‘You do that and you are no daughter of mine.’ Mo scrambled after her, hurrying to keep up with her. Run Run wheeled back around to face her.

‘I will not live my life like you, Mother! I want to be happy. I want to feel love. I would rather die than live a life without love…I am a thay-ne to you—a walking dead. I mean nothing to you.’

Mo had stopped dead in her tracks, shocked. She watched Run Run pick up her pack and throw it over her shoulders, stopping only to hug Phara and Kanya before starting out towards the jungle. She didn’t look back at her mother. For a few seconds Mo stood where she was, bewilderment and hurt on her face, then she swung around and scowled at Alak.

‘Pah…’ Mo looked at him and spat. ‘Don’t fuck up.’

Just as they started after Run Run, the dog began barking furiously, just out of sight on the edge of the camp. Everyone turned to look and to watch Mo’s reaction. She knew its barks as if they were a language. She started slowly towards the direction of the dog. This bark was of alarm, not an intruder, but something was frightening the dog.

Alak removed his gun from its holster. Mann moved Delilah from his boot to his hand and Alak, Louis and Mann walked towards the spot where the dog was still barking. They fanned out as they came near, approaching from three directions. Louis was the first of them to spot the soldier’s body.

68

He was slumped over at the base of a tree. His head was bent back where he had fallen awkwardly. His eyes stared vacantly upwards. His mouth hung open, forming a cave for the flies to explore. His trousers lay around his ankles. It was the soldier who had pulled Phara onto his lap.

Louis knelt down to look him over. Mann bent down beside him.

‘Fucking religious crap.’ Louis snatched something from round the soldier’s neck and threw it into the bushes.

‘What was that?’ asked Mann.

‘Animist charms,’ said Louis. ‘Spirit appeasers. Fucking voodoo beads.’

He looked up at Mo, who had followed them with Phara. ‘How did he die?’ asked Riley.

Louis and Mann searched his body. They found one wound on the soldier’s chest. ‘This is what killed him,’ Mann said as he examined the wound closely. ‘It’s a clean deep cut, made by a fine stiletto-type blade, about an inch wide. There’s bruising either side of it, the knife had a hilt of some kind.’

‘Straight into the heart,’ said Louis. ‘Why wasn’t he missed this morning?’ Louis turned to ask Alak.

‘I sent him to look for the scouts last night. He doesn’t see many women. I didn’t want him causing a problem here in Mo’s camp. The scouts arrived without him; I knew he must have hit trouble. I did not expect it to be so close.’

‘It looks like he came out here when he was caught short,’ said Riley.

‘Not exactly,’ answered Mann, looking at the dried semen on the soldier’s leg.

‘What shall we do?’ asked Sue, her voice sounding panicky.

‘We have no time to find out who killed him or why,’ said Mann. ‘We’ll have to leave his body here for Mo to deal with. We have no choice. We are together now for good or bad. If one of us is a murderer we will find out soon enough.’

‘Yes,’ Alak agreed, picking up his gun and slinging it over his shoulder, ready to leave. ‘We must hurry now.’

They carried the soldier’s body to the medical hut and now, with the sun already high in the sky, they had to hurry to make up for lost time. They picked up their packs and followed Alak as he turned and led them out of the village. Mann looked back to see Mo cutting an anxious, lonely but stoic figure at the village entrance as she watched them go.

After they left, Mo went to tend to the soldier’s body. It must be given the proper rights to appease the spirits. His death, which had taken place in such a violent manner, would bring a curse on the village and his spirit would haunt them all. Phara helped her and together they removed his clothes and prepared his body. They washed him and removed his intestines, then anointed his body with palm oil before wrapping it in strips of white fabric.

‘A blood sacrifice must be made.’

Mo picked up her knife and went to the pig pen below her house. There she grabbed one of the small pigs and thrust the knife into its heart.

‘Tonight we will eat the pig and appease his spirit. We will give it passage to heaven.’

The soldier’s body was carried to a funeral pyre, high up on a sacred mound a half a mile away. Ten of Mo’s women accompanied her whilst the rest stayed in the village.

The brightness of the soldier’s body as it burned lit the evening sky. It was the inadvertent signal that the Burmese army captain, Boon Nam, needed. Mo had taken her best fighters to carry the soldier on his long journey up to the sky. She had left behind Phara to cook the pig in preparation for the evening and to look after the camp. The camp was unprotected.

From their positions on the ground Kanya and the dog were the first to feel the earth beneath them tremble at the approach of many feet. The dog listened; it twisted its head and gave a series of small alarmed barks and then it looked at Kanya. Both of them looked towards the sky. Birds were rising, monkeys were squawking. The dog’s hackles went up. One by one, the other children stopped playing and came to stand with Kanya and the dog. An old woman stood in her doorway and called to them.

‘What is it? Is it Mo returning already?’

Phara stopped turning the pig on its spit. Her eyes went first to one side of the camp and then the other. The jungle was moving all around them. Then she saw the flash of a gun, she heard the crack of twigs breaking beneath army boots, and she shouted to the children, ‘Run, run, run!’

They scampered into the jungle; most were hacked to pieces as they ran into the waiting soldiers. The old woman was killed where she stood. Phara was pinned to the ground by Boon Nam’s men and gangraped whilst her face was forced towards the fire to watch not the pig on the spit, but Kanya, suspended upside down and roasted alive.

69

Mann and the others headed west and followed a small tributary of the river. The night came thick and fast and Alak called a halt to the march when they could no longer see well enough to walk. They cleared an area of the bank twenty feet from the fast-flowing river and made a makeshift camp. The place was cleared of snakes and insects, hammocks were slung between trees and a fire was lit. Run Run and Gee took out the pots from the porters’ packs and began preparing the meal of rice and a thick vegetable sauce. The mood was pensive. They had spent much of the morning discussing the soldier’s death and come to no conclusion. They were all together now for good or bad, till the end.

An hour later, Mann found himself with Sue in the river. Her clothes were already hanging from a branch. As he approached, she waded deeper into the water.

‘So, tell me the story,’ Mann said. ‘What was that all about with Mo and Alak?’

Sue kept her shoulders submerged beneath the skin of the water as she answered him.

’Run Run, Alak and Saw Wah Say were all friends as children. Like Alak said, he and Saw were taken away to fight as youngsters and then to help run the refinery. It seems that Saw was in love with Run Run and so was Alak. Alak is a Buddhist and Mo wouldn’t allow the marriage. Saw was a Christian and she said yes, but Run Run didn’t want it. The two men lived side by side like brothers both after the same girl.

‘From what I heard, in their years at the refinery, they committed many terrible crimes between them—raping, killing, high on drugs—it was a mad time. After the refinery changed hands and they were kicked out, they returned briefly to the village. As Alak said, there was nothing to return to for Saw; his family were all either dead or gone. He stayed with Alak but that brought everything to a head, and he tried to rape Run Run. Alak nearly killed him but, in the process, Run Run’s brother tried to help. He got in the way and he was killed. We don’t know how. No one knows exactly what happened that day, only the three of them. Since then, Saw has been on the run, getting wilder, apparently. Mo will always hate Alak. All I know is that Alak and Run Run can never be together—it is forbidden. But it doesn’t mean they don’t love each other.’