'No. Where I come from we do not gather in such numbers. More people live around this bay than in all my country, I think.'
Now Ismail was the surprised one. 'So few as that?'
'Yes. Although there are a lot of people here, I think. But we live in a great forest, extremely thick and dense. The rivers make the best ways. Until you people arrived, we hunted and grew some crops, we made only what we needed, with no metal or ships. The Muslims brought those to our cast coast, and set up forts in a few harbours, in particular at the mouth of the East River, and on Long Island. There were not so many of them, at first, and we learned a lot from them that we put to use for ourselves. But we have been stricken by sicknesses we never knew before, and many have died, at the same time that many more Muslims have come, bringing slaves from Africa to help them. But our land is very big, and the coast itself, where the Muslims cluster, is not very good land. So we trade with them, and even better, with ships from here, when the Travancoris arrived. We were very happy to see these ships, truly, because we were worried about the Firanjis. We still are. They have lots of cannons, and they go where they want, and tell us we do not know Allah, and that we should pray to him, and so on. So we liked to see the coming of other people, in good ships. People who were not Muslim.'
'Did the Travancoris attack the Muslims already there?'
'Not yet. They landed at the mouth of the Mississippi, a big river. It may be they will come to blows eventually. They both are very well armed, and we are not, not yet.' He looked Ismail in the eye and smiled cheerfully. 'I must remember you are Muslim yourself, no doubt.'
Ismail said, 'I do not insist on it for others. Islam allows you to choose.'
'Yes, they said that. But here in Travancore you see it really happening. Sikh, Hindu, Africans, Japanese, you see them all here. The Kerala does not seem to care. Or he likes it.'
'Hindus absorb all that touch them, they say.'
'That sounds all right to me,' said Wasco. 'Or in any case, preferable to Allah at gunpoint. We're making our own ships now in our great lakes, and soon we can come around Africa to you. Or, now the Kerala is proposing to dig a canal through the desert of Sinai, connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, and giving us more direct access to you. He proposes to conquer all Egypt to make this possible. No, there is much talk to be made, many decisions to be made. My league is very fond of leagues.'
Then Bhakta came by and took Ismail off again. 'You have been honoured with an invitation to join the Kerala in one of the sky chariots.'
'The floating bags?'
Bhakta smiled. 'Yes.'
'Oh joy.'
Following the hobbling abbess Ismail passed through terraces each with its own perfume scenting it, through nutmeg, lime, cinnamon, mint, rose, rising level by level in short stone staircases, feeling as he went something like a step into some higher realm, where both senses and emotions were keener: a faint terror of the body, as the odours cast him farther and farther into a higher state. His head whirled. He did not fear death, but his body did not like the idea of what would happen to take him to that final moment. He caught up to the abbess and walked by her, to stabilize himself by her calm. By the way she went up the stairs he saw that she was always in pain. And yet she never spoke of it. Now she looked back down at the ocean, catching her breath, and put one gnarled hand to Ismail's arm, and told him how glad she was that he was there among then. How much they might accomplish together working under the guidance of the Kerala, who was creating the space for greatness to occur. They were going to change the world. As she spoke Ismail reeled again on the scents in the air, he seemed to catch sight of things to come, of the Kerala sending back people and things from all over the world as he conquered one place after another, sending back to the monastery books, maps, instruments, medicines, tools, people with unusual diseases or new skills, from west of the Urals and east of the Pamirs, from Burma and Siam and the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra and Java, from the east coast of Africa, Ismail saw a witch docter from Madagascar showing him the nearly transparent wings of a kind of bat, which allowed for a full examination of living veins and arteries, at which point he would give the Kerala a complete description of the circulation of the blood, and the Kerala would be very pleased at this, and then Ismail saw a Chinese Sumatran doctor showing him what the Chinese meant by qi and shen, which turned out to be what Ismail had always called lymph, produced by small glands under the arms, which might be affected by poultices of steamed herbs and drugs, as the Chinese had always claimed, and then he saw a group of Buddhist monks arranging charts of different elements in different families, depending on chemical and physical properties, all laid out in a very beautiful mandala, the subject of endless discussions in reading rooms, workshops, foundries and hospitals, everyone exploring even if they did not sail around the world, even if they never left Travancore, all of them anxious to have something interesting to tell the Kerala the next time he came by – not so the Kerala would reward them, though he would, but because he would be so happy at the new information. There was a look on his face everyone craved to see, and that was the whole story of Travancore, right there.
