The Years of Rice and Salt (61 page)

In the end, though, they marched forward in the usual fashion, westward, holding the right flank against the foothills of Nepal, hills that shot abrupt and green out of the Gangetic Plain—as though, Iwa remarked idly one day, India were a ramming ship that had slammed into Asia and plowed under it, pushing all the way under Tibet, and doubling the height of that land but dipping down here almost to sea level.

Bai shook his head at this geomorphic fancy, not wanting to think of the ground as moving like big ships, wanting to understand the ground as solid, because he was trying to convince himself now that Kuo had been wrong and that he was still alive and not in the bardo, where of course lands could slip about like the stage sets they were. Kuo had probably been disoriented by his own abrupt death, and confused as to his own whereabouts; not a good sign concerning his reappearance in his next incarnation. Or perhaps he had just been playing a joke on Bai—Kuo would mock you harder than anyone, though he seldom played jokes. Perhaps he had even been doing Bai a favor, getting him through the worst part of the war by convincing him that he was already dead and had nothing to lose—indeed, was fighting the war on a level where it might actually mean something, might have some use, might be a matter of changing people's souls in their pure existence outside the world, where they might be capable of change, where they might learn what was important and return to life next time with new capacities in their hearts, with new goals in mind.

What might those be? What were they fighting for? It was clear what they were fighting against—against fanatical slaveholding reactionaries, who wanted the world to stand still in the equivalent of the Tang or Sung dynasties—absurdly backward and bloody religious zealots—assassins with no scruples, who fought crazed on opium and ancient blind beliefs. Against all that, certainly, but for what? What the Chinese were fighting for, Bai decided, was . . . clarity, or whatever else it was that was the opposite of religion. For humanity. For compassion. For Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism, the triple strand that did so well in describing a relationship to the world: the religion with no God, with only this world, also several other potential realms of reality, mental realms, and the void itself, but no God, no shepherd ruling with the drooling strictures of a demented old patriarch, but rather innumerable immortal spirits in a vast panoply of realms and being, including humans and many other sentient beings besides, everything living, everything holy, sacred, part of the Godhead—for yes, there was a GOD if by that you meant only a transcendent universal self-aware entity that was reality itself, the cosmos, including everything, including human ideas and mathematical forms and relationships. That idea itself was God, and evoked a kind of worship that was attention to the real world, a kind of natural study. Chinese Buddhism was the natural study of reality, and led to feelings of devotion just from noting the daily leaves, the colors of the sky, the animals seen from the corner of the eye. The movements of chopping wood and carrying water. This initial study of devotion led to deeper understanding as they pursued the mathematical underpinnings of the ways of things, just out of curiosity and because it seemed to help them see even more clearly, and so they made instruments to see farther in and farther out, higher yang, deeper yin.

What followed was a kind of understanding of human reality that placed the greatest value on compassion, created by enlightened understanding, created by study of what was there in the world. This was what Iwa was always saying, while Bai preferred to think of the emotions created by all that proper attention and focused effort: the peace, the sharp curiosity and enraptured interest, the compassion.

But now: all a nightmare. A nightmare speeding up, however, breaking apart and full of non sequiturs, as if the dreamer felt the rapid-eyed stirrings of the end of sleep and the waking of a new day. Every day we wake up into a new world, each sleep causes yet another reincarnation. Some of the local gurus spoke of it as happening with every breath.

They took off out of the bardo into the real world, into battle, with their left wing made up of India's crack regiments, little bearded black men, taller hook-nosed white men, bearded turbaned Sikhs, deep-chested women, Gurkhas come out of the mountains, a banner of Nepali women each of whom was the beauty of her district, or so it appeared; all of them together like a circus crew, but so fast, so well armed, in train and truck divisions, the Chinese could not keep up with them, but got more train lines established and tried to catch up, running vast numbers of men forward with all their supplies. Beyond the forward ends of the train lines the Indians continued to race forward on foot, and in engined cars on rubber wheels, hundreds of them that ran freely over the village paths in this dry season, throwing dust everywhere, and also over a more limited network of asphalted roads, the only ones that would still be passable when the monsoon hit.

