Page 10 of The Salt King

For him, every brick glowed; every windowpane, every salt-carved saint, and every flagstone. It was a castle of light. The stained glass—stained salt—windows threw their glorious colours outward as well as inward. Projected right out onto the stairway, so that you walked through it, was the image in the chapel window, of Saint Hildegard wrestling the King.

But the strongest salt light, full-moon brilliant, beamed from the great archway that led down to the deep mine and the working pit faces. Mammoths could have walked under that archway and felt small, and with the light so bright, there was a counterintuitive certainty that the way must lead outside, not deeper underground. The way was barred with high silver gates to keep anyone from wandering into the deep tunnels.

Then he felt it: exactly what Father Li had wanted him to feel at Mass, but he never had, and exactly what he used to feel every day in this mine.

Most people felt it down here. Hreod had a word for it. It was called the ras, grace: the feeling of being near to the King. He filled up with it, his whole mind falling still and calm.

It hadn’t done that for twelve years.

He had to stand there and breathe. It was like coming out of a long, grinding illness—taking the first painless step, the first easy breath, after years of being . . . what? Not an invalid; he functioned in Italy. But—not right, either.

It was the most incredible relief.

He didn’t think he had ever been able to explain properly to Father Li. Believing in the Salt King was the best feeling he’d ever had. Believing in God and Christ was dreadful. He couldn’t feel them or hear them; their rules were despotic; and he belonged to an order that had murdered its way through South America before starting the Spanish Inquisition. All under the aegis of a Church where, at conservative estimates, one in twenty ordained priests was guilty of the worst thing a man could do.

But it was also true. There was gravity, there was the churning of electrons, and there was the Holy Trinity.

And anything else that said it was a god . . . was not.

Quite suddenly, it occurred to him that he had no idea where to go now. He had been inside the abbey with Father Li years ago, but that had been the first and only time. The miners and the clergy didn’t overlap unless there was a safety problem.

When he strayed to the gate, there was a sign that said in several languages, including Hreod, TO THE Lodge.

He followed it across the courtyard, up a few steps, through a narrow archway, and to a broad door that had a much tinier door set inside it, with another sign that read LODGE. The tiny door was propped open. There was lamplight inside.

He went experimentally through.

5

Lancang, Tibet

The problem with the sacred ducks was that they kept eating the coins in the pool. There were signs up everywhere asking visitors to the monastery not to throw coins, but Brother Kalden had watched streams of old ladies glare at the signs and ignore them in the pointed way of people who would claim not to be able to read if you tried to take them up on it.

And so now he was hurrying after a coughing duck, who didn’t realize he was trying to help and ran away.

He had to pause for a rest against the old salt well, wheezing, breath steaming in the clear morning cold. This altitude. He had joined the monastery a month ago, and he was all right now, mostly, but running around at fourteen thousand feet was enough to make him collapse after about forty seconds. Those elderly ladies kept lapping him on the toil up and down the mountain. He was glad he was giving them a little giggle whenever they saw him, but he was beginning to wish his lungs would hurry up and embrace the new life.

He lifted his phone and took a video of himself being defeated by a duck, and turned the camera around in time to show the duck swimming smugly away and—was he imagining it?—clinking.

It was part of his duties to maintain a social media channel about daily life as a monk. Initially, when the abbot had given him the phone, he had worried that he didn’t know enough yet to do a decent job. The abbot had laughed and said, “That’s the point. Show the ordinary side. Start with the ducks.” He was right. Kalden’s three-way war of attrition with the elderly ladies and the ducks was attracting quite a lot of people to the monastery website.

Below him, the great salt works glimmered their way down the gorge of the Lancang River. From so high up, the works looked like a natural formation of striations in the mountains, rows and rows of vertical terraces, but they weren’t: they were platforms, standing stacked above the river on high cedar posts. Closer to him, the pans were red; further away, they were white. Here and there, gem pools of brilliant green shone too. It was to do with the kind of silt in the pools, he’d heard; the colour affected the flavour of the salt. Small figures stood in the more evaporated pools, raking the salt into patterned ridges nearly like mandalas. Salt stalactites hung from the terraces, and up the steep side of the valley, donkeys laboured to pull carts filled with salt sacks. No roads out here.

That was why he had wanted to come. In this quiet, you could hear yourself pray. Sometimes you could even hear in the quality of the high mountain quiet that something was listening. Even the salt miners, pragmatic people who wore gum boots and pretended not to speak Mandarin when the inevitable news crews came from Beijing to make their yearly feature,3 said that you could hear singing in the river, if you made your mind quiet.

Kalden couldn’t hear it, as such. He understood why people called it hearing, but this felt more like the memory of hearing than hearing fresh. It was a song, and it was a feeling too. Something vast and . . . good.

He had it very clearly, he noticed, whenever he was near a salt well. There was water down there somewhere, densely salty water, but when he first arrived, the abbot had thrown a pebble down to show him how deep it was. So deep you couldn’t hear the splash. Only the song.

“Brother, brother!” Two of the littlest boys rushed up to him. The monastery took boys as young as six, and they were unbearably sweet. These two had hands full of yuan coins. “We got, we got these out of the ducks’ nests for you!”

“Do a magic trick!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Kalden said, pretending to die of altitude sickness against the side of the well.

The boys squeaked and pushed some coins into his hands. “Do the magic trick, do the magic trick!”

“Oh . . . okay, okay.” He sat down on the ground and they crowded into his lap, which made doing the tricks harder, but even if he was useless with the ducks, he was good at this. He’d made a living doing magic tricks outside a railway station when he was little. “Ready . . . Up we go!” He flicked a coin. “Flower side up. Ready for it to do that again? And . . . again. And again. You try.”