The Secrets of a Fire King (29 page)

He knew he should quit the gold fields. The thought of this relieved the weight, but to such a degree that he felt riddled with an emptiness, as if his emotions reflected the spoiled, hacked landscape of the riverbank. For he saw now that working in the rubber trees was a hopeless life. Many went there with dreams, but no rubber tapper would ever own a car the color of the sun.

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People tried hard, he himself had tried, but there was no evidence of their effort in the village, where the houses were still lit by kerosene and the only running water flowed in the river. With gold they might drive themselves to ruin, but at least the hope was always there.

The rain was warm. It swept across the river like prayer veils in the wind and fell so heavily that he could not see the opposite shore. He was wet, and the dirt between his fingers was a warm, gritty mud. He rubbed it mechanically, feeling it melt away into nothing. Then he came upon something hard and sharp. Curious, thinking it was a piece of glass or tin, he rinsed the object in the river. To his surprise it was a tiny gold kris, a wavering Malay sword about ten centimeters long, inscribed with a verse from the Koran. Its tiny point was still sharp, but Muda could tell that it was very old.

“Norliza,” he called through the veil of rain to where his sister was kneeling in the mud. “Norliza, come look at what I have found.”

Muda was not devout, and so he was astonished by the reaction of the village to his discovery. The news spread quickly, until Muda could not go anywhere without people asking to see the kris. Even Ainon, the vegetable seller, held a newspaper over her head against the rain in order to have a glimpse, turning the kris in her brown fingers. She handed it back to him and quickly pressed her palms together in a prayer.

“You are blessed,” she said. Then she chose the largest melon from the pile and handed it to him. “Take this one, please. Take it as a gift, and remember this old woman in your prayers.” No longer did people joke about his bad luck with the gold.

Even Khamina was somewhat appeased. She served his rice more gently in the evening, and took to covering her hair when she went outside to shop. In the gold fields he felt the reverence of people like a circle of quietness around him.

One morning Muda arrived at the gold fields to find a dozen men in khaki uniforms handing out sheets of damp paper, announcing their news through a megaphone that cut through the mist and echoed back from the river’s opposite shore.

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“What is this?” he asked the nearest official, who turned toward him and thrust a paper in his hand.

“There’s been a complaint,” he said. He was a very young man, as young as Muda had been when he first went to the rubber plantation. “About illegal digging. Didn’t you know? You must have a paper before you dig this land.”

“Who complained?” Muda asked. He was not surprised to learn that it was a group from another village, latecomers who had found no gold on their faraway plots. Now these strangers stood around the fringes of the gold field, smiling because they already held the required papers in their hands. They looked greedily at the careful stakes and cordoned areas that, with a single government decree, had become ownerless.

“This isn’t right,” Muda said. “It isn’t fair. When we go to the capital for our papers, these others will take our claims.” His hand went to the kris around his neck. He’d started to wear it on a piece of string, and took some inexplicable comfort from the feel of its inscription.

The young man noticed his action. “Uncle,” he said. “What’s that you’ve got there?” Muda pressed the kris once before he opened his hand to display it for the officer. Its sharp point pricked his skin with an illuminating pain.

“This is my divine guidance,” he began, and he told the young man how he had found the kris. “So you see, this decree of yours goes beyond unfairness. It works against the directive of the heavens, as well.”

The young man looked uncomfortable. He pushed the cap back on his dark hair and shook his head.

“But what can I do?” he said.

“You can give us one day. Let one person go from each family for a paper. Let the others stay and dig. If there is someone without a permit tomorrow, that person must give up the claim. But we deserve this day of grace.”

The young man went to talk with his superior, and then the two of them went to see still another man. Muda watched them talking, shifting their feet uneasily in the muddy ground. Soon the chief offi cer came over to hear Muda’s story. He also exam-Gold

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ined the kris and held it in his palm. Then he picked up the megaphone and announced that the villagers would be given one day to file their claims.

It was Norliza who went from their family, running home for money and to change her clothes, giving Muda the small sack of nuggets she carried on her waist. She kissed each of her children twice on the forehead and told Amin, her oldest, to watch after them carefully. Then she, along with the others, was gone.

All morning Muda felt the unspoken animosity of the people from the other villages. He tried to work, but sometimes had a sense of foreboding so strong that the back of his neck felt cold and damp, as if suddenly beneath the shadow that would pre-cede a blow. Several times he jerked swiftly around, but there was nothing. People worked stodgily at their claims, and when he looked at them the sense of danger disappeared like mist. Still, he would remember the feeling later, the drifting unease that became manifest early in the afternoon.

Muda was up to his waist in a new hole when he heard the shouts. He jumped out of the earth and saw Amin screaming, pointing frantically at the head of his sister as she surfaced from where she had fallen in the river. Briefly, he saw her head and shoulders turn in the slow current near the riverbank. It had been a calm river when the gold was discovered, but the rains had fattened it. Water surged with force near the center, making frothy, churning patterns that had fascinated Maimunah and drawn her to the river’s edge. Now she drifted from the shore and entered the chaos. Muda, who could not swim well himself, did not think twice. The faces of his own children were in his mind as he leaped after her into the swirling waters.

The current was a thousand hands pulling him in different directions. He fought it at first, but each time he thrust his head above water he was pulled down again, rushed against the riverbed, whose stones, he thought, feeling them rub against his face and stomach, might well have been made of gold. Gold. His lungs ached, and he was thrust out of the water long enough to gulp a deep breath, long enough to catch a glimpse of Maimunah’s terrified face, inches away from him. He dove forward,
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grasping water, and wished he had the power of his sister’s hands, hands that could sift out gold from stones, hands that coaxed life into the world. Hands that would know how to fend off these river spirits who were dragging him below again.

