The Reckoning (13 page)

She'd forgotten that Duncan didn't wear a watch. And yet he carried an antique compass in his briefcase. She'd have to ask about the contradiction another time, one more quirk to slip into her book.

“We left camp hours ago,” she said. “We should think about getting back. Don't you want to take a look at the city?” In her mind, the road leading from the tunnel would be a direct shortcut to the head of the stairs.

Duncan eyed the ruins drifting in the mist, and then the path continuing along the wall. She cut off his thinking. “The wall could go on for miles,” she said. Let him connect his circle another day. The mist was thinning. She wanted to see.

“You're right.” He nodded, then stepped back. She led them away from the sealed exit, in from the wall and toward the ruins they enclosed.

Only now did she discern that there was a road underfoot. Roots burst up through the ground, as high as their shoulders. The paving stones had buckled in waves, or split open in grassy zigzags. They passed between pyramids and terraced buildings. Strangler figs occupied rooftops and walls, like sea monsters with waxy brown tentacles. The careful architecture looked squashed.

Corridors branched off the main avenue, impassable, colonized from side to side with primordial trees. They crossed a bridge over a dried-out canal with little landing porches leading up to dark holes of doorways. “Like Venice,” she said, “a city of water.”

Every bend promised a secret. She had to discipline her photography. The Nikon would hold only so many images, and it was a battery hog. She got Duncan clambering across the wreckage of another bridge, this one pierced by a mahogany giant. She shot spires soaring like delicate, baroque rocket ships, their needles pricking the lower canopy and disappearing from view. She took six shots of a Buddha the length of two whales, lying on his side, head pillowed on one hand like a child lazing away a summer day. She could spend a whole week with him alone.

Everywhere she turned, the city offered itself to her, a prehistoric vision. Her wide-angle lens was not wide enough. The place defied her.

Baby steps, she reminded herself. She was intensely aware of the sum of the place, the notion of a grand design. Duncan was right, it would take years to decode. A lifetime.

He found a coin woven into the belly of a discarded bird's nest. Only Duncan, in the midst of a lost city, would have thought to look in a nest that had fallen from the branches.

“Do you know who this is?” He handed the coin to Molly. One side was scaled with verdigris, the other bore a crude profile. “I've seen one other like it, in a book. It's Antoninus Pius, the second-century Roman emperor.” He was awestruck. “Whoever they were, these people were part of a trade network going all the way to the heart of the Roman Empire.”

They entered a canyon of carved panels. Red, gray, and blue lichen plastered the bas-relief in neon blotches. It was like falling into myth. Monkey gods and human warriors waged war with exotic weapons. Concubines lounged, children played. Dancers' fingers curved like currents of water. A majestic peacock was oblivious of two crocodiles stalking it with wide-open jaws.

She and Duncan moved slowly, like lovers in an art gallery, occasionally admiring a find, then drifting apart to continue their separate investigations. The canyon seemed to contain the germs of every kind of fable and myth. The carving was peculiar in its style and demanded her concentration.

Here was a dragon rising from the sea. Here was a great fire set by invaders with spears, and a murderer stabbing his brother. She tried connecting the stories in order, and realized that every arrangement could be disconnected and rearranged to tell other tales. Was the dragon a storm? Were the invaders possibly saviors? Was the fire renewal, not destruction? Was the killer actually a hero? It went on like that.

Molly gave up with her camera. She touched the carvings. They touched her. It was hard to explain. It went beyond seduction. The walls contained her. They invited her to read herself among the carvings. It was as if she inhabited the stone.

Here was a woman exploring a garden. Here was an infant adrift on a river. Here was a woman about to stab herself. Reverse the order: Here was her mother, here the orphan, here the searcher.

She didn't know she was crying until Duncan laid one hand on her shoulder. He saw what she was looking at. It embarrassed her, and he saw that, too.

“Ancestors,” he said. “The place is full with them.”

“I don't know why I bother with her,” said Molly. “Kleat's right. She was just a hippie chick. A suicide. One more lost child.”

“It's not that easy with ghosts,” he said.

“I found her, though. That should be enough.”

