The Reckoning (9 page)

“Blackhorse,” Kleat said. He identified the prints as the marks of two armored cavalry assault vehicles, ACAVs, both the same size, one following the other.

“They came this way, up the hill, along the river, chasing a way to cross without the bridge. What more do you need?” he said to Duncan. “They're over there. They're waiting.”

They came to the pass where the stream spread across the wide riverbed, and the Eleventh Cavalry strays had left more prints in the clay. The water, at the deepest point, came axle high to the Land Cruiser, though it built against Molly's door on the upstream side, slapping and gurgling. The moon made a skin of silver on it. Dangling her hand out the window, she found the water had the temperature of blood or bathwater.

“It's got to be one of these drainages,” Duncan muttered at his map. She could hear him back there, twisting the paper to try to fit it to the terrain. Couldn't he see the handle of the Big Dipper, the stars skipping up to the North Star? They weren't lost, only in motion.

She closed her eyes and, midstream, they seemed adrift on a raft. Her feet were wet, and she saw an inch of water on the floor. She laughed.

“You're happy,” said Duncan.

She didn't turn. “Yes,” she said.

It pleased him. That pleased her.

She didn't try to explain her joy. After all these weeks, she felt released. The tension of searching for the pilot, the pushing and pulling of tool against earth, of man against man, civilian against soldier, of Kleat against Duncan, all of it seemed left behind. Her trespass upon the pilot, with her camera, was a thing of the past. The highway and its dark menace were forgotten.

The sun would find them somewhere. That was the heart of it. The farther they got from the main road, the more it felt like she was finally reaching a center. When the time came, one way or another they could always retrace their journey, and eventually she could return to writing her words, publishing her photos, and promoting her name, the maiden name—the only name she knew—of a woman who had forsaken her. For now, she just wanted to keep going.

The river—or her happiness—changed Duncan, too. His anxieties fell away. He put aside his map, and she thought that now they could cast themselves into the journey. They had made their crossing. Their hell-bent midnight ride could slow. She could start to know Duncan without the background noise and her urgency to catch the recovery team's story. They were on their own now, threading up a path across a river that was just a stream upon a mountain that was just a hill, wandering off the maps. Two searchers, that's who they were.

The bones were an excuse. That divorced her and him from Kleat, who was so bound to his dead and his duty. She hadn't come to resurrect soldiers any more than Duncan had. The missing pilot had drawn them as a novelty, an opportunity, nothing more. Now they could enter a territory of the heart.

They had never talked about what preceded Cambodia for him. For a month, they had worked and lived within inches of each other, but she still didn't have a real handle on him. For all his tales of high school football and a dog named Bandit and his summer-long Harley solo to Anchorage and special barbecue recipes and favorite old movies, she had no idea why he'd landed here, or even when. The one time she'd asked, he'd dodged.
Sometimes it feels like I was born here,
he'd said.
Like I'm like some dusty thing out of a Kipling novel, just one more relic of the empire.

Not Kipling, she thought. Conrad. And not Kurtz, not
Heart of Darkness,
but
Lord Jim.
Duncan had secrets, maybe dark secrets or sad secrets or old guilt. One does not go to the jungle out of innocence. He never talked about a wife or children or another woman, never crouched over snapshots of a lost family or a lover who had chosen a different man or died a tragic death. He never mentioned where that part of his life had gone. Survivor guilt, she guessed. Maybe that was what attracted her to him. He seemed to carry her same sense of a past best unrepeated, of a voyage without anchors. Like an orphan, he acted never quite worthy of love. They were perfect fodder for a grail quest, the two of them.

They passed worn blocks of stone in the river wall, evidence of ancient channels. That perked him up.

“Incredible,” he said. “We're looking at water control that predates the Angkor kingdom by centuries, and on the opposite side of the country. A massive hydraulics system in the mountains, for Pete's sake. You need to understand, water is everything here. There's not another country like this on earth. For the Khmers, the world is water. When the monsoon comes, almost half the country vanishes under water. The Tonle Sap River reverses course. Great battles were fought on inland boats. Their civilization was founded on wet rice cultivation. The Angkor empire rose and fell based on their ability to control water. The Angkor kings captured the rain in huge pools and would dole it out in drought years or choke their enemies with thirst. But where did the Angkor genius come from? What sparked their greatness? Who passed to them the divine mandate? Who came before them?”

