The Years of Rice and Salt (58 page)

BOOK 8

WAR OF THE ASURAS

“China is indestructible, there are too many of us. Fire, flood, famine, war—
they're like pruning a tree. Branches cut to stimulate new life. The tree keeps growing.”

Major Kuo was feeling expansive. It was dawn, the Chinese hour. Early light illuminated the Muslim outposts and put the sun in their eyes, so that they were wary of snipers, and bad at it themselves. Sunset was their hour. Call to prayer, sniper fire, sometimes a rain of artillery shells. Best stay in the trenches at sunset, or in the caves below them.

But now they had the sun on their side. Sky frost-blue, standing around rubbing gloved hands together, tea and cigarettes, the low whump of cannon to the north. Rumbling for two weeks now. Preparation for another big assault, possibly, perhaps even the breakout spoken of for so many years—so many that it had become a catchword for something that would never happen—“when the breakout comes” as “when pigs fly” or the like. So perhaps not.

Nothing they could see would tell them one way or another. Out in the middle of the Gansu Corridor, the vast mountains to the south and the endless deserts to the north were not visible. It looked like the steppes, or it had, before the war. Now the whole width of the corridor, from mountains to desert, and the whole length, from Ningxia to Jiayuguan, was torn to mud. The trenches had moved back and forth, li by li, for over sixty years. In that time every blade of grass and clod of dirt had been blasted into the sky more than once. What remained was a kind of disordered black ocean, ringed and ridged and cratered. As if someone had tried to replicate in mud the surface of the moon. Every spring weeds made brave efforts to return, and failed. The town of Ganzhou had once stood near this very spot, paralleling the Jo River; now there was no sign of either. Land pulverized to bedrock. Ganzhou had been home to a thriving Sino-Muslim culture, so this wasteland they observed, stark in dawn light, was a perfect ideograph of the long war.

The sound of the big guns began behind them. The shells from the latest guns were cast into space, and fell two hundred li away. The sun rose higher. They retreated into the subterranean realm of black mud and wet planks that was their home. Trenches, tunnels, caves. Many caves held Buddhas, usually in his adamant posture, hand out like a traffic cop. Water at the bottom of the lowest trenches, after the night's heavy rain.

Down in the communications cave the wiregraph operator had received orders. General attack to commence in two days. Assault all the way across the corridor. An attempt to end the stalemate, or so Iwa speculated. Cork bunged out of its hole. Onto the steppes and westward ho! Of course the lead point of the breakout was the worst place to be, he noted, but with only his usual academic interest. Once at the front it could not really get any worse. It would be parsing degrees of the absolute, for they were already in hell and dead men, as Major Kuo reminded them with every toast of their rakshi: “We are dead men! A toast to Lord Death-by-gradations!”

So now Bai and Kuo merely nodded: worst place, yes, that was where they were always sent, where they had spent the last five years, or, seen in a larger temporal perspective, their whole lives. Finishing his tea, Iwa said, “It is bound to be very interesting.”

He liked to read the wiregrams and newspapers and try to figure out what was going on. “Look at this,” he would say, scanning papers as they lay in their bunks. “The Muslims have been kicked off Yingzhou. Twenty-year campaign.” Or: “Big battle at sea, two hundred ships sunk! Only twenty of them ours, but ours are bigger, admittedly. North Dahai, water zero degrees, ouch that's cold, glad I'm not a sailor!” He kept notes and drew maps; he was a scholar of the war. The appearance of the wireless had pleased him greatly, he had spent hours in the comm cave talking with other enthusiasts around the globe. “Big bounce in the qisphere tonight, I heard from a guy in South Africa! Bad news, though,” marking up his maps, “he said the Muslims have retaken all the Sahel and have conscripted everyone in west Africa as slave soldiers.” He considered the voices wafting out of the darklight to be unreliable informants, but no more so than the official communiqués from headquarters, which were mostly propaganda, or lies designed to deceive enemy spies. “Look at this,” he would scoff as he lay reading in his bunk. “It says they're rounding up all the Jews and Zotts and Christians and Armenians and killing them. Subjected to medical experimentation . . . blood replaced by mules' blood to see how long they will live . . . who thinks up these things?”

