A Woman of Angkor

by John Burgess

  Two slaves hurriedly put a table in place; others, right behind them, placed bowls of rice and fish on them. I had imagined a very different first meal at home. Certainly not one in which absurd thoughts about a law in suspension returned.

  We members of the embassy ate, very self-consciously. My eye fell again on Commander Rit. There remained a malevolent smile on the man’s face. And then it came to me, suddenly, a thought placed there by some god, I’m sure. Our ships had passed safely through Cham waters, so now war could begin. My eating came to a stop as I considered that.

  The King asked: ‘Are you truly well, Lady? Is something troubling you?’

  ‘I am in good health, Majesty. I am happy to see my family and home soil.’

  ‘There is nothing more?’

  ‘Only, Majesty, that I hope that…’ Why had Heaven placed this responsibility on me? But I knew I must find courage and go on. ‘I hope that our relations with the people to the east will remain peaceful.’

  ‘Lady, do not worry. You and your family will be safe. Whatever happens will be swift and decisive.’

  ‘Majesty,’ I murmured. ‘I have no fear for our safety. The Empire’s armies will see to that.’

  ‘The Empire will become larger. All of us will become more wealthy. Perhaps you will have a new house on land along the Salt Water Sea that the Chams now occupy.’

  ‘But my family and I have houses enough. There is no need for another.’

  The court fell silent. Only the chirping of insects from the jungle darkness was heard. I do believe that the King had begun showing a touch of perspiration on his brow. He said: ‘Parasol master, your wife is an unusual woman – turning aside royal gifts! I am lucky that she agrees to eat my food!’

  Poor Nol. He had to make a large smile to indicate that this was both an excellent joke and a kind comment on my virtues. With his eyes, he told me now that I should not speak again. But I could not stop.

  ‘Majesty, I cannot help but feel that our Empire is now precisely the size that Heaven has ordained. It has rice and fish and fruit enough for every person and for every image in the temples. It has water, for drinking and bathing and bringing life to our fields. It has ample stone and bricks and wood with which to build. It has silver to make into bowls and boxes and yarn for cloth.’

  ‘Lady Sray, we seek only what is ours by right, to guarantee a future peace.’

  ‘But by sending soldiers, Majesty, do we not guarantee future wars? The families of those who die at our hands will not forget. Anger will live on in their hearts, fuelled by evil spirits, and they will seek their vengeance, even if not right away.’

  ‘I understand your concern about war but you are a woman, with no experience in it.’

  ‘Majesty, I do have experience. I was born in a village near the eastern frontier. When I was not even a year into my current life, there was war with the Chams. My village burned, my mother and father, brothers and sisters – their souls all departed. I was the only survivor.’

  ‘Your experience was tragic,’ said the King, his voice now not fully steady. ‘But surely, it was part of a divine plan for your progress in society. You are now one of the Empire’s most prominent ladies. Without the war, you would be an ordinary village woman. Heaven had a plan, and it was successful.’

  ‘Majesty, without the war, I would indeed be a woman in a village. In life we have no right to choose, but were it different, I would have chosen that.’

  ‘Over all your wealth, your servants and houses?’

  ‘Yes, Majesty. In the end, nothing of merit comes from wealth, nothing of merit comes from war. As we are taught, Heaven is most pleased with the man or the woman who does good to others, who never utters abuse, calumny or untruth, who kills only for food, who desires the welfare of all creatures.’

  ‘You believe that, you truly live by that?’ There was no rebuke in the question, I believe, only genuine inquiry.

  ‘I do, Majesty. Whether I successfully live it, that is for Heaven to decide. But I have spoken enough. I have taken time that Your Majesty could have devoted to others.’

  Subhadra spoke up now. ‘Majesty. Please sit back and we will show a sign that what you have heard here is indeed Heaven’s truth.’

