The trip took over a month. The roads and tracks they followed were dry, and they made good time. Partly this was because Kang asked to ride in a cart rather than be carried in a palanquin or smaller chair. At first the servants were convinced this decision had caused some discord in the new couple, for Ibrahim took to riding in the covered cart with Kang, and they heard the arguing between them go on sometimes for whole days on end. But Pao walked close enough one afternoon to catch the drift of what they were saying, and she came back to the others relieved. 'It's only religion they're debating. A real pair of intel lectuals, those two.'
So the servants travelled on, reassured. They went up to Kaifeng, stayed with some of Ibrahim's Muslim colleagues there, then followed the roads paralleling the Wei River, west to Xian in Shaanxi, then over hard passes in dry hills, to Lanzhou.
By the time they arrived, Kang was amazed beyond amazement. 'I can't believe there is so much world,' she would say to Ibrahim. 'So much China! So many fields of rice and barley, so many mountains, so empty and wild. Surely we should have crossed the world by now.'
'Scarcely a hundredth part of it, according to the sailors.'
'This outlandish country is so cold and dry, so dusty and barren. How will we keep a house clean here, or warm? It's like trying to live in hell.'
'Not that bad, surely.'
'Is this really Lanzhou, the renowned city of the west? This little brown windblown mudbrick village?'
'Yes. It's growing quite rapidly, actually.'
'And we are to live here?'
'Well, I have connections here, and in Xining, a bit farther to the west. We could settle in either place.'
'Let me see Xining before we decide. It must be better than this.'
Ibrahim said nothing, but ordered their little caravan on. More days of travel, as the seventh month passed, and storm clouds rolled overhead almost every day, never quite breaking on them. Under these low ceilings the sere broken hills looked even more inhospitable than before, and except in the irrigated, terraced central flats of the long narrow valleys, there was no more agriculture to be seen. 'How do people live here?' Kang asked. 'How do they eat?'
'They herd sheep and goats,' Ibrahim said. 'Sometimes cattle. It's like this all over, west of here, all the way across the dry heart of the world.'
'Astonishing. It's like travelling back in time.'
Finally they came to Xining, another little walled mudbrick town, huddling under shattered mountainsides, in a high valley. A garrison of imperial solders manned the gates, and some new wooden barracks had been thrown up under the town walls. A big caravanserai stood empty, as it was too late in the year to start travelling. Beyond it several walled ironworks used what little power the river provided to run their stamps and forges.
'Ugh!' Kang said. 'I did not think Lanzhou could be beaten for dust, but I was wrong.'
'Wait for your decision,' Ibrahim requested. 'I want you to see Qinghai Lake. It's just a short journey farther.'
'Surely we will fall off the edge of the world.'
'Come see.'
Kang agreed without argument; indeed, it seemed to Pao that she was actually enjoying these insanely dry and barbarous regions, or at least enjoying her complaining about them. The dustier the better, her face seemed to say, no matter what words she spoke.
A few more days west on a bad road brought them through a draw to the shores of Qinghai Lake, the sight of which took speech away from all of them. By chance they had arrived on a day of wild, windy weather, with great white clouds floored by blue grey embroidery charging overhead, and these clouds were reflected in the lake's water, which in sunlight was just as blue green as the name of the lake would suggest. To the west the lake extended right off to the horizon; the curve of its visible shores was a bank of green hills. Out here in this brown desolation, it was like a miracle.
Kang got out of the cart and walked slowly down to the pebbled shore, reciting the Lotus Sutra, and holding up her hands to feel the hard rush of the wind on her palms. Ibrahim gave her some time to herself, then joined her.
'Why do you weep?' he inquired.
Sothis is the great lake,"' she recited,
NowI can at last comprehend The immensity of the universe; My life has gained new meaning! But think of all the women Who never leave their own courtyards, Who must spend their whole lives Without once enjoying a sight like this. -
Ibrahim bowed. 'Indeed. Whose poem is this?'
She shook her head, dashing the tears away. 'That was Yuen, the wife of Shen Fu, on seeing the T'ai Hu. The Great Lake! What would she have thought if she saw this one! It is part of "Six Chapters from a Floating Life". Do you know it? No. Well. What can one say?'
'Nothing.'
'Indeed.' She turned to him, put her hands together. 'Thank you, husband, for showing me this great lake. It is truly magnificent. Now I can settle, let us live wherever you please. Xining, Lanzhou, the other side of the world, where once we met in a previous life wherever you like. It is all the same to me.' And she leaned weeping against his side.
For the time being, Ibrahim decided to settle the household in Lanzhou. This gave him better access to the Gansu Corridor, and therefore the routes to the west, as well as the return routes to the Chinese interior. Also, the madressa he had had the closest contact with in his youth had moved to Lanzhou, forced there from Xining by pressure from newly arrived western Muslims.
They set up their household in a new mudbrick compound by the banks of the Tao River, close to where it joined the Yellow River. The Yellow River's water was indeed yellow, a completely opaque sandy roiling yellow, precisely the colour of the hills to the west out of which it sprang. The Tao River was a bit clearer and more brown.
The household was bigger than Kang's old place in Hangzhou, and she quickly set up the women's quarters in a back building, staking out a garden in the ground around it, and demanding potted trees to begin the process of landscaping. She also wanted a loom, but Ibrahim pointed out that silk thread would be unavailable here, as there were neither mulberry groves nor filatures. If she wanted to continue weaving, she would have to learn to work wool. With a sigh she agreed, and began the process on hand looms. Embroidering silk cloth that was already made also occupied them.
Ibrahim meanwhile went to work meeting with his old associates in the Muslim schools and fellowships, and with the new Qing officials of the town, thereby beginning the process of sorting out and assisting the new political and religious situations in the area, which had changed, apparently, since he had last been home. In the evenings he would sit with Kang on the verandah overlooking the muddy yellow river and explain it to her, answering her endless questions.
'To simplify slightly, ever since Ma Laichi came back from Yemen, bearing texts of religious renewal and rectification, there has been conflict within the Muslims of this part of the world. Understand that Muslims have lived here for centuries, almost since the beginning of Islam, and at this distance from Mecca and the other centres of Islamic learning, various beterodoxies and error were introduced. Ma Laichi wanted to reform these, but the old umma here brought suit against him in the Qing civil court, accusing him of huozhong.'
Kang looked severe, no doubt remembering the effects of such delusion back in the inte rior.
Deluding the people, a serious offence anywhere in China.
'Eventually the governor general out here, Paohang Guangsi, dismissed the suit. But that did not end matters. Ma Laichi proceeded to convert the Salars to Islam they are a people out here who speak a Turkic language, and live on the roads. They are the ones you see in the white caps, who do not look Chinese.'
'Who look like you.'
Ibrahim frowned. 'A little, perhaps. Anyway, this made people nervous, as the Salars are considered dangerous people.'
'I can see why – they look like it.'
