The Noble Path: A relentless standalone thriller from the #1 bestseller Peter May (intellectual books to read .txt) 📖

‘You learn to do a lot of things when there ain’t no one else to do them.’ He turned back to his needle, the taut muscles of his bare chest reflecting the last glow of the fire. ‘What’s your plan?’

‘We’ll head east tomorrow night. As soon as it gets dark.’

‘We?’

Elliot shrugged. ‘Do what you like.’

‘And them?’ McCue flicked his head towards the two women and the boy sleeping against the wall.

‘We are no longer your concern.’ Serey’s voice, soft in the darkness, startled them. ‘Our lives are in no real danger here. And we are together again. If Yuon wants us he can come and get us himself.’ The acrid wood smoke and the darkness obscured her face from them. ‘You have brought my family together. It is you who are in most danger now. If you can escape with your lives then you must try.’

McCue looked at Elliot. ‘So we’re just going to leave them to the tender mercies of the Vietnamese?’

‘Whatever the Vietnamese might be,’ Serey said, ‘they cannot be worse than the Khmer Rouge. If they can rid my country of such an evil then I welcome them with all my heart.’

But McCue shook his head. ‘We came here to get them out, Elliot. We can’t just leave them. A couple of kids and an old woman.’

Serey’s shrill voice silenced him. ‘Mistah McCue, do you know what age I am?’

McCue sighed. ‘No, lady, I don’t know what age you are.’

‘I am thirty-eight.’ She said it proudly.

And Elliot realized, with a shock, that she was two years younger than himself.

‘I may look old to you. Withered, perhaps. But I still have a mind, and a free spirit. I am not stupid. Which is why I am still alive.’ They heard her shift in the dark, but gently so as not to disturb her children. ‘I survived the slaughter of the educated and intelligent by virtue of my education and intelligence. You cannot for one minute imagine what life was like under the Khmer Rouge. To remain silent when all around you saw only senseless destruction. And yet only in silence was there safety.’

Elliot was surprised by her sudden and unexpected clarity of mind. She had barely spoken in the days since the raid on the commune, except to pursue her dogged insistence that she would not leave Cambodia without her son. There was something compelling in her voice now, a power and intelligence that Elliot had never suspected.

‘In the first year after the Khmer Rouge victory, we were moved around from village to village. We were the new people, those from the cities, regarded with suspicion and often disliked by the ancients, the peasants in whose name the revolution had been made.’ She paused to brush stray wisps of grey hair from her face. ‘After several weeks building small-scale irrigation ditches in the paddies, we were assigned to build a larger canal to bring water from a nearby lake.’ Her remembered frustration was audible in a deep sigh. ‘They made us sleep in the open on mats, without tents, close to the site. We were forced to huddle round fires at night to stay warm and keep away the mosquitoes. Every hour of the day was spent digging. Thousands of us digging – a canal that ran uphill.’

The sarcasm in her tone was acid.

‘The site had not been surveyed, there were no plans, no records. The Khmer Rouge appeared to believe that revolutionary fervour could defeat the laws of physics.’

McCue had ceased sewing, his needle held suspended.

Serey’s voice continued to rise and fall in an oddly monotonous cadence, the hint of an American accent in her nasal tone. ‘The banks of the canal were constructed from loosely piled earth. In the unlikely event that water would someday defy gravity and actually run through it, the banks would simply be washed away. If men and women and children had not been dying all around us from exhaustion and hunger, it would have been laughable.’

They heard her breathing in short, sharp gasps in the dark.

‘One poor brave fool who had, until then, concealed his identity as an engineer tried to tell the Khmer Rouge idiots how it should be done. They paraded him before us at a merit festival. He knew nothing about the revolution, they said, and yet he was trying to tell them what to do. He was the living proof of imperialist arrogance. No doubt he died to prove their point. We never saw him again.’ She paused again, her voice trembling now, choked with emotion.

‘Qualifications, they told us, were saignabat – the invisible signal. All that mattered was physical work, saignakhoeunh – the visible signal. That was tangible. Therein lay honour.’ Elliot realized now it was anger he heard in the scratch of her voice, years of pent-up fury. ‘One listens, one obeys, one says nothing. It takes intelligence to create such evil, stupidity to enforce it. You cannot reason with stupidity.’

Elliot glanced at McCue, who appeared not to be listening. He was staring vacantly into the fading light of the fire.

‘In nineteenth-century Cambodian history there was a sage called Puth,’ Serey went on. ‘Puth prophesied that his country would suffer a dreadful upheaval, that traditional values would be turned on their head, houses and streets would be emptied, the illiterate would condemn the educated. Thmils – infidels – would take absolute power and persecute the priests.’ A tiny shower of sparks burst from the embers of the fire and caught her face briefly in its light, eyes glazed now, lost in painful memory.

‘As an educated woman I might once have poured scorn on such prophecies. But Puth also predicted that the people would be saved if they planted the kapok tree. In Cambodian the word for this tree is kor, which also means “mute”. It was said that only the deaf-mutes would survive this period of chaos. Say nothing, hear nothing, understand nothing.

‘I knew the canal