler! My poor Nol. Can you imagine any man more unsure as to how to respond? I had no idea either, of course. So what did we do? We both pretended that what had happened was all very routine, a sign of Kingly virtue.
‘How blessed we all are,’ I told Nol later that night, as we sat together on the veranda, crickets calling to us from the darkness. ‘How blessed is the Empire. It has a monarch whose heart contains a sea of compassion, who cannot rest if just one subject falls ill.’
‘It is that way,’ replied Nol. I do believe he was straining to convince himself of what I had just said. How much easier things would be if it were nothing more t
han that. ‘I see it often in court. Why, only today His Majesty established the alms house fund from his own treasury.’
That night, when we turned in, I made sure that I lay down with him inside his mosquito net. And there I employed all the secret words and touches and bodily alignments that two decades of sleeping mat intimacy had taught me moved him above all others. I was determined to reaffirm to him, to me, to Heaven, that whatever differences he and I might have, our bond of marriage was unbreakable.
I knew when I awoke the following dawn that the question of the King’s interest was not resolved, but I was not prepared for it to arise again as quickly as it did.
I was sitting in my room late that morning, going over accounts sent over from a warehouse. My husband was in the courtyard tending to some parasol business that I suspect didn’t really warrant tending to, at least not by him – he had announced earlier that he would remain at the house for the day and put off a trip to a shrine across the city where preparations were underway for a royal visit.
A maid entered to announce that a messenger from the palace was at the gate. He was shown in and presented us with a piece of slate, cut in a clean square. It bore words which I could only assume were in His Majesty’s own hand.
I beg to express again my relief concerning the recovered health of the Lady Sray and cannot but foresee that there will never be a repeat of the events of a certain visit on a certain evening.
Nol and I looked at each other, stunned all over again. It was an apology, however vaguely worded, an apology from a King. Nol muttered something about His Majesty regretting having broken the protocol of visiting. We’d received no advance notice that he would come to the house, after all. That was a possibility, I suppose, but you can see that my husband was still struggling to keep alive our shared lie. I could read the King’s words for what they were. They were an apology for behaving in an inappropriate way toward a married woman.
Then, two days later, we received from the palace a message that the King would come calling. How we scrambled to prepare. His Majesty arrived at the appointed time with only a small entourage. Nol showed him to the veranda. There we had laid out a mat of honour facing the place where Nol would sit. I would sit to the side. But from the start of this visit, the King turned toward me, and it was Nol who was to the side. How awkward it was for him. Was he host or was he a retainer on duty, bound to remain silent?