'These people who look like me. But no matter. Anyway, there are many other forces in Islam, sometimes in conflict. A new sect called the Naqshabandis are trying to purify Islam by a return to more orthodox older ways, and in China they are led by Aziz Ma Mingxin, who, like Ma Laichi, spent many years in Yemen and Mecca, studying with Ibrahim ibn Hasa al Kurani, a very great shaikh whose teachings are spread now all over the Islamic world.
'Now, these two great shaikhs came back here from Arabia with reforms in mind, after studying with the same people, but alas, they are different reforms. Ma Laichi believed in the silent recital of prayer, called dhikri, while Ma Mingxin, being younger, studied with teachers who believed prayers could be chanted aloud as well.'
'This seems a minor difference to me.'
'Yes.' When Ibrahim looked Chinese it meant he was amused by his wife.
'In Buddhism we allow both.'
'True. But they mark deeper divisions, as often happens. Anyway, Ma Mingxin practises jahr prayer, meaning spoken aloud. This Ma Laichi and his followers dislike, as it represents a new and even purer reli gious revival coming to this area. But they can't stop them coming. Ma Mingxin has the support of the Black Mountain sufis who control both sides of the Pamirs, so more of them are coming in here all the time, escaping the battles between Iran and the Ottomans, and between the Ottomans and the Fulanis.'
'It sounds like such a trouble.'
'Yes, well, Islam is not so well organized as Buddhism,' which made Kang laugh. Ibrahim continued: 'But it is a trouble, you are right. The split between Ma Laichi and Ma Mingxin could be fatal to any hope of unity in our time. Ma Laichi's Khafiya cooperate with the Qing, you see, and they call the jahriya practices superstitious, and even immoral.'
'Immoral?'
'Dancing and suchlike. Rhythmic motion during prayers – even the praying aloud.'
'It sounds fairly ordinary to me. Celebrations are celebrations, after all.'
'Yes. So the jahriya counter by accusing the Khafiya of being a cult of personality around Ma Laichi. And they accuse him of excessive tithing, implying his whole movement is simply a ploy for power and wealth. And in collaboration with the Emperor against other Muslims as well.'
'Trouble.'
'Yes. And everyone out here has weapons, you see, usually guns, because as you noted on our journey out, hunting is still an important source of food here. So each little mosque has its militia ready to join a scrape, and the Qing have bolstered their garrisons to try to deal with all this. The Qing so far have backed the Khafiya, which they translate as Old Teaching, and the jahriya they call the New Teaching, which makes them bad by definition, of course. But what is bad for the Qing dynasty is precisely what appeals to the young Muslim men. There is a lot that is new out there. West of the Black Mountains things are changing fast.'
'As always.'
'Yes, but faster.'
Kang said slowly, 'China is a country of slow change.'
'Or, depending on the temperament of the Emperor, no change at all. In any case, neither Khafiya or jahriya can challenge the strength of the Emperor.'
'Of course.'
'As a result, they fight each other a lot. And because the Qing armies now control the land all the way to the Pamirs, land that once was composed of independent Muslim emirates, the jahriya are convinced that Islam must be returned to its roots, in order to retake what was once a part of Dar al Islam.'
'Unlikely, if the Emperor wants it.'
'Yes. But most of those who say these things have never even visited the interior, much less lived there like you and me. So they cannot know the power of China. They only see these little garrisons, the soldiers spread out by the tens and scores over this immense land.'
Kang said, 'That would make a difference. Well. You seem to have brought me out to a land filled with qi.'
'I hope it will not be too bad. What is needed, if you ask me, is a comprehensive history and analysis that will show the basic underlying identity of the teachings of Islam and Confucius.'
qi: in this case 'malign energy'. Sometimes translated as 'vital essence' or 'psych ophysical stuff', or 'bad vibrations'.
Kang's eyebrows shot up. 'You think so?'
'I am sure of it. It is my task. It has been for twenty years now.'
Kang composed her face. 'You will have to show me this labour.'
'I would like that very much. And perhaps you can help me with the Chinese version of it. I intend to publish it in Chinese, Persian, Turkic, Arabic, Hindi, and other languages, if I can find translators.'
Kang nodded. 'I will help it happily, if my ignorance does not prevent it.'
The household became settled, with everyone's routine established much as it had been before. The same celebrations and festivals were held by the small crowd of Han Chinese exiled to this remote region, who worked on festival days to build temples on the bluffs overlooking the river. To these festivals were added the Muslim holy days, major events for most of the town's occupants.
Every month more Muslims came in from the west. Muslims; Confucians; a few Buddhists, these usually Tibetan or Mongolian; almost no Daoists. Mainly Lanzhou was a town of Muslims and Han Chinese, co existing uneasily, though they had been doing it for centuries, only mixing in the occasional cross marriage.
This twofold nature of the region was an immediate problem for Kang's arrangements concerning Shih. If he was going to continue his studies for the government examinations, it was time to start him with a tutor. He did not want to do this. One alternative was to study in one of the local madressas, thus in effect converting to Islam. This of course was unthinkable – to Widow Kang. Shih and Ibrahim seemed to consider it within the realm of possibility. Shih tried to extend the time given him to make up his mind. I'm only seven, he said. Turn east or west, Ibrahim said. Both said to the boy, You can't just do nothing.
Kang insisted he continue his studies for the imperial service examinations. 'This is what his father would have wanted.' Ibrahim agreed with the plan, as he considered it likely they would return to the interior some day, where passing the exams was crucial to one's hopes of advancement.
Shih, however, did not want to study anything. He claimed an interest in Islam, which Ibrahim could not help but approve, if warily. But Shih's childish interest was in the Jahriya mosques, filled with chanting, song, dancing, sometimes drinking and self flagellation. These direct expressions of faith trumped any possible intellectualism, and not only that, they often led to exciting fights with Khafiya youth.
'The truth is he likes whatever course allows him the least work,' Kang said darkly. 'He must study for the examination, no matter if he turns Muslim or not.'
Ibrahim agreed to this, and Shih was forced by both of them to attend to his studies. He grew less interested in Islam as it became clear that if he chose that path, he would merely add another course of study to his workload.
It should not have been so hard for him to devote himself to books and scholarship, for certainly it was the dominant activity in the household. Kang had taken advantage of the move west to gather all the poems in her possession into a single trunk, and now she was leaving most of the wool work and embroidery to the servant girls, and spending her days going through these thick sheaves of paper, re reading her own voluminous bundles of poems, and also those of the friends, family and strangers she had collected over the years. The well off respectable women of south China had written poems compulsively for the whole of the Ming and Qing dynasties, and now, going through her small sample of them, numbering twenty six thousand or so, Kang spoke to Ibrahim of the patterns she was beginning to see in the choice of topics: the pain of concubinage, of physical enclosure and restriction (she was too discreet to mention the actual forms this sometimes took, and Ibrahim studiously avoided looking at her feet, staring her hard in the eye); the grinding repetitive work of the years of rice and salt; the pain and danger and exaltation of childbirth, the huge primal shock of being brought up as the precious pet of her family, only to be forced to marry, and in that very instant become something like a slave to a family of strangers. Kang spoke feelingly of the permanent sense of rupture and dislocation caused by this basic event of women's lives: 'It is like living through a reincarnation with one's mind intact, a death and rebirth in a lower world, as both hungry ghost and beast of burden, while still holding full memory of the time when you were queen of the world! And for the concubines it's even worse, descent down through the realms of beast and preta, into hell itself. And there are more concubines than wives.'
