The Years of Rice and Salt

1

One night can change the world.

The Doorkeepers sent runners out with strings of wampum, announcing a council meeting at Floating Bridge. They wanted to raise to chiefdom the foreigner they called Fromwest. The fifty sachems had agreed to the meeting, as there was nothing unusual about it. There were many more chiefs than sachems, and the title died with the man, and each nation was free to choose its own, depending on what happened on the warpath and in the villages. The only unusual feature of this raising-up was the foreign birth of the candidate, but he had been living with the Doorkeepers for some time, and word had spread through the nine nations and the eight tribes that he was interesting.

He had been rescued by a war party of Doorkeepers who had run far to the west to inflict another shock on the Sioux, the western people bordering the Hodenosaunee. The warriors had come on a Sioux torture, the victim hung by his chest from hooks, and a fire building under him. While waiting for their ambush to set, the warriors had been impressed by the victim’s speech, which was in a comprehensible version of the Doorkeeper dialect, as if he had seen them out there.

The usual behavior while being tortured was a passionate laughter in the faces of one’s enemies, to show that no pain inflicted by man can triumph over the spirit. This foreigner hadn’t been like that. Calmly he remarked to his captors, in Doorkeeper rather than Sioux: “You are very incompetent torturers. What wounds the spirit is not passion, for all passion is encouragement. As you hate me you help me. What really hurts is to be ground like acorns in a grinding hole. Where I come from they have a thousand devices to tear the flesh, but what hurts is their indifference. Here you remind me I am human and full of passion, a target of passion. I am happy to be here. And I am about to be rescued by warriors much greater than you.”

The Senecans lying in ambush had taken this as an undeniable sign to attack, and with war whoops they had descended on the Sioux and scalped as many as they could catch, while taking particular care to rescue the captive who had spoken so eloquently, and in their own tongue.

How did you know we were there? they asked him.

Suspended as high as he was, he said, he had seen their eyes out in the trees.

And how do you know our language?

There is a tribe of your kinsmen on the west coast of this island, who moved there long ago. I learned your language from them.

And so they had nursed him and brought him home, and he lived with the Doorkeepers and the Great Hill People, near Niagara, for several moons. He went on the hunt and the warpath, and word of his accomplishments had spread through the nine nations, and many people had met him and been impressed. No one was surprised at his nomination to chief.

The council was set for the hill at the head of Canandaigua Lake, where the Hodenosaunee had first appeared in the world, out of the ground like moles.

Hill People, Granite People, Flint Owners, and Shirt Weavers, who came up out of the south two generations before, having had bad dealings with the people who had come over the sea from the east, all walked west on the Longhouse Trail, which extends across the league’s land from east to west. They encamped at some distance from the Doorkeepers’ council house, sending runners to announce their arrival, according to the old ways. The Senecan sachems confirmed the day of the council, and repeated their invitation.

On the appointed morning before dawn, people rose and gathered their rolls, and hunched around fires and a quick meal of burnt corn cakes and maple water. It was a clear sky at dawn, with only a trace of receding gray cloud to the east, like the finely embroidered hems of the coats the women were donning. The mist on the lake swirled as if twisted by sprites skating over the lake, to join a sprite council matching the human one, as often occurred. The air was cool and damp, with no hint of the oppressive heat that was likely to arrive in the afternoon.

The visiting nations trooped onto the water meadows at the lakeshore and gathered in their accustomed places. By the time the sky lightened from gray to blue there were already a few hundred people there to listen to the Salute to the Sun, sung by one of the old Senecan sachems.

The Onandaga nations keep the council brand, and also the wampum into which the laws of the league have been talked, and now their powerful old sachem, Keeper of the Wampum, rose and displayed in his outstretched hands the belts of wampum, heavy and white. The Onondagas are the central nation, their council fire the seat of the league’s councils. Keeper of the Wampum trod a pedestrian dance around the meadow, chanting something most of them heard only as a faint cry.

A fire was kindled at the center point, and pipes passed around. The Mohawks, Onondagas, and Senecans, brother to each other and father to the other six, settled west of the fire; the Oneidas, Cayugas, and Tuscaroras sat to the east; the new nations, Cherokee, Shawnee, and Choctaw, sat to the south. The sun cracked the horizon; its light flooded the valley like maple water, poured over everything and making it summer yellow. Smoke curled, gray and brown turned to one. A morning without wind, and the wisps on the lake burned away. Birds sang from the forest canopy to the east of the meadow.

Out of the arrows of shadow and light walked a short, broad-shouldered man, barefoot and dressed only in a runner’s waist belt. He had a round face, very flat. A foreigner. He walked with his hands together, looking down humbly, and came through the junior nations to the central fire, there offering his open palms to Honowenato, Keeper of the Wampum.

Keeper said to him, “Today you become a chief of the Hodenosaunee. At these occasions it is customary for me to read the history of the league as recalled by the wampum here, and to reiterate the laws of the league that have given us peace for many generations, and new nations joining us from the sea to the Mississippi, from the Great Lakes to the Tennessee.”

Fromwest nodded. His chest was marked deeply by the puckered scars of the Sioux hooking ceremony. He was as solemn as an owl. “I am more than honored. You are the most generous of nations.”

“We are the greatest league of nations under heaven,” Keeper said. “We live here on the highest land of Longer House, with good routes down in all directions.

“In each nation there are the eight tribes, divided in two groups. Wolf, Bear, Beaver, and Turtle; then Deer, Snipe, Heron, and Hawk. Each member of the Wolf tribe is brother and sister to all other Wolves, no matter what nation they come from. The relationship with other Wolves is almost stronger than the relation with those of one’s nation. It is a cross-relation, like warp and weft in basket-weaving and cloth-making. And so we are one garment. We cannot disagree as nations, or it would tear the fabric of the tribes. Brother cannot fight brother, sister cannot fight sister.

“Now, Wolf, Bear, Beaver, and Turtle, being brother and sister, cannot intermarry. They must marry out of Hawk, Heron, Deer, or Snipe.”

Fromwest nodded at each pronouncement of Keeper, made in the heavy, ponderous tones of a man who had labored all his life to make this system work, and to extend it far and wide. Fromwest had been declared a member of the Hawk tribe, and would play with the Hawks in the morning’s lacrosse match. Now he watched Keeper with a hawk’s intensity, taking in the irascible old man’s every word, oblivious to the growing crowd at lakeside. The crowd in turn went about its own affairs, the women at their fires preparing the feast, some of the men setting out the lacrosse pitch on the biggest water meadow.

