Miller's Song

 Sometimes we write things only we really like, stories which don't speak much to others. This is one such. It is in Shared Sacred Landscapes, available for download here: https://lib.icimod.org/records/67y76-5jc26 

ICIMOD has been restructuring its online library, so the download count seen here isn't accurate :)

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We do not know how long ago the events described here occurred ― or where in the weft of events past or yet to come these people lived and died ― but, in the village of Yari, deep in the shadows of the Himalayas, in a valley of plenty and gurgling with the restive Karnali, lived a merchant with an insatiable desire. It wasn’t merely greed or ambition, for he was a learned man, a man of the world who believed in hard work and who had met and studied a thousand other men just like him. His desire was built on caution and thoughtfulness: as a child he had seen deprivation, and as a merchant he had profited from the hardships and the excesses of others. But, as much as he knew how to gain and gather wealth, the miracle through which it could be retained for all ages to come had eluded him.

Every morning, well before his sons or their wives awoke, the merchant chased away sleep and wiped clean his mind muddled with dreams. He cleaned the shrine for the ancestors kept in a corner of the wide, flat roof of his splendid house. He offered water and incense to the aged brass statue of the Buddha in the shrine, and remembered the gods of his home, of the village and the valley, and then remembered all the shrines, peaks and passes, rivers and lakes, meadows and forests where he had prayed for safe passage. In the few moments of rest before the day awoke like a beast in a hurry, he allowed the mind’s eye to wander, and allowed himself the proud but quiet joy of watching himself on his roof, in the home he had built to tower above all the houses in the village, a house that was slightly bigger than the village monastery. There were forty rooms under his roof, each built during the spring thaw of the forty years since he had started his life as a trader.

The merchant hadn’t started rich; he had grown up in a two-room hut, fatherless, in the bosom of a mother who shied from accepting charity and chose instead to labor for each rope of garment and each morsel of food. When his brother, older by two years and a lifetime of hardship already, had failed to return after a summer of herding cattle in the high pastures, he told his mother that he wanted to become a trader instead of working his kinsmen’s fields in exchange for just enough grains to see them through the long winter.

His mother had taken his face in her hands, gazed into his eyes, and quietly walked out of the house. She returned in the evening with a bundle of lamb’s wool. “Urgyen, you’ll repay them, each of them, before you gather your own wealth,” she said and recited to him a list of names and measures: women in the village who had put them in debt by sparing a handful of wool each. Even now, in his ripe old age, standing on the roof of the house where he had gathered more wealth than all the wealth of the richest men in every village within three days in every direction, he could recite the list of names, recall the face of every aunt or elder who had gently pushed him towards his fate.

Through that first winter, when the snow lay thick over the valley, the young merchant spun and wove and carded and felted the wool. His mother sat by the fire and prayed. When the thaw came and the first of the green shoots of wheat peeked out from the wet and dark soil, when traders who had wintered in the southern plains returned with bales of printed cloth and sacks of grain, pots of oil and boxes of ivory and coral, and news of beasts made of iron and smoke, the young merchant was ready with two blankets of coarse black wool to trade and a felted shawl under which to pass the nights.

His kinsmen who had crossed the high passes into the blue skies of Tibet and the frothy rivers to the dark jungles of India, who spoke sometimes among themselves in tongues he knew to be foreign smiled at him with compassion and took care never to speak to him harshly, even when they scolded or pelted their own sons with the dry droppings of goats and yaks for laughing too much or letting a goat wander off the trail. And the young trader repaid them with his only possessions: service, loyalty, obedience and deference. He took special care to know which cattle belonged to which merchant, and, without eavesdropping or being intrusive, he made it a point to remember the particulars of each kinsman’s transactions with traders along the long route over and around the mountains. He learned to look at the facts of trade like a handful of grains to be sifted, the chaff to be separated from what could become seeds to be sown in the coming year.

After the spring spent trading in the endless grasslands and salt-swamps of Tibet, the pair of blankets became twenty sacks of salt. He accompanied his kinsmen back to Yari for a spurt of hurried farm-work before continuing south, through the gorges cut by the Karnali and past villages of Khas people, who saw his age and assumed innocence and tried to seduce him into parting with his sacks of salt for cheap. But he persisted; he watched how friendships were made, how belligerently or politely bargains were struck, how quickly some kinsmen converted profit into goods or how they sewed coins into the linings of their coats. He didn’t sell his salt, but he readily opened a sack to hand out a large fistful to poor women with sons of his own age. He smiled politely and pretended not to understand the gestures made by Khas men with thick arms and soft bellies, but he spent the evenings sharing his tsampa with, and accepting salted gruel from, boys who wore hunger around their eyes and soil under their nails.