Ibrahim would nod, and encourage her to write on these matters, and also to collect the best of the poems she had in her possession, into an anthology like Yun Zhu's 'Correct Beginnings', recently published in Nanjing. 'As she says herself in her introduction,' Ibrahim pointed out, Foreach one I have recorded, there must be ten thousand I have omitted." And how many of those ten thousand were more revealing than hers, more dangerous than hers?'
'Nine thousand and nine hundred,' Kang replied, though she loved Yun Zhu's anthology very much.
So she began to organize an anthology, and Ibrahim helped by asking his colleagues back in the interior, and to the west and south, to send any women's poems they could obtain. Over time this process grew, like rice in the pot, until whole rooms of their new compound were filled with stacks of paper, carefully marked by Kang as to author, province, dynasty and the like. She spent most of her time on this work, and appeared completely absorbed in it.
Once she came to Ibrahim with a sheet of paper. 'Listen,' she said, voice low and serious. 'It's by a Dai Lanying, and called, "On the Night Before Giving Birth to My First Child".' She read: Onthe night before I first gave birth
The ghost of the old monk Bai Appeared before me. He said,
With your permission, Lady, I will come back As your child. In that moment I knew reincarnation was real. I said,
What have you been, what kind of person are you Thus to replace the soul already in me?
He said, I have been yours before I've followed you through all the ages Trying to make you happy. Let me in And I will try again. – Kang looked at Ibrahim, who nodded. 'It must have happened to her as it happened to us,' he said. 'Those are the moments that teach us something greater is going on.'
When she took breaks from her labours as an anthologist, Kang Tongbi also spent a fair number of her afternoons out in the streets of Lanzhou. This was something new. She took a servant girl, and two of the biggest servant men in their employ, heavy bearded Muslim men who wore short curved swords in their belts, and she walked the streets, the riverbank strand, the pathetic city square and the dusty markets around it, and the promenade on top of the city wall that surrounded the old part of town, giving a good view over the south shore of the river. She bought several different kinds of 'butterfly shoes' as they were called, which fitted her delicate little feet and yet extended out beyond them, to make the appearance of normal feet, and – depending on their design and materials – provide her with some extra support and balance. She would buy any butterfly shoes she found in the market that had a different design to those she already owned. None of them seemed to Pao to help her walking very much – she was still slow, with her usual short and crimping gait. But she preferred walking to being carried, even though the town was bare and dusty, and either too hot or too cold, and always windy. She walked observing everything very closely as she made her slow way along.
'Why have you given up sedan chairs?' Pao complained one day as they trudged home.
Kang only said, 'I read this morning, "Great principles are as weighty as a thousand years. This floating life is as light as a grain of rice. – 'Not to me.'
'At least you have good feet.'
'It's not true. They're big but they hurt anyway. I can't believe you won't take the chair.'
'You have to have dreams, Pao.'
'Well, I don't know. As my mother used to say, "A painted rice cake doesn't satisfy hunger. – 'The monk Dogen heard that expression, and replied by saying, "Without painted hunger you never become a true person. – Every year for the spring equinoctial festivals of Buddhism and Islam, they made a trip out to Qinghai Lake, and stood on the shore of the great bluegreen sea to renew their commitment to life, burning incense and paper money, and praying each in their own way. Exhilarated by the sights of the journey, Kang would return to Lanzhou and throw herself into her various projects with tremendous intensity. Before, in Hangzhou, her ceaseless activity had been a wonder to the servants; now it was a terror. Every day she filled with what normal people would do in a week.
Ibrahim meanwhile continued to work away at his great reconciliation of the two religions, colliding now in Gansu right before their eyes. The Gansu Corridor was the great pass between the east and west halves of the world, and the long caravans of camels that had headed cast to Shaanxi or west to the Pamirs since time immemorial were now joined by immense trains of oxen hauled wagons, coming mostly from the west, but also from the east. Muslim and Chinese alike settled in the region, and Ibrahim talked to the leaders of the various factions, and collected texts and read them, and sent letters to scholars all over the world, and wrote his books for many hours every day. Kang helped him in this work, as he helped her in hers, but as the months passed, and they saw the increasing conflict in the region, her help more and more took the form of criticism, of pressure on his ideas – as he sometimes pointed out, when he felt a little tired or defensive.
Kang was remorseless, in her usual way. 'Look,' she would say, 'you can't just talk your way out of these problems. Differences are differences! Look here, your Wang Daiyu, a most inventive thinker, takes great trouble to equate the Five Pillars of the Islamic Faith with the Five Virtues of Confucianism.'
'That's right,' Ibrahim said. 'They combine to make the Five Constants, as he calls them, true everywhere and for everyone, unchanging. Creed in Islam is Confucius's benevolence, or ren. Charity is yi, or righteousness. Prayer is li, propriety, fasting is shi, knowledge. And pilgrimage is xin, faith in humankind.'
Kang threw her hands up. 'Listen to what you are saying! These concepts have almost nothing to do with each other! Charity is not righteousness, not at all! Fasting is not knowledge! And so it is no surprise to find that your teacher from the interior, Liu Zhi, identifies the same Five Pillars of Islam not with the Five Virtues, but with the Five Relationships, the Wugang not the Wuchang! And he too has to twist the words, the concepts, beyond all recognition to make the correspondences between the two groups fit. Two different sets of bad results! If you pursue the same course they did, then anything can be matched to anything.'
Ibrahim pursed his lips, looking displeased, but he did not contradict her. Instead he said, 'Liu Zhi made a distinction between the two ways, as well as finding their similarities. For him, the Way of heaven, tiando, is best expressed by Islam, the Way of Humanity, rendao, by Confucianism. Thus the Quran is the sacred book, but the Analects express the principles fundamental to all humans.'
Kang shook her head again. 'Maybe so, but the mandarins of the interior will never believe that the sacred Book of Heaven came from Tiangfang. How could they, when only China matters to them? The Middle Kingdom, halfway between heaven and earth; the Dragon Throne, home of the Jade Emperor – the rest of the world is simply the place of barbarians, and could not possibly be the origin of something as important as the sacred book of Heaven. Meanwhile, turning to your shaikhs and caliphs in the west, how can they ever accept the Chinese, who do not believe at all in their one god? This is the most important aspect of their faith!' And she muttered, 'As if there could ever only be one god.'
