'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.'

Four. The Afterlife

Many years later, an age later, two old people sat on their verandah watching the river flow. In their time together they had discussed all things, they had even written a history of the world together, but now they seldom spoke, except to note some feature of the waning day. Very rarely did they talk about the past, and they never spoke at all of that time they had sat together in a dark room, diving into the light of the candle, and seeing there strange glimpses of former lives. It was too disturbing to recall the awe and terror of those hours. And besides the point had been made, the knowledge gained. That they had known each other ten thousand years: of course. They were an old married couple. They knew, and that was enough. There was no need to delve deeper into it.

This too is the bardo; or nirvana itself. This is the touch of the eternal.

One day, then, before going out to the verandah to enjoy the sunset hour with his partner, the old man sat before his blank page all the long afternoon, thinking, looking at the stacks of books and manuscripts that walled his study. Finally he took up his brush and wrote, performing the strokes very slowly.

This is what his wife had taught him to see.

'Wealth and the Four Great Inequalities'

The scattered records and broken ruins of the Old World tell us that the earliest civilizations arose in China, India, Persia, Egypt, the Middle West, and Anatolia. The first farmers in these fertile regions taught themselves farming and storage methods that created harvests beyond the needs of the day. Very quickly soldiers, supported by priests, took power in each region, and their own numbers grew, gathering these new abundant harvests largely into their own hands, by means of taxes and direct seizures. Labour divided into the groups described by Confucius and the Hindu caste system, the warriors, priests, artisans and farmers. With this division of labour the subjugation of farmers by warriors and priests was institutionalized, a subjugation that has never ended. This was the first inequality.

In this division of civilized labor, if it had not happened earlier, men established a general domination over women. It may have happened during the earlier ages of bare subsistence, but there is no way to tell; what we can see with our own eyes, is that in farming cultures women labour both at home and in the fields. In truth the farming life requires work from all. But from early on, women did as men required. And in each family, the control of legal power resembled the situation at large: the king and his heir dominated the rest. These were the second and the third inequalities, of men over women and children.

The next small age saw the beginning of trade between the first civilizations, and the silk roads connecting China, Bactria, India, Persia, the Middle West, Rome and Africa moved the surplus harvests around the Old World. Agriculture responded to the new chances to trade, and there was a great rise in the production of bulk cereals and meats, and specialized crops like olives, wine and mulberry trees. The artisans also made new tools, and with them more powerful farming implements, and ships. Trading groups and peoples began to undermine the monopoly on power of the first military priest empires, and money began to replace land as the source of ultimate power. All this happened much earlier than Ibn Khaldun and the Maghribi historians recognized. By the time of the classical period, around 1200 bH, the changes brought by trade had unsettled the old ways and spread and deepened the first three inequalities, raising many questions about human nature. The great classical religions came into being precisely to attempt to answer these questions Zoroastrianism in Persia, Buddhism in India, and the rationalist philosophers in Greece. But no matter their metaphysical details, each civilization was part of a world transferring wealth back and forth, back and forth, eventually to the elite groups; these movements of wealth became the driving force of change in human affairs – in other words, of history. Gathered wealth gathered more wealth.