Saigon: A Novel Part 4

He led them to a dugout canoe half a mile downstream, and they poled slowly across to the other bank. There the gra.s.s was almost chest-high, and by the time they reached the far side of the plain the clothes of all of them were drenched in perspiration. While they rested, Devraux again sent his trackers to climb lookout trees.

Joseph found he couldn't sit still and he rose to pace back and forth at a distance from the others. The incident with the muntjac doe had distracted him for a while but gradually the sense of exultation in his deeds of the previous evening returned and blotted everything else from his mind. While crossing the gra.s.sy plain, the intoxicating heat of the sun had made him a little light-headed, and intense feelings of tenderness for the unknown Moi girl had begun to sweep through him. He realized with a stab of regret he had never once seen her face clearly, and if he went back to seek her out he wouldn't know her for sure among the many daughters of the chief. While watching the Moi trackers scurrying up the trees, he began to daydream of how he would return alone to compete with all the youths of her village in feats of strength and athleticism. There would be running races, mock duels with spears and s.h.i.+elds, tree-climbing contests. . . . He would win them all, and by demonstrating his great prowess he would force the anonymous Moi princess to step forward and offer him her hand....

When the Moi trackers again descended from the lookout trees shaking their heads, Joseph on an impulse asked Jacques Devraux if he might climb to take a look with Chuck's binoculars. The Frenchman nodded his a.s.sent without displaying any interest in the request, and Joseph bounded immediately into the lower branches of the tree nearest him. Thirty feet above the ground its boughs became too slender to support his weight, and he stopped and raised the binoculars to his eyes.

For several minutes he saw nothing in the s.h.i.+mmering haze of the plain. Then he thought his eyes must be playing tricks; a mirage of round-backed whales seemed to be sporting amid the waves of golden gra.s.s. He kept the gla.s.ses trained, and as he watched they turned into a herd of about seven buffalo filing slowly in their direction. They were still a mile off, but their gray-black humps were unmistakable. Joseph called softly to those below and pointed. The Moi immediately climbed other trees and peered in the direction of his finger; then they began chattering excitedly to Devraux in their own language.

The breeze was blowing from behind the buffalo, and if they remained quiet, Devraux counseled, the animals would have no inkling of their presence. The track of the animals seemed likely to take them within two hundred yards of their hiding place, so they should crawl out onto the plain to try to get a shot from half that range.

Nathaniel Sherman nodded his agreement and motioned to Chuck, and together they moved bent double into the tall gra.s.s. Joseph, although he had not been invited, followed, keeping low, his Winchester clutched in both hands.

Crawling through the thick gra.s.s with heavy rifles in the heat of the day left all three of them gasping for breath. Chuck was the first to recover, and when he pulled himself to his knees to peer across the plain, the closeness of the leading herd bull surprised him. It was no more than three hundred yards distant, and he could see the great flattened scimitars of its horns swaying above the gra.s.s as it advanced, scenting the breeze at every step. Its small herd included two st.u.r.dy calves, and he ducked down excitedly to report to his father what he had seen, Nathaniel Sherman peered at his watch, his face puckering in concentration as he calculated the time necessary to allow the buffalo to move into the most favorable range. When two minutes had pa.s.sed he motioned Joseph to stay flat, then nodded at Chuck, and they both stood up simultaneously, their rifles at their shoulders.

The herd bull stopped in astonishment on seeing two men rise abruptly from the gra.s.s only eighty yards away. It lifted its great horned head as though to bellow a warning, but in that moment Chuck Sherman's rifle roared and he let out a yell of delight as he heard the thud of the bullet strike home into the buffalo's broad chest. He fired again as the wounded bull turned and began galloping clumsily towards the safety of the trees, but this second shot went wide. Beside him his father's rifle recoiled, and they saw one of the two calves stagger, then begin stumbling after the bull.

"I think we've got the big boy and his calf, Chuck," breathed Nathaniel Sherman. "Now for a cow!" Retook careful aim with his second barrel at a smaller buffalo that had begun circling in dismay, and they heard the dull thud of his successful shot echo clearly across the plain. The wounded cow, however, dashed frantically towards the jungle along with the other terrified animals of the herd and disappeared with them into the shade.

Only the dying bull stopped before it reached the trees. Staggering slightly, it turned to stare balefully back at them, standing broadside on. Chuck glanced around inquiringly at Jacques Devraux, who had moved out into the plain with his son and Flavia Sherman. "Shall I shoot again, Monsieur?"

