The Years of Rice and Salt

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.

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.

“That’s Chomolungma,” Iwa said. “That was the tallest mountain in the world, but the Muslims have knocked the summit pyramid down until it’s lower than the second tallest, which is a peak in Afghanistan. So now the tallest peak in the world is Muslim.”

His face was its usual blank, but he sounded sad, as though the mountain mattered to him. This worried Bai: if Iwa had gone mad, everyone on Earth had gone mad. Iwa would be the last to go. But maybe it had happened. A soldier in their squad had begun to weep helplessly at the sight of dead horses and mules; he was fine at the sight of dead men scattered about, but the bloated bodies of their poor beasts broke his heart. It made sense in a strange way, but for mountains Bai could conjure up no sympathy. At the most it was one god less. Part of the struggle in the bardo.

Nights the cold approached pure stasis. Starlight gleaming on the empty plateau, smoking a cigarette by the latrines, Bai considered what it might mean that there was war in the bardo. That was the place souls were sorted out, reconciled to reality, sent back down into the world. Judgment rendered, karma assessed; souls sent back to try again, or released to nirvana. Bai had been reading Iwa’s copy of the “Book of the Dead,” looking around him seeing each sentence shape the plateau. Alive or dead, they walked in a room of the bardo, working on their fate. It was always so! This room as bleak as any empty stage. They camped on gravel and sand at the butt end of a gray glacier. Their big guns hunkered, barrels tilted to the sky. Smaller guns on the valley walls guarded against air attack; these emplacements looked like the old dzong-style monasteries that still lined some buttresses in these mountains.

Word came they were going to try to break through Nangpa La, the deep pass interrupting the range. One of the old salt trading passes, the best pass for many li in both directions. Sherpas would guide, Tibetans who had moved south of the pass. On its other side extended a canyon to their capital, tiny Namche Bazaar, now in ruins like everything else. From Namche trails ran directly south to the plains of Bengal. A very good passage across the Himalaya, in fact. Rail could replace trail in a matter of days, and then they could ship the massed armies of China, what was left of them, onto the Gangetic Plain. Rumors swirled, replaced daily by new rumors. Iwa spent all night at the wireless.

It looked to Bai like a change in the bardo itself. Shift to the next room, a tropical hellworld clogged with ancient history. The battle for the pass would therefore be particularly violent, as is any passage between worlds. The artilleries of the two civilizations massed on both sides. Triggered avalanches in the granite escarpments were frequent. Meanwhile explosions on the peak of Chomolungma continued to lower it. The Tibetans fought like pretas as they saw this. Iwa seemed to have reconciled himself to it: “They have a saying about the mountain coming to Muhammad. But I don’t think it matters to the mother goddess.”

Still, it brought home to them yet again how insane their opponents were. Ignorant fanatical disciples of a cruel desert cult, promised eternity in a paradise where sexual orgasm with beautiful houris lasted ten thousand years, no surprise they were so often suicidally brave, happy to die, reckless in frenzied opiated ways that were hard to counter. Indeed they were known to be prodigious benzedrine eaters and opium smokers, pursuing the entire war in a jerky drugged dream state that could include bestial rage. Most of the Chinese would have been happy to join them there, and opium had made its way into the Chinese army, of course, but supplies were short. Iwa had local contacts, however, and as they prepared for the assault on Nangpa La he obtained some from some military policemen. He and Bai smoked it in cigarettes and drank it as a tincture of alcohol, along with cloves and a pill of Travancori medicines said to sharpen sight while dulling the emotions. It worked pretty well.

Eventually there were so many banners and divisions and big guns collected on this high plane of the bardo that Bai became convinced that the rumors were right, and a general assault on Kali or Shiva or Brahma was about to begin. As confirming evidence he noted that many divisions were composed of experienced soldiers, rather than raw boys or peasants or women—divisions with extensive battle experience in the islands or the New World, where the fighting had been particularly intense, and where they claimed to have won. In other words, they were precisely those soldiers most likely to have been killed already. And they looked dead. They smoked cigarettes like dead men. A whole army of the dead, gathered and poised to invade the rich south of the living.