Finally Keeper was done with his recital, and Fromwest addressed all in earshot.

“This is the great honor of my life,” he said loudly and slowly, his accent strange but comprehensible. “To be taken in by the finest people of the Earth is more than any poor wanderer could hope for. Although I did hope for it. I spent many years crossing this great island, hoping for it.”

He bowed his head, hands together.

“A very unassuming man,” remarked Iagogeh, the One Who Hears, wife of Keeper of the Wampum. “And not so young either. It will be interesting to hear what he says tonight.”

“And to see how he does in the games,” said Tecarnos, or Dropping Oil, one of Iagogeh’s nieces.

“Tend the soup,” said Iagogeh.

“Yes, mother.”

The lacrosse field was being inspected by the field judges for rocks and rabbit holes, and the tall poles of the gates were set up at either end of the field. As always, the games set the Wolf, Bear, Beaver, and Turtle tribes against Deer, Snipe, Hawk, and Heron. The betting was active, and wagered goods were laid out by the managers in neat rows, mostly personal items of ornamentation, but also flints, flutes, drums, bags of tobacco and pipes, needles and arrows, two flintlock pistols, and four muskets.

The two teams and the referees gathered at midfield, and the crowd bordered the green field and stood on the hill overlooking it. The day’s match was to be a ten-on-ten, so five passes through the gate would win. The head referee listed the main rules, as always: no touching the ball with hand, foot, limb, body, or head; no deliberate hitting of opponents with the ball bats. He held up the round ball, made of deerskin filled with sand, about the size of his fist. The twenty players stood ten to a side, defending their goals, and one from each side came forward to contest the dropped ball that would start the match. To a great roar from the crowd the referee dropped the ball and retreated to the side of the field, where he and the others would watch for any infraction of the rules.

The two team leaders fenced madly for the ball, the hooped nets at the end of their bats scraping the ground and knocking together. Though hitting another person was forbidden, striking another player’s bat with yours was allowed; it was a chancy play, however, as a mistaken strike on flesh would give the hit player a free shot at the gate. So the two players whacked away until the Heron scooped the ball up and flicked it back to one of his teammates, and the running began.

Opponents ran at the ball carrier, who twisted through them as long as he could, then passed the ball with a flick of his bat, into the net of one of his teammates. If the ball fell to the ground then most of the players nearby converged on it, bats clattering violently as they struggled for possession. Two players from each team stood back from this scrum, on defense in case an opponent caught up the ball and made a dash for the gate.

Soon enough it became clear that Fromwest had played lacrosse before, presumably among the Doorkeepers. He was not as young as most of the other players, nor as fleet as the fastest runners on each side, but the fastest were set guarding each other, and Fromwest had only to face the biggest of the Bear-Wolf-Beaver-Turtle team, who could counter his low and solid mass with body checks, but did not have Fromwest’s quickness. The foreigner held his bat in both hands like a scythe, out low to the side or before him, as if inviting a slash that would knock the ball free. But his opponents soon learned that such a slash would never land, and if they tried it, Fromwest would spin awkwardly and be gone, stumbling forward quite quickly for a big short man. When other opponents blocked him, his passes to open teammates were like shots from a bow; they were if anything perhaps too hard, as his teammates had some trouble catching his throws. But if they did, off to the gate they scampered, waving their bats to confuse the final gate guard, and screaming along with the excited crowd. Fromwest never shouted or said a word, but played in an uncanny silence, never taunting the other team or even meeting their eyes, but watching either the ball or, it seemed, the sky. He played as if in a trance, as if confused; and yet when his teammates were tracked down and blocked, he was always somehow open for a pass, no matter how hard his guard, or soon guards, ran to cover him. Surrounded teammates, desperately keeping their bat free to throw the ball out, would find Fromwest there in the only direction the ball could be thrown, stumbling but miraculously open, and they would flip it out to him and he would snare the ball dexterously and be off on one of his uncertain runs, cutting behind people and across the field at odd angles, wrong-headed angles, until he was blocked and an opportunity to pass opened, and one of his hard throws would flick over the grass as if on a string. It was a pleasure to watch, comical in its awkward look, and the crowd roared as the Deer-Snipe-Hawk-Heron team threw the ball past the diving guardian and through the gate. Seldom had a first score happened faster.

After that the Bear-Wolf-Beaver-Turtle team did what it could to stop Fromwest, but they were puzzled by his strange responses, and could not defend well against him. If they ganged up on him, he passed out to his fast young teammates, who were growing bolder with their success. If they tried to cover him singly, he weaved and bobbed and stumbled in seeming confusion past his guard, until he was within striking distance of the gate, when he would spin, suddenly balanced, his bat at knee height, and with a turn of the wrist launch the ball through the gate like an arrow. No one there had ever seen such hard throws.

Between scores they gathered on the sidelines to drink water and maple water. The Bear-Wolf-Beaver-Turtle team conferred grimly, made substitutions. After that an “accidental” bat blow to Fromwest’s head gashed his scalp and left him covered with his own red blood, but the foul gave him a free shot, which he converted from near midfield, to a great roar. And it did not stop his weird but effective play, nor gain his opponents even a glance from him. Iagogeh said to her niece, “He plays as if the other team were ghosts. He plays as if he were out there by himself, trying to learn how to run more gracefully.” She was a connoisseur of the game, and it made her happy to see it.

Much more quickly than was normal, the match was four to one in favor of the junior side, and the senior tribes gathered to discuss strategy. The women gave out gourds of water and maple water, and Iagogeh, a Hawk herself, sidled next to Fromwest and offered him a water gourd, as she had seen earlier that that was all he was taking.

“You need a good partner now,” she murmured as she crouched beside him. “No one can finish alone.”

He looked at her, surprised. She pointed with a gesture of her head at her nephew Doshoweh, Split the Fork. “He’s your man,” she said, and was off.

The players regathered at midfield for the drop, and the Bear-Wolf-Beaver-Turtle team left behind only a single man to defend. They got the ball, and pressed west with a fury born of desperation. Play went on for a long time, with neither side gaining advantage, both running madly up and down the field. Then one of the Deer-Snipe-Hawk-Herons hurt his ankle, and Fromwest called on Doshoweh to come out.

The Bear-Wolf-Beaver-Turtle team pressed forward again, pushing at the new player. But one of their passes came too near Fromwest, who snagged it out of the air while leaping over a fallen man. He flipped it to Doshoweh and all converged on the youngster, who looked frightened and vulnerable; but he had the presence of mind to make a long toss downfield, back to Fromwest, already running full speed. Fromwest caught the toss and everyone took off in pursuit of him. But it seemed he had an extra turn of speed he had never yet revealed, for no one could catch up to him before he reached the eastern gate, and after a feint with body and bat he spun and fired the ball past the guardian and far into the woods, to end the match.

