The Years of Rice and Salt (59 page)

Iwa said, “I guess the Japanese hatred for us was superseded by a disinclination to have Islam conquer the world.”

“They'll pick off Korea and Manchuria,” Kuo predicted. “They'll never give those back. A few port cities too. Now that we're bled white they can take whatever they please.”

“Fine,” Bai said. “Give them Beijing if they want it, if it only ends this war.”

Kuo glanced at him. “I'm not sure which would be a worse master, Muslims or Japanese. Those Japanese are tough, and they don't like us. And after the earthquake demolished Edo they think they've got the gods on their side. They already killed every Chinese in Japan.”

“In the end we won't serve either side,” Bai said. “The Chinese are indestructible, remember?”

The previous two days had not proved the proverb very well. “Except by the Chinese,” Kuo said. “By Chinese talent.”

“They may have turned the north flank this time,” Iwa noted. “That would be something.”

“It could be the end game,” Bai said, and coughed.

Kuo laughed at him. “Caught between mortar and pestle,” he said. He went to their locked cabinet, inserted into the mud wall of the cave, and unlocked it and brought out a jug of rakshi and took a drink. He drank a jug of these strong spirits every day, when he could get a supply, starting with his first waking moment and ending with his last. “Here's to the Tenth Great Success! Or is it the Eleventh? And we've survived all of them.” For the moment he had passed beyond the ordinary precaution of not speaking of these matters. “Survived them, and the Six Great Errors, and the Three Incredible Fuckups, and the Nine Greatest Incidents of Bad Luck. A miracle! There must be hungry ghosts holding big umbrellas over us, brothers.”

Bai nodded uneasily; he did not like to talk of such things. He tried to hear only the roaring. He tried to forget all he had seen the last three days.

“How can we have possibly survived for so long?” Kuo asked recklessly. “Everyone else we began with is dead. In fact the three of us have outlasted five or six generations of officers. How long has it been? Five years? How can it be?”

“I am Peng-zu,” Iwa said. “I am the Unfortunate Immortal, I can never be killed. I could dive right into the gas and it still wouldn't work.” He looked up from his rice mournfully.

Even Kuo was spooked by this. “Well, you'll get more chances, don't worry. Don't think it's going to end any time soon. The Japanese could take the north because no one cares about it. When they try to come off the taiga onto the steppes, that's when it'll get interesting. I don't think they'll be able to turn the hinge very far. It would mean a lot more if the breakout was in the south. We need to connect up with the Indians.”

Iwa shook his head. “That won't happen.” This kind of analysis was more like him, and the other two asked him to explain. For the Chinese the southern front consisted of the great wall of the Himalaya and Pamirs, and the jungles of Annam and Burma and Bengal and Assam. There were only a few passes over the mountains that were even thinkable, and the defenses of these were impregnable. As for the jungles, the rivers offered the only passage through them, and they were too exposed. The fortifications of their south front were therefore geographical and immovable, but the same could be said for the Muslims on the other side of them. Meanwhile the Indians were trapped below the Deccan. The steppes were the only way; but the armies of both sides were concentrated there. Thus the deadlock.

“It has to end someday,” Bai pointed out. “Otherwise it will never end.”

Kuo spat out a mouthful of rakshi in a burst of laughter. “Very deep logic, friend Bai! But this is not a logical war. This is the end that will never end. We will live our lives in this war, and so will the next generation, and the next, until everyone is dead and we can start the world all over, or not, as the case may be.”

“No,” Iwa disagreed mildly. “It can't go on that long. The end will come somewhere else, that's all. The war at sea, or in Africa or Yingzhou. The break will come somewhere else, and then this region will just be a, a what, a feature of the long war, an anomaly or whatnot. The front that could not be moved. The frozen aspect of the long war at its most frozen. They will tell our story forever, because there will never be anything like it again.”

“You're such a comfort,” Kuo said. “To think we're in the worst fix any soldiers have ever been in!”

“We might as well be something,” Iwa said.

“Exactly! It's a distinction! An honor, if you think about it.”

Bai preferred not to. An explosion above shook dirt out of their ceiling onto them. They bustled about covering cups and plates.

