The Leper King

Jess ran ahead and came across him in the sunlight, ready to receive her. As if he’d been waiting for her over the centuries to come back – perhaps he had, perhaps she too was centuries old but in this eleven year old body for some unspecified time.

She sat in his warm stone lap. Warm sun, warm stone, no questions, no frowns just a gentle acceptance of her. She studied the strange whorls of yellowy moss growing on his body. He could be stared at, being made of stone. He was profoundly silent and she was glad she had nothing to say to him.

The rest of the family approached, her distant father first, preparing the camera, his handsome face squinting at the sun’s angle, ready to shoot; her older sister, Rosie, sheltering with the grownups, one arm shielding the new, tender pink bumps under her white blouse. Her mother and aunt behind. Jess leaned back on the stone lap, safe, for just a moment or two, from comments or the strain of not explaining what she wanted to – how they all seemed to make up a whole planet and she was just a small satellite orbiting it’s edges.

Her father stood over her, using her body to test the light with his metre. “OK, smile Jess.” Click. “Yes that should be a good one.” He turned away to the others and they spoke important nonsense over her head; history, politics, nothing she could add to or knew about, just murmurs in the heat haze. How she loved her father but, that too, could be said, by him or her.

On they all went, wandering without a guide.
Rosie jostled Jess roughly, ‘God, stop getting under my feet, Jess.’

So Jess ran on ahead again, glad she had cut her eyelashes off ‘in a fit of pique’, her mother had said and that she didn’t have ‘bee-bites’ under her t-shirt. But she thought of him, the statue back there, as of a first love, enchanted by his benign face, the way he accepted and embraced her with his age-ringed arms.

They found Angkor Thom, coming upon it suddenly in a dappled clearing, as if they were it’s discoverers. Jess’s mother read from a guide book about the ‘Churning of the Sea of Milk’ gods one side, demons the other but both guarding the temple, as old as the Leper King, like him in grey stone, the gods, serene, warm to touch but the demons with ferocious lip-curling expressions and boiled egg eyes as they churned and churned. Her father took photographs, her sister sat, hot, pink and tender, in between two demon guardians – Jess put her hand out to stop her, it seemed dangerous, but Rosie was too turned inwards to notice what she was doing, concentrating perhaps, on the new growth under her t-shirt. She’d been like that for weeks and wasn’t thinking straight because of it.

Jess kept quiet – too silly, her sister would tell her not to be so stupid. She swallowed a flash of fear about her own growth, when she would have the pink bumps pushing through under her t-shirt, requiring a bra and the blood that would inevitably appear. She didn’t see how she could ever be a woman.

On they went looking now for Banteai Srei the “ ‘Citadel of Women’, her mother chanted out of the guide book”, “ ‘there is an air of femininity about the entire edifice. It is charming, exquisite and dainty.’ Sounds marvellous, don’t you think?” She asked the others, twirling a little, her face alive with interest and expectation.

But Jess ran on, to get away from the prospect of such a sight, to the cool edge of the jungle and stumbled, sunblind, over a giant tree root as big as a python. Two figures moved towards her through the ancient trees and ropes of hanging vines. For a moment she was frightened. But the figures, a father and son, smiled and helped her up. She felt like Livingstone the great explorer and vowed always to be a tomboy. To look at she could have been a boy with her hair cut brutally short, because of the heat, Mum said. There in the cool she could still feel the prickles of stray hairs on her back. And knew, under the shelter of green that she was invisible and full of secrets, ‘enigmatic’ they called her and she knew she was their link to the unknown, for now.

The boy smiled at her, his eyes had the light of joy at their centres and looked at her almost lovingly. He showed her a hand made crossbow and his father produced two more from a cloth bag. She wanted one; never had she wanted anything so much. They were selling them and she looked round to see if the family were coming.
She felt resolve strong in her chest; she would beg if she had to.

They came on towards her, through the cool green gloom, her father in the lead, her mother, olive-skinned with dark wavy hair and a full skirt, almost beautiful, but too eager with pain lines around her mouth. Her sister trailed behind, pink and irritable, with their full-hipped aunt who was chivvying her along. They seemed strangers, too solid and the wrong colour in the ancient ghost-filled jungle. She existed in a world below them and hardly ever looked into their faces. Sometimes she tried to, secretly, but was afraid of getting caught, they would laugh, fondly, at her and ask, in mystified tones, what she was doing and tease her so that later she would cry in bed.

She turned to the boy and his father as you would to those who understood and took the crossbow from the boy, felt it smooth and rich brown in her hands. She told herself to ask, immediately, as they approached, she must get across her need for it, make them understand for once.

She tested it, feeling the tension, wanting to slot an arrow in its’ polished groove and shoot it way out over the trees into the perfect sky. The beautiful boy, her height, maybe her age showed her how. He handled the bow with the care and ease of one who had sat and shaped the thing, like a sculptor, smiling, offering. She thought of the Leper King, his grave, kind expression, his arms and lap inviting, how he had welcomed her into this new world, how he would stil be there, waiting.

The boy slotted an arrow in to the groove, smiling, urging her to try, feel the tension, take a shot at one of the gnarled trees, shoot through the sun-spotted clearing into the shadows beyond. He pulled the bow string, slotted it into the furthest groove for the most powerful shot. His father looked on smiling and cautioning, his hands, patting his eager son’s shoulders, murmuring calm down, remember this is serious, not a toy and this girl, she may never have even held one before. It sounded soothing to Jess, this murmur in their language, almost like a lullaby. But they took no notice of the old man and his concern faded back in to his lined face as he went to squat on a raised hump of tree root that had burst from the ground.

There was a moment when Jess and the boy laughed together like two friends who had known each other all their lives and, almost, the crossbow wasn’t important, she didn’t need it, but as he passed it to her, loaded, she knew she needed it to become a part of the kingdom. The boy turned her gently inwards to the jungle and gestured that she should pick a tree to aim at. Her hands trembled with excitement, she could feel the bow like a live animal waiting to leap out of her hands. She heard the others begin to crash through the jungle making as much noise as a herd of elephants. She herself, could creep almost noiselessly through undergrowth. They were ridiculous. Would they let her have this crossbow? Would they buy it for her or just take a picture for her to look at so she would wish forever that she could have bought it.

She turned, forgetting the thing in her hand, to beg and plead for it. The bow leapt and sprung, her father was falling, crashing like a great felled tree to the ground. Her mother screamed and she distinctly heard her aunt say, ‘steady on Lillian,’ in her strong voice and saw two figures running on quick brown legs.

The leg wound was ‘superficial’, no real harm done, they hastened to assure her, an accident, a mere accident but Jess tossed and turned in the shuttered hotel room with the terrible regret of infidelity and the Leper King’s face over-shadowed her father’s in the secret dark.