They advanced toward Delhi all at once, more or less, and they fell on the Muslim army retreating up the Ganges on both sides of the river, as soon as the Chinese were in position at the foot of the Nepali hills.

Of course the right flank extended up into the hills, each army trying to outflank the other. Bai and Iwa's squad was counted among the mountain troops now because of their experiences in the Dudh Kosi, and so orders came to seize and hold the hills up to the first ridge at least, which entailed taking some higher points on ridges even farther north. They moved by night, learning to climb in the dark along trails found and marked by Gurkha scouts. Bai also became a day scout, and as he crawled up brush-choked ravines he worried not that he would be discovered by any Muslims, for they stuck to their trails and encampments without fail, but whether or not a mass of hundreds of men could follow the tortuous monkey routes he was forced to use in some places. “That's why they send you, Bai,” Iwa explained. “If you can do it, anyone can.” He smiled and added, “That's what Kuo would say.”

Each night Bai went up and down the line guiding and checking to see if routes went as he had expected, learning and studying, and only going to sleep after observing the sunrise from some new hideaway.

They were still doing that when the Indians broke through on the south flank. They heard the distant artillery and then saw smoke pluming into the white skies of a hazy morning, the haze a possible mark of the monsoon's arrival. To make a full breakout assault with the monsoon coming passed all understanding; it seemed possible it would go right to the head of the list of the recently augmented Seven Great Errors, and as the afternoon's clouds bloomed, and built, and dropped black on them, blasting foothills and plain with volleys of thick lightning that struck the metal in several gun emplacements on ridges, it was amazing to hear that the Indians were pressing on unimpeded. They had, among all their other accomplishments, perfected war in the rain. These were not Chinese Daoist Buddhist rationalists, Bai and Iwa agreed, not the Fourth Assemblage of Military Talent, but wild men of all manner of religion, even more spiritual than the Muslims, as the Muslims' religion seemed all bluster and wish fulfillment and support of tyranny with its Father God. The Indians had a myriad of gods, some elephant headed or six armed, even death was a god, both female and male—life, nobility, there were gods for each, each human quality deified. Which made for a motley, godly people, very ferocious in war, among many other things—great cooks, very sensual people, scents, tastes, music, color in their uniforms, detailed art, it was all right there in their camps to be seen, men and women standing around a drummer singing, the women tall and big breasted, big eyed and thick eyebrowed, awesome women really, arms like a woodsman's and filling all the sharpshooter regiments of the Indians, “Yes,” one Indian adjutant had said in Tibetan, “women are better shots, women from Travancore especially. They start when they are five, that may be all there is to it. Start boys at five and they would do as well.”

Now the rains were full of black ash, falling in a watery mud. Black rain. The call came for Bai and Iwa's squad to hurry down to the plain and join the general assault as soon as they could. They ran down the trails and assembled some twenty li behind the front line of the battle, and started marching. They were to hit at the very end of the flank, on the plain itself but right at the foot of the foothills, ready to scale the first rise of the hills if there was any resistance to their charge.

That was the plan, but as they came up to the front word came that the Muslims had broken and were in full retreat, and they joined the chase.

But the Muslims were in full flight, the Indians close on their heels, and the Chinese could only follow the two faster armies across the fields and forests, over canals and through the breaks in bamboo fences and walls, and groups of houses too small even to be called villages, all still and silent, usually burned, and yet slowing them down somehow nevertheless. Dead bodies on the ground in knots, already bloating. The full meaning of embodiment made manifest here by its opposite, disembodiment, death—departure of the soul, leaving behind so little: a putrefying mass, stuff like what one found in a sausage. Nothing human about it. Except for here or there, a face undestroyed, even sometimes undisturbed; an Indian man lying there on the ground for instance, staring sideways but utterly still, not moving, not breathing; the statue of what must have been a very impressive man, well built, strong shoulders, capable—a commanding, high-foreheaded, moustached face, eyes like fish in the market, round and surprised, but still—impressive. Bai had to say a charm to be able to walk by him, and then they were in a zone where the land itself was smoking like the dead zone of Gansu, pools of silvery gassed water reeking in water holes and the air full of smoke and dust, cordite, blood haze. The bardo itself would be looking much like this, crowded now with new arrivals all angry and confused, in agony, the worst possible way to enter the bardo. Here the empty mirror of it, blasted and still. The Chinese army marched through in silence.

