The Map of Lost Memories (34 page)

Simone lowered her head, and if Irene had not known her better, she would have thought she saw shame on her face. Nearly inaudible, she said, “This is her fault.”

“What are you talking about?” Louis asked.

Simone eyed Clothilde already hurrying back, carrying a wet towel and a tin of crackers. “This is your fault. You’re ruining everything. If you weren’t here, I’d be in charge.”

“No, Simone,” Louis said, with resolve, “you can’t blame Clothilde for this.”

Rather than lash out, Simone stared up at him, her eyes sunk into their sockets. She wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist, and with this defeated gesture Irene realized that it was more than dislike, what Simone felt for Clothilde. It was jealousy, and Irene understood it, because it was
warranted. With her knowledge and her loyalty, with the mere fact of her stability, Clothilde had taken the place that Simone had hoped to occupy—a place Irene had wanted Simone to occupy when they first met. Irene was saddened by Simone’s disgrace, but she did not know how to mend the situation, for Simone was in no shape to take charge of anything, not even herself.

Morosely, Simone said to Clothilde, “I still don’t even understand why you’re here. This has nothing to do with you.”

Clothilde examined each person in the group in turn before handing the towel to Louis. For a moment it seemed that she was going to walk away. Then, with her eyes on no one, she said, “Do you think I want to be here? I’m doing this for him, because he saved my daughter. He saved me. He gave me a normal life, or as normal a life as a woman like me can expect. Do you
really
think I’m taking pleasure in any of this? Do you think I enjoy watching the way you treat my country? I should leave you to fend for yourselves.”

With this outburst, Irene recalled the beginning of the expedition and how coolly Clothilde had talked of using Kiri. That indifference was such a contrast to her words in the hut in Leh, and to her anger right now. “Please,” Irene said, “we need you, don’t go.”

“I can’t.” Clothilde looked beaten. “Everything he’s promised me, everything I need for my daughter, it’s all in your hands.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll find out soon enough. It’s in his will. He’s left me a trust, with you in charge of it. It’s up to you to pay me if I follow through with his plans.”

“And what are his plans?” Irene asked.

Drumming her thumb against the lid on the tin of crackers still in her hand, Clothilde did not appear to have heard Irene’s question. “He warned me that you would all be difficult, but I didn’t realize how serious he was.” Her gaze cleared a boneyard of toppled tree trunks, settling on the sentinel Brau who had followed them into the woods. He had lowered his musket and aimed it, as he always did when he was the one on duty, idly sighting them down the barrel. “I never imagined the jungle would be the least of my worries.”

Louis wanted Simone to ride on one of the oxcarts, but she refused, saying, “I
need
to walk.” Finally, he accepted that she was going to have her way, and the expedition started off again. But they had made it no more than another hour up the trail when Xa raised his machete.

Somehow Irene knew, they all knew, simply by the way he motioned, carving into the air with the blade of his knife, not to move, not to make a single noise.

The cobra glided onto the path in front of them.

The
naga
spirit of the Khmer, the serpent gatekeeper of Angkor, slithered out of the myths only three feet from Xa’s son. It rose, its fan unfolding slowly, its hood flaring until its sloped eyes gazed out from a brown cape. Kiri’s scrawny target of a chest was bare. The snake was nearly his height.

With a single snap of its venomous fangs, the cobra could kill an elephant. Blood rushed to Irene’s head, blurring her vision, but still she saw the muscles tense in Xa’s mahogany arms and the tattooed serpents strain up his back. His grip tightened around the handle of his machete, and for once Irene was able to interpret what he was thinking. Could he act fast enough? Was there any such thing as fast enough? She would have looked away, but it felt as if the slightest movement could kill the boy, and even blinking seemed a dangerous thing to do.

“Oh,” Clothilde gasped.

Beyond the cobra stood one of the Brau, a bony man with the face of an ascetic. His body was still as death. Irene had not heard him, she had not felt him, but he had bypassed all of them and was behind the snake, within reach of it, his own machete lifted. His eyes were ferocious, and she shut her own as the snake lunged and metal slashed the air. The thud was blunt and sickening. Kiri shrieked. Simone screamed, and Irene saw her kneeling on the ground holding the child tightly in her lap.

“What do we do?” Irene asked, seeing the despair on Xa’s face.