The Frenchman shook his head and lifted a silent hand in a gesture that implied "Wait!"

For a minute or two they all watched the wounded bull swaying on its legs. "That was great shooting, Chuck," said the senator at last, growing impatient. "But I think we have to go forward and finish him off."

Once more Devraux raised his hand. "No, Shoot again from here."

Chuck reloaded and fired off both barrels with great care, and again he had the satisfaction of hearing his bullets slam into the stationary animal. But although it staggered once more, it still didn't drop. Instead it stood staring bemusedly at its a.s.sailants while blood dribbled from its jaws onto the gra.s.s. Only when Chuck reloaded and shot a third time did the animal slowly crumple to the ground and roll onto its side, leaving one great horn curving majestically upward above the tall gra.s.s.

Nathaniel Sherman slapped Chuck heartily on the back and, taking his arm, hurried him away toward his kill. Jacques Devraux followed more slowly with his son, Flavia Sherman and Joseph. Paul Devraux pointed to the fringes of the thicket into which the remnants of the herd had disappeared: the bulk of the small black calf was clearly visible lying dead on its side a dozen paces short of the trees.

As they approached the curved horn of the dead bull, Nathaniel Sherman began pumping the hand of his eldest son in congratulation. Jacques Devraux followed them, holding his rifle at the ready until he was certain the big animal was dead. Joseph and his mother, after watching them for a moment, turned and strolled away to inspect the dead calf.

n.o.body was looking at the thicket at the moment the wounded cow broke cover. Bellowing with pain and leaving a bright trail of blood on the gra.s.s, the crazed animal galloped frantically towards its dead calf, over which Joseph and his mother were bending. When he looked up and saw the charging buffalo, Joseph raised his Winchester in an instinctive reflex action and dropped to his knees. Peering along its barrel he saw blood foaming around the cow's mouth and heard clearly the tortured rasp of its breath between each anguished bellow.

At the moment of firing he closed his eyes tight, hut he never heard the crack of the Winchester discharging because it was drowned in the roar of Jacques Devraux's Mauser. The Frenchman's bullet pierced the brain of the buffalo just behind its left ear, and the impact twisted its neck and threw the animal down in a swirl of dust only ten yards from where Joseph was kneeling beside his terrified mother. A long shudder ran the length of its body, then after one last explosive and b.l.o.o.d.y exhalation of breath, it lay still.

In the ensuing rush of silence that gripped the plain and its fringe of jungle, n.o.body moved; for several seconds the tableau of scattered human figures stood as though spellbound among the black and b.l.o.o.d.y bodies of the dead animals, They didn't loosen and begin converging around the dead buffalo cow until the first flock of ragged black vultures Flopped clumsily onto an outcrop of rock on the gra.s.sland fifty yards away.

Flavia Sherman was white-faced with shock but she managed to smile at her younger son as he stood up. "You were very brave, Joseph," she said quietly before the others arrived within earshot. "Thank you for what you did."

Joseph's face was pale and his hands were trembling, but he tried to hide this by gripping his rifle tightly as the others gathered around them. In an uncomfortable silence Nathaniel Sherman and the others gazed down at the dead buffalo cow. Only then did they see the great livid gashes that no man could have inflicted raked along both flanks.

"A tiger must have savaged her recently," said Devraux quietly. "She was already half-crazed with pain. We've all had a lucky escape."

"She is no d.a.m.ned good for display like that." Nathaniel Sherman frowned down resentfully at the dead animal. "Not with her hide all lacerated." He lifted his foot and touched the buffalo's curved horns with the toe of his boot. "Still, I guess her head will make us an unusual little trophy." He turned ant smiled at his white-faced wife. "A little Souvenir for you and the plantation house perhaps, my dear - of a moment we won't forget in a hurry?" Each of the Moi carried a long-bladed machete which had been dubbed a coupe-coupe in Annam, and taking one from the nearest tribesman, the senator bent over the dead buffalo. When she saw what he intended to do, Flavia Sherman turned her head quickly. Holding onto one horn, he hacked off the buffalo's head and handed it, still dripping blood, to one of the Moi. Then he grinned and looked at Jacques Devraux. "I guess we ought to get the ox carts here as quickly as possible, Monsieur Devraux, to take our bull and the calf back for skinning. Otherwise their hides won't last long in this heat, will they?"