The crowd erupted with cheers. Hats and bags of tobacco filled the air and rained down on the field. The contestants lay flat on their backs, then rose and gathered in a great hug, overseen by the referees.

Afterward Fromwest sat on the lakeshore with the others. “What a relief,” he said. “I was getting tired.” He allowed some of the women to wrap his head wound in an embroidered cloth, and thanked them, face lowered.

In the afternoon the younger ones played the game of throwing javelins through a rolling hoop. Fromwest was invited to try it, and he agreed to make one attempt. He stood very still, and threw with a gentle motion, and the javelin flew through the hoop, leaving it rolling on. Fromwest bowed and gave up his place. “I played that game when I was a boy,” he said. “It was part of the training to become a warrior, what we called a samurai. What the body learns it never forgets.”

Iagogeh witnessed this exhibit, amd went to her husband, Keeper of the Wampum. “We should invite Fromwest to tell us more about his country,” she said to him. He nodded, frowning a little at her interference as he always did, even though they had discussed every aspect of the league’s affairs, every day for forty years. That was the way Keeper was, irritable and glowering; but all because the league meant so much to him, so that Iagogeh ignored his demeanor. Usually.

The feast was readied and they set to. As the sun dropped into the forest the fires roared bright in the shadows, and the ceremonial ground between the four cardinal fires became the scene of hundreds of people filing past the food, filling their bowls with spiced hominy and corn cakes, bean soup, cooked squash, and roasted meat of deer, elk, duck, and quail. Things grew quiet as people ate. After the main course came popcorn and strawberry jelly sprinkled with maple sugar, usually taken more slowly, and a great favorite of the children.

During this sunset feast Fromwest wandered the grounds, a goose drumstick in hand, introducing himself to strangers and listening to their stories, or answering their questions. He sat with his teammates’ families and recalled the triumphs of the day on the lacrosse field. “That game is like my old job,” he said. “In my country warriors fight with weapons like giant needles. I see you have needles, and some guns. These must have come from one of my old brothers, or the people who come here from over your eastern sea.”

They nodded. Foreigners from across the sea had established a fortified village down on the coast, near the entrance of the big bay at the mouth of East River. The needles had come from them, as well as tomahawk blades of the same substance, and guns.

“Needles are very valuable,” Iagogeh said. “Just ask Needle-breaker.”

People laughed at Needle-breaker, who grinned with embarrassment.

Fromwest said, “The metal is melted out of certain rocks, red rocks that have the metal mixed in them. If you make a fire hot enough, in a big clay oven, you could make your own metal. The right kind of rocks are just south of your league’s land, down in the narrow curved valleys.” He drew a rough map on the ground with a stick.

Two or three of the sachems were listening along with Iagogeh. Fromwest bowed to them. “I mean to speak to the council of sachems about these matters.”

“Can a clay oven hold fires hot enough?” Iagogeh asked, inspecting the big leather-punch needle she kept on one of her necklaces.

“Yes. And the black rock that burns, burns as hot as charcoal. I used to make swords myself. They’re like scythes, but longer. Like blades of grass, or lacrosse bats. As long as the bats, but edged like a tomahawk or a blade of grass, and heavy, sturdy. You learn to swing them right”—he swished a hand backhanded before them—“and off with your head. No one can stop you.”

Everyone in earshot was interested in this. They could still see him whipping his bat around him, like an elm seed spinning down on the wind.

“Except a man with a gun,” the Mohawk sachem Sadagawadeh, Even-tempered, pointed out.

“True. But the important part of the guns are tubes of the same metal.”

Sadagawadeh nodded, very interested now. Fromwest bowed.

Keeper of the Wampum had some Neutral youths round up the other sachems, and they wandered around the grounds until they found all fifty. When they returned, Fromwest was sitting in a group, holding out a lacrosse ball between thumb and forefinger. He had big square hands, very scarred.

“Here, let me mark the world on this. The world is covered by water, mostly. There are two big islands in the world lake. Biggest island is on opposite side of world from here. This island we are on is big, but not as big as big island. Half as big, or less. How big the world lakes, not so sure.”

He marked the ball with charcoal to indicate the islands in the great world sea. He gave Keeper the lacrosse ball. “A kind of wampum.”

Keeper nodded. “Like a picture.”

“Yes, a picture. Of the whole world, on a ball, because the world is a big ball. And you can mark it with the names of the islands and lakes.”

Keeper didn’t look convinced, but what he was put off by, Iagogeh couldn’t tell. He instructed the sachems to get ready for the council.

Iagogeh went off to help with the cleanup. Fromwest brought bowls over to the lakeside to be washed.

“Please,” Iagogeh said, embarrassed. “We do that.”

“I am no one’s servant,” Fromwest said, and continued to bring bowls to the girls for a while, asking them about their embroidery. When he saw Iagogeh had drawn back to sit down on a bit of raised bank, he sat on the bank beside her.

As they watched the girls, he said, “I know that Hodenosaunee wisdom is such that the women decide who marries whom.”

Iagogeh considered this. “I suppose you could say that.”

“I am a Doorkeeper now, and a Hawk. I will live the rest of my days here among you. I too hope to marry someday.”

“I see.” She regarded him, looked at the girls. “Do you have someone in mind?”

“Oh no!” he said. “I would not be so bold. That is for you to decide. After your advice concerning lacrosse players, I am sure you will know best.”

She smiled. She looked at the festive dress of the girls, aware or unaware of their elders’ presence. She said, “How many summers have you seen?”

“Thirty-five or so, in this life.”

“You have had other lives?”

“We all have. Don’t you remember?”

She regarded him, unsure if he was serious. “No.”

“The memories come in dreams, mostly, but sometimes when something happens that you recognize.”

“I’ve had that feeling.”

“That’s what it is.”

She shivered. It was cooling down. Time to get to the fire. Through the net of leafy branches overhead a star or two winked. “Are you sure you don’t have a preference?”

“None. Hodenosaunee women are the most powerful women in this world. Not just the inheritance and the family lines, but choosing the marriage partnerships. That means you are deciding who comes back into the world.”

She scoffed at that: “If children were like their parents.” The offspring she and Keeper had had were all very alarming people.

“The one who comes into the world was there waiting. But many were waiting. Which one comes depends on which parents.”

