The Year of Rice and Salt

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

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

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

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

'Wonderful.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

'What?' Bistami cried.

'It's up to us. No one will help us.'

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

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

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

* * *

In the thirty fifth year of his reign, the Wanli Emperor turned his feverish and permanently dissatisfied eye on Nippon. Ten years earlier the Nipponese general Hideyoshi had had the temerity to attempt the conquest of China, and when the Koreans had refused him passage, his army had invaded Korea as the first step in its path. It had taken a large Chinese army three years to drive the invaders off the Korean peninsula, and the twenty six million ounces of silver it had cost the Wanli Emperor had put his treasury in acute difficulties, difficulties from which it had never recovered. The Emperor was inclined to avenge this unprovoked assault (if you did not count the two unsuccessful attacks on Nippon made by Kublai Khan), and to remove the danger of any future problem arising from Nippon, by subjugating it to Chinese suzerainty. Hideyoshi had died, and leyasu, the head of a new Tokugawa. Shogunate, had successfully united all the Nipponese islands under his command, and then closed the country to foreigners. All Nipponese were forbidden to leave, and those who did were forbidden to return. The building of seaworthy ships was also forbidden, although the Wanli noted irritably in his vermilion memoranda that this did not stop hordes of Nipponese pirates attacking on the long Chinese coastline using smaller craft. He thought leyasu's retreat from the world signalled weakness, and yet at the same time, a fortress nation of warriors just offshore from the Middle Kingdom was not something to be tolerated either. It pleased the Wanli to think of returning this bastard child of Chinese culture to its rightful place under the Dragon Throne, joining there Korea, Annam, Tibet, Mindanao and the Spice Islands.