The Years of Rice and Salt

by Robinson, Kim Stanley

  He regarded her calmly. He looked much older than he had the day before. 'Thank you,' he said, and added something from his tongue. A name, she thought. Her name.

  They walked onshore. Her foot hit a snag and she put a hand on his offered forearm, decorously, to balance herself. On the bank she dried herself with her fingers and dressed, while he retrieved his clothes and did likewise. Side by side they walked back to the fire, past the humming dawn watchers, through the knots of sleeping bodies. lagogeh stopped before one. Tecarnos, a young woman, not a girl, but unmarried. Sharptongued and funny, intelligent and full of spirit. In sleep she did not reveal much of this, but one leg was stretched out gracefully, and under her blanket she looked strong.

  'Tecarnos,' lagogeh said softly. 'My daughter. Daughter of my eldest sister. Wolf tribe. A good woman. People rely on her.'

  Fromwest nodded, hands again pressed together before him, watching her. 'I thank you.'

  'I'll talk to the other women about it. We'll tell Tecarnos, and the men.'

  He smiled, looked around him as if seeing through everything. The wound on his forehead looked raw and was still seeping watery blood. The sun blinked through the trees to the cast, and the singing back by the fires was louder.

  She said, 'You two will bring more good souls into the world.'

  'We can hope.'

  She put her hand on his arm, as she had when they emerged from the lake. 'Anything can happen. But we ‑' meaning the two of them, or the women, or the Hodenosaunee ‑ 'we will make the best chance we. can. That's all you can do.'

  'I know.' He looked at her hand on his arm, at the sun in the trees. 'Maybe it will be all right.'

  lagogeh, the teller of this tale, saw all these things herself.

  Thus it was that many years later, when the jati had again convened in the bardo, after years of work fighting off the foreigners living at the mouth of the East River, fighting to hold together their peoples in the face of all the devastating new diseases that struck them, making alliances with Fromwest's people embattled in like fashion on the west coast of their island, doing all they could to knit together the nations and to enjoy life in the forest with their kin and their tribes, Fromwest approached Keeper of the Wampum and said to him proudly, 'You have to admit it, 1 did what you demanded of me, 1 went out in the world and fought for what was right! And we did some good again!'

  Keeper put a hand to the shoulder of his young brother as he approached the great edifice of the bardo's dais of judgment, and said, 'Yes, you performed well, youth. We did what we could.'

  But already he was looking ahead at the bardo's enormous towers and battlements, wary and unsatisfied, focused on the tasks ahead. Things in the bardo seemed to have become even more Chinese since their last time there, like all the rest of the realms, perhaps, or perhaps it was just a coincidence having to do with their angle of approach, but the great wall of the dai's was broken up into scores of levels, leading into hundreds of chambers, so that it looked somewhat like the side of a beehive.

  The bureaucrat god at the entryway to this warren, one Biancheng by name, handed out guidebooks to the process facing them above, thick tomes all entitled 'The Jade Record', each hundreds of pages long,

  filled with detailed instructions, and with descriptions, illustrated copiously, of the various punishments they could expect to suffer for the crimes and effronteries they had committed in their most recent lives.

  Keeper took one of these thick books and without hesitation swung it like a tomahawk, knocking Biancheng over his paper‑laden desk. Keeper looked around at the long lines of souls waiting their turn to be judged, and saw them staring at him amazed, and he shouted at them, 'Riot! Revolt! Rebel! Revolution!' and without waiting to see what they did, led his little jati into a chamber of mirrors, the first room on their passage through the process of judgment, where souls were to look at themselves and see what they really were.

  'A good idea,' Keeper admitted, after stopping in the middle and staring at himself, seeing what no one else could see. 'I am a monster,' he announced. 'My apologies to you all. And especially to you, Iagogeh, for putting up with me this last time, and all the previous times. And to you, youth,' nodding at Busho. 'But nevertheless, we have work to do. 1 intend to tear this whole place down.' And he began looking around the room for something to throw at the mirrors.

  'Wait,' lagogeh said. She was reading her copy of 'The Jade Record', skimming pages rapidly. 'Frontal assaults are ineffective, as 1 recall. I'm remembering things. We have to go at the system itself. We need a technical solution ... Here. Here's just the thing: just before we're sent back into the world, the Goddess Meng administers to us a vial of forgetting.'

  'I don't remember that,' Keeper said.

  'That's the point. We go into each life ignorant of our pasts, and so we struggle on each time without learning anything from the times before. We have to avoid that if we can. So listen, and remember: when you are in the hundred and eight rooms of this Meng, don't drink anything! If they force you to, then only pretend to drink it, and spit it out when you are released.' She read on. 'We emerge in the Final River, a river of blood, between this realm and the world. If we can get there with our minds intact, then we might be able to act more effectively.'

  'Fine,' Keeper said. 'But 1 intend to destroy this place itself.'

  'Remember what happened last time you tried that,' Busho warned him, getting into the corner of the chamber so he could see the reflection of the reflections. Some things were coming back to him as lagogeh

  had spoken. 'When you took a sword to the goddess of death, and she redoubled on you with each stroke.'