“Do you think so? Sometimes, when I watched mine—they were only strangers, invited into the longhouse.”

“Like me.”

“Yes. Like you.”

Then the sachems found them, and took Fromwest to his raising-up.

Iagogeh made sure the cleaning was near its finish, then went after the sachems, and joined them to help prepare the new chief. She combed his straight black hair, much the same as hers, and helped him tie it up the way he wanted, in a topknot. She watched his cheery face. An unusual man.

He was given appropriate waist and shoulder belts, each a winter’s work for some skillful woman, and in these he suddenly looked very fine, a warrior and a chief, despite his flat round face and hooded eyes. He did not look like anyone she had ever met, certainly not like the one glimpse she had had of the foreigners who had come over the eastern sea to their shores. But she was beginning to feel he was familiar anyhow, in a way that made her feel peculiar.

He looked up at her, thanking her for her help. When she met his gaze she felt some odd sense of recognition.

Some branches and several great logs were thrown on the central fire, and the drums and turtleshell rattles grew loud as the fifty sachems of the Hodenosaunee gathered in their great circle for the raising-up. The crowd drew in behind them, maneuvering and then sitting down so all could see, forming a kind of broad valley of faces.

The raising-up ceremony for a chief was not long compared to that of the fifty sachems. The sponsoring sachem stepped forward and announced the nomination of the chief. In this case it was Big Forehead, of the Hawk tribe, who stood forth and told them all again the story of Fromwest, how they had come across him being tortured by the Sioux, how he had been instructing the Sioux in the superior methods of torture found in his own country; how he already spoke an unfamiliar version of the Doorkeeper dialect, and how it had been his hope to come visit the People of the Longhouse before his capture by the Sioux. How he had lived among the Doorkeepers and learned their ways, and led a band of warriors far down the Ohio River to rescue many Senecan people enslaved by the Lakotas, guiding them so that they were able to effect the rescue and bring them home. How this and other actions had made him a candidate for chiefdom, with the support of all who knew him.

Big Forehead went on to say that the sachems had conferred that morning, and approved the choice of the Doorkeepers, even before Fromwest’s display of skill in lacrosse. Then with a roar of acclamation Fromwest was led into the circle of sachems, his flat face shiny in the firelight, his grin so broad that his eyes disappeared in their folds of flesh.

He held out a hand, indicating he was ready to make his speech. The sachems sat on the beaten ground so that the whole congregation could see him. He said, “This is the greatest day of my life. Never as long as I live will I forget any moment of this beautiful day. Let me tell you now how I came to this day. You have heard only part of the story. I was born on the island Hokkaido, in the island nation Nippon, and grew up there as a young monk and then a samurai, a warrior. My name was Busho.

“In Nippon people arranged their affairs differently. We had a group of sachems with a single ruler, called the emperor, and a tribe of warriors were trained to fight for the rulers, and make the farmers give part of their crops to them. I left the service of my first ruler because of his cruelty to his farmers, and became a ronin, a warrior without tribe.

“I lived like that for years, wandering the mountains of Hokkaido and Honshu as beggar, monk, singer, warrior. Then all Nippon was invaded by people from farther west, on the great island of the world. These people, the Chinese, rule half the other side of the world, or more. When they invaded Nippon no great kamikaze storm wind came to sink their canoes, as always had happened before. The old gods abandoned Nippon, perhaps because of the Allah worshipers who had taken over its southernmost islands. In any case, with the water passable at last, they were unstoppable. We used banks of guns, chains in the water, fire, ambush in the night, swimming attacks over the inner sea, and we killed a great many of them, fleet after fleet, but they kept coming. They established a fort on the coast we could not eject them from, a fort protecting a long peninsula, and in a month they had filled that peninsula. Then they attacked the whole island at once, landing on every west beach with thousands of men. All the people of the Hodenosaunee league would have been but a handful in that host. And though we fought and fought, back up into the hills and mountains where only we knew the caves and ravines, they conquered the flatlands, and Nippon, my nation and my tribe, was no more.

“By then I should have died a hundred times over, but in every battle some fluke or other would save me, and I would prevail over the enemy at hand, or slip away and live to fight another time. Finally there were only scores of us left in all Honshu, and we made a plan, and joined together one night and stole three of the Chinese transport canoes, huge vessels like many floating longhouses tied together. We sailed them east under the command of those among us who had been to Gold Mountain before.

“These ships had cloth wings held up on poles to catch the wind, like those you may have seen the foreigners from the east use, and most winds come from the west, there as here. So we sailed east for a few moons, and when the winds were bad drifted on a great current in the sea.

“When we reached Gold Mountain we found other Nipponese had gotten there before us, either by months, or years, or scores of years. There were great-grandchildren of settlers there, speaking an older form of Nipponese. They were happy to see a band of samurai land; they said we were like the legendary fifty-three ronin, because Chinese ships had already arrived, and sailed into the harbor and shelled the villages with their great guns, before leaving to return to China to tell their emperor that we were there to be put to the needle.” He poked to show how death from a giant needle would take place, his mimicry horribly suggestive.

“We resolved to help our tribes there to defend the place and make it a new Nippon, with the idea of eventually returning to our true home. But a few years later the Chinese appeared again, not on ships coming in through the Gold Gate, but on foot from the north, with a great army, building roads and bridges as they went, and speaking of gold in the hills. Once again the Nipponese were exterminated like rats in a granary, sent reeling south or east, into a waste of steep mountains where only one in ten survived.

“When the remnants were safely hidden away in caves and ravines, I resolved that I would not see the Chinese overrun Turtle Island as they are overrunning the great world island to the west, if I could help it. I lived with tribes and learned some language, and over the years I made my way east, over deserts and great mountains, a bare waste of rock and sand held so high up to the sun that it is cooked everywhere and the ground is like burned corn, it crunches underfoot. The mountains are enormous rock peaks with narrow canyons leading through them. On the broad eastern slope of these mountains are the grasslands beyond your rivers, covered with great herds of buffalo, and tribes of people who live off them in encampments. They move north or south with the buffalo, wherever they go. These are dangerous people, always fighting each other despite their plenty, and I took care to hide myself when I traveled among them. I walked east until I came on some slave farmers who were from the Hodenosaunee, and from what they told me, in a language that to my surprise I could already understand, the Hodenosaunee were the first people I had heard of who might be able to defeat the invasion of the Chinese.

