Bistami saw all this from the avenue leading to the river, and all of a sudden something about the sight struck him like a blow; those pikes and crossbows, pointing inwards: it was like the tiger trap, back in India. These people were like the Bagh mari, the professional tiger killing clans that went about the country disposing of problem tigers for a fee. He had seen them before! And not only with the tigress, but before that as well, some other time that he couldn't remember but remembered anyway, some ambush for Katima, a death trap, men stabbing her when she was tall and black skinned – oh, this had all happened before!

In a panic he ran across the bridge to the palace. Sultana Katima was about to get on her horse to go and confront the invaders, and he threw himself between her and the horse; she was furious and tried to brush by him, and he put his arm around her waist, as slender as a girl's, which shocked them both, and he cried, 'No, no, no, no, no! No, Sultana, I beg you, I beg you, don't go over there! They'll kill you, it's a trap! I've seen it! They will kill you!'

'I have to go,' she said, cheeks flushed. 'The people need me 'No they don't! They need you alive! We can leave and they can follow! They will follow! We have to let those people have this town, the buildings mean nothing, we can move north and your people will follow! Listen to me, listen!' And he caught her up by the shoulders and held her fast, looked ber in the eye: 'I have seen all this play out before. I have been given knowledge. We have to escape or we will be killed.'

Across the river they could hear screams. The Andalusi horsemen were not used to opposition from a population without any soldiers, without cavalry, and they were charging down the streets after mobs who threw stones as they fled. A lot of Barakis were crazy with rage, certainly the one handed ones would die to the man to defend her, and the invaders were not going to have as easy a time of it as they had thought. Snow was now twirling down through the dark air, flying sideways on the wind out of grey clouds streaming low overhead, and already there were fires in the city, the district around the grand mosque beginning to burn.

'Come on, Sultana, there's no time to waste! I've seen how this happens, they'll have no mercy, they're on their way here to the palace, we need to leave now! This has happened before! We can make a new city in the north, some of the people will come with us, gather a caravan and start over, defend ourselves properly!'

' All right!' Sultana Katima shouted suddenly, looking across at the burning town. The wind gusted, and they could just hear screaming in the town over the whoosh of the air. 'Damn them! Damn them! Get a horse then, come on, all of you come on! We'll need to ride hard.'

Nine. Another Meeting in the Bardo

And so it was that when they all reconvened in the bardo, many years later, after going north and founding the city of Nsara at the mouth of the Lawiyya River, and defending it successfully from the Andalusi taifa sultans coming up to attack them in after years, and building the beginnings of a maritime power, fishing all the way across the sea, and trading farther yet than that, Bistami was well pleased. He and Katima had never married, the matter had never come up again, but he had been Nsara's principal ulema for many years, and had helped to create a religious legitimacy for this new thing, a queen in Islam. And he and Katima had worked together on this project almost every day of those lives.

'I recognized you!' he reminded Katima. 'In the midst of life, through the veil of forgetting, when it mattered, I saw who you were, and you – you saw something too. You knew something from a higher reality was going on! We're making progress.'

Katima did not reply. They were sitting on the flagstones of a courtyard in a place very like Chishti's shrine in Fatepur Sikri, except that the courtyard was vastly bigger. People waited in a line to go in the shrine and be judged. They looked like hajjis in line to see the Kaaba. Bistami could hear Mohammed's voice inside, praising some, admonishing others. 'You need to try again,' be heard a voice like Mohammed's say to someone. Everything was quiet and subdued. It was the hour before sunrise, cool and damp, the air filled with distant birdsong. Sitting there beside her, Bistami could see very clearly now how Katima was not at all like Akbar. Akbar had no doubt been sent down to a lower realm, and was even now prowling the jungle hunting for his food, as Katima had been in the existence before last, when she had been a tigress, a killer who had nevertheless befriended Bistami. She had saved him from the Hindu rebels, then picked him out of the ribat in al Andalus: 'You recognized me too,' he said. 'And we both knew Ibn Ezra,' who was at this moment inspecting the wall of the courtyard, running his fingernail down the line between two blocks, admiring the stonework of the bardo.

'This is genuine progress,' Bistami repeated. 'We are finally getting somewhere!'

Katima gave him a sceptical glance. 'You call that progress? Chased to a hole at the far corner of the world?'

'But who cares where we were? We recognized each other, you didn't get killed '

'Wonderful.'

'It was wonderful! I saw through time, I felt the touch of the eternal. We made a place where people could love the good. Little steps, life after life; and eventually we will be there for good, in the white light.'

Katima gestured; her brother in law, Said Darya, was entering the palace of judgment.

'Look at him, a miserable creature, and yet he is not thrown down into hell, nor even become a worm or a jackal, as he deserves. He will return to the human realm, and wreak havoc all over again. He too is part of our jati, did you recognize him? Did you know he was part of our little band, like Ibn Ezra here?'

Ibn Ezra sat beside them. The line moved up and they shifted with it. 'The walls are solid,' he reported. 'Very well built, in fact. I don't think we're going to able to escape.'

'Escape!' Bistami cried. 'This is God's judgment! No one escapes that!'

Katima and Ibn Ezra looked at each other. Ibn Ezra said, 'My impression is that any improvement in the tenor of existence will have to be anthropogenic.'

'What?' Bistami cried.

'It's up to us. No one will help us.'

'I'm not saying they will. Although God always helps if you ask. But it is up to us, that's what I've been saying all along, and we are doing what we can, we are making progress.'

Katima was not at all convinced. 'We'll see,' she said. 'Time will tell. For now, I myself withhold judgment.' She faced the white tomb, drew herself up queenlike, spoke with a tigerish curl of the lip: 'And no one judges me.'

With a wave of the hand she dismissed the tomb. 'It's not here that matters. What matters is what happens in the world.'

In the thirty fifth year of his reign, the Wanli Emperor turned his feverish and permanently dissatisfied eye on Nippon. Ten years earlier the Nipponese general Hideyoshi had had the temerity to attempt the conquest of China, and when the Koreans had refused him passage, his army had invaded Korea as the first step in its path. It had taken a large Chinese army three years to drive the invaders off the Korean peninsula, and the twenty six million ounces of silver it had cost the Wanli Emperor had put his treasury in acute difficulties, difficulties from which it had never recovered. The Emperor was inclined to avenge this unprovoked assault (if you did not count the two unsuccessful attacks on Nippon made by Kublai Khan), and to remove the danger of any future problem arising from Nippon, by subjugating it to Chinese suzerainty. Hideyoshi had died, and leyasu, the head of a new Tokugawa. Shogunate, had successfully united all the Nipponese islands under his command, and then closed the country to foreigners. All Nipponese were forbidden to leave, and those who did were forbidden to return. The building of seaworthy ships was also forbidden, although the Wanli noted irritably in his vermilion memoranda that this did not stop hordes of Nipponese pirates attacking on the long Chinese coastline using smaller craft. He thought leyasu's retreat from the world signalled weakness, and yet at the same time, a fortress nation of warriors just offshore from the Middle Kingdom was not something to be tolerated either. It pleased the Wanli to think of returning this bastard child of Chinese culture to its rightful place under the Dragon Throne, joining there Korea, Annam, Tibet, Mindanao and the Spice Islands.