Page 11 of The Salt King

The boys flicked some coins obediently, and of course the coins wouldn’t cooperate, because Kalden was switching the coins around when he did it. Numbers side, flower side, number side.

“What? You must have bad coins. Up! Oh . . . no, there we are. Flowers again!” He did two at a time, both hands. “And again. And again . . .”

For some reason, it was their favourite thing in the world. They both fell about laughing. They still had chesty baby laughs. One of them dove into his pocket like a puppy to investigate the smartphone—they hardly ever saw phones up here—so Kalden showed him how to take a video. Vibrating with importance, they both filmed him doing the trick, and squealed with pretend indignation when he cuddled them both.

“Now film us, now film us!” one of them demanded. He always said everything twice, not confident you would listen on the first go. Under the red monastery robes, he had on a puffer jacket that made him into a little ball.

“I’m doing it,” Kalden said, laughing too. “Go!”

They both flicked their coins, and let out delighted squeaks when they both threw flowers three times in a row. Kalden laughed too and wondered what the chances were. Well. Not that mad. One in twelve, was it?

A few hours later, feeling worried, he went to see the abbot.

The abbot was admiring the new fairy lights he had just put up in the chapel. They were rainbow colours, and the light gleamed on the gold of the thangkas across the walls, bringing out all the time-faded tints and details. Kalden, who had never seen the inside of a monastery until he was twelve, still thought sometimes that it was strange to see these incredible images of the fourteenth or fifteenth century lit not by candlelight but neon as they so often were, but he loved it. Colour was sacred, and he was privately certain that the monks from those lost centuries would have liked the electric lights too.

“So you’re saying,” the abbot said gently, “that the problem is that the boys have learned how to do a magic trick?”

Kalden wrung his hat between his hands. It was rainbow-coloured too; the abbot, who knitted, had made it for him as a welcome present. “No, sir, it’s—that they don’t know how to do it, but it’s working anyway. Can I show you what the trick is?”

The abbot looked bemused, but he nodded, and Kalden showed him the trick.

“You have to switch the coins, you see? You have to hold one the right way round and then swap it in.”

“I see?”

“But . . . that isn’t what they’re doing,” Kalden said, and showed him the video he had taken of them a few minutes ago. “They’re just doing a normal coin toss. And—it’s all of them, all the little ones. They only throw flower-side-up. All day. I worked it out with a calculator. The chances are . . . well, it’s something like one in forty billion now.”

He had thought the abbot would laugh at him. Instead, the abbot watched the video twice, then nodded slowly. Outside, there was a soft chiming; some visitors were walking around the walls of the monastery, hands trailing on the prayer wheels to keep them spinning. It was good for your soul to pace out a circuit every day, but Kalden was still impressed by the number of people who came up the mountain to do it.

“I see,” the abbot said.

“What’s happening?” Kalden asked, and heard how like a child he sounded.

The abbot squeezed his arm. “What was it that happened to your leg, did you ever tell me?”

“I was hit by a cab when I used to work by the railway station.”

“All right. I want you to walk the wheels and pray for your health today.” He thought about it. “And put in a good word about my sciatica.”

“Yes, sir,” Kalden said, puzzled, but you were supposed to be puzzled by abbots.

The abbot smiled, but he was looking at the thangka by the door now. It showed the mountain, and the spirit who lived beneath it; a many-faced, many-limbed figure who reminded Kalden of a Hindu god, if one had ever belonged in these snow-swept altitudes, with eagle wings and the pelt of a leopard, and many faces.

3 The documentaries were always roughly titled something like How Picturesque a Genuine Tang Dynasty Salt Mine Is, In What Is Genuinely Part of China Because Tibet Is Not a Separate Country, Honest. The journalists always seemed chagrined to find that among all the picturesque, traditional salt pans, people didn’t float around in Tang Dynasty robes reciting poetry but cadged cigarettes behind the storage sheds in bright red Adidas trousers, and that the monks all wore sneakers under their robes, and woolly hats, sometimes with a pom-pom on. You could see them wanting to wail that it wasn’t in keeping. This fuelled the strictly unspoken competition to see who could acquire the most tasteless sneakers. Not, of course, that monks engaged in worldly concerns, but if people would keep donating things, well . . .

6

Hreodwater, England

The Lodge was bright with salt light, but under that, it was dim as far as ordinary light could go. There were a few candles in little groups here and there, the overflowed wax sealing them to the mantelpiece and the corner of the desk. Catching both kinds of light were the spines of the books on the shelves and, much more strangely, hanging by their straps from hooks along the wall, about twenty instant cameras. All of them were closed up in cases that at least looked like solid silver. There were even silver lens covers.

“Oh, come on,” a voice behind him said. “You can’t be an indoor snail. You won’t like it.”

Avelyn looked around and realized he had walked straight past a man who was leaning close to a sash window. Right where the window would crush it if he pushed the lower pane down was an interested snail, peeping over the window ledge. Hreod snails were fun. They spun their shells from salt rather than calcium, so they were luminous.

The man blew gently on the snail’s face. It pulled in its antennae, but only a little bit, and looked like it was scowling.

“Why don’t you pick it up?” asked Avelyn, who had never seen a human lose an argument with a snail before.