The Year of Rice and Salt

After that they joined a number of nuns in a meditation room, and sat chanting for a time. 'So, you are Buddhists?' Budur asked the Hodenosaunee women when the session was over, and they had gone back out into the garden.

'Yes,' Hanea said. 'It's common among our people. We find it very similar to our old religion. And I think it must also have been true that we liked the way it put us in league with the Japanese from the west side of our country, who are like us in so many other ways. We needed their help against the people from your side.'

'I see.'

They stopped before a group of women and men who were sitting in a circle chipping away at sandstone blocks, making large flat bricks, it seemed, perfectly shaped and polished. Hanea pointed at them and explained: 'These are devotional stones, for the top of Chomolungma. Have you heard of this project?'

'No.'

'Well, you know, Chomolungma was the highest mountain in the world, but the top was destroyed by Muslim artillery during the Long War. So, now there is a project started, very slow of course, to replace the top of the mountain. Bricks like these are taken there, and then climbers who ascend Chomolungma carry one brick along with their lifegas canisters, and leave it on the summit for stonemasons to work into the new summit pyramid.'

Budur stared at the dressed blocks of stone, smaller than several of the boulders decorating the courtyard garden. She was invited to pick one up, and did so; it was about as heavy as three or four books in her arms.

'It will take a lot of these?'

'Many thousands. It is a very long term project.' Hanea smiled. 'A hundred years, a thousand years? It depends on how many climbers there are who want to carry one up the mountain. A considerable mass of stone was blasted away. But a good idea, yes? A symbol of a more general restoration of the world.'

They were preparing a meal in the kitchen, and invited Budur to join them, but she excused herself, saying she needed to catch the next tram back.

'Of course,' said Hanea. 'Do give our greetings to your aunt. We look forward to meeting with her soon.'

She didn't explain what she meant, and Budur was left to think it over as she walked down to the beach stop and waited for the tram into town, huddling in its little glass shelter against the stiff blast of the wind. Half asleep, she saw an image of a line of people, carrying a whole library of stone books to the top of the world.

TEN

'Come with me to the Orkneys,' Idelba said to her. 'I could use your help, and want to show you the ruins there.'

'The Orkneys? Where are they again?'

It turned out they were the northernmost of the Keltic Isles, above Scotland. Most of Britain was occupied by a population that had originated in al Andalus, the Maghrib and west Africa; then during the Long War the Hodenosaunee had built a big naval base in a bay surrounded by the main Orkney island, and they were still there, overseeing Firanja in effect, but also protecting by their presence some remnants of the original population, Kelts who had survived the influx of both Frank and Firanji, and of course the plague. Budur had read tales of these tall, pale-skinned, red haired, blue eyed survivors of the great plague.

And as she and Idelba sat at a window table in the gondola of their airship, watching England's green hills pass slowly underneath them, dappled by cloud shadow and cut into large squares by crops, hedgerows and grey stone walls, she wondered what it would be like to stand before a true Kelt – whether she would be able to bear their mute accusatory gaze, stand without flinching before the sight of their albinoesque skin and eyes.

But of course it was not like that at all. They landed to find the Orkney islands were more rolling grassy hills, with scarcely a tree to be seen, except clustered around whitewashed farmhouses with chimneys at both ends, a design ubiquitous and apparently ancient, as it was replicated in grey ruins in fields near the current versions. And the Orcadians were not the spavined freckled inbred halfwits Budur had been expecting from the tales of the white slaves of the Ottoman sultan, but burly shouting fishermen in oils, red faced and straw haired in some cases, black- or brown-haired in others, shouting at each other like fisherfolk in any of the villages of the Nsarene coast. They were unselfconscious in their dealings with Firanjis, as if they were the normal ones and the Firanjis the exotics; which of course was true here. Clearly for them the Orkneys were all the world.