The Year of Rice and Salt

After a while longer Bai got up and went over to see what the offi cers were doing. They were chanting a sutra, in Sanskrit perhaps, Bai thought, and he joined in softly with the 'Lengyan jing', in Chinese. And as the day wore on many Buddhists in both armies gathered around the site, hundreds of them, the mud was covered with people, and they said prayers in all the languages of Buddhism, standing there on the burnt land that smoked in the rain for as far as the eye could see, black, grey and silver. Finally they fell silent. Peace in the heart, compassion, peace. Sharpness remained in them.

ONE

On sunny mornings the parks on the lakefront were filled with families out walking. In the early spring, before the plants had done more than create the tight green buds soon to blossom in their profusion of colours, the hungry swans would congregate in the gleaming black water beside the promenade to fight over the loaves of stale bread thrown at them by children. This had been one of Budur's favourite activities as a young girl, it had cast her into gales of laughter to see the swans flop and tussle for the scraps; now she watched the new kids convulsed by the same hilarity, with a stab of grief for her lost childhood, and for the awareness that the swans, though beautiful and comical, were also desperate and starving. She wished she had the boldness to join the children and throw more bread to the poor things. But if she did it now she would look odd, like one of the mentally deficient ones on their trip out from their school. And in any case there was not a great deal of bread left in their house anyway.

Sunlight bounced on the water, and the buildings lining the back of the lakeshore promenade glowed lemon, peach and apricot, as if lit from within by some light trapped in their stone. Budur walked back through the old town towards home, through the grey granite and black wood of the ancient buildings. Turi had begun as a Roman town, a way station on their main route through the Alps; Father had once driven them up to an obscure alpine pass called the Keyhole, where a stretch of the Roman road was still there, switchbacking through the grass like a petrified dragon's back, looking lonely for the feet of soldiers and traders.

Now after centuries of obscurity Turi was a way station again, this time for trains, and the greatest city in all of central Firanja, the capital of the united Alpine emirates.

The city centre was bustling and squeaky with trams, but Budur liked to walk. She ignored Ahab, her chaperon; though she liked him personally, a simple man with few pretensions, she did not like his job, which included accompanying her on her excursions. She shunned him on principle as an affront to her dignity. She knew also that he would report her behaviour to Father, and when he reported her refusal to acknowledge his presence, yet another small protest of harem would reach Father, if only indirectly.

She led Ahab up through the apartments studding the hillside overlooking the city, to High Street. The wall around their house was beautiful, a tall patterned weave of green and grey dressed stones. The wooden gate was topped by a stone arch seemingly held in a network of wistaria vines; you could pull out the keystone and it would still stand. Ahmet, their gatekeeper, was in his seat in the cosy little wooden closet on the inside of the gateway, where he held forth to all who wanted to pass, his tea tray ready to serve those who had time to tarry.

Inside the house Aunt Idelba was talking on the telephone, which was set on a table in the inner courtyard under the eaves, where anyone could hear you. This was Father's way of trying to keep anything untoward from ever being said, but the truth was that Aunt Idelba was usually talking about microscopic nature and the mathematics of the interiors of atoms, and so no one could have any idea what she was talking about. Budur liked to listen to her anyway, because it reminded her of the fairy tales Aunt Idelba had told in the past when Budur was younger, or her cooking talk with Mother in the kitchen cooking was one of her passions, and she would rattle off spells, recipes, procedures and tools, all mysterious and suggestive just like this talk on the tele phone, as if she were cooking up a new world. And sometimes she would get off the phone looking worried, and absent-mindedly accept Budur's hugs and admit that this was precisely the case: the ilmi, the scientists, were indeed cooking up a new world. Or they could be. Once she rang off flushed pink, and danced a little minuet around the courtyard, singing nonsense syllables, and their laundry ditty, 'God is great, great is God, clean our clothes, clean our souls.'

This time she rang off and did not even see Budur, but stared up at the bit of sky visible from the courtyard.

'What is it, Idelba? Are you feeling hem?' Hem was the women's term for a kind of mild depression that had no obvious cause.