“Maybe it's true,” Kuo suggested. “Kill off the undesirables, the ones that might betray them on the home front . . .”

Iwa turned the page. “Unlikely. Why waste all that labor?”

Now he was on the wireless trying to find out more about the upcoming assault. But you did not have to be a scholar of the war to know about breakouts. They had all been part of past attempts, and this knowledge tended to put a damper on the rest of their day. The front had moved ten li in three years, and eastward at that. Three consecutive Ramadan campaigns, at tremendous cost to the Muslims, a million men per campaign, Iwa calculated, so that they now fought with boys and battalions of women: as did the Chinese. So many had died that those who had survived the past three years were like the Eight Immortals, walking under a description, surviving day after day at a great distance from a world that they only heard about, only saw wrong way through the telescope. Tea in cup was all to them now. Another general assault, masses of men moving west into mud, barbed wire, machine guns, artillery shells coming down from space: so be it. They drank their tea. But it had a bitter taste.

Bai was ready to get it over with. He had lost his heart for this life. Kuo was irritated at the Fourth Assemblage of Military Talent, for ordering the assault during the brief rainy season. “Of course what can you expect of any body named ‘The Fourth Assemblage of Military Talent'!” This wasn't entirely fair, as Kuo's usual analysis of them made plain: the First Assemblage had been old men trying to fight the previous war; the Second Assemblage, overambitious arrivistes ready to use men like bullets; the Third Assemblage, a bad mix of cautious corporals and desperate fuckwits; and the Fourth had come only after the coup that had overthrown the Qing dynasty and replaced it with a military government, so that in principle it was possible that the Fourth Assemblage was an improvement and the one that might finally get things right. Results so far, however, had not supported the notion.

Iwa felt they had discussed this matter too many times already, and confined his remarks to the quality of the day's rice. When it was ready and they had eaten it, they went out to tell their men to get prepared. Bai's squads were mostly conscripts from Sichuan, including three women's squads who kept trenches four through six, considered the lucky ones. When Bai was young and the only women he knew were those from the brothels of Lanzhou, he had felt uncomfortable in their presence, as if dealing with members of another species, worn creatures who regarded him as from across a gaping abyss, looking, as far as he could determine, guardedly appalled and accusatory, as if thinking to themselves, You idiots have destroyed the whole world. But now that they were in the trenches they were just soldiers like any others, different only in that they gave Bai an occasional sense of how bad things had gotten: there was no one in the world left now to reproach them.

That evening the three officers gathered again for a brief visit from the general of their part of the line, a new luminary of the Fourth Assemblage, a man they had never seen before. They stood at loose attention while he spoke briefly, emphasizing the importance of their attack on the morrow.

“We're a diversion,” Kuo declared when General Shen had boarded his personal train and headed back toward the interior. “There are spies among us, and he wanted to fool them. If this was the real point of attack there would be a million more soldiers stacking up behind us, and you can hear the trains, they're on their usual schedule.”

In fact there had been extra trains, Iwa said. Thousands of conscripts brought in, and no shelter for them. They wouldn't be able to stay here long.

That night it rained. Fleets of Muslim fliers buzzed overhead, dropping bombs that damaged the railroad tracks. Repair began as soon as the raid was over. Arc lamps turned the night brilliant silver streaked by white, like a ruined photo negative, and in that chemical glare men scurried about with picks and shovels and hammers and wheelbarrows, as after any other disaster, but speeded up, as film sometimes was. No more trains arrived, and when dawn came there were not very many reinforcements after all. Extra ammunition for the attack was missing as well.

“They won't care,” Kuo predicted.

The plan was to release poison gas first, to precede them downslope on the daily morning east wind. At the first watch a wiregram came from the general: attack.

Today, however, there was no morning breeze. Kuo wiregraphed this news to the Fourth Assemblage command post thirty li down the corridor, asking for further orders. Soon he got them: proceed with the attack. Gas as ordered.

“We'll all be killed,” Kuo promised.

