Geoff Ryman - The King’s Last Song

The other rocked him by the shoulders. ‘You will have your chance of battle soon enough.’

The little prince cried aloud. ‘We are the soldiers of the world! We are the warriors of the Gods!’

Some of the troops heard him, and they waved and smiled. The sun was in the sky at the same time as a pale daylight moon. Auspicious or what?

The soldiers passed and boring high-rankers followed. Women reclined in carved palanquins. Fly whisks and fans replaced swords. The elephants had a bit more glitter, but who cared? Glitter does not need skill.

One elephant, bigger than the rest, heaved its way through the fog of dust. The howdah was a bit bigger than most, too. An old man wearing a temple-tower tiara stood up in the howdah with all the usual stuff. He had a lean, pinched face like an old woman.

It was not until the man had passed with a forest of parasols and nothing further followed that Prince Hereditary Slave realized: that must have been the King. That old man had been Sun Shield, Suryavarman. The King, it seemed, was just another soldier.

The dust settled, but the thought remained.

Luc Andrade steps down a little stiffly from a white Toyota pick-up.

He feels thin-legged and pot-bellied. Too old really for beige Gap jeans and blue tennis shoes. Out in front of him stretch the plains of Cambodia.

Luc sighs. He loves the heat, the silver sky, and the wild flowers clustering in the shade. The palm trees always remind him of Don Quixote with his lance – tall, stretched thin and riding off into the blue distance. And perhaps of himself.

In the back of the pick-up truck, Map and two of his friends from the Patrimony Police are gathering up tents and rifles. Mr Yeo Narith steps out of the cab. Luc has spent a lifetime reading Cambodian smiles and Narith’s wan, tight smile is still angry.

No one is supposed to excavate anywhere in the precincts of Angkor without an APSARA representative being present. APSARA defends the interests of the artefacts and the monuments. They contend with tourist agencies, art thieves, airways passing too near the monuments, or museums in Phnom Penh – interests of all kinds. The last thing APSARA needs is to find it cannot trust its archaeological partners.

‘ Allons-y ,’ says Luc. Narith is of the generation who finds it easier to speak French. He nods and extends an arm for Luc to precede him down the bank.

Out in the field, the contractor is guarding his find, next to a motorcycle and William, the spare driver.

Luc skitters a little awkwardly down into the field. Underfoot, the harvested rice crackles like translucent plastic straws.

It’s April, the end of the dry season and horribly hot. Luc is Director of the United Nations archaelogical project. Most of his UN dig team have gone home, except for one Canadian excavator and Sangha, the Cambodian dig manager. Work is normally finished by the end of March, but the project might not get financing for next year. Since the JPL/NASA overhead flights four years ago gave them a radar map of the old road and canal system, their trench has uncovered one unremarkable stone yoni and nothing else.

A white sheet is spread out on the ground, and rocks and earth are lined up in order along it. Village children squat, peering at the stones. As Luc approaches, the contractor and William the driver stand up. The children chew the bottoms of their torn T-shirts. The contractor from the university hangs his head and kicks the white dust.

So, thinks Luc, he came out here with William and took a risk. The augur, a long slim white tube a bit like a hunting stick, lies abandoned. The contractor grasps two full lengths of pipe. God knows how he got the augur that deep in all this dry ground. William probably sat on the handles.

The contractor is called Sheridan. He’s a microbiologist, out here to identify where he will core in the rainy season. Like Luc, he works at the Australian National University. The UN dig has paid for only four days of his time.

Sheridan launches into his apologies. They sound heartfelt, but Luc shakes his head. ‘I still don’t understand how it happened. You know the rules.’

‘I knew this was where a bridge crossed a canal. The ground was still very wet, and I thought: why not just do a test, see if this will be wet enough in rainy season …’ His voice lowers. ‘I was trying to save you money.’

At least he hasn’t laid the gold out on the ground for the village children to see. They walk back towards the pick-up to look at the find.

At the top of the embankment, Map guards the truck. Map jokes with someone, an old farmer. The farmer has a face Luc has often seen in Cambodian men of that age. The eyes are sad and insolent all at once. The man glares at Luc over half-moon spectacles and stalks away. Map shakes his head and calls, ‘Hey, Luc!’ then surfs down the embankment on his heavy police boots.

‘Oh-ho, is that guy ever unhappy with me. He came and said this is his field and we can’t stay.’ Map strolls companionably alongside Luc. ‘I told him to go buy a mirror and practise smile. I said that you guys find something that Cambodians can’t use – knowledge.’ Map claps his hands together. ‘He used to be my CO in the Khmers Rouges, and he didn’t like me then, either.’

Map outrages people. He drives the APSARA guides crazy by stealing their business. He exasperates the Tourist Police by taking elderly foreigners to stay in country farmhouses. A single red cotton thread barricades his wrists with some kind of magic and his long fingernails are a mottled white like the inside of oyster shells. Luc once wondered if Map was an exorcist, a kru do ompoeu . Map told him that he uses the fingernails for fighting, ‘like knife’.

But he takes good photographs, speaks French, English and German and knows HTML.

Inside the cab of the pick-up, away from the village children, Sheridan reaches into his rucksack and takes out a disk about twice the size of a silver dollar, dull yellow with crinkled cookiecutter edges. Luc sees Sanskrit.

Gold. Writing. From Angkor.

‘We’ve got to excavate as soon as we can,’ Luc says to Narith. Narith then telephones. They already knew they were going to have to camp out all night to guard the find. Mr Yeo asks for more police, with guns.

Outside, the old farmer marches up and down the dyke. Wind blows dust up around him, Map, all of them, like the smoke of war.

They dig through the long afternoon.

The walls of the tent run with condensed sweat. Luc, two volunteers from the Japanese dig and Jean-Claude from Toronto are crouched inside a trench, brushing away dirt.

Slowly, rows of packets wrapped in linen are emerging.

‘ Meu Deus! ’ mutters Jean-Claude. For some reason he always swears in Portuguese. He gestures towards the packets. ‘There’s at least ten packets there,’ he says to Luc, in French. ‘Ten to a packet, that’s one hundred leaves.’

They’ve found a book. An Angkorean book made of gold.

Map darts from side to side taking photographs from many angles.

William, the motoboy, leans over the trench, looking forlorn. Luc can’t let him leave in case he tells anyone about the find. He’s trapped here. He knows that.

Luc pulls himself out of the trench and gets cold cokes from the chest. He passes one to William.

‘What we’re trying to do,’ Luc explains to William in Khmer, ‘is to get as much information as we can about the earth around the object. See the side of the trench? See, it’s in layers, white soil, brown soil, then black soil? That will tell us a lot about when the leaves were buried.’

William dips and bows and smiles.

Map intervenes. ‘Hey, Luc. You think we should take the book out of those packets and photograph it here?’