The Year of Rice and Salt

Then one night in the dark of the moon, all of a sudden there were howls and wolves were on them in a snarling rush. Bold just had time to cut the mare's tether and scramble into a tree. Most of the wolves chased the mare, but some sat panting under the tree. Bold got as comfortable as he could and prepared to wait them out. When rain came they slunk away. At dawn he woke for the tenth time, climbed down. He took off downstream and came on the body of the mare, all skin and gristle and scattered bones. The sidebags were nowhere to be found.

He continued on foot.

One day, too weak to walk, he lay in wait by a stream, and shot a deer with one of the sorry little arrows, and made a fire and ate well, bolting down chunks of cooked haunch. He slept away from the carcass, hoping to return to it. Wolves couldn't climb trees, but bears could. He saw a fox, and as the vixen had been his wife's nafs, long ago, he felt better. In the morning the sun warmed him. The deer had been removed by a bear, it appeared, but he felt stronger with all that fresh meat in him, and pressed on.

He walked south for several days, keeping on ridges when he could, over hills both depopulated and deforested, the ground underfoot sluiced to stone and baked white by the glare of the sun. He watched for the vixen in the valleys at dawn, and drank from springs, and raided dead villages for scraps of food. These grew harder and harder to find, and for a while he was reduced to chewing the leather strap from a harness, an old Mongol trick from the hard campaigns on the steppes. But it seemed to him it had worked better back there, on the endless grass, which was so much easier to cross than these baked tortured white hills.

At the end of one day, after he had long got used to living alone in the world, scavenging it like Monkey himself, he came into a little copse of trees to make a fire, and was shocked to see one already there, tended by a living man.

The man was short, like Bold. His hair was as red as maple leaves, his bushy beard the same colour, his skin pale and brindled like a dog. At first Bold was sure the man was sick, and he kept his distance. But the man's eyes, blue in colour, were clear; and he too was afraid, absolutely on point and ready for anything. Silently they stared at each other, across a small clearing in the middle of the copse.

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

The man was cooking two fish. Bold took a rabbit that he had killed that morning out of his coat, and skinned and cleaned it with his knife. The man watched him hungrily, nodding at each familiar move. He turned his fish on the fire, and made room in the coals for the rabbit. Bold spitted it on a stick and put it in.

After the meat had cooked they ate in silence, sitting on logs on opposite sides of the fire. They both stared into the flames, glancing only occasionally at each other, shy after all their time alone. After all that it was not obvious what one could say to another human.

Finally the man spoke, first brokenly, then at length. Sometimes he used a word that sounded familiar to Bold, but not so familiar as his movements around the fire, and no matter how hard he tried, Bold could make nothing of what the man said.

Bold tried out some simple phrases himself, feeling the strangeness of words in his mouth, like pebbles. The other man listened closely, his blue eyes gleaming in firelight, out of the dirty pale skin of his lean face, but he showed no sign of comprehension, not of Mongolian, Tibetan, Chinese, Turkic, Arabic, Chagatay, or any other of the polyglot greetings Bold had learned through his years of crossing the steppe.

At the end of Bold's recitation the man's face spasmed, and he wept. Then, wiping his eyes clear, leaving big streaks on his dirty face, he stood before Bold and said something, gesturing widely. He pointed his finger at Bold, as if angry, then stepped back and sat on his log, and began to imitate rowing a boat, or so Bold surmised. He rowed facing backwards, like the fishermen on the Caspian Sea. He made the motions for fishing, then for catching fish, cleaning them, cooking them, and feeding them to little children. By his gestures he evoked all the people he had fed, his children, his wife, the people he lived with.

Then he turned his face up at the firelit branches over the two men, and cried again. He pulled up the rough shift covering his body, and pointed at his arms – at his underarms, where he made a fist. Bold nodded, felt his stomach shrink as the man mimed the sickness and cleat o all the children, by lying down on the ground and mewling like a dog. Then the wife, then all the rest. All had died but this man, who walked around the fire pointing at the leaf litter on the ground intoning words, names perhaps. It was all so clear to Bold.