A few days later and they were back in the usual routine. If there was still a Japanese breakout to the north there was no way to tell it here, where the daily barrage and sniping from the Muslims was the same as always, as if the Sixth Great Error, with its loss of perhaps fifty thousand men and women, had never happened.

Soon after that the Muslims too started using poison gas, spreading over the death zone on the wind just as the Chinese had done, but also sending it over contained in explosive shells that came down with a loud whistle, scattering the usual shrapnel (including anything that would cut, as they too were running low on metal, so that they found sticks, cat bones, hooves, a set of false teeth) and now with the shrapnel a thick yellow geyser of the gas, apparently not just mustard gas but a variety of poisons and caustics, which forced the Chinese to keep both gas mask and hood and gloves always by them. Dressed or not, when one of these shells came down it was hard not to get burned around the wrists and ankles and neck.

The other new inconvenience was a shell so huge, cast so high by such big cannons, that when it came down out of the sky it was falling faster than its sound, so there was no warning. These shells were bigger around than a man, and taller, designed to penetrate the mud some distance and then go off, in stupendous explosions that often would bury many more men in trenches and tunnels and caves than were killed by the blasts themselves. Duds of these shells were dug out and removed, very cautiously, each one occupying an entire train car. The explosive used in them was a new one that looked like fish paste, and smelled like jasmine.

One evening after dusk they were standing around drinking rakshi and discussing news that Iwa had gotten from the comm cave. The southern army was being punished for some failure on that front, and each squad commander had to send back one percent of his command, to be executed as encouragement to those that remained.

“What a good idea!” Kuo said. “I know just who I'd send.”

Iwa shook his head. “A lottery would create better solidarity.”

Kuo scoffed: “Solidarity. Might as well get rid of the malingerers while you can, before they shoot you in the back some night.”

“It's a terrible idea,” Bai said. “They're all Chinese, how can we kill Chinese when they haven't done anything wrong? It's crazy. The Fourth Assemblage of Military Talent has gone insane.”

“They were never sane to begin with,” Kuo said. “It's been forty years since anyone on Earth has been sane.”

Suddenly they were all knocked to their feet by a violent blast of air. Bai struggled to his feet, banged into Iwa doing the same. He couldn't hear a thing. There was no sight of Kuo, he was gone and there was a big hole in the ground where he had been standing, a hole perfectly round and some twelve feet wide, thirty feet deep, and floored by the back end of one of the big Muslim supershells. Another dud.

A right hand lay on the ground beside the hole like a white cane spider. “Oh damn,” Iwa said through the roar. “We've lost Kuo.”

The Muslim shell had landed directly on him. Possibly, Iwa said later, his presence had kept it from exploding somehow. It had squished him into the earth like a worm. Only his poor hand remained.

Bai stared at the hand, too stunned to move. Kuo's laugh seemed still to ring in his ears. Kuo certainly would have laughed if he had been able to see this turn of events. His hand was completely recognizable as his, Bai found that he knew it intimately without ever being aware of the fact until now, so many hours sitting together in their little cave, Kuo holding the rice pot or the tea kettle over the stove, or offering a cup of tea or rakshi, his hand, like all the rest of him, a part of Bai's life, callused and scarred, clean palmed and dirty backed, looking still just like itself, even without the rest of him around. Bai sat back down on the mud.

Iwa gently picked up the severed hand, and they gave it the same funeral ceremony given to more complete corpses, before taking it back to one of the death trains for disposal in the crematoriums. Afterward they drank Kuo's remaining rakshi. Bai could not speak, and Iwa didn't try to make him. Bai's own hands displayed the quivering of ordinary trench fatigue. What had happened to their magic umbrella? What would he do now, without Kuo's acid laughter to cut through the deathly miasmas?

Then the Muslims took their turn to attack, and the Chinese were busy for a week with the defense of their trenches, living in their gas masks, firing belt after belt at the ghostly fellahin and assassins emerging from the yellow fog. Bai's lungs gave out again briefly, he had to be evacuated; but at the end of the week he and Iwa were back in the same trenches they had started in, with a new squad composed almost entirely of conscripts from Aozhou, land of the turtle who held up the world, green southerners thrown into the conflict like so many rounds of machine-gun ammunition. They had been so busy that already it seemed a long time since the incident of the dud shell. “Once I had a brother named Kuo,” Bai explained to Iwa.