The moon waxed and waned and the bombardment of the invisible foe across the range continued. Fleets of fliers shaped like sickles shot through the pass and never came back. On the eighth day of the fourth month, the date of the conception of the Buddha, the assault began.

The pass itself had been rigged, and when its immediate defenders were all killed or had retreated south, the ridges guarding the pass erupted in massive explosions and poured down onto the broad saddle. Cho Oyu itself lost some of its mass to this explosion. That was the end for several banners securing the pass. Bai watched from below and wondered, When one died in the bardo where did one go? It was only a matter of chance that Bai’s squad had not been in the first wave.

The defenses as well as the Chinese first wave were buried. After that the pass was theirs, and they could begin the descent of the giant glacier-cut canyon south to the Gangetic Plain. They were attacked every step of the way, chiefly by distant bombardment, and with booby traps and enormous mines buried in the trails at crucial points. They defused or set these off as often as they could, suffered the occasional missed ones, rebuilt a road and rail bed as they descended. It was mostly road work at great speed, as the Muslims gave ground and retreated to the plain, and only their most distant aerial bombardment remained, shots fired from around Delhi, erratic and hilarious unless they happened to make a lucky strike.

In the deep southern canyon they found themselves in a different world. Indeed Bai had to reconsider the idea that he was in the bardo at all. If he was, this was certainly a different level of it: hot, wet, lush, the green trees and bushes and grasses exploding out of the black soil and overrunning everything. The granite itself seemed living down here. Perhaps Kuo had lied to him, and he and Iwa and the rest here had been alive all the while, in a real world become deathly with death. What an awful thought! The real world become the bardo, the two the same… Bai hustled through his hectic days feeling appalled. After all that suffering he had only been reborn into his own life, still ongoing, now regained as if there had been no break, only a moment of cruel irony, a few days’ derangement, and now moved on into a new karmic existence while trapped in the same miserable biological cycle that for some reason had turned into a fine simulacrum of hell itself, as if the karmic wheel had broken and the gears between karmic life and biological life become detached, gone so that one fluctuated without warning, lived sometimes in the physical world, other times in the bardo, sometimes in dream sometimes awake, and very often all at once, without cause or explanation. Already the years in the Gansu Corridor, the whole of his life he would have said before, had become a dream mostly forgotten, and even the mystic high strangeness of the Tibetan plain was fast becoming an unreal memory, hard to recall though it was etched on his eyeballs and he was still looking right through it.

One evening the wiregraph officer came rushing out and ordered them all to get uphill fast. A glacial lake upstream had had its ice dam bombed by the Muslims, and now a huge bolus of water was headed downstream, filling the canyon to a depth of five hundred feet or more, depending on the narrowness of the gorge.

The scramble began. How they climbed. Here they were, dead men already, dead for years, and yet they climbed like monkeys, frantic to move up the slope of a canyon. They had been camped in a narrow steep defile, the better to avoid bombs from the air, and as they hauled themselves up through brush they heard ever more clearly a distant roar like continuous thunder, possibly a falls in the ordinarily loud Dudh Kosi, but probably not, probably the approaching flood, until finally they came to a layback in the slope, and after an hour they were all a good thousand feet above the Dudh Kosi, looking down at the white thread of it that seemed so harmless from the broad nose of a promontory where the officers had regathered them, looking down into the gorge but also around them at the stupendous icy walls and peaks of the range, hearing a roar come out of the higher ones to the north, a healthy booming roar, like a tiger god roaring. Up here they were in a good position to witness the flood, which arrived just as night was falling: the roar grew to something almost as loud as a bombardment on the front, but all below, almost subterranean, coming through the soles of their feet as much as their ears, and then a dirty white wall of water appeared, carrying trees and rocks on its chaotic tumbling front wall, tearing the walls of the canyon right down to bedrock and causing slides down into it, some of which were large enough to dam the whole stream for a few minutes, before water poured over it and ripped it away, causing a smaller surge in the general flood. After the front of it had passed out of sight down the canyon, it left behind torn walls white in the dusk, and a brown foaming river that roared and clunked at just above its usual level.

