The Years of Rice and Salt Read online

  “It takes more wind than this breath to tip us.”

  “Allah protect us from it.”

  “Allah protect us.”

  Muslims. “Allah protect us,” Bold said politely. Then, in Arabic, “In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate.” In his years in Temur’s army he had learned to be as much a Muslim as anyone. The Buddha did not mind what you said to be polite. Now it would not keep him from slavery, but it would perhaps earn him a little more food. The men regarded him curiously. He watched the land slide by. They untied his arms and gave him some dried mutton and bread. He tried to chew each bite a hundred times. The familiar tastes called back to him his whole life. He ate what they gave him, drank fresh water from a cup they gave him.

  “Praise be to Allah. Thank you in the name of God the compassionate, the merciful.”

  They sailed down a long bay, into a larger sea. At night they pulled behind headlands and anchored the boat and slept. Bold curled under a coil of rope. Every time he woke in the night he had to remind himself where he was.

  In the mornings they sailed south and south again, and one day they passed through a long narrows into an open sea, with big waves. The rocking of the boat was like riding a camel. Bold gestured west. The men named it, but Bold didn’t catch the name. “They’re all dead,” the men said.

  The sunset came and they were still on the open sea. For the first time they sailed all night long, always awake when Bold woke, watching the stars without talking to each other. For three days they sailed out of the sight of any land, and Bold wondered how long it would go on. But on the fourth morning the sky to the south grew white, then brown.

  A haze like the one that blew out of the Gobi.

  Sand in the air, sand and fine dust. Land ho!

  Very low land. The sea and sky

  Both turn the same brown

  Before catching sight of a stone tower,

  Then a great stone breakwater, fronting a harbour.

  One of the sailors happily names it: “Alexandria!” Bold had heard the name, though he knew nothing about it. Neither do we; but to find out more, you can read the next chapter.

  THREE

  In Egypt our pilgrim is sold into slavery;

  In Zanj he encounters again the inescapable Chinese.

  His captors sailed to a beach, anchored with a stone tied to a rock, tied Bold up securely, and left him in the boat under a blanket while they went ashore.

  It was a beach for small boats, near an immense long wooden dockfront behind the seawall, which served much bigger ships. When the men came back they were drunk and arguing. Without untying anything but his legs, and with no more words to him, they pulled Bold out of the boat and marched him down the great seafront of the city, which appeared to Bold dusty and salty and worn down, stinking in the sun like a dead fish, of which there were indeed many scattered about. On the docks before a long building were bales, boxes, great clay jars, netted bolts of cloth; then a fish market, which made his mouth water at the same time that his stomach flopped.

  They came to a slave market. A small square with a raised dais in its middle, somewhat like a lama’s teaching platform. Three slaves were quickly sold. The women being sold garnered the most attention and comment from the crowd. They were stripped of all but the ropes or chains holding them, if such were necessary, and stood there listlessly, or cowered. Most were black, some brown. They seemed to be at the end of auction day, people selling off leftovers. Before Bold an emaciated girl of about ten years was sold to a fat black man in dirty silk robes. The transaction was completed in a kind of Arabic; she sold for some unit of currency Bold had never heard of before, the payment in little gold coins. He helped his captors get his crusted old clothes off.

  “I don’t need tying,” he tried to tell them in Arabic, but they ignored him and chained his ankles. He walked onto the platform feeling the baked air settle on him. Even to himself he emitted a powerful smell, and looking down he saw that his time in the empty land had left him about as fleshless as the little girl before him. But what was left was muscle, and he stood up straight, looking into the sun as the bidding went on, thinking the part of the Lapis Lazuli Sutra that went, “The ruffian demons of unkindness roam the earth, begone! begone! The Buddha renounces slavery!”

  “Does he speak Arabic?” someone asked.

  One of his captors prodded him, and in Arabic he said, “In the name of God the merciful, the compassionate, I speak Arabic, also Turkic, Mongolian, Ulu, Tibetan and Chinese,” and he began to chant the first chapter of the Quran as far as he remembered it, until they pulled his chain and he took this as a sign to stop. He was very thirsty.

  A short, slight Arab bought him for twenty somethings. His captors seemed pleased. They handed him his clothes as he stepped down, slapped him on the back and were off. He began to put on his greasy coat, but his new owner stopped him, handing him a length of clean cotton cloth.

  “Wrap that around you. Leave the other filth here.”

  Surprised, Bold looked down at the last vestiges of his previous life. Dirty rags only, but they had accompanied him this far. He pulled his amulet out of them, leaving his knife hidden in a sleeve, but his owner intervened and threw it back onto the clothes.

  “Come on. I know a market in Zanj where I can sell a barbarian like you for three times what I just paid. Meanwhile you can help me get ready for the voyage there. Do you understand? Help, and it will go easier for you. I’ll feed you more.”

