by Daniel Mason
You want to know about Carroll? I haven’t met the man, Nor I, Not I, just stories, Well none of us have met the man, hell raise your glasses to that, the man is but a fairy tale, That’s right, a fairy tale, They say he stands seven feet tall and breathes fire, Really, I haven’t heard that one, Well I’ve heard that your mum stands seven feet tall and breathes fire, Come on, Jackson, be serious you bastard, this fine gentleman wants True stories about Carroll, Truth, raise your glass to Truth then, hell I would be less in awe if the man did stand seven feet tall and breathed fire, Have you heard the story of the building of the fort? That’s a wild one, You tell it, Jackson, you tell it, Well then, I’ll tell it, Quiet, you bastards, Mr. Drake, pardon my French, bit tipsy you know, Get on with the story, Jackson, Fair enough, the story, I’ll get fast to it, where does it start? No, you know what? What? I am going to tell the story of the journey, that’s a better one, Tell it then, All right I will, The Story, ready boys? Carroll arrives in Burma, he’s been here a couple of years, medical stuff, couple of trips into the jungle, but still this fellow’s pretty fresh, I mean, I don’t think he has ever fired a gun or anything, but still he volunteers to set up camp in Mae Lwin, secret stuff at the time, God knows why he wants to go, but he goes anyway, Not only is the country overrun with armed bands, but this is long before we annexed Upper Burma, so if he needs reinforcements, we may not even be able to get there to help him, but still he goes, why, no one knows, every man has his own theory, me, I think the chap was maybe running away from something, wanted to get away, you know, far away, but that’s just my opinion, I don’t know, What do you boys think? Glory maybe, Girls! the bastard likes Shan girls, Thanks, Stephens, I should have expected as much from your mind, this is a fellow who will skip church to sneak down to the Mandalay bazaar to chase the painted mingales, How about you, Murphy? Me, hell, maybe the chap just believes in the cause, you know, civilize the uncivilized, make peace, bring law and order to an untamed land, not like us drunken bastards, Poetic, Murphy, real poetic, Listen you wanted my opinion, All right, how long is this story going to take, Where was I? Carroll heads into the bloody jungle, Yeah, Carroll heads into the jungle, under escort, maybe ten soldiers, that’s it, that’s all he will allow, says it isn’t a military expedition, Well, military expedition or not, before they even reach the site they are attacked, they are crossing a clearing, and suddenly an arrow whizzes past and hits a tree above his head, The soldiers, they take cover in the trees and ready their rifles, but Carroll just stands in the clearing, not moving, mad as a hatter I tell you, all alone, but calm, real calm, calm that would make a card dealer jealous, and another arrow flies by him, faster this time, nicking his helmet, Crazy bastard! Crazy all right, and what does Carroll do? Tell us, Jackson, Yeah tell us you bastard, All right all right, I’ll tell it all right, what does he do? The crazy bastard takes off his helmet, where he had tied a little flute that he likes to play on the marches, and he puts the damn thing to his mouth and begins to play, He’s mad I tell you! Bloody nuts if you ask me! You going to let me finish the story? Yeah go on, go on, finish the bloody story! So Carroll begins to play, and what does he play? “God Bless the Queen”? Wrong, Murphy, “The Wood-cutter’s Daughter”? Damn it, Stephens, nothing dirty please, Sorry for my friend Mr. Drake, and sorry, boys, but Carroll starts to play some crazy song that none of the soldiers has ever heard, a weird little ditty, and I met a soldier once who had served in the escort, and he told me about it, says he never heard the song in his life, nothing fancy, maybe twenty notes, and then Carroll stops and looks around, and the troops are all kneeling, rifles to their cheeks, ready to fire if a bird chirps, but nothing happens, everything’s still, and Carroll plays the tune again, and when he finishes he waits, and then plays it again, and he stares into the forest around the clearing, Nothing, not a peep, no more arrows, and Carroll plays again, and from the bushes comes a whistling, the same damn tune, and this time when the song finishes Carroll doesn’t stop but repeats it, and now there’s more whistling and he plays three more times, and then they are bloody singing together, Carroll and their attackers, and the men can hear laughter and cheering from the forest, but it is dense and dark and no one can be seen, At last Carroll stops and motions his men to stand, and they do so slowly, they are scared, you can imagine, and they climb back onto their mounts, and they continue their march, and never see the attackers again, although the soldier who told me the story said he could hear them the entire way, they were there, guarding the party, guarding Carroll, and this way Carroll passes through some of the most dangerous territory in the Empire without firing a shot, and they reach Mae Lwin, where the local chief is waiting, expecting them, and takes the men’s ponies and offers them warm rice and curries, and gives them shelter, and after three days of conferring, Carroll announces to the party that the chief has granted them permission to build a fort at Mae Lwin, in exchange for protection from dacoits, and the promise of a clinic. And more music.
