The Years of Rice and Salt

  They sailed south down the coast of the new island all this while, and every day they became more amazed that they were not reaching the southern end of it. One cape looked as if it would be the turning point, but past it they saw the land curved south again, behind some baked empty islands. Farther south they saw villages on the beaches, and they knew enough now to identify the bath temples. Kheim kept the fleet well offshore, but he did allow one canoe to approach, and he had Butterfly try speaking to them, but they didn’t understand her, nor she them. Kheim made his dumb show signifying sickness and danger, and the locals paddled quickly away.

  They began to sail against a current from the south, but it was mild, and the winds were constant from the west. The fishing here was excellent, the weather mild. Day followed day in a perfect circle of sameness. The land fell away cast again, then ran south, most of the way to the equator, past a big archipelago of low islands, with good anchorages and good water, and seabirds with blue feet.

  They came at last to a steeply rising coastline, with great snowy volcanoes in the distance, like Fuji only twice as big, or more, punctuating the sky behind a steep coastal range, which was already tall. This final giganticism put paid to anyone’s ability to think of this place as an island.

  “Are you sure this isn’t Africa?” Kheim said to I-Chen.

  I-Chen was not sure. “Maybe. Maybe the people we left up north are the only survivors of the Fulanchi, reduced to a primitive state. Maybe this is the west coast of the world, and we sailed past the opening to their middle sea in the night, or in a fog. But I don’t think so.”

  “Then where are we?”

  I-Chen showed Kheim where he thought they were on the long strips of their map; east of the final markings, out where the map was entirely blank. But first he pointed to the far western strip. “See, Fulan and Africa look like this on their west sides. The Muslim cartographers are very consistent about it. And Hsing Ho calculated that the world is about seventy-five thousand li around. If he’s right, we only sailed half as far as we should have, or less, across the Dahai to Africa and Fulan.”

  “Maybe he’s wrong then. Maybe the world occupies more of the globe than he thought. Or maybe the globe is smaller.”

  “But his method was good. I made the same measurements on our trip to the Moluccas, and did the geometry, and found he was right.”

  “But look!” Gesturing at the mountainous land before them. “If it isn’t Africa, what is it?”

  “An island, I suppose. A big island, far out in the Dahai, where no one has ever sailed. Another world, like the real one. An eastern one like the western one.”

  “An island no one has ever sailed to before? That no one ever knew about?” Kheim couldn’t believe it.

  “Well?” I-Chen said, stubborn in the face of the idea. “Who else before us could have got here, and got back to tell about it?”

  Kheim took the point. “And we’re not back, either.”

  “No. And no guarantee we will be able to do it. Could be that Hsu Fu got here and tried to return, and failed. Maybe we’ll find his descendants on this very shore.”

  “Maybe.”

  • • •

  Closing on the immense land, they saw a city on the coast. It was nothing very big compared to back home, but substantial compared to the tiny villages to the north. It was mud-coloured for the most part, but several gigantic buildings in the city and behind it were roofed by gleaming expanses of beaten gold. These were no Miwok!

  So they sailed inshore warily, feeling unnerved, their ships’ cannons loaded and primed. They were startled to see the primitive boats pulled up on the beaches — fishing canoes like those some of them had seen in the Moluccas, mostly two-prowed and made of bundled reeds. There were no guns to be seen; no sails; no wharves or docks, except for one old pier that seemed to float, anchored out away from the beach. It was perplexing to see the terrestrial magnificence of the gold-roofed buildings combined with such maritime poverty. I-Chen said, “It must have been an inland kingdom to start with.”

  “Lucky for us, the way those buildings look.”

  “I suppose if the Han dynasty had never fallen, this is what the coast of China would look like.”

  A strange idea. But even mentioning China was a comfort. After that they pointed at features of the town, saying “That’s like in Cham,” or ‘They build like that in Lanka,” and so forth; and though it still looked bizarre, it was clear, even before they made out people on the beach gaping at them, that it would be people and not monkeys or birds populating the town.