“So I sought the Hodenosaunee, and came here, sleeping inside logs, and creeping about like a snake to see what I could of you. I came up the Ohio and explored all around this land, and rescued a Senecan slave girl and learned more words from her, and then one day we were captured by a Sioux war party. It was the girl’s mistake, and she fought so hard they killed her. And they were killing me too, when you arrived and saved me. As they were testing me, I thought, A Senecan war party will rescue you—there is one out there even now. There are their eyes, reflecting the firelight. And then you were there.”

He threw out his arms, and cried, “Thank you, people of the Longhouse!” He took tobacco leaves from his waist belt and tossed them gracefully into the fire. “Thank you, Great Spirit, One Mind holding us all.”

“Great Spirit,” murmured all the people together in response, feeling their concourse.

Fromwest took a long ceremonial pipe from Big Forehead, and filled it with tobacco very carefully. As he crumbled the leaves into the bowl he continued his speech.

“What I saw of your people astonished me. Everywhere else in the world, guns rule. Emperors put the gun to the heads of sachems, who put it to warriors, who put it to farmers, and they all together put it to the women, and only the emperor and some sachems have any say in their affairs. They own the land like you own your clothes, and the rest of the people are slaves of one kind or another. In all the world there are perhaps five or ten of these empires, but fewer and fewer as they run into each other, and fight until one wins. They rule the world, but no one likes them, and when the guns aren’t pointed at them, people go away or rebel, and all is violence of one against another, of man against man, and men against women. And despite all that, their numbers grow, for they herd cattle, like elk, who provide meat and milk and leather. They herd pigs, like boars, and sheep and goats, and horses that they ride on, like little buffalo. And so their numbers are grown huge, more than the stars in the sky. Between their tame animals and their vegetables, like your three sisters, squash and beans and corn, and a corn they call rice, which grows in water, they can feed so many that in each of your valleys, they might have living as many people as all the Hodenosaunee together. This is true, I have seen it with my own eyes. On your own island it is already beginning, on the far western coast, and perhaps on the eastern coast as well.”

He nodded at them all, paused to pluck a brand from the fire and light the filled pipe. He handed the smoking instrument to Keeper of the Wampum, and continued as the sachems each took one great puff from the pipe.

“Now, I have watched the Hodenosaunee as closely as a child watches its mother. I see how sons are brought up through their motherline, and cannnot inherit anything from their fathers, so that there can be no accumulation of power in any one man. There can be no emperors here. I have seen how the women choose the marriages and advise all aspects of life, how the elderly and orphans are cared for. How the nations are divided into the tribes, woven so that you are all brothers and sisters through the league, warp and weft. How the sachems are chosen by the people, including the women. How if a sachem were to do something bad they would be cast out. How their sons are nothing special, but men like any other men, soon to marry out and have sons of their own who will leave, and daughters who will stay, until all have their say. I have seen how this system of affairs brings peace to your league. It is, in all this world, the best system of rule ever invented by human beings.”

He raised his hands in thanksgiving. He refilled the pipe and got it burning again, and shot a plume of smoke into the greater smoke rising from the fire. He cast more leaves on the fire, and gave the pipe to the another sachem in the circle, Man Frightened, who indeed at this moment appeared a little awed. But the Hodenosaunee reward skills in oratory as well as skills in war, and now all listened happily as Fromwest continued.

“The best government, yes. But look you—your island is so bountiful in food that you do not have to make tools to feed yourselves. You live in peace and plenty, but you have few tools, and your numbers have not grown. Nor have you metals, or weapons made of metal. This is how it has happened; you can dig deep in the earth and find water, but why should you when there are streams and lakes everywhere? This is the way you live.

“But the big island’s people have fought each other for many generations, and made many tools and weapons, and now they can sail across the great seas on all sides of this island, and land here. And so they are coming, driven as the deer by crowds of wolves behind. You see it on your east coast, beyond Beyond the Opening. These are people from the other side of the same great island I escaped, stretching halfway around the world.

“They will keep coming! And I will tell you what will happen, if you do not defend yourselves in this island of yours. They will come, and they will build more forts on the coast, as they have begun to do already. They will trade with you, cloth for furs—cloth!—cloth for the right to own this land as if it were their clothing. When your warriors object, they will shoot you with guns, and bring more and more warriors with guns, and you will not be able to oppose them for long, no matter how many of them you kill, for they have as many people as grains of sand on the long beaches. They will pour over you like Niagara.”

He paused to let that potent image sink in.

He raised his hands. “It does not have to happen that way. A people as great as the Hodenosaunee, with its wise women and its wily warriors, a nation that every single person would gladly die for, as if for family—a people like this can learn to prevail over empires, empires in which only the emperors truly believe.

“How can we? you ask. How can we stop Niagara’s water from falling?”

He made another pause, refilling the pipe and casting more tobacco on the fire. He passed the pipe out beyond the ring of sachems.

“Here is how. Your league is expandable, as you have shown already by the inclusion of the Shirtweavers, the Shawnee, the Choctaw and the Chickasaw. You should invite all the neighboring nations to join you, then teach them your ways, and tell them of the danger from the big island. Each nation can bring its own skill and devotion to the defense of this island. If you work together, the invaders will never be able to make headway into the depths of the great forest, which is nearly impenetrable even without opposition.

“Also, and most importantly, you need to be able to make your own guns.”

Now the attention of the crowd was fixed very closely. One of the sachems held up for all to regard the musket he had obtained from the coast. Wooden stock, metal barrel, metal trigger and sparking apparatus, holding a flint. It looked sleek and unearthly in the orange firelight, gleaming like their faces, something born not made.

But Fromwest pointed at it. “Yes. Like that. Fewer parts than any basket. The metal comes from crushed rocks put in a fire. The pots and molds to hold the melted metal are made of yet harder metal, that doesn’t melt anymore. Or in clay. Same with the rod you wrap a sheet of hot metal around, to make the barrel of the gun. The fire is made hot enough by using charcoal and coal for fuel, and blowing on the fire with bellows. Also, you can stick a wheel spinning in the river’s flow, that will squeeze a bellows open and closed with the force of a thousand men.”

He went into a description of this process that appeared to be mostly in his own language. The something did something to the something. But he illustrated by blowing on a glowing branch end held before his mouth, till it burst back into yellow flame.

“Bellows are like deerskin bags, squeezed over and over in wooden hands, wooden walls on a hinge,” flapping his hands vigorously. “The devices can be pushed by the river. All work can be linked to the power of the rivers flowing by, and greatly increased. Thus the river’s power becomes yours. Niagara’s power becomes yours to command. You can make metal disks with toothed edges, connect them to the river, and cut through trees like sticks, cut trees longways into planks for houses and boats.” He gestured around them. “A forest covers the whole eastern half of Turtle Island. Numberless trees. You could make anything. Great ships to cross the great seas, to bring the fight to their shores. Anything. You could sail there and ask their people if they want to be slaves of an empire, or a tribe woven into the league. Anything!”

