Khalid coloured at that but said nothing. Nadir left, clearly on his way to other tasks necessary before his flight from Samarqand. Khalid slammed the gate shut after him, cursed him under his breath. Bahram, ecstatic at the unexpected return of Esmerine and the children, hugged them until Esmerine cried out that he would crush them. They wept with joy, and only later, in the midst of shutting the compound off from the city, something they had done successfully ten years before when a plague of distemper had passed through the city, losing only one servant who had slipped into town to see his girlfriend and never come back — only later did Bahram see that his daughter Laila was red-cheeked, with a hectic flush, and lying listlessly on a chest of drawers.
They put her in a room with a bed. Esmerine’s face was pinched with fear. Khalid decreed that Laila be sequestered there, and fed and kept in drink from the door, by poles and net bags and plates and gourds that were not to be returned to the rest of them. But Esmerine hugged the little girl, of course, before all this regime was introduced, and the next day in their bedroom Bahram saw her red cheeks, and how she groaned awake and lifted her arms, and there were the tokens in her armpits, hard yellow protuberances emerging from the skin, even (he seemed to see as she put down her arm) faceted as if they were carbuncles, or as if she was turning to jewels from the inside.
After that they were a sickhouse, and Bahram spent his days nursing the others, running about all hours of the day and night, in a fever of a different kind to that of the sick ones, urged by Khalid never to touch or come within the breath of his stricken family. Sometimes Bahram tried, sometimes he didn’t, holding them as if he could clasp them to this world. Or drag them back into it, when the children died.
Then the adults started dying too, and they were locked out of the town as a sickhouse rather than a safe house. Fedwa died but Esmerine held on; Khalid and Bahram took turns caring for her, and Iwang joined them in the compound.
One night Iwang and Khalid had Esmerine breathe on a glass, and they looked at the moisture through their small-lens, and said little. Bahram looked briefly and glimpsed the host of little dragons, gargoyles, bats and other creatures. He could not look again, but knew they were doomed.
Esmerine died and Khalid showed the tokens that same hour. Iwang could not rise from his couch in Khalid’s workshop, but studied his own breath and blood and bile through the smallscope, trying to make a clear record of the disease’s progress through him. One night as he lay there gasping he said in his low voice, “I’m glad I did not convert. I know you did not want it. And now I would be a blasphemer, for if there is a God I would want to rebuke Him for this.”
Bahram said nothing. It was a judgment, but of what? What had they done? Were the gas shells an affront to God?
“Old men live to be seventy,” Iwang said. “I’m just over thirty. What will I do with those years?”
Bahram couldn’t think. “You said we return,” he said dully.
“Yes. But I liked this life. I had plans for this life.”
He lingered on his couch but could take no food, and his skin was very hot. Bahram did not tell him that Khalid had died already, very swiftly, felled by grief or anger at the loss of Fedwa and Esmerine and the children — as if by apoplexy rather than plague. Bahram only sat with the Tibetan in the silent compound.
At one point Iwang croaked, “I wonder if Nadir knew they were infected, and gave them back to kill us.”
“But why?”
“Perhaps he feared the killer-of-myriads. Or some faction of the court. He had other considerations than us. Or it might have been someone else. Or no one.”
“We’ll never know.”
“No. The court itself might be gone by now. Nadir, the Khan, all of them.”
“I hope so,” Bahram’s mouth said.
Iwang nodded. He died at dawn, wordless and struggling.
Bahram got all the compound’s survivors to put cloths over their faces and move the bodies into a closed workshop beyond the chemical pits. He was so far outside himself that the movements of his numb limbs surprised him, and he spoke as if he were someone else. Do this — do that. Let’s eat. Then, carrying a big pot to the kitchen, he felt the lump in his armpit, and sat down as if the tendons in the back of his knees had been cut, thinking: I guess it’s my turn now.
