The Year of Rice and Salt

Later Bai told Iwa what had happened, his voice shaking, and the Tibetan had given him a sharp glance, then shrugged. 'Maybe he was right,' he said, gesturing around. 'What is there to prove him wrong?'

Another assault struck and suddenly they were ordered to retreat, to get to the back lines and then on the trains. At the depot yard it was chaotic, of course; but men with guns trained on them boarded them on the cars like cattle, and off the trains squealed and clanked.

Iwa and Bai sat at one end of a car as they trained south. From time to time they used their officers' privilege and went out onto the car's coupling base to smoke cigarettes and regard the steel sky lowering overhead. Higher and higher they rose, colder and colder. Thin air hurt Bai's lungs. 'So,' he said, gesturing at the rock and ice rolling past. 'Maybe it is the bardo.'

'It's just Tibet,' Iwa said.

But Bai could see very well that it was more desolate than that. Cirrus clouds hung like sickles just overhead, as on a stage set, the sky black and flat. It didn't look the slightest bit real.

In any case, whatever the realm, Tibet or the bardo, in life or out of it, the war continued. At night winged roaring flyers, their blimp components dispensed with, buzzed overhead dropping bombs on them. Arc lamp searchlights lanced the darkness, pinning flyers to the stars and sometimes blowing them up in gouts of falling flame. Images from Bai's dreams fell right out of the thin air. Black snow glittered in the white light of a low sun.

They stopped before an impossibly huge mountain range, another stage set from the dream theatre. A pass so deep that from their distance it dipped under the sere tabletop of the steppe. That pass was their goal. Their task now was to blast the defences away and go south through that pass, down to some level below this floor of the universe. The pass to India, supposedly. Gate to a lower realm. Very well defended, of course.

The 'Muslims' defending it remained invisible, always over the great snowy mass of granite peaks, greater than any mountains on Earth could be, asura mountains, and the big guns brought to bear on them, asura guns. Never had it been so clear to Bai that they had got caught up in some bigger war, dying by the millions for some cause not their own. Ice and black rock fangs touched the ceiling of stars, snow banners streamed on the monsoon wind away from the peaks, merging with the Milky Way, at sunset becoming asura flames blowing horizontally, as if the realm of the asuras stood perpendicular to their own, another reason perhaps that their puny imitation battles were always so hopelessly askew.

The Muslims' big guns were on the south side of the range; they never even heard them. Their shells whistled over the stars, leaving white rainbow frost trails on the black sky. The majority of these shells landed on the massive white mountain to the cast of the huge pass, blasting it with one stupendous explosion after another, as if the Muslims had gone crazy and declared war on the rocks of the Earth. 'Why do they hate that mountain so much?' Bai asked.

'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 fewer. Part of the struggle in the bardo.

At night the cold approached pure stasis. Watching 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 grey glacier. Their big guns squatted, 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.