The Year of Rice and Salt

In any case, during that long week people passed the time by reciting long passages from Rumi Balkhi, and Ferdowski, and the joker mullah Nusreddin, and the epic poet of Firanja, Ali, and from their own sufi poet of Nsara, young Ghaleb, who had been killed on the very last day of the war. Budur made frequent visits to the women's hospital where Kirana was staying, to tell her what was happening on the plaza and elsewhere in the great city, now pulsing everywhere with its people. They had taken to the streets and were not leaving them. Even when the rain returned they stayed out there. Kirana ate up every word of news, hungry to be out herself, supremely irritated that she was confined at this time. Obviously she was seriously ill or she wouldn't have suffered it, but she was emaciated, with sallow, dark rings under her eyes like a raccoon from Yingzhou, 'stuck', as she put it, 'just when things are getting interesting', just when her long winded acid-tongued facility for speech could have been put to use, could have made history as well as commented on it. But it was not to be; she could only lie there fighting ber illness. The one time Budur ventured to ask how she was feeling, she grimaced and said only, 'The termites have got me.'

But even so she stayed close to the centre of the action. A delegation of opposition leaders, including a contingent of women from the zawlyyas of the city, were meeting with adjutants of the generals to make their protests and negotiate if they could, and these people visited Kirana often to talk over strategy. On the streets the rumour was that a deal was being hammered out, but Kirana lay there, eyes burning, and shook her head at Budur's hopefulness. 'Don't be naive.' Her sardonic grin wrinkled her wasted features. 'They're just playing for time. They think that if they hold on long enough the protests will die down, and they can get on with their business. They're probably right. They've got the guns after all.'

But then a Hodenosaunee fleet steamed into the harbour roads and anchored. Hanea! Budur thought when she saw them: forty giant steel battleships, bristling with guns that could fire a hundred li inland. They called in on a wireless frequency used by a popular music station, and though the government had seized the station, they could do nothing to stop this message from reaching all the wireless receptors in the city, and many heard the message and passed it along: the Hodenosaunee wanted to speak to the legitimate government, the one they had been dealing with before. They refused to speak to the generals, who were breaking the Shanghai Convention by usurping the constitutionally required government, a very serious breach; they declared they would not move from Nsara's harbour until the council established by the postwar settlement was reconvened; and they would not trade with any government led by the generals. As the grain that had saved Nsara from starvation in the previous winter had mostly come from Hodenosaunee ships, this was a serious challenge indeed.

The matter hung for three days, during which rumours flew like bats at dusk: that negotiations were going on between the fleet and the junta, that mines were being laid, that amphibious troops were being readied, that negotiations were breaking down…

On the fourth day the leaders of the coup were suddenly nowhere to be found. The Yingzhou fleet was a few ships smaller in size. The generals had been spirited off, everyone said, to asylums in the Sugar Islands or the Maldives, in exchange for stopping without a fight. The ranking officers left behind led the deployed units of the army back to their barracks and stood down, waiting for further instructions from the legitimate State Council. The coup was cancelled.

The people in the streets cheered, shouted, sang, embraced total strangers, went crazy for joy. Budur did all these things, and led her soldiers back to their ward, and then rushed to Kirana's hospital to tell Kirana everything she had seen, feeling a pang to see her so sick in the midst of this triumph. Kirana nodded at the news, saying, 'We got lucky to get help like that. The whole world saw that, it will have a good effect, you'll see. Although now we're in for it! We'll see what it's like to be part of a league, we'll see what kind of people they really are.'

Other friends wanted to wheel her out to give another speech, but she wouldn't do it, she said, 'Just go and tell people to get back to work, tell them we need to get the bakeries baking again.'