“Sell your salt,” kinsmen only a few years his elder would tell him. “Sell it, buy the grains you need and return to your mother. She must be worried sick.”

But he persisted, without seeming stubborn, without causing offence to those who were clearly more fortunate, and therefore may have taken offence at his ambition. He didn’t offer excuses, and he didn’t let it appear that he sought greater profit.

He had seen how a day’s walk northwards into the windswept plains of Tibet or southwards into the humid stench of the hot valleys of Salyan increased the value of his goods. In Yari, a measure of salt could be bartered for three measures of grain brought by Khas traders from Jumla. But a measure of grain would become three measures of salt when transported to the salt swamps of Tibet, where all day long the women and children carried buckets of brine to their raised terraces where the sun separated the salt from the water. The trader’s life was full of hardship between the two ends of such journeys, but the reward was of the ever-increasing sort. Even as a young boy, the merchant could count in his mind the vast possibilities of wealth that he could command. Accordingly, he acted with caution, holding back his merchandise until the very moment when the potential for gain was the greatest.

Gradually, his kinsmen retraced their steps homewards, loaded with dried apricots and obdurate highland wheat and mustard oil. But the merchant was determined to see the end of the road, to encounter the iron beasts that carried more goods in a day than all the yak caravans of the world combined, to befriend the dark men of the forested plains, for there the greed for gold and musk, the perfume of mountain hashish and sap of pine the was greatest: there lay the wealth he needed for his mother.

Coral, mirrors and glass beads, statues and amulets with the image of the Buddha ― if a trader went deep into the malarial south, these were the goods he brought home. But when the young merchant returned, just before harvest, he had acquired two new pack mules, and each was laden not with the trinkets or trifles expected of a novice, but only with grains. He showed his face to his mother. She touched foreheads with him, muttered a prayer of thanks and peered deeply at his face, then set about boiling water and preparing him a meager but warm meal. The young merchant immediately went around the village to the door of each woman who had given him a measure of wool.

“You are too generous, Urgyen,” each woman said when she saw the measure of grain set before her as repayment. He didn’t look up as he added more grain to the already generous portions, and, in response, the women climbed the ladders to their stores and each brought back an armful of fine wool. “Son,” each of the women said, “don’t embarrass us by repaying this gift. Your father was like a brother to me, and this I give because I have the right to love you like you are my own son.”

And that was a very long time ago ― forty-one winters had passed since. His mother had died, leaving him truly orphaned, but the merchant had built a wide world for himself. He had built his house one spacious room at a time, climbing up the terraced mountain. He had been still young and virile by the time he had gathered wealth enough to last his lifetime. Kinsmen who had once taught him to distinguish between coarse and fine merchandise brought to him their young sons to learn the trade. Richer men offered him their daughters in marriage, but he chose for his bride a poor orphan who knew little of luxury but enough of hardship and economy. Sons were born, and they, too, learned to trade, married pretty brides and filled the house with their laughter.

Now, when he took account of the wealth he had laid away ― the gold and silver, the musk and yak tails so sought after in the plains of India, the bales of fine silk in teakwood chests and heads of cattle strewn across seven meadows and a week’s walk, blocks of sandalwood and utensils of brass ― he accurately counted that his sons and their sons, and their sons and grandsons after them, could live for seven generations to come without ever having to card wool or carry salt, without ever having to leave the village of their birth. The merchant let out a sigh as he opened his eyes to face the gods on the altar of his house ― this wouldn’t suffice, this horde that would last a measly seven generations after his death. What of the sons and daughters to come after? He needed to work harder if he was to earn enough to last another seven generations beyond the seven he had secured against the tomblike cold of the winters and the sharp hunger that infected those months of inactivity.

But lately, as the end of his days approached, his mind had lost the surefootedness of his youthful years when every calculation fell snugly into place, like the hooves of the bellwether yak that plods through blinding blizzards on the high passes across the Himalayas. The beads on the abacus that in years past had flitted about like the shuttlecock on a loom now moved clumsily, as if tired after a life of counting and recounting, and the thread of his thoughts often frayed abruptly. It was in one such moment that he finally recognized the melody that he had often heard through his days filled with industry, when he heard for the first time the words in the songs that he had mistaken for a voice inside his own mind. The merchant was amazed that his daily routine had all along been accompanied by songs so full of reward; the calm and patience he had experienced for so many years was owed to the voice of another, to songs that echoed through the village and found him as he worked. When he understood this, he felt the shores of his patience and calm crumble away, for they had never been his possession, but simply gifts borrowed until this moment of rupture.

