Kim Stanley Robinson - The Years Of Rice And Salt

Tripitaka:Monkey, how far is it to the Western Heaven, the abode of Buddha?

Wukong: Youcan walk from the time of your youth till the time you grow old, and after that, till you

become young again; and even after going through such a cycle a thousand times, you may still find it

difficult to reach the place where you want to go. But when you perceive, by the resoluteness of your

will, the Buddhanature in all things, and when every one of your thoughts goes back to that fountain in

your memory, that will be the time you arrive at Spirit Mountain.

- The Journey to the West ONE

Another journey west, Bold and Psin find an empty land;

Temur is displeased, and the chapter has a stormy end.

Monkey never dies. He keeps coming back to help us in times of trouble, just as he helped Tripitaka

through the dangers of the first journey to the west, to bring Buddhism back from India to China.

Now he had taken on the form of a small Mongol named Bold Bardash, horseman in the army of Temur

the Lame. Son of a Tibetan salt trader and a Mongol innkeeper and spirit woman, and thus a traveller

from before the day of his birth, up and down and back and forth, over mountains and rivers, across

deserts and steppes, crisscrossing always the heartland of the world. At the time of our story he was

already old: square face, bent nose, grey plaited hair, four chin whiskers for a beard. He knew this would

be Temur's last campaign, and wondered if it would be his too.

One day, scouting ahead of the army, a small group of them rode out of dark hills at dusk. Bold was

getting skittish at the quiet. Of course it was not truly quiet, forests were always noisy compared to the

steppe; there was a big river ahead, spilling its sounds through the wind in the trees; but something was

missing. Birdsong perhaps, or some other sound Bold could not quite identify. The horses snickered as

the men kneed them on. It did not help that the weather was changing, long mares' tails wisping orange in

the highest part of the sky, wind gusting up, air damp a storm rolling in from the west. Under the big sky

of the steppe it would have been obvious. Here in the forested hills there was less sky to be seen, and the

winds were fluky, but the signs were still there.

They ride by fields that lay rank with unharvested crops. Barley fallen over itself, Apple trees with apples

dry in the branches, Or black on the ground. No cart tracks or hoof prints or footprints In the dust of the

road. Sun sets, The gibbous moon misshapen overhead. Owl dips over field. A sudden gust: How big the

world seems in a wind. Horses are tense, Monkey too.

They came to an empty bridge and crossed it, hooves thwocking the planks. Now they came upon some

wooden buildings with thatched roofs. But no fires, no lantern light. They moved on. More buildings

appeared through the trees, but still no people. The dark land was empty.

Psin urged them on, and more buildings stood on each side of the widening road. They followed a turn

out of the hills onto a plain, and before them lay a black silent city. No lights, no voices; only the wind,

rubbing branches together over sheeting surfaces of the big black flowing river. The city was empty.

Of course we are reborn many times. We fill our bodies like air in bubbles, and when the bubbles pop

we puff away into the bardo, wandering until we are blown into some new life, somewhere back in the

world. This knowledge had often been a comfort to Bold as he stumbled exhausted over battlefields in

the aftermath, the ground littered with broken bodies like empty coats.

But it was different to come on a town where there had been no battle, and find everyone there already

dead. Long dead; bodies dried; in the dusk and moonlight they could see the gleam of exposed bones,

scattered by wolves and crows. Bold repeated the Heart Sutra to himself. 'Form is emptiness, emptiness

form. Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond. 0, what an Awakening! All hail!'

The horses stalled on the outskirts of the town. Aside from the cluck and hiss of the river, all was still.

The squinted eye of the moon gleamed on dressed stone, there in the middle of all the wooden buildings.

A very big stone building, among smaller stone buildings.

Psin ordered them to put cloths over their faces, to avoid touching

anything, to stay on their horses, and to keep the horses from touching anything but the ground with their

hooves. Slowly they rode through narrow streets, walled by wooden buildings two or three storeys high,

leaning together as in Chinese cities. The horses were unhappy but did not refuse outright.