  How was it that the priest so often would step in to support me, unbidden? Now he went down to the shoreline and spoke there with a man from the ship. Other priests approached and they sat in a row near the water and began a chant that carried far into the darkness. When they reached the final stanza, a gong sounded and across the river there was the most astounding sight.

  A fountain of fire, with embers of red and orange and green, shot into the air like a luminous liquid. People gasped and then two more fountains, larger even than the first, erupted to each side. Then came a series of crackles. Then, things that no one there that night ever forgot. Vishnu’s pillar of fire, spraying so high into the night sky, then breaking open with a flower of brightness, and booms louder than thunder. One by one, people fell to the ground and put hands to ears, and felt the gods speaking.

  Even the King crouched, holding a hand to the sky for protection.

  When the noise and light subsided, Subhadra declared: ‘Heaven decrees it, Majesty. With this display, it announces that this is a time for peace, and that there is a proper place in society for everyone, whether beggar or King, and that everyone, beggar or King, desires things that he cannot have.’

  Later that night, I sat down in a lamp-lit pavilion with Nol and there came another surprise. My daughter, and my son – my son in the presence of his father for the first time in twelve years. Sovan had come with the court to the festival, and I think that the emotions of my return melted Nol’s enmity toward him. This is not to say that all went smoothly. I only now learned that my daughter had become a concubine and I began an indignant protest, though of course I didn’t say half what I was truly thinking. But Nol jumped in with a list of reasons why this was a welcome thing – Bopa lived apart from Rom, there was no longer a question of finding a husband for her, the loyal maid Yan continued to watch over her. He knew me well enough not to mention that our family’s ties to the palace had been strengthened. Then Bopa spoke up to say she felt pride in her station, though I’m afraid that shortly afterward she was expressing anger over losing the chance of the elevation. Nol suggested she should not have overslept; she shot back with an account of the trick that Rom had played. That was new – she had acquired the confidence to speak back to her father. Now Sovan took sides with her, noting how hard she’d tried to abide by the ways of the palace. He spoke in such a persuasive, sympathetic way that Nol fell silent and listened. Then, a miracle of reconciliation. He asked Sovan about his wife and their three sons.

  I looked on, just listening now. It would take time for me to accept my daughter’s new station. But now my mind offered a silent prayer of thanks that my family had come back together. I looked again to my husband, now listening intently to his son, and I felt a tremor of the deepest affection and respect for the little man, who had always protected me, who had never taken a minor wife even in those long periods when I slept apart from him or even (I was certain) when I had gone abroad. His love was so strong that he could feel no suspicion about me. What had happened in China would never be repeated here. Here, among our own gods and spirits, it would be a grave sin. But it would also be a betrayal of the man who now sat at my side. I decided then and there that I would endow a new shrine for a purpose that would remain private, even from the priests who would serve it. Kneeling there, I would say prayers seeking health and happiness for the fine village man who remained on the ship this night and now would again be only my bodyguard.

  The next morning, the court awoke to find that the river was flowing away from the Freshwater Sea. Under Subhadra’s direction, the priests consulted the records, then reported to His Majesty that the previous rite in which this had happened so quickly presaged a year of peace, a harvest never matched, and the unearthing at a distant temp
le of a lost golden image of Vishnu.

  Part Four

  A secret unravelled

  The empire’s soldiers did not go to war that year, or the next, or the next. A thousand thousand mothers were spared the agony of losing their sons. No smoke of pillaging armies blackened the skies. Rice continued to grow, eggs to hatch at frontier villages that otherwise would have been swallowed up by conflict.

  Some people have said that this peace was due solely to my words by the river that night. Truly, it could not have been that way. One woman speaking for a minute or two could not have such broad effect. More likely the cause was the long and diligent teachings of the Rajaguru Subhadra. Still, I will admit that in the years that followed I sometimes allowed myself to think that perhaps I did have at least some small effect on our King. We were to be always apart – I accepted that – but in this thought I had the comfort of knowing that something of me lived in him. And I had the golden bangles. They stayed with me.

