“I think so. I think I am finally better.”
“I’m glad, I was worried,” she said.
“So was I…I dreamed a lot…strange, terrible dreams. I thought I saw you.”
She was silent for a moment. “I didn’t want you to be alone.” She touched his arm. “Come, let’s walk.”
As they moved slowly down the road, the crowd shuffled along behind them. Khin Myo stopped and looked back at the children. “Are you going to bring your…how do you say it?”
“Entourage?”
“A French word, no?”
“I suppose so. I didn’t know you speak French.”
“I don’t. A couple of words only. Doctor Carroll likes teaching me the meanings of words.”
“Well, I would love to learn how to say ‘Go home’ to my entourage. They are charming, but I am not used to such attention.”
Khin Myo turned and said something to them. They squealed and ran back several paces before stopping to watch again. Khin Myo and Edgar continued to walk. The children didn’t follow.
“What did you tell them?” asked Edgar.
“I said that Englishmen eat Shan children,” she answered.
Edgar smiled. “Probably not the type of propaganda we want,” he said.
“Oh, quite the opposite. A number of the most famous Shan spirits eat children. And they have been worshiped since long before you arrived.”
They walked and followed a trail that rose over a small hill. They passed a house that Khin Myo said belonged to an old woman with an evil eye, and she warned Edgar to be careful. She said even this with a playfulness, a lightness, and the sense of sadness he felt from the memory of their talk by the river seemed distant. They entered a small grove of trees and began to climb the hill. The trees thinned, and the ground became spotted with flowers.
“Are these the ones you are looking for?” asked Edgar.
“No, there is a meadow on the other side of the ridge. Come.”
They reached the top of the hill and looked out over a field of tall shrubs, covered with dark red and salmon-colored flowers.
“Oh, how lovely!” exclaimed Khin Myo, and she ran down the trail with a childlike gait. Edgar smiled and followed, walking, but then, reflexively, his legs began to run as well. A little. Khin Myo stopped and turned, and she started to say something, and Edgar tried to stop, but the downward momentum of the hill prevented him, and he skipped, once, twice, before finally stopping before her. He was out of breath, his face red and flushed.
Khin Myo looked at him and raised an eyebrow. “Were you just skipping?” she asked.
“Skipping?”
“I think I just saw you skipping.”
“No, never, I just was running too fast and couldn’t stop.”
Khin Myo laughed. “I think that I saw you skipping! Mr. Drake…” She smiled. “And now look, you are blushing.”
“I am not blushing!”
“You are indeed. Look, you are turning red this very instant!”
“It is sunburn; that is what happens to Englishmen when they go out into the sun.”
“Mr. Drake, I hardly think even English skin will burn so quickly beneath a hat.”
“Exertion then. I am not a young man.”
“Exertion then, Mr. Drake.” And once again she touched his arm. “Come, let’s look at the flowers.”
It was not the type of meadow to which Edgar was accustomed, not the soft dew-coated fields he knew from the English countryside. This was dry, and the stalks and brushes exploded through the hard soil with hundreds of flowers in hues he couldn’t imagine, for a man trained to tell the difference in notes may not recognize the subtlety of vision. “If only it would rain,” said Khin Myo, “there would be even more flowers.”
“Do you know the names?” he asked.
“Only a couple. I know more of the lowland flowers. But Doctor Carroll has taught me some. That one is honeysuckle. And that one is a type of primrose, also found in China. And that one is Saint-John’s-wort, those will be wild roses.” She picked some as she walked.
From over the hill, they heard singing, and a young Shan girl emerged, first her head, as if disembodied, then her torso, and then her legs and feet, which pattered along the path. She walked quickly, and lowered her head in respect. Ten paces along the trail, she turned back to look at them again, quickened her pace, and disappeared behind a rise.
Neither Edgar nor Khin Myo spoke, and Edgar wondered if Khin Myo had noticed what had been implied in the young girl’s stare, what it meant for the two of them to be alone in the meadow of flowers. Finally he cleared his throat. “Perhaps they will get the wrong idea, if we are alone here together,” he said, and immediately wished he hadn’t spoken.
“What do you mean?”
“I am sorry, never mind.” He looked at her. She was standing very close to him, and a wind from across the meadow mixed the scent of flowers with that of her perfume.
Perhaps she sensed his discomfort, for she didn’t ask again, but raised the flowers to her nose and said to him, “Come smell, there is nothing like it.” And slowly, he lowered his head close to hers, only the scent of the flowers hung in the air between their lips. He had never seen her so close, the details of her irises, the cleft of her lips, the delicate powder of thanaka that ran across her cheeks.
Finally, she looked up and said, “It is getting late, Mr. Drake. You have just been sick. We should go back. Perhaps Doctor Carroll is here already.” And she didn’t wait for him to answer, but pulled an ipomoea from the bouquet and reached behind her head to fasten the flower in her hair. She began to walk back toward camp.
Edgar stood only long enough to watch her walk away, and then set off down the trail to follow her.
Doctor Carroll didn’t return that afternoon, but after six months of drought on the Shan Plateau, the rain did. It caught the two of them as they made their way down the trail, and they began to run together, laughing, big warm drops spinning down through the air with the force of hailstones. Within minutes they were soaked. Khin Myo ran ahead of him with her parasol at her side, her hair swinging with the weight of the water. The ipomoea stayed briefly, held by the tension of droplets, and then, carried off by them, drifted to the ground. With a nimbleness that surprised him, and without breaking the mad muddy rush, Edgar reached down and picked it up.
At the edge of the village, they ran through crowds charging up from the river to escape the sudden downpour, everyone laughing, covering their heads, shouting. For each woman who ran for shelter, to protect her carefully tied turban, two children rushed out into the rain, to dance in a swelling puddle in the clearing. Edgar and Khin Myo finally reached shelter, in front of her room. Water rushed over the lip of the roof and fell curtainlike, separating them from the shouts that filled the camp.
“You are soaked,” laughed Khin Myo. “Look at you.” “And you too,” said Edgar. He watched her, her long black hair plastered against her neck, her light blouse to her body. Her skin could be seen through the translucent cloth, the outline of her breast pressing at the cotton. She looked up at him and brushed wet hair from her face.
He stood and watched her and for a moment she held his gaze, and in the deep recesses of his chest he felt something stir, a longing, that she would invite him to her room, to dry off only, of course, he would never ask for more. To dry off only, and then in the darkness of the room, scented with coconut and cinnamon, a wish that perhaps their hands would brush, first accidentally, then again, perhaps, bolder, deliberate, that their fingers would meet and entwine and they would stand like that for a moment before she looked up and he looked down. And he wondered if she thought the same, as they stood outside and felt the coolness of the water on their skin.
And perhaps it could have been, had Edgar acted with the spontaneity of the rain, had he moved toward her with the same boldness with which water falls. But not now. This expects too much of a man whose life is defined by creating order so that others may make beauty. It expects too much of one who makes rules to ask that he break them. And so, after a long silence, as they both stand and listen to the rain, his voice cracks and he says, “We’d better change then. I must find dry clothes.” Fleeting words that mean little and much.