Luke would have muttered “history” had he been conscious. But he had gone to sleep or was traveling in his head. His eyes were shut. Perhaps his delirium had cycles, or the loss of his secret had emptied him. Hibernation suited him, Molly decided. He looked younger without the junkie eyes. Asleep, he looked resigned to himself.

Trailed by the hulking Mercedes, they wound higher along the contour lines. The moon spun left to right across the windshield, a moving target. Molly let go of the urge to orient herself. There was no longer any question of where they were headed.

The prow of the forest seemed to descend to them. White mist leaked from the throat of the trees. Early morning fog was part of the Cambodian clockwork. But tonight it looked to Molly like a word exhaled, like a syllable spilling downhill to greet her.

To the right and left, creeper vines stitched shut the forest wall. The only possible entry was directly through a break in the screen of trees. She wanted to ask Vin to stop for a picture. But that would have meant setting up a tripod for a time-lapse shot, and it would have been more an emotion than a picture anyway.

“It will be a whole other world in there,” Duncan said. “An ecosystem writing its own rules. You'll see. There are species in these mountains that no one knows exist. The
khiting vor,
practically a unicorn, like a myth, part gazelle with curlicue horns. They say it stands on its rear legs to feed, that it eats deadly snakes. There are herds of white elephants, like ghosts. Peacocks. Langur monkeys with two stomachs. Hundreds of species of moths. And the flowers.”

Teak and gum trees soared. He knew them by shape, and by their Khmer names, too. They reached the outskirts of the fog, and it turned to brilliant milky smoke in their beams. Vin slowed, feeling his way forward. But they had their bearings now, that gaping hole in the forest.

Something tapped against the rooftop. A leaf. A twig.

“What about tigers?”

“These days you see more pelts than paw marks,” Duncan said. “The hill tribes and ex-soldiers are trapping them out. It's obscenely easy. They take an old land mine, hide it under a dead monkey for bait, and boom, jackpot. Skin, meat, claws, and penis…you can make enough money for a Honda Dream. That's the bike of choice here. The tiger parts go to China for folk medicine.”

Another story, another time, she idly thought.

“I wouldn't worry about the big cats. Not this deep. They've never bothered me. This far from people, they don't have a taste for us.”

There was another soft pat on the roof, a light rap, an ounce of pebble, less. Then another. Molly glanced at the ceiling. Another. Tiptoes on the metal.

She frowned, wishing the noises away, guessing what they were.

“It can't be,” she stated firmly. “Tell me it's not starting.”

But it was. Duncan had his fingers against the roof, feeling the minute landings. “The luck,” he said.

The season had beat them.

“I don't believe it,” she groaned. “We're so close.”

They had a deal, though. First rain, turn home. It was all the more imperative now with the river between them and the world.

More soft pats on the roof, little metallic kisses.

“I'm sorry,” said Duncan.

A raindrop slapped the windshield. Molly leaned closer to see it. “That's not rain.” She put her fingertip on the inside of the glass.

It was blood. Gore. With little webbed feet. Molly lifted her finger away.

“Is that a frog?” said Duncan.

He was right. It was a storm of frogs, little tree frogs. They were falling from the sky. She cranked her window shut.

You read of tadpoles being sucked into the heights and growing into young frogs among the clouds. Was this that, she wondered? Did the monsoon have that power?

Then she saw that they weren't falling. They were leaping out from the forest's high branches. Another struck the windshield. Another, and this one didn't splash to bits like the others.

Dead or stunned, the frog stuck in place. Its red and black bands glistened, backlit by the white mist.

Another hit, this one alive. It took position on the glass, head high. The tiny thing looked majestic, like a creature mounting their world, claiming it. Its miniature lungs pulsed.

“What are they doing?” she said.

“They must be drawn by the headlights,” said Duncan. “Or it could be some territorial imperative.”

“They're trying to drive us away?”

“I wouldn't make it too personal,” Duncan said. But his voice was sober.

They began to patter, like small hail, on the hood and roof and windshield. Now that she knew what they were, Molly could see them in the lighted mist with their tiny legs and arms stretched wide.

“Or it could be the typhoon affecting them,” Duncan went on. “Animals are sensitive to change. With the low-pressure cell building, their rhythms go haywire. Lemming behavior. One dives, they all dive.”