They came to a broad terrace where the flying basket was tethered. Already its huge silken bag was full of heated air, and straining up in jerks against its anchor ropes. The bamboo wicker basket was as big as a large carriage or a small pavilion; the rigging connecting it to the bottom of the silk bag was a network of lines, each slender, but clearly strong in the aggregate. The silk of the bag was diaphanous. A coalfired enclosed brazier, with a hand bellows affixed to its side, was bolted to a bamboo frame affixed beneath the bag, just over head level when they stepped through a carriage door up into the basket.
The Kerala, the singer, Bhakta and Ismail crowded in and stood at the corners. Pyidaungsu looked in and said, 'Alas, it does not look as if there is room for me, I will crowd you uncomfortably; I will go up next time, regretful though I am to have lost the opportunity.'
The ropes were cast off by the pilot and his passengers, except for a single line, it was a nearly windless day, and this, Ismail was told, was to be a controlled flight. They were to ascend like a kite, the pilot explained, and then when they were near the full extension of the line, they would shut the stove down, and stabilize in that one spot like any other kite, hanging some thousand hands over the landscape. The usual slight onshore afternoon breeze would ensure that they would float inland, if the line happened to part.
Up they rose. 'It is like Arjuna's chariot,' the Kerala said to them, and they all nodded, eyes shining with excitement. The singer was beautiful, the memory of her singing like a song in the air around them; and the Kerala more beautiful still; and Bhakta the most beautiful of all. The pilot pumped the bellows once or twice. The wind whistled in the rigging.
From the air the world proved to be flat looking. It extended a tremendous distance to the horizon – green hills to the northeast and south, and to the west the flat blue plate of the sea, the sunlight on it gleaming like gold on blue ceramic. Things down there were small but distinct. The trees were like green tufts of wool. It looked like the landscapes painted in Persian miniatures, spread out and laid in space below them, gorgeously articulated. Fields of rice were banked and bordered by sinuous lines of palm trees, and beyond them were orchards of small trees, planted in rows and lines, looking like a tight weave of cloth, all the way out to the dark green hills in the east. 'What kind of trees are those?' Ismail asked.
The Kerala answered, for as became clear, he had directed the establishment of most of the orchards they could see. 'They are part of the city lands, and used to grow the sources of essential oils that we trade for the goods that come in. You smelled some of them on our walk to the basket. Root trees like vetiver, costus, valerian and angelica, shrubs like keruda, lotes, kadam, parijat and night queen. Grasses like cintronella, lemon grass and ginger grass and palmarosa. Flowers, as you see, including tuberose, champaca, roses, jasmine, frangipani. Herbs inc
luding peppermint, spearmint, patchouli, artemesia. Then there, back in the woods there, those are orchards of sandalwood and agarwood. All these are bred, planted, grown, harvested, processed and bottled or bagged for trade with Africa and Firanja and China and the new world, where formerly they had no scents and no healing substances anything like as powerful, and so are much amazed, and desire them very much. And now I have people out scouring the world to find more stock of various kind, to see what will grow here. Those that prosper are cultivated, and their oils sold round the world. Demand for them is so high it is hard to match it, and gold comes flowing into Travancore as its wondrous scents perfume the whole Earth.'
The basket turned as it came to the top of its anchor rope, and below them the heart of the kingdom was revealed, the city of Travancore as seen by the birds, or God. The land beside the bay was covered with roofs, trees, roads, docks, all as small as the toys of a princess, extending not as far as Konstantiniyye would have, but big enough, and sprinkled by a veritable arboretum of green trees, hardly displaced by the buildings and roads. Only the docks area was more roof than tree.
