'It has to end some day,' Bai pointed out. 'Otherwise it will never end.'
Kuo spat out a mouthful of rakshi in a burst of laughter. 'Very deep logic, friend Bai! But this is not a logical war. This is the end that will never end. We will live our lives in this war, and so will the next gener ation, and the next, until everyone is dead and we can start the world all over, or not, as the case may be.'
'No,' Iwa disagreed mildly. 'It can't go on that long. The end will come somewhere else, that's all. The war at sea, or in Africa or Yingzhou. The break will come somewhere else, and then this region will just be a, a what, a feature of the long war, an anomaly or whatnot. The front that could not be moved. The frozen aspect of the long war at its most frozen. They will tell our story for ever, because there will never be anything like it again.'
'You're such a comfort,' Kuo said. 'To think we're in the worst fix any soldiers have ever been in!'
'We might as well be something,' Iwa said.
'Exactly! It's a distinction! An honour, if you think about it.'
Bai preferred not to. An explosion above shook dirt out of their ceiling onto them. They bustled about covering cups and plates.
A few days later and they were back in the usual routine. If there was still a Japanese breakout to the north there was no way to tell it here, where the daily barrage and sniping from the Muslims was the same as always, as if the Sixth Great Error, with its loss of perhaps fifty thousand men and women, had never happened.
Soon after that the Muslims too started using poison gas, spreading over the death zone on the wind just as the Chinese had done, but also sending it over contained in explosive shells that came down with a loud whistle, scattering the usual shrapnel (including anything that would cut, as they too were running low on metal, so that they found sticks, cat bones, hooves, a set of false teeth) and now with the shrapnel a thick yellow geyser of the gas, apparently not just mustard gas but a variety of poisons and caustics, which forced the Chinese to keep both gas mask and hood and gloves always by them. Dressed or not, when one of these shells came down it was hard not to get burned around the wrists and ankles and neck.
The other new inconvenience was a shell so huge, cast so high by such big cannons, that when it came down out of the sky it was falling faster than its sound, so there was no warning. These shells were bigger around than a man, and taller, designed to penetrate the mud some distance and then go off, in stupendous explosions that often would bury many more men in trenches and tunnels and caves than were killed by the blasts themselves. Duds of these shells were dug out and removed, very cautiously, each one occupying an entire train car. The explosive used in them was a new one that looked like fish paste, and smelled like jasmine.
One evening after dusk they were standing around drinking rakshi and discussing news that Iwa had got from the comm cave. The southern army was being punished for some failure on that front, and each squad commander had to send back one per cent of his command, to be executed as encouragement to those that remained.
'What a good idea!' Kuo said. 'I know just who I'd send.'
Iwa shook his head. 'A lottery would create better solidarity.'
Kuo scoffed: 'Solidarity. Might as well get rid of the malingerers while you can, before they shoot you in the back some night.'
'It's a terrible idea,' Bai said. 'They're all Chinese, how can we kill Chinese when they haven't done anything wrong? It's crazy. The Fourth Assemblage of Military Talent has gone insane.'
'They were never sane to begin with,' Kuo said. 'It's been forty years since anyone on Earth has been sane.'
Suddenly they were all knocked off their feet by a violent blast of air. Bai struggled to his feet, banged into Iwa doing the same. He couldn't hear a thing. There was no sight of Kuo, he was gone and there was a big hole in the ground where he had been standing, a hole perfectly round and some twelve feet wide, thirty feet deep, and floored by the back end of one of the big Muslim supershells. Another dud.
A right hand lay on the ground beside the hole like a white cane spider. 'Oh damn,' Iwa said through the roar. 'We've lost Kuo.'
The Muslim shell had landed directly on him. Possibly, Iwa said later, his presence had kept it from exploding somehow. It had squished him into the earth like a worm. Only his poor hand left.