He ran his fingers above the stone, not touching the lichen, only isolating the story. “You still have questions. What else is a ghost but a question?”

“I know everything I need to know,” said Molly. “She showed up in Breckenridge with a baby in her arms. The old mining towns were going through this Neil Young
After the Gold Rush
kick, kids—hippies—settling into shacks, you know, letting their freak flags fly. She knitted hats and made candles with flowers in them. She sold them from a cardboard box. She didn't have the sense to get food stamps, so neighbors brought her meals. People stacked firewood by our trailer in the winter.”

“And your father?”

“Which one? It was the Age of Aquarius. I doubt he ever knew I existed. And what would I do with him anyway?”

“You're probably right.”

Molly brushed at the lichen, and if she was destroying a priceless carving, Duncan didn't reprimand her. “She would sing sad songs on the streets,” she said. “An old priest told me that. She had a beautiful voice. Ballads. Hymns. Dirge music.”

“Yes?”

“She died of a broken heart, he said. My poor, crazy mother.”

“And so you're crazy, too?”

She looked at him, and he was not Kleat taunting her. He was Duncan. “On bad days, I wonder,” she said.

“And the good days?”

“On the good days I sing.”

“Sad songs?”

He had her. She could not help but smile. “Maybe.”

“Then maybe, if I'm quiet, I'll hear you,” he said.

“So you're counting on good days ahead, Mr. O'Brian?”

“Days?” He opened his arms to the city. “I'm counting on years. I could spend the rest of my life in here. I was born for this.”

A single gunshot broke their reverie.

At the crack of the bullet, as if the skin of the place had been punctured, the mist drew off in a sudden rush. It didn't burn away; the sun could not penetrate the triple canopy. It simply lifted and was gone.

They were surrounded—dwarfed—by those god heads and demon faces and the dreams of architects raised in stone and by this complicated forest. The canopy stretched overhead like an umbrella with veins. Molly felt made up, as if the giant stone heads among the trees were dreaming them all into existence.

She had forgotten about the others. Hours had passed. She could not read the green twilight. It seemed lighter without the mist, and yet dark for her sense of the time. Could it be late afternoon so soon?

Suddenly she was starving.

They followed the echo of the gunshot out of the canyon. It took some searching to locate the head of the stairs. Molly could barely distinguish between one building and another. She was in sensory overload, drained from too little sleep and too much emotion, way too much. She hadn't experienced so many raw feelings in years, all packed into the space of a single day. The city was like a fuse. One sensation seemed to trigger another in a chain reaction of old fears and repressed memories and anger and wild hope.

Luckily, Duncan had an instinct for the ruins. After a few false turns, he brought them to the rim with its pink sandstone
nagas
and the staircase. With the mist cleared, the terminus sprawled beneath them, a grand cul-de-sac in a bowl of steeply terraced walls. Trees and vines clung to the most precipitous walls.

From this height, the white Land Cruiser looked as delicate as an eggshell. The big Mercedes truck could have been a toy. The rest of them were down there, and when Kleat saw her and Duncan, he gave a big wave with his gun hand, which only made him look more miniature. The expedition suddenly seemed fragile and overreaching. Their discovery was vastly bigger than they were.

As they descended the stairs, Molly saw that Samnang had not been idle during their absence. A bright green rectangle of a hut made of leaves and poles now occupied the lowest terrace, with one side open to his little spark of a fire. The fire gave her a clue to the time. It glittered too brightly for day. Night was nearing.

They reached the ground. As she wove through the trees, Molly kept an eye out for the names of women carved in the bark, but the light had changed or she was among the wrong trees. She couldn't find the marks.

Even before entering the camp area, she saw Kleat grinning, and his reason for it. He was wearing a GI helmet with most of the canvas eaten away. Closer still, she could see fading tally marks along one side where a soldier had been counting down his days.

The brothers were in high spirits, too. A row of green bronze and jade vessels and geometrically painted jars stood along one ledge. She expected Duncan to start in about the plundering, but he only sighed.

“We're on their trail now,” Kleat said. He opened his hand carefully, as if it might hold precious jewels, and three empty brass cartridges lay on his palm.

