“The song…a Shan love ditty. When a Shan boy courts his sweetheart, he always plays the same song. It’s nothing, rather simple, but it worked like a miracle. Carroll later told the soldier who told me the story that no man could kill one who played a song that reminded him of the first time he had fallen in love.”
“Bloody amazing.” There was soft chuckling, the men having drifted into contemplation.
“Any more stories?” asked Edgar.
“About Carroll? Oh, Mr. Drake, so many stories. So many stories.” He looked down into his glass, now nearly empty. “But tomorrow maybe, I’m tired now. The journey is long, and our destination’s days away. We have nothing but stories until bloody Mandalay.”
They steamed up the river, steadily, passing towns, their names streaming together like an incantation. Sitsayan. Kama. Pato. Thayet. Allanmyo. Yahaing. Nyaungywagyi. As they moved farther north, the land grew dry, the vegetation sparse. The green Pegu Hills soon tapered to a flat plain, the dense foliage changed to thorn trees and toddy palms. They stopped at many of the towns, dusty ports with little more than a few huts and a fading monastery. There they picked up or unloaded cargo, and occasionally passengers, soldiers usually, ruddy-faced boys who joined the nightly conversations and brought their own stories.
And they all knew of Carroll. A trooper from Kyaukchet told them that he met a soldier who had been to Mae Lwin once, who said that it reminded him of stories of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, a fort like none other, festooned with the rarest of orchids, where one could hear music playing at all hours and there was no need to take up arms, for there were no dacoits for miles. Where men could sit in the shade by the Salween and eat sweet fruit. Where the girls laughed and tossed their hair and had eyes like those you see in dreams. A Pegu rifleman told them that he had heard that Shan storytellers sang ballads about Anthony Carroll, and an infantryman from Danubyu told them that there was no sickness in Mae Lwin, for cool fresh winds followed the course of the Salween, and one could sleep outside under moonlit skies and awake without a mosquito bite, and there was none of the fever or dysentery that had killed so many of his friends as they waded through steaming jungles and pulled leeches from their ankles. A private traveling with his battalion to Hlaingdet had heard that Anthony Carroll had dismantled his cannons and used them as planters for flowers, and the guns of the soldiers who were lucky enough to pass through Mae Lwin grew rusty, as the men spent their days writing letters and growing fat, and listening to the laughter of children.
More men joined in the stories, and as the steamer groaned northward, Edgar began to realize that the tales were less what each soldier knew was true than what he needed to believe. That although the Commissioner proclaimed there was Peace, for the soldiers there was only Maintaining Peace, which was very different, and with this came fear and the need for something to keep the fear away. And with this realization came another: that he was surprised at how unimportant truth had begun to be for himself. Perhaps more than any lonely soldier, he needed to believe in the Surgeon-Major he had never met.
Sinbaungwe. Migyaungye. Minhla. One night he awoke to hear an eerie song drifting in from the riverbank. He sat up in his bed. The sound was distant, a murmur, disappearing beneath the sound of his breath. He listened, barely moving. The boat moved on.
Magwe. Yenangyaung. And then, in Kyaukye, the long slow pace of the journey upstream was broken by the arrival of three new passengers in chains.
Dacoits. Edgar had heard the word many times since he read his first brief back in London. Thieves. Warlords. Highwaymen. When Thibaw, the last king of Upper Burma, had ascended to the throne almost ten years ago, the country had fallen into chaos. The new king was weak, and the Burmese hold on their land began to crumble, not to any armed resistance but to an epidemic of lawlessness. Throughout Upper Burma, bands of marauders attacked lone travelers and caravans alike, raided villages, demanded protection money from lonely farmers. Their capacity for violence was well known; testimony lay in the hundreds of razed villages, in the bodies of those who resisted nailed up along the roads. When the British inherited the rice fields of Upper Burma along with the annexation, they also inherited the dacoits.
The captives were brought on deck, where they squatted, three dusty men with three parallel lines of chain from neck to neck, wrist to wrist, ankle to ankle. Before the boat pushed off from the rickety docks, a crowd of passengers had already gathered in a semicircle around the prisoners, who let their hands dangle between their knees and stared back, emotionless, defiant of the crowd of soldiers and travelers. They were watched over by three Indian soldiers, and Edgar was terrified to think what the dacoits must have done to deserve such a guard. He didn’t have to wait long for an answer, for as the crowd of passengers stared down at the prisoners, the Italian woman traveler asked one of the soldiers what the men had done, and the soldier in turn asked one of the guards.
The three men, explained the guard, were the leaders of one of the fiercest bands of dacoits, who had terrorized the foothills east of Hlaingdet, near the British fort established during the early military expeditions into the Shan States. Edgar knew the name Hlaingdet; this was where he was to receive an escort on the road to Mae Lwin. The dacoits had been bold enough to attack villages in the vicinity of the fort, where villagers had thought that by moving close to army headquarters they would be safe from the marauders. They had burned rice fields and robbed caravans, and finally had attacked and burned one village and raped women and girls by holding knives to the throats of their children. It had been a large band, perhaps twenty men. When tortured, they had pointed out these three men as their leaders. Now they were being taken to Mandalay for questioning.
“And the other men?” the Italian woman had asked.
“Killed in the encounter,” said the soldier stoically.
“All seventeen?” asked the woman. “I thought you said they were captured and confessed…” But she let the sentence trail off into silence as her face flushed red. “Oh,” she said, weakly.
Edgar stood and stared at the prisoners, trying to see in their expressions evidence of their terrible deeds, but they revealed nothing. They sat in the heavy irons, their faces covered with thick dust that colored their dark hair a lighter brown. One of them looked very young, with a thin mustache and his long hair tied up in a bun on his head. His tattoos were blurred by the dirt, but Edgar thought he could make out the deep stain of a tiger across the boy’s chest. Like the others, his face was set and defiant. He stared back at those who stood around and condemned him. For one brief moment, his eyes met Edgar’s, and held there, before the piano tuner was able to look away.
Slowly, the passengers lost interest in the captives and filed away to their rooms. Edgar followed, still shaken by the story. He would not write to Katherine about this, he decided; he didn’t wish to frighten her. As he tried to sleep, he imagined the attack, and thought of the women villagers, of how they must have carried their children, wondering if they were merchants or if they worked in the fields, wondering if they wore thanaka too. He lay down and tried to sleep. The images of painted girls came to haunt him, the swirls of the white paint over skin blackened by the sun.
On the deck the dacoits crouched in their shackles.
The steamer pushed on. The night passed, and the day, and the towns.
Sinbyugyun. Sale. Seikpyu. Singu. Like a chant. Milaungbya.
Pagan.
It was nearly sunset when the first of the temples appeared on the vast plain. A lone building, fallen into ruins and covered with vines. Below its crumbling walls, an old man sat on the back of an oxcart pulled by a pair of humpbacked Brahmin cows. The steamship was moving close to the shore to avoid sandbanks in the center of the river, and the old man turned to watch them pass. The dust turned up by the cart reflected the rays of the sun, casting the temple in a golden haze.