The Year of Rice and Salt

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  This was not Admiral Kheim's favoured mode of being. 'Enough,' he said darkly, ending the meeting. He had no faith in the sea gods' good will, and took no stock in old stories, except as they were useful. They were caught in the Kuroshio; they had some knowledge of the currents of the Dahai – that north of the equator they ran cast, south of the equator, west. They knew the prevailing winds tended to follow likewise. The doctor, I Chen, had successfully ridden the entirety of this great circle, his unprepared ship's crew living off fish and seaweed, drinking rainwater, and stopping for supplies at islands they passed. This was cause for hope. And as the air remained eerily calm, hope was all they had. It was not as if they had any other options; the ships were dead in the water, and the big ones were too big to row anywhere. In truth they had no choice but to make the best of it.

  Admiral Kheim therefore ordered most of the men of the fleet to get on board the Eighteen Lesser Ships, and ordered half of these to row north, half south, with the idea they could row at an angle out of the Black Stream, and sail home when the wind returned, to get word to the Emperor concerning what had happened. The Eight Great Ships, manned by the smallest crews that could sail them, with as much of the fleet's supplies as could be fitted in their holds, settled in to wait out the ride around the ocean on the currents. If the smaller ones succeeded in sailing back to China, they were to tell the Emperor to expect the Great Eight to return at some later date, out of the southeast.

  In a couple of days the smaller ships all disappeared over the horizon, and the Eight Great Ships drifted on, roped together in a perfect calm, off the maps to the unknown east. There was nothing else they could do.

  Thirty days passed without the slightest breeze. Each day they rode the current farther to the cast.

  No one had ever seen anything like it. Admiral Kheim rejected all talk of the Divine Calm, however; as he pointed out, the weather had gone strange in recent years, mostly much colder, with lakes freezing over that had never frozen before, and freak winds, such as certain whirlwinds that had stood in place for weeks at a time. Something was wrong in the heavens. This was just part of that.

  When the wind returned at last, it was strong from the west, pushing them even farther along. They angled south across the prevailing wind, but cautiously now, hoping to stay within the hypothetical great circle current, as being the fastest way around the ocean and back home. In the middle of the circle there was rumoured to be a permanent zone of calm, perhaps the very centrepoint of the Dahai, as it was near the equator, and perhaps equidistant from shores east and west, though no one could say for sure about that. A doldrums that no junk could escape, in any case. They had to go out far enough to the east to get around that, then head south, then, below the equator, back west again.

  They saw no islands. Seabirds sometimes flew over, and they shot a few with arrows and ate them for luck. They fished day and night with nets, and caught flying fish in their sails, and pulled in snarls of seaweed that grew increasingly rare, and refilled their water casks when it rained, setting funnels like inverted umbrellas over them. And they were seldom thirsty, and never hungry.

  But never a sight of land. The voyage went on, day after day, week after week, month after month. The rattan and the rigging began to wear thin. The sails grew transparent. Their skin began to grow transparent.

  The sailors grumbled. They no longer approved of the plan to ride the circle of currents around the great sea; but there was no turning back, as Kheim pointed out to them. So they passed through their grumbling, as through a storm. Kheim was not an admiral anyone wanted to cross.

  They rode out storms in the sky, and felt the rocking of storms under the sea. So many days passed that their lives before the voyage grew distant and indistinct; Nippon, Taiwan, even China itself began to seem like dreams of a former existence. Sailing became the whole world: a water world, with its blue plate of waves under an inverted bowl of blue sky, and nothing else. They no longer even looked for land. A mass of seaweed was as astonishing as an island would once have been. Rain was always welcome, as the occasional periods of rationing and thirst had taught them painfully their utter reliance on fresh water. This mostly came from rain, despite the little stills that I Chen had constructed to clarify salt water, which gave them a few buckets a day.

