The Years of Rice and Salt Read online

  • • •

  Soon after that conversation, when they were all in Beijing, a great storm came.

  Yellow dust makes the first raindrops muddy;

  Lightning cracks down bronze through it,

  Stitching together earth and sky,

  Visible through closed eyelids.

  About an hour later word comes:

  The new palaces have caught fire.

  The whole centre of the Forbidden

  City Burning as though drenched in pitch,

  Flames licking the wet clouds,

  Pillar of smoke merging with the storm,

  Rain downwind baked out of the air, replaced by ash.

  Running back and forth with terrified horses, then with buckets of water, Bold kept an eye out, and finally, at dawn, when they had given up fighting the blaze, for it was useless, he caught sight of Kyu there among the evacuated imperial concubines. All the Heir Designate’s people had a hectic look, but Kyu in particular seemed to Bold elated, the whites of his eyes visible all the way around. Like a shaman after a successful voyage to the spirit world. He started this fire, Bold thought, just like in Hangzhou, this time using the lightning as his cover.

  The next time Kyu made one of his midnight visits to the stables, Bold was almost afraid to speak to him.

  Nevertheless he said, “Did you set that fire?” — whispering in Arabic, even though they were alone, outside the stables, with no chance of being overheard.

  Kyu just stared at him. The look said Yes, but he didn’t elaborate.

  Finally he said calmly, “An exciting night, wasn’t it? I saved one of the Script Pavilion’s cabinets, and some concubines as well. The redjackets were very grateful about their documents.”

  He went on about the beauty of the fire, and the panic of the concubines, and the rage, and later the fear, of the Emperor, who took the fire to be a sign of heavenly disapproval, the worst bad portent ever to smite him; but Bold could not follow the boy’s talk, his mind filled as it was with images of the various forms of the lingering death. To burn down a merchant in Hangzhou was one thing, but the Emperor of all China! The Dragon Throne! He glimpsed again that thing inside the boy, the black nafs banging its wings around inside, and felt the distance between them grown vast and unbridgeable.

  “Be quiet!” he said sharply in Arabic. “You’re a fool. You’ll get yourself killed, and me too.”

  Kyu smiled grimly. “On to a better life, right? Isn’t that what you told me? Why should I fear dying?”

  Bold had no answer.

  • • •

  After that they saw less of each other than ever. Days passed, festivals, seasons. Kyu grew up. When Bold caught sight of him, he saw a tall slender black eunuch, pretty and perfumed, mincing along with a flash of the eye, and, once, that raptor look as he regarded the people around him. Bejewelled, plump, perfumed, dressed in elaborate silk: a favourite of the Empress and the Heir, even though they hated the eunuchs of the Emperor. Kyu was their pet, and perhaps even a spy in the Emperor’s harem. Bold feared for him at the same time that he feared him. The boy was wreaking havoc among the concubines of both Emperor and Heir, many said, even people in the stables who had no way of knowing directly. The way he moved through them was too forward, he was bound to be making enemies. Cliques would be plotting to bring him down. He must know that, he must be courting it; he laughed in their faces, so that they would hate him even more. It all seemed to delight him. But imperial revenge had a long reach. If someone fell, everyone he knew came down too.

  So when the news spread that two of the Emperor’s concubines had hanged themselves, and the furious Emperor demanded an accounting, and the whole nest of corruption began to unravel before everyone, fear rippling through the court like the plague itself, lies spreading the blame wider and wider, until fully three thousand concubines and eunuchs were implicated in the scandal, Bold expected to hear any hour of his young friend’s torture and lingering death, perhaps from the mouths of guards come to execute him as well.