They came into a paved central square near the river, and stopped before the great stone building. It was

huge. Many of the local people had come to it to die. Their lamasery, no doubt, but roofless, open to the

sky unfinished business. As if these people had only come to religion in their last days; but too late; the

place was a boneyard. Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond. Nothing moved, and it

occurred to Bold that the pass in the mountains they had ridden through had perhaps been the wrong

one, the one to that other west which is the land of the dead. For an instant he remembered something, a

brief glimpse of another life a town much smaller than this one, a village wiped out by some great rush

over their heads, sending them all to the bardo together. Hours in a room, waiting for death; this was why

he so often felt he recognized the people he met. Their existences were a shared fate.

'Plague,' Psin said. 'Let's get out of here.'

His eyes glinted as he looked at Bold, his face was hard; he looked like one of the stone officers in the

imperial tombs.

Bold shuddered. 'I wonder why they didn't leave,' he said.

'Maybe there was nowhere to go.'

Plague had struck in India a few years before. Mongols rarely caught it, only a baby now and then. Turks

and Indians were more susceptible, and of course Temur had all kinds in his army, Persians, Turks,

Mongols, Tibetans, Indians, Tajiks, Arabs, Georgians. Plague could kill them, any of them, or all of them.

If that was truly what had felled these people. There was no way to be sure.

'Let's get back and tell them,' Psin said.

The others nodded, pleased that it was Psin's decision. Temur had told them to scout the Magyar Plain

and what lay beyond, west for four days' ride. He didn't like it when scouting detachments returned

without fulfilling orders, even if they were composed of his oldest qa'uchin. But Psin could face him.

Back through moonlight they rode, camping briefly when the horses

got tired. On again at dawn, back through the broad gap in the mountains the earlier scouts had called the

Moravian Gate. No smoke from any village or hut they passed. They kicked the horses to their fastest

long trot, rode hard all that day.

As they came down the long eastern slope of the range back onto the steppe, an enormous wall of cloud

reared up in the western half of the sky,

Like Kali's black blanket pulling over them,

The Goddess of Death chasing them out of her land. Solid black underside fluted and rippled,

Black pigs' tails and fishhooks swirling into the air below. A portent so bleak the horses bow their heads,

The men can no longer look at each other.

They approached Temur's great encampment, and the black stormcloud covered the rest of the day,

causing a darkness like night. Hair rose on the back of Bold's neck. A few big raindrops splashed down,

and thunder rolled out of the west like giant iron cartwheels overhead. They hunkered down in their

saddles and kicked the horses on, reluctant to return in such a storm, with such news. Temur would take

it as a portent, just as they did. Temur often said that he owed all his success to an asura that visited him

and gave him guidance. Bold had witnessed one of these visitations, had seen Temur engage in

conversation with an invisible being, and afterwards tell people what they were thinking and what would

happen to them. A cloud this black could only be a sign. Evil in the west. Something bad had happened

back there, some~ thing worse even than plague, maybe, and Temur's plan to conquer the Magyars and

the Franks would have to be abandoned; he had been beaten to it by the goddess of skulls herself. It was

hard to imagine him accepting any such preemption, but there they were, under a storm like none of them

had ever seen, and all the Magyars were dead.

Smoke rose from the vast camp's cooking fires, looking like a great sacrifice, the smell familiar and yet

distant, as if from a home they had already left for ever. Psin looked at the men around him. 'Camp here,'

he ordered. He thought things over. 'Bold.'

Bold felt the fear shoot through him.

'Come on.'

Bold swallowed and nodded. He was not courageous, but he had the

stoic manner of the qa'uchin, Temur's oldest warriors. Psin also would know that Bold was aware they

had entered a different realm, that everything that happened from this point onwards was freakish,

something preordained and being lived through inexorably, a karma they could not escape.

Psin also was no doubt remembering a certain incident from their youths, when the two of them had been

captured by a tribe of taiga hunters north of the Kama River. Together they had staged a very successful

escape, knifing the hunters' headman and running through a bonfire into the night.

The two men rode by the outer sentries and through the camp to the Khan's tent. To the west and north

lightning bolts crazed the black air. Neither men had ever seen such a storm in all their lives. The few little

hairs on Bold's forearms stood up like pig bristles, and he felt the air crackling with hungry ghosts, pretas

crowding in to witness Temur emerge from his tent. He had killed so many.

