The King's Last Song

by Geoff Ryman

  Fishing Cat snapped forward. “That's enough. You want to act like a baby, we'll treat you like one.” She snatched her twenty-five-year-old son off the bowl of fruit and dumped him into a wicker cradle. It was too high off the ground for him to climb out.

  Immediately she felt awful.

  He's always at his worst when it's something to do with children, she thought. He hates them; he's afraid of what they'll say. Nanny, why doesn't that man have legs? He can't stand to see the King around his other sons. He starts acting like a clown.

  She looked around the circle of the family, bowing apologies to each of them.

  Lastly, she bowed to the Brahmin. He looked pityingly at her and shook his head. This, he seemed to say, is what comes of such disordering of categories. This is what comes of radical Buddhism.

  They all kept waiting with nothing to say.

  Virakumara stood still with beautiful patience, his kindly face placid and withdrawn. His fat wife looked bored. Some of the younger children asked to leave. “Yes, you can go,” said Rajendradevi and looked at Indradevi with begging eyes.

  "I know!” said Indradevi. “Let's all go out and look at the butterfly tree in torchlight."

  Indradevi gathered up the children and led them away.

  "When do we eat?” one of the little girls demanded before climbing down the steps.

  Rajapati struck again. “My friend Brahmin, I have a question for you about the scriptures."

  The Brahmin turned and looked at him with a kind of practised patience. “What interest would you have in the scriptures?"

  "It amuses me how unlike reality they are, but how much devotion you show to them."

  I have to get him out of here, thought Fishing Cat.

  At that moment she heard the King's unmistakable hammering footfall on the wooden stairs.

  The Second Queen had a moment to sit up straight and pick up her sleeping son before the King thrust aside aside a curtain and swept into the room. Jayavarman scowled as if outraged, his mouth bunched up. Beads of sweat lined up across his forehead like helmets on a distant battlefield.

  Queen Jaya followed with her hand over her mouth. Everyone's eyes caught each other's. Surya? wondered Cat. Has Surya been killed in the war? What in the name of all that is holy has happened?

  The King apologized in a deep, angry voice that Fishing Cat had never heard before. “I'm very sorry, everyone. Some news has come. Please begin."

  The Brahmin was discomfited. What was an appropriate blessing for a prince in a Buddhist household? A prayer that he makes due observance of the Gods? The counsellor fell back on a Jatataka tale of Vishnu coming to test the young Buddha and finding him generous and truthful.

  The King rocked back and forth on his heels throughout.

  The Brahmin ended with, “May this young prince similarly embody virtue before the Gods."

  The Second Queen held up the babe, and Jayavarman's face softened. He went to the hammock and kissed her forehead, and the family chuckled fondly.

  He looked at the babe's face. “My son,” he said, warmly. “Oh, but he's a handsome fellow.” He picked the babe up and cradled him and bounced him. “And he's born big too. Fine and healthy and fat."

  The baby gurgled as if he could talk and everyone responded with appropriate and somewhat edgy affection. The King looked around him, pleased. Sweat still armoured his brow.

  He wiped it with a swift sweep of his hand. He looked into the baby's face. “What will we call you, little fellow? Eh? We can't call you by a great big religious title yet.” His face clouded. “You won't have to fight a war yet, either."

  Rajendradevi asked, “What's happened, my Lord?"

  "Ugh!” he grunted and shook his head and passed the child back to her. He clamped a hand on his forehead.

  "The City Yashodharapura has fallen. Not only has it fallen, but all its propitiations of the Gods achieved nothing. The palaces have been burnt and looted."

  Vira's wife, Cat, Rajendradevi, and some of the servants cried aloud.

  The King rolled on. “The Usurper has been killed and Jaya-Indravarman, the Cham King, has made himself Universal King, over all Kambujadesa. Over us."

  Virakumara looked perplexed. “What on earth are we going to do?"

  The King said, as he folded himself down onto the floor. “We will have a family conference. Most of us are here. The Crown Prince is not."

  Rajapati said, “Admittedly, we can't do anything without him."

