Her Walking Stick is a Sword

There is a statue of a woman in the middle of Nakhon Ratchasima, Northeast Thailand. You may have driven around her in traffic, which is fitting, because she would have understood traffic. She would have understood the particular quality of patience required to sit perfectly still while everything moves chaotically around you, and simply wait for the right moment.

She stands with a sword. A Thai Daab.

Not raised. Not pointed. Held at her side, its tip to the ground, the way a person holds a walking stick when they are not walking… when they are simply standing and thinking, and you would be unwise to interrupt.

She is dressed beautifully. Composed. The wife of a high official. The holder herself of a Royal Title. Every fold of her garment says: I am exactly what I appear to be.

That is the first lie.

Her name is Mo.

One syllable. Not the kind of name that sounds like it could change the shape of a whole region, which was probably useful at the time.

In 1826, an army from Vientiane under Chao Anouvong swept south and west through the Khorat Plateau. Anouvong had calculated, not incorrectly, that Bangkok was distracted, that the distances were vast, and that the Siamese grip on the plateau had some give in it. He was right about the distances. He was right about Bangkok. He was wrong about the grip.

But he would not discover that last part for a while yet, because first he had to deal with Mo, and Mo had not finished yet.

The Lao forces took Nakhon Ratchasima with relatively little resistance. The governor had ‘pulled back’ east. The city’s defences were, charitably, not optimal. And so the Lao soldiers found themselves in possession of a provincial capital, and they did what armies throughout history have done when they find themselves holding something too large to carry: they started moving the people instead.

Thousands of them. Men, women, children, elderly people who had opinions about the pace and expressed them continuously. A column of civilians walking north toward the Mekong and a new life they had not requested and did not want.

Among them was Mo.

She was around forty. Wife of the deputy governor, a woman of standing, which in this context meant she was not chained and the guards spoke to her instead of around her, which was, under the circumstances, not nothing. They gave her the kind of cautious deference that soldiers extend to high-status captives: arms-length respect, not quite trust, the sort of treatment you offer someone when you are not entirely sure how this is all going to end and you want to have behaved reasonably.

Mo accepted this arrangement.

She noticed everything.

This is not emphasised in the official accounts, which prefer to describe her as brave and selfless and heroic, all of which are true and all of which are somewhat beside the point. The point is that she noticed. The way a guard’s posture loosened when he thought no one important was watching. The way discipline softened in the evenings. The way men who have been marching in heat and dust for days become, by nightfall, men who mainly want rice wine and to be told they are doing something worthwhile.

She watched all of this.

She was polite. Very polite. The kind of polite that a person practices when they are doing arithmetic in their head.

  *

The column moved north. Days. The heat specific to the plateau, not tropical wet heat, but the flat dry heat of open country with no shade between you and the horizon. Children crying, then too tired to cry. The elderly falling silent in a way that was more worrying than noise. The ground changing under their feet, the familiar laterite scrub giving way to something hillier and stranger, every step a step further from Korat and further from anything that resembled a plan.

Mo walked. She talked.

She had, by the third day, established a working relationship with the Lao commanders, not quite deference and not quite negotiation, somewhere in the difficult middle register that requires constant recalibration and is exhausting to maintain even in comfortable circumstances, let alone in forty-degree heat on a forced march going in the wrong direction. She managed it by making herself useful. She mediated small disputes between guards and captives before they became large ones. She smoothed things over when a frightened man said something he should not have said. She became, to the guards, so thoroughly associated with the absence of problems that they stopped noticing when she moved through the column.

This is how you become invisible when everyone can see you.

What Mo was running, over those days on the road, was a distributed operation with no headquarters, no written orders, and no margin for anyone saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. She moved through the captives as she was permitted to… tending to the sick, helping with children, doing the ordinary social work of an official’s wife. And while she moved, she talked. She found the people she needed: those who were angry in the quiet way rather than the loud way, which is an important distinction. Quiet anger is anger with somewhere to go. She found who could be trusted to wait and to act at a signal, and not a moment before the signal.

She mapped the guards. Their numbers. Their rotations. Which ones drank and how much. Which ones, at the end of a long day’s march, became men whose attention was mostly elsewhere. Which ones were paying entirely too much attention to women captives.

And then, near a field called Thung Samrit, she found the rice wine. Or arranged for it. Or redirected what was already there. The accounts disagree on the mechanism, as accounts of this kind always do, because the mechanism is the part that was not meant to be remembered. What matters is that one evening the Lao guards had an extremely convivial night.