Later in the afternoon Chuck Sherman ran excitedly into the hut he shared with his brother. Joseph was sitting quietly on his cot, his chin in his hands, staring out thoughtfully at the jungle. "The skinners found two bullets in your buffalo's head, Joey," he said excitedly. "Monsieur Devraux's went through her left ear, but she had another one-: yours - right between the eyes!" He shook his brother's shoulder delightedly. "How about that? Now we know, don't we? When it really matters you shoot straight"

"Thanks for letting me know."Joseph looked up and smiled, but his expression betrayed no sign of real pleasure.

Chuck stared down at him in puzzlement for a moment. Then he shrugged and turned away. A moment later he was running eagerly back across the camp to help the Moi with the skinning of the ma.s.sive bull he himself had killed, unaided.

11.

At sunset, darkness enveloped the hunting camp in a sudden rush. The fading light gave way in a matter of seconds to a moist, velvet blackness, as if a curtain had been drawn swiftly across the sky, and the shadows beyond the glow of the hurricane lamps immediately began to come alive with the shrill vibrations of the jungle night. On the riverbank a small army of frogs croaked a hoa.r.s.e descant to the incessant, high-pitched whine of unseen cicadas and from somewhere far off a bird screamed intermittently as though in agony.

In a shadowy corner of the cook tent,. Ngo Van Loc crouched beside an upturned packing case that he was using as a makes.h.i.+ft writing-table. His face was clenched tight with concentration and he wrote quoc ngu, the phonetic rendering of Annamese into the roman alphabet, in a large, ungainly hand. Every now and then he stopped to peer out through a slit in the tent wall and check that Jacques Devraux was still seated with the American hunting party at the table in the center of the clearing. He had seized the opportunity while they dined to make another copy of a revolutionary tract calling for an end to French rule. It had been prepared originally by the secret society he had joined two years earlier after being forced off his own rice lands for nonpayment of taxes, and he had copied it out dozens of times already in trying to win new recruits for the society in remote jungle villages far from Saigon. He had been hurrying to finish this latest copy before the meal ended, and seeing through the slit that his wife was heading out across the clearing with his two small sons to begin collecting the dishes, he put aside his pencil and hastily read over what he'd written.

O Brothers! O Brothers! For seventy years We have been slaves to the tyrannical French. They beat us down with duties arid taxes and pitilessly steal the fruits of our labors. We are treated like buffaloes and horses in our own land. Under the pretext of accomplis.h.i.+ng a civilizing mission, the red-bearded French barbarians have stolen our rice fields, our mines, our seas, our press, Our commerce. All power, all profits, all our sources of livelihood are in their hands - hut the one thing they leave behind will destroy them - the hatred of a million coolies! The time is coming, Brothers, for us to take the destiny of our nation into our own hands! United we are a vast army against a few thousand Frenchmen!

O Brothers and compatriots, join our society today! Unite with all those who hate the French and revolt against their despotic rule.

At the sound of footsteps outside the tent Loc quickly folded the copy and its master and hid them inside the packing case. Peering through the eye-slit he saw his wife, Mai, approaching, carrying the dishes from the supper table. Not yet thirty, she wore a long dark skirt and a pale sc.r.a.p of cheap cloth above the waist that left her arms and shoulders bare. The sensuality of her broad, peasant face was heightened by her modestly downcast eyes and the long swathe of glossy black hair that reached to her waist. Barefoot, she moved with the natural sinuousness of her race, arid looking beyond her, Loc saw Jacques Devraux lift his eyes momentarily from his plate to follow the swaying movement of her hips as she walked away from the table. For a second or two the expression of the Annamese camp "boy" hardened as he stared at his employer, then he moved away from the peephole and began to busy himself cleaning the pots arid pans that had been used to prepare the meal.

"Devraux told me today he is going to Canton again soon," he said in an excited whisper when his wife came to plunge her arms in the suds beside him. "And he wants me to go with him this time- as his driver." .

Her impa.s.sive face showed no sign of reaction and he leaned closer to emphasize the importance of his news. "Don't you realize what this means? I'll be able to meet other revolutionaries in exile there. We're very lucky to have positions of trust with Devraux." He glanced briefly towards the Frenchman, who was still seated at the table. "We must be very careful not to jeopardize them."

His wife nodded at his side but continued to clean the pans without replying or looking at him.

"Why aren't you interested n this good news?" he asked at last in an exasperated voice. "Don't you understand what I'm saying?"