“We should build the roads higher,” Iwa noted.

Bai could only laugh at Iwa’s cool. The opium was making everything pulse. A sudden realization: “Why, it just occurred to me—I’ve been drowned in floods before! I’ve felt the water come over me. Water and snow and ice. You were there too! I wonder if that was meant for us, and we’ve escaped by accident. I don’t really think we’re supposed to be here.”

Iwa regarded him. “In what sense?”

“In the sense that that flood down there was supposed to kill us!”

“Well,” Iwa said slowly, looking concerned, “I guess we got out of its way.”

Bai could only laugh. Iwa: what a mind. “Yes. To hell with the flood. That was a different life.”

The routemakers however had learned a good lesson without much loss of life (equipment was another matter). Now they built high on the canyon walls where they sloped back, cutting grades and traverses, going far up tributary canyons and then building bridges over their streams, also antiaircraft emplacements, even a small airstrip on one nearly level bench near Lukla. Becoming a construction batallion was much better than fighting, which was what others were doing down in the mouth of the canyon, to keep it open long enough to get the train down there. They could not believe their luck, or the warm days, or the reality of life behind the front, so luxurious, the silence, the lessening of muscle tension, lots of rice, and strange but fresh vegetables…

Then in a blur of happy days the roadbeds and tracks were complete and they took some of the first trains down and encamped on a great dusty green plain, no monsoon yet, division after division making their way to the front, some fluctuating distance to the west of them. That was where it was all happening now.

Then one morning they were on their way too, trained all day to the west and then off and marching over one pontoon bridge after another, until they were somewhere near Bihar. Here another army was already encamped, an army on their side. Allies, what a concept. The Indians themselves, here in their own country, moving north after four decades of holding out against the Islamic horde, down in the south of the continent. Now they too were breaking out, crossing the Indus, and the Muslims therefore in danger of being cut off by a pincer attack as large as Asia, some of them already trapped in Burma, the bulk of them still together in the west and beginning a slow, stubborn retreat.

So Iwa gathered in an hour’s conversation with some Travancori officers who spoke Nepali, which he had known as a child. The Indian officers and their soldiers were dark skinned and small, both men and women, very fast and nimble, clean, well dressed, well armed—proud, even arrogant, assuming that they had taken the brunt of the war against Islam, that they had saved China from conquest by holding on as a second front. Iwa came away unsure whether it was a good idea to discuss the war with them.

But Bai was impressed. Perhaps the world would be saved from slavery after all. The breakout across north Asia was apparently stalled, the Urals being a kind of natural Great Wall of China for the Golden Horde and the Firanjis. Although maps seemed to indicate that it was nicely to the west. And to have crossed the Himalaya in force against such resistance, to have met up with the Indian armies, to be cutting the world of Islam in two…

“Well, sea power could make the whole land war in Asia irrelevant,” Iwa said as they sat one evening on the ground eating rice that had been spiced to newly incendiary heights. Between choking swallows, sweating profusely, he said, “In the time of this war we’ve seen three or four generations of weaponry, of technology generally, the big guns, sea power, now air power—I don’t doubt that a time is coming when fleets of airships and fliers will be all that matter. The fight will go on up there, to see who can control the skies and drop bombs bigger than anything you could ever shoot out of a cannon, right onto the capitals of the enemy. Their factories, their palaces, their government buildings.”

“Good,” Bai said. “Less messy that way. Go for the head and get it over with. That’s what Kuo would say.”

Iwa nodded, grinning at the thought of just how Kuo would say it. The rice here was nothing compared to their Kuo.

The generals from the Fourth Assemblage of Military Talent met with the Indian generals, and as they conferred more railways were built out to the new front west of them. A combined offensive was clearly in the works, and everyone was full of speculation about it. That they would be kept behind to defend their rear from the Muslims still in the Malay Peninsula; that they would be boarded on ships in the mouth of the sacred Ganges and deposited on the Arabian coast to attack Mecca itself; that they were destined for a beachhead attack on the peninsulas of northwest Firanja; and so on. Never an end to the stories they told themselves of how their travail would continue.