  But it didn’t happen. Kyu existed under a spell of protection like that of a sorcerer, it was so obvious that everyone saw it. The Emperor executed forty of his concubines with his own hand, swinging the sword furiously, cutting them in half or decapitating them with single strokes, or running them through over and over, until the steps of the rebuilt Hall of Great Harmony ran with their blood; but Kyu stood just to the side, unharmed. One concubine even cried out towards Kyu as she stood naked before them all, a wordless shriek, and then she cursed the Emperor to his face, “It’s your fault, you’re too old, your yang is gone, the eunuchs do it better than you!” Then snick, her head was falling into the puddles of blood like a sacrificed sheep’s. All that beauty wasted. And yet no one touched Kyu; the Emperor dared not look at him; and the black youth watched it all with a gleam in his eye, enjoying the wastage, and the way the bureaucrats hated him for it. The court was literally a shambles, they were feeding on each other now; and yet none of them had the courage to take on the weird black eunuch.

  • • •

  Bold’s last meeting with him happened just before Bold was to accompany the Emperor on an expedition to the west, to destroy the Tartars led by Arughtai. It was a hopeless cause; the Tartars were too fast, the Emperor not well. Nothing would come of it. They would be back when winter came on, in just a few months. So Bold was surprised when Kyu came to the stables to say farewell, it was like talking to a stranger now. But the youth clasped Bold by the arm suddenly, affectionate and serious, like a prince talking to a trusted old retainer.

  “Do you never want to go home?” he asked.

  “Home,” Bold said.

  “Isn’t your family out there?”

  “I don’t know. It’s been years. I’m sure they think I died. They could be anywhere.”

  “But not just anywhere. You could find them.”

  “Maybe.” He looked at Kyu curiously. “Why do you ask?”

  Kyu didn’t answer at first. He was still clutching Bold’s arm. Finally he said, “Do you know the story of the eunuch Chao Kao, who caused the downfall of the Chin dynasty?”

  “No. Surely you’re not still talking about that.”

  Kyu smiled. “No.” He pulled a little carving from his sleeve — half of a tiger, carved from black ironwood, its stripes cut into the smooth surface. The amputation across its middle was mortised; it was a tally, like those used by officials to authenticate their communications with the capital when they were in the provinces. “Take this with you when you go. I’ll keep the other half. It will help you. We’ll meet again.”

  Bold took it, frightened. It seemed to him like Kyu’s nafs, but of course that was something that couldn’t be given away.

  “We’ll meet again. In our lives to come at least, as you always used to tell me. Your prayers for the dead give them instructions on how to proceed in the bardo, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I must go.” And with a kiss to the cheek Kyu was off into the night.

  • • •

  The expedition to conquer the Tartars was a miserable failure, as expected, and one rainy night the Yongle Emperor died. Bold stayed up all through that night, pumping the bellows for a fire the officers used to melt all the tin cups they had, to make a coffin to carry the imperial body back to Beijing. It rained all the way back, the heavens crying. Only when they reached Beijing did the officers let the news be known.

  The imperial body lay in state in a proper coffin for a hundred days. Music, weddings and all religious ceremonies were forbidden during this interval, and all the temples in the land were required to ring their bells thirty thousand times.

  For the funeral Bold joined the ten thousand members of the escort,

  Sixty lis’ march to the imperial tomb site,

  Northwest of Beijing. Three days zigzagging

  To foil evil spirits, who only travel in straight lines.

  The funeral complex deep underground,
r />   Filled with the dead Emperor’s best clothes and goods,

  At the end of a tunnel three li long,

  Lined with stone servants awaiting his next command.

  How many lifetimes will they stand waiting?

  Sixteen of his concubines are hanged,

  Their bodies buried around his coffin.

  The day the Successor ascended the Dragon Throne, his first edict was read aloud to all in the Great Within and the Great Without. Near the end of the edict, the reader in the palace proclaimed to all assembled there before the Hall of Great Harmony,

  “All voyages of the treasure fleet are to be stopped. All the ships moored in Hangzhou are ordered to return to Nanjing, and all goods on the ships are to be turned over to the Department of Internal Affairs, and stored. Officials abroad on business are to return to the capital immediately; and all those called to go on future voyages are ordered back to their homes. The building and repair of all treasure ships is to stop immediately. All official procurement for going abroad must also be stopped, and all those involved in purchasing should return to the capital.”

