The Map of Lost Memories (33 page)

The village men stood before Irene in the cloudy gloom, narrow waists wrapped in sarongs, chests bare, muskets held at the ready. Cords of white mist spiraled over the dense olive green of the Sekong River. Dew dripped off the fog-soaked trees, tapping from leaf to leaf. She took
a step toward the chief, and the muskets were raised. She took another step, and they were aimed. The irregularity of her heartbeat pounded in her ears. The village women were gawking out at her from the doorways and windows of the surrounding huts, but when she stood before the chief, looking once again into his dark eyes, his old face was like a mask. Marc was right. This was not her known world. How confident she had been of her skills at manipulation. How transparent and irrelevant those skills now seemed. A
ludicrous lie
, Clothilde had called it. As Irene accepted this—the insult it was to both the chief and herself, the ways she had turned this into a game—she could feel something within herself being set free.

She reached into her pocket and took out her pistol. The forest’s sounds gave way to the staccato ticking of muskets being cocked. She sank to her knees. With her face lowered, hidden from view, she blinked back tears of pure fear. Holding the gun flat between her shaking palms while she drew her hands to her forehead, she bowed to the ground three times, a
sampeah
to show her respect. She set the gun at the chief’s gnarled bare feet. She slowly stood. His countenance had not changed.

She had always operated from behind the impervious shield of her strategies. This morning she would be unarmored. She persisted across the impossibly fluid ground, through the village square, toward the trail that led to the temple. She was staring straight ahead, but she could see that none of the Brau were focused on her. Their gazes were fixed on the impenetrable border of forest behind her, as if it contained a repository of hidden strengths.

The men stood side by side, forming a chain along the rim of the path. They were close enough to strike her down with the wooden stocks of their guns, but she could not even hear their breathing. With each man she passed, her back felt broader, more exposed, but she kept walking, despite the melted rubber of her knees, until she reached the last of them. Finally, her eyes could not stay away. In the single instant of her glance, she saw him as if he were standing in a spotlight, the serrated puffs of ritual scars on his arms and cheeks, the resoluteness of his posture. She felt the potency of his waiting for instruction from his chief.

She lifted one leaden boot and forced it forward, and lifted the other
and forced that one ahead too. If the man were to lower his musket, he would shoot point-blank. He could not miss. Bats tore at the cindered sky, and the village men began to murmur. The jungle ahead was a frayed green wall. She was as terrified of backing down and never knowing what lay ahead as she was of defying the chief and being shot. So she kept going, one step at a time, into the turbulent discord of frogs and cicadas, growing so loud that eventually she could hear nothing else, not even her own footsteps. She walked blindly into the first rays of sunlight, for how long she didn’t know. She did not pause until a hand reached into her trance, touching her shoulder.

Irene expected it to be a Brau, and longed for it to be Marc so she could collapse into him, but it was Clothilde, still holding her gun. “I think your courage impressed even the chief,” she whispered. “Here, have some water, you’ve been walking for more than an hour.”

As Irene took Clothilde’s canteen and drank, she looked back down the path. Adrift a few yards away, Simone stood with May-ling curled head to tail on her shoulder, watching Irene and Clothilde with bewilderment on her face. Next came Xa and Kiri, and beyond them, Marc and Louis, holding their rifles to their chests in positions of readiness, still on guard, for farther on, in the morning’s smoky blue light, Irene could make out a group of ten armed Brau villagers in a somber file behind the coolies and the oxcarts.

“This is a good sign,” Louis said and then added with a resigned smile, “or at least as good a sign as we could hope for in such a situation. Not that I’ve ever been in such a situation.” He waved the spark of his cigarette toward their Brau escorts, who were standing at a distance down the path, watching the members of the expedition as they gathered around Irene. “If the chief was positive we were lying to him about Ormond sending us up here to retrieve the scrolls from the temple, or if he’s protecting that temple for himself, he would have stopped you, Irene. And he never would have let us follow you. Don’t you agree, Clothilde?”