Bai stared at the hand, too stunned to move. Kuo's laugh seemed still to ring in his cars. Kuo certainly would have laughed if he had been able to see this turn of events. His hand was completely recognizable as his, Bai found that he knew it intimately without ever being aware of the fact until now, so many hours sitting together in their little cave, Kuo holding the rice pot or the tea kettle over the stove, or offering a cup of tea or rakshi, his hand, like all the rest of him, a part of Bai's life, callused and scarred, clean palmed and dirty backed, looking still just like itself, even without the rest of him around. Bai sat back down on the mud.
Iwa gently picked up the severed hand, and they gave it the same funeral ceremony given to more complete corpses, before taking it back to one of the death trains for disposal in the crematoria. Afterwards they drank Kuo's remaining rakshi. Bai could not speak, and Iwa didn't try to make him. Bai's own hands displayed the quivering o or inary trenc fatigue. What had happened to their magic umbrella? What would he do now, without Kuo's acid laughter to cut through the deathly miasmas?
Then the Muslims took their turn to attack, and the Chinese were busy for a week with the defence of their trenches, living in their gas masks, firing belt after belt at the ghostly fellahem and assassins emerging from the yellow fog. Bai's lungs gave out again briefly, he had to be evacuated; but at the end of the week he and Iwa were back in the same trenches they had started in, with a new squad composed almost entirely of conscripts from Aozhou, land of the turtle who held up the world, green southerners thrown into the conflict like so many rounds of machine-gun ammunition. They had been so busy that already it seemed a long time since the incident of the dud shell. 'Once I had a brother named Kuo,' Bai explained to Iwa.
Iwa nodded, patted Bai on the shoulder. 'Go and see if we have new orders.' His face was black with cordite, except around mouth and nose where his mask had been, and under his eyes, white with deltas of tear streaks. He looked like a puppet in a play, his face the mask of asura suffering. He had been at his machine gun for over forty straight hours, and in that time had killed perhaps three thousand men. His eyes looked sightlessly through Bai, through the world.
Bai staggered away, down the tunnel to the comm cave. He ducked in and fell into a chair, trying to catch his breath, feeling himself continuing to fall, through the floor, through the earth, on the airy drop to oblivion. A creak pulled him up; he looked to see who was already in the chair at the wireless table.
It was Kuo, sitting there grinning at him.
Bai straightened up. 'Kuo!' he said. 'We thought you were dead!'
Kuo nodded. 'I am dead,' he said. 'And so are you.'
His right hand was there at the end of his wrist.
'The shell went off,' he said, 'and killed us all. Since then you've been in the bardo. All of us have. You've gone at it by pretending you weren't there yet. Although why you would want to hang on to that hell world we were living in, I can't imagine. You are so damned obstinate, Bai. You need to see you're in the bardo to be able to understand what's happening to you. It's the war in the bardo that matters, after all. The battle for our souls.'
Bai tried to say yes; then no; then he found himself on the floor of the cave, having fallen off the chair, apparently, which had woken him up. Kuo was gone, his chair empty. Bai groaned. 'Kuo! Come back!' But the room stayed empty.
Later Bai told Iwa what had happened, his voice shaking, and the Tibetan had given him a sharp glance, then shrugged. 'Maybe he was right,' he said, gesturing around. 'What is there to prove him wrong?'
Another assault struck and suddenly they were ordered to retreat, to get to the back lines and then on the trains. At the depot yard it was c
haotic, of course; but men with guns trained on them boarded them on the cars like cattle, and off the trains squealed and clanked.
Iwa and Bai sat at one end of a car as they trained south. From time to time they used their officers' privilege and went out onto the car's coupling base to smoke cigarettes and regard the steel sky lowering overhead. Higher and higher they rose, colder and colder. Thin air hurt Bai's lungs. 'So,' he said, gesturing at the rock and ice rolling past. 'Maybe it is the bardo.'
'It's just Tibet,' Iwa said.
But Bai could see very well that it was more desolate than that. Cirrus clouds hung like sickles just overhead, as on a stage set, the sky black and flat. It didn't look the slightest bit real.