The two men dismounted and stood there. Guards came out of the tent, drawing aside the flaps of the

doorway and standing at attention, ready with drawn bows. Bold's throat was too dry to swallow, and it

seemed to him a blue light glowed from within the great yurt of the Khan.

Temur appeared high in the air, seated on a litter his carriers had already hefted on their shoulders. He

was palefaced and sweating, the whites of his eyes visible all the way around. He stared down at Psin.

'Why are you back?'

'Khan, a plague has struck the Magyars. They're all dead.'

Temur regarded his unloved general. 'Why are you back?'

'To tell you, Khan.'

Psin's voice was steady, and he met Temur's fierce gaze without fear. But Temur was not pleased. Bold

swallowed; nothing here was the same as that time he and Psin had escaped the hunters, there wasn't a

single feature of that effort that could be repeated. Only the idea that they could do it remained.

Something inside Temur snapped, Bold saw it his asura was speaking through him now, and it looked as

if it was wreaking great harm as it did so. Not an asura, perhaps, but his nafs, the spirit animal that lived

inside him. He rasped, 'They cannot get away as easily as that! They

will suffer for this, no matter how they try to escape.' He waved an arm weakly. 'Go back to your

detachment.'

Then to his guards he said in a calmer voice, 'Take these two back and kill them and their men, and their

horses. Make a bonfire and burn everything. Then move our camp two days' ride east.'

He raised up his hand.

The world burst asunder.

A bolt of lightning had exploded among them. Bold sat deaf on the ground. Looking around stunned, he

saw that all the others there had been flattened as well, that the Khan's tent was burning, Temur's litter

tipped over, his carriers scrambling, the Khan himself on one knee, clutching his chest. Some of his men

rushed to him. Again lightning blasted down among them.

Blindly Bold picked himself up and fled. He looked over his shoulder through pulsing green afterimages,

and saw Temur's black nafs fly out of his mouth into the night. TemuriLang, Iron the Lame, abandoned

by both asura and nafs. The emptied body collapsed to the ground, and rain bucketed onto it. Bold ran

into the dark to the west. We do not know which way Psin went, or what happened to him; but as for

Bold, you can find out in the next chapter.

TWO

Through the realm of hungry ghosts

A monkey wanders, lonely as a cloud.

Bold ran or walked west all that night, scrambling through the growing forest in the pouring rain, climbing

into the steepest hills he could find, to evade any horsemen who might follow. No one would be too

zealous in pursuit of a potential plague carrier, but he could be shot down from a good distance away,

and he wanted to disappear from their world as if he had never existed. If it had not been for the uncanny

storm he would certainly be dead, already embarked on another existence: now he was anyway. Gone,

gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond ...

He walked the next day and all the second night. Dawn of the second day found him hurrying back

through the Moravian Gate, feeling that no one would dare follow him there. Once onto the Magyar Plain

he headed south, into trees. In the morning's wet light he found a fallen tree and slipped deep under its

exposed roots, to sleep for the rest of the day in hidden dryness.

That night the rain stopped, and on the third morning he emerged ravenous. In short order he found,

pulled and ate meadow onions, then hunted for more substantial food. It was possible that dried meat still

hung in the empty villages' storehouses, or grain in their granaries. He might also be able to find a bow

and some arrows. He didn't want to go near the dead settlements, but it seemed the best way to find

food, and that took precedence over everything else.

That night he slept poorly, his stomach full and gassy with onions. At dawn he made his way south,

following the big river. All the villages and settlements were empty. Any people he saw were dead on the

ground. it was disturbing, but there was nothing to be done. He too was in some kind of posthumous

existence, a very hungry ghost indeed. Living on from one found bite to the next, with no name or fellows,

he began to close in on himself, as during the hardest campaigns on the steppes, becoming more and

more an animal, his mind shrinking in like the horns of a touched snail. For many watches at a time he

thought little but the Heart Sutra. Form is emptiness, emptiness form. Not for nothing had he been named

Sun Wukong, Awake to Emptiness, in an earlier incarnation. Monkey in the void.

He came to a village that looked untouched, skirted its edge. In an empty stable he found an unstrung

bow and a quiver of arrows, all very primitive and poorly made. Something moved in the pasturage

outside, and he went out and whistled up a small black mare. He caught her with onions, and quickly

taught her to take him.