In the end, though, they marched forward in the usual fashion, westward, holding the right flank against the foothills of Nepal, hills that shot abrupt and green out of the Gangetic Plain—as though, Iwa remarked idly one day, India were a ramming ship that had slammed into Asia and plowed under it, pushing all the way under Tibet, and doubling the height of that land but dipping down here almost to sea level.

Bai shook his head at this geomorphic fancy, not wanting to think of the ground as moving like big ships, wanting to understand the ground as solid, because he was trying to convince himself now that Kuo had been wrong and that he was still alive and not in the bardo, where of course lands could slip about like the stage sets they were. Kuo had probably been disoriented by his own abrupt death, and confused as to his own whereabouts; not a good sign concerning his reappearance in his next incarnation. Or perhaps he had just been playing a joke on Bai—Kuo would mock you harder than anyone, though he seldom played jokes. Perhaps he had even been doing Bai a favor, getting him through the worst part of the war by convincing him that he was already dead and had nothing to lose—indeed, was fighting the war on a level where it might actually mean something, might have some use, might be a matter of changing people’s souls in their pure existence outside the world, where they might be capable of change, where they might learn what was important and return to life next time with new capacities in their hearts, with new goals in mind.

What might those be? What were they fighting for? It was clear what they were fighting against—against fanatical slaveholding reactionaries, who wanted the world to stand still in the equivalent of the Tang or Sung dynasties—absurdly backward and bloody religious zealots—assassins with no scruples, who fought crazed on opium and ancient blind beliefs. Against all that, certainly, but for what? What the Chinese were fighting for, Bai decided, was… clarity, or whatever else it was that was the opposite of religion. For humanity. For compassion. For Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism, the triple strand that did so well in describing a relationship to the world: the religion with no God, with only this world, also several other potential realms of reality, mental realms, and the void itself, but no God, no shepherd ruling with the drooling strictures of a demented old patriarch, but rather innumerable immortal spirits in a vast panoply of realms and being, including humans and many other sentient beings besides, everything living, everything holy, sacred, part of the Godhead—for yes, there was a GOD if by that you meant only a transcendent universal self-aware entity that was reality itself, the cosmos, including everything, including human ideas and mathematical forms and relationships. That idea itself was God, and evoked a kind of worship that was attention to the real world, a kind of natural study. Chinese Buddhism was the natural study of reality, and led to feelings of devotion just from noting the daily leaves, the colors of the sky, the animals seen from the corner of the eye. The movements of chopping wood and carrying water. This initial study of devotion led to deeper understanding as they pursued the mathematical underpinnings of the ways of things, just out of curiosity and because it seemed to help them see even more clearly, and so they made instruments to see farther in and farther out, higher yang, deeper yin.

What followed was a kind of understanding of human reality that placed the greatest value on compassion, created by enlightened understanding, created by study of what was there in the world. This was what Iwa was always saying, while Bai preferred to think of the emotions created by all that proper attention and focused effort: the peace, the sharp curiosity and enraptured interest, the compassion.

But now: all a nightmare. A nightmare speeding up, however, breaking apart and full of non sequiturs, as if the dreamer felt the rapid-eyed stirrings of the end of sleep and the waking of a new day. Every day we wake up into a new world, each sleep causes yet another reincarnation. Some of the local gurus spoke of it as happening with every breath.

They took off out of the bardo into the real world, into battle, with their left wing made up of India’s crack regiments, little bearded black men, taller hook-nosed white men, bearded turbaned Sikhs, deep-chested women, Gurkhas come out of the mountains, a banner of Nepali women each of whom was the beauty of her district, or so it appeared; all of them together like a circus crew, but so fast, so well armed, in train and truck divisions, the Chinese could not keep up with them, but got more train lines established and tried to catch up, running vast numbers of men forward with all their supplies. Beyond the forward ends of the train lines the Indians continued to race forward on foot, and in engined cars on rubber wheels, hundreds of them that ran freely over the village paths in this dry season, throwing dust everywhere, and also over a more limited network of asphalted roads, the only ones that would still be passable when the monsoon hit.

