The Years of Rice and Salt

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “A good idea,” Keeper admitted, after stopping in the middle and staring at himself, seeing what no one else could see. “I am a monster,” he announced. “My apologies to you all. And especially to you, Iagogeh, for putting up with me this last time, and all the previous times. And to you, youth,” nodding at Busho. “But nevertheless, we have work to do. I intend to tear this whole place down.” And he began looking around the room for something to throw at the mirrors.

  “Wait,” Iagogeh said. She was reading her copy of ‘The Jade Record’, skimming pages rapidly. “Frontal assaults are ineffective, as I recall. I’m remembering things. We have to go at the system itself. We need a technical solution . . . Here. Here’s just the thing: just before we’re sent back into the world, the Goddess Meng administers to us a vial of forgetting.”

  “I don’t remember that,” Keeper said.

  “That’s the point. We go into each life ignorant of our pasts, and so we struggle on each time without learning anything from the times before. We have to avoid that if we can. So listen, and remember: when you are in the hundred and eight rooms of this Meng, don’t drink anything! If they force you to, then only pretend to drink it, and spit it out when you are released.” She read on. “We emerge in the Final River, a river of blood, between this realm and the world. If we can get there with our minds intact, then we might be able to act more effectively.”

  “Fine,” Keeper said. “But I intend to destroy this place itself.”

  “Remember what happened last time you tried that,” Busho warned him, getting into the corner of the chamber so he could see the reflection of the reflections. Some things were coming back to him as Iagogeh had spoken. “When you took a sword to the goddess of death, and she redoubled on you with each stroke.”

  Keeper frowned, trying to recall. Outside there was a roaring, shouts, sounds of gunfire, boots running. Irritated, distracted, he said, “You can’t be cautious at times like this, you have to fight evil whenever the chance comes.”

  “True, but cleverly. Little steps.”

  Keeper regarded him sceptically. He held his thumb and forefinger together in the air. “That small?” He grabbed up Iagogeh’s book and threw it at one wall of the mirrors. One of them cracked, and a shriek came from behind the wall.

  “Stop arguing,” Iagogeh said. “Pay attention now.”

  Keeper picked the book back up and they hurried through close little rooms, moving higher and higher, then lower again, then higher, always up or down stairs in multiples of seven or nine. Keeper abused several more functionaries with the big book. Pounds the Rocks kept slipping into side rooms and getting lost.

  Finally they reached the hundred and eight chambers of Meng, the Goddess of Forgetting. Everyone had to pass through a different one of the chambers, and drink the cup of the wine-that-was-not-wine set out for them. Guards who did not look as if they would notice the slap of a book, be it ever so thick, stood at every exit to enforce this requirement; souls were not to return to life too burdened or advantaged by their pasts.

  “I refuse,” Keeper shouted; they could all hear it from the nearby rooms. “I don’t remember this ever being required before!”

  “That’s because we’re making progress,” Busho tried to call to him. “Remember the plan, remember the plan.”

  He himself took up his vial, happily fairly small, and faked swallowing its sweet contents with an exaggerated gulp, tucking the liquid under his tongue. It tasted so good he was sorely tempted to swallow it down, but resisted and only let a little seep to the back of his tongue.

  Thus when his guard tossed him out into the Final River with the rest, he spat out what he could of the not-wine, but he was disoriented nevertheless. The other members of the jati thrashed likewise in the shallows, choking and spitting, Straight Arrow giggling drunkenly, totally oblivious. Iagogeh rounded them up, and Keeper, no matter what he had forgotten, had not lost his main purpose, which was to wreak havoc however he could. They half-swum, half-floated across the red stream to the far shore.

  There, at the foot of a tall red wall, they were hauled out of the river by two demon gods of the bardo, Life-is-short and Death-by-gradations. Overhead a banner hanging down the side of the wall displayed the message, “To be a human is easy, to live a human life is hard; to desire to be human a second time is even harder. If you want release from the wheel, persevere.”

