Fiction / Ashley Mangtani
:: The Eastern Feeder ::
The rope had chewed through the meat of Si Khmau’s palms before the same length of split bamboo came round on the eddy a third time, its splintered end leading, the swell at the high lip turning against the timber where the current should have pushed through. Upstream, Si Knāy stood waist-deep in the channel, face rotated a quarter from the others, and Si Khmau, still only a boy, watched the hands, because the face would tell him nothing, not that morning, not on any morning he would have to remember after.
Rain had come down hard into the Kulen hills for six days. By the second day, the older men had stopped speaking of it, and by the fourth, they had stopped sleeping. On the seventh light, they worked the upper gate of the eastern feeder canal, a wooden sluice between laterite supports, which carried blessed water out of the lingas down toward the West Baray, and which the priests inspected in the dry season and forgot during the monsoon.
The boy had pulled rope on this gate since his twelfth year. He knew the grain under his hands, knew the smell the laterite gave back when it took on water, iron coming up out of the stone; he did not know what this carried. It smelled of upcountry and red earth, and of something the high ground had kept down a long while and could hold no longer.
Si Knāy lifted his hands from the brace beam, looked at no one, and put them back. The men operated without speaking, nine of them, two boys to run the rope, and seven older men, some of whom Si Knāy had pulled off the southern channel when the rain had not ceased, and the boy knew some by name and knew not to ask after the rest. A man asking names would have been a man saying he expected to use them later, and the silence the older men kept around him was a mercy they did not need to name.
The wet had got into him. The rope slipped the wrong way, and twice he had to take his wrap again, and twice he lost pressure on the post while Si Knāy held the upper brace alone. Two years before, Si Knāy had walked the length of the canal to put one hand on the boy’s shoulder after a slack line, and had wandered back without a word, the only correction he had taken in four years under him. Si Knāy remained at the brace now, though the boy had pulled his first slack line in two years.
Somewhere down the channel beyond the bend, a cry broke, coming up high and short, ending as the wet cord left his fingers. The brace went after, and his fingers knew he would not bring it back, and the cry reached his bones before it reached his ears. When it stopped, he maintained a still head, because turning was the older men’s work, and what they would not face was not yet his to see.
The thrash against the bulwark had begun to make a sound he had never heard water make, something deep in the wood, without a break. He had heard that sound once, as a small child, the night a wall of the old causeway gave and his uncle carried him out into the dark to put his ear to the ground and listen to the old rocks shifting beneath the city. It came again now, up through the channel and through the wood, and trembled there like something alive.
Si Knāy lifted his face up the channel and held it there, and his hand left the brace. It did not lift to wipe rain from his eyes, did not signal the others. It went to the block at his hip and pressed flat against it, fingers spread, as a rider presses against the chest of a horse to tell whether the breathing has gone bad. He held it there a count of two, then returned it to the wood and went on with the strain.
He kept pulling. The rope was different in a way he could not yet name, and his hands knew before his head did: that the gate would not hold, that it had not been holding for some time, and that Si Knāy had known this since before the rain had stopped seeming like rain.
None of the other men looked at Si Knāy. They had been watching him the whole of dawn without seeming to. Now one of them, Si Chke, who had taught the boy to wrap a wet loop so it would not slip, untied the thread at his own waist and ran it twice around the erect trunk and once around his thigh, and did this without ceremony, as one fastens his sandal before going down to the bank. Another, downstream, did the same, and then Si Knāy himself hooked in.
The river pushed hard against the planks, checked only by the heavy weight and the grip he kept on the line. He thought of nothing, or he thought of his mother carrying fish up from the lake in a bamboo basket, dripping onto her hip, the slap her sandals had made on the wet path, the way he had once stepped exactly into her footprints and felt the warm shape where her foot had been.
The line endured, but he never lashed it or bound himself to the upright. The cord at his waist stayed knotted where his mother had tied it on the morn he left the house, six days before, double, and then once more, and he had not undone it since.
Si Knāy and Si Chke labored, bound to the wood. Down the line, four of the men whose names he had not asked had made themselves fast, and the fifth, a thin man with a burn scar at the side of his neck, was working a line around his ankle in a bow that came out wrong the first time and right the second. Only the boy and one other had not tied; that other was Si Sva, older than him by two years, who had a wife in the city and an infant son he had once seen at the festival of the rising waters, asleep against his mother in a sling of indigo cloth.
Si Sva caught his gaze, just once, and neither spoke nor nodded, nor did any of the things a man does to give another man permission. It lasted no longer than a damp rope takes to relax, and he understood from it that no one was going to give anyone permission that morning, that permission belonged to other days and to other men. Si Sva unwound the cord from his waist, let it fall into the mud, and left. He trod rather than ran, as one wanders back to the hut after the day has ended, and the rain came down on his shoulders as he went, and Si Knāy kept his eyes forward.
The boy dwelled at the rope a count he would not afterward remember, as long as it takes to draw three breaths, or two, or one, and in that span the waterline rose against the timber the width of his thumb. Then his hands let go.
He fixed his sight past Si Knāy, past Si Chke, past the men whose names he had not asked. He broke from the line and walked as Si Sva had walked, into the rain, away from the gate, and his cord stayed double-tied at his waist as his mother had done, as the women of his village had secured their sons’ cords for as long as anyone could remember and longer.