"Yes, I understand," she said quietly.

"Then what's the matter?"

She sc.r.a.ped away at a pan in silence for a while. "He has been behaving differently today." She hesitated, seeming uncertain of what she wanted to say. "Normally he ignores me. But today he has looked at me two or three times in a certain way."

Loc stared hard at her for a moment then glanced out across the clearing again, remembering suddenly the expression he'd seen a few minutes before on the Frenchman's face.

"I think the American woman has upset him in some way," she continued in a quiet voice, "He never talks to her at the table - but she stares at him strangely sometimes."

"You're probably imagining it," he said quickly. "I'm sure there's nothing to worry about." - From the corner of his eye Loc noticed Flavia Sherman rise from the table and begin sauntering back towards her hut, Although she walked slowly, he saw there was a noticeable agitation in her manner; she tossed her head frequently, as if finding the heat oppressive, and ran her fingers repeatedly through her long black hair. He watched her, frowning, for a moment but then a squeal of high-pitched laughter rang across the camp, distracting him, and he turned to see his two sons, Dong and Hoc, squatting at the side of the clearing beside Paul and Joseph. The far-off cries of the lone bird they'd been hearing since sunset had recently seemed to double in intensity, and Loc realized that Paul Devraux had been echoing its call by blowing on blades of jungle gra.s.s between his thumbs. The American boy, he saw, was puffing out his cheeks and making loud trumpeting noises in an attempt to emulate these feats, and it was this comic performance that was causing the Annamese boys to shake with laughter.

Fearing suddenly that their behavior might upset Jacques Devraux, Loc ran quickly across the clearing towards them. "Monsieur Paul, please don't excite them any more," he called in French. "It is time they both were in bed."

Before he reached them Paul and Joseph had hoisted the two boys, aged eleven and thirteen, onto their shoulders and were encouraging them to joust at one another with chopsticks from the table. When Loc, with another worried glance in Jacques Devraux's direction, insisted it was time for them to go to bed, Paul galloped across the clearing with little Hoc on his shoulders and dumped the boy squealing with laughter on his sleeping mat. Joseph followed suit with Dong, and when the commotion died down and they had bidden the Annamese boys goodnight, he and Paul stripped off their s.h.i.+rts and walked over to the bamboo skinning platform where Chuck was already back at work on his buffalo hide.

In her hut Flavia Sherman, distracted by the sounds of merriment, gave up trying to read by the light of a hurricane lamp and walked restlessly to the front opening. Her bush s.h.i.+rt was sticking to the small of her back and she could feel tiny rivulets of perspiration trickling between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. In the distance thunder rumbled across the dark sky, and she suddenly raked her hands through her hair, holding both palms tight against her temples until the noise ceased.

In-the center of the camp Senator Nathaniel Sherman was still seated at the table on his own, savoring his third post-prandial cognac. He had drunk a lot of wine during supper "to celebrate Chuck's mighty fine bull," and she had noticed that his manner had been louder and more expansive as a result. On the far side of the camp, she saw Jacques Devraux stripping to the waist in order to resume work at the skinning platform, and suddenly unable to remain in the hut any longer, she strolled out across the clearing again. By the ox cart that had been used to haul the dead buffalo in from the plain, she paused to watch the men working on its hide. The curly-haired Moi were wearing only breechclouts, and their naked haunches gleamed in the lamplight as they moved vigorously around the platform; beside her pale-skinned sons, their glistening bodies looked almost black. Chuck's broad back was bowed over his task, his pride in his kill visible in every movement, but the slighter figure of Joseph bent and straightened at his side with less enthusiasm. Once Chuck turned and grinned delightedly at her as he paused to mop his brow, and she smiled warmly back. Against her will, however, she found her gaze straying repeatedly to Jacques Devraux.

Without a s.h.i.+rt the Frenchman's body looked lean and hard, and she guessed he must be a man of her own age. The muscles of his arms and shoulders were tight and sinewy, flexing like knotted cords beneath a sheen of perspiration, and in the flickering light of the lamps she could see a livid white hunting or battle scar running down the base of his throat and across his ribs. The American woman watched him intently for several minutes, a commotion of half-forgotten sensations stirring within her, but if he had noticed her presence he gave no sign.

