The Years of Rice and Salt (18 page)

The whole town followed the cortege, Sultana Katima leading it on her bay. The crowd roared in its sorrow like the sea on its pebble beach. They buried him overlooking the great gray ocean, and after that it was black cloth and ashes for many months.

Somehow they never
came out of that year of mourning. It was more than the death of the ruler; it was that the sultana continued to rule on alone.

Now Bistami, and everyone else, would have said that Sultana Katima had been the true leader all along, and the sultan merely her gracious and beloved consort. No doubt that was true. But now, when Sultana Katima of Baraka came into the grand mosque and spoke in the Friday prayers, Bistami was once again uneasy, and he could see the townspeople were as well. Katima had spoken before many times in this manner, but now all felt the absence of the covering angel provided by the lenient sultan's presence across the river.

This unease communicated itself to Katima, of course, and her talks became more strident and plaintive. “God wants relations in marriage between husband and wife to be between equals. What the husband can be the wife can be also! In the time of the chaos before the year one, in the zero time, you see, men treated women like domestic beasts. God spoke through Muhammad, and made it clear that women were souls equal to men, to be treated as such. They were given by God many specific rights, in inheritance, divorce, power of choice, power to command their children—given their lives, do you understand? Before the first hegira, before the year one, right in the middle of this tribal chaos of murder and theft, this monkey society, God told Muhammad to change it all. He said, Oh yes, of course you can marry more than one wife, if you want to—if you can do it without strife. Then the next verse says ‘But it cannot be done without strife!' What is this but a ban on polygamy stated in two parts, in the form of a riddle or a lesson, for men who could not otherwise imagine it?”

But now it was very clear that she was trying to change the way things worked, the way Islam worked. Of course they all had been, all along—but secretly, perhaps, not admitting it to anyone, not even to themselves. Now it faced them with the face of their only ruler, a woman. There were no queens in Islam. None of the hadith applied anymore.

Bistami, desperate to help, made up his own hadith, and either supplied them with plausible but false isnads, attributing them to ancient Sufi authorities made up out of whole cloth; or else he ascribed them to their sultan, Mawji Darya, or to some old Persian Sufi he knew about; or he left them to be understood as wisdom too common to need ascription. The sultana did the same, following his lead, he thought, but took most of her refuge in the Quran itself, returning obsessively to the suras that supported her positions.

But everyone knew how things were done in al-Andalus, and the Maghrib, and in Mecca, and indeed everywhere across Dar al-Islam, from the western ocean to the eastern ocean (which Ibn Ezra now claimed were the two shores of the same ocean, spanning the greater part of the Earth, which was a globe covered mostly by water). Women did not lead prayers. When the sultana did, it remained shocking, and triply so with the sultan gone. Everyone said it; if she wished to continue along this path, she needed to remarry.

But she showed no sign of interest in that. She wore her widow's black, and held herself aloof from everyone in the town, and had no royal communications with anyone in al-Andalus. The man other than Mawji Darya who had spent the most time in her company was Bistami himself; and when he understood the looks some townspeople were giving him, implying that he might conceivably marry the sultana and remove them from their difficulty, it made him feel light-headed, almost nauseous. He loved her so much that he could not imagine himself married to her. It wasn't that kind of love. He didn't think she could imagine it either, so there was no question of testing the idea, which was both attractive and terrifying, and so in the end painful in the extreme. Once she was talking to Ibn Ezra when Bistami was present, asking him about his claims concerning the ocean fronting them.

“You say this is the same ocean as the one seen by the Moluccans and Sumatrans, on the other side of the world? How could this be?”

“The world is most certainly a globe,” said Ibn Ezra. “It's round like the moon, or the sun. A spherical ball. And we have come to the western end of the land in the world, and around the globe is the eastern end of the land in the world. And this ocean covers the rest of the world, you see.”

“So we could sail to Sumatra?”

“In theory, yes. But I've been trying to calculate the size of the Earth, using some calculations made by the ancient Greeks, and Brahmagupta of south India, and by my studies of the sky, and though I cannot be sure, I believe it must be some ten thousand leagues around. Brahmagupta said five thousand yoganda, which as I understand it is about the same distance. And the land mass of the world, from Morocco to the Moluccas, I reckon to be about five thousand leagues. So this ocean we look out on covers half the world, five thousand leagues or more. No ship could make it across.”

