The King’s Last Song

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?’

Luc shakes his head. ‘No. The packets will have information too. We could photograph what the augur pulled up. The disks.’

The ten torn disks are laid out on the ground. The gold is brown, thicker than paper, but not by much. A light slants sideways across their surfaces, to make the incisions clearer.

Luc can read them.

The text comes in torn snatches across the face of the ten disks. Luc’s breath feels icy as he reads.

…who conserves perpetuity…

…men seek for heaven and its deliverance…

…the ninth day of the moon …

‘We have a saka date,’ Luc announces. The Japanese volunteers stand up to hear. Luc is so skilled at this that he can do the conversion to the European calendar in his head. The text is about a consecration in 1191 AD.

‘It’s twelfth century. The time of Jayavarman Seven.’

‘One hundred leaves from the time of Jayavarman?’ Even Yeo Narith rocks back on his feet. Map looks up, his face falling.

‘Plus que ça,’ mutters Jean-Claude inside the trench. He holds out his hands as if at a Mass. He has brushed aside all the loam. Inside his trench, lined up in rumpled, pitch-coated linen, are fifteen packets of ten leaves each. ‘Plus there is one smaller packet to the side,’ he says.

One hundred and fifty leaves of gold?

Art gets stolen in Cambodia. It gets chopped up, incorporated into fakes, shipped across the world, sold by unscrupulous dealers. If it’s gold, it might get melted down.

Luc turns to Yeo Narith. ‘Who do we trust in the Army?’

William can’t go home.

It’s late at night. The tent glows in the middle of the field like a filament.

Around a campfire, William and Map face each other. Working for the same boss, they should be polite and friendly with each other, but Map won’t even look at William.

Many other people sit drinking coffee: Dik Sangha, officials from APSARA, Map’s captain from the Patrimony Police, and a friend of Teacher Andrade’s from the École Française d’Extrême Orient whose name William keeps trying to catch. Patrimony Police stand guard round the field. They’ve already stopped people with shovels and metal detectors.

Map cradles his gun. He’s been sipping beer all evening and his face is bright red. He grins and tells unsuitable stories.

William is mystified. Teacher Andrade trusts Map and gives him responsibility. Map knows about the Internet and a lot about the monuments. He could teach these things to William, but he won’t.

William thinks: when I started to work for Teacher Andrade, you were friendly. Now you won’t talk to me or even look at me. I’ve done nothing to you.

Map is talking in English. ‘So my older brother and me go to shoot the Vietnamese. They have a big ammo dump behind the Grand Hotel. And my older brother Heng is crazy man. You think I’m crazy, you should see Heng. He strap grenade launcher to his wrist. One launcher on each arm. He fires both at the same time, kapow, kapow. I hear him breaking his wrist. But he keep shooting, shooting. I say, Older Brother, you are a crazy guy. Then all that Vietnamese ammo goes up, huge big fire and I have to drag Heng home.’