  For my family, there began a time of domestic peace. My son and husband were reconciled. I no longer had to make secret visits. With me near at hand again, my daughter was given freedom to leave the house in the palace compound where she had been confined. She found, I think, a good measure of contentment in life as a concubine, though I never quite gave up wondering how she would have fared had she married one of the boys who used to come calling.

  Things were well too between Nol and me. I no longer slept apart from him. We took rice together, we confided, we went for walks in the evening. When he began to develop pain in his joints, he slowed his pace on those walks and I slowed mine. Back at home, he lay down on his mat and I massaged his places of pain.

  I was wise enough by this time to know that such tranquillity cannot last forever. But I prayed that when change did come, it would come subtly, through things barely noticeable, giving us all time to adapt. That was not how it happened.

  50: The apsaras

  Eighteen hundred apsaras. My son had told the King that this number was part of his vision, but I can tell you that prior to the moment when he knelt in the audience room, bound and pleading for his life and permission to build the mountain-temple in the proper way, he had had no idea how many Heavenly nymphs should brighten its stones. The number floated by in his mind as he crouched, and he reached out and plucked it, sensing that for the King the chance of eternity amongst such a host would close the question.

  Now, the number he promised was approximately the same as the number of sculptors at the construction site at the time. For the time being, they were concerning themselves only with ornamentation, carving symmetrical grooves onto door frames, Capitals onto column tops, flower patterns onto lintels. They were waiting impatiently for the Brahmins, who were rarely quick about anything, to work out the precise roster of gods and epic scenes that the temple’s stone would depict and the sequence in which they would be carved. But from the moment that Sovan was helped from the audience room, one part of the plan was settled, whatever the Brahmins might say – there would be apsaras everywhere.

  A few months later, I was sitting in the design pavilion with him, drinking tea, when an assistant announced that the chief concubine to His Majesty the King had come calling.

  Before he could respond, she breezed in, trailed by two maids. She sat down, saying nothing, not acknowledging my presence – I doubt she would have chosen to come had she known I was there, but now she was too proud to withdraw.

  She began by letting a silence build that was supposed to convey that he could guess why she had come. Avoiding her eyes, Sovan called for tea for the visitor. It quickly came; she ignored it. She was still looking at him, sizing him up now – he told me later that this was the first time they had ever met.

  Then she made an announcement: ‘I have come to pose for your master sculptor.’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘You don’t know, Architect? The Brahmins have ruled that my face and form will be the model for the mountain-temple’s apsaras.’ She took a breath, and held still for a moment, as if posing, daring him to say there was beauty that could outshine hers.

  I must say that she did have beauty, but in my opinion it was a baleful, spiteful kind that would not fit with the spirit of the edifice.

  ‘We might as well get started,’ she said. ‘His Majesty is already asking when he can see the first of his eighteen hundred.’

  Sovan parried. ‘Forgive my ignorance, but no one has told me the Brahmans had made the decisions you describe.’

  ‘If they haven’t already, they will. Perhaps you’d know if you spent more time at the palace, not as a hermit out here. Everyone knows.’

  Sovan replied that the chief sculptor was away at his home village; I could sense that he was inventing this, playing for time. A posing was simply impossible for now, he continued. She protested, saying she would settle for the chief’s assistant, but Sovan countered that a woman of her rank could be sketched only by the top man himself.

  Slowly she gave in; an aide showed her out.

  Sovan let out a long breath. ‘Mother, there’s always something like that. I have so little time left for the actual work of building this place. The question becomes whether to build the best building I can or appease someone’s demand.’ He broke off there, because he was contemplating something, a finger to his cheek. Then he said: ‘Theological interpretation is not my specialty. But tell me, mother, may I pose some ideas to you? I am not sure they are valid.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘The human world is in many ways a reflection of the supernatural one, is it not?’

  ‘Certainly it is.’

  ‘Heaven has day and it has night, as we have here on earth.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘On earth, some people do good, some do bad, some people do good and bad, just as it is in Heaven with the gods.’