  All things were reduced to their elemental being. Water was ocean; air was sky; earth, their ships; fire, the sun, and their thoughts. The fires banked down. Some days Kheim woke, and lived, and watched the sun go down again, and realized that he had forgotten to think a single thought that whole day. And he was the admiral.

  Once they passed the bleached wreckage of a huge junk, intertwined with seaweed and whitened with bird droppings, barely afloat. Another time they saw a sea serpent out to the east, near the horizon, perhaps leading them on.

  Perhaps the fire had left their minds entirely, and was in the sun alone, burning above through rainless days. But something must have remained – grey coals, almost burnt out – for when land poked over the horizon to the cast, late one afternoon, they shouted as if it was all they had ever thought of, in every moment of the hundred and sixty days of their unexpected journey. Green mountainsides, falling precipitously into the sea, apparently empty; it didn't matter; it was land. What looked to be a large island.

  The next morning it was still there ahead of them. Land ho!

  Very steep land, however, so steep that there was no obvious place to make landfall: no bays, no river mouths of any size; just a great wall of green hills, rising wetly out of the sea.

  Kheim ordered them to sail south, thinking even now of the return to China. The wind was in their favour for once, and the current also. They sailed south all that day and the next, without a single harbour to be seen. Then, as light fog lifted one morning, they saw they had passed a cape, which protected a sandy southern reach; and farther south there was a gap in the hills, dramatic and obvious. A bay. There was a patch of turbulent white water on the north side of this majestic entrance strait, but beyond that it was clear sailing, and the flood tide helping to usher them in.

  So they sailed into a bay like nothing any of them had ever seen in all their travels. An inland sea, really, with three or four rocky islands in it, and hills all around, and marshes bordering most of its shores. The hills were rocky on top but mostly forested, the marshes lime green, yellowed by autumn colours. Beautiful land; and empty!

  They turned north and anchored in a shallow inlet, protected by a hilly spine that ran down into the water. Then some of them spotted a line of smoke rising up into the evening air.

  'People,' I Chen said. 'But I don't think this can be the western end of the Muslim lands. We haven't sailed far enough for that, if Hsing Ho is correct. We shouldn't even be close yet.'

  'Maybe it was a stronger current than you thought.'

  'Maybe. I can refine our distance from equator tonight.'

  'Good.'

  But a distance from China would have been better, and that was the calculation they could not make. Dead reckoning had been impossible during the long period of their drift, and despite I Chen's continual guesses, Kheim didn't think they knew their distance from China to within a thousand li.

  As for distance from equator, I Chen reported that night, after measuring the stars, that they were at about the same line as Edo or Beijing a little higher than Edo, a little lower than Beijing. I Chen tapped his astrolabe thoughtfully. 'It's the same level as the hui countries in the far west, in Fulan where all the people died. If Hsing Ho's map can be trusted. Fulan, see? A harbour called Lisboa. But there's no Fulan chi here. I don't think this can be Fulan. We must have come upon an island.'

  'A big island!'

  'Yes, a big island.' I Chen sighed. 'If we could only solve the distancefrom China problem.'

  It was an everlasting complaint with him, causing an obsession with clockmaking; an accurate clock would have made it possible to calculate longitude, using an almanac to give the star times in China, and t
iming from there. The Emperor had some fine timepieces in his palace, it was said, but they had no clock on their ship. Kheim left him to his muttering.

  The next morning they woke to find a group of locals, men, women and children, dressed in leather skirts, shell necklaces, and feather headdresses, standing on the beach watching them. They had no cloth, it appeared, and no metal except small bits of hammered gold, copper and silver. Their arrowheads and spear tips were flaked obsidian, their baskets woven of reeds and pine needles. Great mounds of shells lay heaped on the beach above the high tide mark, and the visitors could see smoke rising from fires set inside wicker hovels, little shelters like those the poor farmers in China used for their pigs in winter.

  The sailors laughed and chattered to see such people. They were partly relieved and partly amazed, but it was impossible to be frightened of these folk.