Just above them floated a tapestry of crosshatched cloud, moving inland on the wind. Off to sea a great line of tall white marbled clouds sailed towards them. 'We'll have to get down before too long,' the Kerala said to the pilot, who nodded and checked his stove.
A flock of vultures pinioned about them curiously, and the pilot shouted once at them, pulling a fowling gun out of a bag on the inside of the basket. He had never seen it happen, he said, but he had heard of a flock of birds pecking a bag right out of the sky. Hawks, jealous of their territory, apparently; probably vultures would not be so bold; but it would be a bad thing by which to be surprised.
The Kerala laughed, looked at Ismail and gestured at the colourful and fragrant fields. 'This is the world we want you to help us make,' he said. 'We will go out into the world and plant gardens and orchards to the horizons, we will build roads through the mountains and across the deserts, and terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be garden everywhere, and plenty for all, and there will be no more empires or kingdoms, no more caliphs, sultans, emirs, khans or zamin dars, no more kings or queens or princes, no more qadis or mullas or ulema, no more slavery and no more usury, no more property and no more taxes, no more rich and no more poor, no killing or maiming or torture or execution, no more jailers and no more prisoners, no more generals, soldiers, armies or navies, no more patriarchy, no more clans, no more caste, no more hunger, no more suffering than what life brings us for being born and having to die, and then we will see for the first time what kind of creatures we really are.'
Chapter Three. Gold Mountain
In the twelfth year of the Xianfeng Emperor, rain inundated Gold Mountain. It started raining in the third month of the autumn, the usual start of the rainy season on this part of the coast of Yingzhou, but then it never stopped raining until the second month of the following spring. It rained every day for half a year, and often a pounding, drenching rain, as if it were the tropics. Before that winter was halfway over the great central valley of Gold Mountain had flooded up and down its entire length, forming a shallow lake fifteen hundred li long and three hundred li wide. The water poured brownly between the green hills flanking the delta, into the great bay and out of the Gold Gate, staining the ocean the colour of mud all the way out to the Peng lai Islands. The outflow ran hard both ebb and flood, but still this was not enough to empty the great valley. The Chinese towns and villages and farms on the flat valley floor were drowned to the rooftops, and the entire population of the valley had to leave for higher ground, in the coastal range or the foothills of the Gold Mountains, or, for the most part, down to the city, fabled Fangzhang. Those who lived on the eastern side of the central valley tended to move up into the foothills, ascending the rail and stage roads that ran up through apple orchards and vineyards, overlooking the deep canyons that cut between the tablelands. Here they ran into the large foothill population of Japanese.
Many of these Japanese had come in the diaspora, after the Chinese armies had conquered Japan, in the Yung Cheng dynasty, a hundred and twenty years before. They were the ones who had first begun to grow rice in the central valley; but after only a generation or two, Chinese immigration filled the valley as the rains were now filling it, and most of the Japanese nisei and sansei moved up into the foothills, looking for gold, or growing grapes and apples. There they encountered a fair number of the old ones, hidden in the foothills and struggling to survive a malaria epidemic that recently had killed most of them off. The Japanese got along with the survivors, and the other old ones that came from the east, and together they resisted Chinese incursions into the foothills in every way they could, short of insurrection; for over the Gold Mountains lay high desolate akaline deserts, where nothing could live. Their backs were to the wall.
So the arrival of so many Chinese refugee farming families was no very happy event for those already there. The foothills were composed of plateaux tilted up towards the high mountains, and cut by very deep, rugged, heavily forested river canyons. These manzanita choked canyons were impenetrable to the Chinese authorities, and hidden in them were many Japanese families, most of them panning for gold or working small diggings. Chinese road building campaigns stuck to the plateaux for the most part, and the canyons had remained substantially Japanese, despite the presence of Chinese prospectors: a Hokkaido-in exile, tucked between the Chinese valley and the great desert of the natives. Now this world was filling with soaked Chinese rice farmers.
