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  PUFFIN BOOKS

  LITTLE BROTHER

  The shots were so close they seemed to explode inside Vithy’s head. He threw himself to the ground and clapped his hands over his ears …

  It’s Cambodia. The killing machine of the Khmer Rouge is in power. Vithy has lost everyone and every-thing he loved – except his older brother, Mang. They’ve escaped from almost certain execution, but the brothers become separated and Vithy is left alone to ‘follow the lines … to the border’ – his brother’s last instructions.

  But which lines? Which border?

  Winner of the 1992 US Bank Street Children’s Book of the Year Award

  Shortlisted for the 1986 Guardian Children’s Fiction Award

  1992 US Children’s Book Council Notable Book

  1986 Children’s Book Council of Australia: Highly Commended

  American Bookseller ‘Pick of the Lists’

  Translated into French and German

  Also by Allan Baillie

  Adrift

  Riverman

  Eagle Island

  Megan’s Star

  Mates

  Hero

  The China Coin

  Little Monster

  The Bad Guys

  Magician

  The Dream Catcher

  Songman

  Secrets of Walden Rising

  Wreck!

  Saving Abbie

  The Last Shot

  The Excuse

  Foggy

  Imp

  Treasure Hunters

  Riding With Thunderbolt

  PICTURE BOOKS

  Drac and the Gremlin

  Bawshou Rescues the Sun

  The Boss

  Rebel!

  Old Magic

  DragonQuest

  Star Navigator

  Archie the Good Bad Wolf

  NON-FICTION

  Legends

  Heroes

  Villains

  ALLAN BAILLIE

  LITTLE BROTHER

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Puffin Books

  Penguin Group (Australia)

  250 Camberwell Road

  Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  Penguin Books Ltd

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Books, a division of Pearson Canada

  10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd

  Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd

  24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books India (P) Ltd

  11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi, 110 017, India

  First published in the United Kingdom by Blackie & Son Ltd, 1985

  Magnet edition published 1988

  Mammoth edition published 1990

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., 1992

  First published in Australia by Thomas Nelson Australia, 1985

  First published by Puffin, a division of Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 1995

  This edition published by Penguin Group (Australia), a division of

  Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd, 2004

  Text copyright © Allan Baillie, 1985

  Foreword text © Allan Baillie, 2004

  Afterword text © Allan Baillie, 2004

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  www.puffin.com.au

  ISBN: 978-1-74-253002-4

  My thanks to Mr Esmond Way of the Sydney Indo-China Refugee Association and the people of the International Red Cross at Aranyaprathet for their help and guidance

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Cambodia is a small country lying between Vietnam, Laos and Thailand.

  In 1975, after a civil war of five years, communist Khmer Rouge ruled the country. They drove out all the people from the capital, Phnom Penh, and from all other towns, to work camps. Almost two million people died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge.

  But in 1979 a war broke out between the Khmer Rouge and Vietnam. The Vietnamese troops drove the Khmer Rouge out of the towns and into the jungled mountains, beginning a thirteen-year-long fight. Thousands of starving Cambodians desperately flooded to the safety of Thailand. When Little Brother was first published, in 1985, this brutal conflict was still taking place.

  Eventually there were United-Nations-sponsored elections in 1993 and Cambodia has slowly moved toward peace. National elections in 1998 led to the surrender of all remaining Khmer Rouge forces.

  Vithy’s nightmare is over but today there are refugee children across the world with stories like his …

  Allan Baillie, Sydney, 2004

  ESCAPE

  They had been running for a long time now.

  The two boys pounded through the forest, leaping over immense roots, twisting past dark bushes. They wore only torn and dirty grey rags around the waist and their skins were burnt to deep coffee by too many months in the sun. They were lean, their muscles sliding under their skin like heavy wire. Both had eyebrows like black comets, a broad mouth, a short straight nose and darting brown eyes beneath tossing dark hair. The bigger boy was about eighteen and was constantly watching for a hiding place. The smaller boy was about eleven and wanted to curl up and scream.

  The smaller boy had felt as if he had been breathing fire for as far as he could remember, his legs trembling and shooting pain into his stomach with every unsteady step. He ran blind to the great dark trees that roofed out the sky far over his head, locking his eyes on the feet of the bigger boy as they flitted through the tangled shadows. He heard only the bigger boy’s breath thundering like a steam train on the flat, with his own strangled gasps drowned by the constant shouting and crashing behind him.

  More than anything his body wanted to stop. It wanted to slide down to the ground and sink slowly into the gentle green moss. But he wanted to run faster, even faster. He knew he could not stop. Ever.

  Suddenly his foot slid sideways on a banyan root. He crossed his legs in a desperate effort to keep going, but he was moving too fast. He turned in the air and crashed heavily onto a dead branch. Immediately the sounds of men running seemed louder.

  The bigger boy looked over his shoulder and wound his running to a skip and a stop in four strides. He turned back and propped his arms on his knees.