  Keeper read the message and snorted. “A second time — what about the tenth? What about the fiftieth?” And with a roar he shoved Death-by-gradations into the river of blood. They had spat enough of Meng’s not-wine of forgetting in the stream that the god guard quickly forgot who had shoved him, and what his job was, and how to swim.

  But the others of the jati saw what Keeper had done, and their purpose came back ever more clearly to their consciousness. Busho shoved the other guard into the stream: “Justice!” he shouted after the suddenly absent-minded swimmer. “Life is short indeed!”

  Other guards appeared upstream on the bank of the Final River, hurrying towards them. The members of the jati acted quickly, and for once like a team; by twisting and tangling the banner hanging down the wall, they made it into a kind of rope they could use to pull themselves up the Red Wall. Busho and Keeper and Iagogeh and Pounds the Rock and Straight Arrow and Zig-zag and all the rest hauled themselves up to the top of the wall, which was broad enough to sprawl onto. There they could catch their breath, and have a look around: back down into the dark and smoky bardo, where a struggle even more chaotic than usual had broken out; it looked like they had started a general revolt; and then forward, down onto the world, swathed in clouds.

  “It looks like that time when they took Butterfly up that mountain to sacrifice her,” Keeper said. “I remember that now.”

  “Down there we can make something new,” Iagogeh said. “It’s up to us. Remember!”

  And they dived off the wall like drops of rain.

  BOOK SIX

  Widow Kang

  ONE

  A Case of Soul-theft

  The widow Kang was extremely punctilious about the ceremonial aspects of her widowhood. She referred to herself always as wei wang ren, “the person who has not yet died.” When her sons wanted to celebrate her fortieth birthday she demurred, saying “This is not appropriate for one who has not yet died.” Widowed at the age of thirty-five, just after the birth of her third son, she had been cast into the depths of despair; she had loved her husband Kung Xin very much. She had dismissed the idea of suicide, however, as a Ming affectation. A truer interpretation of Confucian duty made it clear that to commit suicide was to abandon one’s responsibilities to one’s children and parents-in-law, which was obviously out of the question. Widow Kang Tongbi was instead determined to remain celibate past the age of fifty, writing poetry and studying the classics and running the family compound. At fifty she would be eligible for certification as a chaste widow, and would receive a commendation in the Qianlong Emperor’s elegant calligraphy, which she planned to frame and place in the entrance to her home. Her three sons might even build a stone arch in her honour.

  Her two older sons moved around the country in the service of the imperial bureaucracy, and she raised the youngest while continuing to run the family household left in Hangzhou, now reduced in number to her son Shih, and the servants left behind by her older sons. She oversaw the sericulture that was the principal support for the household, as her older sons were not yet in a position to send much money home, and the whole process of silk production, filature and embroidery was under her command. No house under a district magistrate was ruled with any more iron hand. This too honoured Han learning, as women’s work in the better households, usually hemp and silk manufacture, was considered a virtue long before Qing policies revived official support for it.

  Widow Kang lived in the women’s quarters of the small compound, which was located near the banks of the Chu River. The outer walls were stuccoed, the inner walls wood shingle, and the women�
��s quarters, in the innermost reach of the property, were contained in a beautiful white square building with a tile roof, filled with light and flowers. in that building, and the workshops adjacent to it, Widow Kang and her women would weave and embroider for at least a few hours every day, and often several more, if the light was good. Here too Widow Kang had her youngest son recite the parts of the classics he had memorized at her command. She would work at the loom, flicking the shuttle back and forth, or in the evening simply spin thread, or work at the larger patterns of embroidery, all the while running Shih through the Analects, or Mencius, insisting on perfect memorization, just as the examiners would when the time came. Little Shih was not very good at it, even compared to his older brothers, who had been only minimally acceptable, and often he was reduced to tears by the end of the evening; but Kang Tongbi was relentless, and when he was done crying, they would get back to it. Over time he improved. But he was a nervous and unhappy boy.