They put on their masks, turned the valves on the steel tanks that released the gas. It shot out and spread, heavy, almost viscous, in color virulent yellow, seeping forward and down a slight slope, where it lay in the death zone, obscuring their way. Fine in that regard, although its effect on those with defective gas masks would be disastrous. No doubt it was an awful sight for the Muslims, to see yellow fog flowing heavily toward them, and then, emerging out of it, wave after wave of insect-faced monsters firing guns and launchers. Nevertheless they stuck to their machine guns and mowed them down.

Bai was quickly absorbed in the task of moving from crater to crater, using mounds of earth or dead bodies as a shield, and urging groups of soldiers who had taken refuge in holes to keep going. “Safer if you get out of holes now, the gas settles. We need to overrun their lines and stop the machine guns,” and so on, in the deafening clatter, which meant none of them could hear him. A gust of the usual steady morning breeze moved the gas cloud over the devastation onto the Muslim lines, and less machine-gun fire struck at them. Their attack picked up speed, cutters busy everywhere at the barbed wire, men filing through. Then they were in the Muslim trenches, and they turned the big Iranian machine guns on the retreating enemy, until their ammunition was drained.

After that, if there had been any reinforcements available, it might have gotten interesting. But with the trains stuck fifty li behind the lines, and the breeze now pushing the gas back to the east, and the Muslim big guns now beginning to pulverize their own front lines, the breakout's position became untenable. Bai directed his troops down into the Muslim tunnels for protection. The day passed in a confusion of shouts and mobile wiregraph and wireless miscommunication. It was Kuo who shouted down to him that the order had finally come to retreat, and they rounded up their survivors and made their way back across the poisoned, shattered, body-strewn mud that had been the day's gain. An hour after nightfall they were back in their own trenches, less than half as numerous as they had been in the morning.

Well after midnight the officers convened in their little cave and got the stove burning and started cooking rice, each trapped in his own ears' roaring; they could barely hear each other talk. It would be like that for a day or two. Kuo was still fizzing with irritation, one did not have to be able to hear what he was saying to see that. He seemed to be trying to decide whether he should revise the Five Great Errors of the Gansu campaign by dropping the least of the previous great errors, or by turning it into the Six Great Errors. Assemblage of talent indeed, he shouted as he held their rice pot over the burning coals of their little stove, his bare blackened hands shaking. A bunch of fucking idiots. Up the hole the sounds of the hospital trains chugged and clanked. Their ears rang. Too much had happened for them to be able to speak anyway. They ate in the silence of a great roaring. Unfortunately Bai began vomiting, and then could not catch his breath. He had to submit to being carried up and back to one of the hospital trains. Put on with the host of wounded, gassed, and dying men. It took all the next day to move twenty li to the east, and then another day waiting to be processed by the overwhelmed medical crews. Bai almost died of thirst, but was saved by a girl in a mask, given sips of water while a doctor diagnosed gas-burned lungs, and stuck him with acupuncture needles in the neck and face, after which he could breathe much easier. This gave him the strength to drink more, then eat some rice, then talk his way out of the hospital before he died there of hunger or someone else's infection. He walked back to the front, hitching a ride at the end on a mule-drawn cart. It was night when he passed one of the immense batteries of artillery, and the garish sight of the huge black mortars and cannons pointed at the night sky, the tiny figures scurrying about under the arc lamps servicing them, holding hands to their ears (Bai did too) before they went off, made it clear to him yet again that they must all have been dragged into the next realm and gotten caught in a war of asuras, a titanic conflict in which humans were as ants, crushed under the wheels of the asuras' superhuman machines.

Back in their cave Kuo laughed at him for returning so quickly—You're like a pet monkey, can't get rid of you—but Bai in his relief only said, It's safer here than in the hospital, which made Kuo laugh again. Iwa came back from the comm cave full of news: apparently their assault had been a diversion after all, just as Kuo had said. The Gansu plug had been pushed at in order to tie up Muslim armies, while a Japanese force had finally honored their agreement to help the cause, given in exchange for their liberty, which was already accomplished anyway but which could have been challenged, and the Japanese, being fresh, had made a hard push in the far north, and broken through the line there and started a big breakout, rolling west and south like a bunch of crazed ronin out on a murderous lark. Hopefully they would fold down the back side of the Muslim line and force a retreat from Gansu, leaving the shattered Chinese alone and at peace in the field.