“Are you sure it is so big as that?”

Ibn Ezra waggled a hand uncertainly. “Not sure, Sultana. But I think it must be something like that.”

“What about islands? Surely this ocean is not completely empty for five thousand leagues! Surely there are islands!”

“Undoubtedly, Sultana. I mean, it seems likely. Andalusi fishermen have reported running into islands when storms or currents carried them far to the west, but they don't describe how far, or in what direction.”

The sultana looked hopeful. “So we could perhaps sail away, and find the same islands, or others like them.”

Ibn Ezra waggled his hand again.

“Well?” she said sharply. “Do you not think you could build a seaworthy ship?”

“Possibly, Sultana. But supplying it for a voyage that long . . . We don't know how long it would be.”

“Well,” she said darkly, “we may have to find out. With the sultan dead, and no one for me to remarry”—and she shot a single glance at Bistami—“there will be Andalusi villains thinking to rule us.”

It was like a stab to his heart. That night Bistami lay twisting on his bed, seeing that short glance over and over. But what could he do? How could he be expected to help such a situation? He could not sleep, not the entire night long.

Because a husband would have helped. There was no longer a feeling of harmony in Baraka, and word of the situation certainly had made its way over the Pyrenees, for early in the following spring, when the rivers were still running high and the mountains protecting them still stood white and jagged-edged to the south, horsemen came down the road out of the hills, just ahead of a cold spring storm, pouring in from the ocean: a long column of cavalry, in fact, with pennants from Toledo and Granada flying, and swords and pikes at their hips gleaming in the sun. They rode right into the mosque plaza at the center of town, colorful under the lowering clouds, and lowered their pikes until they all pointed forward. Their leader was one of the sultan's elder brothers, Said Darya, and he stood in his silver stirrups so that he towered over the people gathering there, and said,

“We claim this town in the name of the caliph of al-Andalus, to save it from apostasy, and from the witch who threw her spell over my brother and killed him in his bed.”

The crowd, growing by the moment, stared stupidly up at the horsemen. Some of the townspeople were red-faced and tight-lipped, some pleased, most confused or sullen. A few of the rabble from the original Ship of Fools were already pulling cobblestones out of the ground.

Bistami saw all this from the avenue leading to the river, and all of a sudden something about the sight struck him like a blow; those pikes and crossbows, pointing inward: it was like the tiger trap, back in India. These people were like the Bagh-mari, the professional tiger-killing clans that went about the country disposing of problem tigers for a fee. He had seen them before! And not only with the tigress, but before that as well, some other time that he couldn't remember but remembered anyway, some ambush for Katima, a death trap, men stabbing her when she was tall and black-skinned—oh, this had all happened before!

In a panic he ran across the bridge to the palace. Sultana Katima was about to get on her horse to go and confront the invaders, and he threw himself between her and the horse; she was furious and tried to brush by him, and he put his arm around her waist, as slender as a girl's, which shocked them both, and he cried, “No, no, no, no, no! No, Sultana, I beg you, I beg you, don't go over there! They'll kill you, it's a trap! I've seen it! They will kill you!”

“I have to go,” she said, cheeks flushed. “The people need me—”

“No they don't! They need you alive! We can leave and they can follow! They will follow! We have to let those people have this town, the buildings mean nothing, we can move north and your people will follow! Listen to me, listen!” And he caught her up by the shoulders and held her fast, looked her in the eye: “I have seen all this play out before. I have been given knowledge. We have to escape or we will be killed.”

Across the river they could hear screams. The Andalusi horsemen were not used to opposition from a population without any soldiers, without cavalry, and they were charging down the streets after mobs who threw stones as they fled. A lot of Barakis were crazy with rage, certainly the one-handed ones would die to the man to defend her, and the invaders were not going to have as easy a time of it as they had thought. Snow was now twirling down through the dark air, flying sideways on the wind out of gray clouds streaming low overhead, and already there were fires in the city, the district around the grand mosque beginning to burn.

