EIGHTEEN

As the days and the weeks passed Budur continued to read voraciously, in the zawiyya, the institute, the parks, at the jetty's end, in the hospital for the blind soldiers. Meanwhile there were ten trillion piastre bills arriving with immigrants from the Middle West, and they were at ten billion drachmas themselves; recently a man had stuffed his house from floor to ceiling with money, and traded the whole establishment for a pig. At the zawiyya it was harder and harder to put together meals big enough to feed them all. They grew vegetables in crops on the roof, cursing the clouds, and lived on their goats' milk, their chickens' eggs, cucumbers in great vats of vinegar, pumpkins cooked in every conceivable fashion, and potato soup, watered to a thinness thinner than milk.

One day Idelba found the three spies going through the little cabinet above her bed, and she had them kicked out of the house as common thieves, calling in the neighbourhood police and bypassing the issue of spying, without however getting into the tricky issue of what else besides her ideas she had that would be worth stealing.

'They'll be in trouble,' Budur observed after the three girls were taken away. 'Even if they're plucked out of jail by their employers.'

'Yes,' Idelba agreed. 'I was going to leave them here, as you saw. But once caught, we had to act as if we didn't know who they were. And the truth is we can't afford to feed them. So they can go back to who sent them. Hopefully.' A grim expression; she didn't want to think about it – about what she might have condemned them to. That was their problem. She had hardened in just the two years since she had brought Budur to Nsara, or so it seemed to Budur. 'It's not just my work,' she explained, seeing Budur's expression. 'That remains latent. It's the problems we have right now. Things won't need blowing up if we all starve first. The war ended badly, that's all there is to it. I mean not just for us, as the defeated, but for everyone. Things are so out of balance, it could bring everything down. So everyone needs to pull together. And if some people don't, then I don't know…'

'All that time you spend working in the music of the Franks,' Budur said to Tristan, one evening in the cafe, 'do you ever think about what they were like?'

'Why yes,' he said, pleased at the question. 'All the time. I think they were just like us. They fought a lot. They had monasteries and madressas, and water powered machinery. Their ships were small, but they could sail into the wind. They might have taken control of the seas before anyone else.'

'Not a chance,' said Tahar. 'Compared to Chinese ships they were no more than dhows. Come now, Tristan, you know that.'

Tristan shrugged.

'They had ten or fifteen languages, thirty or forty principalities, isn't that right?' said Naser. 'They were too fractured to conquer anyone else.'

'They fought together to capture Jerusalem,' Tristan pointed out. 'The infighting gave them practice. They thought they were God's chosen people.'

' Primitives often think that.'

'Indeed.' Tristan smiled, leaning sideways to peer through the window towards the neighbourhood mosque. 'As I say, they were just like us. If they had lived, there would be more people like us.'

'There's no one like us,' Naser said sadly. 'I think they must have been very different.'

Tristan shrugged again. 'You can say anything you like about them, it doesn't matter. You can say they would have been enslaved like the Africans, or made slaves of the rest of us, or brought a golden age, or waged wars worse than the Long War…'

People shook their heads at all these impossibilities.

'… but it doesn't matter. We'll never know, so you can say whatever you like. They are our jinns.'

'It's funny how we look down on them,' Kirana observed, 'just because they died. At an unconscious level it seems like it must have been their fault. A physical weakness, or a moral failing, or a bad habit.'

'They affronted God with their pride.'

'They were pale because they were weak, or vice versa. Muzaffar has shown it, how the darker the skin, the stronger the persons. The blackest Africans are strongest of all, the palest of the Golden Horde are weakest. He did tests. The Franks were hereditarily incompetent, that was his conclusion. Losers in the evolutionary game of survival of the fittest.'

Kirana shook her head. 'It was probably just a mutation of the plague, so strong it killed off all its hosts, and therefore died itself. It could have happened to any of us. The Chinese, or us.'

'But there's a kind of anemia common around the Mediterranean, that might have made them more susceptible.

'No. It could have been us.'

'That might have been good,' Tristan said. 'They believed in a god of mercy, their Christ was all love and mercy.'

'Hard to tell that by what they did in Syria.'

'Or al Andalus '

'It was latent in them, ready to spring forth. While for us what is latent is jihad.'

'They were the same as us, you said.'

Tristan smiled under his moustache. 'Maybe. They're the blank on the map, the ruins underfoot, the empty mirror. The clouds in the sky that look like tigers.'

I, it's such a useless exercise,' Kirana reflected. 'What if this had happened, what if that had happened, what if the Golden Horde had forced the Gansu Corridor at the start of the Long War, what if the Japanese had attacked China after retaking Japan, what if the Ming had kept their treasure fleet, what if we had discovered and conquered Yingzhou, what if Alexander the Great had not died young, on and on, and they all would have made enormous differences and yet it's always entirely useless. These historians who talk about employing counterfactuals to bolster their theories, they're ridiculous. Because no one knows why things happen, you see? Anything could follow from anything. Even real history tells us nothing at all. Because we don't know if history is sensitive, and for want of a nail a civilization was lost, or if our mightiest acts are as petals on a flood, or something in between, or both at once. We just don't know, and the what ifs don't help us work it out.'

'Why do people like them so much then?'

Kirana shrugged, took a drag on her cigarette. 'More stories.'

And indeed more of them were immediately proposed, for despite their uselessness in Kirana's eyes, people enjoyed contemplating the what might have been: what if the lost Moroccan fleet of 924 had been blown to the Sugar Islands and then made it back, what if the Kerala of Travancore had not conquered much of Asia and set out his railways and legal system, what if there had been no New World islands there at all, what if Burma had lost its war with Siam…

Kirana only shook her head. 'Perhaps it would be better just to focus on the future.'

'You, a historian, say this? But the future can't be known at all!'

'Well, but it exists for us now as a project to be enacted. Ever since the Travancori enlightenment we have had a sense of the future as something we make. This new awareness of time to come is very important. It makes us a thread in a tapestry that has unrolled for centuries before us, and will unroll for centuries after us. We're midway through the loom, that's the present, and what we do casts the thread in a panic ular direction, and the picture in the tapestry changes accordingly. When we begin to try to make a picture pleasing to us and to those who come after, then perhaps you can say that we have seized history.'