  Though they had no great hope that Butterfly would be understood here, they took her near the shore with them nevertheless, in the biggest landing boat. They kept the flintlocks and crossbows concealed under their seats while Kheim stood in the bow making the peaceful gestures that had won over the Miwok. Then he got Butterfly to greet them kindly in her language, which she did in a high, clear, penetrating voice. The crowd on the beach watched, and some with hats like feathered crowns spoke to them, but it was not Butterfly’s language, nor one that any of them had ever heard.

  The elaborate headdresses of part of the crowd seemed faintly military to Kheim, and so he had them row offshore a little bit, and keep a lookout for bows or spears or any other weapons. Something in the look of these people suggested the possibility of an ambush.

  Nothing of the sort happened. In fact, the next day when they rowed in, a whole contingent of men, wearing checked tunics and feathered headdresses, prostrated themselves on the beach. Uneasily Kheim ordered a landing, on the lookout for trouble.

  All went well. Communication by gesture, and quick basic language lessons, was fair, although the locals seemed to take Butterfly to be the visitors’ leader, or rather talisman, or priestess, it was impossible to say; certainly they venerated her. Their mimed interchanges were mostly made by an older man in a headdress with a fringe hanging over his forehead to his eyes, and a badge extending high above the feathers. These communications remained cordial, full of curiosity and good will. They were offered cakes made of some kind of dense, substantial flour; also huge tubers that could be cooked and eaten; and a weak sour beer, which was all they ever saw the locals drink. Also a stack of finely woven blankets, very warm and soft, made of a wool from sheep that looked like sheep bred with camels, but were clearly some entirely other creature, unknown to the real world.

  Eventually Kheim felt comfortable enough to accept an invitation to leave the beach and visit the local king or emperor, in the huge goldroofed palace or temple on the hilltop behind the city. It was the gold that had done it, Kheim realized as he prepared for the trip, still feeling uneasy. He loaded a short flintlock and put it in a shoulder bag tucked under his arm, hidden by his coat; and he left instructions with I-Chen for a relief operation if one proved necessary. Off they went, Kheim and Butterfly and a dozen of the biggest sailors from the flagship, accompanied by a crowd of local men in checked tunics.

  They walked up a track past fields and houses. The women in the fields carried their babies strapped to boards on their backs, and they spun wool as they walked. They hung looms from ropes tied to trees, to get the necessary tension to weave. Checked patterns seemed the only ones they used, usually black and tan, sometimes black and red. Their fields consisted of raised mounds, rectangular in shape, standing out of wetlands by the river. Presumably they grew their tubers in the mounds. They were flooded like rice fields, but not. Everything was similar but different. Gold here seemed as common as iron in China, while on the other hand there was no iron at all to be seen.

  The palace above the city was huge, bigger than the Forbidden City in Beijing, with many rectangular buildings arranged in rectangular patterns. Everything was arranged like their cloth. Stone plinths in the courtyard outside the palace were carved into strange figures, birds and animals all mixed up, painted all colours, so that Kheim found it hard to look at them. He wondered if the strange creatures represented on them would be found living in
the back country, or were their versions of dragon and phoenix. He saw lots of copper, and some bronze or brass, but mostly gold. The guards standing in rows around the palace held long spears tipped with gold, and their shields were gold too; decorative, but not very practical. Their enemies must not have had iron either.

  Inside the palace they were led into a vast room with one wall open onto a courtyard, the other three covered in gold filigree. Here blankets were spread, and Kheim and Butterfly and the other Chinese were invited to sit on one.

  Into the room came their emperor. All bowed and then sat on the ground. The Emperor sat on a checked cloth next to the visitors, and said something politely. He was a man of about forty years, white-toothed and handsome, with a broad forehead, high prominent cheekbones, clear brown eyes, a pointed chin and a strong hawkish nose. His crown was gold, and was decorated with small gold heads, dangling in holes cut into the crown, like pirates’ beads at the gates of Hangzhou.