Iwa nodded, patted Bai on the shoulder. “Go see if we have new orders.” His face was black with cordite, except around mouth and nose where his mask had been, and under his eyes, white with deltas of tear streaks. He looked like a puppet in a play, his face the mask of asura suffering. He had been at his machine gun for over forty straight hours, and in that time had killed perhaps three thousand men. His eyes looked sightlessly through Bai, through the world.

Bai staggered away, down the tunnel to the comm cave. He ducked in and fell into a chair, trying to catch his breath, feeling himself continuing to fall, through the floor, through the earth, on the airy drop to oblivion. A creak pulled him up; he looked to see who was already in the chair at the wireless table.

It was Kuo, sitting there grinning at him.

Bai straightened up. “Kuo!” he said. “We thought you were dead!”

Kuo nodded. “I am dead,” he said. “And so are you.”

His right hand was there at the end of his wrist.

“The shell went off,” he said, “and killed us all. Since then you've been in the bardo. All of us have. You've gone at it by pretending you weren't there yet. Although why you would want to hang on to that hell world we were living in, I can't imagine. You are so damned obstinate, Bai. You need to see you're in the bardo to be able to understand what's happening to you. It's the war in the bardo that matters, after all. The battle for our souls.”

Bai tried to say yes; then no; then he found himself on the floor of the cave, having fallen off the chair, apparently, which had woken him up. Kuo was gone, his chair empty. Bai groaned. “Kuo! Come back!” But the room stayed empty.

Later Bai told Iwa what had happened, his voice shaking, and the Tibetan had given him a sharp glance, then shrugged. “Maybe he was right,” he said, gesturing around. “What is there to prove him wrong?”

Another assault struck and suddenly they were ordered to retreat, to get to the back lines and then on the trains. At the depot yard it was chaotic, of course; but men with guns trained on them boarded them on the cars like cattle, and off the trains squealed and clanked.

Iwa and Bai sat at one end of a car as they trained south. From time to time they used their officers' privilege and went out onto the car's coupling base to smoke cigarettes and regard the steel sky lowering overhead. Higher and higher they rose, colder and colder. Thin air hurt Bai's lungs. “So,” he said, gesturing at the rock and ice rolling past. “Maybe it is the bardo.”

“It's just Tibet,” Iwa said.

But Bai could see very well that it was more desolate than that. Cirrus clouds hung like sickles just overhead, as on a stage set, the sky black and flat. It didn't look the slightest bit real.

In any case, whatever the realm, Tibet or the bardo, in life or out of it, the war continued. At night winged roaring fliers, their blimp components dispensed with, buzzed overhead dropping bombs on them. Arc-lamp searchlights lanced the darkness, pinning fliers to the stars and sometimes blowing them up in gouts of falling flame. Images from Bai's dreams fell right out of the thin air. Black snow glittered in the white light of a low sun.

They stopped before an impossibly huge mountain range, another stage set from the dream theater. A pass so deep that from their distance it dipped under the sere tabletop of the steppe. That pass was their goal. Their task now was to blast the defenses away and go south through that pass, down to some level below this floor of the universe. The pass to India, supposedly. Gate to a lower realm. Very well defended, of course.

The “Muslims” defending it remained invisible, always over the great snowy mass of granite peaks, greater than any mountains on Earth could be, asura mountains, and the big guns brought to bear on them, asura guns. Never had it been so clear to Bai that they had gotten caught up in some bigger war, dying by the millions for some cause not their own. Ice and black rock fangs touched the ceiling of stars, snow banners streamed on the monsoon wind away from the peaks, merging with the Milky Way, at sunset becoming asura flames blowing horizontally, as if the realm of the asuras stood perpendicularly to their own, another reason perhaps that their puny imitation battles were always so hopelessly askew.

The Muslims' big guns were on the south side of the range, they never even heard them. Their shells whistled over the stars, leaving white rainbow frost trails on the black sky. The majority of these shells landed on the massive white mountain to the east of the huge pass, blasting it with one stupendous explosion after another, as if the Muslims had gone crazy and declared war on the rocks of the Earth. “Why do they hate that mountain so much?” Bai asked.