  When the reader had finished, the new Emperor, who had just named himself the Hongxi Emperor, spoke for himself. “We have spent too much on extravagance. The capital will return to Nanjing, and Beijing will be designated an auxiliary capital. There will be no more waste of imperial resources. The people are suffering. Relieving people’s poverty ought to be handled as though one were rescuing them from fire, or saving them from drowning. One cannot hesitate.”

  Bold saw Kyu’s face across the great courtyard, a little black figurine with blazing eyes. The new Emperor turned to look at his dead father’s retinue, so many of them eunuchs. “For years you eunuchs have only been thinking of yourselves, at the expense of China. The Yongle Emperor thought you were on his side. But you were not. You have betrayed all China.”

  Kyu spoke up before his fellows could stop him. “Your Highness, it’s the officials who are betraying China! They are trying to be as regent to you, and make you a boy emperor for ever!”

  With a roar a gang of the officials rushed at Kyu and some of the other eunuchs, pulling knives from their sleeves as they pounced. The eunuchs struggled or fled, but many were cut down on the spot. Kyu they stabbed a thousand times.

  The Hongxi Emperor stood and watched. When it was over he said, “Take the bodies and hang them outside the Meridian Gate. Let all the eunuchs beware.”

  • • •

  Later, in the stables, Bold sat holding the half-tiger tally in his hand. He had thought they would kill him too, and was ashamed how much that thought had dominated him during the slaughter of the eunuchs; but no one had paid the slightest attention to him. It was possible no one else even remembered his connection to Kyu.

  He knew he was leaving, but he didn’t know where to go. If he went to Nanjing and helped burn the treasure fleet, and all its docks and warehouses, he would certainly be continuing his young friend’s project. But all that would be done in any case.

  Bold recalled their last conversation. Time to go home, perhaps, to start a new life.

  But guards appeared in the doorway. We know what happened next; and so do you; so let’s go on to the next chapter.

  EIGHT

  In the bardo, Bold explains to Kyu the true nature of reality;

  Their jati regathered, they are cast back into the world.

  At the moment of death Kyu saw the clear white light. It was everywhere, it bathed the void in itself, and he was part of it, and sang it out into the void.

  Some eternity later he thought: This is what you strive for.

  And so he fell out of it, into awareness of himself. His thoughts were continuing in their tumbling monologue reverie, even after death. Incredible but true. Perhaps he wasn’t dead yet. But there was his body, hacked to pieces on the sand of the Forbidden City.

  He heard Bold’s voice, there inside his thoughts, speaking a prayer.

  “Kyu my boy, my beautiful boy,

  The time has come for you to seek the path.

  This life is over. You are now

  Face to face with the clear light.”

  I’m past that, Kyu thought. What happens next? But Bold couldn’t know where he was along his way. Prayers for the dead were useless in that regard.

  “You are about to experience reality

  In its pure state. All things are void.

  You will be like a clear sky,

  Empty and pure. Your named mind

  Will be like clear still water.”

  I’m past that! Kyu thought. Get to the next part!

  “Use the mind to question the mind. Don’t sleep at this crucial time. Your soul must leave your body awake, and go out through the Brahma hole.”

  The dead can’t sleep, Kyu thought irritably. And my soul is already out of my body.

  His guide was far behind him. But it had always been that way with Bold. Kyu would have to find his own way. Emptiness still surrounded the single thread of his thoughts. Some of the dreams he had had during his life had been of this place.

  He blinked, or slept, and then he was in a vast court of judgment. The dais of the judge was on a broad deck, a plateau in a sea of clouds. The judge was a huge black-faced deity, sitting potbellied on the dais. Its hair was fire, burning wildly on its head. Behind it a black man held a pagoda roof that might have come straight out of the palace in Beijing. Above the roof floated a little seated Buddha, radiating calm. To his left and right were peaceful deities, standing with gifts in their arms; but these were all a great distance away, and not for him. The righteous dead were climbing long flying roads up to these gods. On the deck surrounding the dais, less fortunate dead were being hacked to pieces by demons, demons as black as the Lord of Death, but smaller and more agile. Below the deck more demons were torturing yet more souls. It was a busy scene and Kyu was annoyed. This is my judgment, and it’s like a morning abattoir! How am I supposed to concentrate?

