The Years of Rice and Salt Read online

  “That’s all bad,” one sailor said, a little bit the worse for drink, “but worst of all for the Emperor is the fact that he’s sixty years old. There’s no help for that, even when you’re Emperor. It may even be worse for him.”

  Everyone nodded. “Bad, very bad.”

  “He won’t be able to keep the eunuchs and officials from fighting.”

  “We could see a civil war before too long.”

  “To Beijing,” Kyu said to Bold.

  • • •

  But before they left, Kyu insisted they go up to Zheng He’s house, a rambling mansion with a front door carved to look like the stern of one of his treasure ships. The rooms inside (seventy-two, the sailors said) were each supposed to be decorated to resemble a different Muslim country, and in the courtyard the gardens were planted to resemble Yunnan.

  Bold complained all the way up the hill. “He will never see a poor trader and his slave. His servants will kick us away from the door, this is ridiculous!”

  It happened just as Bold had predicted. The gatekeeper sized them up and told them to be on their way.

  “All right,” Kyu said. “Off to the temple for Tianfei.”

  This was a grand complex of buildings, built by Zheng He to honour the Celestial Consort, and to thank her for her miraculous rescue of them in the storm.

  The centrepiece of the temple

  Is a nine-storeyed octagonal pagoda,

  Tiled in white porcelain fired with Persian cobalt

  That the treasure fleet brought back with it.

  Each level of the pagoda must be built

  With the same number of tiles, this

  Pleases Tianfei, so the tiles get smaller

  As each storey narrows to a graceful peak,

  Far above the treetops. Beautiful offering

  And testament to a goddess of pure mercy.

  There in the midst of the construction, conversing with men who looked no better than Bold or Kyu, was Zheng He himself. He looked at Kyu as they approached, and paused to talk to him. Bold shook his head to see this example of the boy’s power revealing itself.

  Zheng nodded as Kyu explained they had been part of his last expedition. “You looked familiar.” He frowned, however, when Kyu went on to explain that they wanted to serve the Emperor in Beijing.

  “Zhu Di is off campaigning in the west. On horseback, with his rheumatism.” He sighed. “He needs to understand that the fleet’s way of conquering is best. Arrive with the ships, start trading, install a local ruler who will cooperate, and for the rest, simply let them be. Trade with them. Make sure the man at the top is friendly. There are sixteen countries sending tribute to the Emperor as a direct result of the voyages of our fleet. Sixteen!”

  “It’s hard to get the fleet to Mongolia,” Kyu said, frightening Bold. But Zheng He laughed.

  “Yes, the Great Without is high and dry. We have to convince the Emperor to forget the Mongols, and look to the sea.”

  “We want to do that,” Kyu said earnestly. “In Beijing we will argue the case every chance we get. Will you give us introductions to the eunuch officials at the palace? I could join them, and my master here would be good in the imperial stables.”

  Zheng looked amused. “It won’t make any difference. But I’ll help you for old times’ sake, and wish you luck.”

  He shook his head as he wrote a memorial, his brush wielded like a little hand broom. What happened to him afterwards is well-known: grounded by the Emperor, given a land-locked military command, spending his days constructing the nine-storeyed porcelain pagoda honouring Tianfei; we imagine he missed his voyages over the distant seas of the world, but cannot say for sure. But we do know what happened to Bold and Kyu, and we will tell you in the next chapter.

  SEVEN

  New capital, new emperor, plots reach their ends.

  Boy against China; you can guess who wins.

  Beijing was raw in every sense, the wind frigid and damp, the wood of the buildings still white and dripping with sap, the smell of pitch and turned earth and wet cement everywhere. It was crowded, too, though not like Hangzhou or Nanjing, so that Bold and Kyu felt cosmopolitan and sophisticated, as if this huge construction site were beneath them somehow. A lot of people here had that attitude.