“The first aid kit!” Louis shouted.

Marc was already running back to the oxcarts.

But Kiri was struggling to free himself from Simone, and the stunned
adults realized that what could have happened had not. The relief would take hours to sink in. Scooping up the two pieces of the dead snake, the Brau carried them back to his fellow villagers. Clothilde dug out the thermos of lukewarm tea and passed it around, everyone drinking from the same cup as they waited for Xa to regain his composure. But he was in shock, staring blankly at the ground where the snake had been.

As Clothilde started toward him, Simone touched her arm. “Let me. Please.”

Clothilde nodded.

Simone went to Xa, whispering, soothing. He whispered back.

“What’s he saying?” Irene asked.

“If we’re serious about keeping Kiri safe, then we’ll take him out of the jungle with us when we go.” Although Simone appeared to be weaker than ever, there was a steadiness to her words, as if by being sick she had purged herself of some degree of instability. “And if we do that, Xa will continue to play our game and pretend to believe our story.”

That Xa understood the situation did not surprise Irene. She watched the boy dancing after the Brau, hissing triumphantly at the severed snake. “Tell him we want to do whatever we can for his son.”

“Do you mean that?” Simone asked.

Xa was looking at Irene expectantly, and she saw in the old man’s expression the same helplessness that had been in her father’s face during the months after her mother died. She understood for the first time not only the burden that had been accepted by Mr. Simms but the relief that her father must have felt in being able to count on his help. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

Early that evening, as the sun descended, clouds dispersed into a metallic froth over the darkening sky, and wind whipped the treetops into a frenzy. An unseasonable night storm was coming in, and it would be imprudent to try to take on the ever-narrowing trail in a downpour. In an overgrown resting area, the coolies cut away long grasses and tramped on the remains before setting up camp. The day had been tiring in more than just
the usual ways. It had been emotionally punishing, and the group was worn down, all but Simone, who had miraculously improved. Though she was not well, she was not incapacitated, which was the state Irene had expected her to be in. She had even managed to make a batch of gintonics and was carrying the glasses around on a tray.

Sitting in a canvas chair, as Marc applied Unguentine to the crosshatch of scratches on her cheek and neck, Irene watched the Brau. They had started their own fire in a clearing behind the tents. Ragged strips of the cobra’s skin were strung on forked branches over the flames. As usual, one of the men stood sentry, squatting on an oxcart with a musket in his arms, his eyes fixed on the foreigners.

“What are they doing with the snake?” Irene asked Clothilde, declining the drink Simone offered.

“They’re preparing to make a sacrifice,” Clothilde answered, taking a glass.

Irene had bathed as best she could in a makeshift tin-bowl sink. She had changed into clean clothes and loose canvas shoes to relieve her swollen feet, but none of this tempered the foreboding that came with Clothilde’s answer, swift as the snake that had crossed their path. According to Clothilde, they could reach the temple by tomorrow afternoon. In less than twenty-four hours they would, or would not, discover the scrolls, and with them the entire time would be these Brau, who could sneak up silently behind a rearing cobra and strike it dead.

“What is the sacrifice for?” she asked.

“I have seen a child bitten by a cobra. I held him through the seizures. I watched him take his last breath. Still, it’s not the snake that frightens me. It’s the snake’s spirit that I respect and fear,” explained Clothilde. “It’s the same for these Brau. The one who saved the boy, he will eat the snake’s heart and pray it will give him strength to fight off the
naga
’s spirit when it comes for him tonight.”

Intent on maintaining the minutiae of the expedition, Louis looked up from the screwdriver he was using to tighten the eyepiece on a pair of field glasses. “Superstition has always fascinated me, how half of the world has found a way past it—the advanced half, I might add—and the other half is still dominated by it.”

“I have lived in both worlds, and I have yet to find reason to stop believing in the spirits,” Clothilde said.

Carefully massaging the antiseptic into Irene’s skin, Marc asked, “What are they going to sacrifice?”

Clothilde motioned to May-ling, perched in Simone’s lap. “They caught a gibbon about an hour ago.”

At that instant Irene heard the first agitated cry of a wild animal. The air smelled deceptively civilized, of citronella and the leather boots drying in front of the flames, but the Brau had circled their own rising fire, chanting softly, stirring the night with a rhythmic moan that was echoed by stalks of bamboo groaning together against the storm. “I wish they’d chosen a place out of sight,” she said. Any curiosity she might have had about the ritual was overpowered by its eeriness and her growing apprehension.