  ‘Yes, it is like that.’

  ‘On earth we have scenes of great beauty, such as mists kissing a river’s surface at first light, and we have scenes that are foul beyond description, such as, well – there is no need to name any of them. It is that way in the gods’ realm, is it not? Mount Meru is a place of divine perfection, yet there is also hell, where the air rings with the screams of tortured sinners.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ I was anxious to hear the point.

  ‘Now, on earth, we have many kinds of women. Some are beautiful – like my mother. And please, don’t protest! I say that not only because I am your son. Some are plain, some are…well, there is no word but ugly. Some are a mixture of both – a beautiful face and shoulders, perhaps, but hips that are more narrow than the ideal. In any case, each woman has an appearance different than any other.’

  ‘Yes, yes. We can see that every day.’

  ‘Then, can we not conclude, drawing inference from these analogies, that these women we see reflect the nymphs of Heaven? That therefore nymphs come in all kinds, that they do not all have perfect physical attributes?’

  ‘Why, I suppose so.’

  ‘And would it not match Heaven’s will if the nymphs we will carve at the temple were to reflect this eternal truth?’

  There were so many aspects to my son’s brilliance, can’t you see? The next day he went to see the Brahmin Subhadra. First, he found that the council was nowhere near a decision of the type that Rom had claimed. And second, he found that Subhadra was willing to put to the council the approach that he had outlined to me.

  A formal decision was issued four weeks later. Rom quickly went again to Sovan’s workplace, this time to demand that she at least be the first to be sketched. The chief sculptor was duly called. She stood for him, and he began to record her likeness on a slate. Several times he told her, using the most diplomatic words he could muster, that, please, it would be good to relax, to contemplate the Vedas, perhaps, that her face should reflect Heaven’s flawless harmony. Instead, her face tightened! The sculptor gave her no more of those words, trying to achieve the desired effect on his own
. But when she had gone away, and he looked at his drawing, he announced to my son that he had succeeded only in part.

  The chief sculptor went on to carve an apsara in Rom’s image. But she was to be just one in a holy host. Every one of the eighteen hundred sculptors got the right to select one woman – wife, minor wife, sweetheart, drinking-stall companion, coveted village beauty – to serve as model for one apsara. This was as my son had proposed to the Brahmins. It seemed a good way to bring in a sampling of all the Empire’s women, however many million they were. It might also put an end to recent grumbling among the masons that their skills made them deserving of more silver and larger rations than other workers.

  The sketching and carving took place over many years, because when it began only a fraction of the walls and columns that would be homes to the apsaras existed. The chief sculptor told a scribe to maintain a list of the men and select from them as new walls and columns were completed. The scribe chose randomly, except, perhaps, concerning those men who paid him bribes. In some cases, this was not entirely dishonourable – construction progressed so slowly that some of the older men worried that they might be dead before their turn came around. Each man on whom the good news was settled got one cycle of the moon to make his pick. His chosen woman, bathed, purified by her local priest, put on her finest and processed proudly to a masons’ work yard to the south of the temple. She was directed toward a wooden platform decorated with flowers and bright drapes. This was of course a special occasion, and family, friends and the hundreds of sculptors and assistants stopped work to watch. The female of the day climbed the platform and stood there proudly, perhaps holding a lotus blossom to her cheek. She might smile with a hint of provocation, catching the sculptor’s eye; she might gaze to the earth with modesty. The sculptor sketched the image on slate, then held it up to the crowd for admiration (and sometimes good-natured derision). Later, the image was recopied in charcoal on the designated place in the temple. Then the real work began. The sculptor first chipped away stone that lay outside the outline, to create a niche-home. As days and weeks progressed, his nymph took form from the stone that he had left untouched. With that work complete, painters came to apply gilding to her jewellery, hues to her flowers and cloth, and a gentle pastel to her skin. Her eternity of glorification of her monarch began.