Again Ibrahim looked troubled. But he insisted: 'The fundamental way is the same. And with the empire extending westwards, and more Muslims coming east, there simply must be some kind of synthesis. We will not be able to get along without it.'
Kang shrugged. 'Maybe so. But you cannot mix oil and vinegar.'
'Ideas are not chemicals. Or, they are like the Daoists' mercury and sulphur, combining to make every kind of thing.'
'Please don't tell me you plan to become an alchemist.'
'No. Only in the realm of ideas, where the great transmutation remains to be made. After all, look at what the alchemists have accomplished in the world of matter. All the new machines, the new things…'
'Rock is much more malleable than ideas.'
'I hope not. You must admit, there have been other great collisions of civilizations before, making a synthetic culture. In India, for instance, Islam invaders conquered a very ancient Hindu civilization, and the two have often been at war since, but the prophet Nanak brought the values of the two together, and that is the Sikhs, who believe in Allah and karma, in reincarnation and in divine judgment. He found the harmony beneath the discord, and now the Sikhs are among the most powerful groups in India. Indeed, India's best hope, given all its wars and troubles. We need something like that here.'
Kang nodded. 'But maybe we have it already. Maybe it has been here all along, before Mohammed or Confucius, in the form of Buddhism.'
Ibrahim frowned, and Kang laughed her short unhumorous laugh. She was teasing him while at the same time she was serious, a combination very common in her dealings with her new husband.
'You must admit, the material is at hand. There are more Buddhists out here in these wastelands than anywhere else.'
He muttered something about Lanka and Burma.
'Yes yes,' she said. 'Also Tibet, Mongolia, the Annamese, the Thais and Malays. Always they are there, you notice, in the border zone between China and Islam. Already there. And the teachings are very fundamental. The most fundamental of all.'
Ibrahim sighed. 'You will have to teach me.'
She nodded, pleased.
In that year, the forty third year of the reign of the Qianlong Emperor, an influx of Muslim families greater than ever before came in from the west on the old Silk Road, speaking all manner of languages and including women and children, and even animals. Whole villages and towns had emptied and their occupants headed east, apparently, driven by intensifying wars between the Iranians, Afghans and Kazakhs, and the civil wars of Fulan. Most of the new arrivals were Shiites, Ibrahim said, but there were many other kinds of Muslims as well, Naqshabandis, Wahhabis, different kinds of sufis… As Ibrahim tried to explain it to Kang, she pursed her lips in disapproval. 'Islam is as broken as a vase dropped on the floor.'
Later, seeing the violent reaction to the newcomers from the Muslims already ensconced in Gansu, she said, 'It's like throwing oil on a fire. They will end up all killing each other.'
She did not sound particularly distressed. Shih was again asking to study in a jahriya qong, claiming that his desire to convert to Islam had returned, which she was sure represented only laziness at his studies, and an urge to rebellion that was troubling in one so young. Meanwhile she had had ample opportunity to observe Muslim women in Lanzhou, and while before she had often complained that Chinese women were oppressed by men, she now declared that Muslim women had it far worse. 'Look at that,' she said to Ibrahim one day on their riverside verandah. 'They are hidden like goddesses behind their veils, but treated like cows. You can marry as many as you like of them, and so none of them have any family protection. And there's not a single one of them who can read. It's disgraceful.'
'Chinese men take concubines,' Ibrahim pointed out.
'Nowhere is it a good thing to be a woman,' Kang replied irritably. 'But concubines are not wives, they don't have the same family rights.'
'So things are only better in China if you are married.'
'This is true everywhere. But not to be able to read, even the daughters of the rich and educated men! To be cut off from literature, to be unable to write letters to your birth family…'
This was something Kang never did, but Ibrahim did not mention that. He only shook his head.
'It was far worse for women before Mohammed brought Islam to the world.'
'That says very little. How bad it must have been before, and that was over a thousand years ago, correct? What barbarians they must have been. By then Chinese women had enjoyed two thousand years of secure privileges.'
Ibrahim was frowning at this, looking down. He did not reply.
All over Lanzhou they saw signs of change. The iron mines of Xinjiang fuelled the foundries being built upstream and down from the town, and the new influx of potential foundry workers made possible many more expansions, in ironworks and construction more generally. One of the main products of these foundries was cannon, and so the town garrison was beefed up, the Green Standard Chinese guards supplemented by Manchu horsemen. The foundries were under permanent order to sell all their guns to the Qianlong, so that the weaponry flowed only east towards the interior. As most of the workers were Muslim – and dirty work it was – quite a few guns made their way west in defiance of the imperial edict. This caused more military surveillance, larger garrisons of Chinese, more Manchu banners, and increased friction between local workers and the Qing garrison. It was not a situation that could last.
The longer term residents could only watch things degenerate. There was nothing any one individual could do. Ibrahim continued to work for a good relationship between the hui and the Emperor, but this made him enemies among the new arrivals, intent on revival and jihad.
In the midst of all this trouble, Kang told Pao one day that she found herself to be pregnant. Pao was shocked, and Kang herself appeared to be stunned.
'An abortion might be arranged,' Pao whispered, looking the other way.
Kang politely declined. 'I will have to be an old mother. You must help me.'
'Oh we will, I will.'
Ibrahim too was surprised by the news, but he adjusted quickly. 'It will be good to see a child come of our union. Like our books, but alive.'
'It might be a daughter.'
'If Allah wills it, who am I to object?'
Kang studied his face closely, then nodded and went away.
Now she seldom went out into the streets, and then only by day, and in a chair. After dark it would be too dangerous in any case. No respectable people remained out after dark now, only gangs of young men, often drunk, jahriya or Khafiya or neither, though usually it was the jahriyas spoiling for a fight. The babblers versus the deafmutes, as Kang said contemptuously.
Indeed, it was intra Muslim battling that caused the first great disaster of the troubles, or so Ibrahim judged. Hearing of the fighting between jahriya and Khafiya, a banner arrived with a high Qing official,
A banner: a horse detachment of up to a thousand men.
Xirizhu, who joined Yang Shiji, the town's prefect. Ibrahim came back from a meeting with these men deeply troubled.
'They, don't understand,' he said. 'They talk about insurrection, but no one out here is thinking of the great enterprise, how could they be?
We are so far from the interior that people out here barely know what China is. It is only local quarrelling, but they come out here thinking they are bound for real war.'
The great enterprise: dynastic replacement.
Despite Ibrahim's reassurances, the new officials had Ma Mingxin arrested. Ibrahim shook his head gloomily. Then the new banners marched out into the countryside to the west. They met with the Salar jahriya chief, Su Forty three, at Baizhuangzi. The Salars had concealed their weapons, and they claimed to be adherents of the Old Teaching. Hearing this, Xinzhu announced to them he intended to eliminate the New Teaching, and Su's men promptly attacked the company and stabbed both Xinzhu and Yang Shiji to death.
