The Years of Rice and Salt Read Free Page B

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    He walked the next day and all the second night. Dawn of the second day found him hurrying back through the Moravian Gate, feeling that no one would dare follow him there. Once onto the Magyar plain he headed south, into trees. In the morning's wet light he found a fallen tree and slipped deep under its exposed roots, to sleep for the rest of the day in hidden dryness.
    That night the rain stopped, and on the third morning he emerged ravenous. In short order he found, pulled, and ate meadow onions, then hunted for more substantial food. It was possible that dried meat still hung in the empty villages' storehouses, or grain in their granaries. He might also be able to find a bow and some arrows. He didn't want to go near the dead settlements, but it seemed the best way to find food, and that took precedence over everything else.
    That night he slept poorly, his stomach full and gassy with onions. At dawn he made his way south, following the big river. All the villages and settlements were empty. Any people he saw were dead on the ground. It was disturbing, but there was nothing to be done. He too was in some kind of posthumous existence, a very hungry ghost indeed. Living on from one found bite to the next, with no name or fellows, he began to close in on himself, as during the hardest campaigns on the steppes, becoming more and more an animal, his mind shrinking in like the horns of a touched snail. For many watches at a time he thought little but the Heart Sutra. Form is emptiness, emptiness form. Not for nothing had he been named Sun Wu-kong, Awake to Emptiness, in an earlier incarnation. Monkey in the void.
    He came to a village that looked untouched, skirted its edge. In an empty stable he found an unstrung bow and a quiver of arrows, all very primitive and poorly made. Something moved in the pasturage outside, and he went out and whistled up a small black mare. He caught her with onions, and quickly taught her to take him on her back.
    He rode her across a stone bridge over the big river, and slowly crossed the grain of the land southward, up and down, up and down. All the villages continued empty, their food rotted or scavenged by animals, but now he had the mare's milk and blood to sustain him, so the matter was not so urgent.
    It was autumn here, and he began to live like the bears, eating berries and honey, and rabbits shot with the ridiculous bow. Possibly it had been concocted by a child; he couldn't believe anyone older would make such a thing. It was a single bend of wood, probably ash, partly carved but still misshapen; no arrowrest, no nocking point, its pull like that of a prayer-flag line. His old bow had been a laminate of horn, maplewood, and tendon glue covered by blue leather, with a sweet pull and release, and enough power to pierce body armor from over a li away. Gone now, gone altogether beyond, lost with all the rest of his few possessions, and when he shot these twig arrows with this branch bow and missed, he would shake his head and wonder if it was even worth tracking the arrow down. It was no wonder these people had died.
    In one small village, five buildings clustered above a stream ford, the headman's house proved to have a locked larder, still stocked with dried fishcakes that were spiced with something Bold did not recognize, which made his stomach queasy. But with the strange food in him he felt his spirits rise. In a stable he found sidebags for the mare, and stuffed them with more dried food. He rode on, paying more attention than he had been to the land he was passing through.

    White-barked trees hold up black branches,
    Pine and cypress still verdant on the ridge.
    A red bird and a blue bird sit near each other
    In the same tree. Now anything is possible.

    Anything but return to his previous life. Not that he harbored any resentment of Temur; Bold would have done the same in his place. Plague was plague, and could not be treated lightly. And this plague was obviously worse than