Chapter One - Richard Lewis

And levitating above the hole in the ground was indeed a skull, held up by a
worker's dirty hand. The skull slowly rotated, as if its empty sockets were surveying the
crowd before stopping to gaze at the men by the ambulance.
Men Djawa shrieked. Bolting under the arms of a cop, she raced on bandied legs
toward the men, her pink sandals flapping, and threw herself at them with hands
outstretched like claws. Mantera jerked back in alarm, but before she could land her
attack, Dharma and a police officer had grabbed her arms. The prince's imperturbability
reasserted itself. He stepped close to Men Djawa and said something as her shrieks
quieted to incoherent babbling. She didn't resist as two policemen marched her off.
Nol's uneasiness was now burbling through his marrow. Marching over to the
tarp, he squatted on his haunches to inspect the skulls, careful not to touch them. He
noted the depressed factures, but did see a single bullet hole.
A shadow fell across the skulls and there entered into his field of vision a pair of
polished black shoes and immaculate trouser cuffs. Nol lifted his gaze up to Raka,
surveying the bones. His heavy black eyes turned to Nol. "Communist scum," he said
and strode off.
Nol stood to go, but the skulls held him in place.
Dharma came over and put a hand on his shoulder. "You know he's not here," he
said. "This will do you no good."
When Nol was school, after his last class of the day he'd go directly to his Uncle
Dharma's compound, always bustling with activity, unlike his own house, where he had
to tiptoe around his mother. With his cousins and friends, he played tops and gambled
marbles and flew kites and hunted in the fields for snails and eels. He'd grab a meal out of
the kitchen and sleep over, a ragtag assembly of cousins all tangled up on a single bed.
Uncle Dharma loved to tell stories to the boys, recounting the heroic deeds of the
warrior king Ken Arok and his powerful and yet tragically cursed keris blade that gave
Ken Arok his kingdom and in the end took his life. Many an evening, Uncle Dharma
spirited Nol away into the jungles where Hanuman the Monkey King fought the Demon
King who'd kidnapped the lovely princess Sita. Nol laughed until he cried at the antics of
Pan Balang Tamak, the village trickster who always found a clever way to weasel out of
temple dues and village duties.
On the dark of the new moon, when dangerous spirits roamed, Nol and the others
would huddle on Dharma's porch, shivering to his tales of the leyak called Luhde
Srikandi, a fanged witch disguised as a beautiful woman, an agent of the evil
Communists who lured honest patriotic men to their horrible deaths.
"One night of the new moon," Uncle Dharma said, "I heard outside my window
the sweetest voice asking me for help. But I knew Luhde Srikandi's tricks and I closed
my ears. Not everyone did so. The next morning, we found at the pura dalem a man with
his half-eaten heart on the ground and his entrails pulled out and arranged in the
communist hammer and sickle."
He would end these stories with reassurances. "Don't worry, boys, we trapped her
and killed her. How beautiful she was! But when we cut off her head, it became her real
self, with red bulging eyes and sharp bloody fangs."
But the stories Nol loved hearing the most were the ones Uncle Dharma told him
in private, about his father. Madé Catra was smart and kind and cheerful and famously
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