When the news of this violence got back to Lanzhou with the Manchu horsemen who had managed to escape the assault, Ibrahim groaned with frustration and anger. 'Now it really is insurrection,' he said. 'Under Qing law, it will go very bad for all concerned. How could they be so stupid?'
A large force arrived soon thereafter, and was attacked by Su Forty three's band; and after that, more imperial troops arrived. In response Su Forty three and an army of two thousand men attacked Hezhou, then crossed the river on pifaci and camped right outside Lanzhou itself. All of a sudden they were indeed in a war.
Pilaci: hide rafts that for centuries had allowed people to cross the Yellow, Wei and Tao Rivers.
The Qing authorities who had survived the jahriya ambush had Ma Mingxin shown on the town walls, and his followers cried out to see his chains, and prostrated themselves, crying 'Shaikh! Shaikh!' audibly from across the river and from the hilltops overlooking the town. Having thus identified the rebels' leader definitively, the authorities had him hauled down off the wall and beheaded.
When the jahriya learned what had happened they were frantic for revenge. They had no equipment for a proper siege of Lanzhou, so they built a fort on a nearby hill, and began systematically to attack any movement into or out of the city walls. The Qing officials in Beijing were informed of the harassment, and they reacted angrily to this assault on a provincial capital, and sent out imperial Commissioner Agui, one of the Qianlong's senior military governors, to pacify the region.
This he failed to do, and life in Lanzhou grew lean and cold. Finally Agui sent Hushen, his chief military officer, back to Beijing, and when he came back out with new imperial orders, he called up a very large armed militia of Gansu Tibetans, also Alashan Mongols, and all the men from the other Green Standard garrisons in the region. Such ferocious huge men now walked the streets of the town that it seemed it was only a big barracks. 'It's an old Han technique,' Ibrahim said with some bitterness. 'Pit the non Hans against each other out on the frontier, and let them kill each other.'
Thus reinforced, Agui was able to cut off the water supply from the jahriyas' hilltop fort across the river, and the tables were turned; besieger became besieged, as in a game of go. At the end of three months, word came into town that the final battle had occurred, and Su Forty three and every single one of his thousands of men had been killed.
Ibrahim was gloomy at this news. 'That won't be the end of it. They'll want revenge for Ma Mingxin, and for those men. The more the jahriya are put down, the more young Muslim men will turn to them. The oppression itself makes the rebellion!'
'It's like the soul stealing craze,' Kang noted.
Ibrahim nodded, and redoubled his efforts on his books. It was as though if he could only reconcile the two civilizations on paper, the bloody battles happening all around them would come to an end. So he wrote many hours each day, ignoring the meals set on his table by the servants. His conversations with Kang were extensions of his day's thought; and conversely, what his wife said to him in these conversa tions was often quickly incorporated into his books. No one else's opin ions were so important to him. Kang would curse the young Muslim fighters, and say, 'You Muslims are too religious, to kill and die as you are doing, and all for such puny differences in dogma, it's crazy!'
'Mohammed Meets Confucius': presumably the work in five volumes published in the sixtieth year of the Qianlong as 'Reconciliation of the Philosophies of Liu Zhi and Ma Mingxin'.
And soon thereafter Ibrahim's writing in the immensely long study that Kang had nicknamed 'Mohammed Meets Confucius' included the following passage: When observing the tendency towards physical extremism in Islam, ranging from fasting, whirling and self flagellation, all the way up to jihad itself, one wonders at its causes, which may be several, including the words of Mohammed sanctioning jihad, the early history of Islamic expansion, the harsh and otherworldly desert landscapes that have been the home of so many Muslim societies, and, perhaps most importantly, the fact that for Islamic peoples the religious language is by definition Arabic, and therefore a second language to the great majority of them. This has fateful consequences, because one's native tongue is always grounded in a physical reality by vocabulary, grammar, logic, and metaphors, images and symbols of all kinds, many of them buried and forgotten in names themselves; but in the case of Islam, instead of having a physical reality attached to it linguistically, its sacred language is detached from all that, for most believers, by its secondary and translated quality, its only partly learned nature, so that it conveys only abstract concepts, removed from the world, conveying the devout into a world of ideas abstracted and detached from the life of the senses and the physical realities of life, creating the possibility and even the likelihood of extremism resulting from a lack of perspective, a lack of grounding. To give a good example of the kind of linguistic process I mean: Muslims who have Arabic as a second language do not 'have their feet on the ground'; their behaviour is all too often directed by abstract thought, floating alone in the empty space of language. We need the world. Each situation must be placed in its setting to be understood. Possibly, therefore, our religion should be taught mostly in the vernacular tongues, the Quran translated into all the languages of Earth; or else better instruction in Arabic be given to all; although taking this road might entail requiring Arabic to become the first language of all the world, not a practical project and likely to be regarded as another aspect of jihad…
Another time, when Ibrahim was writing about the theory of dynastic cycles, which was held in common by both Chinese and Islamic historians and philosophers, his wife had brushed it all aside like a piece of botched embroidery: 'That's just thinking of history as if it were the seasons of a year. It's a most simple-minded metaphor. What if they are nothing at all alike, what if history meanders like a river for ever, what then?'
And soon afterwards Ibrahim wrote in his 'Commentary on the Doctrine of the Great Cycle in History':
Ibn Khaldun, the most influential of Muslim historians, speaks of the great cycle of dynasties in his 'Muqaddimah', and most of the Chinese historians identify a cyclic pattern in history as well, beginning with the Han historian Dong Zhongshw in his 'Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals', a system which indeed was an elaboration of Confucius himself, and which was elaborated in its turn by Kang Yuwei, who in his 'Commentary on the Evolution of Rites' speaks of the Three Ages, each of which, Disorder, Small Peace and Great Peace, go through internal rotations of disorder, small peace and great peace, so that the three become nine, and then eighty one when these are recombined, and so on. And Hindu religious cosmology, which so far is that civilization's only statement on history as such, speaks also of great cycles, first the kalpa which is a day of Brahma, said to be 4,320,000,000 years long, divided into fourteen manvantaras, each of which is divided into seventy one maha yugas, length 3,320,000 years. Each maha yuga or Great Age is divided into four ages, Sarya yuga, the age of peace, Treta yuga, Dvaparayuga and Kali yuga, said to be our current age, an age of decline and despair, awaiting renewal. These spans of time, so vastly greater than those of the other civilizations, seemed to many earlier commentators excessive, but it must be said that, the more we learn of the antiquity of the Earth, with stone seashells found on mountaintops, and layers of rock deposits enjambed perpendicularly to each other, and so on, the more the introspections of India seem to have pierced through the veil of the past most accurately to the true scale of things.
But in all of them, in any case, the cycles are only observed by ignoring most of what has been recorded as actually happening in the past, and are very probably theories based on the turning of the year and the return of the seasons, with civilizations seen as leaves on a tree, going through a cycle of growth and decay and new growth. It may be that history itself has no such pattern to it, and that civilizations each create a unique fate that cannot be read into a cyclic pattern without doing damage to what really happened in the world.
