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 glacier-cut 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 the 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.
One evening the wiregraph officer came rushing out and ordered them all to get uphill fast. A glacial lake upstream had had its ice dam bombed by the Muslims, and now a huge bolus of water was headed downstream, filling the canyon to a depth of five hundred feet or more, depending on the narrowness of the gorge.
The scramble began. How they climbed. Here they were, dead men already, dead for years, and yet they climbed like monkeys, frantic to move up the slope of a canyon. They had been camped in a narrow steep defile, the better to avoid bombs from the air, and as they hauled themselves up through brush they heard ever more clearly a distant roar like continuous thunder, possibly a falls in the ordinarily loud Dudh Kosi, but probably not, probably the approaching flood, until finally they came to a layback in the slope, and after an hour they were all a good thousand feet above the Dudh Kosi, looking down at the white thread of it which seemed so harmless from the broad nose of a promontory where the officers had regathered them, looking down into the gorge but also around them at the stupendous icy walls and peaks of the range, hearing a roar come out of the higher ones to the north, a healthy booming roar, like a tiger god roaring. Up here they were in a good position to witness the flood, which arrived just as night was falling: the roar grew to something almost as loud as a bombardment on the front, but all below, almost subterranean, coming through the soles of their feet as much as their ears, and then a dirty white wall of water appeared, carrying trees and rocks on its chaotic tumbling front wall, tearing the walls of the canyon right down to bedrock and causing slides down into it, some of which were large enough to dam the whole stream for a few minutes, before water poured over it and ripped it away, causing a smaller surge in the general flood. After the front of it had passed out of sight down canyon, it left behind torn walls white in the dusk, and a brown foaming river that roared and clunked at just above its usual level.
“We should build the roads higher,” Iwa noted.
Bai could only laugh at Iwa’s cool. The opium was making everything pulse. A sudden realization: “Why, it just occurred to me — I’ve been drowned in floods before! I’ve felt the water come over me. Water and snow and ice. You were there too! I wonder if that was meant for us, and we’ve escaped by accident. I don’t really think we’re supposed to be here.”
Iwa regarded him, “In what sense?”
“In the sense that that flood down there was supposed to kill us!”
“Well,” Iwa said slowly, looking concerned, “I guess we got out of its way.”
Bai could only laugh. Iwa: what a mind. “Yes. To hell with the flood. That was a different life.”
The routemakers however had learned a good lesson without much loss of life (equipment was another matter). Now they built high on the canyon walls where they sloped back, cutting grades and traverses, going far up tributary canyons and then building bridges over their streams, also anti-aircraft emplacements, even a small airstrip on one nearly level bench near Lukla. Becoming a construction battalion was much better than fighting, which was what others were doing down in the mouth of the canyon, to keep it open long enough to get the train down there. They could not believe their luck, or the warm days, or the reality of life behind the front, so luxurious, the silence, the lessening of muscle tension, lots of rice, and strange but fresh vegetables . . .
Then in a blur of happy days the roadbeds and tracks were complete and they took some of the first trains down and encamped on a great dusty green plain, no monsoon yet, division after division making their way to the front, some fluctuating distance to the west of them. That was
where it was all happening now.
Then one morning they were on their way too, trained all day to the west and then off and marching over one pontoon bridge after another, until they were somewhere near Bihar. Here another army was already encamped, an army on their side. Allies, what a concept. The Indians themselves, here in their own country, moving north after four decades of holding out against the Islamic horde, down in the south of the continent. Now they too were breaking out, crossing the Indus, and the Muslims therefore in danger of being cut off by a pincer attack as large as Asia, some of them already trapped in Burma, the bulk of them still together in the west and beginning a slow, stubborn retreat.
So Iwa gathered in an hour’s conversation with some Travancori officers who spoke Nepali, which he had known as a child. The Indian officers and their soldiers were dark-skinned and small, both men and women, very fast and nimble, clean, well-dressed, well-armed — proud, even arrogant, assuming that they had taken the brunt of the war against Islam, that they had saved China from conquest by holding on as a second front. Iwa came away unsure whether it was a good idea to discuss the war with them.
But Bai was impressed. Perhaps the world would be saved from slavery after all. The breakout across north Asia was apparently stalled, the Urals being a kind of natural Great Wall of China for the Golden Horde and the Firanjis. Although maps seemed to indicate that it was nicely to the west. And to have crossed the Himalaya in force against such resistance, to have met up with the Indian armies, to be cutting the world of Islam in two . . .
“Well, sea power could make all the whole land war in Asia irrelevant,” Iwa said as they sat one evening on the ground eating rice that had been spiced to newly incendiary heights. Between choking swallows, sweating profusely, he said, “In the time of this war we’ve seen three or four generations of weaponry, of technology generally, the big guns, sea power, now air power — I don’t doubt that a time is coming when fleets of airships and flyers will be all that matter. The fight will go on up there, to see who can control the skies and drop bombs bigger than anything you could ever shoot out of a cannon, right onto the capitals of the enemy. Their factories, their palaces, their government buildings.”
“Good,” Bai said. “Less messy that way. Go for the head and get it over with. That’s what Kuo would say.”
Iwa nodded, grinning at the thought of just how Kuo would say it. The scorching rice here was nothing compared to their Kuo.
The generals from the Fourth Assemblage of Military Talent met with the Indian generals, and as they conferred more railways were built out to the new front west of them. A combined offensive was clearly in the works, and everyone was full of speculation about it. That they would be kept behind to defend their rear from the Muslims still in the Malay Peninsula; that they would be boarded on ships in the mouth of the sacred Ganges and deposited on the Arabian coast to attack Mecca itself; that they were destined for a beachhead attack on the peninsulas of northwest Firanja; and so on. Never an end to the stories they told themselves of how their travail would continue.
In the end, though, they marched forwards in the usual fashion, westwards, 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 ploughed 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 favour, 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 selfaware 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 colours 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 hooknosed white men, bearded turbanned 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 forwards with all their supplies. Beyond the forward ends of the train lines the Indians continued to race forwards on foot, and in engined cars on rubber wheels, hundreds of them that ran freely over the villages 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 towards 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 th
e 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 too 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 which 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-fulfilment 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, colour 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.”
The Years of Rice and Salt Page 54