The Years of Rice and Salt

by Robinson, Kim Stanley

  by interior walls into nine individual compartments, each several times bigger than the biggest Red Sea dhows. The slaves who had been on ships before said that would make the great ship impossible to sink; if one compartment leaked it could be emptied and repaired, or even left to flood, but the others would keep the ship afloat. It was like being on nine ships tied together.

  one morning the deck overhead reverberated with the drumming of sailors' feet, and they could feel the two giant stone anchors being raised. Big sails were hauled up on crossbeams, one for each mast. The ship began a slow stately rocking over the water, heeling slightly.

  It was indeed a floating town. Hundreds lived on it; moving bags and boxes from hold to hold, Bold counted five hundred different people, and there were no doubt many more. It was astonishing how many people were aboard. Very Chinese, the slaves all agreed. The Chinese didn't notice it was crowded, to them it was normal, no different from any other Chinese town.

  The admiral of the great fleet was on their ship: Zheng He, a giant of a man, a flat­faced western Chinese, a hui as some slaves called him under their breath. Because of his presence the upper deck was crowded with officers, dignitaries, priests and supernumeraries of every sort. Belowdecks there were a lot of black men, Zanjis and Malays, doing the hardest work.

  That night four men came into the slaves' room. One was Hua Man, Zheng's first officer. They stopped before Kyu and grabbed him up. Hua struck him on the head with a short club. The other three pulled off the boy's robe and separated his legs. They tied bandages tightly around his thighs and around his waist. They held the semi‑conscious boy up, and Hua took a small curved knife from his sleeve. He grasped the boy's penis and pulled it out, and with a single deft slice cut off penis and balls, right next to the body. The boy groaned as Hua squeezed the bleeding wound and slipped a leather thong around it. He leaned down and inserted a slender metal plug into the wound, then pulled the thong tight and tied it off. He went to the shithole and dropped the boy's genitals through it into the sea. Then from one of his assistants he took a wet wad of paper and held it against the wound he had made, while the others bandaged it in place. When it was secured two of them put the boy's arms over their shoulders, and walked him out the door.

  They returned with him a watch or so later, and let him lie down. Apparently they had been walking him the whole time. 'Don't let him drink,' Hua said to the cowed slaves. 'If he drinks or eats in the next three days, he'll die.'

  The boy moaned through the night. The other slaves moved instinctively to the other side of the room, too scared to talk about it yet. Bold, who had gelded quite a few horses in his time, went and sat by him. The boy was perhaps ten or twelve years old. His grey face had some quality that drew Bold, and he stayed by him. For three days the boy moaned for water, but Bold didn't give him any.

  On the night of the third day the eunuchs returned. 'Now we see whether he will live or die,' Hua said. They held up the boy, took off the bandages, and with a swift jerk Hua pulled the plug from the boy's wound. Kyu yelped and groaned as a hard stream of urine sprayed out of him into a porcelain chamberpot held in place by the second eunuch.

  'Good,' Hua said to the silent slaves. 'Keep him clean. Remind him to take out the plug to relieve himself, and to get it back in quick, until he heals.'

  They left and locked the door.

  Now the Abyssinian slaves would talk to the boy. 'If you keep it clean it will heal right up. Urine cleans it too, so that's all right, I mean, if you wet yourself when you go.'

  'Lucky they didn't do it to all of us.'

  'Who says they won't?'

  'They don't do it to men. Too many die of it. Only boys can sustain the loss.'

  The next morning Bold led the boy to the shithole and helped him to get the bandage off, so he could pull the plug and pee again. Then Bold put it back for him, showing him where it went, trying to be delicate as the boy whimpered. 'You have to have the plug, or the tube will close up and you'll die.'

  The boy lay on his cotton shift, feverish. The others tried not to look at the horrible wound, but it was hard not to see it once in a while.

  'How could they do it?' one said in Arabic, when the boy was sleeping.