Back in the Bardo
Well, it was, as might be imagined after an end like that, a very discouraged and dispirited little jati that huddled together on the black floor of the bardo this time around. Who could blame them? Why should they have had any will to continue? It was hard to discern any reward for virtue, any forward progress — any dharmic justice of any kind. Even Bahram could not find the good in it, and no one else even tried. Looking back down the vale of the ages at the endless recurrence of their reincarnations, before they were forced to drink their vials of forgetting and all became obscure to them again, they could see no pattern at all to their efforts; if the gods had a plan, or even a set of procedures, if the long train of transmigrations was supposed to add up to anything, if it was not just mindless repetition, time itself nothing but a succession of chaoses, no one could discern it; and the story of their transmigrations, rather than being a narrative without death, as the first experiences of reincarnation perhaps seemed to suggest, had become instead a veritable charnel house. Why read on? Why pick up their book from the far wall where it has been thrown away in disgust and pain, and read on? Why submit to such cruelty, such bad karma, such bad plotting?
The reason is simple: these things happened. They happened countless times, just like this. The oceans are salt with our tears. No one can deny that these things happened.
And so there is no choice in the matter. They cannot escape the wheel of birth and death, not in the experience of it, or in the contemplation of it afterwards; and their anthologist, Old Red Ink himself, must tell their stories honestly, must deal in reality, or else the stories mean nothing. And it is crucial that the stories mean something.
So. No escape from reality: they sat there, a dozen sad souls, huddled together at a far corner of the great stage of the hall of judgment. it was dim, and cold. The perfect white light had lasted this time for only the briefest of moments, a flash like the eyeball exploding; after that, here they were again. Up on the dais the dogs and demons and black gods capered, in a hazy mist that shrouded all, that damped all sound.
Bahram tried, but could think of nothing to say. He was still stunned by the events of their last days in the world; he was still ready to get up and go out and start another day, on another morning just like all the rest. Deal with the crisis of an invasion from the east, the taking of his family, if that was what it meant — whatever problems the day happened to bring, trouble, crisis, sure, that was life. But not this. Not this already. Salt tears of timely death, alum tears of untimely death: bitterness filled the air like smoke. I liked that life! I had plans for that life!
Khalid sat there just as Khalid always had, as if ensconced in his study thinking over some problem. The sight gave Bahram a deep pang of regret and sorrow. All that life, gone. Gone, gone, gone altogether beyond . . . The past is gone. Even if you can remember it, it’s gone. And even at the time it was happening Bahram had known how he had loved it, he had lived in a state of nostalgia-for-the-present, every day of it.
Now gone.
The rest of the jati sat or sprawled on the cheap wooden floor around Khalid. Even Sayyid Abdul looked distraught, not just sorry for himself, but distraught for them all, sad to have left that turbulent but oh-so-interesting world.
An interval passed; a moment, a year, an age, the kalpa itself, who could tell in such a terrible place?
Bahram took a deep breath, exerted himself, sat up.
“We’re making progress,” he announced firmly.
Khalid snorted. “We are like mice to the cats.” He gestured up at the stage, where the grotesqueries continued to unfold. “They are petty arseholes, I say. They kill us for sport. They do
n’t die and they don’t understand.”
“Forget them,” Iwang advised. “We’re going to have to do this on our own.
“God judges, and sends us out again,” Bahram said. “Man proposes, God disposes.”
Khalid shook his head. “Look at them. They’re a bunch of vicious children playing. No one leads them, there is no god of gods.”
Bahram looked at him, surprised. “Do you not see the one enfolding all the rest, the one we rest within? Allah, or Brahman, or what have you, the one only true God of Gods?”
“No. I see no sign of him at all.”
“You aren’t looking! You’ve never looked yet! When you look, you will see it. When you see it, everything will change for you. Then it will be all right.”
Khalid scowled. “Don’t insult us with that fatuous nonsense. Good Lord, Allah, if you are there, why have you inflicted me with this fool of a boy!” He kicked at Bahram. “It’s easier without you around! You and your damned all right! It’s not all right! It’s a fucking mess! You only make it worse with that nonsense of yours! Did you not see what just happened to us, to your wife and children, to my daughter and grandchildren? It’s not all right! Start from that, if you will! We may be in a hallucination here, but that’s no excuse for being delusional!”