“This is awful,” she said.

The pat of bodies became a rattling, a squall of miniature carnage.

“But at least it's not the rain.”

“It's unnatural.”

“It's just a few frogs.”

“A few?”

The windshield was layered with bits of tissue. They were casting themselves down by the scores, catapulting from the trees. She saw a mother, her back swarming with tiny young. The wiper blades went to work and mangled them. The hood looked like a butcher block. Molly hated it. The death and mutilation were senseless.

Plainly, Vin had never witnessed such a thing. He gripped the wheel, and the tattoos on his skinny forearms—crude lines and circles and suns, his magic symbols—rippled. He believed in other worlds. And here was this, this curse, a hailstorm of frogs.

Vin drifted to a halt. He craned his head up to see inside the strange torrent. The banging grew louder. He was staring at her. She saw his fear. It made her more afraid.

She put her hands against the roof, as if it might collapse. The metal throbbed. “We can't stay here.” She had to shout over the noise.

Like vomit against the windshield, the forest puked its creatures at them. It sickened her. She glanced around.

Luke's eyes were closed. How could he sleep through this? And he was smiling.

Duncan said something in Khmer, his tone calm. He said it again. Vin nodded. They lurched into motion.

Duncan spoke into her ear. “It's okay, we're going inside now. They'll stop, Molly.” His hand was on her shoulder.

She could barely see through the plastered glass. Up ahead, like the mouth of a cave, the forest parted its lips. “Faster,” she whispered.

The forest yawned open.

Roots and stones rose up from underneath the fog. Vin picked up speed. The Land Cruiser hopped and bounded, tools rattling in the back.

They entered.

Instantly the darkness changed. The moonlight vanished. It was like mercy. The hailstone beating quit. The frogs stopped.

The wiper blades were squealing on dry glass.

Their battle was over, but Vin didn't slow a bit.

Molly hunched over and peered through her side window like it was a porthole. Dark shapes reeled past, trees as thick as bridge pillars. The Land Cruiser lunged over roots like big swells, throwing her against the door.

Duncan barked something at Vin. The boy ignored him, still racing from the animal assault, driving blind. In a way, Molly was relieved by his dread. It validated her own. His fear gave her a fear to settle. She placed one hand on his arm and found he was quivering.

The wiper blades scratched at the crust of frogs. Forward vision returned in streaks. The mist flared in sudden white eruptions. Blackness and light.

Abruptly a huge face jumped up in front of them. Vin braked and swerved. Even so, they banged against it, not ruinously, but with a jolt.

“My God,” Duncan whispered.

Molly unclenched her hands from her camera.

The stone head was as large as the car.

The wipers clawed at the rusty glass. Duncan patted Vin's shoulder. The wipers stopped. They stared at the head's tilted eyes.

Molly lifted her camera. Fog edged through the dark trees, sliding in slow, soundless white bunches between the strings of vines brewing up around the stone head.

Time had partially melted its demonic rage. The head had rolled onto one rounded jaw, part human, part animal. Its angry, bulging eyes had eroded over the ages. All around lay more pieces of toppled giant statuary.

“What on earth?” said Molly.

“A warrior icon,” said Duncan. “A holy warrior.”

“With fangs?”

“A wrathful deity,” Duncan said. “A guardian.”

“Guarding what, though?”

“That's the question. I don't know. They usually don't appear singly. There must be more like him around here, sentinels to warn the enemy away. But away from what? And look at the style, crude by Angkor standards. Primitive. Old. Molly, this goes back.” His mind was churning.

She wasted a shot through the crappy windshield.

“Something's out there, Molly. This is big.” His voice grew larger. “Why didn't you tell us?” he said to Luke.

But their guide was deep in REM sleep. Molly could see Luke's eyes darting beneath the closed lids, stormed by dreams.

Duncan rolled down his window for a better look, and Molly braced for the amphibious stink. But the air carried a rich, potent scent full of flowers and fertile soil and, for all she knew, tigers and old rain.

“How can this be?” he murmured to himself. His excitement infected her.

“I need pictures,” she said suddenly, and fumbled in the camera bag between her feet, feeling for her wide-angle lens and the strobe flash.