He rode her across a stone bridge over the big river, and slowly crossed the grain of the land

southwards, up and down, up and down. All the villages continued empty, their food rotted or scavenged

by animals, but now he had the mare's milk and blood to sustain him, so the matter was not so urgent.

It was autumn here, and he began to live like the bears, eating berries and honey, and rabbits shot with

the ridiculous bow. Possibly it had been concocted by a child; he couldn't believe anyone older would

make such a thing. It was a single bend of wood, probably ash, partly carved but still misshapen; no

arrowrest, no nocking point, its pull like that of a prayer flag line. His old bow had been a laminate of

horn, maplewood and tendon glue covered by blue leather, with a sweet pull and release, and enough

power to pierce body armour from over a Ii away. Gone now, gone altogether beyond, lost with all the

rest of his few possessions, and when he shot these twig arrows with this branch bow and missed, he

would shake his head and wonder if it was even worth tracking the arrow down. It was no wonder these

people had died.

In one small village, five buildings clustered above a stream ford, the headman's house proved to have a

locked larder, still stocked with dried fishcakes that were spiced with something Bold did not recognize,

which made his stomach queasy. But with the strange food in him he felt his spirits rise. In a stable he

found sidebags for the mare, and stuffed them

with more dried food. He rode on, paying more attention than he had been to the land he was passing

through.

Whitebarked trees hold up black branches, Pine and cypress still verdant on the ridge. A red bird and a

blue bird sit near each other In the same tree. Now anything is possible.

Anything but return to his previous life. Not that he harboured any resentment of Temur; Bold would

have done the same in his place. Plague was plague, and could not be treated lightly. And this plague was

obviously worse than most, having killed everyone in the region. Among the Mongols plague usually

killed a few babies, maybe made some adults sick. You killed rats or mice on sight, and if babies got

feverish and developed the bumps, their mothers took them out to live or die by the rivers. Indian cities

were said to have a worse time with it, people dying in great crowds. But never anything like this. It was

possible something else had killed them.

Travelling through empty land.

Clouds hazy, moon waning and chill. Sky, frostcoloured, cold to look at.

Wind piercing. Sudden terror.

A thousand trees roar in the sparse woodland: A lonely monkey cries on a barren hill.

But the terror washed through him and then away, like freshets of rain, leaving a mind as empty as the

land itself. It was very still. Gone, gone, altogether gone.

For a time he thought he would ride through and out of the region of plague, and find people again. But

then he came over a jagged range of black hills, and saw a big town spread below, bigger than any he

had ever seen, its rooftops covering a whole valley bottom. But deserted. No smoke, no noise, no

movement. In the centre of the city another giant stone temple stood open to the sky. Seeing it, the terror

poured into him again, and he rode into the forest to escape the sight of so many people gone like the

autumn leaves.

He knew roughly where he was, of course. South of here, he would eventually come into the Ottoman

Turks' holdings in the Balkans. He would be able to speak with them., he would be back in the world,

but

out of Temur's empire. Something then would start up for him, some way to live.

So he rode south. But still only skeletons occupied the villages. He grew hungrier and hungrier. He drove

the mare harder, while drinking more of her blood.

Then one night in the dark of the moon, all of a sudden there were howls and wolves were on them in a

snarling rush. Bold just had time to cut the mare's tether and scramble into a tree. Most of the wolves

chased the mare, but some sat panting under the tree. Bold got as comfortable as he could and prepared

to wait them out. When rain came they slunk away. At dawn he woke for the tenth time, climbed down.

He took off downstream and came on the body of the mare, all skin and gristle and scattered bones. The

sidebags were nowhere to be found.

He continued on foot.

One day, too weak to walk, he lay in wait by a stream, and shot a deer with one of the sorry little

arrows, and made a fire and ate well, bolting down chunks of cooked haunch. He slept away from the

carcass, hoping to return to it. Wolves couldn't climb trees, but bears could. He saw a fox, and as the

vixen had been his wife's nafs, long ago, he felt better. In the morning the sun warmed him. The deer had

been removed by a bear, it appeared, but he felt stronger with all that fresh meat in him, and pressed on.

He walked south for several days, keeping on ridges when he could, over hills both depopulated and

deforested, the ground underfoot sluiced to stone and baked white by the glare of the sun. He watched

for the vixen in the valleys at dawn, and drank from springs, and raided dead villages for scraps of food.