  So no one was happier than Shih when the ordinary routine of the household was interrupted by festivals. All three of the Bodhisattva Guanyin’s birthdays were important holidays for his mother, especially the main one, on the nineteenth day of the sixth month. As this great festival approached, the widow would relent in her strict lessons, and make her preparations: proper reading, writing of poetry, collection of incense and food for the indigent women of the neighbourhood; these activities were added, to her already busy days. As the festival approached she fasted, and abstained from any polluting actions ‘ including becoming angry, so that she stopped Shih’s lessons for the time, and offered sacrifices in the compound’s little shrine.

  The old man in the moon tied red threads

  Around our legs when we were babies.

  We met and married; now you are gone.

  Ephemeral life is like water flowing;

  Suddenly we have been separated by death all these years.

  Tears well up as an early autumn begins.

  The one who has not yet died is dreamed of

  By a distant ghost. A crane flies, a flower falls;

  Lonely and desolate, I set aside my needlework

  And stand in the courtyard to count the geese

  Who have lost their flocks. May Bodhisattva Guanyin

  Help me get through these chill final years.

  When the day itself came they all fasted, and in the evening joined a big procession up the local hill, carrying sandalwood in a cloth sack, and twirling banners, umbrellas and paper lanterns, following their temple group’s flag, and the big pitchy torch leading the way and warding off demons. For Shih the excitement of the night march, added to the cessation of his studies, made for a grand holiday, and he walked behind his mother swinging a paper lantern, singing songs and feeling happy in a way usually impossible for him.

  “Miao Shan was a young girl who refused her father’s order to marry,” his mother told the young women walking ahead of them, although they had all heard the story before. “In a rage he committed her to a monastery, then he burned the monastery down. A bodhisattva, Dizang Wang, took her spirit to the Forest of Corpses, where she helped the unsettled ghosts. After that she went down through the levels of hell, teaching the spirits there to rise above their suffering, and she was so successful that Lord Yama returned her as the Bodhisattva Guanyin, to help the living learn these good things while they are still alive, before it’s too late for them.”

  Shih did not listen to this oft-heard tale, which he could not make sense of. It did not seem like anything in his mother’s life, and he didn’t understand her attraction to it. Singing, firelight and the strong smoky smells of incense all converged at the shrine on the top of the hill. Up there the Buddhist abbot led prayers, and people sang and ate small sweets.

  Long after moonset they trooped back down the hill and along the river path home, still singing songs in the windy darkness. Everyone from the household moved slowly along, not only because they were tired, but to accommodate Widow Kang’s mincing stride. She had very small beautiful feet, but got around almost as well as the big flat-footed servant girls, by using a quick step and a characteristic swivel of the hips, a gait that no one ever commented on.

  Shih wandered ahead, still nursing his last candle’s guttering, and by its light he glimpsed movement against their compound wall: a big dark figure, stepping awkwardly in just the way his mother did, so that he thought for a moment it was her shadow on the wall.

  But then it made a sound like a dog whimpering, and Shih jumped back and shouted a warning. The others rushed forward, Kang Tongbi at their fore, and by torchlight they saw a man in ragged robes, dirty, hunched over, staring up at them, his frightened eyes big in the torchlight.

  “Thief!” someone shouted.

  “No,” he said in a hoarse voice. “I am Bao Ssu. I’m a Buddhist monk from Soochow. I’m just trying to get water from the river. I can hear it.” He gestured, then tried to limp away towards the river sound.

  “A beggar,” someone else said.

  But sorcerers had been reported west of Hangzhou, and now Widow Kang held her lantern so close to his face that he had to squint.

  “Are you a real monk, or just one of the hairy ones that hide in their temples!”

  “A true monk, I swear. I had a certificate, but it was taken from me by the magistrate. I studied with Master Yu of the Purple Bamboo Temple.” And he began to recite the Diamond Sutra, a favourite of women past a certain age.

  Kang inspected his face carefully in the lamplight. She shuddered palpably, stepped back. “Do I know you?” she said to herself. Then to him: “I know you!”