The soldier stopped. There was silence. Even the rowdiest of the soldiers had quieted, awed by the story.
“What was the song?” asked Edgar, finally.
“Sorry?”
“The song. What was the song that he played on his flute?”
“The song … a Shan love ditty. When a Shan boy courts his sweetheart, he always plays the same song. It’s nothing, rather simple, but it worked like a miracle. Carroll later told the soldier who told me the story that no man could kill one who played a song that reminded him of the first time he had fallen in love.”
“Bloody amazing.” There was soft chuckling, the men having drifted into contemplation.
“Any more stories?” asked Edgar.
“About Carroll? Oh, Mr. Drake, so many stories. So many stories.” He looked down into his glass, now nearly empty. “But tomorrow maybe, I’m tired now. The journey is long, and our destination’s days away. We have nothing but stories until bloody Mandalay.”
They steamed up the river, steadily, passing towns, their names streaming together like an incantation. Sitsayan. Kama. Pato. Thayet. Allanmyo. Yahaing. Nyaungywagyi. As they moved farther north, the land grew dry, the vegetation sparse. The green Pegu Hills soon tapered to a flat plain, the dense foliage changed to thorn trees and toddy palms. They stopped at many of the towns, dusty ports with little more than a few huts and a fading monastery. There they picked up or unloaded cargo, and occasionally passengers, soldiers usually, ruddy-faced boys who joined the nightly conversations and brought their own stories.
And they all knew of Carroll. A trooper from Kyaukchet told them that he met a soldier who had been to Mae Lwin once, who said that it reminded him of stories of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, a fort like none other, festooned with the rarest of orchids, where one could hear music playing at all hours and there was no need to take up arms, for there were no dacoits for miles. Where men could sit in the shade by the Salween and eat sweet fruit. Where the girls laughed and tossed their hair and had eyes like those you see in dreams. A Pegu rifleman told them that he had heard that Shan storytellers sang ballads about Anthony Carroll, and an infantryman from Danubyu told them that there was no sickness in Mae Lwin, for cool fresh winds followed the course of the Salween, and one could sleep outside under moonlit skies and awake without a mosquito bite, and there was none of the fever or dysentery that had killed so many of his friends as they waded through steaming jungles and pulled leeches from their ankles. A private traveling with his battalion to Hlaingdet had heard that Anthony Carroll had dismantled his cannons and used them as planters for flowers, and the guns of the soldiers who were lucky enough to pass through Mae Lwin grew rusty, as the men spent their days writing letters and growing fat, and listening to the laughter of children.
More men joined in the stories, and as the steamer groaned northward, Edgar began to realize that the tales were less what each soldier knew was true than what he needed to believe. That although the Commissioner proclaimed there was Peace, for the soldiers there w
as only Maintaining Peace, which was very different, and with this came fear and the need for something to keep the fear away. And with this realization came another: that he was surprised at how unimportant truth had begun to be for himself. Perhaps more than any lonely soldier, he needed to believe in the Surgeon-Major he had never met.
Sinbaungwe. Migyaungye. Minhla. One night he awoke to hear an eerie song drifting in from the riverbank. He sat up in his bed. The sound was distant, a murmur, disappearing beneath the sound of his breath. He listened, barely moving. The boat moved on.
Magwe. Yenangyaung. And then, in Kyaukye, the long slow pace of the journey upstream was broken by the arrival of three new passengers in chains.
