The Years of Rice and Salt (5 page)

4
                                                                                                            

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 is
land. The room they were kept in was low and broad, extending 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 aboard 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 semiconscious 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 gray 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 chamber pot 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 I 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 gray 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 traveled 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 like they had moved anywhere. Bold tried to figure 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 crennellated,

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 the city's great size, all activity 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 colors 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 Bön 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 slaves were sold, and only once were they taken ashore, to help break up a mass of cloth bolts and carry them to the long low dugouts 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 jewelry and porcelain mosaics, and had a gold statue facing forward 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 draft fore and aft. He had a broad face, not Han; and 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. I 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 behavior 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 harbor, 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 throat-tearing 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 center, 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 east, the story circulated through the ship that the Dalada was 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 favor. 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, unaccountably 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 center. 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 challenge a fleet so huge and powerful, tooth of the Buddha or not.