Thus the extremely rapid spread of Islam seems to support no particular cyclic pattern, while its success perhaps resulted from it proposing not a cycle but a progress towards God, a very simple message resisting the great urge to elaboration that fills most of the world's philosophies in favour of comprehensibility by the masses.
Kang Tongbi was also writing a great deal at this time, compiling her anthologies of women's poetry, arranging them into groups and writing commentaries on what they meant in the aggregate. She also began, with her husband's help, a 'Treatise on the History of the Women of Hunan', in which her thoughts very often reflected, or commented on, those of her husband, just as his did hers; so that later scholars were able to collate the writings of the two during their Lanzhou years, and construct of them a kind of ongoing dialogue or duct.
Kang's opinions were her own, however, and often would not have been agreed with by Ibrahim. Later that year, for instance, frustrated by the irrational nature of the conflict now tearing the region apart, and fearful of greater conflict to come, feeling as if they were living under a great storm cloud about to burst on them, Kang wrote in her 'Treatise':
So you see systems of thought and religion coming out of the kinds of societies that invented them. The means by which people feed themselves determine how they think and what they believe. Agricultural societies believe in rain gods and seed gods and gods for every manner of thing that might affect the harvest (China). People who herd animals believe in a single shepherd god (Islam). In both these kinds of cultures you see a primitive notion of gods as helpers, as big people watching from above, like parents who nevertheless act like bad children, deciding capriciously whom to reward and whom not to, on the basis of craven sacrifices made to them by the humans dependent on their whim. The religions that say you should sacrifice or even pray to a god like that, to ask them to do something material for you, are the religions of desperate and ignorant people. It is only when you get to the more advanced and secure societies that you get a religion ready to face the universe honestly, to announce there is no clear sign of divinity, except for the existence of the cosmos in and of itself, which means that everything is holy, whether or not there be a god looking down on it.
Ibrahim read this in manuscript and shook his head, sighing. 'I have married one wiser than myself,' he said to his empty room. 'I am a lucky man. But sometimes I wish that I had chosen to study not ideas, but things. Somehow I have drifted outside the range of my talent.'
Every day news of more Qing suppression of Muslims came to them. Supposedly the Old Teaching was favoured over the New Teaching, but ignorant and ambitious officials arrived from the interior, and mistakes were made more than once. Ma Wuyi, for instance, the successor to Ma Laichi, not to Ma Mingxin, was ordered to move with his adherents west to Tibet. Old Teaching to new territory, people said, shaking their heads at the bureaucratic mistake, which was sure to get people killed. It became the third of the Five Great Errors of the suppression campaign. And the disorder grew.
Eventually a Chinese Muslim named Tian Wu rallied the jahriyas openly, to revolt and free themselves from Beijing. This happened just north of Gansu, and so everyone in Lanzhou stockpiled again for war.
Soon the banners came, and like everything else the war had to move through the Gansu Corridor to get from east to west. So though much of the fighting took place far away in eastern Gansu, the news of it in Lanzhou was constant, as was the movement of troops through town.
Kang Tongbi found it unnerving to have the major battles of this revolt happening east of them, between them and the interior. It was several weeks before the Qing army managed to put down Tian Wu's force, even though Tian Wu had been killed almost immediately. Soon after that, news came that Qing general Li Shiyao had ordered the slaughter of over a thousand jahriya women and children in east Gansu.
Ibrahim was in despair. 'Now all the Muslims in China are jahriya in their hearts.'
'Maybe so,' Kang said cynically, 'but I see it doesn't keep them from accepting jahriya lands confiscated by the government.'
But it was also true that jahriya orders were springing up everywhere now, in Xizang, Turkestan, Mongolia, Manchuria, and all the way south to distant Yunnan. No other Muslim sect had ever attracted so many adherents, and many of the refugees streaming in from the wars to the far west became jahriya the moment they arrived, happy after the confusions of Muslim civil war to join a straightforward jihad against infidels.
Even during all this trouble, in the evenings Ibrahim and the heavily pregnant Kang would retire to their verandah and watch the Tao River flow into the Yellow River. They talked over the news and their day's work, comparing poems or religious texts, as if these were the only things that really mattered. Kang tried to learn the Arabic alphabet, which she found difficult, but instructive.
'Look,' she would say, 'there is no way to mark the sounds of Chinese in this alphabet, not really. And no doubt the same is true the other way around!' She gestured at the rivers' confluence. 'You have said the two peoples can mix like the waters of these two rivers. Maybe so. But see the ripple line where the two meets. See the clear water, still there in the yellow.'
'But a hundred li downstream. Ibrahim suggested.
'Maybe. But I wonder. Truly, you must become like these Sikhs you talk about, who combine what is best from the old religions, and make something new.'
'What about Buddhism?' Ibrahim asked. 'You say it has already changed Chinese religion completely. How can we apply it to Islam as well?'
She thought about it. 'I'm not sure it's possible. The Buddha said there are no gods, rather that there are sentient beings in everything, even clouds and rocks. Everything holy.'
Ibrahim sighed. 'There has to be a god. The universe could not arise from nothing.'
'We don't know that.'
'I believe Allah made it. But now, it may be that it is up to us. He gave us free will to see what we would do. Again, Islam and China may have two parts of the whole truth. Perhaps Buddhism has another part. And we must find whole sight. Or all will be desolation.'
Darkness fell on the river.
'You must raise Islam to the next level,' Kang said.
Ibrahim shuddered. 'Sufism has been trying to do that for centuries. The sufis try to rise up, the Wahhabis drag them back down, claiming there can be no improvement, no progress. And here the Emperor crushes both!'
'Not so. The Old Teaching has standing in imperial law, the books by your Liu Zhu are in the imperial collection of sacred texts. It's not like with the Daoists. Even Buddhism finds no favour with the Emperor, compared to Islam.'
'So it used to be,' Ibrahim said. 'As long as it stayed quiet, out here in the west. Now these young hotheads are inflaming the situation, wrecking all chance of co-existence.'
There was nothing Kang could say to that. It was what she had been saying all along.
Now it was fully dark. No prudent citizen would be out in the streets of the rude little town, walled through it was. It was too dangerous.
News arrived with a new influx of refugees from the west. The Ottoman sultan had apparently made alliances with the steppes emirates north of the Black Sea, descendant states of the Golden Horde that had only recently come out of anarchic conditions, and together they had defeated the armies of the Safavid empire, shattering the Shlite stronghold in Iran and continuing east into the disorganized emirates of central Asia and the silk roads. The result was chaos all the across the middle of the world, more war in Iraq and Syria, widespread famine and destruction; although it was said that with the Ottoman victory, peace might come to the western half of the world. Meanwhile, thousands of Shiites Muslims were headed cast over the Pamirs, where they thought sympathetic reformist states were in power. They did not seem to know that China was there.