Somewhere at the bottom of the river, rushed along so that his pockets filled with stones and water, he gave up. By some miracle the kris was still around his neck; he closed his hand around it and stopped fighting. He was a log, heavy, a log burning inside but motionless, bounced along with the current, tossed this way, then that. He was smashed into an underwater boulder with such force that he thought his arm must have broken, but even then he did not resist. And suddenly, as if he were a mouse in the mouth of the river spirits, they tired of their game and tossed him up into a calm place, a buckle in the river where the water was still and quiet.

This calmer water was full of debris. Broken branches fl oated near him, and he pushed past the carcasses of dead cats and lizards as he made his way to the shore. Maimunah was there. Her shorts had been torn away but her shirt was still on and was tangled in some branches. He feared she was dead, because she did not answer when he called to her. She was alive—when he touched her she turned her head to look at him—but he was filled with a deep fear because her gaze was still and blank, like calm water, and he thought that one of the river spirits had entered her while they held her underneath the water. He hooked his broken arm around a branch, wedging his elbow tightly into the mud. He was so exhausted, suddenly, that he thought he might slip back into the calm water and sink like a stone. It was only Maimunah that caused him to hold on. He collected her in his good arm, where she clung to him like a sea creature. He put his mouth very close to her ear, and he began to sing. The old songs, first of all, songs about the land, the trees, the tall grass that waved around the river. When his voice began to fade he turned to prayers that he remembered, interspersed with the verses from his lucky kris. In the end, he was reduced to only a phrase, muttering it over and over, his arms gone numb from the
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weight of the child and the tree. That was how the villagers found them.

The people of the village had not discussed the river spirits in years, but after Muda became so sick, they began to remember the stories. There were spirits of the water who could drag you underneath to live on air and algae, there were spirits of the currents who could enter your mind and set it spinning for the rest of your life. This was the one they feared had entered Muda. For ten days he was overtaken by a fever so strong that he twisted and mum-bled on the floor of his home, and flailed at Khamina when she tried to bring him water. The imam came first, and then the local healer, who lit candles in all four corners of the room and chanted verses from the Koran, and cried out in the voices of the river spirits, trying to lure them out, to lure them home. In the end even he left, shaking his head, saying that these spirits were strong—there was nothing to be done but to wait, and pray.

On the eleventh day the fever broke by itself. Khamina had fallen into an uneasy sleep, propped against the wall across from Muda. She woke to a silence, a certain strangeness in the air. For an instant she thought he had died, but when she opened her eyes she saw him staring at her from across the room. He blinked, and asked quite clearly for a glass of water. Yet even after the fever had broken, he remained weak. People who came to visit him noticed that he hardly spoke, that his eyes wandered into the dark corners of the house, and that he was constantly touching the kris hanging from his neck. Often he was heard murmuring the verses that were inscribed there by a hand long dead.

In this time, when the villagers feared for his mind but not for his life, Muda himself was afraid of dying. During the fever he had dreamed recurring dreams of light, as strong as midday sun but without the heat. When the fever broke these dreams did not vanish. It seemed to him that he was walking in between two worlds, the familiar world of his home and one that he had dreamed, warm and unfamiliar and full of a white, soothing light. He did not wish to see anyone, not because he felt weak but because their voices seemed to come to him from so far away,
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through a sound like water rushing, that it cost him a great effort to listen to them. For several weeks he sat on the porch of his home, looking out into the white light that surrounded him day and night, and waited for some signal. He had it one day when the call to prayer came to him clearly, a low, sweet, peaceful voice that was not marred by the rush and static of other sounds. He listened to it, moved by its clarity, by the familiar rhythm of the words. He touched the gold kris on his bony chest. It took several days, but from that moment the world began to come back to him, until everything around him shone with a vividness, a clarity, he did not remember from before.

When he was well enough, Muda went back to his job in the rubber trees. Khamina rejoiced at first, thinking he had returned to his senses. She reestablished her place on the porch with her stacks of fragrant leaves, and for a few days she watched Muda carefully, hardly daring to believe again in the normal pattern of her life. Yet even when the village leaders came to explain how they had saved his plot at the gold fields, Muda was not tempted.

He waved them away, saying only that the claim was Norliza’s now, she could do what she wanted with it.

It was only as the days passed into weeks that Khamina began to understand that the madness of the gold had not disappeared, but had only been transformed. In the evenings, after the last call to prayer, she set Muda’s rice out carefully on the leaves and waited for him to come home. But as in the worst days of gold, he did not appear. She discovered that he was stopping at the mosque on his way home, and that sometimes he stayed there far into the night, his forehead pressed to the cool stone fl oor in prayer. At home he often retreated to the porch with a lamp and his new copy of the holy book, and she sometimes woke in the middle of the night to see him there, the light fl ickering across his face as he murmured in the language of the imams. He grew thin and the fever-light in his eyes did not fade. He moved through his days with a terrible, strange energy. She was afraid, but she could not complain, not about the Koran, or about his hard work, or anything.

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He took his new devotion even into the rubber trees with him. No longer did he nap throughout the long afternoons; instead, he prayed, a murmur that mingled with the rustling sounds of the trees. That was how the boys found him when the plantation owners came one day to his house. They followed the sound of his voice at prayer. He was resting in the rubber trees, drinking tea and turning the pages of his holy book. Muda heard the boys coming, and put the cup down slowly on the ground.

When they burst into the small clearing, he saw the excitement and fear on their faces, and his hand moved without thought to cover the kris on his chest. He said one last prayer, then followed the children back to his house where the men were waiting.

It was the kris they wanted. That much he understood even before they spoke. The village chief was there, drinking the expensive Coca-Cola that Khamina had poured for all the visitors.