Dacoits. Edgar had heard the word many times since he read his first brief back in London. Thieves. Warlords. Highwaymen. When Thibaw, the last king of Upper Burma, had ascended to the throne almost ten years ago, the country had fallen into chaos. The new king was weak, and the Burmese hold on their land began to crumble, not to any armed resistance but to an epidemic of lawlessness. Throughout Upper Burma, bands of marauders attacked lone travelers and caravans alike, raided villages, demanded protection money from lonely farmers. Their capacity for violence was well known; testimony lay in the hundreds of razed villages, in the bodies of those who resisted nailed up along the roads. When the British inherited the rice fields of Upper Burma along with the annexation, they also inherited the dacoits.
The captives were brought on deck, where they squatted, three dusty men with three parallel lines of chain from neck to neck, wrist to wrist, ankle to ankle. Before the boat pushed off from the rickety docks, a crowd of passengers had already gathered in a semicircle around the prisoners, who let their hands dangle between their knees and stared back, emotionless, defiant of the crowd of soldiers and travelers. They were watched over by three Indian soldiers, and Edgar was terrified to think what the dacoits must have done to deserve such a guard. He didn’t have to wait long for an answer, for as the crowd of passengers stared down at the prisoners, the Italian woman traveler asked one of the soldiers what the men had done, and the soldier in turn asked one of the guards.
The three men, explained the guard, were the leaders of one of the fiercest bands of dacoits, who had terrorized the foothills east of Hlaingdet, near the British fort established during the early military expeditions into the Shan States. Edgar knew the name Hlaingdet; this was where he was to receive an escort on the road to Mae Lwin. The dacoits had been bold enough to attack villages in the vicinity of the fort, where villagers had thought that by moving close to army headquarters they would be safe from the marauders. They had burned rice fields and robbed caravans, and finally had attacked and burned one village and raped women and girls by holding knives to the throats of their children. It had been a large band, perhaps twenty men. When tortured, they had pointed out these three men as their leaders. Now they were being taken to Mandalay for questioning.
“And the other men?” the Italian woman had asked.
“Killed in the encounter,” said the soldier stoically.
“All seventeen?” asked the woman. “I thought you said they were captured and confessed …” But she let the sentence trail off into silence as her face flushed red. “Oh,” she said, weakly.
Edgar stood and stared at the prisoners, trying to see in their expressions evidence of their terrible deeds, but they revealed nothing. They sat in the heavy irons, their faces covered with thick dust that colored their dark hair a lighter brown. One of them looked very young, with a thin mustache and his long hair tied up in a bun on his head. His tattoos were blurred by the dirt, but Edgar thought he could make out the deep stain of a tiger across the boy’s chest. Like the others, his face was set and defiant. He stared back at those who stood around and condemned him. For one brief moment, his eyes met Edgar’s, and held there, before the piano tuner was able to look away.
Slowly, the passengers lost interest in the captives and filed away to their rooms. Edgar followed, still shaken by the story. He would not write to Katherine about this, he decided; he didn’t wish to frighten her. As he tried to sleep, he imagined the attack, and thought of the women villagers, of how they must have carried their children, wondering if they were merchants or if they worked in the fields, wondering if they wore thanaka too. He lay down and tried to sleep. The images of painted girls came to haunt him, the swirls of the white paint over skin blackened by the sun.
On the deck the dacoits crouched in their shackles.
The steamer pushed on. The night passed, and the day, and the towns.
Sinbyugyun. Sale. Seikpyu. Singu. Like a chant. Milaungbya.
Pagan.
It was nearly sunset when the first of the temples appeared on the vast plain. A lone building, fallen into ruins and covered with vines. Below its crumbling walls, an old man sat on the back of an oxcart pulled by a pair of humpbacked Brahmin cows. The steamship was moving close to the shore to avoid sandbanks in the center of the river, and the old man turned to watch them pass. The dust turned up by the cart reflected the rays of the sun, casting the temple in a golden haze.
A woman walked alone under a parasol, heading somewhere unseen.