When they had sc.r.a.ped and gouged all the fat from the buffalo's hide, Jacques Devraux showed the others how to rub in a.r.s.enical soap to repel the hordes of flies that would otherwise blow on it, and gradually the pungent reek of a.r.s.enic mingled with the other rank odors of human sweat and animal fat hanging in the saturated air. Another distant roll of thunder added a ba.s.s note to the orchestrated shrillness of the tropical night, and Devraux lifted his head for a second to listen. Antic.i.p.ating rain, he ordered the Moi to sling the hide on poles and move it into a canvas tent set up nearby. There he broke open some of the salt sacks and instructed the tribesmen to begin drying the skin. When he was satisfied they were doing it correctly he picked up the head of the dead buffalo and carried it to the river. Wading knee-deep into the warm, muddy water he drew a broad-bladed hunting knife from his belt and began hacking the flesh from it.

The American woman strolled over to the riverbank to watch him, and as the fragments of the raw flesh floated away downstream she saw the water churned to a white froth by shoals of ravenous fish fighting to devour them. Fascinated and repelled in the same moment she continued to watch the macabre spectacle despite herself, her lips parted, her eyes bright. Then she turned to look at the Frenchman and spoke softly in his language. "You honor us, Monsieur Devraux, by working so late into the night for our expedition."

"If we don't start drying the hides now, dampness and the heat will destroy all our efforts within a few hours." He stopped work long enough to look up directly into her face, then bent his head once more and continued cleaning the skull with neat, precise movements of the knife.

"I also wanted to thank you for what you did this afternoon," she said quietly. "It was a fine shot that killed the wounded buffalo."

The Frenchman scrambled out of the river and stopped in front of her. She had been standing on the bank above him with her booted feet apart, her hands jammed into the pockets of her tight-fitting breeches, and for a fleeting instant he looked at her appraisingly as he had done at the reception. Then he thrust his knife back into its sheath and spoke towards the gleaming skull he still held in his left hand. "I think, Madame Sherman, it might be, more diplomatic if you were to return to your quarters now. We're about to rid ourselves of the blood and fat of the buffalo."

When he glanced up at her again his thin mouth had returned to its habitual unsmiling lines and she turned away immediately. From her hut she heard him call to the Moi and her sons, and a moment later they all plunged naked into the river. For several minutes she heard them splas.h.i.+ng and laughing in the water, then gradually quiet returned to the camp. Chuck and Joseph, flushed and tousle-haired from their dip, looked in to bid her goodnight, and after they had returned to their hut she tried to resume her book by the lamp. But the words on the page didn't have the power to blot out the crack of hunting guns she was beginning to hear again inside her head, nor make her forget the sight of the blood trails on the hot plain. She saw too, in her mind's eye, the heaving bulk of the buffalo bull struggling in the gra.s.s in its death throes, saw once more the blindly charging cow and the ragged black vultures flopping down out of the sky, and all these images crowding through her mind heightened the vague sense of turbulence that was growing inside her with the gathering storm.

When she heard Jacques Devraux join her husband for a final drink at the table in the center of the clearing, she tried to listen to their conversation. What they said remained inaudible, but it was clear that the Frenchman was offering only an occasional monosyllable to punctuate her husband's rambling drawl. They talked in this desultory fas.h.i.+on for a few minutes, then when she heard them bid one another goodnight she ducked quickly under her mosquito net and lay down without undressing.

Inside his hut on the other side of the camp Ngo Van Loc also heard the two men take their leave of one another. He had been keeping a wary eye on Jacques Devraux while he made another laborious copy of the revolutionary tract and he stopped writing to watch the Frenchman walk back to his own quarters. In the rear of their hut his wife was bending over a bowl of water, naked to the waist, was.h.i.+ng herself, and she s.n.a.t.c.hed up a towel to cover her bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s when she heard Loc hiss a sudden warning. Glancing over her shoulder she saw him fumbling frantically to hide the pencil and paper he had been using, and a moment, later Jacques Devraux ducked under the hut's front flap. Blus.h.i.+ng furiously she turned away but still she felt the eyes of the Frenchman on her naked back.

"Send Mai to my hut in two minutes," she heard him say at last in a curt voice. "I wish to give her instructions for tomorrow's meals. Ask her also to bring needle and thread."

When he'd gone the Annamese woman turned to stare apprehensively at her husband. "He has never asked me to go at this time of night before," she whispered.

Ngo Van Loc avoided her gaze. "If we disobey him I may lose the opportunity to go to Canton," he said shortly. "And that's important for our movement. Get dressed and go quickly. I will find the needle and thread for you."