Bai found Iwa, and they made their way into the burned ruins of Bodh-Gaya, to a park on the west bank of the Phalgu River. This was where the Bodhi Tree had stood, they were told, the old assattha tree, pipal tree, under which the Buddha had received enlightenment so many centuries before. The area had taken as many hits as the peak of Chomolungma, and no trace of tree or park or village or stream remained, only black rendered mud for as far as the eye could see.

A group of Indian officers discussed root fragments someone had found in the mud near what some thought had been the location of the tree. Bai didn't recognize the language. He sat down with a small fragment of bark in his hands. Iwa went over to see what the officers were saying.

Then Kuo stood before Bai. “Cut is the branch,” he said, offering a small twig from the Bodhi Tree.

Bai took it from him. From his left hand; Kuo's right hand was still missing. “Kuo,” Bai said, and swallowed. “I'm surprised to see you.”

Kuo gave him a look.

“So we are in the bardo after all,” Bai said.

Kuo nodded. “You didn't always believe me, did you, but it's true. Here you see it—” waving his hand at the black smoking plain. “The floor of the universe. Again.”

“But why?” Bai said. “I just don't get it.”

“Get what?”

“Get what I'm supposed to be doing. Life after life—I remember them now!” He thought about it, seeing back through the years. “I remember them now, and I've tried in every one. I keep trying!” Out across the black plain it seemed they could see together the faint afterimages of their previous lives, dancing in the infinite silk of lightly falling rain. “It doesn't seem to be making any difference. What I do makes no difference.”

“Yes, Bai. Perhaps so. But after all you are a fool. A good-natured fucking idiot.”

“Don't, Kuo, I'm not in the mood,” though his face was attempting painfully to smile, pleased to be ribbed again. Iwa and he had tried to do this for each other, but no one could bring it off like Kuo. “I may not be a great leader like you but I've done some good things, and they haven't made a bit of difference. There seem to be no rules of dharma that actually pertain.”

Kuo sat down next to him, crossed his legs and made himself comfortable. “Well, who knows. I've been thinking these things over myself, this time out in the bardo. There's been a lot of time, believe me—so many have been tossed out here at once that there's quite a waiting line, it's just like the rest of the war, a logistical nightmare, and I've been watching you all struggle on, bashing against things like moths in a bottle, and I know I did it too, and I've wondered. I've thought sometimes that maybe it went wrong back when I was Kheim and you were Butterfly, a little girl we all loved. Do you remember that one?”

Bai shook his head. “Tell me.”

“As Kheim I was Annamese. I continued the proud tradition of the great Chinese admirals being foreigners and disreputable, I had been a pirate king for years on the long coast of Annam, and the Chinese made a treaty with me as they would with any great potentate. Struck a deal in which I agreed to lead an invasion of Nippon, at least the sea aspect of it and perhaps more.

“Anyway we missed all that for lack of a wind, and went on and discovered the ocean continents, and found you, and then we took you, and lost you, and saved you from the executioner god of the southern people; and that's when I felt it, coming back down the mountain after we had saved you. I aimed my pistol at people and pulled the trigger, and felt the power of life and death in my hands. I could kill them, and they deserved it, bloody cannibals that they were, killers of children. I could do it merely by pointing at them. And it seemed to me then that my so much greater power had a meaning to it. That our superiority in weapons came out of a general superiority of thought that included a superiority of morals. That we were better than they were. I strode back down to the ships and sailed west still feeling that we were superior beings, like gods to those horrid savages. And that's why Butterfly died. You died to teach me that I was wrong—that though we had saved her we had killed her too, that that feeling we had had, striding through them as if through worthless dogs, was a poison that would never stop spreading in men who had guns. Until all the people like Butterfly, who lived in peace without guns, were dead, murdered by us. And then only men with guns would be left, and they would murder each other too, as fast as they could in the hope that it wouldn't happen to them, until the human world died, and we all fell into this preta realm and then to hell.