  “I understand.”

  “Be sure that you do. Don’t think of trying to escape. Alexandria is a very fine city. The Mamlukes keep things stricter than sharia here. They are not forgiving of slaves that try to escape. They’re orphans brought here from north of the Black Sea, men whose parents were killed by barbarians like you.”

  In fact Bold himself had killed quite a few of the Golden Horde, so he nodded without comment.

  His owner said, “They have been trained by Arabs in the way of Allah, and now they are more than Muslim.” He whistled at the thought. “Trained to rule Egypt apart from all lesser influences, to be true only to the sharia. You don’t want to cross them.”

  Bold nodded again. “I understand.”

  • • •

  Crossing the Sinai was like travelling with a caravan crossing one of the deserts of the heartland, except this time Bold was walking with the slaves, in the cloud of dust at the back of the camel train. They were part of the year’s haj. Enormous numbers of camels and people had tramped over this road through the desert, and now it was a broad dusty smooth swathe through rockier hills. Smaller parties going north passed by to their left. Bold had never seen so many camels.

  The caravanserai were beaten and ashy. The ropes tying him to his new master’s other slaves were never untied, and they slept in circles on the ground at night. The nights were warmer than Bold was used to, and this almost made up for the heat of the days. Their master, whose name was Zeyk, kept them well-watered and fed them adequately at night and at dawn, treating them about as well as his camels, Bold observed: a tradesman, taking care of the goods in his possession. Bold approved of the attitude, and did what he could to keep the bedraggled string of slaves in good form. If they all kept the pace it made the walking that much easier. One night he looked up and saw the Archer looking down on him, and he remembered his nights alone in the empty land.

  The ghost of Temur,

  The last survivor of the fisherfolk,

  The empty stone temples open to the sky,

  The days of hunger, the little mare,

  That ridiculous bow and arrow,

  A red bird and blue bird, sitting side by side.

  They came to the Red Sea, and boarded a ship three or four times as long as the one that had brought him to Alexandria, a dhow or zambuco, people called it both. The wind always blew from the west, sometimes hard, and they hugged the western shore with their big lateen sail bellied out to the cast. They made good time. Zeyk fed his string of
slaves more and more, fattening them for the market. Bold happily downed the extra rice and cucumbers, and saw the sores around his ankles begin to heal. For the first time in a long time he was not perpetually hungry, and he felt as if he was coming out of a fog or a dream, waking up more each day. Of course now he was a slave, but he wouldn’t always be one. Something would happen.

  After a stop at a dry brown port called Massawa, one of the hajjira depots, they sailed east across the Red Sea and rounded the low red cape marking the end of Arabia, to Aden, a big seaside oasis, indeed the biggest port Bold had ever seen, a very rich town of green palms waving over ceramic roofs, citrus trees, and numberless minarets. Zeyk did not disembark his goods or slaves here, however; after a day on shore he came back shaking his head.

  “Mombasa,” he said to the ship’s captain, and paid him more, and they sailed south across the strait again, around the horn and Ras Hafun, then down the coast of Zanj, sailing much farther south than Bold had ever been. The sun at noon was nearly directly overhead, and beat down on them most cruelly all day, day after day, with never a cloud in the sky. The air baked as if the world were an oven. The coast appeared either dead brown or else vibrant green, nothing in between. They stopped at Mogadishu, Lamu and Malinda, each a prosperous Arab trading port, but Zeyk got off only briefly at them.

  As they sailed into Mombasa, the grandest harbour yet, they came on a fleet of giant ships, ships bigger than Bold had imagined possible. Each one was as big as a small town, with a long line of masts down its centre. There were about ten of these gigantic outlandish ships, with another twenty smaller ones anchored among them. “Ah good,” said Zeyk to the zambuco’s captain and owner. “The Chinese are here.”

  The Chinese! Bold had had no idea they owned such a great fleet as this one. It made sense, though. Their pagodas, their great wall; they liked to build big.

  The fleet was like an archipelago. All on board the zambuco looked at the great ships, abashed and apprehensive, as if faced with sea-going gods. The large Chinese ships were as long as a dozen of the biggest dhows, and Bold counted nine masts on one of them. Zeyk saw him and nodded. “Look well. Those will soon be your home, God willing.”

  The zambuco’s master brought them inshore on a breath of a breeze. The town’s little waterfront was entirely occupied by the landing boats of the visitors, and after some discussion with Zeyk, the zambuco’s owner beached his craft just south of the waterfront. Zeyk and his man rolled up their robes and stepped over the freeboard into the water, and helped the whole string of slaves over the side onto land. The green water was as warm as blood, or even hotter.