“Come on, Sultana, there's no time to waste! I've seen how this happens, they'll have no mercy, they're on their way here to the palace, we need to leave now! This has happened before! We can make a new city in the north, some of the people will come with us, gather a caravan and start over, defend ourselves properly!”

“All right!” Sultana Katima shouted suddenly, looking across at the burning town. The wind gusted, and they could just hear screaming in the town over the whoosh of the air. “Damn them! Damn them! Get a horse then, come on, all of you come on! We'll need to ride hard.”

9
                                                                                                            

Another Meeting in the Bardo

And so it was that when they all reconvened in the bardo, many years later, af
ter going north and founding the city of Nsara at the mouth of the Lawiyya River, and defending it successfully from the Andalusi taifa sultans coming up to attack them in after years, and building the beginnings of a maritime power, fishing all the way across the sea, and trading farther yet than that, Bistami was well pleased. He and Katima had never married, the matter had never come up again, but he had been Nsara's principal ulema for many years, and had helped to create a religious legitimacy for this new thing, a queen in Islam. And he and Katima had worked together on this project almost every day of those lives.

“I recognized you!” he reminded Katima. “In the midst of life, through the veil of forgetting, when it mattered, I saw who you were, and you—you saw something too. You knew something from a higher reality was going on! We're making progress.”

Katima did not reply. They were sitting on the flagstones of a courtyard in a place very like Chishti's shrine in Fatepur Sikri, except that the courtyard was vastly bigger. People waited in a line to go into the shrine and be judged. They looked like hajis in line to see the Kaaba. Bistami could hear Muhammad's voice inside, praising some, admonishing others. “You need to try again,” he heard a voice like Muhammad's say to someone. Everything was quiet and subdued. It was the hour before sunrise, cool and damp, the air filled with distant birdsong. Sitting there beside her, Bistami could see very clearly now how Katima was not at all like Akbar. Akbar had no doubt been sent down to a lower realm, and was even now prowling the jungle hunting for his food, as Katima had been in her previous existence, when she had been a tigress, a killer who had nevertheless befriended Bistami. She had saved him from the Hindu rebels, then picked him out of the ribat in al-Andalus: “You recognized me too,” he said. “And we both knew Ibn Ezra,” who was at this moment inspecting the wall of the courtyard, running his fingernail down the line between two blocks, admiring the stonework of the bardo.

“This is genuine progress,” Bistami repeated. “We are finally getting somewhere!”

Katima gave him a skeptical glance. “You call that progress? Chased to a hole at the far corner of the world?”

“But who cares where we were? We recognized each other, you didn't get killed—”

“Wonderful.”

“It was wonderful! I saw through time, I felt the touch of the eternal. We made a place where people could love the good. Little steps, life after life; and eventually we will be there for good, in the white light.”

Katima gestured; her brother-in-law, Said Darya, was entering the palace of judgment.

“Look at him, a miserable creature, and yet he is not thrown down into hell, nor even become a worm or a jackal, as he deserves. He will return to the human realm, and wreak havoc all over again. He too is part of our jati, did you recognize him? Did you know he was part of our little band, like Ibn Ezra here?”

Ibn Ezra sat beside them. The line moved up and they shifted with it. “The walls are solid,” he reported. “Very well built, in fact. I don't think we're going to able to escape.”

“Escape!” Bistami cried. “This is God's judgment! No one escapes that!”

Katima and Ibn Ezra looked at each other. Ibn Ezra said, “My impression is that any improvement in the tenor of existence will have to be anthropogenic.”

“What?” Bistami cried.

“It's up to us. No one will help us.”

“I'm not saying they will. Although God always helps if you ask. But it is up to us, that's what I've been saying all along, and we are doing what we can, we are making progress.”

Katima was not at all convinced. “We'll see,” she said. “Time will tell. For now, I myself withhold judgment.” She faced the white tomb, drew herself up queenlike, spoke with a tigerish curl of the lip: “And no one judges me.”

With a wave of the hand she dismissed the tomb. “It's not here that matters. What matters is what happens in the world.”