  Keeper frowned, trying to recall. Outside there was a roaring, shouts, sounds of gunfire, boots running. Irritated, distracted, he said, 'You can't be cautious at times like this, you have to fight evil whenever the chance comes.'

  'True, but cleverly. Little steps.'

  Keeper regarded him sceptically. He held his thumb and forefinger together in the air. 'That small?' He grabbed up lagogeh's book and threw it at one wall of the mirrors. One of them cracked, and a shriek came from behind the wall.

  'Stop arguing,' Iagogeh said. 'Pay attention now.'

  Keeper picked the book back up and they hurried through close little rooms, moving higher and higher, then lower again, then higher, always up or down stairs in multiples of seven or nine. Keeper abused several more functionaries with the big book. Pounds the Rocks kept slipping into side rooms and getting lost.

  Finally they reached the hundred and eight chambers of Meng, the Goddess of Forgetting. Everyone had to pass through a different one of the chambers, and drink the cup of the wine‑that‑was‑not‑wine set out for them. Guards who did not look as if they would notice the slap of a book, be it ever so thick, stood at every exit to enforce this requirement; souls were not to return to life too burdened or advantaged by their pasts.

  'I refuse,' Keeper shouted; they could all hear it from the nearby rooms. 'I don't remember this ever being required before!'

  'That's because we're making progress,' Busho tried to call to him. 'Remember the plan, remember the plan.'

  He himself took up his vial, happily fairly small, and faked swallowing its sweet contents with an exaggerated gulp, tucking the liquid under his tongue. It tasted so good he was sorely tempted to swallow it down, but resisted and only let a little seep to the back of his tongue.

  Thus when his guard tossed him out into the Final River with the rest, he spat out what he could of the not‑wine, but he was disoriented nevertheless. The other members of the jati thrashed likewise in the shallows, choking and spitting, Straight Arrow giggling drunkenly, totally oblivious. lagogeh rounded them up, and Keeper, no matter what he

  had forgotten, had not lost his main purpose, which was to wreak havoc however he could. They half‑swum, half‑floated across the red stream to the far shore.

  There, at the foot of a tall red wall, they were hauled out of the river by two demon go
ds of the bardo, Life‑is‑short and Death‑by‑gradations. Overhead a banner hanging down the side of the wall displayed the message, 'To be a human is easy, to live a human life is hard; to desire to be human a second time is even harder. If you want release from the wheel, persevere.'

  Keeper read the message and snorted. 'A second time ‑ what about the tenth? What about the fiftieth?' And with a roar he shoved Deathby‑gradations into the river of blood. They had spat enough of Meng's not‑wine of forgetting in the stream that the god guard quickly forgot who had shoved him, and what his job was, and how to swim.

  But the others of the jati saw what Keeper had done, and their purpose came back ever more clearly to their consciousness. Busho shoved the other guard into the stream: 'Justice!' he shouted after the suddenly absent‑minded swimmer. 'Life is short indeed!'

  Other guards appeared upstream on the bank of the Final River, hurrying towards them. The members of the jati acted quickly, and for once like a team; by twisting and tangling the banner hanging down the wall, they made it into a kind of rope they could use to pull themselves up the Red Wall. Busho and Keeper and lagogeh and Pounds the Rock and Straight Arrow and Zig‑zag and all the rest hauled themselves up to the top of the wall, which was broad enough to sprawl onto. There they could catch their breath, and have a look around: back down into the dark and smoky bardo, where a struggle even more chaotic than usual had broken out; it looked like they had started a general revolt; and then forward, down onto the world, swathed in clouds.

  'It looks like that time when they took Butterfly up that mountain to sacrifice her,' Keeper said. 'I remember that now.'

  'Down there we can make something new,' lagogeh said. 'It's up to us. Remember!'

  And they dived off the wall like drops of rain.

  One. A Case of Soul‑theft

  The widow Kang was extremely punctilious about the ceremonial aspects

  of her widowhood. She referred to herself always as wei wang ren, 'the person who has not yet died'. When her sons wanted to celebrate her fortieth birthday she demurred, saying 'This is not appropriate for one who has not yet died.' Widowed at the age of thirty‑five, just after the birth of her third son, she had been cast into the depths of despair; she had loved her husband Kung Xin very much. She had dismissed the idea of suicide, however, as a Ming affectation. A truer interpretation of

  Confucian duty made it clear that to commit suicide was to abandon one's responsibilities to one's children and parents‑in‑law, which was obviously out of the question. Widow Kang Tongbi was instead determined to remain celibate past the age of fifty, writing poetry and studying the classics and running the family compound. At fifty she would be

  eligible for certification as a chaste widow, and would receive a commendation in the Qianlong Emperor's elegant calligraphy, which she planned to frame and place in the entrance to her home. Her three sons might

  even build a stone arch in her honour.

