The Year of Rice and Salt

The routemakers however had learned a good lesson without much loss of life (equipment was another matter). Now they built high on the canyon walls where they sloped back, cutting grades and traverses, going far up tributary canyons and then building bridges over their streams, also anti aircraft emplacements, even a small airstrip on one nearly level bench near Lukla. Becoming a construction battalion was much better than fighting, which was what others were doing down in the mouth of the canyon, to keep it open long enough to get the train down there. They could not believe their luck, or the warm days, or the reality of life behind the front, so luxurious, the silence, the lessening of muscle tension, lots of rice, and strange but fresh vegetables…

Then in a blur of happy days the roadbeds and tracks were complete and they took some of the first trains down and encamped on a great dusty green plain, no monsoon yet, division after division making their way to the front, some fluctuating distance to the west of them. That was where it was all happening now.

Then one morning they were on their way too, trained all day to the west and then off and marching over one pontoon bridge after another, until they were somewhere near Bihar. Here another army was already encamped, an army on their side. Allies, what a concept. The Indians themselves, here in their own country, moving north after four decades of holding out against the Islamic horde, down in the south of the continent. Now they too were breaking out, crossing the Indus, and the Muslims therefore in danger of being cut off by a pincer attack as large. as Asia, some of them already trapped in Burma, the bulk of them still together in the west and beginning a slow, stubborn retreat.

So Iwa gathered in an hour's conversation with some Travancori officers who spoke Nepali, which he had known as a child. The Indian officers and their soldiers were dark skinned and small, both men and women, very fast and nimble, clean, well dressed, well armed – proud, even arrogant, assuming that they had taken the brunt of the war against Islam, that they had saved China from conquest by holding on as a second front. Iwa came away unsure whether it was a good idea to discuss the war with them.

But Bai was impressed. Perhaps the world would be saved from slavery after all. The breakout across north Asia was apparently stalled, the Urals being a kind of natural Great Wall of China for the Golden Horde and the Firanjis. Although maps seemed to indicate that it was nicely to the west. And to have crossed the Himalaya in force against such resistance, to have met up with the Indian armies, to be cutting the world of Islam in two…

'Well, sea power could make all the whole land war in Asia irrelevant,' Iwa said as they sat one evening on the ground eating rice that had been spiced to newly incendiary heights. Between choking swallows, sweating profusely, he said, 'In the time of this war we've seen three or four generations of weaponry, of technology generally, the big guns, sea power, now air power – I don't doubt that a time is coming when fleets of airships and flyers will be all that matter. The fight will go on up there, to see who can control the skies and drop bombs bigger than anything you could ever shoot out of a cannon, right onto the capitals of the enemy. Their factories, their palaces, their government buildings.'

'Good,' Bai said. 'Less messy that way. Go for the head and get it over with. That's what Kuo would say.'

Iwa nodded, grinning at the thought of just how Kuo would say it. The scorching rice here was nothing compared to their Kuo.

The generals from the Fourth Assemblage of Military Talent met with the Indian generals, and as they conferred more railways were built out to the new front west of them. A combined offensive was clearly in the works, and everyone was full of speculation about it. That they would be kept behind to defend their rear from the Muslims still in the Malay Peninsula; that they would be boarded on ships in the mouth of the sacred Ganges and deposited on the Arabian coast to attack Mecca itself; that they were destined for a beachhead attack on the peninsulas of northwest Firanja; and so on. Never an end to the stories they told themselves of how their travail would continue.

In the end, though, they marched forwards in the usual fashion, westwards, holding the right flank against the foothills of Nepal, hills that shot abrupt and green out of the Gangetic Plain – as though, Iwa remarked idly one day, India were a ramming ship that had slammed into Asia and ploughed under it, pushing all the way under Tibet, and doubling the height of that land but dipping down here almost to sea level.