Fromwest paused for another toke on the pipe. Keeper of the Wampum took the opportunity to say, “You speak always of struggle and fighting. But the foreigners on the coast have been most friendly and solicitous. They trade, they give us guns for furs, they do not shoot us, or fear us. They speak of their god as if it is none of our concern.”

Fromwest nodded. “So it will be, until you look around you, and find there are foreigners all around you, in your valleys, in forts on your hilltops, and insisting that they own the land of their farm as if it were their tobacco pouch, and willing to shoot anyone who kills an animal there, or cuts a tree. And at that point they will say their law rules your law, because there are more of them and they have more guns. And they will have permanently armed warriors, ready to go on the warpath for them anywhere in the whole world. And then you will be running north to try to escape them, leaving this land here, the highest land on Earth.”

He wiggled upward to show how high. Many laughed despite their consternation. They had watched him take three or four giant pulls on the pipe, and they had all taken a puff themselves by now, so they knew how high he must be feeling. He was leaving them now, they could see it. He began to speak as from a great distance away, from inside his spirit, or out among the stars.

“They will bring disease. Many of you will die of fevers, and infections coming as if from nowhere, spreading from person to person. The diseases eat you from within, like mistletoe, growing everywhere inside you. Tiny parasites inside you, big parasites outside you, people living from your work even though they stay on the other side of the world, making you do it by the force of laws and guns. Laws like mistletoe! There to support the luxuries of an emperor around the world. So many of them that they will be able to cut down all the trees in the forest.”

He took a deep breath, and shook his head like a dog to get out of that dark place.

“Well!” he cried. “So! You must live as if you are already dead! Live as if you are warriors already captured, do you understand? The foreigners on the coast must be resisted, and confined to a harbor town, if you can do it. War will come eventually, no matter what you do. But the later it comes the more you can prepare for it, and hope to win it. Defending a home is easier than conquering the other side of the world, after all. So we might succeed! Certainly we must try, for all the generations that come after us!”

Another long inhalation on the pipe.

“Therefore, guns! Guns big and small! Gunpowder. Sawmills. Horses. With these things alone, we could do it. And messages on birchbark. A particular mark for each sound in the languages. Make the mark, make the sound. Easy. So talk like this can go on all the time, at great distances in space and time, between speakers and listeners. These things are being done all over the other side of the world. Listen, your island is isolated from the other by such great seas, that you have been as on another world, all the ages since the Great Spirit made people. But now the others are coming here! To resist them you have only your understanding, your spirit, your courage, and the arrangement of your nation, like the warp and weft of your baskets, so much stronger than any mere gathering of reeds. Stronger than guns!”

Suddenly he looked up and shouted it to the eastern stars. “Stronger than guns!” To the western stars: “Stronger than guns!” To the northern stars: “Stronger than guns!” To the southern stars: “Stronger than guns!”

Many cried out with him.

He waited for silence again.

“Each new chief is allowed to ask the council of sachems, gathered to honor his raising-up, consideration of some point of policy. I now ask the sachems to look at the matter of the foreigners on the east coast, and at opposing them, by harnessing river power, and making guns, and pursuing a general campaign against them. I ask the sachems to pursue our own power over our affairs.”

He put his hands together and bowed.

The sachems stood.

Keeper said, “That is more than one proposal. But we will take the first one into consideration, and that will cover the rest.”

The sachems gathered in small bunches and began to confer, Pounds the Rock talking fast as always, making a case for Fromwest, Iagogeh could tell.

All of them are required to be of one mind in decisions like this. The sachems of each nation divide into classes of two or three men each, and these talk in low voices to each other, very concentrated on each other. When they decide the view their class will take, one of them joins representatives from the other classes in their nation—four for the Doorkeepers and the Swampers. These also confer for a while, while the sachems finished with their work consult with the pipe. Soon one sachem from each nation expresses that view to the other eight, and they see where they stand.

On this night, the conference of the eight representatives went on for a long time, so long that people began to look at them curiously. A few years before, when conferring over how to deal with the foreigners on the east coast, they had not been able to come to a unanimous view, and nothing then had been done. By accident or design, Fromwest had brought up again one of the most important and unresolved problems of their time.

Now it was somewhat similar. Keeper called a halt to the conference, and announced to the people, “The sachems will meet again in the morning. The matter before them is too large to conclude tonight, and we don’t want to delay the dancing any longer.”

This met with general approval. Fromwest bowed deeply to the sachems, and joined the first knot of dancers, who led with the turtleshell rattles. He took a rattle and shook it vigorously side to side, as oddly as he had swung his lacrosse bat. There was a fluid quality to his moves, very unlike the Hodenosaunee warriors’ dancing, which looked something like attacks with tomahawks, extremely agile and energetic, leaping up into the air over and over, singing all the while. A sheen of sweat quickly covered their bodies, and their singing was punctuated by hard sucks for air. Fromwest regarded these gyrations with an admiring grin, shaking his head to indicate how beyond his abilities these dancers were; and the crowd, pleased that there was something he was not good at, laughed and joined in the dance. Fromwest shuffled to the back, dancing with the women, like the women, and the string of dancers went around the fire, around the lacrosse field, and back to the fire. Fromwest stepped out of the snake, and took ground tobacco leaves from his pouch and placed a small amount on the tongue of each passerby, including Iagogeh and all the dancing women, whose graceful shuffling would long outlast the leaping warriors. “Shaman’s tobacco,” he explained to each person. “Shaman gift, for dancing.” It had a bitter taste, and many ate some maple water afterward to dispel it. The young men and women continued dancing, their limbs blurring in the bonfire’s light, more robust and burnished than before. The rest of the crowd, younger or older, danced slightly in place as they wandered, talking over the events of the day. Many gathered around those who were inspecting Fromwest’s lacrosse-ball map of the world, which seemed to glow in the firelit night as if burning a little at its heart.

“Fromwest,” Iagogeh said after a while, “what was in that shaman tobacco?”

Fromwest said, “I lived with a nation to the west who gave it to me. Tonight of all nights the Hodenosaunee need to take a vision quest together. A spirit voyage, as it always is. This time all out of the longhouse together.”