“Based on what the chief told Xa, the village doesn’t have any interest in the temple,” Clothilde
said. “He’s under orders from Ormond. He couldn’t risk trying to detain you, in case your story is true. Plus, he couldn’t be sure of what a band of greedy foreigners with guns might do if provoked. So his men are going to keep an eye on us while he sends someone to Stung Treng to consult with Ormond and find out what’s really going on.”

“Even if the scout travels alone and on foot,” Louis interrupted, “it will still take him more than a full day to go there and back, and another to catch up with us. By then we should have reached the temple, if your estimate is correct.”

Kiri was asleep on Clothilde’s hip, and with one hand cradling his head, she said, “It’s not an estimate. I visited the temple half a dozen times for holy festivals when I was a girl, and I made annual visits to Kha Seng to see my aunties when I was living in Stung Treng. Same road, same number of days.”

Louis said, “That will give us a bit of time to look for the scrolls.”

“Irene?” Simone said. “I should have been at your side.”

“Not now, Simone,” Irene said and then asked Clothilde, “If the scrolls are up at the temple and Ormond sends someone to stop us, what do you suggest we do?”

“You should be asking me,” Simone whispered, gnawing on a ball of sticky rice she had taken from her knapsack.

The group had become adept at paying no attention to Simone’s mutterings, and Louis said, “We can deal with that later. All I know is that I want to keep going. Hell, Irene, that was incredible!”

Irene noticed the speckles of blood on her sleeves from smashed mosquitoes. She didn’t feel incredible. She felt cold to the bone, and she was grateful when Marc took her hands, rubbing them between his palms, melting the deep chill of her residual fear. “And you?” she asked him. “Do you still want to go through with this?”

He studied her with a questioning look. “I’m still here, aren’t I?”

Sensation was returning to her numb limbs, a tingling in her calves and upper arms. “Too many things could go wrong,” she said. “If you’re doing this just for me—”

“That’s a part of it,” he said, kneading her fingertips. “But we all have
more than one motive, when it comes down to it. If we didn’t, this jaunt would be a hell of a lot easier.”

“I think we should talk to the Brau.” Simone forced her way into the conversation. “We should find out what they really want.”

“The chief told us he wants to ride in a motorcar,” Marc said.

“And to see a skyscraper before he dies,” Louis added.

“That’s not what I mean,” Simone said, swatting at May-ling as she grabbed at the rice with her black paw.

“We know what you mean,” Irene said, once again looking down the path at the Brau, standing in an orderly row, one behind the other, their expressions impossible to decipher, their presence—and their muskets—impossible to ignore.

Clothilde rolled her eyes. “I’ll tell you what they really want. They
really
want to chew their hemp and be anywhere other than here right now.”

Annoyed, Simone said, “You would know best, wouldn’t you?”

Within the jungle’s deepening heat, with the Brau men watching the expedition’s every move and Ormond’s coolies warily watching the Brau, the hours seemed to leapfrog and backtrack, intermingling like the liana vines that climbed the banyan trees from the forest floor. Was it on the second day of the trek, or the third, or the first, that sunburn singed the exposed backs of Irene’s hands? She could not remember a time when they were not submerged in flame, a time when she did not wince as she walked on blistered feet. Edging her way past the spiraling blades of pandanus trees, she felt her fatigue as if it were a weight she had been ordered to carry on her back.

As for the others, Marc was physically fit and emotionally tough, an ideal combination for the jungle. Clothilde did not tire as easily as Irene did, despite all of the time she had been away in America, and Louis was clearly accustomed to trudging about in swampy heat. He, of all of them, had the strongest instinct for what a situation required. He knew when to hand a canteen to someone, and when to stop for a break. He was
attentive to their surroundings and individual needs, even Simone’s—especially Simone’s—despite his shattered feelings for her.

Although Irene had given up hope that Simone might prove useful, she came to admire the woman’s incredible stamina, especially when the group woke from their day of rest after leaving the village of Leh and discovered that Simone was not well. All of them were sweating all the time, but there was a strange grayness to the sheen on her skin, and she was shaking. Louis suspected malaria, but when he tried to talk to her about the symptoms, or convince her to drink one of the teas she had brought from the Chinese pharmacy in Saigon, she refused and insisted it was the mild flulike malaise that was typical in overly humid weather. If she suspected that the expedition was taking a break for her sake, she would forge ahead.

