The Years of Rice and Salt (60 page)

“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 less. Part of the struggle in the bardo.

Nights the cold approached pure stasis. 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 gray glacier. Their big guns hunkered, 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. Rumors swirled, replaced daily by new rumors. 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 Muhammad. 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 rumors 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 fliers 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 Oyu 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 defenses 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 fine 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 plain 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 that 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 the 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 antiaircraft emplacements, even a small airstrip on one nearly level bench near Lukla. Becoming a construction batallion 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 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 fliers 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 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.