He took up a flute given to him, and put his fingers carefully on the stops, then played a sequence of notes, then a scale. “Ha!” he said, and looked closely at it. “Our holes are set in different places! I’ll try anyway.”

He played a song so piercing they were all dancing on the sound of it together, like birds. Fromwest winced as he played, until at last his face grew peaceful, and he played reconciled to the new scale.

When he was done he looked again at the flute. “That was ‘Sakura,’ ” he said. “The holes for ‘Sakura,’ but it came out something else. No doubt everything I say to you comes out changed in a similar fashion. And your children will take what you do and change it yet again. So it will not matter much what I say tonight, or you do tomorrow.”

One of the girls danced by holding an egg painted red, one of their toys, and Fromwest stared after her, startled by something. He looked around, and they saw that the cut on his head had started to bleed again. His eyes rolled, and he slumped as if struck, and dropped the flute. He shouted something in another language. The crowd grew quiet, and those nearest him sat on the ground.

“This has happened before,” he declared in a stranger’s voice, slow and grinding. “Oh yes—now it all comes back!” A faint cry, or moan. “Not this night, repeated exactly, but a previous visit. Listen—we live many lives. We die and then come back in another life, until we have lived well enough to be done. Once before I was a warrior from Nippon—no, from China!—” He paused, thinking that over. “Yes. Chinese. And it was my brother, Peng. He crossed Turtle Island, rock by rock, sleeping in logs, fighting a bear in her den, all the way here to the top, to this very encampment, this council house, this lake. He told me about it after we died.” He howled briefly, looked around as if searching for something, then ran off to the bone house.

Here the bones of the ancestors are stored after the individual burials have exposed them long enough to the birds and gods to have cleansed them white. They are stacked neatly in the bone house under the hill, and it is not a place people visit during dances, and rarely ever.

But shamans are notoriously bold in these matters, and the crowd watched the bone house needling light through the chinks in its bark walls, sparking as Fromwest moved his torch here and there. A huge groaning shout from him, rising to a scream, “Ahhhhhh!” and he emerged holding his torch up to illuminate a white skull, which he was jabbering at in his language.

He stopped by the fire and held up the skull to them. “You see—it’s my brother! It’s me!” He moved the broken skull beside his face, and it looked out at them from its empty eye sockets, and indeed it seemed a good match for his head. This caused everyone to stop still and listen to him again.

“I left our ship on the west coast, and wandered inland with a girl. East always, to the rising sun. I arrived here just as you were meeting in council like this, to decide on the laws you live by now. The five nations had quarreled, and then been called together by Daganoweda for a council to decide how to end the fighting in these fair valleys.”

This was true; this was the story of how the Hodenosaunee had begun.

“Daganoweda, I saw him do it! He called them together and proposed a league of nations, ruled by sachems, and by the tribes cutting across the nations, and by the old women. And all the nations agreed to it, and your league of peace was born in that meeting, in the first year, and has stayed as designed by the first council. No doubt many of you were there too, in your previous lives, or perhaps you were on the other side of the world, witnessing the monastery that I grew up in being built. Strange the ways of rebirth. Strange the ways. I was here to protect your nations from the diseases we were certain to bring. I did not bring you your marvelous government, Daganoweda did that with all the rest of you together, I knew nothing of that. But I taught you about scabbing. He brought the scabs, and taught you to make a shallow scratch and put some scab in the cut, and save some of the scab that formed, and to go through the smallpox rituals, the diet and the prayers to the smallpox god. Oh that we can heal ourselves on this Earth! And thus in the sky.”

He turned the skull to him and looked inside it. “He did this and no one knew,” he said. “No one knew who he was, no one remembers this act of mine, no record of it exists, except in my mind, intermittently, and in the existence of all the people here who would have died if I had not done it. This is what the human story is, not the emperors and the generals and their wars, but the nameless actions of people who are never written down, the good they do for others passed on like a blessing, just doing for strangers what your mother did for you, or not doing what she always spoke against. And all that carries forward and makes us what we are.”

The next part of his address was in his own language, and went on for some time. Everyone watched attentively as he spoke to the skull in his hand, and caressed it. The sight held all in its spell, and when he stopped to listen so raptly to the skull speaking back to him, they seemed to hear it too, more words in his own birdlike speech. Back and forth they spoke, and briefly Fromwest wept. It was a shock when he turned to speak to them again, in his weird Senecan:

“The past reproaches us! So many lives. Slowly we change, oh so slowly. You think it doesn’t happen, but it does. You”—he used the skull to point at Keeper of the Wampum—“you could never have become sachem when I knew you last, O my brother. You were too angry, but now you are not. And you—”

Pointing the skull at Iagogeh, who felt her heart skip within her—

“You would never have known before what to do with your great power, O my sister. You would never have been able to teach Keeper so much.

“We grow together, as the Buddha told us would happen. Only now can we understand and take on our burden. You have the finest government on this Earth, no one else has understood that all are noble, all are part of the One Mind. But this is a burden too, do you see? You have to carry it—all the unborn lives to come depend on you! Without you the world would become a nightmare. The judgment of the ancestors,” swinging the skull around like a pipe to be smoked, gesturing wildly at the bone house. His head wound was bleeding freely now and he was weeping, sobbing, the crowd watching him openmouthed, traveling out now with him into the sacred space of the shaman.

“All the nations on this island are your will-be brothers, your will-be sisters. This is how you should greet them. Hello, will-be brother! How fare you? They will recognize your soul as theirs. They will join you if you are their elder brother, showing them the way forward. Struggle between brothers and sisters will cease, and the league of the Hodenosaunee will be joined by nation after nation, tribe after tribe. When the foreigners arrive in their canoes to take your land, you can face them as one, resist their attacks, take from them what is useful and reject what is harmful, and stand up to them as equals on this Earth. I see now what will happen in the time to come, I see it! I see it! I see it! I see it! The people I will become dream now and speak back to me, through me, they tell me all the world’s people will stand before the Hodenosaunee in wonder at the justice of its government. The story will move from longhouse to longhouse, to everywhere people are enslaved by their rulers, they will speak to each other of the Hodenosaunee, and of a way things could be, all things shared, all people given the right to be a part of the running of things, no slaves and no emperors, no conquest and no submission, people like birds in the sky. Like eagles in the sky! Oh bring it, oh come the day, oh ooohhhhhhhhhhhh…”

Fromwest paused then, sucking in air. Iagogeh approached him and tied a cloth around his head, to stanch the bleeding from his wound. He reeked of sweat and blood. He stared right through her, then looked up at the night sky and said “Ah,” as if the stars were birds, or the twinkling of unborn souls. He stared at the skull as if wondering how it got there in his hand. He gave it to Iagogeh, and she took it. He stepped toward the young warriors, sang feebly the first part of one of the dance songs. This released the men from the spell cast over them, and they leaped to their feet, and the drumming and rattling picked up again. Quickly the dancers surrounded the fire.