  King Jaya found him in his crib and glared at him. “I want to make sure he behaves. I wouldn't put it past him to be part of this."

  "Like we were once?” said Rajapati.

  The King smiled, crookedly. “'Pati, I can always rely on you to silence any discussion. Do you have a view or do you just want to create confusion?"

  Rajapati whispered, “I have no view."

  Virakumara did. “If....if they are more inclined to Buddhism, and you were an ally of theirs, is this not a good time to put yourself forward for preferment?"

  Jaya blasted back at him. “And be a traitor? They burned the City! It is one thing to be the harrow of the Usurper, it is quite another to destroy the kingdom....all those beautiful buildings, the carvings, the cloth....the wealth....just....broken, squandered, ruined. They're barbarians!"

  "And we're not,” said Rajapati very carefully to make sure it sounded like a statement, not sarcasm. “As when we burnt Vijaya."

  "No wit, ‘Pati. Intelligence please, but no wit. From someone! Anyone!"

  Princess Indradevi, summoned by her sister, entered the room.

  "Queen Indradevi!” said Jaya, which was a mistake as she was not a queen. “At last, somebody will talk sense!"

  Princess Indradevi was rocked by this. The King was not generally so dominant or so aggressive. “My Lord wishes to do something,” she said, recovering.

  "Our strategy was this: to perfect the art of ruling over a Buddhist state, a state in which compassion was the main principle of rule. The well-being of the people was to be the primary sign of a successful ruler, not the addition of territory, or the aggrandizement of the person. In that we have succeeded. And it means nothing!” The King hid his face in his hands.

  Then he snatched his hands away.

  "The Chams gave no sign they were doing this because they blamed their defeat of a dozen years ago on us. We went home, and recovered from being traitors to the Usurper. We were grateful for being unnoticed. We pulled shut all the curtains. We meditated. We perfected our graces. In the small circle of our tiny kingdom, we made sure we earned merit for ourselves while the rest of the country sank under an illegitimate ruler. And now, we wake up."

  The King lifted up his hands and brought them down slapping onto his knees. “We wake up to find that there is no Kambujadesa anymore! We find that allowing the Usurper to continue in his misrule was an irresponsible, heedless act! It was irresponsible to allow ourselves to pay no notice to the Chams or their intentions, to assume that they had forgotten and forgiven all those years of war. Now we wake up to discover we are their vassals. I was enslaved by the Chams once. I was determined never to be their slave again!"

  The King was shouting. He slammed his fist down on his own knee.

  Queen Jaya ventured. “How....how did they do this?"

  "By....following....my....advice!” The King had the face of a tiger. “I told them the first time, I said, if you try to march across land, you will give the Khmers time to organize. I told them to wait until April, when there is no rice to forage and no food for an army. Come up the rivers by boat and sweep across the Great Lake. From there, go by canal. You will find all of Yashodharapura unwalled, undefended, open to attack because its Kings seriously believe that drinking water washed over a stone penis keeps the City safe from harm!"

  Cat had never heard the King talk this way. She looked at the Brahmin. He was still and grey.

  The King was shouting and bouncing up and down on his haunches. “So they thought I w
as untrustworthy but they still took my advice!"

  His hands pressed down on the top of this head. “And now I find I don't like playing the Little King any longer. I find that I have learned a hard lesson, that it is not enough to make a....what did you call it, Indradevi? A little island of safety. Well, come the monsoon and the little island is flooded just like everywhere else!"

  This was Jayavarman the warrior. This was Jayavarman the Great, who wanted to be King.

  And had realized that only too late.

  The First Queen said in a quiet voice, “So what do we do?"

  Jayavarman shrugged like a great ox under a yoke it cannot bear. “We....do....nothing. Not for a while. The Khmers regard us as traitors. The Chams have no need of us. Both would prefer us dead or gone. The only thing we can do is stay unnoticed for a while and build. Build new loyalties, build new armies, new weapons, new means. We must smile and lie and prevaricate and hide until we can strike. Then I will set out to do what I should have done from the first, which is to make myself"—he slammed his own chest with the point of his finger—"the Universal King! And make all of Kambujadesa a Buddhist state. A state that does not rely on empty ceremonies AND THAT BUILDS A WALL AROUND THE CITY!"

