The Year of Rice and Salt

'Yes, Scheherazade is a good tale about dealing with men. But there must be better models for how women should pass history along, to younger women, for instance. The Greeks had a very interesting mythology, full of goddesses modelling various woman to woman behaviours. Demeter, Persephone… they have a wonderful poet for this stuff too, Sappho. You haven't heard of her? I'll give you the references.'

SEVEN

This was the start of many more personal conversations over coffee, late at night in the rain lashed cafes. Kirana lent Budur books on all kinds of topics, but especially Firanji history: the Golden Horde's survival of the plague that had killed the Christians; the continuing influence of the Horde's nomad structures on the descendant cultures of the Skandistani states; the infill of al Andalus, Nsara and the Keltic Islands by Maghribis; the zone of contention between the two infilling cultures in the Rhine Valley. Other volumes described the movement of Turks and Arabs through the Balkans, adding to the discord of the Firanji emirates, the little taifa states that fought for centuries, according to loyalties Sunni or Shiite, sufi or Wahabbi, Turkic or Maghribi or Tartar; fought for dominance or survival, often desperately, creating conditions usually repressive for women, so that only in the farthest west had there been any cultural advances before the Long War, a progressiveness that Kirana associated with the ocean, and contact with other cultures by sea, and with Nsara's origins as a refuge for the heterodox and marginal, founded indeed by a woman, the fabled refugee Sultana Katima.

Budur took these books and tried reading from them aloud to her blind soldiers in the hospital. She read them the story of the Glorious Ramadan Revolution, when Turkic and Kirghizi women had led seizures of the power plants of the big reservoirs above Samarqand, and moved into the ruins of the fabled city, which had been abandoned for nearly a century because of a series of violent earthquakes; how they had formed a new republic in which the holy laws of Ramadan were extended through the year, and the life of the people made a communal act of divine worship, all humans completely equal, men and women, adult and child, so that the place had reclaimed its glorious heritage of the tenth century, and made amazing advances in culture and law, and all had been happy there, until the Shah had sent his armies cast from Iran and crushed them as heretics.

Her soldiers nodded as they listened. That's the way it happens, their silent faces said. The good is always crushed. Those who see the farthest have their eyes put out. Budur, seeing the way they hung on every word, like starving dogs watching people cat in sidewalk cafes, brought in more of her borrowed books to read to them. Ferdowsi's 'The Book of Kings', the huge epic poem describing Iran before Islam, was very popular. So was the sufi lyric poet Hafiz, and of course Rumi and Khayyarn. Budur herself liked to read from her heavily annotated copy of Ibn Khaldun's 'Muqaddimah'.

'There is so much in Khaldun,' she said to her listeners. 'Everything I learn at the institute I find already here in Khaldun. One of my instructors is fond of a theory that has the world being a matter of three or four major civilizations, each a core state, surrounded by peripheral states. Listen here to Khaldun, in the section entitled "Each dynasty has a certain amount of provinces and lands, and no more".'

She read, Whenthe dynastic groups have spread over the border regions, their numbers are necessarily exhausted. This, then, is the time when the territory of the dynasty has reached its farthest extension, where the border regions form a belt around the centre of the realm. If the dynasty then undertakes to expand beyond its holdings, its widening territory remains without military protection, and is laid open to any chance attack by enemy or neighbour. This has a detrimental result for the dynasty. – Budur looked up. 'A very succinct description of core periphery theory. Khaldun also addresses the lack of an Islamic core state that the others can rally around.'

Her audience nodded; they knew about that; the absence of alliance coordination at the various fronts of the war had been a famous problem, with sometimes terrible results.