‘Better light a fire.’ He wondered for a moment where this strange voice had come from, metallic and soulless, echoing out of nowhere — before he realized it was his own.
McCue took less than half an hour, returning several times with armfuls of dry wood, to get a fire burning. Elliot laid out a sleeping mat, eased Slattery on to it, and covered him with another. The Aussie’s face was so pale it almost glowed, drained of blood and life. Elliot fingered the sticky warmth of the blood that oozed around the tourniquet on Slattery’s leg. He knew that if he took it off Slattery would bleed to death. If it stayed on much longer he would lose the leg.
The flames of McCue’s fire licked up around the small group, yellow light flickering across faces lost in fatigue and hopelessness.
‘Sleep,’ Elliot said. ‘I’ll take first watch.’
The shadows of lions couchant and many-headed serpents rose up around him. He walked slowly through the slabs of silvered light that fell between the tall stone columns guarding the hideously carved outer walls of the wat. People devoured by crocodiles, butchered by swordsmen. Elliot wondered if this barbarous culture had somehow proved a breeding ground for the horrors of the Khmer Rouge to come.
He glanced back along the length of the causeway, across the long grass and the still lakes, to the distant line of the outer walls and the jungle beyond. Not a sound, nor a movement, stirred the night air. It did not seem natural. McCue had pumped Slattery full of painkillers and the Aussie had fallen into a restless slumber. McCue himself had been asleep almost before his head touched the floor, curled up in a curiously foetal position close to the fire. A sleeping child. Elliot had left Ny wide-eyed and sleepless watching over her mother. ‘Don’t let the fire go out,’ he told her.
The scrape of a foot on stone brought his thoughts to an abrupt halt. He turned to find Ny staring up at him out of the gloom, dark eyes turning black. ‘You should be sleeping,’ he said curtly.
She shrugged. ‘No can sleep.’
He took in her slight, fragile frame, and for the first time realized just how small she really was. Like a child half her age. And yet there was a maturity and experience in her eyes that might have belonged to a woman of twice her years. In her gaze was a sense of knowing, as if she had known him all her life. As if she knew him all too well, as only he did. The idea discomfited him. He rested his M16 against the wall and squatted down on the top step, leaning back against a pillar and taking out a cigarette. He lit it and felt the smoke, dry and acrid, burn his mouth, and he sucked it deep inside him and felt the tightness across his chest relax.
‘Smoke?’ he asked, and held out a cigarette.
She shook her head. ‘When cadres smoke it smell bad. Bitter. Like...’ she searched for the word ‘... privilege.’
He smiled. ‘You’re too young to have thought that one up for yourself. You hear it from your mother?’
She tilted her jaw defiantly. ‘My mamma clever. She keep us stay alive.’
Elliot nodded seriously. ‘Sure.’ He drew again on the cigarette. ‘Weren’t you ever curious? For yourself?’
‘About what?’
‘Smoking.’
She met his look with the same directness, mirroring his seriousness, unaware that he was laughing at her. And at once he regretted his flippancy.
‘I remember see ladies smoke, Phnom Penh. It make them look like bad woman.’
‘Sounds like your mother talking again.’
‘You no laugh me, Mistah Elliot.’
He heard, with something like shock, her father’s voice in hers. The way she said his name. And he remembered she was somebody’s little girl who’d grown up without a father.
‘You no — curious?’ she asked, rolling the word around her tongue, savouring its newness.
‘About what?’
She looked at his blankness and wondered if it could be real. A little half smile. ‘You no curious.’
‘If you mean about what happened to you and your mother, to this whole godforsaken country, I’m not paid to be curious. Just to get you out.’
‘You only thinking and doing what you paid to.’
‘Yes,’ he said. And he remembered the heat and the white blinding brightness, and then the sightless dark, the smell of sweat and fear. And after, through the red mist, smoke clearing, eyes adjusting, the broken bleeding bodies. Children, like Ny, and younger. ‘It’s an old army trick I learned years ago. Otherwise you end up drunk somewhere, or shooting junk.’
She didn’t speak for a long time, sitting on the edge of the stone balustrade watching him. He let his head fall back against the pillar, the cigarette easing his tension. And as the tension eased, so he felt the first seductive waves of fatigue. His eyes were gritty and sore and he closed them for just a moment. And saw himself standing beneath the stark winter trees in the rain watching the stranger in black who was his daughter being led away by another stranger — a young man with red hair. He knew she’d seen him. But of course she had no idea who he was. A stranger at her mother’s funeral who was her father. She commented on him to the young man with red hair who flicked angry eyes in his direction before steering her away toward the line of cars.
‘Will your friend die?’
Ny’s soft, stilted voice startled him. He opened his eyes and saw her still sitting on the balustrade. Birds fluttered around in his chest and stomach. He saw that his cigarette had burned down to the filter and gone out. ‘What?’
‘Your friend who is shot. He will die?’
The blunt, emotionless quality of her question was unnerving. She accepted death with the same ease she accepted life. But, then, hadn’t she known as much of one as the other? ‘I don’t know,’ he lied.
She seemed to accept this, nodding thoughtfully. Then, ‘My mamma mean what she say.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Elliot searched his pockets for another cigarette.
‘Will you take us Phnom Penh?’
He found one and looked at her irritably. ‘You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?’
‘No answer without question.’
He lit his cigarette and got to his feet. He was getting tired of her fatalism. ‘Sometimes the last thing you want to hear is the answer, so you don’t ask the question.’ And he walked back into the temple to the glow of the dying embers of McCue’s fire. He heard Ny’s bare feet behind him. ‘I thought I told you not to let the fire go out.’
Without a word she padded towards the circle of light and picked up a log to poke among the ashes before piling on fresh wood. McCue sat up, instantly awake. His eyes shone like polished coals, fastening on Elliot as he stepped into the flickering light. ‘My watch?’
Elliot nodded. ‘Wake me at first light.’
The blood drained out of the dawn sky leaving it a blue so pale it was almost yellow. A mist lay across the water like gently undulating gauze slowly smoking into the morning haze as the sun rose to scorch the air. McCue and Elliot stood, silent statues, staring out across the causeway towards the jungle. With the light, they realized how vulnerable they had been through the night. The wat was surrounded on three sides by flat swampland, tall trees growing sparsely through the swollen waters of the Tonle Sap. They had limped up a blind alley without knowing it. Had the Khmer Rouge picked up their trail the night before, they would have been trapped. As it was, they were still in danger, and Elliot wanted them out of here fast.
‘Do we go north or south?’ McCue asked without looking at him.
‘North.’
‘What about the old woman?’