Taking care not to wake her sons, who were curled up together on their sleeping mats, she dressed and combed 'her hair then slipped out of the hut without looking at her husband.

Nathaniel Sherman stumbled slightly at the entrance of his hut, and his wife heard him cursing and fumbling for a long time with the flap fastenings. Once inside he removed his shoes and trousers very slowly then drew back her mosquito net and smiled lopsidedly at her before lowering himself unsteadily onto her cot. Outside, the thunder rolled more loudly, and a few drops of rain began to plop against the thatch above their heads.

"You're still a mighty beautiful woman, my dear," he said, slurring his words slightly. "I know I haven't always been what a husband should be to you - but that doesn't mean I don't appreciate and admire your beauty." He bent his head towards her until she could smell the cognac fumes on his breath. "You know that, don't you?"

She closed her eyes to hide her revulsion as he pressed his open mouth against hers and began fumbling with the b.u.t.tons of her bush s.h.i.+rt. Eventually he pushed his hand inside her bra.s.siere and began kneading one of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, but instead of responding she lay motionless and waited as she always did; gradually the movements of his hand grew slower, the rhythm of his breathing more regular, and when at last he lay still she disentangled his hand from her twisted clothing and slipped out from underneath him. Immediately he sprawled sideways across the cot in a loose posture of sleep and began snoring loudly.

The rain at that moment became torrential, drumming noisily on the thatch above her head, blotting out all other sounds of the night. She hesitated for only a second or two, then without looking around, she ripped the ties from the front flaps and stepped outside. The rain was driving down with great force, swamping the dry ground, and within moments her hair was plastered flat against her cheeks. Lightning forked overhead, illuminating the camp like day, and thunder crashed deafeningly through the deep darkness that followed. In the glare of the lightning flashes she rushed across the flooded clearing and didn't stop until she reached Jacques Devraux's hut.

Inside, a lamp hanging from the apex of the roof was still lit, and because he hadn't closed his mosquito curtain, her eyes fell at once on the slender golden body of Ngo Van Loc's wife spread-eagled beneath him on his cot. Devraux was staring towards the front flaps as she entered and he froze when he saw her. She gazed back mutely into his eyes, horrified and deeply aroused in the same instant, and when she didn't turn away he began to move once more, slowly at first, and then with gathering force and swiftness. Again and again he bore down on the Annamese woman and as his movements quickened he kept his gaze fixed challengingly on Flavia Sherman's face.

She stood rooted to the spot, staring back at him as though hypnotized, watching the skin of his face slowly tauten across his cheekbones. Gradually the downward thrust of his naked loins became more urgent and uncontrolled, and in a final moment of spasm, his features spread and widened suddenly into a flattened mask. For a long time he remained motionless like this, his body arched backward, his teeth clenched, his lips drawn back in a silent rictus of ecstatic agony. Then the Annamite woman began to sob and he relented at last and raised himself from her; still moaning quietly to herself she scrambled from the cot onto the dirt floor, gathered her sc.r.a.ps of clothing together and fled past the American woman into the rain.

As soon as she'd gone, Flavia Sherman began to fumble with the buckle of her belt; but her hands shook uncontrollably and it took her a long time to undress. Jacques Devraux watched in silence as she stepped out of her sodden clothing. In the light of the lamp hr naked body was glistening with rain and perspiration and when she saw the desire in his eyes she fell to her knees beside him.

With a tenderness that surprised her the Frenchman put his arms around her and lifted her onto the cot beside him. For a moment he held her head in his hands, searching her face with a strange expression in his eyes. Then he drew her against himself and kissed her roughly. She began to moan as he caressed her trembling body, and when he entered her she cried aloud as though in great pain. With the roar of the jungle storm filling their ears they abandoned their bodies to the hunger of many lonely years, driving in blind, frantic rhythms towards one furious ecstasy after another.

Sometimes Flavia Sherman wept as though with grief, and although the storm drowned most of her cries Joseph heard the faint sounds of his mother sobbing as he stood outside the hut in the torrential downpour. Unable to sleep he had drawn back the front flaps of his hut to watch the spectacular storm and had been startled to see her das.h.i.+ng across the flooded clearing in the glare of the lightning flashes. Thinking that she might need his help, he had dressed quickly and hurried after her, but outside the hut of Jacques Devraux he had stopped, suddenly afraid. When he first heard her voice she seemed to be in agony, and imagining she was ill, he had started impulsively forward again; then with a deep sense of shock he had sensed the awful intimacy of the strangled cries. For several minutes he stood outside the hut, drenched to the skin, listening to the m.u.f.fled sounds with a growing sense of desolation. Then he turned away and splashed numbly back across the flooded camp to his own hut.

