The Years of Rice and Salt Read online

  Stunned, Bold scrambled to his feet, whispering “Why, why, why, why? We had a good thing here, you should have asked me first if I wanted any part of this!”

  “I want to escape,” Kyu said, “and I need you to do it. I need a master to get around.”

  “Get around where?”

  But now Bold was following Kyu through the silent household, stepping blindly with complete assurance, so well had he come to know this building, the first one he had ever lived in. He liked it. Kyu led him into the kitchen, took a branch sticking out of the smouldering stove fire; he must have put it in before rousing Bold, for the pitchy knot at the end was now blazing. “We’re going north to the capital,” Kyu said over his shoulder as he led Bold outdoors. “I’m going to kill the Emperor.”

  “What!”

  “More about that later,” Kyu said, and applied the flaming torch to a bundle of rush and kindling and balls of wax he had put against the walls, in a corner. When it had caught fire he ran outside, and Bold followed him appalled. Kyu lit another bundle of kindling against the house next door, and placed the brand against a third house, and all the while Bold stayed right behind him, too shocked to think properly. He would have stopped the boy if it weren’t for the fact that Shen was already murdered. Kyu and Bold’s lives were forfeit; setting the district on fire was probably their only chance, as it might burn the body so that the killing would not show. It also might be assumed that some slaves had been burned up entire, locked in their room as they were. “Hopefully they’ll all burn,” Kyu said, echoing this thought.

  We are as shocked as you are by this development, and don’t know what happened next, but no doubt the next chapter will tell us.

  SIX

  By way of the Grand Canal our pilgrims escape justice;

  In Nanjing they beg the aid of the Three jewel Eunuch.

  They ran north up the dark alleys paralleling the service canal. Behind them the alarm was being raised already, people screaming, fire bells ringing, a fresh dawn wind blowing in off West Lake.

  “Did you take some cash?” Bold thought to ask.

  “Many strings,” Kyu said. He had a full bag under his arm.

  They would need to get as far away as they could, as quickly as possible. With a black like Kyu it would be hard to be inconspicuous. Necessarily he would have to remain a young black eunuch slave, Bold therefore his master. Bold would have to do all the talking; this was why Kyu had brought him along. This was why he had not murdered Bold along with the rest of the household.

  “What about I-Li Did you kill her too?”

  “No. Her bedroom has a window. She’ll do fine.”

  Bold wasn’t so sure; widows had a hard time of it; she’d end up like Wei Big Knife, on the street cooking meals on a brazier for passers-by. Although for her that might be opportunity enough.

  Wherever there were a lot of slaves, there were usually quite a few blacks. The canal boats were often moved along through the countryside by slaves, turning capstans or pulling their ropes directly, like mules or camels. Possibly the two of them could take on such a role and hide in it; he could pretend to be a slave himself — but no, they needed a master to account for them. If they could slip onto the end of a rope line . . . He couldn’t believe he was thinking about joining a canal boat ropeline, when he had been waiting tables in a restaurant! It made him so angry at Kyu that he hissed.

  And now Kyu needed him. Bold could abandon the boy and he would stand a much better chance of slipping into obscurity, among the many traders and Buddhist monks and beggars on the roads of China; even their famous bureaucracy of local yamens and district officials could not keep track of all the poor people slipping around in the hills and the back country. While with a black boy he stood out like a festival clown with his monkey.

  But he was not going to abandon Kyu, not really, so he just hissed. on they ran through the outer city, Kyu pulling Bold by the hand from time to time and urging him in Arabic to hurry. “You know this is what you really wanted, you’re a great Mongol warrior, you told me, a barbarian of the steppes, feared by all the peoples, you were only just pretending not to mind being someone’s kitchen slave, you’re good at not thinking about things, about not seeing things, but it’s all an act, of course you always knew, you just pretend not to know, you wanted to escape all the while.” Bold was amazed to think anyone could have misunderstood him that completely.

