A Taste of Cockroach Read online

  It was at this time that Yvette and Henri met Auguste Pavie. Pavie was an explorer who had gone into the jungles

  of Siam and Cambodia, and was just about to go to Tonkin, Annam and the old Kingdom of a Million Elephants, whose capital was once called the City of Gold. Henri had seen the precious Emerald Buddha in Bangkok and been told that it was taken from the City of Gold. He insisted that Pavie take him and his niece along before something unpleasant happened …

  Yvette looked out at the brooding mountains and thought back to that long trek with Monsieur Pavie. First, there was the little steamer towing the fleet of pirogues up the flat rivers, then the paddling of pirogues into the turbulent water of the hills. They rode the elephants into the jungled mountains, and took bamboo rafts down the last river.

  Henri had complained most of the time. He had moaned about the rivers’ slowness, then about the rapids, about the jungle smells of rotten wood and fungus, the stinging horseflies, the twitching leeches, the elephants’ rolling walk. Yvette had often seen Pavie looking around desperately, as if searching for a crocodile or a tiger to throw Henri to. But there were no crocodiles or tigers out there.

  Perhaps Monsieur Pavie had envied her the sudden sickness on the last river, because she hadn’t had to listen to Uncle Henri. Maybe it was because of Uncle Henri’s moaning that Monsieur Pavie paddled off …

  ‘Now, do you like my city?’ Kam said, sweeping his arm down.

  The mist had been lifting in the early morning sun. Below, the city looked like a massive ship sliding between two rivers. In that narrow stretch the wedding-cake roofs of wats were nestling together, a glitter of gold and green. Their monks were a flicker of orange fire in the streets, and the gleaming elephants were grey fishing boats as they crept from their river wash towards the King’s palace. Food hawkers were setting up stalls, women were hurrying to the market, there were children running from their houses, fishermen casting nets from their pirogues and bullocks hauling carts from the ferry wharf, while soldiers with long rifles and bright banners marched down the main road.

  ‘It really is the City of Gold, isn’t it?’ Yvette shielded her eyes from the glare from one of the wat’s front walls. But, she thought, that was its old name. It is now Luang Prabang, meaning Royal Large Holy Image.

  ‘What are you doing, boy?’ Uncle Henri was staggering a little bit from the effort of climbing the steps, and under his side-whiskers his face was bright red. ‘You should have brought the girl down the mountain quickly, not wasted most of the morning up here!’

  Kam lowered his head. ‘Yvette needed to rest —’

  ‘You’re a strong boy. You could have carried her.’

  ‘Hey!’ Yvette jerked from the wall.

  ‘She is better,’ Kam said hurriedly.

  ‘Better? Look at her!’

  Yvette looked down and saw that she was wearing her nightdress and her feet were bare. ‘Oh …’

  Kam turned to her. ‘I am sorry, I should have thought.’

  ‘Stupid boy, ’ Uncle Henri hobbled to the wall, peered and thrust a finger. ‘You should have been thinking about that!’

  The soldiers that Yvette had seen marching down the road were moving to the public wharf where pirogues and bamboo rafts had gathered. Some of them had already reached a village on the other side of the river.

  ‘Oh,’ said Kam dully.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Yvette said with a light smile.

  Henri closed his eyes. ‘What is wrong, girl, is Monsieur bloody Pavie has scarpered up the rivers with his armed men – I don’t know where he is – and most of the Siamese soldiers are now leaving. Rama V sent his troops to protect the city, but those quivering cowards are galloping back to Bangkok because of a rumour. They say there is an army of bandits marching down on the city. Well, we should have left the city with those Siamese troops, but you have fouled that up, haven’t you?’

  Yvette swallowed. ‘I didn’t know. Perhaps we can run after them?’

  ‘No, by the time we climb down the hill and collect our things, the soldiers will have crossed the Mekong, gone through Paclung village and into the jungle. We’d never catch them.’

  ‘We don’t need those tremblers.’ Kam dispensed the soldiers with a flick of his hand.

  Uncle Henri suddenly laughed bitterly.

  ‘We’ve got the King – and our golden Buddha,’ Kam said, protesting.