Didn’t the merchant once have a friend who died of malaria, nearly twenty years ago? Did the man not leave behind a child? No fate worse than to die shivering of sweat and fever in the winter, with the paths to shrines and sacred groves of ancestor gods buried under snow, weighed down by the helplessness of knowing that the disease had smuggled itself here from a faraway land, so that no local spirit or god could answer the appeals, for the gods, too, admitted to their inadequacy at such times, and the dhamis halfheartedly muttered their incantations, the smoke of the incense only stung the eyes and didn’t fill the flesh with the hope of healing. Malaria should kill men in the damp swamps of the Terai, not in the crisp air and crystal light of the mountains. And, so, after prolonged suffering, the man had died, leaving behind a seven-year-old girl, who, straightaway, knowing fully the hardship that awaited her, pursed her lips in quiet determination and set about being the orphan who doggedly pursues survival.

The merchant now remembered, not without revulsion, the cold and rational manner in which he had asked his eldest son to carry a sack of rice and a blanket to the orphan, and never since given any thought to his dead friend or his daughter. She was the singer: this he now learned. And he also learned that he no longer remembered her name.

 

The merchant came to the edge of his roof and watched the young woman ― what was her name? Sonam? Tseten? ― as she walked past his house. She glanced up and saw him. He froze in guilt; she smiled and scratched her head, walked around the corner of the house and began humming her tune again. The merchant walked to the room where he worked ― a brazier in a corner, a tiger-skin rug before a low table, an abacus, a bowl and a flask of water, ink, discreet heaps of scrolls. He scratched his head tilted to a side to follow the orphan miller’s song.

Every day, the orphan miller walked to the top of the village, to the mill on the stream that rushed through, and waited for villagers to bring her grains to be milled. Her share was a measure of the flour she delivered to their homes in the evening. Every year, each family also spared her their old clothes and blankets. There was no trade to be had through the winter when the stream froze over ― she had to set aside a portion of her wages each day, a fistful of the flour or tsampa, a store against the lean months. She lived downstream of the village, in a hut on the way out of the valley. The merchant rode his horse past the hut four times every year, and when he put his mind to work recollecting what he had heard and seen of the hut each time, he realized that he had seen nothing and heard nothing: through the always open door, past the threadbare blanket draped halfway across the threshold, he had seen nothing but the dim shape of a pellet on the damp floor and two pots stacked by a corner bearded in soot. He had heard nothing, but the miller’s song had always chased him to the gorge leading out of the valley, or welcomed him home after his lengthy travels.

 

Grief had left no score on the orphan: within weeks of her father’s death, Thendup, the old miller, had invited the geshe from the monastery and asked elders from each household to drink tea at his house. “I have milled your grains, brothers, but now I am tired. Geshe has given me mantras to chant, and a hut behind the monastery where I can rest my old bones, and I hope you will come when he calls you to bury my body. But, my brothers and nephews, know that you will not see me again in this village.”

The men had nodded their heads solemnly, scratching their bare heads, waiting for someone to ask the necessary question: “But, who will take your place, Thendup?”

Before anybody did ask the question, Thendup spoke in a soft voice, asking the men to lean in and listen. “I have learned something that none of you have – milling is not a job for someone without gratitude. Yes, the stream turns the water-wheel and the millstones grind the grains, but the miller makes the flour.” Everybody understood Thendup: without the care and compassion of the miller, each batch of flour wouldn’t match its purpose.

“We have among us an unfortunate child. Geshe knows better if she suffers now because of her father’s karma, or if this suffering is due to the karma of her own soul.” It was understood then that the child would become the village miller. For months to come, the women of the village would have to show the child how to mill the flour for noodles and how to grind roasted grains for tsampa, how to break grains for cattle-feed and how to store the chaff of wheat. But the orphan learned, and became the miller.

And, as her work became her life, when her daily routine required no effort, the orphan started singing. From dawn to dusk, with each breath, she sang – of gods and love, of faraway lands she had heard of only in songs, of the mother whose love she had never known, of the wind that brought snow and rain, and of the sun that brought the thaw. She remembered a song after hearing it once, and she could recite the songs of harvest and rain, songs of pilgrimages to Kailash in Ngari and to Swyambhu in Nepal. Her songs became the yarn that stitched together the village: they awoke to a song and were lulled to sleep by another; in the winter the songs touched the ache in the bones, sometimes taking away the pain, and sometimes sweetening it into a longing for the first runs of snowmelt in April. In the short spring the song was the smell of new grass and the flitting of butterflies among short-lived flowers. In abrupt moments when a man caught himself mid-thought, the miller’s songs were his thoughts, fading away in smoky curlicues. The wails of births and deaths in the village were twined with the miller’s songs.