  The suburbs of Hangzhou were much greener than the old central quarter, every household compound marked by trees, even small mulberry orchards. Behind them the fire alarm bells were waking the whole city, the day starting in a panic. From a slight rise they could look back between walls and see the lakefront aglow; the entire district appeared to have caught fire as quickly as Kyu’s little balls of wax and kindling, fanned by a good stiff west wind. Bold wondered if Kyu had waited for a windy night to make his break. The thought chilled him. He had known the boy was clever, but this ruthlessness he had never suspected, despite the preta look he sometimes had, which reminded Bold of Temur’s look — some intensity of focus, some totemic aspect, his raptor nafs looking out no doubt. Each person was in some crucial sense his or her nafs, and Bold had already concluded Kyu’s was a falcon, hooded and tied. Temur’s had been an eagle on high, stooping to tear at the world.

  So he had seen some sign, had had some idea. And there was that closed aspect of Kyu too, the sense that his true thoughts were many rooms away, ever since his castration. Of course that would have had its effects. The original boy was gone, leaving the nafs to negotiate with some new person.

  They hurried through the northernmost sub-prefecture of Hangzhou, and out of the gate in the last city wall. The road rose higher into the Su Tung-po Hills, and they got a view back to the lakefront district, the flames less visible in the dawn, more a matter of clouds of black smoke, no doubt throwing sparks east to spread the blaze. “This fire will kill a lot of people!” Bold exclaimed.

  “They’re Chinese,” Kyu said. “There’s more than enough to take their place.”

  • • •

  Walking hard to the north, paralleling the Grand Canal on its west side, they saw again how crowded China was. Up here a whole country of rice paddies and villages fed the great city on the coast. Farmers were out in the morning light,

  Sticking rice starts into the submerged fields,

  Bending over time after time. A man walks

  Behind a water buffalo. Strange to see

  Such rain-polished black poverty,

  Tiny farms, rundown crossroad villages,

  After all the colourful glories of Hangzhou.

  “I don’t see why they all don’t move to the city,” Kyu said. “I would.”

  “They never think of it,” Bold said, marvelling that Kyu would suppose other people thought like he did. “Besides, their families are here.”

  They could just see the Grand Canal through the trees lining it, some two or three li to the east. Mounds of earth and timber stood by it, marking repairs or improvements. They kept their distance, hoping to avoid any army detachments or prefecture posses that might be patrolling the canal on this unfortunate day.

  “Do you want a drink of water?” Kyu asked. “Do you think we can drink it here?”

  He was very solicitous, Bold saw; but of course now he had to be. Near the Grand Canal the sight of Kyu would probably pass for normal, but Bold had no paperwork, and local prefects or canal officials might very well ask him to produce some. So neither the Grand Canal nor the country away from it would work all the time. They would have to slip on and off it as they went, depending on who was around. They might even have to move by night, which would slow them down and be more dangerous. Then again it seemed unlikely that all the hordes of people moving up and down the canal and its corridor were being checked for papers, or had them either.

  So they moved over into the crowd walking the canal road, and Kyu carried his bundle and wore his chains, and fetched water for Bold, and prete
nded ignorance of any but the simplest commands. He could do a scarily believable imitation of an idiot. Gangs of men hauled barges, or turned the capstans that raised and lowered the lock gates that interrupted the flow of the canal at regular intervals. Pairs of men, master and servant or slave, were common. Bold ordered Kyu about, but was too worried to enjoy it. Who knew what trouble Kyu might cause in the north. Bold didn’t know what he felt, it changed minute by minute. He still couldn’t believe Kyu had forced this escape on him. He hissed again; he had life-or-death power over the boy, yet he remained afraid of him.