The soldiers had told Edgar that the ship would stop “for sightseeing” at the ruins of Pagan, the ancient capital of a kingdom that had ruled Burma for centuries. At last, after nearly an hour of steaming past rows of fallen monuments, as the river began its slow turn to the west, they stopped at a nondescript quay and a number of passengers disembarked. Edgar followed the Italian couple over a narrow plank.
They walked with a soldier who led them up a dusty road. More pagodas soon became visible, structures that had been obscured by the scattered foliage or the rise of the bank. The sun was setting rapidly. A pair of bats flapped through the air. Soon they reached the base of a large pyramid. “Let’s climb here,” said the soldier. “The finest view in all of Pagan.”
The steps were steep. At the top of the stairs, a wide platform circled the central spire. If they had arrived ten minutes later, they would have missed the sun as it cast its rays over the vast field of pagodas that stretched away from the river to the distant mountains, floating in the dust and smoke of burning rice fields.
“What are those mountains?” Edgar asked the soldier.
“The Shan Hills, Mr. Drake. Finally we can see them.”
“The Shan Hills,” Edgar repeated. He stared past the temples that stood like soldiers in formation, to the mountains that rose abruptly from the plain and seemed to hover in the sky. He thought of a river that ran through those hills, and how somewhere, hidden in the darkness, waited a man who perhaps stared out at the same sky, but who had yet to know his name.
The sun set. The mantle of night crept across the plain, enveloping each pagoda one by one, until at last the soldier turned, and the travelers followed him back to the ship.
Nyaung-U, Pakokku, and then it was day again. Kanma, and the confluence of the Chindwin River, Myingyan, and Yandabo, and then it was night, and as the Sagaing Hills rose to the west, the passengers went to sleep knowing that during the night the steamship, plowing upstream, would pass the old capital of Amarapura, which means City of the Immortals. Before the sun rose, they would arrive in Mandalay.
9
The following morning, Edgar was awakened by the sudden arrival of silence. The steamboat, after groaning relentlessly for seven days, cut her engines and drifted. New sounds slipped into the cabin: a faint sloshing, the whispered shriek of metal on metal as a kerosene lamp swung on its chain, the shouts of men, and the distant yet unmistakable clamor of a bazaar. Edgar rose and dressed without washing, left his room, and walked the length of the corridor toward the spiral stairs that climbed to the deck, conscious of the creaking of the floorboards beneath his bare feet. At the top of the stairs, he almost collided with one of the young deckhands, who swung down the banister like a langur. Mandalay, said the boy, grinning, and swept his arm toward the shore.
&n
bsp; They were floating past a market. Or into it; the boat seemed to be descending, the bank and its inhabitants swirling to overflow from the quayside and onto the deck. The market pressed in on either side, hustling shapes and voices shouting, the floating outlines of thanaka in the shade of broad bamboo hats, the silhouettes of traders rising from the backs of elephants. A group of children laughed and leaped over the rail and onto the boat, chasing each other, weaving through the piles of coiled rope, the stacks of chain, and now bags of spices, carried forward by a row of vendors who swept over the deck of the ship. Edgar heard singing behind him and turned. A roti-wallah stood on the deck, grinning a toothless smile, his dough spinning on his fist. The sun, he sang, and raised his lips to point at the sky, The sun. His dough spun faster and he hurled it skyward.
Edgar looked back toward the steamer, but he could no longer see the ship, it was all the bazaar. Spices spilled from the bags onto the deck. A line of monks wound past, chanting for alms, circling him as he watched their bare feet track patterns in scattered dust the color of their robes. A woman shouted at him in Burmese, chewing betel, her tongue the color of plums, her laughter turning into the pattering of footsteps. The children again ran past. Then laughter again. Edgar turned to look back to the roti-wallah, and then up at the spinning dough. The man sang and reached up and picked the sun from the sky. It was dark and Edgar stared into the darkness of his cabin.
The engines had indeed stopped. For a brief moment he wondered if he was still dreaming, but his window was open and no light poured in. Outside he heard voices, and at first he dismissed them as those of the crew. But the sounds seemed to be coming from farther away. He climbed to the deck. The moon was nearly full, casting blue shadows on the men who swiftly rolled barrels toward the gangplank. The bank was lined with shacks. For the second time that night, Edgar Drake arrived in Mandalay.
