The Lost Sun Throne

Chapter 1: The Treasurer's Road

Angkor, 1431

The drums on the eastern wall fell silent an hour after sunset, and Yos knew what the silence meant.

He stood at the top of the treasury steps with a clay lamp in his hand and listened. For seven months the Siamese army had camped beyond the moat. For seven months the drums had answered their horns every night. Now there was only the crackle of burning thatch in the outer city and, far off, a low roar like the sea. It was the sound of thousands of men shouting at once.

An old man came hurrying up the steps toward him. It was the chamberlain, still in his court silks, his face grey with smoke. He held out a small bronze seal on a cord.

“They are through the east gate,” the chamberlain said, gasping for breath. “The king has gone south with his guard. He leaves you this.”

Yos took the seal. On its face was a three-headed elephant beneath a royal parasol, the mark of the kings of Angkor. As royal treasurer he had pressed that mark into wax ten thousand times, on tax rolls and temple accounts and letters to distant governors. He had never held the seal itself.

“And his orders?”

“Save what the city cannot defend.” The chamberlain looked past him, through the doorway, into the long dark hall where the treasures of the state temple were kept. “You know the place in the west. The king's father began it for exactly this night. Take everything there. Hide it. Tell no one the road.”

“And after that?”

The old man smiled sadly. “After that, come home. If there is still a home to come to.”

By midnight twenty-two war elephants stood in the treasury courtyard, swaying and rumbling in the torchlight. Their mahouts sat behind their ears with iron hooks across their knees. The head mahout was a broad, quiet man named Phok, who rode the oldest cow in the royal stables, a tall grey elephant with torn ears and a patient eye. Her name was Chaya. The other elephants followed her the way soldiers follow a captain they trust.

The treasure came out of the hall in a long line of sweating men. There were gold crowns set with rubies and pearls. There were shrines no bigger than a man's chest, each one sheathed in thin gold leaf. There were bronze gods wrapped in cloth and lashed into baskets, chests of ritual bowls, and the jeweled covers of sacred books.

Last of all came the Sun Throne.

It took sixteen men and a timber frame to move it. The seat rested on the backs of four bronze lions. Behind it rose a great disc of beaten gold, carved with rays that spread outward like the morning sun. Under the gold was a core of solid bronze, and the whole thing weighed as much as a small elephant. Kings of Angkor had been crowned on it for three hundred years. In the torchlight it seemed to burn by itself.

They roped it into a reinforced howdah on Chaya's back. The old elephant grunted under the weight but did not stamp or complain. Phok leaned down and spoke softly into her ear, and she stepped forward.

The column left by the western gate as the first Siamese banners appeared on the far side of the royal square. No one stopped them. In the chaos, a line of elephants plodding away from the fighting looked like frightened animals being led to safety.

They traveled for eleven days. They kept off the main roads and moved by night whenever they could. They crossed rice country, then dry scrub forest, then the first steep green folds of the mountains the people called Kravanh, which foreign traders would one day name the Cardamoms. The rain began on the seventh day and did not stop. Leeches dropped from the leaves onto the mahouts' necks. One elephant slipped on a muddy ridge and broke a leg, and Yos had to watch while Phok ended her suffering with a spear. They divided her load among the others and kept walking.

On the twelfth morning they came over a high saddle and looked down into a hidden valley. A river wound through the bottom of it. At the valley's head, that same river poured off a sheer cliff in a single white sheet and crashed into a round green lake.

A grey-haired man was waiting on the shore. His name was Mok, and he was the chief engineer of the kingdom. He had spent twenty years in this valley with a few hundred stonecutters, building something no one in the capital was allowed to see.

“Behind the water,” Mok said, and bowed to the seal hanging around Yos's neck.

The elephants could go no farther. The ledge behind the falls was too narrow for them. So the mahouts and the stonecutters carried everything themselves, piece by piece, along a slippery path that ran behind the thundering curtain of water. The spray soaked them. The noise was so loud that men had to shout into each other's ears. It took three days and every rope they owned to drag the Sun Throne along that ledge on timber rollers.

Behind the falls, a flight of carved steps climbed to a doorway in the rock. Beyond the doorway, Mok's men had cut halls out of the living mountain. There were pillars shaped like lotus stems and walls carved with dancing goddesses. There was a great hall with a high, rough ceiling where a natural chimney let in a thin shaft of daylight. At the far end of the great hall, up a steep stair, stood the treasury itself, a square chamber raised high above the floor.

Mok led Yos to a narrow gallery at the side of the halls and showed him a wall of fitted stone blocks, taller than three men. Water seeped through its joints.

“Behind this wall is a lake inside the mountain,” Mok said. “The rain feeds it through the cracks in the rock. The wall holds it back. The doors to the treasury must be opened in a certain order. If a thief forces them wrongly, stone bars drop, the sluices open, and the water fills the halls. It carries the thief out through the drinking tunnel and over the falls.”

He pointed to a line of carved serpents, nagas, running along the walls of the great hall at the height of a man's chest.

“The water rises to the nagas and no higher,” Mok said. “The treasury stands above them. Water guards the house of the king. The thief will drink. The king sits above the water.”

When everything was inside, they closed the great stone door, and Mok's men sealed it with a slab carved to look like natural rock.

On the journey home, Yos stopped at a small sandstone temple on the edge of the hills called Prasat Ta Sok. It guarded a frontier pass, and it had an old sculptor named Kong who had carved half the lintels in the province. Yos found him under a tamarind tree and crouched beside him in the dust.

“If I die on the road,” Yos said, “the king's heirs must still be able to find what I have hidden. A man can be killed or tortured. Stone remembers.” He drew in the dirt with a stick. “Carve me a procession of royal elephants climbing a mountain. Put three standing stones along their road. At the top, carve a mountain where the river drinks the sky.”

Kong frowned. “The river drinks the sky?”

“In the early morning, the sun shines into the spray at the foot of the falls. The mist climbs upward into a rainbow, so it looks as if the water is falling up. Carve that.” Yos drew a long line along the bottom of his sketch. “And here, along the border, carve a row of small elephants. Make them walk the other way. Put the real landmarks beside them: the split rock, the twin peaks, the three fig trees. Make it look like decoration.”

“Why the other way?”

“Because thieves read the middle of a picture,” Yos said. “Only the patient read the edges.”

The stones in the middle of the carving would be lies. On the way down the mountains, Yos had his mahouts drag three tall stelae from an old quarry and set them up on the ridges of the wide, easy valley that any pursuer would choose. Each stone pointed a little farther along that valley. The last pointed into a dead-end gorge with no way out.

Kong carved the panel in six weeks, and it was beautiful.

Two days after the carving was finished, a runner reached Prasat Ta Sok. Angkor had been plundered. The king and his court were not coming back. They were moving south, toward the great rivers, to build a new capital far from the Siamese.

Yos stood in the temple courtyard for a long time, holding the bronze seal. If he went south, every prince and general at the new court would want to know where the gold had gone. Sooner or later, someone would make him tell.

He turned to Phok, who was waiting beside Chaya.

“We carried the king's house into the mountains,” Yos said. “I think now we must stay and keep it.”

Phok looked west, toward the green hills, and nodded.

The column turned back into the forest. Neither Yos nor his elephants ever reached the capital again. In the villages of the Cardamoms, people later told stories of mahouts who came out of the east with a treasurer and a broken heart, and whose children's children still walked an old road through the mountains, long after they had forgotten where it led.