  At a new little paved square, next to locks made of new raw timber, a local yamen and his deputies were stopping every fourth or fifth group. Suddenly they waved at Bold, and when he led Kyu over, suddenly hopeless, they asked to see his papers. The yamen was accompanied by a higher official in robes, a prefect wearing a patch with twinned sparrow hawks embroidered on it. The prefects’ symbols of rank were easy to read — the lowest rank showed quail pecking the ground, the highest, cranes sporting over the clouds. So this was a fairly senior figure here, possibly on the hunt for the arsonist of Hangzhou, and Bold was trying to think of lies, his body tensing to run, when Kyu reached into his bag and gave Bold a packet of papers tied with a silk ribbon. Bold undid the ribbon’s knot and gave the packet to the yamen, wondering what it said. He knew the Tibetan letters for ‘om mani padme hum’, as who could not with them carved on every rock in the Himalaya, but other than that he was illiterate, and the Chinese alphabet looked like chicken tracks, each letter different from all the rest.

  The yamen and the sparrow hawk official read the top two sheets, then handed them back to Bold, who tied them up and gave them to Kyu without looking at him.

  “Take care around Nanjing,” Sparrow Hawk said. “There are bandits in the hills just south of it.”

  “We’ll stick to the canal,” Bold said.

  When they were out of sight of the patrol, Bold struck Kyu hard for the first time. “What was that! Why didn’t you tell me about the papers! How can you expect me to know what to say to people?”

  “I was afraid you would take them and leave me.”

  “What do you mean? If they say I have a black slave, then I need a black slave, don’t I? What do they say?”

  “They say you are a horse merchant from the treasure fleet, travelling to Nanjing to complete business in horses. And that I am your slave.”

  “Where did you get them?”

  “A rice boatman who does them wrote one for me.”

  “So he knows our plans?”

  Kyu said nothing, and Bold wondered if the boatman too was dead. The boy seemed capable of anything. Getting a key, getting papers forged, preparing the little fireballs . . . If the time came where he thought he didn’t need Bold, Bold would no doubt wake up one morning with a slit throat. He would most certainly be safer on his own.

  As they trudged past the barge ropelines, he brooded on this. He could abandon the boy to whatever fate befell him — more enslavement, or quick death as a runaway, or slow death as an arsonist and murderer — and then work his way north and west to the great wall and the steppes beyond, and thence home.

  From the way Kyu avoided his gaze and slunk behind him, it was apparent that he knew more or less what Bold was thinking. So for a day or two Bold ordered him about harshly, and Kyu jumped at every word.

  But Bold did not leave him, and Kyu did not slit Bold’s throat. Thinking it over, Bold had to admit to himself that his karma was somehow tied up with the boy’s. He was part of it somehow. Very possibly he was there to help the boy.

  “Listen,” Bold said one day as they walked. “You can’t go to the capital and kill the Emperor. It isn’t possible. And why would you want to anyway?”

  Hunched, sullen, the boy eventually said in Arabic, “To bring them down.”

  Again the term he used came from camel driving.

  “To what?”

  “To stop them.”

  “But killing the Emperor, even if you could, wouldn’t do that. They’d just replace him with another one, and it would all go on the same as before. That’s how it works.”

  Much trudging, and then: ‘They wouldn’t fight over who got to be the new emperor?”

  “Over the succession? Sometimes that happens. It depends on who’s in line to succeed. I don’t know about that any more. This Emperor, the Yongle, is a usurper himself. He took it away from his nephew, or uncle. But usually the eldest son has a clear right. Or the Emperor designates a different successor. In any case the dynasty continues. It isn’t often there is a problem.”

  “But there might be?”

  “There might be and there might not. Meanwhile they’d be staying up at night working out better ways to torture you. What they did to you on the ship would be nothing compared to it. The Ming emperors have the best torturers in the world, everyone knows that.”

  More trudging. “They have the best everything in the world,” the boy complained. “The best canals, the best cities, the best ships, the best armies. They sail around the seas and everywhere they go people kotow to them. They land and see the tooth of the Buddha, they take it with them. They install a king that will serve them, and move on and do the same everywhere they go. They’ll conquer the whole world, cut all the boys, and all the children will be theirs, and the whole world will end up Chinese.”

  “Maybe so,” Bold said. “It’s possible. There certainly are a lot of them. And those treasure ships are impressive, no doubt of that. But you can’t sail into the heart of the world, the steppes where I came from. And the people out there are much tougher than the Chinese. They’ve conquered the Chinese before. So things should be all right. And listen, no matter what happens, you can’t do anything about it.”

