The Year of Rice and Salt

'They had ten or fifteen languages, thirty or forty principalities, isn't that right?' said Naser. 'They were too fractured to conquer anyone else.'

'They fought together to capture Jerusalem,' Tristan pointed out. 'The infighting gave them practice. They thought they were God's chosen people.'

' Primitives often think that.'

'Indeed.' Tristan smiled, leaning sideways to peer through the window towards the neighbourhood mosque. 'As I say, they were just like us. If they had lived, there would be more people like us.'

'There's no one like us,' Naser said sadly. 'I think they must have been very different.'

Tristan shrugged again. 'You can say anything you like about them, it doesn't matter. You can say they would have been enslaved like the Africans, or made slaves of the rest of us, or brought a golden age, or waged wars worse than the Long War…'

People shook their heads at all these impossibilities.

'… but it doesn't matter. We'll never know, so you can say whatever you like. They are our jinns.'

'It's funny how we look down on them,' Kirana observed, 'just because they died. At an unconscious level it seems like it must have been their fault. A physical weakness, or a moral failing, or a bad habit.'

'They affronted God with their pride.'

'They were pale because they were weak, or vice versa. Muzaffar has shown it, how the darker the skin, the stronger the persons. The blackest Africans are strongest of all, the palest of the Golden Horde are weakest. He did tests. The Franks were hereditarily incompetent, that was his conclusion. Losers in the evolutionary game of survival of the fittest.'

Kirana shook her head. 'It was probably just a mutation of the plague, so strong it killed off all its hosts, and therefore died itself. It could have happened to any of us. The Chinese, or us.'

'But there's a kind of anemia common around the Mediterranean, that might have made them more susceptible.

'No. It could have been us.'

'That might have been good,' Tristan said. 'They believed in a god of mercy, their Christ was all love and mercy.'

'Hard to tell that by what they did in Syria.'

'Or al Andalus '

'It was latent in them, ready to spring forth. While for us what is latent is jihad.'

'They were the same as us, you said.'

Tristan smiled under his moustache. 'Maybe. They're the blank on the map, the ruins underfoot, the empty mirror. The clouds in the sky that look like tigers.'

I, it's such a useless exercise,' Kirana reflected. 'What if this had happened, what if that had happened, what if the Golden Horde had forced the Gansu Corridor at the start of the Long War, what if the Japanese had attacked China after retaking Japan, what if the Ming had kept their treasure fleet, what if we had discovered and conquered Yingzhou, what if Alexander the Great had not died young, on and on, and they all would have made enormous differences and yet it's always entirely useless. These historians who talk about employing counterfactuals to bolster their theories, they're ridiculous. Because no one knows why things happen, you see? Anything could follow from anything. Even real history tells us nothing at all. Because we don't know if history is sensitive, and for want of a nail a civilization was lost, or if our mightiest acts are as petals on a flood, or something in between, or both at once. We just don't know, and the what ifs don't help us work it out.'

'Why do people like them so much then?'

Kirana shrugged, took a drag on her cigarette. 'More stories.'

And indeed more of them were immediately proposed, for despite their uselessness in Kirana's eyes, people enjoyed contemplating the what might have been: what if the lost Moroccan fleet of 924 had been blown to the Sugar Islands and then made it back, what if the Kerala of Travancore had not conquered much of Asia and set out his railways and legal system, what if there had been no New World islands there at all, what if Burma had lost its war with Siam…

Kirana only shook her head. 'Perhaps it would be better just to focus on the future.'

'You, a historian, say this? But the future can't be known at all!'

'Well, but it exists for us now as a project to be enacted. Ever since the Travancori enlightenment we have had a sense of the future as something we make. This new awareness of time to come is very important. It makes us a thread in a tapestry that has unrolled for centuries before us, and will unroll for centuries after us. We're midway through the loom, that's the present, and what we do casts the thread in a panic ular direction, and the picture in the tapestry changes accordingly. When we begin to try to make a picture pleasing to us and to those who come after, then perhaps you can say that we have seized history.'

NINETEEN