 

The merchant spent the day poring over accounts, distracted, worrying the cubes of chhurpi mixed into the dry tsampa in a pocket of his chuba; he had always disdained the interruptions that came from his body: the need to feed, the need to chew his food, the cramps and aches in his limbs and joints, the need to empty his bowels even as he was in the middle of planning the next caravan to Purang in the north or Achham in the south. It felt profane, this insistent repatriation back to carnality. His daughters-in-law knew this, and all day long they quietly circled him, placing before him warm, salty tea or porridge flecked with dried yak meat, adding wood to the brazier or cracking open the window to let out the smoke. When his moon-faced second daughter-in-law climbed up the ladder with a bowl of rice and meat, he asked her to wait. He scratched under his hat, thinking, but she waited patiently.

“Dawa,” he said, “when did you go to the mill last?”

“I am going tomorrow, father,” she said.

“Go today,” the merchant said. “Go today.”

In the evening, the merchant heard the miller approach his door and call Dawa.

“I am coming,” Dawa said as she hurried down a ladder. The merchant called her in a louder-than-usual voice. “Dawa! Come up for a moment.”

Dawa stood on the ladder and peeked into the room, just her head and shoulders appearing through the passage on the floor.

“Give her more than her usual share, will you? Give her two times what you would give.”

Dawa nodded and smiled. As she climbed down, the merchant muttered, half a command to Dawa and half a reminder to himself, “We have enough to spare, don’t we?”

“Tseten,” he heard Dawa call. “You will need a bigger sack today!”

 

Over the next week, the merchant sent Dawa to the mill twice, and heard a lift in the miller’s songs. He instructed his daughters-in-law to bring to him their tattered old dresses, and although they protested that they didn’t have any tattered old dresses, that they had been well provided for, he nevertheless cut a comical figure, the patriarch rifling through the clothes of the women of the household and picking chuba robes and a thick outer bakkhus.

“Send these to the girl, Dawa,” he said.

When he noticed that the miller walked barefoot, the merchant sent her his dead wife’s shoes. And he wondered if he had done enough, if it was quite enough. Throughout the week he listened to the miller’s song, now with a certain amount of proprietorship. He even tried humming along to one of her songs, but was too embarrassed to listen to himself. However, with each day, through his mind's eye, he saw how little work he was getting done: he watched himself go about the day clumsily, mislaying scrolls, forgetting trading camps along a route, losing confidence that he had successfully imagined what people in a particular village would want beyond just the bare necessities of salt, grain and yarn. He had lived for so long now with the singular purpose of increasing wealth, without pause or rest. But he was restless now; he knew he was still poor, because the merchant inside him could feel the raw absence of what would bring fulfillment.

On a quiet evening, after watching from his roof as women gathered grains and greens drying in the sun, or gathered the children playing in the alleys, and as men ducked indoors to close the purse of the short autumn day, after listening to the miller walk past his house with her upbeat songs, the merchant put on a hat trimmed with fur and stepped out. “Urgyen la,” a cousin called from his house, “Where are you going?” But the merchant didn’t stop for longer than it took to wave at the cousin to signal that he was on urgent business. With each turn in the alleyways that took him farther from his house and closer to the mill he felt more like a thief. The cold lump of a silver ingot in his pocket felt heavy. He was grateful when the jumble of houses ended abruptly and the path to the mill opened up before him, hugging close to the clear, cold stream.

The millstone, resting still for the night, was as broad as the merchant was tall, and the mill was swept clean, with not a stray grain or sprinkle of flour anywhere. Water rushing under the mill chilled the air but the smell of crushed grain brought warmth to the merchant’s mind. Surely, nobody ever came here in the dark ― to the young and innocent the stream was the abode of a water-demon; and the mill was the domain of the miller, where only her labor was of a thing of value, for the rest were stone and wood and nothing more. The merchant took out the silver, embossed with an imperial seal ― shaped like the head of a horse, with eyes cut into deep grooves ― and carefully placed it by the millstone. Will she recognize it for what it is, he wondered. Only a man as widely traveled as he was, and only a man as wealthy, could tell the rare piece of silver from a misshapen lump of tin. It was the emperor’s own coin, worth a cartload of sandalwood, a hundred cartloads of salt. This was his gift for the poor miller: he wanted her to share in his wealth just as he had shared in her wealth of songs. A lifetime’s worth of wealth for a poor miller. But she will recognize it, the merchant told himself. When she arrives in the morning, even in the dim light of dawn, the silver will gleam and catch her eye, he thought.