In any case, whatever the realm, Tibet or the bardo, in life or out of it, the war continued. At night winged roaring flyers, their blimp components dispensed with, buzzed overhead dropping bombs on them. Arc lamp searchlights lanced the darkness, pinning flyers to the stars and sometimes blowing them up in gouts of falling flame. Images from Bai's dreams fell right out of the thin air. Black snow glittered in the white light of a low sun.
They stopped before an impossibly huge mountain range, another stage set from the dream theatre. A pass so deep that from their distance it dipped under the sere tabletop of the steppe. That pass was their goal. Their task now was to blast the defences away and go south through that pass, down to some level below this floor of the universe. The pass to India, supposedly. Gate to a lower realm. Very well defended, of course.
The 'Muslims' defending it remained invisible, always over the great snowy mass of granite peaks, greater than any mountains on Earth could be, asura mountains, and the big guns brought to bear on them, asura guns. Never had it been so clear to Bai that they had got caught up in some bigger war, dying by the millions for some cause not their own. Ice and black rock fangs touched the ceiling of stars, snow banners streamed on the monsoon wind away from the peaks, merging with the Milky Way, at sunset becoming asura flames blowing horizontally, as if the realm of the asuras stood perpendicular to their own, another reason perhaps that their puny imitation battles were always so hopelessly askew.
The Muslims' big guns were on the south side of the range; they never even heard them. Their shells whistled over the stars, leaving white rainbow frost trails on the black sky. The majority of these shells landed on the massive white mountain to the cast of the huge pass, blasting it with one stupendous explosion after another, as if the Muslims had gone crazy and declared war on the rocks of the Earth. 'Why do they hate that mountain so much?' Bai asked.
'That's Chomolungma,' Iwa said. 'That was the tallest mountain in the world, but the Muslims have knocked the summit pyramid down until it's lower than the second tallest, which is a peak in Afghanistan. So now the tallest peak in the world is Muslim.'
His face was its usual blank, but he sounded sad, as though the mountain mattered to him. This worried Bai: if Iwa had gone mad, everyone on Earth had gone mad. Iwa would be the last to go. But maybe it had happened. A soldier in their squad had begun to weep helplessly at the sight of dead horses and mules. He was fine at the sight of dead men scattered about, but the bloated bodies of their poor beasts broke his heart. It made sense in a strange way, but for mountains Bai could conjure up no sympathy. At the most it was one god fewer. Part of the struggle in the bardo.
At night the cold approached pure stasis. Watching starlight gleaming on the empty plateau, smoking a cigarette by the latrines, Bai considered what it might mean that there was war in the bardo. That was the place souls were sorted out, reconciled to reality, sent back down into the world. judgment rendered, karma assessed; souls sent back to try again, or released to nirvana. Bai had been reading Iwa's copy of the Book of the Dead, looking around him seeing each sentence shape the plateau. Alive or dead, they walked in a room of the bardo, working on their fate. It was always so! This room as bleak as any empty stage. They camped on gravel and sand at the butt end of a grey glacier. Their big guns squatted, barrels tilted to the sky. Smaller guns on the valley walls guarded against air attack; these emplacements looked like the old dzong style monasteries that still lined some buttresses in these mountains.
Word came they were going to try to break through Nangpa La, the deep pass interrupting the range. One of the old salt trading passes, the best pass for many li in both directions. Sherpas would guide, Tibetans who had moved south of the pass. On its other side extended a canyon to their capital, tiny Namche Bazaar, now in ruins like everything else. From Namche trails ran directly south to the plains of Bengal. A very good passage across the Himalaya, in fact. Rail could replace trail in a matter of days, and then they could ship the massed armies of China, what was left of them, onto the Gangetic Plain. Rumours swirled, replaced daily by new rumours. Iwa spent all night at the wireless.
It looked to Bai like a change in the bardo itself. Shift to the next room, a tropical hellworld clogged with ancient history. The battle for the pass would therefore be particularly violent, as is any passage between worlds. The artilleries of the two civilizations massed on both sides. Triggered avalanches in the granite escarpments were frequent. Meanwhile explosions on the peak of Chomolungma continued to lower it. The Tibetans fought like pretas as they saw this. Iwa seemed to have reconciled himself to it: 'They have a saying about the mountain coming to Mohammed. But I don't think it matters to the mother goddess.'