These grew harder and harder to find, and for a while he was reduced to chewing the leather strap from

a harness, an old Mongol trick from the hard campaigns on the steppes. But it seemed to him it had

worked better back there, on the endless grass, which was so much easier to cross than these baked

tortured white hills.

At the end of one day, after he had long got used to living alone in the world, scavenging it like Monkey

himself, he came into a little copse of trees to make a fire, and was shocked to see one already there,

tended by a living man.

The man was short, like Bold. His hair was as red as maple leaves, his bushy beard the same colour, his

skin pale and brindled like a dog. At first Bold was sure the man was sick, and he kept his distance. But

the man's eyes, blue in colour, were clear; and he too was afraid, absolutely on point and ready for

anything. Silently they stared at each other, across a small clearing in the middle of the copse.

The man gestured at his fire. Bold nodded and came warily into the glade.

The man was cooking two fish. Bold took a rabbit that he had killed that morning out of his coat, and

skinned and cleaned it with his knife. The man watched him hungrily, nodding at each familiar move. He

turned his fish on the fire, and made room in the coals for the rabbit. Bold spitted it on a stick and put it

in.

After the meat had cooked they ate in silence, sitting on logs on opposite sides of the fire. They both

stared into the flames, glancing only occasionally at each other, shy after all their time alone. After all that

it was not obvious what one could say to another human.

Finally the man spoke, first brokenly, then at length. Sometimes he used a word that sounded familiar to

Bold, but not so familiar as his movements around the fire, and no matter how hard he tried, Bold could

make nothing of what the man said.

Bold tried out some simple phrases himself, feeling the strangeness of words in his mouth, like pebbles.

The other man listened closely, his blue eyes gleaming in firelight, out of the dirty pale skin of his lean

face, but he showed no sign of comprehension, not of Mongolian, Tibetan, Chinese, Turkic, Arabic,

Chagatay, or any other of the polyglot greetings Bold had learned through his years of crossing the

steppe.

At the end of Bold's recitation the man's face spasmed, and he wept. Then, wiping his eyes clear, leaving

big streaks on his dirty face, he stood before Bold and said something, gesturing widely. He pointed his

finger at Bold, as if angry, then stepped back and sat on his log, and began to imitate rowing a boat, or

so Bold surmised. He rowed facing backwards, like the fishermen on the Caspian Sea. He made the

motions for fishing, then for catching fish, cleaning them, cooking them, and feeding them to little children.

By his gestures he evoked all the people he had fed, his children, his wife, the people he lived with.

Then he turned his face up at the firelit branches over the two men,

and cried again. He pulled up the rough shift covering his body, and pointed at his arms at his underarms,

where he made a fist. Bold nodded, felt his stomach shrink as the man mimed the sickness and cleat o all

the children, by lying down on the ground and mewling like a dog. Then the wife, then all the rest. All had

died but this man, who walked around the fire pointing at the leaf litter on the ground intoning words,

names perhaps. It was all so clear to Bold.

Then the man burned his dead village, all in gestures so clear, and mimed rowing away. He rowed on his

log for a long time, so long Bold thought he had forgotten the story; but then he ground to a halt and fell

back in his boat. He got out, looking around in feigned surprise. Then he began to walk. He walked

around the fire a dozen times, pretendeating grass and sticks, howling like a wolf, cowering under his log,

walking some more, even rowing again. Over and over he said the same things, 'Dea, dea, dea, dea,'

shouting it at the branchcrossed stars quaking over them.

Bold nodded. He knew the story. The man was moaning, with a low growl like an animal, cutting at the

ground with a stick. His eyes were as red as any wolf's in the light. Bold ate more of the rabbit, then

offered the stick to the man, who snatched it and ate hungrily. They sat there and looked at the fire. Bold

felt both companionable and alone. He eyed the other man, who had eaten both his fish, and was now

nodding off. The man jerked up, muttered something, lay down, curled around the fire, fell asleep.

Uneasily Bold stoked the fire, took the other side of it, and tried to do the same. When he woke the fire

had died and the man was gone. It was a cold dawn, dewdrenched, and the trail of the man led down the

meadow to a big bend in a stream, where it disappeared. There was no sign of where the man had gone

from there.

