The Monsoon Throne

Chapter 1: The Monastery of Broken Spires

The monastery had no proper name anymore. The monks who had once filled its corridors with chanting and the rustle of saffron robes were long scattered—some to the forests, others to the new capital at Phnom Penh, a few to death. Only Brother Vichea remained, a young monk of perhaps twenty years, thin as a bamboo pole and nearly as upright, who had taken it upon himself to tend the crumbling sanctuary because no one else would.

It was to this place that Sovann Ratanak came in the dry season of the year 1348, walking slowly along the causeway that had once connected the monastery to the great processional road. The causeway stones were heaved and broken by tree roots. Frangipani blossoms lay in the cracks like offerings no one had placed.

Sovann was old. His back was bent from decades of labor, and his left eye—the weak one, the one that had never quite focused since birth—had gone entirely white. But his right eye was still sharp, still restless, still cataloging the world in terms of plane and relief, light and shadow, the way a sculptor's eye never stops working. He carried a walking stick of dark ironwood, and a cloth bundle that contained everything he owned.

Brother Vichea met him at the eastern gate, where a naga balustrade had lost most of its serpent heads to time and theft.

"Venerable grandfather," the young monk said, pressing his palms together. "You sent word you wished to stay."

"I did." Sovann lowered himself onto a stone block that had once been part of a lintel. He could read the carving on its face even upside down—a scene of Vishnu churning the ocean of milk. The chisel work was competent but uninspired. Not his. "I wish to stay, and I wish to tell you something. A story, if you have patience for an old man's talking."

"I have little else, grandfather. The monastery is quiet."

"It was not always quiet." Sovann looked past the monk toward the tree line, where the towers of Angkor Wat rose above the canopy like the fingers of a drowning hand. "None of this was quiet. I remember when you could not hear yourself think for the sound of chisels on stone, and the trumpeting of elephants hauling laterite blocks, and the temple dancers' ankle bells ringing through the galleries at dawn. I remember the smell of the place—wet stone and incense and the particular stink of ten thousand workers sweating in the sun."

He paused. A gecko clicked somewhere in the ruined ceiling above them.

"I carved those temples," he said. "Some of them. The parts that mattered to me. And I watched them begin to die, which is the part that matters now."

Brother Vichea settled onto the ground across from him, folding his legs beneath his robe. He had a young man's curiosity, barely concealed behind monastic discipline. "Where does the story begin, grandfather?"

Sovann considered this. "With my father's hands," he said. "And with the quarry."

---

The quarry at Phnom Kulen was a wound in the earth forty li northeast of Angkor. It had been worked for generations, each new king demanding more sandstone for more temples, more causeways, more walls to proclaim his divinity. By the time Sovann was born—in the year he later calculated as 1290, though no one had recorded the birth of a quarrier's son—the wound had grown deep and wide, a canyon of pink and gray stone echoing with the ring of iron on rock.

His father, Ratanak, was a block-cutter. Not a skilled one, not a man who understood the grain of the stone the way the master quarriers did, but a strong one, broad across the shoulders and thick in the forearms, capable of swinging a mallet from dawn prayer to evening prayer without complaint. He had married a woman named Kunthea who washed clothes for the overseers' families and who died of a fever when Sovann was four. Sovann remembered almost nothing of her—a smell of wet cotton, a song about a fish—and his father never spoke of her.

What Sovann did remember, with the peculiar clarity that attaches to formative things, was the stone.

He had been born with his left eye turned slightly inward, the pupil clouded at its edge. The village healer said a spirit had breathed on him in the womb. His father said nothing, but Sovann could see the man's disappointment—a quarrier's son needed two good eyes to judge the depth of a cut, to read the fracture lines that ran through the living rock.