  They made their way to the eunuch clinic named in Zheng He’s memorial, located just south of the Meridian Gate, the southern entrance to the Forbidden City. Kyu presented his introduction, and he and Bold were whisked inside to see the clinic’s head eunuch. “A reference from Zheng He will take you far in the palace,” this eunuch told them, “even if Zheng himself is having troubles with the imperial officials. I know the palace’s Director of Ceremonies, Wu Han, very well, and will introduce you. He is an old friend of Zheng’s, and needs eunuchs in the Literary Depth Pavilion for rescript writing. But wait, you are not literate, are you? But Wu also administers the eunuch priests maintained to attend to the spiritual welfare of the concubines.”

  “My master here is a lama,” Kyu said, indicating Bold. “He has trained me in all the mysteries of the bardo.”

  The eunuch regarded Bold skeptically. “Be that as it may, one way or another the memorial from Zheng will get you in. He has recommended you very highly. But you will need your pao, of course.”

  “Pao?” Kyu said. “My precious?”

  “You know.” The eunuch gestured at Kyu’s groin. “It is necessary to prove your status, even after I have inspected and certified you. Also, more importantly perhaps, when you die you will be buried with it on your chest, to fool the gods. You don’t want to come back as a shemule, after all.” He glanced at Kyu curiously. “You don’t have yours?”

  Kyu shook his head.

  “Well, we have many here you can choose from, left over from patients who died. I doubt you can tell black from Chinese after the pickling!” He laughed and led them down a hall.

  His name was Jiang, he said; he was an ex-sailor from Fukian, and was puzzled that anyone young and fit would ever leave the coast to come to a place like Beijing. “But as black as you are, you’ll be like the quillin that the fleet brought back last time for the Emperor, the spotted unicorn with the long neck. I think it also was from Zanj. Do you know it?”

  “It was a big fleet,” Kyu said.

  “I see. Well, Wu and the other palace eunuchs love exotics like you and the quillin, and so does the Emperor, so you’ll be fine. Keep quiet and don’t get mixed up in any conspiracies, and you’ll do well.”

  In a cool storage building they went into a room filled with sealed porcelain and glass jars, and found a black penis for Kyu to take with him. The head eunuch then inspected him personally, to make sure he was what he said he was, and then brushed his certification onto the introduction from Zheng, and put his chop to it in red ink. “Some people try to fake it, of course, but if they’re caught they get it handed to them, and then they aren’t faking it any more, are they. You know, I noticed they didn’t put in a quill when they cut you. You should have a quill to keep it open, and then the plug goes in the quill. It’s much more comfortable that way. They should have done that when you were cut.”

  “I seem to be all right without it,” Kyu said. He held the glass jar up against the light, looking closely at his new pao. Bold shuddered and led the way out of the creepy room.

  While further arrangements were made in the palace, Kyu was assigned a bed in the dorm, and Bold was offered a room in the clinic’s men’s building. “Temporary, you understand. Unless you care to join us in the main building. Great opportunities for advancement . . .”/p>

  “No thank you,” Bold said politely. But he saw that many men were coming in to request the operation, desperate for a job. When there was famine in the countryside there was no shortage of applicants, they even had to turn people away. As with everything in China, there was a whole bureaucracy at work here, the palace requiring as it did several thousand eunuchs for its operation. This clinic was just a small part of that.

&nb
sp; • • •

  So they were launched in Beijing. Indeed, things had gone so well that Bold wondered if Kyu, no longer needing Bold as he had during their journey north, would now abandon him — move into the Forbidden City and disappear from his life. The idea made him sad, despite all.

  But Kyu, after being assigned to the concubines of Zhu Gaozhi, the Emperor’s eldest legitimate son and the Heir Designate, asked Bold to come with him and apply to be a stabler for the Heir. “I still need your help,” he said simply, looking like the boy who had boarded the treasure ship so long ago.

  “I’ll try,” Bold said.

  Kyu was able to ask the favour of an interview from Zhu Gaozhi’s stable master, and Bold went in and displayed his expertise with some big beautiful horses, and was given a job. Mongolians had the same kind of advantage in the stable that eunuchs had in the palace.