Days passed, and Bold continued south. Many watches went by in which he didn't think a thing, only

scanning the land for food and the sky for weather, humming a word or two over and over. Awake to

emptiness. One day he came on a village surrounding a spring,

Old temples scattered throughout,

Broken round columns pointing at the sky. All in the midst of a vast silence. What made these gods so

angry

With their people? What might they make Of a solitary soul wandering by After the world has ended?

White marble drums fallen this way and that: One bird cheeps in the empty air.

He did not care to test anything by trespassing, and so circled the temples, chanting 'Orn mane padme

hum, om mane padme hummmm', aware suddenly that he often spoke aloud to himself now, or hummed,

without ever noticing it, as if ignoring an old companion who always said the same things.

He continued south and east, though he had forgotten why. He scrounged roadside buildings for dried

food. He walked on the empty roads. It was an old land. Gnarled olive trees, black and heavy with their

inedible fruit, mocked him. No person ate entirely by his own efforts, no one. He got hungrier, and food

became his only focus, every day. He passed more marble ruins, foraged in the farmhouses he passed.

Once he came on a big clay jar of olive oil, and stayed there four days to drink it all down. Then game

became more abundant. He saw the vixen more than once. Good shots with his ridiculous bow kept him

away from hunger. He made his fires larger every night, and once or twice wondered what had become

of the man he had met. Had meeting Bold made him realize he would be alone no matter what happened

or whom he found, so that he had killed himself to rejoin his jati? Or perhaps just slipped while drinking?

Or walked in the stream to keep Bold from tracking him? There was no way of telling, but the encounter

kept coming back to Bold, especially the clarity with which he had been able to understand the man.

The valleys ran south and east. He felt the shape of his travels in his mind, and found he could not

remember enough of the last few weeks to be sure of his location, relative to the Moravian Gate, or the

khanate of the Golden Horde. From the Black Sea they had ridden west about ten days' ride, hadn't

they? It was like trying to remember things from a previous life.

It seemed possible, however, that he was nearing the Byzantine empire, coming towards Constantinople

from the north and west. Sitting slumped before his nightly bonfire, he wondered if Constantinople would

be dead too. He wondered if Mongolia was dead, if perhaps everyone in the world was dead. The wind

soughed through the shrubs like ghosts' voices, and he fell into an uneasy sleep, waking through the

watches of the night to check the stars and throw more branches on his fire. He was cold.

He woke again, and there was Temur's ghost standing across the fire, the light of the flames dancing over

his awesome face. His eyes were black as obsidian, and Bold could see stars gleaming in them.

'So,' Temur said heavily, 'You ran away.'

'Yes,' Bold whispered.

'What's wrong? Don't want to go out on the hunt again?'

This was a thing he had said to Bold before. At the end he had been so weak he had had to be carried

on a litter, but he never thought of stopping. In his last winter he had considered whether to move east in

the spring, against China, or west, against the Franks. During a huge feast he weighed the advantages of

each, and at one point he looked at Bold, and something on Bold's face caused the Khan to jump him

with his powerful voice, still strong despite his illness: 'What's wrong, Bold? Don't want to go out on the

hunt again?'

That earlier time Bold had said, 'Always, Great Khan. 1 was there when we conquered Ferghana,

Khorasan, Sistan, Kbrezm and Mughalistan. One more is fine by me.'

Temur had laughed his angry laugh. 'But which way this time, Bold? Which way?'

Bold knew enough to shrug. 'All the same to me, Great Khan. Why don't you flip a coin?'

Which got him another laugh, and a warm place in the stable that winter, and a good horse in the

campaign. They had moved west in the spring of the year 784.

Now Temur's ghost, as solid as any man, glared reproachfully at Bold from across the fire. 'I flipped the

coin just like you said, Bold. But it must have come up wrong.'

'Maybe China would have been worse,' Bold said.

Temur laughed angrily. 'How could it have been? Killed by lightning? How could it have been? You did

that, Bold, you and Psin. You brought the curse of the west back with you. You never should have come

back. And 1 should have gone to China.'