  Kheim was not so sure. 'They're like the wild people on Taiwan,' he said. 'We had some terrible fights with them when we went after pirates in the mountains. We have to be careful.'

  I Chen said, 'Tribes like that exist on some of the Spice Islands too, I've seen them. But even those people have more things than these.'

  'No brick or wood houses, no iron that I can see, meaning no guns…'

  'No fields for that matter. They must cat the clams,' pointing at the great shell heaps, 'and fish. And whatever they can hunt or glean. These are poor people.'

  'That won't leave much for us.'

  'No.'

  The sailors were shouting down at them: 'Hello! Hello!'

  Kheim ordered them to be quiet. He and I Chen got in one of the little rowing boats they had on the great ship, and had four sailors row them ashore.

  From the shallows Kheim stood and greeted the locals, palms up and out, as one did in the Spice Islands with the wild ones. The locals didn't understand anything he said, but his gestures made plain his peaceful intent, and they seemed to recognize it. After a while he stepped ashore, confident of a peaceful welcome, but instructing the sailors to keep their flintlocks and crossbows below the seats at the ready, just in case.

  On shore he was surrounded by curious people, babbling in their own tongue. Somewhat distracted by the sight of the women's breasts, he greeted a man who stepped forward, whose elaborate and colourful headdress perhaps confirmed him as their headman. Kheim's silk neck scarf, much salt damaged and faded, had the image of a phoenix on it, and Kheim untied it and gave it to the man, holding it flat so he could see the image. The silk itself interested the man more than the image on it. 'We should have brought more silk,' Kheim said to I Chen I Chen shook his head. 'We were invading Nippon. Get their words for things if you can.'

  I Chen was pointing to one thing after another, their baskets, spears, dresses, headpieces, shell mounds; repeating what they said, noting it quickly on his slate. 'Good, good. Well met, well met. The Emperor of China and his humble servants send their greetings.'

  The thought of the Emperor made Kheim smile. What would the Wanli, Heavenly Envoy, make of these poor shell grubbers?

  'We need to teach some of them Mandarin,' I Chen said. 'Perhaps a young boy, they are quicker.'

  'Or a young girl.'

  'Don't let's get into that,' I Chen said. 'We need to spend some time here, to repair the ships and restock. We don't want the men here turning on us.'

  Kheim mimed their intentions to the headman. Stay for a while camp on shore – cat, drink – repair ships – go back home, beyond the, sunset to the west. It seemed they eventually understood most of this. In return he understood from them that they ate acorns and courgettes, fish and clams and birds, and larger animals, probably they meant deer. They hunted in the hills behind. There was lots of food, and the Chinese were welcome to it. They liked Kheim's silk, and would trade fine baskets and food for more of it. Their ornamental gold came from hills to the east, beyond the delta of a big river that entered the bay across from them, almost directly cast; they indicated where it flowed through a gap in the hills, somewhat like the gap leading out to the ocean.

  As this information about the land obviously interested I Chen, they conveyed more to him in a most ingenious way; though they had no paper, nor ink, nor writing nor drawing, except for the patterns in their baskets, they did have maps of a particular kind, made in the sand on the beach. The headman and some other notables crouched and shaped damp sand most minutely with their hands, smoothing flat the part meant to represent the bay, then getting into spirited discussions about the true shape of the mountain between them and the ocean, which they called Tamalpi, and which they indicated by gesture was a sleeping maiden, a goddess apparently, though it was hard to be sure. They used grass to represent a broad valley inland of the hills bracketing the bay on the east, and wetted the channels of a delta and two rivers, one draining the north, the other the south part of a great valley. To the east of this big valley were foothills rising to mountains much bigger than the coastal range, snow capped (indicated by dandelion fluff) and holding in their midst a big lake or two.

  All this they marked out with endless disputations concerning the details, and care over fingernail creasings and bits of grass or pine sprays; and all for a map that would be washed away in the next high tide. But when they were done, the Chinese knew that their gold came from people who lived in the foothills; their salt from the shores of the bay; their obsidian from the north and from beyond the high mountains, whence came also their turquoise; and so on. And all without any language in common, merely things displayed in mime, and their sand model of their country.

