第4章 The Map That Lies

Day twenty-eight. The ink went on the twenty-eighth day and Captain Ito did not tell anybody for six hours, and the six hours were the longest of the whole forty. It had not gone all at once. It had been going since about the twentieth, in the way that everything goes in that valley, and on the twenty-eighth the rubber band came off the sheet entirely, in one piece, like a dead skin off a snake, and the card sprang open in Rafe's hands and the rain got at the inside of the fold and there it was. The valley of the blind river was on the inside of the fold. That was the piece that mattered, and Ito had spent nine weeks not looking at it, and he looked at it for about a minute and a half on the twenty-eighth day and then rolled it up and put it inside his jacket and said, "Nobody is to ask me about that sheet." "Sir," said Sant, "I was going to ask about the sheet." "Then don't." That was the whole of it. Sant was a sergeant of nine months' service and he had walked away and shut up, and the other five did the same, and Reefer lay under a tarp with his bad foot in a sling and said nothing at all, and Tran Minh, who had been awake the entire time and who understood a good deal more about maps than any of them understood about anything, looked at the place where the valley of the blind river was and then at Ito's jacket for rather a long time. The valley is eleven kilometres long and four wide and it is the floor of the whole of this part of the country. The river runs down the middle of it in the summer and the whole thing is a bowl of white sand and scree and the easiest ground a column can find for forty miles in any direction. The map says the river runs down the middle of it. The map said that in 1962, and the map was drawn from a 1948 aerial photograph, and in 1948 the river did run down the middle of it, and in the spring of 1959 a wall came off the ridge above the head of the valley in eleven hours of rain, and the river went out of its bed in about a quarter of an hour, and it went south, and it has been south ever since, and nobody has been up here to redraw anything. The river is now eleven kilometres south of where the blue line is. That is the whole of what the map lies about. It is one line on one sheet and the line is eleven kilometres out, and eleven kilometres in that country is four days on foot and it is the difference between walking up a valley floor and walking up a hillside in the rain, and it is the difference between a column and a funeral. "Mr Tran," said Ito, that evening, when the others were down. "You have not said anything all day and I have been waiting since the twentieth for you to say something." "I have nothing to say, Captain." "You looked at that sheet for rather a long time." "Then I will tell you what I looked at." Tran Minh was sitting with his back against a tree and the fob out from under his shirt, which he had never done in front of anyone, and he was holding it in his hand and turning it over the way a man turns a coin. "There are eleven lines on that sheet and one of them is eleven kilometres out, and the other ten are correct, and a man who has been reading a map for nine weeks knows which of the ten are the ones he has checked and which of the ten are the ones he has believed. You have believed the blue line. Everybody believes the blue line. That is not stupidity. It is what a map is for." "Then what is it for." "To be believed," said the colonel, "and that is exactly the problem with it, and I have been on both sides of a map I was not supposed to be reading for nineteen years, Captain, and the thing I can tell you is that nobody has ever been killed by a map being wrong. They have been killed by a map being right." Ito did not say anything to that for a while. The rain came off the tarp in a rope. "The column came in on the sixth at twenty past four," he said at last. "At the water at Co Tinh. It is holding there. That is nine days south of where the map has the valley, and it has been walking for nine days, and the only reason it stopped is that the ground let it." "Then it is not in this valley." "It is not in this valley." He got the wet sheet out and unrolled it across his knee, in the dark, by feel. "But the relief is three days behind it, and the relief moves every week, and the relief comes up this valley, because this valley is the only thing on the map for forty miles that a column can walk in. And the relief is going to come through here, and the relief is going to come through here whether there is anybody in it or not, and it is going to come through in about nine days, and it is going to bring with it every man that the column has been able to tell about, which is the entire business of the fire direction post on the ridge over there." "And you are eight of us with a colonel in the middle of you and a man with a bad foot." "Yes," said Ito. "So we are going to go north-east off the paper on to the Long Trail, which is not on any paper at all, and which I learned off a district officer in An Thuc in November of 1963 when I was told to go and look at a hill that the French had used a road on, and which runs for sixty kilometres along the top of that ridge and is the only piece of ground in this whole stretch that a man can see four hundred metres." "And after the ridge?" "After the ridge there is a valley with a village in it and about four hundred people in the village," said Ito, "and if I have any say in it, that is where this ends, and it ends in about twelve days."