Neither side liked it. By now bad relations between Chinese and Japanese were as natural as between dog and cat. The foothill Japanese tried to ignore the Chinese setting up refugee camps by the all the stage and railway stations; the Chinese tried to ignore the Japanese homesteads they were intruding on. Rice ran low, tempers got short, and the Chinese authorities sent troops into the area to keep order. The rain kept falling.
One group of Chinese walked out of the flooding on the stage road that followed the course of Rainbow Trout River. Overlooking the river's north bank were apple orchards and cattle pasturage, mostly owned by Chinese in Fangzhang, but worked by Japanese. This group of Chinese camped in one of the orchards, and did what they could to construct shelter from the rain, which continued to fall, day after day after day. They built a pole framed barnlike building with a shingle roof, an open fire at one end and mere sheets for walls; meagre protection, but better than none. By day the men scrambled down the canyon walls to fish in the roaring river, and others went into the forest to hunt deer, shooting great numbers of them and drying their meat.
The matriarch of one of these families, Yao Je by name, was frantic that her silkworms had been left behind on their farm, in boxes tucked in the rafters of her filature. Her husband did not think there was anything that could be done about it, but the family employed a Japanese servant boy named Kiyoaki, who volunteered to go back down to the valley and take their rowing boat out on the first calm day, and recover the silkworms. His master did not like the proposal, but his mistress approved of it, as she wanted the silkworms. So one rainy morning Kiyoaki left to try to return to their flooded farm, if he could.
He found the Yao family's rowing boat still tied to the valley oak where they had left it. He untied it and rowed out over what had been the eastern rice paddies of their farm, towards their compound. A west wind churned up high waves, and both pushed him back east. His palms were blistered by the time he coasted up to the Yaos' inundated compound, scraped the flat bottom of the boat over the outer wall, and tied it to the roof of the filature, the tallest building on the farm. He climbed through a side window into the rafters, and found the sheets of damp paper covered with silkworm eggs, in their boxes filled with rocks and mulberry mulch. He gathered all the sheets into an oilcloth bag and lowered them out of the window into the rowing boat, feeling pleased.
Now rain was violently thrashing the surface of the flood, and
Kiyoaki considered spending the night in the attic of the Yaos' house. But the emptiness of it frightened him, and for no better reason than that, he decided to row back. The oilcloth would protect the eggs, and he had been wet for so long that he was used to it. He was like a frog hopping in and out of its pond, it was all the same to him. So he got in the boat and began to row.
But now, perversely, the wind was from the east, blowing up waves of surprising weight and power. His hands hurt, and the boat occasionally brushed over drowned things: treetops, wiregraph poles, perhaps other things, he was too jumpy to look. Dead men's fingers! He could not see far in the growing gloom, and as night fell he lost his feeling for what direction he was headed. The rowing boat had a oiled canvas decking bunched in its bow, and he pulled it back over the gunwales, tied it in place, got under it and floated over the flood, lying in the bottom of the boat and occasionally bailing with a can. It was wet, but it would not founder. He let it bounce over the waves, and eventually fell asleep.
He woke several times in the night, but after bailing he always forced himself to sleep again. The rowing boat swirled and rocked, but the waves never broke over it. If they did the boat would founder and he would drown, but he avoided thinking about that.
Dawn made it clear he had drifted west rather than east. He was far out on the inland sea that the central valley had become. A knot of valley oaks marked a small island of higher ground that still stood above the flood, and he rowed towards it.
As he was facing away from the new little island, he did not see it well until he had thumped the bow onto it. Immediately he discovered it was coated with a host of spiders, bugs, snakes, squirrels, moles, rats, mice, raccoons and foxes, all leaping onto the rowing boat at once, as representing the new highest ground. He himself was the highest ground of all, and he was shouting in dismay and slapping desperate snakes and squirrels and spiders off him, when a young woman and baby leapt onto the boat like the rest of the crowd of animals, except the girl pushed off from the tree Kiyoaki had rowed against, weeping and crying loudly, 'They're trying to cat her, they're trying to eat my baby!'
The Year of Rice and Salt Page 48