Three days into the pilgrimage, with one more day’s walk to the temple, they were still using the narrow hunting and trading path. But it was much less traveled than the section that had skirted the river. The horses whinnied in protest as they were prodded through the entangled leaves of giant ferns. The leather gloves that Louis had given Irene were too thin, and the pads of her palms were bruised and constantly bleeding from grabbing vines to pull herself along the most overgrown portions of the trail. The coolies had to force the oxen and carts through brush so dense that it was inconceivable to imagine the ancient Khmer dragging thousand-pound stones across such terrain.

Hoisting herself over shoulder-high, moss-glazed logs, Irene understood how Cambodia’s first travelers could have believed that Angkor Wat was built by gods or monsters. The woolly trees screeched and scratched like living beasts. The only signs of humanity were the occasional villages, scruffy and as unsettling in their indifference as Leh was in its watchfulness. With their aging chiefs and tall bamboo towers for keeping lookout for tigers, each cluster of huts was more primitive than the last. It felt as if, in their approach to the temple, they were traveling back in time—a journey made even more disorienting by the restless truce between the expedition and its Brau keepers, as each group waited to see what the other was going to do.

——

“How much hashish could they have brought with them?” Marc asked, unable to hide his fascination with the Brau. “There’s not a minute in the day when they’re not chewing on it. And where the hell do they store it? They don’t have a single pocket among them. They’re starting to unnerve me. They’re high all the time, and yet they still manage to keep an eye on us. I was watched in Shanghai, but never like this. They don’t even blink.”

“At least Ormond’s coolies chat among themselves. I haven’t heard the Brau speak since we left Leh,” Louis said. “Have you?”

“Not a word,” confirmed Marc, who was perched with Louis and Irene on fallen logs in an open space on the side of the trail.

They had stopped so that antiseptic could be applied to the morning’s newest injury, a bloody gash on one of the coolie’s shoulders from the unanticipated whip of a vine. While Xa spread a melting cream over the man’s torn skin, Irene wriggled her toes inside her boots, her feet sticky with sweat and antifungal powder. As Marc and Louis discussed the enigmatic demeanor of their Brau wardens, she looked around for the man on guard duty, for there was always one taking a turn, while the rest gnawed on hashish, sharpened knives, dozed, or skinned the squirrels they caught in the woods, giving the fuzzy brown tails to Kiri, to add to the collection tied to a leather strap draped over his shoulder. Watching the assigned guard was a way for Irene to remind herself of what she had done in Leh. Of what she was capable of doing.

She located the day’s watchman, his cheeks speckled with tattoos. He was standing on the trail behind Kiri, who was passing the time batting at leaves, sucking nectar from flowers, and shaking a string of cans to scare off tigers and ghosts. She told Marc and Louis, “I try to put myself in their heads. I try to imagine what they could be thinking—”

But before she could pursue this train of thought, Clothilde approached and said, “Irene, could you come with me for a moment?”

“What is it?”

“There’s something I want to show you.”

The men continued with their discussion while Irene followed
Clothilde into the forest off the opposite side of the path. Behind the immense trunk of an evergreen tree, Simone was on her hands and knees, vomit pooled in the scrub in front of her. Instantly, Irene thought of her overdose in Saigon. “Simone, what have you taken today?”

“No pills, Irene.” Her voice was feeble. “I promise.”

“She was sick last night too,” Clothilde said.

Simone scowled at her.

Taking a handkerchief from her pocket, Clothilde asked, “Can you sit up? Here, let me help you.”

But as Simone scooted back from the evidence of her suffering and leaned against the tree, she pushed the cloth away and snapped, “Don’t touch me.”

“Clothilde,” Irene said, “ask the cook to make some rice. And a pot of weak black tea.”

As Clothilde rushed away, she passed Marc and Louis, who were wandering over to see what was going on. The moment Louis saw Simone, he crouched in front of her, laying the back of his hand over her forehead, as if she were a child. They sat together like this for a minute, each of them looking miserable, until Louis said, “You have a fever. I knew it, I knew this would be too much for you. Simone, what am I going to do with you?”