  He calmed himself and all of his round body was pumping like a heart. He said, more quietly, “It is, after all, only a city like any other."

  He glanced up at the Brahmin, whose eyes were cast down.

  "I will send the messengers back to the City with word to Jaya-Indravarman ambiguous enough to be read as congratulations without making myself a legendary figure of hatred. I will lie. I will tell him that we are content as always to be part of the greater state. For I am just an eccentric odd little king with a religion for a harmless hobby.” The King looked up at his son Rajapativarman. “You see, I can wound myself with words too, “'Pati."

  Rajapati was almost smiling. It was a bitter smile, not amused, and not particularly cruel. “That is because you are a cripple, Father."

  "We all are. That's why we hate to look at cripples so much."

  Both could scorch the air with words.

  Rajapati's smile did not move. He said, in a very quiet voice, “I suggest that you start building those loyalties, Father."

  Both he and his father blew out air in unison.

  Cat looked up and saw the Brahmin was no longer there.

  Invited Brahmins should leave with all due ceremony. A slave, however, could slip out of rooms unnoticed to carry out her tasks. Cat signalled for a torch, gathered up her skirts, and ran. She and not the Brahmin could take the shorter hidden way through the royal apartments to the main western gate.

  She ordered all the torches lit around the gopura and then climbed the staircase onto the walls to wait. As she suspected, the Brahmin came trotting out of the gate, hunched under a shoulder bag.

  By the time she had slipped back into Rajendradevi's chambers almost everyone had gone. The King was holding his newborn son, and looking at his face.

  "You will be a big, big man, my son. You will have to be a warrior.” The baby—huge, pink, and calm—looked back at the King with a complete lack of excitement. Rajapati, trapped in the crib, looked on forlornly.

  "I know,” the King said rubbing his nose against the baby's. “We'll call you Tlos."

  Chubby.

  The Brahmin was found on the road to the City, stabbed to death.

  Leaf 59

  Kambujadesa is country where rivers flow backwards. You think the clear fresh water has washed the land, sweeping away the old dead leaves. Then look! The season of rains and flooding comes, and the rivers change course. Here the dead leaves come again, carried back by the floods. Look through the floorboards of your house and you can see the old dirt, flowing backwards, drowning your hens. Your children weep. The mud rises up your ladder, step by step. It swirls into your house, soiling it. Kambujadesa is a country where the past washes back. We are like the fish who swim choking on the past, not knowing why our mouths are full of mud, or when the fisherman will haul in his nets or strike us with spears. My life has been a tale first of war and then remembrance.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  The Season of Rain and Flooding

  An officer's shirt with a bullethole through it arrives at the offices of Phnom Penh Soir with this note.

  This is your general's shirt. You will not be getting him back nor the Golden Book. There is no point negotiating. You have nothing we want. We would not believe any promises you make and we expect nothing from you. All we want to do is hurt the tourist trade as much as possible. We don't benefit from it. Hurting it is the best way to hurt you. Why do we want to hurt you? In a city where a hotel room can cost as much as two thousand dollars a night and people die for the price of antibiotics, where pirates make fortunes and look down on hardworking people, it should not take you long to think of a reason.

  The letter does not mention Professor Luc Andrade. The French is perfect. Reading the note, Sinn Rith thinks: is it possible that Ta Barang helped them do this?

  Rith is not the only one.

  * * * *

  Since the shooting, Luc has begun to shake inside all the time.

  At first he thought it was shock. A boat arrived in the middle of the night, and an another older man got off it, and said that someone at the Phimeanakas had been arrested. He himself had been followed; the police now knew Saom Pich had taken the Book. Luc finally learned the old man's name. Police had visited his wife.

  The General lay on the floor of the hull. He was yellow and howling, streaming sweat and demanding water. In that instant the old man turned with his rifle and shot him in the heart. The General was lying next to Luc, and Luc felt him jump. Everything went dark; the boys started the engine and the boat pulled away. Luc was left shut in the hull with the body and blood.