'Maybe so.' Bold didn't know how to deal with him. Angry ghosts needed to be defied as often as they

needed to be placated. But those jetblack eyes, sparkling with starlight

Suddenly Temur coughed. He put a hand to his mouth, and gagged out something red. He looked at it,

then held it out for Bold to see: a red egg. 'This is yours,' he said, and tossed it over the flames at Bold.

Bold twisted to catch it, and woke up. He moaned. The ghost of Temur clearly was not happy.

Wandering between worlds, visiting his old soldiers like any other preta ... in a way it was pathetic, but

Bold could not shake the fear in him. Temur's spirit was a big power, no matter what realm it was in. His

hand could reach into this world and grab Bold's foot at any time.

All that day Bold wandered south in a haze of memories, scarcely seeing the land before him. The last

time Temur visited him in the stables had been difficult, as the Khan could no longer ride. He had looked

at one thick black mare as if at a woman, and smoothed its flank and said to Bold, 'The first horse 1 ever

stole looked just like this one. 1 started poor and life was hard. God put a sign on me. But you would

think He would have let me ride to the end.' And he had stared at Bold with that vivid gaze of his, one

eye slightly higher and larger than the other, just like in the dream. Although in life his eyes had been

brown.

Hunger kept Bold hunting. Temur, though a hungry ghost, no longer had to worry about food; but Bold

did. All the game ran south, down the valleys. One day, high on a ridge, he saw water, bronze in the

distance. A large lake, or sea. Old roads led him over another pass, down into another city.

Again, no one there was alive. All was motionless and silent. Bold wandered down empty streets,

between empty buildings, feeling the cold hands of pretas running down his back.

On the central hill of the city stood a copse of white temples, like bones bleaching in the sun. Seeing

them, Bold decided that he had found the capital of this dead land. He had walked from peripheral towns

of rude stone to capital temples of smooth white marble, and still no one had survived. A white haze filled

his vision, and through it he stumbled up the dusty streets, up onto the temple hill, to lay his case before

the local gods.

On the sacred plateau three smaller temples flanked a large one, a rectangular beauty with double rows

of smooth columns on all four sides, supporting a gleaming roof of marble tiles. Under the eaves carved,

figures fought, marched, flew and gestured in a great stone tableau depicting the absent people, or their

gods. Bold sat on a marble drum from a longtoppled column and stared up at the carving in stone, seeing

the world that had been lost.

Finally he approached the temple, entered it praying aloud. Unlike the big stone temples in the north, it

had been no place of congregation in the end; there were no skeletons inside. Indeed it looked as if it had

been abandoned for many years. Bats hung in the rafters, and the darkness was lanced by sunbeams

breaking through broken rooftiles. At the far end of the temple it looked as if an altar had been hastily

erected. On it a single candlewick burned in a pot of oil. Their last prayer, flickering even after they had

died.

Bold had nothing to offer by way of sacrifice, and the great white temple stood silent above him. 'Gone,

gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond! 0 what an awakening! All hail!' His words echoed hollowly.

He stumbled back outside into the afternoon glare, and saw to the south the blink of the sea. He would

go there. There was nothing here to keep him; the people and their gods too had died.

A long bay cut in between hills. A harbour at the head of the bay was empty, except for a few small

rowing boats slapping against the waves, or upturned on the shingle beach stretching away from the

docks. He did not risk the boats, he knew nothing about them. He had seen Issyk Kul and Lake Qinghai,

and the Aral, Caspian and Black Seas, but he had never been in a boat in his life, except for ferries

crossing rivers. He did not want to start now.

No traveller seen on this long road,

No boats from afar return for the night. Nothing moves in this dead harbour.

On the beach he scooped a handful of water to drink spat it out it was salty, like the Black Sea, or the

springs in the Tarim Basin. It was strange to see so much waste water. He had beard there was an ocean

surrounding the world. Perhaps he was at the edge of the world, the

western edge, or the southern. Possibly the Arabs lived south of this sea. He didn't know., and for the

first time in all his wandering, he had the feeling that he had no idea where he was.

He was asleep on the warm sand of a beach, dreaming of the steppes, trying to keep Temur out of the

dream by force of will alone, when he was rousted by strong hands, rolling him over and tying his legs

together and his arms behind his back. He was hauled to his feet.

Kim Stanley Robinson - The Years Of Rice And Salt

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