Then in a blur of happy days the roadbeds and tracks were complete and they took some of the first trains down and encamped on a great dusty green plain, no monsoon yet, division after division making their way to the front, some fluctuating distance to the west of them. That was where it was all happening now.

Then one morning they were on their way too, trained all day to the west and then off and marching over one pontoon bridge after another, until they were somewhere near Bihar. Here another army was already encamped, an army on their side. Allies, what a concept. The Indians themselves, here in their own country, moving north after four decades of holding out against the Islamic horde, down in the south of the continent. Now they too were breaking out, crossing the Indus, and the Muslims therefore in danger of being cut off by a pincer attack as large. as Asia, some of them already trapped in Burma, the bulk of them still together in the west and beginning a slow, stubborn retreat.

So Iwa gathered in an hour's conversation with some Travancori officers who spoke Nepali, which he had known as a child. The Indian officers and their soldiers were dark skinned and small, both men and women, very fast and nimble, clean, well dressed, well armed – proud, even arrogant, assuming that they had taken the brunt of the war against Islam, that they had saved China from conquest by holding on as a second front. Iwa came away unsure whether it was a good idea to discuss the war with them.

But Bai was impressed. Perhaps the world would be saved from slavery after all. The breakout across north Asia was apparently stalled, the Urals being a kind of natural Great Wall of China for the Golden Horde and the Firanjis. Although maps seemed to indicate that it was nicely to the west. And to have crossed the Himalaya in force against such resistance, to have met up with the Indian armies, to be cutting the world of Islam in two…

'Well, sea power could make all the whole land war in Asia irrelevant,' Iwa said as they sat one evening on the ground eating rice that had been spiced to newly incendiary heights. Between choking swallows, sweating profusely, he said, 'In the time of this war we've seen three or four generations of weaponry, of technology generally, the big guns, sea power, now air power – I don't doubt that a time is coming when fleets of airships and flyers will be all that matter. The fight will go on up there, to see who can control the skies and drop bombs bigger than anything you could ever shoot out of a cannon, right onto the capitals of the enemy. Their factories, their palaces, their government buildings.'

'Good,' Bai said. 'Less messy that way. Go for the head and get it over with. That's what Kuo would say.'

Iwa nodded, grinning at the thought of just how Kuo would say it. The scorching rice here was nothing compared to their Kuo.

The generals from the Fourth Assemblage of Military Talent met with the Indian generals, and as they conferred more railways were built out to the new front west of them. A combined offensive was clearly in the works, and everyone was full of speculation about it. That they would be kept behind to defend their rear from the Muslims still in the Malay Peninsula; that they would be boarded on ships in the mouth of the sacred Ganges and deposited on the Arabian coast to attack Mecca itself; that they were destined for a beachhead attack on the peninsulas of northwest Firanja; and so on. Never an end to the stories they told themselves of how their travail would continue.

In the end, though, they marched forwards in the usual fashion, westwards, holding the right flank against the foothills of Nepal, hills that shot abrupt and green out of the Gangetic Plain – as though, Iwa remarked idly one day, India were a ramming ship that had slammed into Asia and ploughed under it, pushing all the way under Tibet, and doubling the height of that land but dipping down here almost to sea level.

Bai shook his head at this geomorphic fancy, not wanting to think of the ground as moving like big ships, wanting to understand the ground as solid, because he was trying to convince himself now that Kuo had been wrong and that he was still alive and not in the bardo, where of course lands could slip about like the stage sets they were. Kuo had probably been disoriented by his own abrupt death, and confused as to his own whereabouts; not a good sign concerning his reappearance in his next incarnation. Or perhaps he had just been playing a joke on Bai, Kuo would mock you harder than anyone, though he seldom played jokes. Perhaps he had even been doing Bai a favour, getting him through the worst part of the war by convincing him that he was already dead and had nothing to lose indeed, was fighting the war on a level where it might actually mean something, might have some use, might be a matter of changing people's souls in their pure existence outside the world, where they might be capable of change, where they might learn what was important and return to life next time with new capacities in their hearts, with new goals in mind.

What might those be? What were they fighting for? It was clear what they were fighting against – against fanatical slaveholding reactionaries, who wanted the world to stand still in the equivalent of the Tang or Sung dynasties – absurdly backward and bloody religious zealots assassins with no scruples, who fought crazed on opium and ancient blind beliefs. Against all that, certainly, but for what? What the Chinese were fighting for, Bai decided, was… clarity, or whatever else it was that was the opposite of religion. For humanity. For compassion. For Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism, the triple strand that did so well in describing a relationship to the world: the religion with no God, with only this world, also several other potential realms of reality, mental realms, and the void itself, but no God, no shepherd ruling with the drooling strictures of a demented old patriarch, but rather innumerable immortal spirits in a vast panoply of realms and being, including humans and many other sentient beings besides, everything living, everything holy, sacred, part of the Godhead – for yes, there was a God if by that you meant only a transcendent universal selfaware entity that was reality itself, the cosmos, including everything, including human ideas and mathematical forms and relationships. That idea itself was God, and evoked a kind of worship that was attention to the real world, a kind of natural study. Chinese Buddhism was the natural study of reality, and led to feelings of devotion just from noting the daily leaves, the colours of the sky, the animals seen from the corner of the eye. The movements of chopping wood and carrying water. This initial study of devotion led to deeper understanding as they pursued the mathematical underpinnings of the ways of things, just out of curiosity and because it seemed to help them see even more clearly, and so they made instruments to see farther in and farther out, higher yang, deeper yin.

What followed was a kind of understanding of human reality that placed the greatest value on compassion, created by enlightened understanding, created by study of what was there in the world. This was what Iwa was always saying, while Bai preferred to think of the emotions created by all that proper attention and focused effort: the peace, the sharp curiosity and enraptured interest, the compassion.

But now: all a nightmare. A nightmare speeding up, however, breaking apart and full of non sequiturs, as if the dreamer felt the rapid eyed stirrings of the end of sleep and the waking of a new day. Every day we wake up into a new world, each sleep causes yet another reincarnation. Some of the local gurus spoke of it as happening with every breath.

They took off out of the bardo into the real world, into battle, with their left wing made up of India's crack regiments, little bearded black men, taller hooknosed white men, bearded turbanned Sikhs, deepchested women, Gurkhas come out of the mountains, a banner of Nepali women each of whom was the beauty of her district, or so it appeared; all of them together like a circus crew, but so fast, so well armed, in train and truck divisions, the Chinese could not keep up with them, but got more train lines established and tried to catch up, running vast numbers of men forwards with all their supplies. Beyond the forward ends of the train lines the Indians continued to race forwards on foot, and in engined cars on rubber wheels, hundreds of them that ran freely over the villages paths in this dry season, throwing dust everywhere, and also over a more limited network of asphalted roads, the only ones that would still be passable when the monsoon hit.