'Tell me more about what the Buddha said,' Ibrahim would say in the evenings on the verandah. 'I have the impression it is all very primitive and self concerned. You know: things are the way they are, one adapts to that, focuses on oneself. All is well. But obviously things in this world are not well. Can Buddhism speak to that? Is there an "ought to" in it, as well as an "is"?'
Ifyou want to help others, practise compassion. If you want to help yourself, practise compassion." This the Tibetans' Dalai Lama said. And Buddha himself said to Sigala, who worshipped the six directions, that the noble discipline would interpret the six directions as parents, teachers, spouse and children, friends, servants and employees, and religious people. All these should be worshipped, he said. Worshipped, do you understand? As holy things. The people in your life! Thus daily life becomes a form of worship, do you see? It's not a matter of praying on Friday and then the rest of the week terrorizing the world.'
'This is not what Allah calls for, I assure you.'
'No. But you have your jihads, yes? And now it seems the whole of Dar al Islam is at war, conquering each other or strangers. Buddhists never conquer anything. In the Buddha's ten directives to the Good King, non violence, compassion and kindness are the matter of more than half of them. Asoka was laying waste to India when he was young, and then he became Buddhist, and never killed another man. He was the good king personified.'
'But not often imitated.'
'No. But we live in barbarous times. Buddhism spreads by people converting out of their own wish for peace and right action. But power condenses around those willing to use force. Islam will use force, the Emperor will use force. They will rule the world. Or fight over it, until it is all destroyed.'
Another time she said, 'What I find interesting is that of all these religious figures of ancient times, only the Buddha did not claim to be a god, or to be talking to God. The others all claim to be God, or God's son, or to be taking dictation from God. Whereas the Buddha simply said, there is no God. The universe itself is holy, human beings are sacred, all the sentient beings are sacred and can work to be enlightened, and one must only pay attention to daily life, the middle way, and give thanks and worship in daily action. It is the most unassuming of religions. Not even a religion, but more a way to live.'
'What about these statues of Buddha I see everywhere, and the worship in the Buddhist temples? You yourself spend a great deal of time at prayer.'
'Partly the Buddha is revered as the exemplary man. Simple minds might have it otherwise, no doubt. But these are mostly people who worship everything that moves, and Buddha is just one god among many others. They miss the point. In India they made him an avatar of Vishnu, an avatar who is deliberately trying to mislead people away from the proper worship of Brahman, isn't that right? No, many people miss the point. But it is there for all to see, if they would.'
'And your prayers?'
'I pray to see things better.'
Quickly enough the jahriya insurrection was crushed, and the western part of the empire apparently at peace. But now there were deep seated forces, driven underground, that were working all the while for a Muslim rebellion. Ibrahim feared that even the Great Enterprise was no longer out of the question. People spoke of trouble in the interior, of Han secret societies and brotherhoods, dedicated to the eventual overthrow of the Manchu rulers and a return to the Ming dynasty. So even Han Chinese could not be trusted by the imperial government; the dynasty was Manchu after all, outsiders, and even the extremely punctilious Confucianism of the Qianlong Emperor could not obscure this basic fact of the situation. If the Muslims in the western part of the empire revolted, there would be Chinese in the interior and the south coast who would regard it as an opportunity to pursue their own rebellion; and the empire might be shattered. Certainly it seemed that the sheng shi, the peak of this particular dynastic cycle (if there were any such thing) had passed.
This danger Ibrahim memorialized to the Emperor repeatedly, urging him to infold the Old Teaching even more firmly into imperial favour, making Islam one of the imperial religions in law as well as fact, as China in the past had infolded Buddhism and Daoism.
No reply ever came to these memoranda, and judging by the contents of the beautiful vermilion calligraphy brushed at the bottom of other petitions returned from the Emperor to Lanzhou, it seemed unlikely that Ibrahim's would be received any more favourably. 'Why am I surrounded by knaves and fools?' one imperial commentary read. 'The coffers have been filling with gold and silver from Yingzhou for every year of our rule, and we have never been more prosperous.'
He had a point, no doubt; and knew more about the empire than anyone else. Still, Ibrahim persevered. Meanwhile more refugees came pouring east, until the Gansu Corridor, Shaarixi, and Xining were all crowded with new arrivals – all Muslim, but not necessarily friendly towards each other, and oblivious of their Chinese hosts. Lanzhou appeared to be prospering, the markets were jammed, the mines and foundries and smithies and factories were all pouring out armaments, and new machinery of all kinds, threshers, power looms, carts; but the ramshackle west end of town now extended along the bank of the Yellow River for many li, and both banks of the Tao River were slums, where people lived in tents, or in the open air. No one in town recognized the place any more, and everyone stayed behind locked doors at night, if they were prudent.
Child of mine coming into this world Be careful where you take yourself. So many ways for things to go wrong; Sometimes I grow afraid. If only we lived in the Age of Great Peace I could be happy to see your innocent face Watching the geese fly south in the fall.
Once Kang was helping Ibrahim clean up the clutter of books and paper, inkstones and brushes in his study, and she stopped to read one of his pages.
'History can be seen as a series of collisions of civilizations, and it is these collisions that create progress and new things. It may not happen at the actual point of contact, which is often racked by disruption and war, but behind the lines of conflict, where the two cultures are most trying to define themselves and prevail, great progress is often made very swiftly, with works of permanent distinction in arts and technique. Ideas flourish as people try to cope, and over time the competition yields to the stronger ideas, the more flexible, more generous ideas. Thus Fulan, India and Yingzhou are prospering in their disarray, while China grows weak from its monolithic nature, despite the enormous infusion of gold from across the Dahai. No single civilization could ever progress; it is always a matter of two or more colliding. Thus the waves on the shore never rise higher than when the backwash of some earlier wave falls back into the next one incoming, and a white line of water jets up to a startling height. History may not resemble so much the seasons of a year, as waves in the sea, running this way and that, crossing, making patterns, sometimes a triple peak, a very Diamond Mountain of cultural energy, for a time.'
Kang put the sheet down, looked at her husband fondly. 'If only it were true,' she said to herself.
'What?' He looked up.
'You are a good man, husband. But it may be you have taken on an impossible task, out of your goodness.'
Then, in the forty sixth year of the Qianlong Emperor's reign, rain fell for all of the third month. Everywhere the land was flooded, just at the time when Kang Tongbi was nearing her confinement. Whether general rebellion across the west broke out because of the misery caused by the floods, or was calculatedly initiated to take advantage of the disaster's confusion, no one could say. But Muslim insurgents attacked town after town, and while Shiite and Wahhabi and Jahriya and Khafiya factions murdered each other in mosque and alleyway, Qing banners too went down before the furious attacks of the rebels. It became so serious that the bulk of the imperial army was rumoured to be heading west; but meanwhile the devastation was widespread, and in Gansu the food began to run out.
