Mark de Silva - Square Wave

The sun descended from its apex just as he reached the top. The palace grounds had stood unoccupied for over four hundred years. It was a site for research only now, and so far, beyond the reach of the Europeans. Just as Kandy marked the southern stronghold of the kingdom, Anuradhapura, though more vulnerable, did in the north. Sigiriya lay safely between the two. It left Darasa free, in a less fraught space, to make sense of things, which was what monks of his rank chiefly did.

Scattered throughout the grounds were staircases of varying widths leading only into the sky, the surrounding structures long ago having been dispersed by the elements. Several well-preserved buildings with broad balconies lined the plateau’s far edge, each with eccentrically shallow stairs: sixty of them rising just ten feet.

The largest building, the palace proper, stood to the right, along the southern edge of the plateau, five stories high, each floor narrower than the one below. The inner wall had long ago collapsed, leaving behind a cross-sectional view.

The interior was mostly debris. The outer wall, facing over the cliff’s edge, was in better condition, but large patches of it had fallen away, leaving gaps of a leafy green — forest surrounded the great rock out to the horizon — against the pale gold of the remaining stone.

The vast quantities of rock had been quarried miles away and brought up the sheer walls by an elaborate system of pulleys. All supplies would have been carried on the backs of servants, dragging many to their deaths. The king himself would only occasionally be shepherded from the palace to the long rectangular pools at the foot of the rock, where members of the extended court, and further out, the priesthood, resided.

The walls were engraved with lions and other animals, alongside geometric patterns and what seemed an uninterpreted language. Darasa entered the ruins to finish recording these markings. They might shift the meaning, he thought, of King Kassapa’s description in the Chronicle, and perhaps send a sort of interpretive ripple through the ages down to the current regime and Darasa’s own king, Rajasingha II.

He climbed to the third floor of an adjoining structure to take down the exterior markings on the palace walls. The angular inscriptions seemed to him clearly more than decorative, patterned as they were with something like a syntax, though not of a language like Sanskrit or any of its descendants.

The more he studied it, the more the writing came to resemble not a language but a shorthand, one that would have been filled in contextually during Kassapa’s reign. On either side of the writing were elongated etchings, some of a creature that was a man below and a lion above, depicted beneath a broad parasol, and adjoining other images of palm trees and scabbards.

He copied down the three-inch-high script bounded by these drawings. On the fifth and narrowest floor, a pair of interior columns within the king’s chambers was similarly marked. He kneeled near one of the columns and transcribed the text that wound its way up to the low ceiling in a spiral. After finishing the other column, he sat against the wall and put away the stylus and the palm book. The day was not unusually hot, but an ordinary day was fiery in the midlands, far from the cooling seas.

The king would inquire about the commentary on the Great Chronicle the monk would prepare back in the Highlands, the core of the modern kingdom. He was sure of this. Rajasingha presented himself to the Sinhalese, and to the Europeans equally, as a champion of historical inquiry — perhaps he was — and, more certainly, of the notion of lineal rule of the kingdom tracing back to Kassapa.

The king would be even keener, naturally, to know what the committee of monks was preparing to add to the Lesser Chronicle about his own reign over the last decades. But here Rajasingha’s inquiry could not be direct. By tradition the clerical records were not to be interfered with. If influence were to be exerted, it would have to travel by subterranean channels.

For the moment, Darasa thought, the king might be occupied by more pressing matters — the intensifying Dutch raids from the south, and the more ambiguous, mature standoff with the Portuguese to the north — to bother much with this. Any sort of respite from his “vigilance” would be a relief.

The monk took a sesame ball from his satchel and ate in the heat, thinking of the trip back down the mountain, to the village temple where he’d spent these last nights.

Stagg rose from the desk and pushed open the bathroom door. He tugged on the beaded metal chain that hung at eye-level. The bulb hummed then flickered. It stabilized a faint white and revealed a mirror stained by a mist of toothpaste and a tiny oval sink ringed with millimeter-length hair. He put his hand on the hot water knob of the shower. But he was late. In the many months now since he’d started writing the pieces in earnest, stopping only when the scenes trailed off in his mind, he always was.

From the medicine cabinet he pulled an uncapped bottle of mouthwash, bright green, and gargled with his head held back while pissing into the stained bowl. The sound of disturbed water confirmed his position as the burn of alcohol grew in his mouth till he had to spit it out over the last trickles of piss. He dressed quickly in the clothes on the bed, sank his feet into loafers, and squeezed his laptop into a briefcase, a gift from Renna, that was stiff from underuse.

The air in the hallway was an improvement, cooler, smelling faintly of sawdust. The trip down three flights seemed longer than usual, and he caught himself limping slightly. His Achilles was sore, though he couldn’t think of when or where he might have strained it. Perhaps dragging the girl.

The foyer was flush with sunlight. It streamed through the glass doors and reflected off the concrete stairs outside and the glossy speckled tiling underfoot that smelled of disinfectant. For a moment everything disappeared in the glare.

“This is what,” thomas penerin said, studying the manila-foldered report on the last assault. “Jen Best. Found… Harth, right, well, that says almost nothing. This is what, then? For us.”

“I’ve seen a lot of girls now on that route,” Stagg said. “And no one’s turned up like this.” He picked bits of lint from his sock, which rested on the opposite thigh, his legs being crossed. “Maybe that doesn’t say much. Either way, though.”

“Not really, no. One way counts, Carl. The other is simple assault. Run-of-the-mill police work. We’d turn that over. Even a string of beatings — if that’s all it is, we’re wasting our time. So, does this woman, what happened to her, have anything to do with anything? Jenko, say. Or the elections—”

“Does it matter who wins anymore?” Stagg said. “Sometimes, for a few seconds, I can forget who’s president now. Which is crazy.”

“It matters,” Penerin said.

“A third of them voted last time.”

“And that’s what we’re trying to fix. We have to make it matter to them. Obviously it already does to the ones destroying everything. So as long as you work for me, as long as the government keeps picking up both our tabs, it’ll have to matter to you. So, from all the months you’ve been with us, Carl, can you tell me something?”

A sneer overtook Stagg’s face. “Look, this girl, she got seriously fucked up. But it looked like, to me, she was meant to live, the exact way she’d been fucked up. That’s it. She didn’t say a word, not when the police and the ambulance came either. They must have gotten her name after I left, or from something she had on her. I only know what you’re holding in your hands. And there’s not all that much in the report, beyond the few details I supplied. What’s there to interpret yet? Her empty stare? If it’s speculation — sure, a less-than-murderous ex, maybe. Or a warning for the check that bounced. Or just a dissatisfied customer looking for a refund. There was nothing obviously about… politics — the ‘State’—if that’s what you mean. That I can say.”