  ‘Oh, yes, like your phis – spirits hiding in every rock,’ Henri snorted. He nodded at Yvette. ‘I was thinking. There are two rivers down there, the Mekong and the Khan. Just a little bit up the Khan is a grave in a bog. That is Henri Mouhot, the explorer who found the great ruined city of Angkor in Cambodia, but the jungle got him. If Pavie doesn’t paddle out of the Mekong before these bandits get here then we are going to join Mouhot …’

  Yvette stared at the brown rivers. She had woken into a nightmare.

  Kam looked at her face. ‘It’s not that bad,’ he said softly. ‘The King is very clever and he will talk to the leader of the bandits and stop them. And our Buddha has been saving the city for hundreds of years …’

  Yvette started to grimace, but caught herself and blurted: ‘The Buddha … I saw it before.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Henri snapped.

  ‘Yes, you did.’ Kam nodded. ‘The monk who told me that you had gone to the hill was helping to carry it.’

  Henri studied them both. ‘The Pha Bang? But it’s almost never shown. Even I couldn’t get a look at it before; nobody would tell me where it was kept.’

  ‘The monks are preparing the Pha Bang now, for the King,’ Kam said.

  ‘I want to see it, right now.’ Henri thumped his fist on the stone wall.

  * * *

  But Kam first took Henri and Yvette to their house so she could have a cold wash and change. Over a quick breakfast she caught up with what had been happening while she had been battling with a fever for two months.

  She had been brought to Luang Prabang, where Henri had left the Pavie expedition to look after her – nothing to do with the original name of the city being the City of Gold! King Oun Khan of the Kingdom of Luang Prabang had been so worried about her that he gave her and Henri one of his houses near the palace. Kam, a palace scholar and worker, was to help her and her uncle. As she slowly recovered Henri began to visit the city’s goldmine up the Mekong and started negotiating with two goldsmiths in the city.

  Then some Siamese troops arrived in the city, saying that they had come from a great victory at the high plateau town of Muong Theng – the Vietnamese called the town Dien Bien Phu – and they marched four chained bandits down the main street. The Siamese merchants set up bamboo arches to celebrate, but most people were relieved when the bandits were taken to Bangkok.

  Meanwhile Auguste Pavie had taken his expedition up the Mekong and the mountain river Ou to reach a high plateau with a small town called Dien Bien Phu.

  That brought Yvette up to this day: Friday, May 27, 1887. Now the Siamese troops had just abandoned Luang Prabang the city was seething with rumours of marching bandits.

  After breakfast Kam led Uncle Henri and Yvette to the Pha Bang statue at Wat Vixoun. The building was very old. Its gold surfaces were stained with grime, not like the gleaming wats on the main street, and the monks working on the statue were wearing faded rags. The statue was only as tall as a small boy.

  Henri forgot to worry about the bandits as he stared at the statue, with his lips twitching.

  The Pha Bang stood in its own special pavilion under a tiny roof which echoed the complicated wat roofs of Luang Prabang. The statue gleamed gold from its head to its feet.

  ‘I wonder how much gold is in there …’ Henri muttered.

  Kam shrugged. ‘Gold is nothing. The Pha Bang is everything.’

  ‘It looks old,’ Yvette said.

  ‘Maybe older than the ninth century,’ Kam said. ‘Everyone in Luang Prabang knows about Pha Bang. It was made on Sinhala1, an island south of India, but was t
aken to the empire of Angkor, which wasn’t a ruin in the fourteenth century. A prince brought the Pha Bang from there to here, the Kingdom of a Million Elephants.’

  Uncle Henri rubbed his finger thoughtfully on his chin. ‘It doesn’t look as valuable as the Emerald Buddha.’

  ‘The Emerald Buddha that was stolen from Luang Prabang in the 16th century? The one in Bangkok? The Siamese can keep it. We have Pha Bang. The Siamese would love to have Pha Bang instead, but they can’t.’

  ‘You think so?’ Henri cocked an eyebrow. Yvette suspected that Henri was goading Kam.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Kam nodded quickly. ‘Before, we had only phi, spirits, everywhere, but with the Pha Bang – Large Holy Image – we have Buddha as well. We still have the phi, but the Pha Bang changed everything. The Gold City became Royal Large Holy Image – Luang Pra Bang. The Kingdom of a Million Elephants became the Kingdom of Luang Prabang. We didn’t change our name to the Green Kingdom when we got the Emerald Buddha, and the Siamese didn’t change the name Bangkok when they took it there.’