12.

A vista of paradisiacal tranquility opened up beyond the windows of Jacques Devraux's Citroen B-2 landaulet as the motor car swung over the summit of another of the many rolling hills along the Mandarin Way. On one side of the ancient north-south coastal highway linking Saigon and Hanoi steep cliffs fell away to a dazzling beach of white sand fringed with coconut palms, and on the mirror-flat surface of the South China Sea far below, bat- winged Chinese junks floated at rest like toys on a turquoise pond. Inland, the Annamite Cordillera thrust its purple peaks towards the afternoon sky, but neither Joseph Sherman nor his mother gave more than a pa.s.sing glance to the spectacular mountain and ocean scenery outside the car.

They had remained wrapped in their own separate thoughts ever since leaving the hunting camp earlier in the day and had barely spoken to one another. Flavia Sherman was still wrestling with the turmoil of emotions that had kept her awake long after she returned to her own hut through the stormy jungle night. There she had found her husband still snoring on her cot, and she had stretched out on his; but sleep hadn't come, and long before dawn she had decided she must leave the camp at once. When Nathaniel Sherman awoke and saw where he was, he had looked at his wife shamefacedly and agreed immediately to her request to be driven to the imperial capital at Hue where the emperor of Annam was due to celebrate the Tet festival the following day. Joseph had accompanied her willingly, but she had soon noticed that his manner was subdued and cool towards her, and this had added a vague new dimension to her unease.

As Ngo Van Loc drove them northwards, her thoughts against her will returned constantly to the frenzy of that midnight jungle storm and the gnawing fear that she might not have emerged from her folly unscathed. A breathless, pervasive sense of heat possessed her body at every return of the memory and she was unable to remain settled and at ease in her seat for more than a few minutes at a time. She found herself searching back to her youth for reasons to explain the blind and selfish obsessions which had taken hold of her since they arrived in the French tropics and she wondered if her father's ruin and death by his own hand in the Louisiana cotton slump of '89, when she was only two years old, was the root cause. If he had lived, her hard-pressed mother might not have insisted that she accept the advances of the heir to the Sherman tobacco fortune. Perhaps the suffocating conventions of the Shermans' Queen Anne plantation house would not have been forced on an unknowing seventeen-year-old if her ailing mother had not been so shamed by their straitened conditions in a rented house on the borders of the Creole quarter of New Orleans.

The first of a series of world hunting trips to collect animals for the newly endowed Sherman Field Museum of Natural History - the latest public shrine to celebrate the force and virility of the male Sherman line -- had seemed to promise her a refres.h.i.+ng diversion from the dull routine of Tidewater Virginia and the house of political convenience in Georgetown. But the strangeness of the tropics and the sophistication of the almost-forgotten culture from which she had sprung had greatly exaggerated her sense of release from the frustrations of the past. The sudden disturbing plunge into the jungle in the cloying heat of the Saigon River had made her more intensely aware of her body than at any time since the fevered days of adolescence. Perhaps too the journey had reminded her of the dreadful certainty that within a few years her beauty would fade, and all these inflated hopes and fears had combined to produce a mood of abandon utterly foreign to her that had found its culmination in that jungle storm. She closed her eyes as the memory rushed back vividly into her mind again, and a feeling of panic rose through her at the thought that a fierce spark of that madness might be living on within her as she approached the middle of her life. She s.h.i.+fted restlessly in her seat once more, imagining she could actually feel the angry pinpoint of fire burning deep inside her womb....

In his corner Joseph found himself grappling with an overwhelming sense of bewilderment. He couldn't reconcile those terrible uncontrolled cries he had heard in the night with anything he already knew of his mother. To him until then she had always been a safe comforting haven; complete and seemingly self- sufficient in herself, she had always been an unfailing source of rea.s.surance, ever ready to pour unquestioning love and affection on him in his moments of need. His father's favoring of Chuck had forced him to turn to her increasingly for solace, and that some unimaginable selfishness should have driven her to commit her dreadful act of desertion baffled and disturbed him deeply for reasons he didn't begin to understand. Although she was sitting only a foot or two away from him in the opposite corner of the seat and had frequently tried to smile at him, he felt inexplicably betrayed. He didn't really understand what had happened or why, but he sensed things would never be quite the same again. Something alien had come between them, something that could never be removed. He felt irretrievably alone and the woman beside him seemed suddenly to be a total stranger.

