The Year of Rice and Salt

'But how can a historian work with stuff like this?' Budur asked at one point, as they walked down one of the long lanes created by the rows of stones, studying the patterns of black and yellow lichen that grew on their nobbled surfaces. Most were about twice Budur's height, really massive things.

'You study things instead of stories. It's something different from history, more a scientific inquiry of material conditions that early people lived in, things they made. Archaeology. Again, it is a science that began during the first Islamic flowering, in Syria and Iraq, then was not pursued again until the Nahda,' this being the rebirth of Islamic high culture in certain cities like Teheran and Cairo, in the half century before the Long War started and wrecked everything. 'Now our understanding of physics and geology is such that new methods of inquiry are being suggested all the time. And construction and reconstruction projects are digging up all kinds of new finds as well, and people are going out deliberately looking for more, and it is all coming together in a very exciting way. It is a science taking off, if you know what I mean. Most interesting. And Firanja is turning out to be one of the best places to practise it. This is an ancient place.'

She gestured at the long rows of stones, like a crop seeded by great stone gods who had never come back to make a harvest. Clouds scudded by overhead, and the blue sky seemed flat and low over them. 'Not just these, or the stone rings in Britain, but stone tombs, monuments, whole villages. I'll have to take you up to the Orkneys with me some time. I may be wanting to go up there soon in any case, I'll take you along. Anyway, you think about studying this kind of thing too, as a grounding for you while you listen to Madam Fawwaz and all her scheherazading.'

Budur rubbed her hand over a stone dressed by a thin lichen coat of many colours. Clouds rushed by. 'I will.'

SIX

Classes, a new job cleaning Idelba's lab, walking the docks and the jetty, dreaming of a new synthesis, an Islam that included what was important in the Buddhism so prevalent in the labs: Budur's days passed in a blur of thought, everything she saw and did fed into it. Most of the women in Idelba's lab were Buddhist nuns, and many of the men there were monks. Compassion, right action, a kind of agape, as the ancient Greeks had called it – the Greeks, those ghosts of this place, people who had had every idea already, in a lost paradise that had included even the story of paradise lost, in the form of Plato's tales of Atlantis, which were turning out to be true, according to the latest studies of the scholars on Kreta, digging in the ruins.

Budur looked into classes in this new field, archaeology. History that was more than talk, that could be a science… The people working on it were an odd mix, geologists, architects, physicists, Quranic scholars, historians, all studying not just the stories, but the things left behind.

Meanwhile the talk went on, in Kirana's class and in the cafes afterwards. One night in a cafe Budur asked Kirana what she thought of archaeology, and she replied, 'Yes, archaeology is very important, sure. Although the standing stones are rather mute when it comes to telling us things. But they're discovering caves in the south, filled with wall paintings that appear to be very old, older even than the Greeks. I can give you the names of the people at Avignon involved with that.'

' Thanks.'

Kirana sipped her coffee and listened to the others for a while. Then she said to Budur under the hubbub, 'What's interesting, I think, beyond all the theories we discuss, is what never gets written down. This is crucial for women especially, because so much of what we did never got written down. just the ordinary, you know, daily existence. The work of raising children and feeding families and keeping a home together, as an oral culture passed along generation to generation. Uterine culture, Kang Tongbi called it. You must read her work. Anyway uterine culture has no obvious dynasties, or wars, or new continents to discover, and so historians have never tried to account for it – for what it is, how it is transmitted, how it changes over time, according to material and social conditions. Changing with them I mean, in a weave with them.'

'In the harem it's obvious,' Budur said, feeling nervous at being jammed knee to knee with this woman. Cousin Yasmina had conducted enough clandestine 'practice sessions' of kissing and the like among the girls that Budur knew just what the pressure from Kirana's leg meant. Resolutely she ignored it and went on: 'It's like Scheherazade, really. Telling stories to get along. Women's history would be like that, stories told one after another. And every day the whole process has to be renewed.'