She opened her door. The story quickened in her, morphing, branching off into a completely different narrative. They had set out to find one thing, a few bones from a war, only to discover something monumental. Punt the war, this was Indiana Jones territory.

The story would begin here, she determined, fog swirling, with the blood-encrusted Land Cruiser held at bay by this ferocious head. She backed off to shoot the vehicle, its fender bent around the head. Pieces of hundreds of frogs smeared the grille and hood and rooftop.

She angled right to get Duncan's stunned expression as he approached the beast. Her flash made small explosions. He touched the carved face. He ran his palms over its blind eyes. He peeled off rug sheets of lime- and rose-colored moss.

Vin stayed inside his getaway car, engine idling, as spooked as a thoroughbred.

Light from the headlight beam played up the great flat nose, a ridiculous shot. They'd discovered a nose? She compensated with her own light, prowling for more shots.

“I know him,” Duncan said. “
Ganas,
they're called. He's a kind of Buddhist/Hindi hero, like a Superman for the faithful.”

“A fetish,” she said, prompting him, capturing his moment of discovery.

“Much more than that,” he said, “a destroyer of ignorance, a protector of the Way. A guardian, not just of a people, but of a whole cosmology.”

“A hill tribe?”

“Something this large? It's the tip of an iceberg.”

She liked that, a tropical iceberg. “A city?” she said. Molly wanted this for him, whatever it was. All his years of humble, anonymous, lonely searching were coming together here tonight.

The truck arrived, adding more light to the display.

Doors opened behind the rank of headlights. She heard a curse, Kleat tripping on a root. Samnang materialized from the rags of fog. She snapped him pressing his hands together in a
sampeah
to the demon head. Then he kept on walking into the darkness.

Kleat joined them, wiping the humidity from his glasses. The circles under his eyes were discolored pouches. Molly had never seen him like this, his bluff vigor drained, that muscular face betraying frailty. He fit the steel rims back onto his face.

Molly lowered her camera. Edit. Delete. Kleat wasn't going to be part of this story.

“Were you trying to have a wreck?” he said. “You took off like a bolt. Now look. You're lucky it wasn't worse.”

“The frogs,” she said. Now that the danger was past, she tried to make light of it. “We thought it might be a spring shower.”

Kleat peered at her from beneath his thick bone of a brow, then turned to the stone head. “It would be a lot easier to go around the rocks, not through them,” he said.

“Rocks?” Duncan said. “This could go back to the Funan empire, a thousand years before the Angkor regime. The time of Christ, of Rome. It's practically a myth, like Atlantis or Babylon. Funan wasn't even its real name. That's the Chinese transliteration for “phnom,” or hill. It was mentioned in early Chinese travel accounts, lost fragments referenced in later accounts. And look, here we are on a hill.”

“Save it for the lecture circuit,” said Kleat.

Molly held her hand against the bright lights. Vin's older brothers were scolding him for damaging the bumper. Luke lay piled asleep against his door.

“We didn't come for this,” said Kleat.

“But this is what we've come to,” Duncan marveled.

“Irrelevant.” Kleat snapped it like a whip. “They're waiting for us.” His dead.

She no longer thought of them as hers. In the holes, working the screens, gathering the facts, shedding blood on the airplane metal, she had felt a contract with the bones. Not anymore. The captain had not confiscated her camera, his way of protesting what his superiors were making him do. But the exile had stolen her pride of place. The bones were meaningless to her now.

There was a movement in the darkness, and Kleat aimed his big flashlight cop-style. Samnang appeared among the trees in his neat white shirt. He blinked at the lights.

“The boulevard goes on,” he announced.

Intent on the stone head, they had failed to notice the road beneath their feet. Even with roots and rocks shrugging up through its surface, it did resemble a Paris boulevard. Paved with stones, it stretched thirty feet from side to side, and extended off into the pit of the forest.

“Where does it lead?” said Duncan.

“Who knows? It goes on,” said Samnang.

“Then let's keep going,” Kleat said. He clapped his hands. They returned to their vehicles.

“It could be nothing,” Duncan cautioned as they drove on. Molly could hear his hope. First the channel stones lining parts of the river, now the carved head and this decaying road.

She reached back and laid a fist on his knee. “But also it could just be something,” she said.

He closed his hands around her fist. His palms were wet. He looked dazed and childlike.