Fromwest took the skull back from Iagogeh. She felt as if she were giving him his head. He walked slowly back to the bone house, weaving like a drunk, looking smaller with every weary step. He went inside without a torch. When he came out his hands were free, and he took a flute given him, and returned to the edge of the dance. There he swayed feebly in place and played with the other musicians, tootling rhythmically with no particular melody. Iagogeh shuffled in the dance, and when she passed him she pulled him back into the line, and he followed her.

“That was good,” she said. “That was a good story you told.”

“Was it?” he said. “I don’t remember.”

She was not surprised. “You were gone. Another Fromwest spoke through you. It was a good story.”

“Did the sachems think so?”

“We’ll tell them to think so.”

She led him through the crowd, testing the look of him against one maid or another who had occurred to her as possibilities. He did not react to any of these pairings, but only danced and breathed through his flute, looking down or into the fire. He appeared drained and small, and after more dancing Iagogeh led him away from the fire. He sat down cross-legged, playing the flute with his eyes closed, adding wild trills to the music.

In the time before dawn the fire crumbled to a great mound of gray coals, glowing orangely here and there. Many people had gone into the Onondagas’ longhouse to sleep, and many others were curled like dogs in their blankets on the grass under the trees. Those still awake sat in circles by the fire, singing songs or telling stories while they waited for dawn, tossing a branch on the fire to watch it catch and blaze.

Iagogeh wandered the lacrosse field, tired but buzzing in her limbs from the dance and the tobacco. She looked for Fromwest, but he was not to be found, in longhouse, on meadow, in the forest, in the bone house. She found herself wondering if the whole marvelous visitation had been only a dream they had shared.

The sky to the east was turning gray. Iagogeh went down to the lakeshore, to the women’s area, beyond a small forested spit of land, thinking to wash before anyone else was around. She took off her clothes, all but her shift, and walked out into the lake until she was thigh deep, then washed herself.

Across the lake she saw a disturbance. A black head in the water, like a beaver. It was Fromwest, she decided, swimming like a beaver or an otter in the lake. Perhaps he had become an animal again. His head was preceded by a series of ripples in the water. He breathed like a bear.

She had been still for some time, and when he put his feet on the bottom, down by the spit where it was muddy, she turned and stood facing him. He saw her and froze. He was wearing only his waist belt, as in the game. He put his hands together, bowed deeply. She sloshed slowly toward him, off the sand bottom and onto soft mud.

“Come,” she said quietly. “I have chosen for you.”

He regarded her calmly. He looked much older than he had the day before. “Thank you,” he said, and added something from his tongue. A name, she thought. Her name.

They walked onshore. Her foot hit a snag and she put a hand on his offered forearm, decorously, to balance herself. On the bank she dried herself with her fingers and dressed, while he retrieved his clothes and did likewise. Side by side they walked back to the fire, past the humming dawn watchers, through the knots of sleeping bodies. Iagogeh stopped before one. Tecarnos, a young woman, not a girl, but unmarried. Sharp tongued and funny, intelligent and full of spirit. In sleep she did not reveal much of this, but one leg was stretched out gracefully, and under her blanket she looked strong.

“Tecarnos,” Iagogeh said softly. “My daughter. Daughter of my eldest sister. Wolf tribe. A good woman. People rely on her.”

Fromwest nodded, hands again pressed together before him, watching her. “I thank you.”

“I’ll talk to the other women about it. We’ll tell Tecarnos, and the men.”

He smiled, looked around him as if seeing through everything. The wound on his forehead looked raw and was still seeping watery blood. The sun blinked through the trees to the east, and the singing back by the fires was louder.

She said, “You two will bring more good souls into the world.”

“We can hope.”

She put her hand on his arm, as she had when they emerged from the lake. “Anything can happen. But we”—meaning the two of them, or the women, or the Hodenosaunee—“we will make the best chance we can. That’s all you can do.”

“I know.” He looked at her hand on his arm, at the sun in the trees. “Maybe it will be all right.”

Iagogeh, the teller of this tale, saw all these things herself.

2

Thus it was that many years later, when the jati had again convened in the bardo, after years of work fighting off the foreigners living at the mouth of the East River, fighting to hold together their peoples in the face of all the devastating new diseases that struck them, making alliances with Fromwest’s people embattled in like fashion on the west coast of their island, doing all they could to knit together the nations and to enjoy life in the forest with their kin and their tribes, Fromwest approached Keeper of the Wampum and said to him proudly, “You have to admit it, I did what you demanded of me, I went out in the world and fought for what was right! And we did some good again!”

Keeper put a hand to the shoulder of his young brother as he approached the great edifice of the bardo’s dais of judgment, and said, “Yes, you performed well, youth. We did what we could.”

But already he was looking ahead at the bardo’s enormous towers and battlements, wary and unsatisfied, focused on the tasks ahead. Things in the bardo seemed to have gotten even more Chinese since their last time there, like all the rest of the realms, perhaps, or perhaps it was just a coincidence having to do with their angle of approach, but the great wall of the dais was broken up into scores of levels, leading into hundreds of chambers, so that it looked somewhat like the side of a beehive.

The bureaucrat god at the entryway to this warren, one Biancheng by name, handed out guidebooks to the process facing them above, thick tomes all entitled “The Jade Record,” each hundreds of pages long, filled with detailed instructions, and with descriptions, illustrated copiously, of the various punishments they could expect to suffer for the crimes and affronteries they had committed in their most recent lives.

Keeper took one of these thick books and without hesitation swung it like a tomahawk, knocking Biancheng over his paper-laden desk. Keeper looked around at the long lines of souls waiting their turn to be judged, and saw them staring at him amazed, and he shouted at them, “Riot! Revolt! Rebel! Revolution!”, and without waiting to see what they did, he led his little jati into a chamber of mirrors, the first room on their passage through the process of judgment, where souls were to look at themselves and see what they really were.

“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, whom he had known as Fromwest. “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 skeptically. 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.

“Quit 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 Rock 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 swam, 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 spit 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 absentminded swimmer. “Life is short indeed!”

Other guards appeared upstream on the bank of the Final River, hurrying toward 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 Zigzag 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 dove off the wall like drops of rain.