  Her two older sons moved around the country in the service of the

  imperial bureaucracy, and she raised the youngest while continuing to run the family household left in Hangzhou, now reduced in number to her son Shih, and the servants left behind by her older sons. She oversaw the sericulture that was the principal support for the household, as her

  older sons were not yet in a position to send much money home, and the whole process of silk production, filature and embroidery was under

  her command. No house under a district magistrate was ruled with any more iron hand. This too honoured Han learning, as women's work in the better households, usually hemp and silk manufacture, was considered a virtue long before Qing policies revived official support for it.

  Widow Kang lived in the women's quarters of the small compound, which was located near the banks of the Chu River. The outer walls were stuccoed, the inner walls wood shingle, and the women's quarters, in the innermost reach of the property, were contained in a beautiful white square building with a tile roof, filled with light and flowers. in that building, and the workshops adjacent to it, Widow Kang and her women would weave and embroider for at least a few hours every day, and often several more, if the light was good. Here too Widow Kang had her youngest son recite the parts of the classics he had memorized at her command. She would work at the loom, flicking the shuttle back and forth, or in the evening simply spin thread, or work at the larger patterns of embroidery, all the while running Shih through the Analects, or Mencius, insisting on perfect memorization, just as the examiners would when the time came. Little Shih was not very good at it, even compared to his older brothers, who had been only minimally acceptable, and often he was reduced to tears by the end of the evening; but Kang Tongbi was relentless, and when he was done crying, they would get back to it. Over time he improved. But he was a nervous and unhappy boy.

  So no one was happier than Shih when the ordinary routine of the household was interrupted by festivals. All three of the Bodhisattva Guanyin's birthdays were important holidays for his mother, especially the main one, on the nineteenth day of the sixth month. As this great festival approached, the widow would relent in ber strict lessons, and make her preparations: proper reading, writing of poetry, collection of incense and food for the indigent women of the neighbourhood; these activities were added, to ber already busy days. As the festival approached she fasted, and abstained from any polluting actions ' including becoming angry, so that she stopped Shih's lessons for the time, and offered sacrifices in the compound's little shrine.

  The old man in the moon tied red threads Around our legs when we were babies.

  We met and married; now you are gone. Ephemeral life is like water flowing; Suddenly we have been separated by death all these years. Tears well up as an early autumn begins. The one who has not yet died is dreamed of By a distant ghost. A crane flies, a flower falls; Lonely and desolate, 1 set aside my needlework And stand in the courtyard to count the geese Who have lost their flocks. May Bodhisattva Guanyin Help me get through these chill final years.

  When the day itself came they all fasted, and in the evening joined a big procession up the local hill, carrying sandalwood in a cloth sack, and twirling banners, umbrellas and paper lanterns, following their temple group's flag, and the big pitchy torch leading the way and warding off demons. For Shih the excitement of the night march, added to the cessation of his studies, made for a grand holiday, and he walked behind his mother swinging a paper lantern, singing songs and feeling happy in a way usually impossible for him.

  'Miao Shan was a young girl who refused her father's order to marry,' his mother told the young women walking ahead of them, although they had all heard the story before. 'In a rage he committed her to a monastery, then he burned the monastery down. A bodhisattva, Dizang Wang, took her spirit to the Forest of Corpses, where she helped the unsettled ghosts. After that she went down through the levels of hell, teaching the spirits there to rise above their suffering, and she was so successful that Lord Yama returned her as the Bodhisattva Guanyin, to help the living learn these good things while they are still alive, before it's too late for them.'

  Shih did not listen to this oft‑heard tale, which he could not make sense of. It did not seem like anything in his mother's life, and he didn't understand her attraction to it. Singing, firelight and the strong smoky smells of incense all converged at the shrine on the top of the hill. Up there the Buddhist abbot led prayers, and people sang and ate small sweets.

  Long after moonset they trooped back down the hill and along the river path home, still singing songs in the windy darkness. Everyone

  from the household moved slowly along, not only because they were tired, but to accommodate Widow Kang's mincing stride. She had very small beautiful feet, but got around almost as well as the big flat‑footed servant girls, by using a quick step and a characteristic swivel of the hips, a gait that no one ever commented on.

  Shih wandered ahead, still nursing his last candle's guttering, and by its light he glimpsed m
ovement against their compound wall: a big dark figure, stepping awkwardly in just the way his mother did, so that he thought for a moment it was her shadow on the wall.

  But then it made a sound like a dog whimpering, and Shih jumped back and shouted a warning. The others rushed forward, Kang Tongbi at their fore, and by torchlight they saw a man in ragged robes, dirty, hunched over, staring up at them, his frightened eyes big in the torchlight.

  'Thief!' someone shouted.

  'No,' he said in a hoarse voice. 'I am Bao Ssu. I'm a Buddhist monk from Soochow. I'm just trying to get water from the river. I can hear it.' He gestured, then tried to limp away towards the river sound.

  'A beggar,' someone else said.

  But sorcerers had been reported west of Hangzhou, and now Widow Kang held her lantern so close to his face that he had to squint.

  'Are you a real monk, or just one of the hairy ones that hide in their temples!'

  'A true monk, 1 swear. 1 had a certificate, but it was taken from me by the magistrate. 1 studied with Master Yu of the Purple Bamboo Temple.' And he began to recite the Diamond Sutra, a favourite of women past a certain age.