  “We’ll see about that in Nanjing.”

  It was crazy, of course. The boy was deluded. Nevertheless there was that look that came into his eye — inhuman, totemic, his nafs looking out at things — the sight of which gave Bold a chill down the chakra nerve right to the first centre, behind his balls. Aside from the raptor nafs, which he had been born with, there was something scary in the hatred of a eunuch, something impersonal and uncanny. Bold had no doubt that he was travelling with some kind of power, some African witch child or shaman, a tulku, who had been captured out of the jungles and mutilated, so that his power had been redoubled, and was now turning to revenge. Revenge, against the Chinese! Despite his belief that it was crazy, Bold was curious to see what might come of that.

  • • •

  Nanjing was bigger even than Hangzhou. Bold had to give up being amazed. It was also the home harbour for the great treasure fleet. An entire city of shipbuilders had been established down by the Yangzi River estuary, the shipyards including seven enormous drydocks running perpendicular to the river, behind high dams with guards patrolling their gates so that no one could sabotage them. Thousands of shipwrights, carpenters and sailmakers lived in quarters behind the drydocks, and this sprawling town of workshops, called Longjiang, included scores of inns for visiting labourers, and sailors ashore. Evening discussions in these inns concerned mainly the fate of the treasure fleet and of Zheng He, who currently was occupied building a temple to Tianfei, while he worked on another great expedition to the west.

  It was easy for Bold and Kyu to slip into this scene as small-time trader and slave, and they rented sleeping spaces on the mattresses at the South Sea Inn. Here in the evenings they learned of the construction of a new capital up in Beiping, a project which was absorbing a great deal of the Yongle Emperor’s attention and cash. Beiping, a provincial northern outpost except during the Mongol dynasties, had been Zhu Di’s first power base before he usurped the Dragon Throne and became the Yongle Emperor, and he was now rewarding it by making it the imperial capital once again, changing its name from Beiping (‘northern peace’) to Beijing (‘northern capital’). Hundreds of thousands of workers had been sent north from Nanjing to build a truly enormous palace, ind
eed from all accounts the whole city was being made into a kind of palace — the Great Within, it was called, forbidden to any but the Emperor and his concubines and eunuchs. Outside this precious ground was to be a larger imperial city, also new.

  All this construction was said to be opposed by the Confucian bureaucracy who ruled the country for the Emperor. The new capital, like the treasure fleet, was a huge expense, an imperial extravagance that the officials disliked, for bleeding the country of its wealth. They must not have seen the treasures being unloaded, or did not believe them equal to what had been spent to gain them. They understood Confucius to say that the wealth of the empire ought to be land-based, a matter of expanded agriculture and assimilation of border people, in the traditional style. All this innovation, this shipbuilding and travel, seemed to them to be manifestations of the growing power of the imperial eunuchs, whom they hated as their rivals in influence. The talk in the sailors’ inns supported the eunuchs, for the most part, as the sailors were loyal to sailing, to the fleet and Zheng He, and the other eunuch admirals. But the officials didn’t agree.

  Bold saw the way Kyu picked up on this talk, and even asked further questions to learn more. After only a few days in Nanjing, he had found out all kinds of gossip Bold had not heard: the Emperor had been thrown by a horse given to him by the Temurid emissaries, a horse once owned by Temur himself (Bold wondered which horse it was; strange to think an animal had lived so long, though on reflection he realized it had been less than two years since Temur’s death). Then lightning had struck the new palace in Beijing and burned it all down. The Emperor had released an edict blaming himself for this disfavour from Heaven, causing fear and confusion and criticism. In the wake of these events, certain bureaucrats had openly criticized the monstrous expenditures of the new capital and the treasure fleet, draining the treasury surplus just as famine and rebellion in the south cried out for imperial relief. Very quickly the Yongle Emperor had tired of this criticism, and had had one of the most prominent critics exiled from China, and the rest banished to the provinces.