Bahram was hurt by this. “It’s you who give up on things,” he protested. “Every time. That’s what your cynicism is — you don’t even try. You don’t have the courage to carry on.”
“The hell I don’t. I’ve never given up yet. I’m just not willing to go at it babbling lies. No, it’s you who are the one who never tries. Always waiting for me and Iwang to do the hard things. You do it for once! Quit babbling about love and try it yourself one time, damn it! Try it yourself, and see how hard it is to keep a sunny face when you’re looking at the truth of the situation eye to eye.”
“Ho!” said Bahram, stung. “I do my part. I have always done my part. Without me none of you would be able to carry on. It takes courage to keep love at the centre when you know just as well as anyone else the real state of things! It’s easy to get angry, anyone can do that. It’s making good that’s the hard part, it’s staying hopeful that’s the hard part! it’s staying in love that’s the hard part.”
Khalid waggled his left hand. “All very well, but it only matters if the truth is faced and fought. I’m sick of love and happiness — I want justice.”
“So do we.”
“All right, then show me. Show me what you can do this next time out in the miserable world, something more than happy happy.”
“I will then!”
“Good.”
Heavily Khalid pulled himself up, and limped over to Sayyid Abdul Aziz, and without any warning kicked him sprawling across the stage. “And you!” he roared. “What is your EXCUSE! Why are you always so bad? Consistency is no excuse, your CHARACTER is NO EXCUSE!”
Sayyid glared up at him from the floor, sucking on a torn knuckle. Daggers in his stare: “Leave me alone.”
Khalid made as if to kick him again, then gave up on it. “You’ll get yours,” he promised. “One of these days, you’ll get yours.”
“Forget about him,” Iwang advised. “He’s not the real problem, and he’ll always be part of us. Forget about him, forget about the gods. Let’s concentrate on doing it ourselves. We can make our own world.”
BOOK FIVE
Warp and Weft
ONE
One night can change the world.
The Doorkeepers sent runners out with strings of wampum, announcing a council meeting at Floating Bridge. They wanted to raise to chiefdom the foreigner they called Fromwest. The fifty sachems had agreed to the meeting, as there was nothing unusual about it. There were many more chiefs than sachems, and the title died with the man, and each nation was free to choose its own, depending on what happened on the warpath and in the villages. The only unusual feature of this raising-up was the foreign birth of the candidate, but he had been living with the Doorkeepers for some time, and word had spread through the nine nations and the eight tribes that he was interesting.
He had been rescued by a war party of Doorkeepers who had run far to the west to inflict another shock on the Sioux, the western people bordering the Hodenosaunee. The warriors had come on a Sioux torture, the victim hung by his chest from hooks, and a fire building under him. While waiting for their ambush to set, the warriors had been impressed by the victim’s speech, which was in a comprehensible version of the Doorkeeper dialect, as if he had seen them out there.
The usual behaviour while being tortured was a passionate laughter in the faces of one’s enemies, to show that no pain inflicted by man can triumph over the spirit. This foreigner hadn’t been like that. Calmly he remarked to his captors, in Doorkeeper rather than Sioux: “You are very incompetent torturers. What wounds the spirit is not passion, for all passion is encouragement. As you hate me you help me. What really hurts is to be ground like acorns in a grinding hole. Where I come from they have a thousand devices to tear the flesh, but what hurts is their indifference. Here you remind me I am human and full of passion, a target of passion. I am happy to be here. And I am about to be rescued by warriors much greater than you.”
The Senecans lying in ambush had taken this as an undeniable sign to attack, and with warwhoops they had descended on the Sioux and scalped as many as they could catch, while taking particular care to rescue the captive who had spoken so eloquently, and in their own tongue.
How did you know we were there? they asked him.
Suspended as high as he was, he said, he had seen their eyes out in the trees.