They advanced toward Delhi all at once, more or less, and they fell on the Muslim army retreating up the Ganges on both sides of the river, as soon as the Chinese were in position at the foot of the Nepali hills.

Of course the right flank extended up into the hills, each army trying to outflank the other. Bai and Iwa’s squad was counted among the mountain troops now because of their experiences in the Dudh Kosi, and so orders came to seize and hold the hills up to the first ridge at least, which entailed taking some higher points on ridges even farther north. They moved by night, learning to climb in the dark along trails found and marked by Gurkha scouts. Bai also became a day scout, and as he crawled up brush-choked ravines he worried not that he would be discovered by any Muslims, for they stuck to their trails and encampments without fail, but whether or not a mass of hundreds of men could follow the tortuous monkey routes he was forced to use in some places. “That’s why they send you, Bai,” Iwa explained. “If you can do it, anyone can.” He smiled and added, “That’s what Kuo would say.”

Each night Bai went up and down the line guiding and checking to see if routes went as he had expected, learning and studying, and only going to sleep after observing the sunrise from some new hideaway.

They were still doing that when the Indians broke through on the south flank. They heard the distant artillery and then saw smoke pluming into the white skies of a hazy morning, the haze a possible mark of the monsoon’s arrival. To make a full breakout assault with the monsoon coming passed all understanding; it seemed possible it would go right to the head of the list of the recently augmented Seven Great Errors, and as the afternoon’s clouds bloomed, and built, and dropped black on them, blasting foothills and plain with volleys of thick lightning that struck the metal in several gun emplacements on ridges, it was amazing to hear that the Indians were pressing on unimpeded. They had, among all their other accomplishments, perfected war in the rain. These were not Chinese Daoist Buddhist rationalists, Bai and Iwa agreed, not the Fourth Assemblage of Military Talent, but wild men of all manner of religion, even more spiritual than the Muslims, as the Muslims’ religion seemed all bluster and wish fulfillment and support of tyranny with its Father God. The Indians had a myriad of gods, some elephant headed or six armed, even death was a god, both female and male—life, nobility, there were gods for each, each human quality deified. Which made for a motley, godly people, very ferocious in war, among many other things—great cooks, very sensual people, scents, tastes, music, color in their uniforms, detailed art, it was all right there in their camps to be seen, men and women standing around a drummer singing, the women tall and big breasted, big eyed and thick eyebrowed, awesome women really, arms like a woodsman’s and filling all the sharpshooter regiments of the Indians, “Yes,” one Indian adjutant had said in Tibetan, “women are better shots, women from Travancore especially. They start when they are five, that may be all there is to it. Start boys at five and they would do as well.”

Now the rains were full of black ash, falling in a watery mud. Black rain. The call came for Bai and Iwa’s squad to hurry down to the plain and join the general assault as soon as they could. They ran down the trails and assembled some twenty li behind the front line of the battle, and started marching. They were to hit at the very end of the flank, on the plain itself but right at the foot of the foothills, ready to scale the first rise of the hills if there was any resistance to their charge.

That was the plan, but as they came up to the front word came that the Muslims had broken and were in full retreat, and they joined the chase.

But the Muslims were in full flight, the Indians close on their heels, and the Chinese could only follow the two faster armies across the fields and forests, over canals and through the breaks in bamboo fences and walls, and groups of houses too small even to be called villages, all still and silent, usually burned, and yet slowing them down somehow nevertheless. Dead bodies on the ground in knots, already bloating. The full meaning of embodiment made manifest here by its opposite, disembodiment, death—departure of the soul, leaving behind so little: a putrefying mass, stuff like what one found in a sausage. Nothing human about it. Except for here or there, a face undestroyed, even sometimes undisturbed; an Indian man lying there on the ground for instance, staring sideways but utterly still, not moving, not breathing; the statue of what must have been a very impressive man, well built, strong shoulders, capable—a commanding, high-foreheaded, moustached face, eyes like fish in the market, round and surprised, but still—impressive. Bai had to say a charm to be able to walk by him, and then they were in a zone where the land itself was smoking like the dead zone of Gansu, pools of silvery gassed water reeking in water holes and the air full of smoke and dust, cordite, blood haze. The bardo itself would be looking much like this, crowded now with new arrivals all angry and confused, in agony, the worst possible way to enter the bardo. Here the empty mirror of it, blasted and still. The Chinese army marched through in silence.