Still, it brought home to them yet again how insane their opponents were. Ignorant fanatical disciples of a cruel desert cult, promised eternity in a paradise where sexual orgasm with beautiful houris lasted ten thousand years, no surprise they were so often suicidally brave, happy to die, reckless in frenzied opiated ways that were hard to counter. Indeed they were known to be prodigious benzedrine eaters and opium smokers, pursuing the entire war in a jerky drugged dream state that could include bestial rage. Most of the Chinese would have been happy to join them there, and opium had made its way into the Chinese army, of course, but supplies were short. Iwa had local contacts, however, and as they prepared for the assault on Nangpa La he obtained some from some military policemen. He and Bai smoked it in cigarettes and drank it as a tincture of alcohol, along with cloves and a pill of Travancori medicines said to sharpen sight while dulling the emotions. It worked pretty well.
Eventually there were so many banners and divisions and big guns collected on this high plane of the bardo that Bai became convinced that the rumours were right, and a general assault on Kali or Shiva or Brahma was about to begin. As confirming evidence he noted that many divisions were composed of experienced soldiers, rather than raw boys or peasants or women – divisions with extensive battle experience in the islands or the New World, where the fighting had been particularly intense, and where they claimed to have won. In other words, they were precisely those soldiers most likely to have been killed already. And they looked dead. They smoked cigarettes like dead men. A whole army of the dead, gathered and poised to invade the rich south of the living.
The moon waxed and waned and the bombardment of the invisible foe across the range continued. Fleets of flyers shaped like sickles shot through the pass and never came back. On the eighth day of the fourth month, the date of the conception of the Buddha, the assault began.
The pass itself had been rigged, and when its immediate defenders were all killed or had retreated south, the ridges guarding the pass erupted in massive explosions and poured down onto the broad saddle. Cho Oyo itself lost some of its mass to this explosion. That was the end for several banners securing the pass. Bai watched from below and wondered, when one died in the bardo where did one go? it was only a matter of chance that Bai's squad had not been in the first wave.
The defences as well as the Chinese first wave were buried. After that the pass was theirs, and they could begin the descent of the giant glaciercut canyon south to the Gangetic Plain. They were attacked every step of the way, chiefly by distant bombardment, and with booby traps and enormous mines buried in th
e trails at crucial points. They defused or set these off as often as they could, suffered the occasional missed ones, rebuilt a road and rail bed as they descended. It was mostly road work at great speed, as the Muslims gave ground and retreated to the plain, and only their most distant aerial bombardment remained, shots fired from around Delhi, erratic and hilarious unless they happened to make a lucky strike.
In the deep southern canyon they found themselves in a different world. Indeed Bai had to reconsider the idea that he was in the bardo at all. If he was, this was certainly a different level of it: hot, wet, lush, the green trees and bushes and grasses exploding out of the black soil and overrunning everything. The granite itself seemed living down here. Perhaps Kuo had lied to him, and he and Iwa and the rest here had been alive all the while, in a real world become deathly with death. What an awful thought! The real world become the bardo, the two the same… Bai hustled through his hectic days feeling appalled. After all that suffering he had only been reborn into his own life, still ongoing, now regained as if there had been no break, only a moment of cruel irony, a few days' derangement, and now moved on into a new karmic existence while trapped in the same miserable biological cycle that for some reason had turned into a One simulacrum of hell itself, as if the karmic wheel had broken and the gears between karmic life and biological life become detached, gone so that one fluctuated without warning, lived sometimes in the physical world, other times in the bardo, sometimes in dream sometimes awake, and very often all at once, without cause or explanation. Already the years in the Gansu Corridor, the whole of his life he would have said before, had become a dream mostly forgotten, and even the mystic high strangeness of the Tibetan plateau was fast becoming an unreal memory, hard to recall though it was etched on his eyeballs and he was still looking right through it.
The Year of Rice and Salt Page 52