The Years of Rice and Salt (3 page)

2
                                                                                                            

Through the realm of hungry ghosts

A monkey wanders, lonely as a cloud.

Bold ran or walked west all that night, scrambling through
the growing forest
in the pouring rain, climbing into the steepest hills he could find, to evade any horsemen who might follow. No one would be too zealous in pursuit of a potential plague carrier, but he could be shot down from a good distance away, and he wanted to disappear from their world as if he had never existed. If it had not been for the uncanny storm he would certainly be dead, already embarked on another existence: now he was anyway. Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond . . .

He walked the next day and all the second night. Dawn of the second day found him hurrying back through the Moravian Gate, feeling that no one would dare follow him there. Once onto the Magyar plain he headed south, into trees. In the morning's wet light he found a fallen tree and slipped deep under its exposed roots, to sleep for the rest of the day in hidden dryness.

That night the rain stopped, and on the third morning he emerged ravenous. In short order he found, pulled, and ate meadow onions, then hunted for more substantial food. It was possible that dried meat still hung in the empty villages' storehouses, or grain in their granaries. He might also be able to find a bow and some arrows. He didn't want to go near the dead settlements, but it seemed the best way to find food, and that took precedence over everything else.

That night he slept poorly, his stomach full and gassy with onions. At dawn he made his way south, following the big river. All the villages and settlements were empty. Any people he saw were dead on the ground. It was disturbing, but there was nothing to be done. He too was in some kind of posthumous existence, a very hungry ghost indeed. Living on from one found bite to the next, with no name or fellows, he began to close in on himself, as during the hardest campaigns on the steppes, becoming more and more an animal, his mind shrinking in like the horns of a touched snail. For many watches at a time he thought little but the Heart Sutra. Form is emptiness, emptiness form. Not for nothing had he been named Sun Wu-kong, Awake to Emptiness, in an earlier incarnation. Monkey in the void.

He came to a village that looked untouched, skirted its edge. In an empty stable he found an unstrung bow and a quiver of arrows, all very primitive and poorly made. Something moved in the pasturage outside, and he went out and whistled up a small black mare. He caught her with onions, and quickly taught her to take him on her back.

He rode her across a stone bridge over the big river, and slowly crossed the grain of the land southward, up and down, up and down. All the villages continued empty, their food rotted or scavenged by animals, but now he had the mare's milk and blood to sustain him, so the matter was not so urgent.

It was autumn here, and he began to live like the bears, eating berries and honey, and rabbits shot with the ridiculous bow. Possibly it had been concocted by a child; he couldn't believe anyone older would make such a thing. It was a single bend of wood, probably ash, partly carved but still misshapen; no arrowrest, no nocking point, its pull like that of a prayer-flag line. His old bow had been a laminate of horn, maplewood, and tendon glue covered by blue leather, with a sweet pull and release, and enough power to pierce body armor from over a li away. Gone now, gone altogether beyond, lost with all the rest of his few possessions, and when he shot these twig arrows with this branch bow and missed, he would shake his head and wonder if it was even worth tracking the arrow down. It was no wonder these people had died.

In one small village, five buildings clustered above a stream ford, the headman's house proved to have a locked larder, still stocked with dried fishcakes that were spiced with something Bold did not recognize, which made his stomach queasy. But with the strange food in him he felt his spirits rise. In a stable he found sidebags for the mare, and stuffed them with more dried food. He rode on, paying more attention than he had been to the land he was passing through.

White-barked trees hold up black branches,

Pine and cypress still verdant on the ridge.

A red bird and a blue bird sit near each other

In the same tree. Now anything is possible.

Anything but return to his previous life. Not that he harbored any resentment of Temur; Bold would have done the same in his place. Plague was plague, and could not be treated lightly. And this plague was obviously worse than most, having killed everyone in the region. Among the Mongols plague usually killed a few babies, maybe made some adults sick. You killed rats or mice on sight, and if babies got feverish and developed the bumps, their mothers took them out to live or die by the rivers. Indian cities were said to have a worse time with it, with people dying in great crowds. But never anything like this. It was possible something else had killed them.

Traveling through empty land.

Clouds hazy, moon waning and chill.