“You found those in the city?” asked Duncan.

“No, right here in the clearing. Sam found them lying over there.” He knocked on the helmet. “We almost drove over it last night.”

“That's all you have?”

“It's a start. Now we know where to look. Down here. Forget the city.”

Molly glanced around at the forest enclosing them. You couldn't see the reservoirs from here, or their tire marks in the leaves. When it came time to leave, they would have to search just to find their way back to the causeway.

“What are those?” she asked, pointing at saplings bent into
O
shapes. They appeared at various distances among the trees, like animal snares.

“That's Sam's work. Landmarks. I sent him to look for the ACAVs. They have to be around here somewhere.”

“Was that your gunshot?”

“No sense wasting time up there. They probably never went up into the ruins.”

Molly resented that. She and Duncan had been crossing the city's threshold, drifting among its stories. And Kleat had summoned them.

“Well, they did, for your information,” she blurted out.

Duncan grimaced. She bit her lip. How could she have known that was their secret?

“They were up there?” Kleat said.

It was too late to take back her words. “We found barbed wire in the gate at the back.”

“You found wire?” Kleat said. “And you didn't call for me? That was the deal. I told you—”

Molly darted a glance at Duncan. It was true, they had abandoned the evidence in order to go exploring in the city. “We called for you,” she lied. “We waited. You didn't hear us.”

“What gate?” His eyes fell on her camera. “Show me.”

She turned on the camera and showed him her pictures of the tunnel. The camera was quirking out again. The flash glare had blanched white the interior of the tunnel. The vines and roots and coiled wire were thin dark arabesques, but also there were shapes inside, trapped shapes if you wanted to embellish the image. With some imagination, one could almost make out arms and legs.

“What are those things?” Kleat said.

“Ricochet. The flash bouncing off the mist. Maybe I'm wrong about the wire. It looks like vines.” Or tendons.

But his curiosity was piqued. “And what about these?” he pounced, as she scrolled through the terra-cotta warrior series. This was what Duncan had been hoping to hide.

“Statues.” She shrugged. The stone eyes stared out from the display.

“There must be fifty of them.”

“I didn't count.”

“Where is this gate?”

“There's no way to describe it,” Duncan said. “You saw what a jumble it is.”

“Then you can lead me there tomorrow,” Kleat said. “But first thing, we're going to do a line sweep of the area down here. Those ACAVs are somewhere.”

She started to object to his diktat. But Duncan was quicker. “Good,” he agreed. “There's nothing left of today. It's getting dark. We need rest and food. We'll start fresh in the morning.” Not a word more about the city, as if Kleat really might forget it.

The two men went to the hut. Before it got dark, Molly walked to the truck to grab a flashlight and another camera battery from her mule bag. Picture possibilities swarmed through her mind. There had to be a temple or a tree from which to shoot that giant reclining Buddha in its entirety, and she wanted to line up three particular spires so they took the eye to a vanishing point. And there were those sweethearts' names in the forest, so tender, so terribly mortal, the letters deformed by the years.

She was zipping shut the mule bag when Samnang returned through the dusk. He went straight to the ledge with the looted ceramics and bronze and jade bowls, and obviously this was the first he'd seen them. He approached the brothers, crouching by the fire. From the truck, she could hear him chastising them. One of the brothers rose and shouted back, shaking his rifle. Another flicked a burning twig at him.
Bad luck children,
she thought.

She joined Kleat and Duncan in the hut.

“A regular civil war out there,” Kleat said. The Khmers' arguing seemed to please him. At last Samnang disengaged and hobbled off into the forest again.

Someone had put a box of MREs inside for them. Molly sorted through the packets, calling out the names of meals. She made her own selection and slit the thick plastic with her Swiss Army knife. People complained about the meals, but she'd developed a taste for them while covering a crew of hotshots one fiery season in the San Juan range.

While her chow mein heated in the bag, she gazed out at the darkening trees, unwinding for the first time in a month. After the muggy central lowlands, the forest felt cool and restoring. Even so, sweat beaded her forehead. She wiped at it.