Sometimes, as they encountered new crowds of pole-carrying Annamese peasants jogging ceaselessly between market and rice field, or spilling out of their tiny village temples and paG.o.das, he felt that what had happened was somehow inextricably bound up with the torrid, exotic country that was so totally unfamiliar to him in all its ways, and other distressing images of the recent past began to flood through his mind; he saw again the brutal French colon las.h.i.+ng the fallen prisoners between the shafts of the cart in Saigon, remembered the horror he had felt at the sight of what he thought were many ma.s.sacred coolies on the river wharf on their arrival, and he heard once more the thud of the Citroen striking the peasant boy on the way to the hunting camp. The elation he'd felt the day before at his own breathtaking adventure with the Moi girl now also seemed suddenly shameful to him, and he began to wonder if his exaggerated pride in the deed hadn't been the direct cause of the danger in which he and his mother had suddenly found themselves on the plain. It had, he decided, certainly brought about the death of the unfortunate buffaloes. Before they left the camp he had seen the hides of the bull and its calf sc.r.a.ped clean of all life, suspended like limp black rags in the drying tent; their white, eyeless skulls were hanging close by, and he felt a sense of desolation suddenly at the thought that he was responsible. Only the day before, those n.o.ble, horned beasts had been filing unsuspectingly through the long gra.s.s of the plain, intending to wallow harmlessly in some cool place through the heat of the day. Then in his foolish exhilaration he had leaped into a tree and spotted them with his binoculars. If he hadn't been so puffed up with conceit, the buffalo that had not been noticed by the Moi might now be basking contentedly in the shallows of the river....

"Joseph, is something wrong?"

The voice of his mother broke into his thoughts unexpectedly and he started inwardly. Because he knew he couldn't speak of what was in his mind, he pretended he hadn't heard her and continued to stare out of the window.

"Is it because you couldn't shoot the deer? Are you still upset because your father called you 'Momma's boy'?"

"Perhaps, a little." He kept his face turned away from her so that she wouldn't see that he wasn't telling the whole truth. "I was thinking too, about the buffalo. I feel like I sentenced them to death because I spotted them. Those skins are going to be s.h.i.+pped home and stuffed with sawdust and put in a gla.s.s case in our museum. But n.o.body would really care if they weren't. It would have been better if we'd let them live His mother leaned across the seat to Squeeze his hand, but he felt an inner coldness towards her and didn't respond. Studying his profile she noticed that he looked pale and red-eyed, and a new fear made her temples throb suddenly.

"Did you sleep well last night, Joseph? The storm didn't keep you awake, did it?"

"No. I slept very well," he said quickly. "I was really tired after everything that happened yesterday."

She sat watching him for a moment, hoping he would look around and smile; but he kept his back turned to her and continued to gaze abstractedly out the window.

13.

"We believe that living in harmony with natural forces of life is o the highest importance," said Tran Van Hieu gently, waving his hand towards the golden-roofed temples and palaces of the Imperial City inside the Hue citadel. "That is why the location for the Thai Hoa, the Palace of Perfect Concord, was chosen with such care."

Joseph gazed up wide-eyed at the snarling ceramic dragons that writhed along the ridges and cornices of the Thai Hoa; in the bright sunlight of the first morning of the Year of the Buffalo they glittered and s.h.i.+mmered like real gold. "It's very beautiful," said Joseph in a hushed voice. "But why was this particular spot found to be so favorable?"

They were crossing the Bridge of the Golden Waters and entering the ornamental esplanade in front of the palace where shaded, tree-lined walks led past lotus pools and bal.u.s.traded flower gardens. Joseph was dressed in a formal gray knickerbocker suit and the Annamese at his side was already wearing the stepped Ming dynasty bonnet, curly-toed boots and embroidered silk gown in which he would pay homage to the emperor of Annam along with hundreds of other mandarins at the annual Tet ceremony.

"This was where the strongest forces of all were found to meet in perfect union," said Tran Van Hieu quietly. "The white tiger and the blue dragon, which are often in conflict, rest peacefully with one another on the precise spot where the emperor's throne stands inside the palace."

"What are the white tiger and the blue dragon?"