But the defect did something unexpected. Because Sovann's left eye contributed so little to his vision, his brain learned to extract depth from other cues—the fall of shadow, the subtle gradation of color across a surface, the way light pooled in a concavity and fled from a convex curve. He saw the world the way a bas-relief sees it: in terms of projection and recession, figure and ground. By the time he was seven, he could look at a raw block of sandstone and tell you where the soft veins ran, where the iron deposits would stain red, where the stone would take a fine edge and where it would crumble.

His father put him to work as a water carrier, the lowest job in the quarry. Sovann hauled clay jars from the stream to the cutting face, where the quarriers poured water along their chisel lines to soften the stone and cool the iron. It was brutal work for a child, and his knees bore the scars of it for the rest of his life—the rough stone paths, the constant kneeling to fill the jars, the weight of the yoke across shoulders that had not yet hardened.

But he watched. That was the thing about Sovann that set him apart before anyone noticed: he watched everything. He watched the master quarriers read the stone. He watched the rough-cutters shape the blocks. And when the finished blocks were loaded onto ox-sledges and dragged down the mountain to the canal system that would float them to Angkor, he watched the carvers who sometimes came up from the city to select their material.

The carvers were a different breed from the quarriers. They were thinner, their hands more delicate, their eyes perpetually narrowed in assessment. They wore cotton wraps dyed with turmeric rather than the quarriers' plain loincloths, and they spoke to the overseers as equals, not subordinates. They served the Brahmin priests who designed the temple decorations, and through the priests they served the king himself.

One carver came more often than the others. His name was Pheakdei, and he was perhaps fifty years old—ancient by the standards of men who worked stone for a living. He had a long face, deeply lined, and hands that were maps of old cuts and calluses. He came to Phnom Kulen every few months to select blocks for the apsara galleries of the newest temple project, and he was particular to the point of obsession. He would spend an entire day examining a single block, running his fingers along its surface, holding it up to the light at different angles, tapping it with a small bronze hammer and listening to its ring.

Sovann was twelve when Pheakdei first spoke to him.

The boy had been delivering water to the cutting face when he paused to watch the old carver examining a rejected block—one the quarriers had set aside because of a dark vein running through its center. Pheakdei was turning the block slowly, frowning.

"It's not a flaw," Sovann said, before he could stop himself. "The dark vein. It runs shallow. Cut two fingers deep on the south face and you'll find clean stone beneath."

Pheakdei looked at him. Not with anger—Sovann had expected anger, because quarry boys did not speak to master carvers—but with a sudden, sharp attention.

"How do you know that?"

"I can see it. The color changes at the edge—there, where the shadow falls. The vein is curving back toward the surface. It doesn't go deep."

Pheakdei stared at him for a long moment. Then he took his bronze hammer and tapped the block precisely where Sovann had indicated. The ring was clean and true—solid stone, not the dull thud of a deep flaw.

"What happened to your eye?" the carver asked.

"Born with it, master."

"And the other one? The good one?"

"It works."

Pheakdei almost smiled. "It does more than work, boy. Come here. Tell me what you see in this block."

That was the beginning.

---

Sovann paused in his telling. The afternoon light had shifted, throwing long shadows through the monastery's broken windows. Brother Vichea had not moved.

"He took you as an apprentice?" the monk asked.

"Not immediately. It took another year. My father had to be compensated—he was losing a water carrier, after all, and quarry boys were not easy to replace. Pheakdei paid the overseer three measures of rice and a length of cotton cloth, which was more than my father earned in two months. My father did not argue. He was not a sentimental man."

"Did you miss the quarry?"

"I missed my father. For a time. But children are adaptable creatures, and the work Pheakdei gave me was so much more interesting than hauling water that I forgot to be homesick within a week." Sovann shifted on his stone seat. "I should tell you about Angkor as it was then. You have only seen the ruins. You cannot imagine what I saw when Pheakdei brought me down from the mountain."

"Tell me, grandfather."

Sovann closed his good eye. Behind the lid, the city assembled itself from memory, vivid and complete.

"Angkor," he said, "was the center of the world."