Soon, inevitably, Kleat and Duncan began arguing. There was no excuse for it. The evening was quiet except for animal noises, and each of the men was occupied, Duncan with his sketch pad and Kleat cleaning his pistol. And it was the same argument they'd had that morning. The only difference was that now they had real artifacts to fuel their positions. They were no longer talking about the hypothetical. Duncan had found a city. Kleat had found war relics.

“We have to retreat,” Duncan said. “First thing in the morning, before anything more gets destroyed or pillaged, we need to pack up and leave. We're not prepared for this. The city needs protection. We have to get this right.”

Kleat rejected it with a grunt. “Not going to happen.”

Molly didn't know what to say. She felt safe in here. She felt found. And yet Duncan was inviting the world in before they even had their foothold.

“But we could lose everything,” she said, trying to reason with him. Once word of the find spread, the eight-hundred-pound gorillas—the
Smithsonian
s and
National Geographic
s and universities and celebrity professors and best-selling authors and staff photographers—would descend on the place. She would get cut out, and so would Duncan. That was how it worked.

Kleat picked up the theme. “This is what I've been saying. We're here. It's ours.” He dripped solvent onto a patch and pumped the rod down the barrel.

“We'll come back again,” Duncan said, “but on our terms, not theirs.” He gestured at the brothers. “We can get them to drive us down to one of the towns, and bring us back with supplies to last us through the next six months. That gives us the monsoon.”

“And what makes you think they'll keep the big secret down in town?” said Kleat.

“They won't. That's a given. They're human. They're poor. We're in a race against time. Which makes you, Molly, the most important one of us. Everything depends on you. You can document the city before the jackals pick it clean. It's not just these guys. Once the news breaks, the Cambodian army and government will step in. That's when the real looting begins. You're our witness to all the greatness the way it is. It means staying through the rains, though. I'd send the drivers away before the river swelled. After that, we'd be shut inside, alone.”

“Yes,” she answered him, though he hadn't asked the question. Yes, she wanted to be here. Shut inside. Alone.

“Get all the snapshots you want,” Kleat said, “while we search for the men. They come first. There's not going to be any mission creep here. We came for the bones, not a city. We can beat the rains. Once I have the bones, this pile of rocks is all yours. You two can stay until kingdom come, I don't care.” He started assembling the pistol.

“We can spend the next few days preparing,” said Duncan. “And the next six months exploring.”

“You and your city,” Kleat said. He fit the spring onto the barrel. “What about the men?”

“If they're here, we'll find them.”

“There's no if. They're here. And we're here. And we're staying.”

Molly dabbed at the sweat trickling down her temples. Was she getting sick?

Now was her turn to try reasoning with Kleat. “What if we can't find them before the rain comes? Duncan has a point. It's the difference between having a few days to search or having six months.”

“I need this.” For a moment Kleat sounded desperate. “Before it's too late.”

“I don't understand.”

“The captain will come, or someone like him,” Kleat said. “Once they hear it's us up here, they'll come to take it over. The river won't stop them, they'll fly right over it and banish us again. And that's not happening. They had their chance.”

“Their chance?”

“These bones belong to me,” Kleat declared. He fit the barrel into the frame with a metallic
click-clack.

Molly and Duncan exchanged a look. The bones belonged to him? “John,” Duncan said quietly. “That's not right. What about your talk of honor?”

“One buys the other,” Kleat said. “These dead buy my dead. It's the only way I'll ever find my brother.”

Molly remembered Luke laughing—barking like a monkey—at the claim that Kleat had a brother.

“That's why you're here?” said Duncan.

“The captain sent us off like traitors. Here's their wake-up call. Every year, the missing die a little more. Wives remarry. Children grow up and forget. New wars eclipse the old ones. Soon it will be too late.”

“What do you think the captain and his people are doing in the dirt and mud and sun?” said Duncan. “Searching for the lost ones.”

“They need to search harder, then. With the bones to shame them, I can make America sit up and listen. That's why you're important,” he said to Molly. “You and your newspapers. Shame them. Destroy the old rule. We need fresh blood. New direction. My brother is out there somewhere, and one way or another I'm going to take him home.”

The fire crackled outside. No one spoke for a minute.