Lanzhou was again besieged, this time by a coalition of immigrant Muslim rebels of all sects and national origins. Ibrahim's household did everything it could to protect the mistress of the house in her late pregnancy. But even this high in its watershed, the Yellow River had risen dangerously with the rains, and being located at the confluence of the Yellow and the Tao made things worse for their compound. The town's high bluff began to look not so high. It was a frightening sight to see the rivers risen so startlingly, brown and foaming at the very tops of their banks. Finally, on the fifteenth day of the tenth month, when an imperial army was a day's march downstream, and relief of the siege therefore almost in sight, the rain fell harder than ever, and the rivers rose and spilled over their banks.
Someone, rebels everyone assumed, chose this worst of all moments to break the dam upstream on the Tao River, sending an immense muddy flow of water ripping down the watershed, over the Tao's already overtopped banks, rushing into the Yellow River and even backing up the larger stream, so that all was brown water, spreading up into the hills on each side of the narrow river valley. By the time the imperial army arrived the whole of Lanzhou was covered with a sheet of dirty brown water, to knee height, and rising still.
Ibrahim had already gone out to meet the imperial army, taken there by the governor of Lanzhou to consult with the new command, and to help them find rebel authorities to negotiate with. So as the water rose inexorably around the walls of Ibrahim's compound, there were only the women of the household and a few servants to deal with the flood.
The compound wall and sandbags at the gates appeared to be adequate to protect them, but then word of the broken dam and its surge of water was shouted into the compound by people departing for higher ground.
'Come quickly,' Zunli cried. 'We must get to higher ground too. We must leave now!'
Kang Tongbi ignored him. She was busy stuffing trunks with her papers and with Ibrahim's. There were rooms and rooms full of books and papers, as Zunli exclaimed when he saw what she was doing. There wasn't time to save them all.
'Then help me,' Kang grated, working at a furious clip.
'How will we move it all?'
'Put the boxes in the sedan chair, quickly.'
'But how will you go?'
'I will walk! Go! Go! Go!'
They stuffed boxes. 'This isn't right,' Zunli protested, looking at Kang's rounded form. 'Ibrahim would want you to leave. He wouldn't worry about these books!'
'Yes he would!' she shouted. 'Pack! Get the rest in here and pack!'
Zunli did what he could. A wild hour of racing around in a pure panic had him and the other servants exhausted, but Kang Tongbi was just getting started.
Finally she relented, and they hurried out the front gate of the compound, sloshing immediately into knee high brown water that poured into the compound until they closed the gate against it. It was a strange sight indeed to see the whole town become a shallow foamy brown lake. The sedan chair was piled so full with books and papers that it took all the servants jammed together under the hoist bars to lift and move it. A low, hair raising boom of moving water shook the air. The foaming brown lake that covered both rivers and the town extended into the hills on all sides, and Lanzhou itself was completely awash. The servant girls were crying, filling the air with shrieks, shouts, screams. Pao was nowhere to be seen. Thus it was that only a mother's ears heard a single boy crying out.
Kang realized: she had forgotten her own son. She turned and hopped back inside the gate that had been pushed open by water, unnoticed by the servants staggering under the loaded sedan chair.
She splashed through rushing water to Shih's room: the compound itself was already floored by the opaque brown flood.
Shih had apparently been hiding under his bed, and the water had flushed him out and onto it, where he curled tip terrified. 'Help! Mother, help me!'
'Come quickly then!'
'I can't! I can't!'
'I can't carry you, Shih. Come on! The servants are all gone, it's just you and me now!'
'I can't!' And he began to wail, balled up on his bed like a threeyear old.
Kang stared at him. Her right hand even jerked towards the gate, as if leaving ahead of the rest of her. She snarled then, grabbed the boy by the ear and jerked him howling to his feet.
'Walk or I'll tear your ear off, you hui!'
'I'm not the hui! Ibrahim is the hui! Everyone out here is hui! Ow!' And he howled as she twisted his ear almost off his head. She dragged him like that through the flooding household to the gate.
As they passed out the gate a surge of water, a low wave, washed into them waist high on her, chest high on him. When it passed the level of the flood stayed higher. They were now thigh deep in water. The roar was much greater than before. They couldn't hear each other. No servants were in sight.
Higher ground stood at the end of the lane leading south, and the city wall was there as well, so Kang sloshed that way, looking for ber servants. She stumbled and cursed; one of her butterfly shoes had been sucked away in the tow of water. She kicked the other one off, proceeded barefoot. Shih seemed to have fainted, or gone catatonic, and she had to put an arm under his knees, and lift him up and carry him, resting him on the top shelf of her pregnant belly. She shouted angrily for her servants, but could not even hear herself. She slipped once and cried out to Guanyin, She Who Hears Cries.
Then she saw Xinwu, swimming towards her like an otter with arms, serious and determined. Behind him Pao was wading towards her, and Zunli. Xinwu pulled Shih away from Kang and whacked him on his reddened car. 'That way!' Xinwu shouted loudly at Shih, pointing out the city wall. Kang was surprised to see Shih almost run towards it, leaping out of the water time after time. Xinwu stood at her side and helped her slosh up the lane. She was like a canal barge being towed upstream, bow waves lapping at her distended waist. Pao and Zunli joined them and helped her, Pao crying and shouting 'I went ahead to check the depth, I came back and thought you were in the chair!' while Zunli was saying something to the effect that they thought she had gone ahead with Pao. The usual confusion.
On the city wall the other servants were urging them on, staring upstream white-eyed with fright. Hurry! their mouths mouthed. Hurry!
At the foot of the wall the brown water was streaming hard by. Kang struggled against the flow awkwardly, slipping on her little feet. People lowered a wooden ladder from the top of the city wall, and Shih scampered up it. Kang started to climb. She had never climbed a ladder before, and Xinwu and Pao and Zunli pushing her from below did not really help. It was hard getting her feet to curl over the submerged rungs; indeed her feet were not as long as the rungs were wide. She could get no purchase. Now she could see out of the corner of her eye a big brown wave, filled with things, smashing along the wall, sweeping it clean of ladders and everything else that had been leaned against it. She pulled herself up by the arms and pegged her foot down onto a dry rung.
Pao and Zunli shoved her up from below, and she was lifted bodily onto the top of the city wall. Pao and Zunli and Xinwu shot up beside her. The ladder was pulled up after them just as the big wave swept by.
Many people had taken refuge up on the wall, as it now formed a sort of long island in the flood. People on a pagoda rooftop nearby waved to them. Everyone on the wall was staring at Kang, who rearranged her gown and pulled her hair out of her face with her fingers, checking to see that everyone from her compound was there. Briefly she smiled. It was the first time any of them had ever seen her smile.
By the time they were reunited with Ibrahim, late that same day, having been rowed to a hill to the south and above the flooded town, Kang was done with smiling. She pulled Ibrahim down next to her, and they sat there in the chaos of people. 'Listen to me,' she said, hand on her belly, 'if this is a daughter we have here 'I know,' Ibrahim said.
' If this is a daughter we have been given – there will be no more footbinding.'