  ‘Okay?’ he panted.

  The smaller boy scrabbled his feet under him, looking back at the noise with panic in his eyes. He spread his hands before him and levered himself to his feet, air sighing in his throat. He forced himself to start running, then staggered, and fell.

  ‘My ankle …’ he gasped.

  The shouting swept through the trees towards them.

  The bigger boy lifted his eyes from his mate, ignored his feeble efforts to get to his feet, and looked around him. After a few tense seconds he nodded at a nearby tree with a leaning trunk. He scooped up the struggling boy and half-dragged him to the base of the tree.

  A man shouted angrily and threw himself at some brush twenty metres away.

  The bigger boy skipped back from the tree and ran up the trunk, leaping at a low branch. He threw his legs over the branch and swun
g down like a monkey to catch his mate’s hands and pull him up. He pressed a finger on his own lips and waited, with the light, bony boy lying painfully across his back.

  The thrashing swept round the tree in an angry tide. The smaller boy stopped breathing when a man paused directly below him. Through the leaves the boy could see no more than a foot in an old sandal and an arm in a black shirt, torn from the shoulder. The arm was carrying a rifle.

  Suddenly the boy’s right arm began to tremble, softly shaking the leaves on the branch. He grabbed his arm, bore down on it and bit it, tears flooding his cheeks.

  After what seemed longer than a week someone in a distant tangle of vines called out and the man sighed, spat and moved on.

  ‘All right, Vithy. Get off,’ the bigger boy whispered.

  Vithy climbed off the boy’s back very slowly and quietly. He could hear the soldiers moving away, but they were still too close.

  ‘Now just be quiet.’

  For perhaps half an hour the two boys lay in the tree, motionless and silent. Then the bigger boy stretched and slid to the ground.

  Vithy moved cautiously after him. ‘Are they gone?’ he whispered. He rubbed the teeth mark remaining on his arm. ‘What d’you think, Mang?’ Mang swung his arms about, freeing his cramped muscles. He looked at Vithy with an easy smile.

  ‘I think, little brother, that we may have beaten them.’

  Vithy stared at Mang. Once, a very long time ago, he had resented Mang’s smug ‘big brother’ attitude to him. But now Mang could call him – and did – a toad, a cockroach, as bone-headed as a water buffalo, anything he liked. Just so long as he was there.

  Vithy tried the beginnings of a smile, the first since his furtive twitch when Mang had strolled into his guarded paddy months ago. ‘You think so? Really?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Vithy looked about him and listened to the forest. There was nothing now, not even the distant explosions that had distracted the soldiers and given them the chance to run. Nothing but the drowsy hum of fat insects and the call of a lonely bird. He began to relax, but clenched his fists again and could not stop watching the trees about them. They’re coming back, he thought. Nobody ever beats the Khmer Rouge. But Mang hunkered beside him and squeezed his arm. ‘Hey, they’re only a bunch of stupid mountain men. Let’s have a look at that foot.’

  Vithy lifted his foot and leaned against the trunk. Maybe they can be beaten, this time. ‘You think they would have … shot us, Mang?’

  Mang knelt before Vithy and felt around the foot. ‘Well they aren’t going to shoot us now.’ Mang snapped his fingers as if he had forgotten something. ‘Hey, maybe they were taking us into the forest for a picnic. Eh? Fish and crab from the sea, pineapple and bananas and ice cream … Maybe we’d better go back.’

  Vithy laughed, and stopped. Laughter felt strange and he had forgotten how it sounded.

  ‘I don’t think it’s broken.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The foot. Probably just sprained.’

  ‘Hey …’ Vithy sat down with his foot stretched out before him. He looked astonished. ‘We’re free.’

  ‘Sort of.’

  Vithy tried a bit of a giggle then a bit of a soft song to hear how they sounded. ‘We’re not going to have to work in the Big Paddy any more … What do you mean, “sort of”?’

  Mang sighed. ‘Where are we, little brother?’

  ‘We’re … I don’t know.’ Vithy looked alarmed for a moment, then recovered with a shrug. ‘Doesn’t matter. You know where we are.’

  ‘We’re still in trouble, little brother. Better, but still in trouble.’ Mang nodded in the direction of the morning’s explosions. ‘At the paddy they were saying we’re in some sort of war again. If we’re careful we can get out of it, but we could get shot by anyone.’

  ‘Oh.’ Vithy was silent for a while, staring at the forest. ‘What do we do, Mang?’ He was whispering again.

  Mang shook his head. ‘I’m thinking.’

  ‘Do we go home?’

  Mang looked at his brother. ‘You know we don’t have a home any more …’

  Vithy shrugged, then slowly nodded his head.

  ‘Okay. We’ve got no time to think back. We go forward. Start again. Follow the lines out of the war and everything.’ Mang stood up. ‘I think we’ll go to the border.’

  ‘Which –?’

  A shout echoed in the forest.

