Night does not make the town square empty. Night makes the town square watchful.
Raka Wulung dragged his bandaged foot out of the market stalls. He left Kertra's clay jug behind. The rag wrapped around his foot had soaked through with blood again. Every step sent pain shooting all the way up to his teeth.
Wira's words still hung in his ears.
Thrown into Kali Brangkal. The place where dead buffalo carcasses were dumped.
Kali Brangkal lay beyond the village boundary. Its water was shallow and smelled of sulfur. Villagers dumped diseased carcasses there so they would not foul the rice paddies. No human was buried there. Only animals.
He could not let that happen. Not because he still thought his father was a hero. That morning, he had seen his father tied up for taking what belonged to others. But the body was still his father. The hands that had once lifted him onto a horse's back.
The town square was dark. There were no torches. The Bhayangkara soldiers had already returned to Trowulan. Only the wooden post in the center still stood. And the black shadow hanging from it.
The smell had changed. The scent of sweat and dust from earlier that day was now mingled with the sharp, slightly sweetening stench of rot. The smell of death.
Three stray dogs sat in a circle beneath the post, waiting.
"Go away!" Raka rasped. His voice was not loud. His throat was dry.
The dogs did not leave. They stared at him. Their eyes glowed.
Raka picked up a small stone and threw it. His trembling hand made him miss. The dog took a step back but did not run.
He had to get closer. He had to touch him.
The rope around Kala Dipa's neck had gone stiff with blood and dew. Its knot was large, a soldier's knot. Raka tried to undo it with his fingers. His nails broke. His fingers were slick with sweat and blood from the blisters on his feet, which had split open again.
He had no knife. His father's ivory-sheathed kris had been broken beneath a soldier's foot that morning.
He used his teeth.
The sharp, salty taste flooded his mouth. The taste of filthy rope. He bit down, pulled, and growled like the dogs. His saliva mixed with dust.
At last, the knot loosened. The body fell.
It landed with a heavy, wet thud. Like a sack of rice grain full of water hitting the ground.
Raka collapsed into a seated position beside it. His breathing came in broken gasps. He did not dare look at his father's face, which was covered by the ragged cloth Auntie Sari had given him earlier. He looked only at his father's hands. The hands that had once worn a red stone ring. The ring was gone. Karno had taken it.
The dogs approached again, sniffing.
"Go away!" This time Raka screamed. The sound tore out of his stomach. It was not a nobleman's voice. It was the voice of a frightened animal.
The dogs startled and ran to the edge of the town square, but they continued to wait.
Raka had to drag him.
He gripped his father beneath the arms. Kala Dipa's body was heavy. Heavier than when he had been alive, because all his muscles had gone slack and soaked up the earth. His clothes were wet.
Raka pulled. His bare feet pressed against the dirt of the town square. The blisters split open again. Fresh blood seeped into the rag.
One step. Two steps. The ground that had burned beneath the afternoon sun was now cold and needling.
From the houses around the town square, slivers of torchlight showed through cracks from within. Raka could feel the eyes. So many eyes.
A woman peeked from behind a door and quickly shut it.
An old man said loudly under his breath, "Let him be. Let him bury his own thief."
A little boy threw a pebble at Raka. It missed. But the message reached him.
Raka did not stop. He dragged his father along the main road. The same road he had ridden that morning, splashing mud onto the farmers. Now he stepped barefoot through that mud and dragged his father's sin across it.
He passed his own house. The bamboo barricade was still there. The torches inside had gone out. The yard that had once smelled of flowers now reeked of freshly turned earth. He wanted to stop. He wanted to go in and get a hoe.
He could not. Wira and his friends were still keeping watch at the guard post, watching him and laughing softly.
"The Ragged God is carrying his father! The Ragged God is throwing a feast!"
Raka lowered his head. He kept dragging. His back felt ready to break. His shoulders, which had once ached only from practicing proud horseback stances in the yard, now hurt from the weight of the corpse.
The village boundary was marked by a huge banyan tree and a small, moss-covered statue guarding the rice paddies. Beyond it, the ground sloped down toward Kali Brangkal.
The sulfur smell grew stronger. The smell of a buffalo carcass that had been rotting for a long time.
Raka dropped his father's body at the edge of the stream. He fell to his knees beside it. His hands trembled violently. Not because of the weight. Because he had to dig.
There was no hoe. No shovel.
He used both hands.
The ground beside Kali Brangkal was hard and rocky. His nails, already broken, began bleeding again. He clawed at the earth like a rat. Dirt packed beneath his nails. Stones cut his fingertips. He dug, tossed the dirt aside, and dug again.
Sweat ran into his eyes. Salty. The smell of his own sweat now matched the smell of the farmers he had once despised. The smell of labor and fear.
The hole was not deep. Only knee-deep. Not enough for an adult. But it was all he could manage.
He pushed his father's body into it. The cloth covering his face, the one Auntie Sari had given him, slipped open a little. Raka caught a glimpse. His father's face was swollen. His eyes were closed.
Raka wanted to turn his face away, the way Karno had that morning. He could not. He had to look.
He saw his father's hand clenched into a fist. Clenched hard, even after death.
Raka crouched down. With bloodied fingers, he tried to open the fist.
His father's fingers were stiff.
He forced them open.
Inside was not a ring. Not money.
A small, crumpled piece of cloth. A tax seal cloth. But the stamp was not Kala Dipa's. It was larger. The duchy's seal, normally used to send rice to Trowulan. The seal was smeared with mud and a little dried blood. On the back were a few trembling words in his father's handwriting: "It wasn't me."
Raka stopped breathing.
He remembered what the old guard at the forest on the village boundary had said yesterday. Your father isn't the only thief.
Before he could think, the earth around him began to tremble softly. It was not an earthquake.
Footsteps. Many of them.
Torches flared in the direction of the village. Wira and three other young men approached, carrying hoes and bamboo spears. Their faces were tense. They were no longer drunk.
Wira looked at the shallow hole and the body inside. Then he looked at the seal cloth in Raka's bloodied hand.
Wira's face changed.
"So it's true," Wira said softly. "You're trying to bury the evidence too. You want to get rid of that seal. So your father will look innocent."
"No! This isn't... My father was holding it..."
"The District Chief said no one was to bury him in village soil! He said to dump him in the stream! You're breaking the order!"
Wira raised his hoe. Not to dig. To strike.
Raka was still kneeling in that shallow grave beside his father's corpse, both hands bloody, the forged seal cloth clenched in his fist.
Behind Wira, from the darkness beneath the banyan tree, another torch appeared. It was held higher. Someone who had not come with Wira's group. Someone who simply stood there in silence, watching and waiting to see what Raka would do.
Would Raka fight back, or would he let his father truly be dumped into the stream like a buffalo carcass?