Bai found Iwa, and they made their way into the burned ruins of Bodh-Gaya, to a park on the west bank of the Phalgu River. This was where the Bodhi Tree had stood, they were told, the old assattha tree, pipal tree, under which the Buddha had received enlightenment so many centuries before. The area had taken as many hits as the peak of Chomolungma, and no trace of tree or park or village or stream remained, only black rendered mud for as far as the eye could see.

A group of Indian officers discussed root fragments someone had found in the mud near what some thought had been the location of the tree. Bai didn’t recognize the language. He sat down with a small fragment of bark in his hands. Iwa went over to see what the officers were saying.

Then Kuo stood before Bai. “Cut is the branch,” he said, offering a small twig from the Bodhi Tree.

Bai took it from him. From his left hand; Kuo’s right hand was still missing. “Kuo,” Bai said, and swallowed. “I’m surprised to see you.”

Kuo gave him a look.

“So we are in the bardo after all,” Bai said.

Kuo nodded. “You didn’t always believe me, did you, but it’s true. Here you see it—” waving his hand at the black smoking plain. “The floor of the universe. Again.”

“But why?” Bai said. “I just don’t get it.”

“Get what?”

“Get what I’m supposed to be doing. Life after life—I remember them now!” He thought about it, seeing back through the years. “I remember them now, and I’ve tried in every one. I keep trying!” Out across the black plain it seemed they could see together the faint afterimages of their previous lives, dancing in the infinite silk of lightly falling rain. “It doesn’t seem to be making any difference. What I do makes no difference.”

“Yes, Bai. Perhaps so. But after all you are a fool. A good-natured fucking idiot.”

“Don’t, Kuo, I’m not in the mood,” though his face was attempting painfully to smile, pleased to be ribbed again. Iwa and he had tried to do this for each other, but no one could bring it off like Kuo. “I may not be a great leader like you but I’ve done some good things, and they haven’t made a bit of difference. There seem to be no rules of dharma that actually pertain.”

Kuo sat down next to him, crossed his legs and made himself comfortable. “Well, who knows. I’ve been thinking these things over myself, this time out in the bardo. There’s been a lot of time, believe me—so many have been tossed out here at once that there’s quite a waiting line, it’s just like the rest of the war, a logistical nightmare, and I’ve been watching you all struggle on, bashing against things like moths in a bottle, and I know I did it too, and I’ve wondered. I’ve thought sometimes that maybe it went wrong back when I was Kheim and you were Butterfly, a little girl we all loved. Do you remember that one?”

Bai shook his head. “Tell me.”

“As Kheim I was Annamese. I continued the proud tradition of the great Chinese admirals being foreigners and disreputable, I had been a pirate king for years on the long coast of Annam, and the Chinese made a treaty with me as they would with any great potentate. Struck a deal in which I agreed to lead an invasion of Nippon, at least the sea aspect of it and perhaps more.

“Anyway we missed all that for lack of a wind, and went on and discovered the ocean continents, and found you, and then we took you, and lost you, and saved you from the executioner god of the southern people; and that’s when I felt it, coming back down the mountain after we had saved you. I aimed my pistol at people and pulled the trigger, and felt the power of life and death in my hands. I could kill them, and they deserved it, bloody cannibals that they were, killers of children. I could do it merely by pointing at them. And it seemed to me then that my so much greater power had a meaning to it. That our superiority in weapons came out of a general superiority of thought that included a superiority of morals. That we were better than they were. I strode back down to the ships and sailed west still feeling that we were superior beings, like gods to those horrid savages. And that’s why Butterfly died. You died to teach me that I was wrong—that though we had saved her we had killed her too, that that feeling we had had, striding through them as if through worthless dogs, was a poison that would never stop spreading in men who had guns. Until all the people like Butterfly, who lived in peace without guns, were dead, murdered by us. And then only men with guns would be left, and they would murder each other too, as fast as they could in the hope that it wouldn’t happen to them, until the human world died, and we all fell into this preta realm and then to hell.

