The Years of Rice and Salt Read Online Free Page B

to a big bend in a stream, where it disappeared. There was no sign of where the man had gone from there.
             
    Days passed,
and Bold continued south. Many watches went by in which he didn't think a thing, only scanning the land for food and the sky for weather, humming a word or two over and over. Awake to emptiness. One day he came on a village surrounding a spring.

    Old temples scattered throughout,
    Broken round columns pointing at the sky.
    All in the midst of a vast silence.
    What made these gods so angry
    With their people? What might they make
    Of a solitary soul wandering by
    After the world has ended?
    White marble drums fallen this way and that:
    One bird cheeps in the empty air.

    He did not care to test anything by trespassing, and so circled the temples, chanting “Om mane padme hum, om mane padme hum, hummm,” aware suddenly that he often spoke aloud to himself now, or hummed, without ever noticing it, as if ignoring an old companion who always said the same things.
             
    He continued south
and east, though he had forgotten why. He scrounged roadside buildings for dried food. He walked on the empty roads. It was an old land. Gnarled olive trees, black and heavy with their inedible fruit, mocked him. No person ate entirely by his own efforts, no one. He got hungrier, and food became his only focus, every day. He passed more marble ruins, foraged in the farmhouses he passed. Once he came on a big clay jar of olive oil, and stayed there four days to drink it all down. Then game became more abundant. He saw the vixen more than once. Good shots with his ridiculous bow kept him away from hunger. He made his fires larger every night, and once or twice wondered what had become of the man he had met. Had meeting Bold made him realize he would be alone no matter what happened or whom he found, so that he had killed himself to rejoin his jati? Or perhaps just slipped while drinking? Or hiked in the stream to keep Bold from tracking him? There was no way of telling, but the encounter kept coming back to Bold, especially the clarity with which he had been able to understand the man.
    The valleys ran south and east. He felt the shape of his travels in his mind, and found he could not remember enough of the last few weeks to be sure of his location, relative to the Moravian Gate, or the khanate of the Golden Horde. From the Black Sea they had ridden west about ten days' ride, hadn't they? It was like trying to remember things from a previous life.
    It seemed possible, however, that he was nearing the Byzantine empire, coming toward Constantinople from the north and west. Sitting slumped before his nightly bonfire, he wondered if Constantinople would be dead too. He wondered if Mongolia was dead, if perhaps everyone in the world was dead. The wind soughed through the shrubs like ghost's voices, and he fell into an uneasy sleep, waking through the watches of the night to check the stars and throw more branches on his fire. He was cold.
    He woke again, and there was Temur's ghost standing across the fire, the light of the flames dancing over his awesome face. His eyes were black as obsidian, and Bold could see stars gleaming in them.
    “So,” Temur said heavily, “you ran away.”
    “Yes,” Bold whispered.
    “What's wrong? Don't want to go out on the hunt again?”
    This was a thing he had said to Bold before. At the end he had been so weak he had had to be carried on a litter, but he never thought of stopping. In his last winter he had considered whether to move east in the spring, against China, or west, against the Franks. During a huge feast he weighed the advantages of each, and at one point he looked at Bold, and something on Bold's face caused the khan to jump him with his powerful voice, still strong despite his illness: “What's wrong, Bold? Don't want to go out on the hunt again?”
    That earlier time Bold had said, “Always, great khan. I was there when we conquered Ferghana,