  'They're eunuchs themselves,' one of the Abyssinians said. 'Hua is a eunuch. The admiral himself is a eunuch.'

  'You'd think they'd be the ones to know.'

  'They know and that's why they do it. They hate us all. They rule the Chinese Emperor, and they hate everyone else. You can see how it will be,' waving around at the immense ship. 'They'll castrate all of us. it's the end coming.'

  'You Christians like to say that, but so far it's only been true for you.'

  'God took us first to shorten our suffering. Your turn will come.'

  'It's not God 1 fear, but Admiral Zheng He, the Three Jewel Eunuch. He and the Yongle Emperor were friends when they were boys, and the Emperor ordered him castrated when they were both thirteen. Can you believe it? Now the eunuchs do it to all the boys they take prisoner.'

  in the days that followed Kyu got hotter and hotter, and was seldom conscious. Bold sat by his side and put wet rags in his mouth, reciting sutras in his mind. The last time he had seen his own son, almost thirty years before, the boy had been about this age. This one's lips were grey and parched, his dark skin dull, and very dry and hot. Bold had never felt anyone that hot who had not died, so it was probably a waste of time for all concerned; best to let the poor sexless creature slip away, no doubt. But he kept giving him water anyway. He recalled the boy looking around the ship as they had loaded it, his gaze intense and searching. Now the body lay there looking like some sad little African girl, sick to death from an infection in her loins.

  But the fever passed. Kyu ate more and more. Even when he was active again, however, he spoke little compared to before. His eyes were not the same either; they stared at people like a bird's eyes do, as if they did not quite believe anything they saw. Bold realized that the boy had travelled out of his body, gone into the bardo and come back someone else. All different. That black boy was dead; this one started anew.

  'What is your name now?' he asked him.

  'Kyu,' the boy said, but unsurprised, as if he didn't remember telling Bold before.

  'Welcome to this life, Kyu.'

  Sailing on the open ocean was a strange way to travel. The skies flew by overhead, but it never looked as if they had moved anywhere. Bold tried to reckon what a day's ride was for the fleet, wondering if it was faster in the long run than horses, but he couldn't do it. He could only watch the weather and wait.

  ...............

  Twenty‑three days later the fleet sailed into Calicut, a city much bigger than any of the ports of Zanj, as big as Alexandria, or bigger.

  Sandstone towers bulbed, walls crenellated,

  All overgrown by a riot of greens.

  This close to the sun life fountains into the sky. Around the stone of the central districts,

  Light wooden buildings fill the green bush Up the coast in both directions,

  Into the hills behind; the city extends

  As far as the eye can see, up the sides Of a mountain ringing the town.

  Despite its great size, all activity in the city stopped at the arrival of the Chinese fleet. Bold and Kyu and the Ethiopians looked through their grating at the shouting crowds, all those people in their colours waving their arms overhead in awe.

  'These Chinese will conquer the whole world.'

  'Then the Mongols will conquer China,' Bold said.

  He saw Kyu watching the throng on shore. The boy's expression was that of a preta, unburied at death. Certain demon masks had that look, the old Bon look, like Bold's father when enraged, staring into a person's soul and saying I'm taking this along with me, you can't stop me and you'd better not try. Bold shuddered to see such a face on a mere boy.

  They were put to work unloading cargo into boats, and taking other loads out of boats onto the ship, but none of the slav
es was sold, and only once were they taken ashore, to help break up a mass of cloth bolts and carry them to the long low dug‑outs being used to transfer goods from the beaches to the treasure fleet.