  Finally the hatch opened, letting in grey early light. The old man told Luc to help move the body. Sprays of blood covered Luc's arms; his back was wet with it. Calmly, the old man began to push rocks down the General's still-warm throat. He held up the General's shirt and shot that too. The sound made Luc collapse inside—for an instant he thought that he'd been shot as well.

  Then the old man said in a quiet voice. “I need you to write something for us in French.” He passed Luc the notebook, open to a fresh page with a letter already written on it in Khmer. Feeling eerily as though he had shown up late for an ordinary office job, Luc translated it into French.

  The letter and the shirt were given to the boys to post. They climbed into their uncle's boat. “Tell the police you've been working at our charcoal smelter. The illegal one. Let them force you to admit it. They'll believe you then. Your uncle came to fetch you. He sold the hens at a dockside market."

  The three hens were left with Luc and Pich, and the other boat headed back north towards Siem Reap.

  Pich started their engine and headed west. Somewhere on the lake, with no other boats in sight, he rolled the General's body over the side.

  They chugged their way into the marshy channels at the mouth of a small stream, reeds and scrub scraping the sides. They stopped somewhere and Pich jumped out and dragged the boat under overhanging branches.

  He sat cross-legged on the deck and waved Luc out of the hull. “What packet are you translating now?” he asked.

  * * * *

  They remain hidden without moving for weeks.

  No further messengers come. The heat and insects buzz. Pich will not allow a fire, so they eat the chickens raw. Luc is still shaking as if from the sound of the gun.

  At first he cannot keep cool. Then he cannot keep warm. It's the shock, he tells himself; I'm worn down. It's the food.

  They eat raw fish like mangoes, peeling the flesh away from its skin with their teeth. Sometimes the flesh twitches or Luc gets a mouthful of gut. Saom Pich says nothing that is not brief and practical. He uses fish bones for toothpicks. His whole intent seems to be to keep Luc working on the translation. He says nothing a
bout his family or his old life. To Luc's utter horror, Pich takes off his glasses and his wedding ring and throws both over the side.

  Luc is covered in bites. The insects torment him. At night he can hear them whine in the air all around him. They crawl on his skin and nip him before he can slap them away. The worst are the flies; they seem to tear off whole steaks from his arms and legs, leaving smears of blood. He scratches himself raw. His head aches and he wants to throw up.

  The task of translating is getting too much for him. He finds he can work for only about two hours each day, in the early morning when it's light but cool. He jumps overboard first thing every day to wash and escape the insects. He plunges right down under the water. He drifts off to sleep and jumps awake, realising that part of his mind has been counselling him to breathe in deeply.

  The Book, Luc. They will never get the Book if you do not work.

  Sometimes, Saom Pich is almost sympathetic. He pats Luc's arm in a comradely kind of way, and lets him dry in the sun before passing him the notebooks.

  All the leaves are out of order; the cut circles don't seem to fit anywhere; and Luc's handwriting gets smaller and smaller to conserve space. He has to write notes more frequently.

  This leaf might fit with the battle scenes.

  We're missing Leaf 59 just before Bharata-Rahu. Is this it? Transition to history of the battles?

  At times, as birds sing, as shade creeps, as water gurgles, Luc feels something almost like peace.

  Then his joints begin to ache. His head seems to squash down on top of his body; his eyes cross so that he's unable to see; and he rocks back and forth, soaked with sweat.

  Pich takes Luc's old shirt and uses it to mop and cool his brow. He starts to use a word long since fallen out of favour. It took the place of loak during the time of the Communists. He starts to call Luc comrade.

  Comrade? thinks Luc. When you're going to have to shoot me?

  "Read them to me,” Pich asks sometimes in the mornings or whenever he thinks Luc is well enough. Pich blinks. He can read without his spectacles, but it's uncomfortable. So Luc reads and Pich hangs his head or looks skywards. Sometimes he laughs or shakes his head in sadness.