 

Dawn broke the next day, as it did every day in the village of Yari, in the plentiful valley under the Himalayas. First stirred the fog from the river, rising to hide the stars already retreating from the morning’s brilliance, then stirred the birds in the pine and juniper, then came the calls of deer farther out in the forest and the lowing of cattle in their enclosures. A murmur filled the valley as men awoke to pray and women to prepare for the day. Incense rising from the sweet resin of juniper boughs chased after the thinning fog, meeting it midway between earth and sky, and dissolving before they could together smother out the sun. The miller’s song approached the merchant’s house and passed without hurry. The merchant smiled at the altar to his ancestors and touched the statue of the Buddha, calling forth a witness. He settled at his low table; the abacus and the scrolls rolled towards him. A shaft of sun illuminated the heavenward path for his prayers and offerings.

An abrupt silence snaked through the village and entered the merchant’s room: of course there were a thousand other noises that made up the voice of routines roped together like the crackle of fire and the gurgle of boiling gruel, but there was also the dread absence of a particular note: the miller’s song had gone quiet.

Drugged as they were by the omniscience of the miller’s songs, the villagers failed to hear the silence, but the merchant’s ears rang with the coarseness of an uninvited silence, and he saw the song withdraw and fade from the overlay of the village: now, the alleyways would seem dimmer, the cattle restless, the light in the ears of wheat dull. As the echoes of the miller’s songs faded away, the suffusion of warmth that had covered the village also ebbed and dissipated. The silence was a shadow, as if the gods had turned their backs upon the people of the valley.

Throughout the day, the merchant got up abruptly to stand at the edge of his roof, high above the rest of the village, to lean in the direction of the mill, as if through this supplication he could call forth the lost songs. He saw women carry sacks of grains to the mill, and, surely, he heard the millstones grind. But the miller didn’t sing. The merchant watched the miller hurry past his home in the evening, huddled under a bakhhu he had given her. In the morning, the merchant searched for the wisp of smoke that should have come from the miller’s hut, but saw nothing. When she hurried past his house, without looking up or making smalltalk with Dawa, it was already midmorning, and she had an unpleasant look pasted to her face, as if the villagers calling her to the mill had stolen the morning from her.

“Dawa!” the merchant called his daughter-in-law when he heard the millstones grind to a halt sometime in the mid-afternoon. “Go to the mill, Dawa. Take two baskets of wheat.”

“Father,” Dawa said. “We have more flour than we need for the entire winter.”

The extra flour, the clothes and blankets and shoes ― the merchant turned red with embarrassment. What explanation did he have to give? What must they think, his sons and daughters-in-law? But he didn’t have the patience to explain anything just then.

“Daughter, just go, will you? Half a basket of wheat, if you think we already have too much, but go.”

When Dawa returned, the merchant tried to think of a way in which he could ask her about the miller, if she seemed sour or if she had laughed freely, but without letting his impatience and dejection become apparent. Just then, he heard Dawa talk to her sister-in-law.

‘Something has taken over Tseten. She is pale, she is shivering, as if she hasn’t slept for a week. She didn’t even hear me call her name, and when she saw me, she jumped up, scared, and ran to a corner. She wouldn’t come to the door, she wouldn’t move her feet. She must have been hiding something. She stood like this, on her bakkhu, like she was killing a frog under her foot. She scared me.’

The merchant had to sit, because now he understood why the miller had stopped singing: the silver he had offered her had become her demonic master; greed had bred fear, and suspicion in her heart now poisoned every comfort. He looked at the wealth around him: the silk khata around the Buddha, which he knew was cut from the same cloth that a Lhasa merchant had offered to the Potala to be sewn into the robe that His Holiness the Dalai Lama wore for his ascension to the holy seat; the tiger pelt on which he sat daily; the ivory of his pen and the sandalwood of his table. The many rooms in his house where nobody slept or sat around a fire, but which were all full to the rafters. Debts outstanding that he hoped to collect from Limi, from Purang and Dunai, from Achham and Ladakh. The chest of turquoise that bore his seal and sat idle in a Muslim merchant’s home in Srinagar. Far to the east, in the valley of Nepal, in a Shakya artisan’s home in Patan, his name being carved into the base of a bejeweled statue of the Guru Rimpoche, with rubies and lapis lazuli on the sage’s crown. The silver was a paltry nothing compared to the wealth the merchant surrounded himself with every day, but it had been enough poison to seed suspicion and greed in the miller’s mind. Urgyen had taken away the song from her.