  This too made Kheim uneasy, and he shifted his pistol under his coat, looking around surreptitiously. There were no other signs to trouble him. Of course there were hard-looking men there, clearly the Emperor’s guard, ready to pounce if anything threatened him; but other than that, nothing; and that seemed an ordinary precaution to take when strangers were around.

  A priest wearing a cape made of cobalt blue bird feathers came in, and performed a ceremony for the Emperor, and after that they feasted through the day, on a meat like lamb, and vegetables and mashes that Kheim did not recognize. The weak beer was all they drank, except for a truly fiery brandy. Eventually Kheim began to feel drunk, and he could see his men were worse. Butterfly did not like any of the flavours, and ate and drank very little. Out on the courtyard, men danced to drums and reed pipes, sounding very like Korean musicians, which gave Kheim a start; he wondered if these people’s ancestors had drifted over from Korea ages ago, carried on the Kuroshio. Perhaps just a few lost ships had populated this whole land, many dynasties before; indeed the music sounded like an echo from a past age. But who could say? He would talk to I-Chen about it when he got back to the ship.

  At sundown Kheim indicated their desire to return to their ships. The Emperor only looked at him, and gestured to his caped priest, and then rose. Everyone stood and bowed again. He left the room.

  When he had gone, Kheim stood and took Butterfly by the hand, and tried to lead her out the way they had come (although he was not sure he could remember it); but the guards blocked them, their goldtipped spears held crossways, in a position as ceremonial as their dances had been.

  Kheim mimed displeasure, very easy to do, and indicated that Butterfly would be sad and angry if she were kept from their ships. But the guards did not move.

  • • •

  So. There they were. Kheim cursed himself for leaving the beach with such strange people. He felt the pistol under his coat. One shot only. He would have to hope that I-Chen could rescue them. It was a good thing he had insisted the doctor stay behind, as he felt I-Chen would do the best job of organizing such an operation.

  The captives spent the night huddled together on their blanket, surrounded by standing guards who did not sleep, but spent their time chewing small leaves they took from shoulder bags tucked under their chequered tunics. They watched bright-eyed. Kheim huddled around Butterfly, and she snuggled like a cat against him. It was cold. Kheim got the others to crowd around, all of them together, protecting her by a single touch or at least the proximity of their warmth.

  At dawn the Emperor returned, dressed like a giant peacock or phoenix, accompanied by women wearing gold breast cones, shaped uncannily like real breasts, with ruby nipples. The sight of these women gave Kheim an absurd hope that they would be all right. Then behind them entered the caped high priest, and a chequered masked figure, whose headdress dangled everywhere with tiny gold skulls. Some form of their death god, there was no mistaking it. He was there to execute them, Kheim thought, and the realization jolted him into a heightened state of awareness, in which all the gold sheeted white in the sun, and the space they walked through had an extra dimension of depth and solidity, the chequered people as solid and vivid as festival demons.

  They were led out into the misty horizontal light of dawn, east and uphill. Uphill all that day, and the next day too, until Kheim gasped as he climbed, and looked back amazed from the occasional ridge, down and down to the sea, which was a blue textured surface, extremely flat and very far below. He had never imagined he could get so far above the ocean, it was like flying. And yet there were higher hills still ahead to the cast, and on certain crests of the range, massive white volcanoes, like super-Fujis.

  They walked up towards these. They were fed well, and given a tea as bitter as alum; and then, in a musical ritual ceremony, given little bags of the tea leaves, the same ragged-edged green leaves their guards had been chewing on the first night. The leaves also were bitter to the taste, but they soon numbed the mouth and throat, and after that Kheim felt better. The leaves were a stimulant, like tea or coffee. He told Butterfly and his men to chew theirs down as well. The thin strength that poured through his nerves gave him the qi energy to think about the problem of escape.

  It did not seem likely that I-Chen would be able to get through the mud-and-gold city to follow them, but Kheim could not stop hoping for it, a kind of furious hope, felt every time he looked at Butterfly’s face, unblemished yet by doubt or fear; as far as she was concerned this was just the next stage of a journey that was already as strange as it could get. This part was interesting to her, in fact, with its bird-throat colours, its gold and its mountains. She didn’t seem affected by the height to which they had climbed.