  Kam asked the monks if there was any more news about the bandits, but they had none; all they had been told was to prepare the Pha Bang. Kam decided to go to the palace to see what his friends there knew.

  Henri stared at Kam’s retreating back and slowly a smile twitched across his face. Yvette looked at him in puzzlement.

  ‘Just imagine,’ he said. ‘If I presented the Siamese King with the Pha Bang to go with the Emerald Buddha I would be the golden boy. Never mind about chopping heads, he would give me a teak forest and an island …’

  ‘But —’

  ‘Just thinking.’

  * * *

  Kam reappeared next morning with a dark face. ‘Monsieur Pavie has sent a message to the King.’

  ‘Good, good. What did he say?’ Henri was ignoring Kam’s alarmed expression.

  ‘Remember those four bandits that the Siamese marched down the main street? Well, the Siamese army was fighting Black Flag armies around Dien Bien Phu.’

  ‘Black Flag?’ said Yvette.

  ‘Armies from the Black River in Yunnan in southern China. Be quiet,’ said Henri to Yvette and turned back to Kam. ‘Go on.’

  ‘The Black Flag is bad enough but the Haw bandits are part of these armies, and they’re much worse. I have seen the Haw once …’ Kam shook his head. ‘The Black Flag seemed to be quietening down in the mountain area, but then the Haw attacked Dien Bien Phu, destroying it. We don’t even know why.’

  Yvette tried to understand what it means when a town is destroyed, and failed. ‘Um – what happened to Monsieur Pavie …’

  ‘Monsieur Pavie was close to Dien Bien Phu when it happened. He saw people fleeing down the river and through the jungle. He said that he was also retreating, and the Haw was coming to Luang Prabang.’

  Suddenly Yvette was frightened. ‘What do we do?’

  Henri looked at her with a touch of fear in his own face. ‘Pray that Pavie beat the Haw.’

  * * *

  After a few tense days, Yvette watched several rafts and pirogues drift out from the shimmering mountains. The pirogues had several lengths of bamboo lashed to either side; while large bamboo rafts each carried a few armed men standing around a straw hut. The Pavie expedition had returned.

  Henri pounced on Auguste as soon as he stepped onto the wharf. ‘You’ve heard about the Siamese soldiers? They’ve all left us unprotected. How close are the bandits? How many of them are there? When are we leaving?’

  Pavie patted his huge walrus moustache and talked very slowly as if to calm Henri down. Yes, he had heard about the Siamese troops leaving. The Haw were close now, there were about six hundred of them …

  ‘Six hundred! We must leave! Now!’

  But Pavie shook his head. ‘I am sorry. I must see what I can do to help the King. We must wait.’

  ‘Wait? You’re a stupid fool, Pavie!’

  Kam smiled furtively.

  Pavie opened his hands in regret. ‘Yes, probably.’

  * * *

  Yvette and Kam were walking around the wats when they stopped before a strange gold door. Other wat doors showed images of kings, elephants, dancers or the Buddha, but not this one. This one showed two Europeans from ancient times dancing.

  Kam said, ‘Those are Portuguese merchants. They came here in the seventeenth century and so impressed the people they were put on a wat door. Maybe your uncle will be on a door in the future.’

  Yvette remembered Henri’s plot for the Pha Bang and winced. ‘I don’t think the people of Luang Prabang would like him.’

  ‘He’s only an uncle.’ Kam frowned. ‘You don’t have a father and mother?’

  Yvette took a breath and talked very quickly, before the pain came in. ‘No. My mother died from smallpox before I knew her and my father was shot in the stomach in the Franco-Prussian War. He came home but he was always sick after that, and he finally died. So I’m here. With Uncle Henri.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Kam hesitated for a moment. ‘I’m like that. I’m not from Luang Prabang but I’m part of it now. I used to live in a village in the mountains. We had a high wall of poles around a hill, with huts, animals and a well inside, but there’s nothing left now.’

  ‘The Haw bandits?’

  ‘They don’t leave anything.’

  Yvette took his hand.

  They walked away from the dancing Portuguese and drifted towards an increasing din at the ferry wharf.

  ‘Ah no …’ Kam murmured.