He had gone fifty paces, his sandals taking on mud past the ankle, when a vibration came up through his heels and broke the rainwater in the prints at his rear, and he understood that this was not the river. The river had its own pulse, and he had been carrying it in his palms, and this was something coming from above.
He had not looked up when he heard a cry out beyond the bend, because looking had not been his to do. But he had already left the dressed blocks and entered the mud, and what came next was no longer the older men’s work, and so he faced it.
Behind him, where the channel met the catchment, the face of the upper hillside had come away from itself along a line that had always been there, and what moved down toward him was broken sandstone and torn teak, taller than the temples of the city, moving the way the river had never moved, without channel and in silence, up through the rope and the wood.
Where the wall had not yet reached, Si Knāy and Si Chke and the others stood with their ropes anchoring them to the timber, doing what they had always done; none of them had turned. Then the wall reached the gate—and the gate was not there, and the men were not there, and the place where the men had been was not there, and what passed through was the upper hillside on its way down to the city.
He ran. He had not known until then that he could still run, but his legs ran, and the mud under his sandals rose to his calves and then his knees. He came up onto a stand above the eastern feeder, ground his grandfather had once told him would stand when other ground would not, and from there he watched.
The flood had already left the channel. It moved in a sheet across the plain, and where it went, the lowland villages and the rice terraces and the stilt houses gave way. The hillside became a great wave and rolled on toward the city, where cooking smoke threaded the rain, and he watched the earth close.
The mud touched the outer moats, and the moats took the mud and could take no more. Water came over the retainer walls in a long red wash, and the nagas went under, and the merchants’ stalls that had been heavy with stacked rice an hour before went down, and the lower galleries of the temple complex began to fill with the colour of the upcountry. The silt climbed the steps of the central temple, as if it had always meant to.
Priests lingered on the upper terraces, and villagers crowded the highest steps. No one screamed, and no one ran; the running was over, and the people who had reached the temple had reached it because there was nowhere left. The boy stood on the high ground until the rain stopped, which was some time after he had ceased watching.
He left the city before the flood had finished with it. He was one of a thousand, and then ten thousand, and the leaving became something the city itself did, across a generation, until what had been Angkor was a place where men went only to cut masonry from the temples of gods who had stopped requiring anything of anyone.
In the years that followed, he turned his back on the eastern feeder. He did not speak the name of Si Knāy, or of Si Chke, or of Si Sva, or of the men he had not known well enough to name, and the not-speaking became a thing in him that he went around year after year, as a man behind a plough goes around a buried stone.
He took a wife in a village two days east, and he had sons and daughters, and he worked wood and not water. His sons handled wood after him, and none of them knew the smell of laterite when it took the first rain of the season, and he chose not to teach them.
When he was old, his youngest grandson came to him with a length of rope from the market and asked him how to tie a good knot. He was perhaps eight, with his mother’s slender fingers. The old man took it, and the knot came to him without thought, and it came out of his hands as it had always come, double, and then once more, the way his mother had tied his own cord at his waist on a morning sixty years before.
He gave it back to the boy and sat there, drawing in a breath. His hands smelled of nothing, and had not smelled of the canal in sixty years. His grandson ran out into the yard with the rope, calling something back over his shoulder the old man did not catch and did not need to. He sat in the doorway and watched the rain come down on the laterite step, and his hands stayed open in his lap.
From the writer
:: Account ::
The Eastern Feeder grew out of my travels in Southeast Asia after leaving the UK and my former career as a civil servant. Over the past few years, I have spent extended periods living in the region and have returned to the Angkor archaeological complex several times. The scale of the site is difficult to grasp until you stand among it. Alongside the monuments themselves, I became interested in the fragments of history that survive through local stories and guides.
During one visit, a guide told me about the rope pullers depicted in the famous bas-relief of the Churning of the Ocean of Milk. The image stayed with me, and I found myself thinking less about the gods and mythical figures at the centre of the scene and more about the anonymous rope pullers whose purpose was simply to pull. That idea became the starting point for the story.
While writing The Eastern Feeder, I was interested in the relationship between labour, belief, and inherited systems. Many of the structures that shape our lives predate us and will likely outlast us, yet people continue to sustain them without always understanding their origins or ultimate purpose. The story emerged from that tension, filtered through the atmosphere of Angkor and the sense of deep time that the site evokes.
Although the setting and events are fictional, the experience of walking through temple complexes, hearing local interpretations of their history, and imagining the lives of those connected to them formed the foundation of the piece. The story explores what happens when duty outlasts memory, and when people find meaning within systems larger than any individual can comprehend.
Ashley Mangtani is a slipstream writer who’s never met a rule of reality he didn’t want to bend, mostly because straight fiction never let him say what he actually meant. Nominated for Best Small Fictions and the Pushcart Prize 26, his work appears or is forthcoming in over fifty literary journals, including Smokelong Quarterly, Strange Horizons, Litro, Washington Square Review, Gone Lawn, Ghost Parachute, Boudin, Heavy Feather Review, BULL, Cherry Tree, Thin Skin, The Fool’s World, HAWKEYE, Mobius, i70 Review, Palisades Review, Third Wednesday, Rock Salt, Neon Dystopia, Apocalypse Confidential, and many others. His debut short story collection, Unhappy Endings, will be available in 2027, and he’s currently finishing his novella series, Crescendo. Read more at ashleymangtani.com