  A creature like a monkey approached him and raised a hand: “Judgment,” it said in a deep voice.

  Bold’s prayer sounded in his mind, and Kyu realized that Bold and this monkey were related somehow. “Remember, whatever you suffer now is the result of your own karma,” Bold was saying. “It’s yours and no one else’s. Pray for mercy. A little white god and a little black demon will appear, and count out the white and black pebbles of your good and evil deeds.”

  Indeed it was so. The white imp was pale as an egg, the black imp like onyx; and they were hoeing great piles of white and black stones into heaps, which to Kyu’s surprise appeared about equal in size. He could not remember doing any good deeds.

  “You will be frightened, awed, terrified.”

  I will not! These prayers were for a different kind of dead, for people like Bold.

  “You will attempt to tell lies, saying I have not committed any evil deed.”

  I will not say any such ridiculous thing.

  Then the Lord of Death, up on its throne, suddenly took notice of Kyu, and despite himself Kyu flinched.

  “Bring the mirror of karma,” the god said, grinning horribly. Its eyes were burning coals.

  “Don’t be frightened,” Bold’s voice said inside him. “Don’t tell any lies, don’t be terrified, don’t fear the Lord of Death. The body you’re in now is only a mental body. You can’t die in the bardo, even if they hack you to pieces.”

  Thanks, Kyu thought uneasily. That is such a comfort.

  “Now comes the moment of judgment. Hold fast, think good thoughts; remember, all these events are your own hallucinations, and what life comes next depends on your thoughts now. In a single moment of time a great difference is created. Don’t be distracted when the six lights appear. Regard them all with compassion. Face the Lord of Death without fear.”

  The black god held a mirror up with such practised accuracy that Kyu saw in the glass his own face, dark as the god’s. He saw that the face is the naked soul itself, always, and t
hat his was as dark and dire as the Lord of Death’s. This was the moment of truth! And he had to concentrate on it, as Bold kept reminding him. And yet all the while the whole antic festival shouted and shrieked and clanged around him, every possible punishment or reward given out at once, and he couldn’t help it, he was annoyed.

  “Why is black evil and white good?” he demanded of the Lord of Death. “I never saw it that way. If this is all my own thinking, then why is that so? Why is my Lord of Death not a big Arab slave trader, as it would be in my own village? Why are your agents not lions and leopards?”

  But the Lord of Death was an Arab slave trader, he saw now, an Arab intaglioed in miniature in the surface of the god’s black forehead, looking out at Kyu and waving. The one who had captured him and taken him to the coast. And among the shrieks of the rendered there were lions and leopards, hungrily gnawing the intestines of living victims.

  All just my thoughts, Kyu reminded himself, feeling fear rise in his throat. This realm was like the dream world, but more solid; more solid even than the waking world of his just-completed life; everything trebly stuffed with itself, so that the leaves on the round ornamental bushes (in ceramic pots!) hung like jade leaves, while the jade throne of the god pulsed with a solidity far beyond that of stone. Of all the worlds the bardo was the one of the utmost reality.

  The white Arab face in the black forehead laughed and squeaked, “Condemned!” and the huge black face of the Lord of Death roared, “Condemned to hell!” It threw a rope around Kyu’s neck and dragged him off the dais. It cut off Kyu’s head, tore out his heart, pulled out his entrails, drank his blood, gnawed his bones; yet Kyu did not die. Body hacked to pieces, yet it revived. And it all began again. Intense pain throughout. Tortured by reality. Life is a thing of extreme reality; death also.

  Ideas are planted in the mind of the child like seeds, and may grow to dominate the life completely.

  The plea: I have done no evil.

  Agony disassembled into anguish, regret, remorse; nausea at his past lives and how little they had gained him. In this terrible hour he sensed them all without actually being able to remember them. But they had happened. Oh, to get off the endless wheel of fire and tears. The sorrow and grief he felt then was worse than the pain of dismemberment. The solidity of the bardo fell apart, and he was bombarded by light exploding in his thoughts, through which the palace of judgment could only be seen as a kind of veil, or a painting on the air.