  Kheim began to understand that clouds, which often now lay below them, existed in a colder and less fulfilling air than the precious salty soup they breathed on the sea surface. Once he caught a whiff of that sea air, perhaps just the salt still in his hair, and he longed for it as for food. Hungry for air! He shuddered to think how high they were.

  Yet they had not finished. They climbed to a ridge covered by snow. The trail was pounded glistening into the hard white stuff. They were given soft wood-soled boots with fur on the inside, and heavier tunics, and blankets with holes for the head and arms, all elaborately checked, with small figures filling small squares. The blanket given to Butterfly was so long it looked as if she was wearing a Buddhist nun’s dress, and it was made of such fine cloth that Kheim grew suddenly afraid. There was another child travelling with them, a boy Kheim thought, though he was not sure; and this child too was dressed as finely as the caped priest.

  They came to a campsite made of flat rocks set on the snow. They made a big fire in a sunken pit in this platform, and around it erected a number of yurts. Their captors settled on their blankets and ate a meal, followed by many ritual cups of their hot tea, and beer and brandy, after which they performed a ceremony to honour the setting sun, which fell into clouds scudding over the ocean. They were well above the clouds now, yet above them to the east a great volcano poked into the indigo sky, its snowy flanks glowing a deep pink in the moments after sunset.

  That night was frigid. Again Kheim held Butterfly, fear waking him whenever she stirred. The girl even seemed to stop breathing from time to time, but she always started again.

  At dawn they were roused, and Kheim was thankful to be given more of the hot tea, then a substantial meal, followed by more of the little green leaves to chew; though these last were handed to them by the executioner god.

  They started up the side of the volcano while it was still a grey snow slope under a white dawn sky. The ocean to the west was covered by clouds, but they were breaking up, and the great blue plate lay there far, far below, looking to Kheim like his home village or his childhood.

  It got colder as they ascended, and hard to walk. The snow was brittle underfoot, and icy bits of it clinked and glittered. It was extremely bright, but everything else was too dark: the sky blue-black, the row of people dim. Kheim’s
eyes ran, and the tears were cold on his face and in his thin grey whiskers. On he hiked, placing his feet carefully in the footsteps of the guard ahead of him, reaching back awkwardly to hold Butterfly’s hand and pull her along.

  Finally, after he had forgotten to look up for a while, no longer expecting anything ever to change, the slope of the snow laid back. Bare black rocks appeared, thrusting out of the snow left and right, and especially ahead, where he could see nothing higher.

  Indeed, it was the peak: a broad jumbled wasteland of rock like torn and frozen mud, mixed with ice and snow. At the highest point of the tortured mass a few poles obtruded, cloth streamers and flags flying from them, as in the mountains of Tibet. Perhaps these were Tibetans then.

  The caped priest and the executioner god and the guards assembled at the foot of these rocks. The two children were taken to the priest, guards restraining Kheim all the while. He stepped back as if giving up, put his hands under his blanket as if they were cold, which they were; they fumbled like ice for the handle of his flintlock. He cocked the lock and pulled the pistol free of his coat, hidden only under the blanket.

  The children were given more hot tea, which they drank willingly. The priest and his minions sang facing the sun, drums pounding like the painful pulse behind Kheim’s half-blinded eyes. He had a bad headache, and everything looked like a shadow of itself.

  Below them on the snowy ridge, figures were climbing fast. They wore the local blankets, but Kheim thought they looked like I-Chen and his men. Much farther below them, another group straggled up in pursuit.

  Kheim’s heart was already pounding; now it rolled inside him like the ceremonial drums. The executioner god took a gold knife out of an elaborate carved wooden scabbard, and cut the little boy’s throat. The blood he caught in a gold bowl, where it steamed in the sun. To the sound of the drums and pipes and sung prayers, the body was wrapped in a mantle of the soft chequered cloth, and lowered tenderly into the peak, in a crack between two great rocks.