  Bold spotted some Chinese, wearing their characteristic red felt coats even here, where they were certainly much too warm. They wandered the market, fingering the goods on display and chattering among themselves, trading with the aid of a translator Zeyk knew. Zeyk approached and greeted him effusively, asked about direct trade with the Chinese visitors. The translator introduced him to some of the Chinese, who seemed polite, even affable, in their usual way. Bold found himself trembling slightly, perhaps from heat and hunger, perhaps from the sight of the Chinese, after all these years, on the other side of the world. Still pursuing their business.

  Zeyk and his assistant led the slaves through the market. It was a riot of smell, colour and sound. People as black as pitch, their eyeballs and teeth flashing white or yellow against their skin, offered goods and bartered happily. Bold followed the others past

  Great mounds of green and yellow fruit,

  Rice, coffee, dried fish and squid,

  Lengths and bolts of coloured cotton cloth,

  Some spotted, others striped white-and-blue;

  Bales of Chinese silk, piles of Mecca carpets;

  Huge brown nuts, copper pans

  Filled with coloured beads or gemstones,

  Or round balls of sweet-smelling opium;

  Pearls, raw copper, carnelian, quicksilver;

  Daggers and swords, turbans, shawls;

  Elephant tusks, rhinoceros horns,

  Yellow sandalwood, ambergris,

  Ingots and coin-strings of gold and silver,

  White cloth, red cloth, porcelains,

  All the things of this world, solid in the sun.

  And then the slave market, again in a square of its own, next to the main market, with a central auction block, so much like a lama’s dais when empty.

  The locals were gathered around a sale to one side, not a full auction.

  They were mostly Arabs here, and often dressed in blue cloth robes and red leather shoes. Behind the market a mosque and minaret stood before rows of four- and even five-storey buildings. The clamour was great, but surveying the scene, Zeyk shook his head. “We’ll wait for a private audience,” he said.

  He fed the slaves barley cakes and led them to one of the big buildings next to the mosque. There some Chinese arrived with their translator, and they all went inside to an inner courtyard of the building, shaded and full of green broad-leaved plants and a burbling fountain. A room opening onto this courtyard had shelves on all its walls, with bowls and figures placed on them in an elaborate, beautiful display: Bold recognized pottery from Samarqand, and painted figurines from Persia, among Chinese white porcelain bowls painted in blue, gold leaf and copper.

  “Very elegant,” Zeyk said.

  Then they were to business. The Chinese officers inspected Zeyk’s string of slaves. They spoke to the translator, and Zeyk conferred in private with the man, nodding frequently. Bold found he was sweating, though he felt cold. They were being sold to the Chinese as a single lot.

  One of the Chinese strolled down the line of slaves. He looked Bold over.

  “How did you get here?” he asked Bold in Chinese.

  Bold gulped, waved north. “I was a trader.” His Chinese was really rusty. “The Golden Horde took me and brought me to Anatolia. Then to Alexandria, then here.”

  The Chinese nodded, then moved on. Soon after they were led off by Chinese sailors in trousers and short shirts, back to the waterfront. There several other strings and groups of slaves were gathered. They were stripped, washed down with fresh water, an astringent, more fresh water. They were given new robes of plain cotton, led to boats, and rowed out to the huge side of one of the great ships. Bold climbed a ladder forty-one steps up the wooden wall of the ship’s side, following a skinny black slave boy. They were taken together below the main deck, to a room near the rear of the ship. What happened in there we don’t want to tell you, but the story won’t make sense unless we do, so on to the next chapter. These things happened.

  FOUR

  After dismal events, a piece of the Buddha appears;

  Then the treasure fleet asks Tianfei to calm their fears.

  The ship was so big it did not rock on the waves. It was like being on an island. The room they were kept in was low and broad, extending across the width of the ship. Gratings on both sides let in air and some light, though it was dim. A hole under one grating overhung the ship’s side and served as the place of relief.

  The skinny black boy looked down it as if judging whether he could escape through the hole. He spoke Arabic better than Bold, though it was not his native tongue either; he had a guttural accent that Bold had never heard before. “They trot you like derg.” He came from the hills behind the sahil he said, staring down the hole. He stuck one foot through, then another. He wasn’t going to get through.

  Then the doorlock rattled and he pulled his feet out and sprang away like an animal. Three men came in and had them all stand before them. Ship’s petty officers, Bold judged. Checking the cargo. One of them inspected the black boy closely. He nodded to the others, and they put wooden bowls of rice on the floor, and a big bamboo tube bucket of water, and left.

  That was the routine for two days. The black boy, whose name was Kyu, spent much of his time looking down the shithole, at the water it seemed, or at nothing. On the third day they were led up and out to help load the ship
’s cargo. It was hauled inboard on ropes running through pulleys on the masts, then guided down hatches into holds below. The loaders followed instructions from the officer of the watch, usually a big moon-faced Han. Bold learned that the hold was broken 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 flat-faced 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.