  In the days that followed, however, they exchanged words for a host of daily objects and events, and I Chen kept lists and started a glossary, and started teaching one of the local children, a girl of about six years who was the child of the headman, and very forward; a constant babbler in ber own tongue, whom the Chinese sailors named Butterfly, both for her manner and for the joke that perhaps at this point they were only her dream. She delighted in telling I Chen what was what, very firmly; and quicker than Kheim could have believed possible she was using Chinese as well as her own language, mixing them together sometimes, but usually reserving her Chinese for I Chen, as if it were his private tongue and he some sort of freak, or inveterate joker, always making up fake words for things neither opinion far from the truth. Certainly her elders agreed that I Chen was a strange foreigner, feeling their pulse and abdomens, looking in their mouths, asking to inspect their urine (this they refused), and so on. They had a kind of doctor themselves, who led them in ritual purifications in a simple steam bath. This elderly raddled wild eyed man was no doctor in the sense I Chen was, but I Chen took great interest in the man's herbarium and his explanations, as far as I Chen could make them out, using ever more sophisticated sign languages, and Butterfly's growing facility in Chinese. The locals' language was called Miwok, as the people also called themselves; the word meant 'people' or something like. They made it clear with their maps that their village controlled the watershed of the stream that flowed into the bay. Other Miwok lived in the nearly watersheds of the peninsula, between bay and ocean; other people with different languages lived in other parts of the country, each with its own name and territory, though the Miwok could argue among themselves over the details of these things endlessly. They told the Chinese that the great strait leading out to the ocean had been created by an earthquake, and that the bay had been fresh water before the cataclysm had let the ocean in. This seemed unlikely to I Chen and Kheim, but then one morning after they had slept on shore, they were awakened by a severe shaking, and the earthquake lasted many heartbeats, and came back twice that morning; so that after that they were not as sure about the strait as they had been before.

  They both enjoyed listening to the Miwok speak, but only I Chen was interested in how the women made the bitter acorns of the jaggedleaved oaks edible, by grinding and leeching the acorn powder in beds of leaves and sand, giving them a sort of flour; I Chen thought it was most ingenious. This flour, a
nd salmon both fresh and dried, were the staples of their diet, which they offered the Chinese freely. They also ate deer, a kind of giant deer, rabbits, and all manner of waterfowl. Indeed, as the autumn descended mildly on them, and the months passed, the Chinese began to understand that food was so plentiful in this place that there was no need for agriculture as practised in China. Despite which there were very few people living there. That was one of the mysteries of this island.

  The Miwok's hunts were big parties in the hills, all day events that Kheim and his men were allowed to join. The bows used by the Miwok were weak but adequate. Kheim ordered his sailors to leave the crossbows and guns hidden on the ships, and the cannon were simply left to view but not explained, and none of the locals asked about them.

  On one of these hunting trips Kheim and I Chen followed the headman, Ta Ma, and some of the Miwok men up the stream that poured through their village, up into hills to a high meadow that had a view of the ocean to the west. To the cast they could see across the bay, to range after range of green hills.

  The meadow was marshy by the stream, grassy above it, with stands of oak and other trees tufting the air. There was a lake at the lower end of the meadow that was entirely covered with geese – a white blanket of living birds, all honking now, upset by something, complaining. Then the whole flock thrashed into the air, groups swirling and fragmenting, coming together, flying low over the hunters, squawking or silently concentrating, on flight, the distinctive creak of their pumping wing feathers loud in the air. Thousands on thousands.

  The men stood and watched the spectacle, eyes bright. When the geese had all departed, they saw the reason they had left; a herd of giant deer had come to the lake to drink. The stags had huge racks of antlers. They stared across the water at the men, vigilant but undeterred.

  For a moment, all was still.