Chuckling as he polished the lenses of the glasses, Louis glanced at Marc. “Maybe it’s biology that makes women more susceptible to hocus-pocus than men.”

The Brau tramped in a back and forth pattern around their fire, while the coolies sat in the brush and watched. The wind picked up, adding a restless clacking to the plaint of the bamboo. “My daughter came to me once in Shanghai,” Marc said, the reflection of flame wavering in his eyes. “Ghosts only appear when something isn’t finished.”

“Hell, Rafferty,” Louis chided, “how much opium did you smoke that night?”

Irene flinched as Marc’s fingers dug into her skin, roughly rubbing buffalo tallow over the inflamed blister that cupped her palm.

There was silence around the campfire, and it took a moment for Louis to realize the harshness of what he had said. “That was unnecessary.” He set his glasses aside. “This has been quite the day. Simone, I’ll take one of those drinks, if you’re still offering.”

Simone handed him a gin-tonic, then sat back in her chair and pulled her velvet jacket tighter around her. “The fact is, Louis,” she said, “human beings all need superstition to some degree. Without anything to believe in, life is simply too hard. Even you worship the Angkor temples. The secular direction the world is headed, it’s dangerous, don’t you think?”

She sounded so logical that everyone stared at her as if she were speaking in tongues.

The Brau’s chants grew louder, coarser, casting a haunting baritone over the campsite. A dagger of lightning stabbed the forest yards from the encampment, and the chanting intensified. The expedition’s stallion stamped its hooves, and the mares brayed in frightened reply.

“Too close for comfort,” Marc muttered toward the sky.

“The French have taken all of the Cambodians’ power,” Simone said. “The government has taken almost everything, except this—their beliefs. Why shouldn’t they cling to their so-called hocus-pocus?” She faltered and her eyes widened as an inhuman shriek splintered the night.

The Brau who had saved Kiri’s life seemed to be rising out of the fire. His brown skin dripped sweat as he clutched a knife in one hand and a limp gibbon in the other. Its throat was slit. The rush of its blood gleamed in the firelight. The Brau’s tribesmen undulated around him, propelled by hemp and the wind. He threw the hemorrhaging ape to the ground and raised an earthenware jug to his lips.

Simone sheltered May-ling inside her coat.

Transfixed, Clothilde whispered, “Rice wine mixed with the snake’s blood.”

Lightning flared again, and the floodgates were ruptured. The rain struck fast and hard, and everyone scrambled to their feet to run for shelter. The stallion had broken loose, galloping toward the camp chairs with two coolies stumbling behind it. Marc and Louis darted forward to cut off the spooked horse. With Simone gripping one arm and Clothilde grabbing for the other, Irene ducked to rescue her map case from the ground beside her chair and barely dodged out of the animal’s way. As she skidded through the mud, the mares ran free around her, bawling as lightning shattered the dark, illuminating the entirety of the night so that for an instant Irene saw the Brau racing toward the camp, machetes and axes raised.

Her breath came in short, petrified gasps as the Brau surged through a frenzy of coolies and horses, a sable riot tearing saddlebags, slashing tents, smashing crates.

“Get down!” Clothilde screamed, and over this Simone shouted in
French for Xa, having forgotten in the madness that he did not speak the language.
“Qu’est-ce qui se passe? Qu’est-ce qui se passe?”
But Xa and Kiri had vanished, and everyone knew exactly what was happening. Knew finally why the chief had sent his men: to prevent the foreigners from reaching the temple. But how far would they go, fueled by drugs and blood sacrifice and the storm?

The shadows of two Brau found the shadows of the expedition’s rifles and beat them against the trunk of a tree. Simone clambered through the mud, calling frantically, “May-ling! I can’t find May-ling!” Marc caught hold of a horse. His fingers tore at its mane, but he could not tame its panic. If Louis was out there, he was not visible, and Irene could see less and less as the rain drenched her vision. Clothilde forced her into the swampy grass, hissing, “Stay down,” but Irene struggled against her. She had to defend what she’d come all this way to do. She had to drive the Brau the hell out of there before someone was hurt. She crawled toward Marc, shouting, “Your gun! Give me your gun!”