The Year of Rice and Salt

He returned within the week, and they had another session 'inside the candle' as Kang called it. From the depths of her trance she burst into speech that neither of them understood – not Ibrahim as it happened, nor Kang when he read back to her what he had written down.

He shrugged, looking shaken. 'I will ask some colleagues. Of course it may be some language totally lost to us now. We must concentrate on what you see.'

'But I remember nothing! Or very little. As you recall dreams, that slip away on waking.'

'When you are actually inside the candle, then. I must be clever, ask the right questions.'

'But if I don't understand you? Or if I answer in this other tongue?'

He nodded. 'But you seem to understand me, at least partly. There must be translation in more than one realm. Or there may be more to the hun soul than has been suspected. Or the tendril that keeps you in contact with the travelling hun-soul conveys other parts of what you know. Or it is the po soul that understands.' He threw up his hands: who could say.

Then something struck her, and she put her hand to his arm. 'There was a landslide!'

They stood together in silence. Faintly the air quivered.

He went away puzzled, distracted. At every departure he left bemused, and at every return he was fairly humming with ideas, with anticipation of their next voyage into the candle.

'A colleague in Beijing thinks it may be a form of Berber that you are speaking. At other times, Tibetan. Do you know these places? Morocco is at the other end of the world, the west end of Africa, in the north. It was Moroccans who repopulated al Andalus when the Christians died.'

'Ah,' she said, but shook her head. 'I was always Chinese, I am sure. It must be an old Chinese dialect.'

He smiled, a rare and pleasant sight. 'Chinese in your heart, perhaps. But I think our souls wander the whole world, life to life.'

'In groups?'

'People's destinies intertwine, as the Quran says. Like threads in your embroideries. Moving together like the travelling races on Earth the Jews, the Christians, the Zotti. Remnants of older ways, left without a home.'

'Or the new islands across the Eastern Sea, yes? So we might have lived there too, in the empires of gold?'

'Those may be Egyptians of ancient times, fled west from Noah's flood. Opinion is divided.'

'Whatever they are, I am certainly Chinese through and through. And always have been.'

He regarded her with a trace of his smile in his eye. 'It does not sound like Chinese that you speak when inside the candle. And if life is inextinguishable, as it seems it might be, you may be older than China itself.'

She took a deep breath, sighed. 'Easy to believe.'

The next time he came to put her under a description, it was night, so they could work in silence and darkness; so that the candle flame, the dim room and the sound of his voice would be all that seemed to exist. It was the fifth day of the fifth month, an unlucky day, the day of the festival of hungry ghosts, when those poor preta who had no living descendants were honoured and given some peace. Kang had said the Surangama Sutra, which expounded the rulai zang, a state of empty mind, tranquil mind, true mind.

She made the purification of the house rituals, and fasted, and she asked Ibrahim to do the same. So when the preparations were finally finished, they sat alone in the stuffy dark chamber, watching a candle burn. Kang entered into the flame almost the moment Ibrahim touched her wrist, her pulse flooding, a yin in yang pulse. Ibrahim watched her closely. She muttered in the language he could not understand, or perhaps another language yet. There was a sheen on her forehead, and she seemed distraught.

The Surangama Sutra: spuriously Sanskrit, originally written in Chinese and titled 'Lengyan jing'. The awareness it describes, changzhi, is sometimes called Buddha nature, or tathagatagarbha, or 'mind ground'. The sutra claims that devotees can be 'suddenly awakened' to this state of high awareness.

The flame of the candle shrank down to the size of a bean. Ibrahim swallowed hard, holding off fear, squinting with the effort.

She stirred, her voice grew more agitated.

'Tell me in Chinese,' he said gently. 'Speak Chinese.'

She groaned, muttered. Then she said, very clearly, 'My husband died. They wouldn't – they poisoned him, and they wouldn't accept a queen among them. They wanted what we had. Ah!' And she began again to speak in the other language. Ibrahim fixed her clearest words in mind, then saw that the candle's flame had grown again, but past its normal height, rising so high that the room grew hot and stifling, and he feared for the paper ceiling. 'Please be calm, 0 spirits of the dead,' he said in Arabic, and Kang cried out in the voice not hers,