  The monk bowed his head. “I don’t know how, lady. I come from Soochow. Perhaps you’ve visited there?”

  She shook her head, still disturbed, peering intently into his eyes. “I know you,” she whispered.

  Then to the servants she said, “Let him sleep by the back gate. Guard him, and we’ll find out more in the morning. It’s too dark now to see a man’s nature.”

  In the morning the man had been joined by a boy just a few years younger than Shih. Both were filthy, and were busy sifting the compost for the freshest scraps of food, which they wolfed down. They regarded the members of the household at the gate as warily as foxes. But they could not run away; the man’s ankles were both swollen and bruised.

  “What were you questioned for?” Kang asked sharply.

  The man hesitated, looking down at the boy. “My son and I were travelling through on our way back to the Temple of the Purple Bamboo Grove, and apparently some young boy had his queue clipped about that time.”

  Kang hissed, and the man looked her in the eye, one hand up. “We’re no sorcerers. That’s why they let us go. But my name is Bao Ssu, fourth son of Bao Ju, and a beggar they had in hand for cursing a village headmaster was questioned, and he named a sorcerer he said he had met, called Bao Ssu-ju. They thought I might be that man. But I’m no soulstealer. Just a poor monk and his son. In the end they brought the beggar back in, and he confessed he had made it all up, to stop his questioning. So they let us go.

  Kang regarded them with undiminished suspicion. It was a cardinal rule to stay out of trouble with the magistrates; so they were guilty of that, at the least.

  “Did they torture you too?” Shih asked the boy.

  “They were going to,” the boy replied, “but they gave me a pear instead, and I told them Father’s name was Bao Ssu-ju. I thought it was right.”

  Bao kept watching the widow. “You don’t mind if we get water from the river?”

  “No. Of course not. Go.” And she watched him while the man limped down the path to the river.

  “We can’t let them inside”, she decided. “And Shih, don’t you go near them. But they can keep the gate shrine. Until winter comes that will be better than the road for them, I suppose.”

  This did not surprise Shih. His mother was always adopting stray cats and castaway concubines; she helped to maintain the town orphanage, and stretched t
heir finances by supporting the Buddhist nuns. She often spoke of becoming one herself. She wrote poetry: “These flowers I walk on hurt my heart,” she would recite from one of her day poems. “When my days of rice and salt are over,” she would say, “I’ll copy out the sutras and pray all day. But until then we had all better get to the day’s work!”

  So, after that the monk Bao and his boy became fixtures at the gate, and around that part of the river, in the bamboo groves and the shrine hidden in the thinning forest there. Bao never regained a normal walk, but he was not quite as hobbled as on the night of Guanyin’s enlightenment day, and what he could not do his son Xinwu, who was strong for his size, did for both of them. On the next New Year’s Day they joined the festivities, and Bao had managed to obtain a few eggs and colour them red, so that he could give them out to Kang and Shih and other members of the household.

  Bao presented the eggs with great seriousness: “Ge Hong related that the Buddha said the cosmos is egg-shaped, and the Earth like the yolk inside it.” As he gave one to Shih he said, “Here, put it longways in your hand, and try to crush it.”

  [Giving red eggs: this was a south China custom, called ‘sending happiness for the new year’. Possibly the author means to suggest the monk Bao had lied about his place of origin.]

  Shih looked startled, and Kang objected: “It’s too pretty.”

  “Don’t worry, it’s strong. Go ahead, try to crush it. I’ll clean it up if you can.”

  Shih squeezed gingerly, turning his head aside, then harder. He squeezed until his forearm was taut. The egg held. Widow Kang took it from him and tried it herself. Her arms were very strong from embroidery, but the egg stood fast.

  “You see,” Bao said. “Eggshell is weak stuff, but the curve is strong. People are like that too. Each person weak, but together strong.”

  After that, on religious festival days Kang would often join Bao outside the gate, and discuss the Buddhist scriptures with him. The rest of the time she ignored the two, concentrating on the world inside the walls.