That night, after washing his bowl with hot water and drinking down the swill, the merchant asked his sons to sit with him. He passed around the scrolls and asked them to recite the contents to each other, then quizzed them hard. Dawa came into the room twice to replenish the oil in the lamps before the merchant was satisfied that his sons knew every detail he wanted them to remember.

“Go to your beds now,” he told his sons. “Remember ― this,” he swept an arm around, a finger pointing to the skies to encircleg everything he owned in the world. “All of this is yours, for you to keep and enjoy until the end of your days.” His sons looked at him with worry, but they were obedient, and so they went quietly to their wives. Perhaps he had given them too much to remember all at once.

 

The merchant didn’t bother with the gods on his roof when morning broke the next day. Before his daughters-in-law could rouse their tired husbands, the merchant had put on his fur hat and left the house. He was astonished to find the miller in the mill, sitting still in a corner as if somebody had forgotten her there a thousand years ago. When he stirred in the doorway, she looked up, recognized him, and scurried back with a tiny yelp of protest. Her knuckles went white from gripping the silver ingot in her hand. The merchant could make out the shape of the piece of silver under her bony palm. What names old Thendup would call me now if he could see what I have done! My sin is the greatest, he thought, for I have done worse than harbor greed: I have tainted an innocent mind with greed and avarice. 

The merchant kneeled by the door, keeping out of the morning light. “Why don’t you sing anymore, Tseten?” The merchant was embarrassed by how simple and plaintive he sounded. The miller didn’t answer. This woman ― this poor orphan, this daughter of a dead friend ― how pitiable and ugly she had become over just a few days!

“Tseten,” he tried to approach her, but she retreated into the dark. “I haven’t come to take back what I gave you. I have come to ask why you don’t sing anymore. Your song was the joy of our village. It was my joy, too. But you have taken it away from us.”

The miller watched the merchant as if it was he who had lost his mind. She tried to laugh, but only a repulsive twitch of the mouth filled her face. She buried the silver piece deeper into the flesh of her chest.

“It is only silver, Tseten! It isn’t the breath of life or the blessings of our ancestors. It can buy silk and wine, but it cannot buy a moment’s peace in the world.” Was the merchant telling this to the miller, was it Urgyen pleading to Tseten? Like scales falling away from a serpent, or like the colors of a sand mandala being swept away to reveal the plain ground underneath, desire fell away from the merchant, even as he realized that more and more desires were clinging to the miller every new moment.

After a long and quiet moment, the merchant kneeled before the miller and spread a scarf on the mill-floor. “Daughter,” he said, “Give me a fistful of flour.”

As he walked away, lightened of a burden, weighed down by another, he heard her call after him in a voice made ragged by a new fury ― “Doesn’t fill your belly, a song doesn’t. Doesn’t keep you warm, doesn’t fatten you, doesn’t make you the mistress of a big house like it makes your daughters-in-law, a song doesn’t. What do you know of want and poverty? When have you known the cold embrace of the floor and the shattering lightness of an empty belly?”

 

It didn’t take the merchant as long as he had feared it would take to walk far away enough that he wouldn’t see any of the mountains around his village: after all, the trading route hewed close to the serpentine rush of the Karnali. A sharp bend in the river, and everything else in Creation was hidden out of sight, save the blue-tinted light of the space and whatever life found a hold within. Knowing that he no longer saw his village or valley instantly put the miller’s song out of the merchant’s mind. In a fold in his coat he carried a small sack of tsampa, and in the lining were three gold coins. A party of Khas shepherds recognized him and flocked to him, bringing him firewood and water, showing him a flat recess in a fire-blackened cave where to sleep, never daring to question why he was so far from home and so obviously without kinsmen or merchandise, horse or mule. He tried to share his tsampa with them, but they laughed and brought him misshapen copper bowls of hot food instead.

The fire burned bright and hot for an hour, but soon no spark from the crackle climbed with the smoke, and the ash on embers turned as grey as the moonlight on it. When he saw that everybody around him was warm and asleep, the merchant spread his bakkhu by the fire, covered himself with an old and worn felt blanket, and waited for sleep to find him.