The Year of Rice and Salt

But for now it was impossible not to feel they had failed. And so when Kheim was led into the Forbidden City, and brought before the Wanli Emperor to accept the acclaim of all the officials there, and the interested and gracious thanks of the Emperor himself, he said only, 'When a great sea has been crossed, there is no one to take credit.'

The Wanli Emperor nodded, fingering one of the gold disc ingots they had brought back, and then the big hummingbird moth of beaten gold, its feathers and antennae perfectly delineated with the utmost delicacy and skill. Kheim stared at the Heavenly Envoy, trying to see in to the hidden Emperor, the Jade Emperor inside him. Kheim said to him, 'That far country is lost in time, its streets paved with gold, its palaces roofed with gold. You could conquer it in a month, and rule over all its immensity, and bring back all the treasure that it has, endless forest and furs, turquoise and gold, more gold than there is yet now in the world; and yet still the greatest treasure in that land is already lost.'

Snowy peaks, towering over a dark land. The first blinding crack of sunlight flooding all. He could have made it then everything was so bright, he could have launched himself into pure whiteness at that moment and never come back, flowed out for ever into the All. Release, release. You have to have seen a lot to want release that much.

But the moment passed and he was on the black stage floor of the bardo's hall of judgment, on its Chinese side, a nightmare warren of numbered levels and legal chambers and bureaucrats wielding lists of souls to be remanded to the care of meticulous torturers. Above this hellish bureaucracy loomed the usual Tibet of a dais, occupied by its menagerie of demonic gods, chopping up condemned souls and chasing the pieces off to hell or a new life in the realm of preta or beast. The lurid glow, the giant dais like the side of a mesa towering above, the hallucinatorily colourful gods roaring and dancing, their swords flashing in the black air; it was judgment – an inhuman activity – not the pot calling the kettle black, but true judgment, by higher authorities, the makers of this universe. Who were the ones, after all, that had made humans as weak and craven and cruel as they so often were – so that there was a sense of doom enforced, of loaded dice, karma lashing out at whatever little pleasures and beauties the miserable subdivine sentiences might have concocted out of the mud of their existence. A brave life, fought against the odds? Go back as a dog! A dogged life, persisting despite all? Go back as a mule, go back as a worm. That's the way things work.

Thus Kheim reflected as he strode up through the mists in a growing rage, as he banged through the bureaucrats, smashing them with their own slates, their lists and tallies, until he caught sight of Kali and her court, standing in a semi circle taunting Butterfly, judging her – as if that poor simple soul had anything to answer for, compared to these butcher gods and their cons of evil evil insinuated right into the heart of the cosmos they themselves had made!

Kheim roared in wordless fury, and charged up and seized a sword from one of the death goddess's six arms, and cut off a brace of them with a single stroke; the blade was very sharp. The arms lay scattered and bleeding on the floor, flopping about – then, to Kheim's unutterable consternation, they were grasping the floorboards and moving themselves crabwise by the clenching of the fingers. Worse yet, new shoulders were growing back behind the wounds, which still bled copiously. Kheim screamed and kicked them off the dais, then turned and chopped Kali in half at the waist, ignoring the other members of his jati who stood up there with Butterfly, all of them jumping up and down and shouting 'Oh no, don't do that Kheim, don't do that, you don't understand, you have to follow protocol,' even I-Chen, who was shouting loudly over the rest of them, 'At least we might direct our efforts at the dais struts, or the vials of forgetting, something a little more technical, a little less direct!' Meanwhile Kali's upper body fisted itself around the stage, while her legs and waist staggered, but continued to stand; and the missing halves grew out of the cut parts like snail horns. And then there were two Kalis advancing on him, a dozen arms flailing swords.

He jumped off the dais, thumped down on the bare boards of the cosmos. The rest of his jati crashed down beside him, crying out in pain at the impact. 'You got us in trouble,' Shen whined.

'It doesn't work like that,' Butterfly informed him as they panted off together into the mists. 'I've seen a lot of people try. They lash out in fury and cut the hideous gods down, and how they deserve it – and yet the gods spring back up, redoubled in other people. A karmic law of this universe, my friend. Like conservation of yin and yang, or gravity. We live in a universe ruled by very few laws, but the redoubling of violence by violence is one of the main ones.'

'I don't believe it,' Kheim said, and stopped to fend off the two Kalis now pursuing them. He took a hard swing and decapitated one of the new Kalis. Swiftly another head grew back, swelling on top of the gusher on the neck of the black body, and the new white teeth of her new head laughed at him, while her bloody red eyes blazed. He was in trouble, he saw; he was going to be backed to pieces. For resisting these evil unjust absurd and horrible deities he was going to be hacked to pieces and returned to the world as a mule or a monkey or a maimed old geezer.

Transmutation

Now it so happened that as the time approached for the great alchemist's red work to reach its culmination, in the final multiplication, the projection of the sophic hydrolith into the ferment, causing tincture – that is to say, the transmuting of base metals into gold – the son in law of the alchemist, one Bahram al Bokhara, ran and jostled through the bazaar of Samarqand on last minute errands, ignoring the calls of his various friends and creditors. 'I can't stop,' he called to them, 'I'm late!'

'Late paying your debts!' said Divendi, whose coffee stall was wedged into a slot next to Iwang's workshop.

'True,' Bahram said, but stopped for a coffee. 'Always late but never bored.'

'Khalid keeps you hopping.'

'Literally so, yesterday. The big pelican cracked during a descension, and it all spilled right next to me – vitriol of Cyprus mixed with sal ammoniac.'

'Dangerous?'

'Oh my God. Where it splashed on my trousers the cloth was eaten away, and the smoke was worse. I had to run for my life!'

'As always.'

'So true. I coughed my guts out, my eyes ran all night. It was like drinking your coffee.'

'I always make yours from the dregs.'

'I know,' tossing down the last gritty shot. 'So are you coming tomorrow?'

'To see lead turned into gold? I'll be there.'

Iwang's workshop was dominated by its brick furnace. Familiar sizzle and smell of bellowed fire, tink of hammer, glowing molten glass, Iwang twirling the rod attentively: Bahram greeted the glassblower and silversmith, 'Khalid wants more of the wolf.'

'Khalid always wants more of the wolf.' Iwang continued turning his blob of hot glass. Tall and broad and big faced, a Tibetan by birth, but long a resident of Samarqand, he was one of Khalid's closest associates. 'Did he send payment this time?'

'Of course not. He said to put it on his tab.'

Iwang pursed his lips. 'He's got too many tabs these days.'

'All paid after tomorrow. He finished the seven hundred and seventyseventh distillation.'

Iwang put down his work and went to a wall stacked with boxes. He handed Bahram a small leather pouch, heavy with small beads of lead. 'Gold grows in the earth,' he said. 'Al Razi himself couldn't grow it in a crucible.'

'Khalid would debate that. And Al Razi lived a long time ago. He couldn't get the heat we can now.'

'Maybe.' Iwang was sceptical. 'Tell him to be careful.'

'Of burning himself?'

'Of the Khan burning him.'

'You'll be there to see it?'