Chastened by his accident, Vin took it slowly, steering around big stone tiles tipped up by time. Fog curdled in pools. Enormous trees bracketed the road. Their seeds had taken root with time, and younger trees grew in the middle of the avenue, rupturing more tiles.

“Look how big around these monsters are,” Duncan said. “Things grow fast here. But this is old growth. Very old. I can't believe the loggers haven't plundered it.”

No spindly, fibrous sugar palms in here. No fields of grass. No paddies. No sky. The trunks were like columns of skycrapers, red and gray and black and tan. Their massiveness had the look of a great cosmic weight being held aloft. As they crawled over and around the roots and rocks, it was like sliding over immense tendons and slippery bone. She could imagine the ribs of Jonah's whale.

The fog puddled in recesses as dark as side canyons. It hung like linen rags among the branches.

“Look,” said Duncan, his window wide open. His wobbling light picked out another carved face watching them. There were more. Half buried among the trees, big stone
ganas
—some with the heads of monkeys and hook-beaked birds of prey—loomed among the branches. Gods appeared, their eyes half shut, their mouths half smiling. The statues kept pace with their advance. They seemed aware. The smiles seemed too serene.

Molly struggled to get a feel for their welcome. Even the times she'd visited Super Max in southern Colorado to shoot portraits of mass murderers, there had been a sense of control. This was different. They'd landed among giants. Giants wearing the masks of good and evil.

“The city wall,” said Duncan.

It appeared ahead of them among the complex of vegetation. The closer they drove, the more it took shape, a long, high barrier of mineral colors in the night. It seemed to be forming from their presence, taking on detail out of their expectation of its details. The stone blocks were cabled with vines. The vines had fingers. Ferns grew from the joints.

“It must be twenty feet tall.” His breathing had tripped into high gear, Molly could hear it. Then she realized it was her own breathing.

She bent to see through the windshield mottled with gruel, trying to make out the parapets or battlements, whatever you called them. Gaps plunged like missing teeth, muscled open by fat towers of trees with bark as smooth as pigskin. There was no way to tell which was winning, the forest or the dead architect.

“Here we go,” Duncan said. “The gateway.”

A broad, crumbling tower straddled the wall, a tunnel running through its base. Faces crowned the tower, each staring sightlessly in a different direction. The tunnel lay at the center of their collective chest. One entered through the heart of gods. Vin flipped his light beams from low to high to low. The eyes stared down at them and then away.

Vin inched in.

“It's the perfect traffic control,” Duncan remarked. “You could stop any invaders with a few rocks piled inside. In fact, I wonder if this tower's rigged to drop its guts.” He cast around with his flashlight.

Molly had never suffered from claustrophobia, but the moment they entered, the walls seemed to close in on her. A sort of nausea gripped her. She felt physically sick. It went beyond that. She felt trapped, as if she were calcifying inside her skin.

They emerged on the far side and the feeling lifted. She cranked at her window handle for fresh air.

“You're sweating,” Duncan said.

“No, I'm cold,” she said. But her face was dripping. Duncan laid his
kroma
around her bare neck, and it carried his body heat.

She had expected to drive into a city in ruins, but there was more road. Elevated upon a spine of solid, squared stone, a causeway ran in a straight line, bound on either side by vast pools of water that had degraded into swamps fouled with mangrove trees. Their serpentine roots breached and looped back into the water.

“You're looking at the wealth of kings,” said Duncan.
“Barays
—reservoirs—with enough water to feed a whole people. This could be the prototype for Angkor. It could be the genesis for the very idea of Cambodia.”

They came to a gauntlet of stone cobras carved along the roadside.
“Nagas,”
Duncan said, identifying them. “Water snakes that figure in all kinds of Asian creation myths. From
naga
you get
nagara,
Khmer for ‘The City.' ”

There were at least two dozen of the fantastic creatures arranged along the roadway. Some had snapped off at the neck and fallen into the pools. Most were intact, rising higher than the Land Cruiser, their hoods spread open to expose multiple heads with fangs bared.

As they motored slowly through the dangling moss, the water stirred. Molly could hear it down there. On an impulse, she held her camera to the open window and fired blindly, triggering the flash. Her light ricocheted off the black water. The sound stopped. She looked at the LCD to see what her camera had seen.