Mo did not drink.

She had things to do in the morning.

  *

The Lao guards were not, on balance, bad people. This is worth saying because the story does not require them to be villains to work. They were soldiers following orders in service of a ruler’s geopolitical ambitions, far from home, tired, and possibly not entirely convinced this particular campaign was going to end the way Anouvong had promised. They drank because it was offered and they felt they had earned it, and the evening was warm, and the woman who kept refilling their cups seemed remarkably friendly and completely unthreatening.

In the morning, while the dew was still cold on the grass, Mo moved.

This part is fast in every account, which is accurate, because the action itself was fast. The prisoners had the considerable advantage of knowing it was coming. The guards, several of whom had significant headaches and were still assembling their understanding of the day, did not.

It is also loud, in the accounts. The sound of six thousand people who have been patient for a week discovering they are not going any further north tends to carry.

When it was over — and every account agrees it was over quickly — the column stopped moving.

And then, because there was no army left to escort them in any direction, and because they were several days’ march from home and still had their legs and the morning was still young, they did the only logical thing available.

They turned around.

They walked back.

Mo at the front, which by that point seemed appropriate. Behind her, the people of Korat, farmers, servants, merchants, officials’ wives, the elderly who had complained about the pace going north and who complained equally about the pace going south, which was perhaps comforting in its consistency, walking back through the Khorat Plateau on a morning in 1826 or 1827, heading home under their own decision.

No one recorded what they talked about on the way back, which is a pity. Six thousand people with a lot to process and several days’ walk in front of them. The conversations must have been interesting.

  *

Go back to the statue in the city center now.

The composed one. The official’s wife, sword at rest. She looks like a woman who has made peace with her circumstances. Dignified. Still. She does not look like a woman who just reversed a military operation from the inside by being, for seven days, the most useful person in the room.

But that was always the point. Looking like what you actually are is a luxury available to people who have the freedom to make it obvious. Mo did not have that freedom. She worked with what she had, which was intelligence, patience, the social authority of her position, and the particular quality of attention that comes from watching a situation very carefully while appearing to be doing something else entirely.

The sword at her side is not decorative. It is at rest because the work is done, not because it was never used.

  *

Now drive about thirty kilometres east.

You arrive at Thung Samrit.

The statue group there is different.

No composure. No official robes. No careful posture calibrated to reassure anyone about anything. The women at Thung Samrit are in motion: swords raised, two blades for some, spears extended, bows drawn back. The weapons of their would-be kidnappers. Turnabout is fairplay. The geometry of the whole piece is forward momentum, commitment, the concentrated physics of people who have decided they are not going where they are being sent.

It is startling if you arrive there from Korat. You go from the composed woman with the resting sword to this: the field, the weapons, the absolute kinetic fact of it; and you understand that both statues are of the same event. One shows you what the story looked like from the outside, across two centuries, laundered through ceremony and gratitude and the very human need to produce a national hero with good posture. The other shows you what it felt like from the inside, in the moment when the arithmetic Mo had been running for a week reached its conclusion.

History usually gives you one version.

Korat gives you both.

Stand at Thung Samrit long enough and the city-center statue starts to make a different kind of sense. She did not stand like that instead of what happened at this field. She stood like that because of it. Because she had already calculated what would happen here, and she was the kind of person who, having made her calculation and seen it through, saw no particular reason to look anything other than composed.

The sword was always the cane. She always knew where she was walking.

In 1827, after the Siamese army under Prince Bodin finally pushed Anouvong back across the Mekong, King Rama III gave Mo a title: Thao Suranari. Brave Lady of the Realm. The kind of title that takes a one-syllable name and drapes ceremony over it until the name almost disappears.

She was awarded it because she had, without weapons or orders or any official authority whatsoever, rescued thousands of people, disrupted a military operation from its interior, and done it with such precise attention to what people expected from her that no one noticed until it was finished.

She died in Korat in 1852. She is said to have been, right up until the end, someone whose presence in a room caused other people to arrange themselves in relation to her without quite knowing why.

No one has adequately explained this quality.

Possibly it was the title.

Possibly it was the forty years of knowing exactly what she was doing and letting other people think whatever they needed to.

The statue in the traffic circle does not explain it either. It just stands there, sword at rest, with the expression of a woman who has assessed the situation thoroughly and is in no particular hurry, because she has already decided how this ends.

Which is, it turns out, the most dangerous position available.

  *

Ya Mo is a typical middle-aged Isaan woman.

Short story originally published on https://kohopeh.com/works/ya-mo-story