And how do you know our language?
There is a tribe of your kinsmen on the west coast of this island, who moved there long ago. I learned your language from them.
And so they had nursed him and brought him home, and he lived with the Doorkeepers and the Great Hill People, near Niagara, for several moons. He went on the hunt and the warpath, and word of his accomplishments had spread through the nine nations, and many people had met him and been impressed. No one was surprised at his nomination to chief.
The council was set for the hill at the head of Canandaigua Lake, where the Hodenosaunee had first appeared in the world, out of the ground like moles.
Hill People, Granite People, Flint Owners and Shirt Weavers, who came up out of the south two generations before, having had bad dealings with the people who had come over the sea from the east, all walked west on the Long House Trail, which extends across the league’s land from east to west. They encamped at some distance from the Doorkeepers’ council house, sending runners to announce their arrival, according to the old ways. The Senecan sachems confirmed the day of the council, and repeated their invitation.
On the appointed morning before dawn, people rose and gathered their rolls, and hunched around fires and a quick meal of burnt corn cakes and maple water. It was a clear sky at dawn, with only a trace of receding grey cloud to the east, like the finely embroidered hems of the coats the women were donning. The mist on the lake swirled as if twisted by sprites skating over the lake, to join a sprite council matching the human one, as often occurred. The air was cool and damp, with no hint of the oppressive heat that was likely to arrive in the afternoon.
The visiting nations trooped onto the water meadows at the lakeshore and gathered in their accustomed places. By the time the sky lightened from grey to blue there were already a few hundred people there to listen to the Salute to the Sun, sung by one of the old Senecan sachems.
The Onondagas nations keep the council brand, and also the wampum into which the laws of the league have been talked, and now their powerful old sachem, Keeper of the Wampum, rose and displayed in his outstretched hands the belts of wampum, heavy and white. The Onondagas are the central nation, their council fire the seat of the league’s councils. Keeper of the Wampum trod a pedestrian dance around the meadow, chanting something most of them heard only as a faint cry.
A fire w
as kindled at the centrepoint, and pipes passed around. The Mohawks, Onondagas and Senecans, brother to each other and father to the other six, settled west of the fire; the Oncidas, Cayugas and Tuscaroras sat to the east; the new nations, Cherokee, Shawnee and Choctaw, sat to the south. The sun cracked the horizon; its light flooded the valley like maple water, pouring over everything and making it summer yellow. Smoke curled, grey and brown turned to one. A morning without wind, and the wisps on the lake burned away. Birds sang from the forest canopy to the east of the meadow.
Out of the arrows of shadow and light walked a short, broad-shouldered man, barefoot and dressed only in a runner’s waist belt. He had a round face, very flat. A foreigner. He walked with his hands together, looking down humbly, and came through the junior nations to the central fire, there offering his open palms to Honowenato, Keeper of the Wampum.
Keeper said to him, “Today you become a chief of the Hodenosaunee. At these occasions it is customary for me to read the history of the league as recalled by the wampum here, and to reiterate the laws of the league that have given us peace for many generations, and new nations joining us from the sea to the Mississippi, from the Great Lakes to the Tennessee.”
Fromwest nodded. His chest was marked deeply by the puckered scars of the Sioux hooking ceremony. He was as solemn as an owl. “I am more than honoured. You are the most generous of nations.”
“We are the greatest league of nations under heaven,” Keeper said. “We live here on the highest land of Longer House, with good routes down in all directions.
“In each nation there are the eight tribes, divided in two groups. Wolf, Bear, Beaver and Turtle; then Deer, Snipe, Heron and Hawk. Each member of the Wolf tribe is brother and sister to all other Wolves, no matter what nation they come from. The relationship with other Wolves is almost stronger than the relation with those of one’s nation. It is a cross-relation, like warp and weft in basket weaving and cloth making. And so we are one garment. We cannot disagree as nations, or it would tear the fabric of the tribes. Brother cannot fight brother, sister cannot fight sister.