After murdering his father and marrying all the widows, King Narathu feared reincarnation. Perhaps he'd return as a lizard to be stoned by the villagers, skinned and roasted - a sputtering drizzle of juice in the fire. To evade fate he built the largest temple in Pagan on the plain already a hummocked quilt of mud brick bribes against mortal deeds. Mornings, he trailed his courtiers behind him like a child with a clacking pull-toy, through the dusty bristle of palms, to insert a needle between yesterday's bricks. If he could, the mason lost a finger. Eight hundred years ago eight assassins stabbed him, then each other, but still bricks and mortar - death's dust steeped and kneaded - stack neat sandwiches. In his dim arches, where bats swoop, we shake our heads over his litany of iniquity, loving it, wanting evil to be monstrous, mythical, something our ordinariness cannot achieve. When he looked down his tunnel's sealed masonry to the framed opening of light and green, perhaps he longed to be without the dark within. Emerging from his shadows where bats scream at the edge of hearing, we watch a lizard warm his blood in the dust circled by boys, pouches of slingshots pulled taut on limber fingers. |