  During this work Zheng He came ashore in his personal barge, which was painted, gilded and encrusted with jewellery and porcelain mosaics, and had a gold statue facing forwards from the bow. Zheng stepped down a walkway from the barge, wearing golden robes embroidered in red and blue. His men had laid a carpet strip on the beach for him to walk on, but he left it to come over and observe the loading of the new cargo. He was truly an immense man, tall, broad, and with a deep draught fore‑and‑aft. He had a broad face, not Han; and he was a eunuch; he was all the Abyssinians had claimed. Bold watched him out

  of the corner of his eye, and then noticed that Kyu was standing bolt upright staring at him too, work forgotten, eyes fixed like a hawk's on a mouse. Bold grabbed the boy and hauled him back to work. 'Come on, Kyu, we're chained together here, move or I'll knock you down and drag you across the ground. 1 don't want to get in trouble here, Tara knows what happens to a slave in trouble with such people as these.'

  From Calicut they sailed south to Lanka. Here the slaves were left aboard the ship, while the soldiers went ashore and disappeared for several days. The behaviour of the officers left behind made Bold think the detachment was out on a campaign, and he watched them as closely as he could as the days passed and they grew more nervous. Bold could not guess what they might do if Zheng He did not return, but he did not think they would sail away. Indeed the fire officers were hard at work laying out their array of incendiaries, when the admiral's barge and the other boats came flying back out of Lanka's inner harbour, and their men came aboard shouting triumphantly. Not only had they fought their way out of an inland trap, they said, but they had captured the treacherous local usurper who had laid the trap, and taken the rightful king as well ‑though there seemed to be some confusion in the story as to which was which, and why they should abduct the rightful king as well as the usurper. Most amazing of all, they said that the rightful king had had in his possession the island's holiest relic, a tooth of the Buddha, called the Dalada. Zheng held up the little gold reliquary to show all aboard this prize. An eyetooth, apparently. Crew, passengers, slaves, all spontaneously roared their acclaim, in throattearing shouts that went on and on.

  'This is a great bit of fortune,' Bold told Kyu when the awful noise died down, pressing his hands together and reciting the Descent into Lanka Sutra. In fact it was so much good fortune it frightened him. And there was no doubt that fright had been a big part of the roar of the crew. The Buddha had blessed Lanka, it was one of his special lands, with a branch of his Bodhi tree growing in its soil, and his mineralized tears still falling off the sides of the sacred mountain in the island's centre, the one that was topped by Adam's footprint. Surely it was not right to take the Dalada away from its rightful place in such a holy land. There was an affront in the act that could not be denied.

  As they sailed cast, the story circulated through the ship that the

  Dalada was only proof of the deposed king's right to rule; it would be returned to Lanka when the Yongle Emperor determined the rights of the case. The slaves were reassured by this news.

  'So the Emperor of China will decide who rules that island,' Kyu said. Bold nodded. The Yongle Emperor had himself come to the throne in a violent coup, so it was not clear to Bold which of the two Lankan contenders he would favour. Meanwhile, they had the Dalada on board. 'It's good,' he said to Kyu after thinking it over some more. 'Nothing bad can happen to us on this voyage, anyway.'

  And so it proved. Black squalls, bearing directly down on them, un~ accountably evaporated just as they struck. Giant seas rocked all the horizons, great dragon tails visibly whipping up the waves, while they sailed serenely over a moving flat calm at their centre. They even sailed through the Malacca Strait without hindrance from Palembanque, or, north of that, from the myriad pirates of Cham, or the Japanese wakou ‑ though, as Kyu pointed out, no pirate in his right mind would chal‑ lenge a fleet so huge and powerful, tooth of the Buddha or no.

  Then as they sailed into the south China Sea, someone saw the Dalada floating about the ship at night, as if, he said, it were a little candle flame. 'How does he know it wasn't a candle flame?' Kyu asked. But the next morning the sky dawned red. Black clouds rolled over the horizon in a line from the south, in a way that reminded Bold strongly of the storm that had killed Temur.

  Driving rain struck, then a violent wind that turned the sea white. Shooting up and down in their dim little room, Bold realized that such a storm was even more frightening at sea than on land. The ship's astrologer cried out that a great dragon under the sea was angry, and thrashing the water under them. Bold joined the other slaves in holding to the gratings and looking out of their little holes to see if they could catch sight of spine or claw or snout of this dragon, but the spume flying over the whitewater obscured the surface. Bold thought he might have seen part of a dark green tail in the foam.

