Budur on that morning was awakened in the zawiyya by someone bringing news to her of a phone message: it was from one of her blind soldiers. They wanted to talk to her.

She took the tram and then walked into the hospital, feeling apprehensive. Were they angry at her for not coming recently? Were they worried about the way she had left after her last visit?

No. The oldest ones spoke for them, or for some part of them, anyway; they wanted to march in the demonstration against the army takeover, and they wanted her to lead them. About two thirds of the ward said they wanted to do it.

It wasn't the kind of request one could refuse. Budur agreed, and feeling shaky and uncertain, led them out of the gate of the hospital. There were too many of them for the trams, so they walked down the riverfront road, and then the corniche, hands on the shoulders before them, like a parade of elephants. Back in the ward Budur had got used to the look of them, but out here in the brilliant sunshine and the open air they were a shocking sight once again, maimed and awful. Three hundred and twenty seven of them, walking down the corniche; they had taken a head count when leaving the ward.

Naturally they drew a crowd, and some people began following them down the corniche, and in the big plaza there was already a crowd, a crowd that quickly made room for the veterans at the front of the protest, facing the old palace. They arranged themselves into ranks and files by feel, and counting off in undertones, with a little aid from Budur. Then they stood silently, right hands on the shoulders to their left, listening to the speakers at the microphone. The crowd behind them grew bigger and bigger.

Army airships floated low over the city, and amplified voices from them ordered everyone to leave the streets and plazas. A full curfew had been declared, the mechanical voices informed them.

This decision had no doubt been made in ignorance of the blind soldiers' presence in the palace square. They stood there without moving, and the crowd stood with them. One of the blind soldiers shouted, 'What are they going to do, gas us?'

In fact this was all too possible, as pepper gas had been deployed already, at the State Council Chambers and the police barracks, and down on the docks. And later it was said by many that the blind soldiers were in fact tear gassed during that tense week, and that they just stood there and took it, for they had no tears left to shed; that they stood in their square with their hands on each other's shoulders and chanted the Fatiha, and the bismallah which starts every sura: 'In the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful! In the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful!'

Budur herself never saw any pepper gas dropped in the palace square, although she heard her soldiers chanting the bismallah for hours at a time. But she was not there in the square every hour of that week, and hers was not the only group of blind soldiers to have left their hospitals and joined the protests, either. So possibly something of the sort occurred. Certainly in the time afterwards everyone believed it had.

In any case, during that long week people passed the time by reciting long passages from Rumi Balkhi, and Ferdowski, and the joker mullah Nusreddin, and the epic poet of Firanja, Ali, and from their own sufi poet of Nsara, young Ghaleb, who had been killed on the very last day of the war. Budur made frequent visits to the women's hospital where Kirana was staying, to tell her what was happening on the plaza and elsewhere in the great city, now pulsing everywhere with its people. They had taken to the streets and were not leaving them. Even when the rain returned they stayed out there. Kirana ate up every word of news, hungry to be out herself, supremely irritated that she was confined at this time. Obviously she was seriously ill or she wouldn't have suffered it, but she was emaciated, with sallow, dark rings under her eyes like a raccoon from Yingzhou, 'stuck', as she put it, 'just when things are getting interesting', just when her long winded acid-tongued facility for speech could have been put to use, could have made history as well as commented on it. But it was not to be; she could only lie there fighting ber illness. The one time Budur ventured to ask how she was feeling, she grimaced and said only, 'The termites have got me.'

But even so she stayed close to the centre of the action. A delegation of opposition leaders, including a contingent of women from the zawlyyas of the city, were meeting with adjutants of the generals to make their protests and negotiate if they could, and these people visited Kirana often to talk over strategy. On the streets the rumour was that a deal was being hammered out, but Kirana lay there, eyes burning, and shook her head at Budur's hopefulness. 'Don't be naive.' Her sardonic grin wrinkled her wasted features. 'They're just playing for time. They think that if they hold on long enough the protests will die down, and they can get on with their business. They're probably right. They've got the guns after all.'

But then a Hodenosaunee fleet steamed into the harbour roads and anchored. Hanea! Budur thought when she saw them: forty giant steel battleships, bristling with guns that could fire a hundred li inland. They called in on a wireless frequency used by a popular music station, and though the government had seized the station, they could do nothing to stop this message from reaching all the wireless receptors in the city, and many heard the message and passed it along: the Hodenosaunee wanted to speak to the legitimate government, the one they had been dealing with before. They refused to speak to the generals, who were breaking the Shanghai Convention by usurping the constitutionally required government, a very serious breach; they declared they would not move from Nsara's harbour until the council established by the postwar settlement was reconvened; and they would not trade with any government led by the generals. As the grain that had saved Nsara from starvation in the previous winter had mostly come from Hodenosaunee ships, this was a serious challenge indeed.

The matter hung for three days, during which rumours flew like bats at dusk: that negotiations were going on between the fleet and the junta, that mines were being laid, that amphibious troops were being readied, that negotiations were breaking down…

On the fourth day the leaders of the coup were suddenly nowhere to be found. The Yingzhou fleet was a few ships smaller in size. The generals had been spirited off, everyone said, to asylums in the Sugar Islands or the Maldives, in exchange for stopping without a fight. The ranking officers left behind led the deployed units of the army back to their barracks and stood down, waiting for further instructions from the legitimate State Council. The coup was cancelled.

The people in the streets cheered, shouted, sang, embraced total strangers, went crazy for joy. Budur did all these things, and led her soldiers back to their ward, and then rushed to Kirana's hospital to tell Kirana everything she had seen, feeling a pang to see her so sick in the midst of this triumph. Kirana nodded at the news, saying, 'We got lucky to get help like that. The whole world saw that, it will have a good effect, you'll see. Although now we're in for it! We'll see what it's like to be part of a league, we'll see what kind of people they really are.'

Other friends wanted to wheel her out to give another speech, but she wouldn't do it, she said, 'Just go and tell people to get back to work, tell them we need to get the bakeries baking again.'

Darkness. Silence. Then a voice in the void: Kirana? Are you there? Kuo? Kyu? Kenpo? What. Are you there? I'm here. We're back in the bardo. There is no such thing. Yes there is. Here we are. You can't deny it. We keep coming back. (Blackness, silence. A refusal of speech.) Come on, you can't deny it. We keep coming back. We keep going out again. Everybody does. That's dharma. We keep trying. We keep making progress. A noise like a tiger's growl. But we do! Here's Idelba, and Piali, and even Madam Sururi. So she was right. Yes. Ridiculous. Nevertheless. Here we are. Here to be sent back again, sent back together, our little jati. I don't know what I would do without all of you. I think the solitude would kill me. You're killed anyway. Yes, but it's less lonely this way. And we're making a difference. No, we are! Look at what has happened! You can't deny it! Things were done. It's not very much.