  They watched families loading their belongings – including a goat – on pirogues and bamboo rafts. A squabble on the river bank caused an old pirogue on deep water to capsize. Two families had been fighting over a tiny piece of the bank, and a shouting woman in the pirogue had stood up. After the confusion, the pirogues and the rafts finally moved down the Mekong. One old man was towing a water buffalo in the water behind his pirogue.

  ‘It has started,’ said Kam.

  * * *

  Pavie moved his expedition across the Mekong to the village Paclung, and Henri and Yvette decided to follow. Henri still thought Auguste Pavie was a stupid fool, but he felt safer with Pavie’s armed men than without them in Luang Prabang. Yvette tried to get Kam to come with them but failed.

  ‘This is my city, I cannot go,’ he said.

  The expedition was given some huts in the village and the men put up some of their tents. The tents were green with mildew, torn and stinking, and Yvette was glad to have a bed in the kitchen of Pavie and Henri’s hut.

  * * *

  As the panic on the river got worse, the King prepared to calm his people, and invited the Pavie expedition to cross the river and join him.

  In the city, Yvette saw Kam carrying a banner, but he was trying to hide his face from her.

  She planted herself in front of him. ‘Well …?’

  Kam looked at her. ‘All right, it’s getting worse. Remember those four bandits? We’ve been told they were sons of an old leader of the Black Flag armies. He had sent his four sons to make peace with the Siamese army, but they were put in chains and sent here and then to Bangkok.’

  Yvette stepped aside. It can’t get worse, she thought. She was wrong.

  Kam said, ‘The leader of the Haw is Kam Oum. He is the brother of the four bandits.’

  Very soon King Oun Khan stepped out in front of the Luang Prabang’s greatest wat, the Wat Xieng Thong – the Golden City wat – and faced his people at the meeting of the Mekong and the Khan rivers. Beside him was the polished Pha Bang and the round faces of phi images – like small balloons. The King gleamed in his gold-laced coat and his blue-streaked crown and tried to look confident, but he was over eighty and it showed.

  The King said to the crowd: ‘My people – Kam Oum and his Haw bandits are only hours from Luang Prabang.’

  A ripple of fear went through the crowd.

  ‘But I am going to stay here with you,’ the King said. ‘I will meet with Kam Oum and we will see what we can work out
…’

  * * *

  In the afternoon, Henri disappeared to make some quick deals with the goldsmiths, but he wanted Yvette across the river. She conceded that he was right, this time. She reluctantly left Kam to wait at the palace wharf for a pirogue to take her back.

  On the wharf she could see that the King’s speech had calmed people; there were only a few rafts moving from the city. But she also knew that after the speech the King had asked Pavie to take his family and some ancient articles across the river.

  She was just climbing down to a pirogue when a massive drum beat came from the Golden City wat, and a moment later there was a great shriek from the other side of the city.

  Yvette couldn’t ignore that. She scurried back up the ladder, through the King’s palace, past guards with whitened hands on their tilted lances, and past the gates. Immediately she was swept into a flood of people rushing towards the Khan River. She soon reached the Golden City wat and saw that the Pha Bang had been abandoned.

  For a moment she began thinking that Uncle Henri could take it now and carry it to the King of Siam before anyone noticed that it had gone … She felt guilty just thinking about it, as she joined Henri and Kam, who she had spotted at the rear corner of the wat. Then she saw what the rest of the crowd had come to see.

  The Haw bandits had arrived.

  On the other side of the Khan River men in black were flooding from the jungled hills and across the paddies. Many of them waved black banners as they ran. It seemed that there was no end to them and when they stopped on the river bank the paddies were black.

  King Oun Khan moved slowly towards his royal pirogue. He was helped down the slippery bank by three courtiers, but he shook them off when he was standing on the boat. The paddlers slipped the pirogue into the current with hardly a ripple, glided across the Khan and stopped in the shallows. For a still moment the King stood alone to face the seething mass of men on the bank.

  Then a bandit splashed into the river and caught the bow of the pirogue as another on the shore lifted his spear. Around Yvette people shrieked, but a bandit with a long black moustache pushed the spearman aside and four other bandits with black banners shuffled after him. The man with the moustache carried a sword and pistol in his belt. He swaggered over to the bank, spread his feet, put his hands on his hips and laughed at the King.