  Wind shrieks through the nine masts,

  All bare of sail. The great ship tilts in the wind, Rolls side to side, and the little ships

  Accompanying them bob like corks,

  In and out of view through the grating.

  in storms like this, nothing to be done but hold on! Bold and Kyu cling fast to the wall, Listening through the howl for the officers' shouts And the thumping feet of the sailors Doing what they can to secure the sails And then to tie the tiller securely in place. They hear the fear in the officers, And sense it in the sailors' feet. Even belowdecks they are wet with spray.

  Up on the great poop deck the officers and astrologers performed some sort of ceremony of appeasement, and Zheng He himself could be heard calling out to Tianfei, the Chinese goddess of safety at sea.

  'Let the dark water dragons go down into the sea, and leave us free from calamity! Humbly, respectfully, piously, we offer up this flagon of wine, offer it once and offer it again, pouring out this fine, fragrant wine! That our sails may meet favourable winds, that the sea lanes be peaceful, that the all‑seeing and all‑hearing spirit‑soldiers of winds and seasons, the wave‑quellers and swell‑drinkers, the airborne immortals, the god of the year, and the protectress of our ship, the Celestial Consort, brilliant, divine, marvellous, responsive, mysterious Tianfei might save us!'

  Looking up through the dripping cracks in the deck Bold could see a composite vision of sailors watching this ceremony, mouths all open wide shouting against the wind's roar. Their guard yelled at them, 'Pray to Tianfei, pray to the Celestial Consort, the sailor's only friend! Pray for her intercession! All of you! Much more of this wind and the ship will be torn apart!'

  'Tianfei preserve us,' Bold chanted, squeezing Kyu to indicate he should do the same. The black boy said nothing. He pointed up at the forward masts, however, which they could see through the hatchway grating, and Bold looked up and saw red filaments of light dancing between the masts: balls of light, like Chinese lanterns without the paper or the fire, glowing at the top of the mast and over it, illuminating the flying rain and even the black bottoms of the clouds that were peeling by overhead. The otherworldly beauty of the sight tempered the terror of it; Bold and everyone else moved outside the realm of terror, it was too strange and awesome a sight to worry any longer about life or death. All the men were crying out, praying at the top of their lungs. Tianfei

  coalesced out of the dancing red light, her figure gleaming brightly over them, and the wind diminished all at once. The seas calmed around them. Tianfei dissipated, ran redly out of the rigging and back into the air. Now their grateful voices could be heard above the wind. Whitecaps still toppled and rolled, but all at a distance from them, halfway to the horizon.

  Tianfei!' Bold shouted with the rest. 'Tianfei!'

  Zheng He stood at the poop rail and raised both hands in a light rain. He shouted 'Tianfei! Tianfei has saved us!' and they all bellowed it with him, fill
ed with joy in the same way the air had been filled with the red light of the goddess. Later the wind blew hard again, but they had no fear.

  How the rest of the voyage home went is not really material; nothing of note happened, they made it back safely, and what happened after that you can find out by reading the next chapter.

  FIVE

  In a Hangzhou restaurant, Bold and Kyu rejoin their jati; In a single moment, end of many months' harmony.

  Storm‑tossed, Tianfei‑protected, the treasure fleet sailed into a big estuary. Ashore, behind a great seawall, stood the rooftops of a vast city. Even the part visible from the ship was bigger than all the cities Bold had ever seen put together ‑ all the bazaars of central Asia, the Indian cities Temur had razed, the ghost towns of Frengistan, the white seaside towns of Zanj, Calicut ‑ all combined would have occupied only a quarter or a third of the land covered by this forest of rooftops, this steppe of rooftops, extending all the way to distant hills visible to the west.