The Year of Rice and Salt

The sky to the east was turning grey. Iagogeh went down to the lakeshore, to the women's area, beyond a small forested spit of land, thinking to wash before anyone else was around. She took off her clothes, all but her shift, and walked out into the lake until she was thigh deep, then washed herself.

Across the lake she saw a disturbance. A black head in the water, like a beaver. It was Fromwest, she decided, swimming like a beaver or an otter in the lake. Perhaps he had become an animal again. His head was preceded by a series of ripples in the water. He breathed like a bear.

She had been still for some time, and when he put his feet on the bottom, down by the spit where it was muddy, she turned and stood facing him. He saw her and froze. He was wearing only his waist belt, as in the game. He put his hands together, bowed deeply. She sloshed slowly towards him, off the sand bottom and onto soft mud.

'Come,' she said quietly. 'I have chosen for you.'

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. Iagogeh 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,' Iagogeh 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.'

Iagogeh, 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, I did what you demanded of me, I 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.