“So our little jati is stuck here with everyone else, no matter what you do, not that you have been notably effectual, I must say again, Bai, speaking of your tendency toward credulous simplicity, gullibility, and general soft-hearted namby-pamby ineffectiveness—”

“Hey,” Bai said. “Not fair. I’ve been helping you. I’ve just been going along with you.”

“Well, all right. Granted. In any case we’re all in the bardo together now, and headed for the lower realms again, at best the realm of the human, but possibly spinning down the death spiral into the hellworlds always underfoot, we may have done it and are in the spin you can’t pull out of, humanity lost to us for a time even as a possibility, so much harm have we done. Stupid fucking bastards! Damn it, do you think I haven’t been trying too?” Kuo popped to his feet, agitated. “Do you think you’re the only one who has tried to make some good in this world?” He shook his solitary fist at Bai, and then at the lowering gray clouds. “But we failed! We killed reality itself, do you understand me! Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” Bai said, hugging his knees and shivering miserably. “I understand.”

“So. Now we are in this lower realm. We must make do. Our dharma still commands right action, even here. In the hope of small advances upward. Until reality itself be reestablished, by many millions of lives of effort. The whole world will have to be rebuilt. That’s where we are now,” and with a farewell tap to Bai’s arm he walked away, sinking into the black mud deeper with every step, until he had disappeared.

“Hey,” Bai said. “Kuo! Don’t leave!”

After a while Iwa returned and stood before him, looked down quizzically at him.

“Well?” Bai said, lifting his head from his knees, collecting himself. “What is it? Will they save the Bodhi Tree?”

“Don’t worry about the tree,” Iwa said. “They’ll get a shoot from a daughter tree in Lanka. It’s happened before. Best worry about the people.”

“More shoots there too. On to the next life. To a better time.” Bai shouted it after Kuo: “To a better time!”

Iwa sighed. He sat down where Kuo had been sitting. Rain fell on them. A long time passed in exhausted silence.

“The thing is,” Iwa said, “what if there is no next life? That’s what I think. This is it. Fan Chen said the soul and body are just two aspects of the same thing. He speaks of sharpness and the knife, soul and body. Without knife, no sharpness.”

“Without sharpness, no knife.”

“Yes…”

“And sharpness goes on, sharpness never dies.”

“But look at those dead bodies over there. Who they were won’t come back. When death comes, we don’t come back.”

Bai thought of the Indian man, lying so still on the ground. He said, “You’re just distraught. Of course we come back. I was talking to Kuo this very minute.”

Iwa gazed at him. “You shouldn’t try to hold on, Bai. This is what the Buddha learned, right here. Don’t try to stop time. No one can do it.”

“Sharpness remains. I tell you, he was cutting me up same as always!”

“We have to try to accept change. And change leads to death.”

“And then through death.” Bai said this as cheerfully as he could, but his voice was desolate. He missed Kuo.

Iwa considered what Bai had said, with a look that seemed to say he had been hoping that a Buddhist at the Bodhi Tree would perhaps have had something more helpful to say. But what could you say? The Buddha himself had said it: suffering is real. You have to face it, live with it. There is no escape.

After a while longer Bai got up and went over to see what the officers were doing. They were chanting a sutra, in Sanskrit perhaps, Bai thought, and he joined in softly with the “Lengyan jing,” in Chinese. And as the day wore on many Buddhists in both armies gathered around the site, hundreds of them, the mud was covered with people, and they said prayers in all the languages of Buddhism, standing there on the burnt land that smoked in the rain for as far as the eye could see, black gray and silver. Finally they fell silent. Peace in the heart, compassion, peace. Sharpness remained in them.