  It was easy work, Bold found; the Heir Designate was an indolent man, his horses seldom ridden, so that the stablers had to exercise them on a track, and in the new parks of the palace grounds. The horses were all very big and white, but slow and weak-winded; Bold saw now why the Chinese could never go north of their Great Wall and attack the Mongols to any great effect, despite their stupendous numbers. Mongols lived on their horses, and lived off them too — made their clothes and shelter from their felt and wool, drank their milk and blood, ate them when they had to. Mongolian horses were the life of the people; whereas these big clodhoppers might as well have been driving millstones in a circle with blinkers on, for all the wind and spirit they had.

  It turned out Zhu Gaozhi spent a lot of time in Nanjing, where he had been brought up, visiting his mother the Empress Xu. So as the months passed, Bold and Kyu made the trip between the two capitals many times, travelling on barges on the Grand Canal, or on horseback beside it. Zhu Gaozhi preferred Nanjing to Beijing, for obvious reasons of climate and culture; late at night, after drinking vast quantities of rice wine, he could be heard declaring to his intimates that he would move the capital back to Nanjing on the very day of his father’s death. This made the enormous labour of building Beijing look odd to them when they were there.

  But more and more they were in Nanjing. Kyu helped run the Heir’s harem, and spent most of his time inside their enclosure. He never told Bold a thing about what he did in there, except one time, when he came out to the stables late at night, a bit drunk. This was almost the only time Bold saw him any more, and he looked forward to these nocturnal visits, despite the way they made him nervous.

  On this occasion Kyu remarked that his main task these days was to find husbands for those of the Emperor’s concubines who had reached the age of thirty without ever having relations with the Emperor. Zhu Di farmed these out to his son, with instructions to marry them off.

  “Would you like a wife?” Kyu asked Bold slyly. “A thirty-year-old virgin, expertly trained?”

  “No thanks,” Bold said uneasily. He already had an arrangement with one of the servant women in the compound in Nanking, and though he supposed Kyu was joking, it made him feel strange.

  Usually when Kyu made these midnight visits out to the stables, he was deep in thought. He did not hear things Bold said to him, or answered oddly, as if replying to some other question. Bold had heard that the young eunuch was well-liked, knew many people in the palace, and had the favour of Wu, the Director of Ceremonies. But what they all did in the concubines’ quarters during the long nights of the Beijing winters, he had no idea. Usually Kyu came out to the stables reeking of wine and perfume, sometimes urine, once even vomit. “To stink like a eunuch’ — the common phrase came back to Bold at those times with unpleasant force. He saw how people made fun of the mincing eunuch walk, the hunched little steps with feet pointing outwards, something that was either a physical necessity or a group style, Bold didn’t know. They were called crows for their falsetto voices, among other names; but always behind their backs; and everyone agreed that as they fattened and then wizened in their characteristic fashion, they came to look like bent old women.

  Kyu was still young and pretty, however, and drunk and dishevelled as he was during his night visits to Bold, he seemed very pleased with himself. “Let me know if you ever want women,” he said. “We’ve got more than we need in there.”

  • • •

  During one of the Heir’s visits to Beijing, Bold caught a glimpse of the Emperor and his heir together, as he brought their perfectly groomed horses out to the Gate of Heavenly Purity, so that the two could ride to ether in the parks of the imperial garden. Except the Emperor wanted to leave the enclosure and ride well to the north of the city, apparently, and sleep out in tents. Clearly the Heir Designate was unenthusiastic, and the officials accompanying the Emperor were as well. Finally he gave in and agreed to make it a day ride, but outside the imperial city, by the river.

  As they were mounting the horses he exclaimed to his son, “You have to learn to fit the punishment to the crime! People need to feel the justice of your decision! When the Board of Punishments recommended that Xu Pei-yi be put to the lingering death, and all his male relations over sixteen put to death and all his female relations and children enslaved, I was merciful! I lowered his sentence to beheading, sparing all the relatives. And so they say, “the Emperor has a sense of proportion, he understands things.”

  “Of course they do,” the Heir agreed blandly.