Sky, frost-colored, cold to look at.

Wind piercing. Sudden terror.

A thousand trees roar in the sparse woodland:

A lonely monkey cries on a barren hill.

But the terror washed through him and then away, like freshets of rain, leaving a mind as empty as the land itself. It was very still. Gone, gone, altogether gone.

For a time he thought he would ride through and out of the region of plague, and find people again. But then he came over a jagged range of black hills, and saw a big town spread below, bigger than any he had ever seen, its rooftops covering a whole valley bottom. But deserted. No smoke, no noise, no movement. In the center of the city another giant stone temple stood open to the sky. Seeing it the terror poured into him again, and he rode into the forest to escape the sight of so many people gone like the autumn leaves.

He knew roughly
where he was, of course. South of here, he would eventually come into the Ottoman Turks' holdings in the Balkans. He would be able to speak with them; he would be back in the world, but out of Temur's empire. Something then would start up for him, some way to live.

So he rode south. But still only skeletons occupied the villages. He grew hungrier and hungrier. He drove the mare harder, while drinking more of her blood.

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. In the 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 so much easier to cross than these baked tortured white hills.

At the end of one day, after he had long gotten 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 color, 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 color, 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, Chagatai, or any other of the polyglot greetings Bold had learned through the years 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 backward, 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 childen. 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 death of 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.

Then the man burned his dead village, all in gestures so clear, and mimed rowing away. He rowed on his log for a long time, so long Bold thought he had forgotten the story; but then he ground to a halt and fell back in his boat. He got out, looking around in feigned surprise. Then he began to walk. He walked around the fire a dozen times, pretend-eating grass and sticks, howling like a wolf, cowering under his log, walking some more, even rowing again. Over and over he said the same things, “Dea, dea, dea, dea,” shouting it at the branch-crossed stars quaking over them.

Bold nodded. He knew the story. The man was moaning, with a low growl like an animal, cutting at the ground with a stick. His eyes were as red as any wolf's in the light. Bold ate more of the rabbit, then offered the stick to the man, who snatched it and ate hungrily. They sat there and looked at the fire. Bold felt both companionable and alone. He eyed the other man, who had eaten both his fish, and was now nodding off. The man jerked up, muttered something, lay curled around the fire, fell asleep. Uneasily Bold stoked the fire, took the other side of it, and tried to do the same. When he woke the fire had died and the man was gone. It was a cold dawn, dew-drenched, and the trail of the man led down the meadow to a big bend in a stream, where it disappeared. There was no sign of where the man had gone from there.

Days passed,
and Bold continued south. Many watches went by in which he didn't think a thing, only scanning the land for food and the sky for weather, humming a word or two over and over. Awake to emptiness. One day he came on a village surrounding a spring.

Old temples scattered throughout,

Broken round columns pointing at the sky.

All in the midst of a vast silence.

What made these gods so angry

With their people? What might they make

Of a solitary soul wandering by

After the world has ended?

White marble drums fallen this way and that:

One bird cheeps in the empty air.

He did not care to test anything by trespassing, and so circled the temples, chanting “Om mane padme hum, om mane padme hum, hummm,” aware suddenly that he often spoke aloud to himself now, or hummed, without ever noticing it, as if ignoring an old companion who always said the same things.

He continued south
and east, though he had forgotten why. He scrounged roadside buildings for dried food. He walked on the empty roads. It was an old land. Gnarled olive trees, black and heavy with their inedible fruit, mocked him. No person ate entirely by his own efforts, no one. He got hungrier, and food became his only focus, every day. He passed more marble ruins, foraged in the farmhouses he passed. Once he came on a big clay jar of olive oil, and stayed there four days to drink it all down. Then game became more abundant. He saw the vixen more than once. Good shots with his ridiculous bow kept him away from hunger. He made his fires larger every night, and once or twice wondered what had become of the man he had met. Had meeting Bold made him realize he would be alone no matter what happened or whom he found, so that he had killed himself to rejoin his jati? Or perhaps just slipped while drinking? Or hiked in the stream to keep Bold from tracking him? There was no way of telling, but the encounter kept coming back to Bold, especially the clarity with which he had been able to understand the man.