of the sky and the blue of the reflecting paddies and the blue of the horizon. Anxiously smudged with faint cloud.
No one spoke for many minutes as they made a lonely ascent through tiny hamlets and empty woodland. The return to the tranquillity of deep rural Laos was a small welcome death. They passed villages where girls threw tennis balls at young men, all of the men in suits, the girls in splendid dresses. The jeep sped on, urgent and noisy in the quiet of the woods.
‘A mating ritual,’ said Chemda. ‘They sing to each other and throw tennis balls, at New Year. That way they can find husbands . . . and wives . . . This damn phone.’
Chemda was again frustratedly checking her cellphone. But she shook her head. Agitated. Frightened. Determined. No signal. She leaned and asked Tou:
‘Tou! Where are we going? How can we get out of Laos – we need to find a way out!’
The lad turned.
‘Yes yes big danger. But Yeng say he have friends. We go. But we drive long-time long-time. Road dirty.’
Jake guessed immediately who these friends must be: Hmong fighters, tribal renegades, hiding out in the rugged hills. They were surely beyond government jurisdiction: this was surely rebel territory. He had been in just enough lawless regions to recognize the sensation: that liminal frisson as you passed into a no-man’s-land, the interzone, where the laws of the city do not apply.
That’s where they were now. There were no police here. No civilian laws. Just endless thick forest and orchids and fungi and wild camellias astir in the sunny breeze; and in the distance, thin strings of waterfall tasseling in the wind as they dropped from the misty peaks of the high Cordillera.
The journey was lengthy and anxious. Every so often they passed clearings in the forest where Hmong children, carrying wicker baskets full of freshly chopped hardwood, stopped dead and pointed, evidently stunned, astounded: wholly gobsmacked by what they saw in the jeep.
One boy gazed Jake’s way, his mouth hanging wide open, goggling and laughing. The child’s mother came behind, pushing a long-handled wooden wheelbarrow.
She also paused and stared at Jake; her expression was so shocked it was beyond alarm, it was pure incomprehension: like she was seeing an extraterrestrial.
Tou laughed, unhappily.
‘They have never seen a white man before, ever. You are like a god. Or a demon.’
A cloud of grey dust showed a vehicle approaching: coming the other way. It was an army vehicle. Troops in khaki were hanging on the back of the truck. The fear was congealing. No one spoke in the jeep. What troops were these? But the soldiers just gazed vacantly at them, half curious, half bored. Tired maybe. The apathetic gaze of conscripts across the world.
Nothing further happened. The army truck disappeared. The trail ran its ragged way through the hills, sidling around mountains. Getting higher, giddily high. The first hints of mist and cloud appeared; bashful centaurs and unicorns of cloud that fled as they approached.
It was darkening fast, it was nearly night. How long had they been driving? Chemda was half asleep, her head bobbing against the glass of the jeep window. Jake yearned to stop, to get out, to take a pee, to stop. But could they risk it? Maybe the police were just a few kilometres back. Maybe they were closing.
But they had to stop – so they stopped. For a second. In the middle of the dark jungle. Now it was truly night: and it was cold up here, in the hills. Jake walked a few yards into the dank and clammy darkness of the chattering forest, full of night sounds. Frogs croaking. A concerto of insects. Nocturnal howlings in the distance. He thought of the wild cats and strange jungle dogs he’d seen in Ponsavanh market.
He relieved himself. Trying not to make the mental association: all the blood, the blood in the muzzles of the dead jungle dogs, the blood on the floor of the hotel room: the man with a gaping throat, hung by his ankles to bleed out like a hoisted bush pig. Probably Samnang was killed by the police. But why? And why so cruelly? Was it really to frighten them? Surely murder and death was frightening enough.
Jake shuddered. Sometimes, despite his convinced and angry atheism, he could sense death approaching, like a black god, a god he didn’t believe in who yet still hated him. I got your mother and your sister, now you.
The moon was lonely overhead. Fireflies twinkled blue and green like shy and tiny ice-stars in the undergrowth.
He walked back to the car and Chemda talked, nervously, as they drove on. She was talking of ancient history: speculating about the remains they had found in the jars. Jake marvelled that he had forgotten about them. In the midst of it all he had mislaid that image: the skulls kept in the jars. The sad old bones. Reproachful. You left us behind.
No. He got a grip on himself.
No.
Chemda was talking about the prophecies of the ancient Khmer.
‘If the people in the jars, the people who made the jars, if they were Khmer . . . maybe they really were Black Khmer.’
‘And they are?’
‘The ancient Khmer: a cursed people. There are stories in the Khmer tradition of the earliest Khmers being a kind of terrible breed – no that’s the wrong word – of making a terrible mistake. Losing God. Losing faith. Becoming violent. What is the prophecy – Tou mentioned it.’
The jeep’s headlights were struggling against the dark and the mist of the mountain forest. Chemda remembered the words:
‘A darkness will settle on the people of Cambodia. There will be houses but no people in them, roads but no travellers; the land will be ruled by barbarians with no religion; blood will run so deep as to touch the belly of the elephant. Only the deaf and the mute will survive.’
Tou was silent, Yeng was silent. Jake nodded. He didn’t believe in prophecies, he didn’t believe in legends, he didn’t believe – he certainly didn’t believe in any kind of God, what kind of brutal God would allow all the terrors of the world? The Khmer Rouge? The death of children? His sister? But the skulls in the jar: they were certainly real; he had seen them, and the holes carved in their foreheads.
Why?
Chemda’s words echoed his thoughts.
‘It is highly suggestive. What happened on the Plain of Jars two thousand years ago? To the Black Khmer? Maybe they did something terrible – to their gods – to each other. That is the prophecy. That then is why they would be cursed. Ah. It could explain the legends.’
‘It’s like a kind of Noah legend, of a Flood. God wiping out the people as revenge.’
‘Yes,’ said Chemda. ‘And also no. And, ah, I still don’t know why this so upset Doctor Samnang.’
Jake turned from her and looked out of the viewless window. Out there it was cold and dark and chilling, like a sickening. The jungle was shivering. Feverish and clammy.
Where were they going to sleep? Were they ever going to sleep? Devil black darkness had descended on them, broken by the feeble beams of the headlights. They were churning mud now, deep gloopy mud. The fireflies twinkled. Above them shone the moon, bemused, like a disembodied head, like the pale round face of a grieving mother in a black Islamic headscarf. The jungle yawned and sucked. The mud sucked them further in. Further and further. And at last Jake fell asleep.
He dreamed of a man throwing a tennis ball. A tall dark man. A little girl picked it up. Her face was blemished with a vivid, portwine birthmark.
He woke with a startled pain. Tou was shaking him roughly awake.
How long had he been sparked out?
It was dawn. They were on the lip of a canyon: a long mist-churned valley stretched ahead, and led down to a flat expanse, with a kind of airstrip and a dilapidation of buildings: low cabins, concrete and steel – but tumbledown and old. And there were ruined roads, strangled with weeds, or so it looked from this distance.