  The Emperor glanced sharply at him, and off they rode.

  When they returned, late in the day, he was still lecturing his son, sounding even more peeved than he had in the morning. “If you know nothing but the court, you will never be able to rule! The people expect the Emperor to understand them, to be a man who rides and shoots as well as the Heavenly Envoy! Why do you think your governors will do what you say if they think you are womanly? They will only obey you to your face, and behind your back they will mock you and do whatever they like.”

  “Of course they will,” said the Heir, looking the other way.

  The Emperor glared at him. “Off the horse,” he said in a heavy voice.

  The Heir sighed and slid from his mount. Bold caught the reins and calmed the horse with a quick hand while leading it towards the Emperor’s mount, ready when the Emperor leapt off and roared “Obey!”

  The Heir fell to his knees and kotowed.

  “You think the bureaucrats care about you!” the Emperor shouted. “But they don’t! Your mother is wrong about that, like she is about everything else! They have their own ideas, and they won’t support you when there’s the least trouble. You need your own men.”

  “Or eunuchs,” the Heir said into the gravel.

  The Yongle Emperor stared at him. “Yes. My eunuchs know they depend on my good will above all else. No one else will back them. So they’re the only people in the world you know will back you.”

  No reply from the prostrated elder son. Bold, facing away and moving to the very edge of earshot, risked a glance back. The Emperor, shaking his head heavily, was walking away, leaving his son kneeling on the ground.

  “You may be backing the wrong horse,” Bold said to Kyu the next time they met, on one of Kyu’s increasingly rare night visits to the stables. “The Emperor is going out with his second son now. They ride, they hunt, they laugh. One day they killed three hundred deer we had enclosed. While with the Heir Designate, the Emperor has to drag him out of doors, can’t get him off the palace grounds, and spends the whole time yelling at him. And the Heir nearly mocks him to his face. Comes as close as he dares. And the Emperor knows it too. I wouldn’t be surprised if he changed the Heir Designate.”

  “He can’t,” Kyu said. “He wants to, but he can’t.”

  “Whyever not?”

  “The eldest is the son of the Empress. The second-born is the son of a courtesan. A low-ranking courtesan at that.”

  “But the Emperor can do what he wants, right?”

  “Wrong. It only works when they all follow the laws together. If anyone breaks the laws,
it can mean civil war, and the end of the dynasty.”

  Bold had seen this in the Chinggurid wars of succession, which had gone on for generations. Indeed it was said now that Temur’s sons had been fighting ever since his death, with the Khan’s empire divided into four parts, and no sign of it ever coming together again.

  But Bold also knew that a strong ruler could get away with things. “You’re parroting what you’ve heard from the Empress and the Heir and their officials. But it isn’t that simple. People make the laws, and sometimes they change them. Or ignore them. And if they’ve got the swords, that’s it.”

  Kyu considered this in silence. Then he said, “There’s talk that the countryside is suffering. Famine in Hunan, piracy on the coast, diseases in the south. The officials don’t like it. They think the great treasure fleet brought back disease instead of treasure, and wasted huge sums of money. They don’t understand what trade brings back, they don’t believe in it. They don’t believe in the new capital. They tell the Empress and the Heir that they should help the people, that we should get back to agriculture, and stop wasting so much cash on extravagant projects.”

  Bold nodded. “I’m sure they do.”

  “But the Emperor persists. He does what he wants, and he has the army behind him, and his eunuchs. The eunuchs like the foreign trade, as they see it makes them rich. And they like the new capital, and all the rest. Right?”

  Bold nodded again. “So it seems.”

  “The regular officials hate the eunuchs.”

  Bold glanced at him. “Do you see that yourself?”

  “Yes. Although it’s the Emperor’s eunuchs they really hate.”

  “No doubt. Whoever is closest to power is feared by all the rest.”

  Again Kyu thought things over. He seemed to Bold to be happy, these days; but then again Bold had thought that in Hangzhou. So it always made Bold nervous to see Kyu’s little smile.