  Mang looked sharply to his left and said very quickly: ‘They’re back. Get down and don’t move.’

  He ran off very fast, almost towards the shout.

  Vithy pushed himself to his knees in a desperate attempt to follow him, but a man bellowed in triumph and Vithy dived behind a root. He watched Mang run across a small clearing, with shouts following him from almost a semi-circle. A shot echoed from near Vithy, then two more, but Mang was still running as he reached the trees on the other side of the clearing. Five distant figures ran across the clearing a few seconds later and other men pounded through the forest on Vithy’s right. The shouting receded.

  Vithy slowly raised his head and immediately felt exposed. He closed his eyes and pushed his face into the damp ground.

  They’ll come back, he thought. He ran his tongue over his lip. They’ll come back when they see they are only chasing Mang.

  He squirmed away from the tree to a cleft in the ground which was covered with dead leaves and roofed by ferns. He felt very cold and his arm was trembling again. He did not know whether he was afraid for Mang or just for himself.

  It was probably just for himself.

  But he knew what he had to do. Nothing. Mang had said, ‘Don’t move!’ and that was all he could do. Mang would fool the soldiers; he always did, and then he would come back.

  Vithy waited while the sounds of the searching soldiers died into silence and the hazy shadows lengthened. He tried to forget where he was and for a while he was in an old boat with Mang, shooting the rapids near home, scared stiff, and the boat half full of water, but Mang was whistling ‘Old Man River’, of all things …

  Mang might not come back.

  The dreamy smile died on Vithy’s face and he was back in the forest. Why didn’t he come back?

  A single, distant shot.

  Vithy stared at the echoing trees for a long, still moment, then cried out and jerked to his feet. He ran through the forest, his ankle sending bars of pain up his leg with every stride. He skipped, hopped, limped, shuffled, anything to carry him from the sound of the shot, his eyes awash and half blind. In the end he fell and rolled limply onto his back because he was too exhausted to keep moving.

  He opened his eyes some time later to stare at clouds of leaves swaying darkly across an angry black sky. He realised where he was and turned away from the sudden memory of the shot, to see something like a grey lion about to roar from a bush a metre away.

  He rolled away with a desperate gasp and had his good foot under him when he realised the lion threatening him was stone. Stone stained with algae and moss, cracked and bound together with vines. The lion was guarding the shell of an ancient temple slowly being destroyed by the coiling roots of a tall tree.

  Thunder rolled above the shifting canopy of leaves and large drops of water splashed heavily around Vithy. He funnelled water from a broad leaf into his mouth, then moved into the complete darkness of the ruin, groping carefully as he went. He found a large flat stone, checking it with his fingertips as he sat. Outside the canopy swayed and creaked as water crashed onto the foliage. For a few seconds the canopy held the flood, then it rained lightly, then it poured.

  Vithy stared at the curtain of water, and he imagined that if he could see through the rain he would be able to see what that terrible single shot had meant.

  But he knew what it meant. It meant that he had no one, no friend, no family, nobody left. He was terribly alone.

  Something moved above Vithy’s head, sounding like worn leather. He crouched almost flat on the stone, staring up into the
blackness.

  Something like a mouse.

  Vithy took in a shuddering breath, ready to scream. Two small eyes sparkled over his head. Then another pair, another and another until the dripping stone roof was watching him with a thousand eyes.

  Oh, he thought, and relaxed. Bats.

  As the night outside became a seething storm the roof above Vithy rippled, flapped and squeaked. Vithy lay on the rock and after a while he talked to the bats.

  It stopped him thinking about Mang.

  THE FOREST

  Vithy woke to a gnawing hunger. That was normal. He would soon be shouted at by the soldiers, given a small bowl of rice and then marched out with all the other boys, men and women to work in the barren plain of the Big Paddy … But something was different.

  There was a smell like damp mice and old stone. He opened his eyes, lay on his back and wondered where he was and why his ankle was throbbing. He called for Mang softly. Then he remembered and stopped. He wanted to close his eyes again and go back to a dreamless sleep, but the bats were stirring over his head. He limped slowly from the musky ruin to a silent forest still carrying a cloak of shining rain.

  He drank from a hollow in a stone and walked from the ruin for a few metres, testing his foot gingerly with each step. He was frightened of the strange forest, the silence and above all the uncertainty of the day. He was so frightened he almost wanted to be back in the Big Paddy. There you could get killed for laughing or talking, but you knew the rules and there was a little food every day. Here, there was no food unless you could think how to find it, and Vithy had forgotten how to think.

  Mang had told him, many months ago, that the only way to survive in the Big Paddy was to be careful and dumb. Work hard, never let them know that you can read and write and handle arithmetic. Always remember your kid sister, Sorei. And above all, never think. But now he had to.

  Vithy leaned against a tree, which showered him. He was hungry, so hungry he could eat the bark from trees. If Mang was here he’d know how to get food. He always knew.