The Years of Rice and Salt (6 page)

Then as they sailed into the South China Sea, someone saw the Dalada floating about the ship at night, as if, he said, it were a little candle flame. “How does he know it wasn't a candle flame?” Kyu asked. But the next morning the sky dawned red. Black clouds rolled over the horizon in a line from the south, in a way that reminded Bold strongly of the storm that had killed Temur.

Driving rain struck, then a violent wind that turned the sea white. Shooting up and down in their dim little room, Bold realized that such a storm was even more frightening at sea than on land. The ship's astrologer cried out that a great dragon under the sea was angry, and thrashing the water under them. Bold joined the other slaves in holding to the gratings and looking out their little holes to see if they could catch sight of spine or claw or snout of this dragon, but the spume flying over the white water obscured the surface. Bold thought he might have seen part of a dark green tail in the foam.

Wind shrieks through the nine masts,

All bare of sail. The great ship tilts in the wind,

Rolls side to side, and the little ships

Accompanying them bob like corks,

In and out of view through the grating.

In storms like this, nothing to be done but hold on!

Bold and Kyu cling fast to the wall,

Listening through the howl for the officers' shouts

And the thumping feet of the sailors

Doing what they can to secure the sails

And then to tie the tiller securely in place.

They hear the fear in the officers,

And sense it in the sailors' feet.

Even belowdecks they are wet with spray.

Up on the great poop deck the officers and astrologers performed some sort of ceremony of appeasement, and Zheng He himself could be heard calling out to Tianfei, the Chinese goddess of safety at sea.

“Let the dark water dragons go down into the sea, and leave us free from calamity! Humbly, respectfully, piously, we offer up this flagon of wine, offer it once and offer it again, pouring out this fine, fragrant wine! That our sails may meet favorable winds, that the sea-lanes be peaceful, that the all-seeing and all-hearing spirit-soldiers of winds and seasons, the wave-quellers and swell-drinkers, the airborne immortals, the god of the year, and the protectress of our ship, the Celestial Consort, brilliant, divine, marvelous, responsive, mysterious Tianfei might save us!”

Looking up through the dripping cracks in the deck Bold could see a composite vision of sailors watching this ceremony, mouths all open wide shouting against the wind's roar. Their guard yelled at them, “Pray to Tianfei, pray to the Celestial Consort, the sailor's only friend! Pray for her intercession! All of you! Much more of this wind and the ship will be torn apart!”

“Tianfei preserve us,” Bold chanted, squeezing Kyu to indicate he should do the same. The black boy said nothing. He pointed up at the forward masts, however, which they could see through the hatchway grating, and Bold looked up and saw red filaments of light dancing between the masts: balls of light, like Chinese lanterns without the paper or the fire, glowing at the top of the mast and over it, illuminating the flying rain and even the black bottoms of the clouds that were peeling by overhead. The otherworldly beauty of the sight tempered the terror of it; Bold and everyone else moved outside the realm of terror, it was too strange and awesome a sight to worry any longer about life or death. All the men were crying out, praying at the top of their lungs. Tianfei coalesced out of the dancing red light, her figure gleaming brightly over them, and the wind diminished all at once. The seas calmed around them. Tianfei dissipated, ran redly out the rigging and back into the air. Now their grateful voices could be heard above the wind. Whitecaps still toppled and rolled, but all at a distance from them, halfway to the horizon.

“Tianfei!” Bold shouted with the rest. “Tianfei!”

Zheng He stood at the poop rail and raised both hands in a light rain. He shouted “Tianfei! Tianfei has saved us!” and they all bellowed it with him, filled with joy in the same way the air had been filled with the red light of the goddess. Later the wind blew hard again, but they had no fear.

How the rest of the voyage home went is not really material; nothing of note happened, they made it back safely, and what happened after that you can find out by reading the next chapter.

5
                                                                                                            

In a Hangzhou restaurant, Bold and Kyu rejoin their jati;

In a single moment, end of many months' harmony.

Storm-tossed, Tianfei-protected, the treasure fleet sailed into a big estuary.
Ashore, behind a great seawall, stood the rooftops of a vast city. Even the part visible from the ship was bigger than all the cities Bold had ever seen put together—all the bazaars of central Asia, the Indian cities Temur had razed, the ghost towns of Frengistan, the white seaside towns of Zanj, Calicut—all combined would have occupied only a quarter or a third of the land covered by this forest of rooftops, this steppe of rooftops, extending all the way to distant hills visible to the west.

The slaves stood in the waist of the big ship, silent in the midst of the cheering Chinese, who cried out. “Tianfei, Celestial Consort, thank you!” and “Hangzhou, my home, never thought to be seen again!” “Home, wife, new year festival!” “We happy, happy men, to have traveled all the way to the other side of the world and then make it back home!” and so on.

The ships' huge anchor stones were dropped over the side. Where the Chientang River entered the estuary there was a powerful tidal bore, and any ship not securely anchored could be swept far up into the shallows, or flushed out to sea. When the ships were anchored the work of unloading began. This was a massive operation, and once as he ate rice between watches at the hoist, Bold noted that there were no horses, camels, water buffalo, mules, or asses to help with the job, or with any other job in the city: just thousands of laborers, endless lines of them, moving the food and goods in, or taking out the refuse and manure, mostly by canal—in and out, in and out, as if the city were a monstrous imperial body lying on the land, being fed and relieved by all its subjects together.

Many days passed in the labor of unloading, and Bold and Kyu saw a bit of the harbor Kanpu, and Hangzhou itself, when manning barges on trips to state warehouses under the southern hill compound that had once been the imperial palace, hundreds of years before. Now lesser aristocrats and even high-ranking bureaucrats and eunuchs lived in the old palace grounds. North of these extended the walled enclosure of the old city, impossibly crowded with warrens of wooden buildings that were five, six, and even seven stories tall—old buildings that overhung the canals, people's bedding spread out from balconies to dry in the sun, grass growing out of the roofs.

Bold and Kyu gawked up from the canals while unloading the barges. Kyu looked with his bird's gaze, seeming unsurprised, unimpressed, unafraid. “There are a lot of them,” he conceded. Constantly he was asking Bold the Chinese words for things, and in the attempt to answer Bold learned many more words himself.

When the unloading was done, the slaves from their ship were gathered together and taken to Phoenix Hill, “the hill of the foreigners,” and sold to a local merchant named Shen. No slave market here, no auction, no fuss. They never learned what they had been sold for, or who in particular had owned them during their sea passage. Possibly it had been Zheng He himself.

Chained together
at the ankles, Bold and Kyu were led through the narrow crowded streets to a building near the shores of a lake flanking the west edge of the old city. The first floor of the building was a restaurant. It was the fourteenth day of the first moon of the year, Shen told them, the start of the Feast of Lanterns, so they would have to learn fast, because the place was hopping.

Tables spill out of the restaurant

Into the broad street bordering the lakefront,

Every chair filled all day long.

The lake itself dotted with boats,

Each boat sporting lanterns of all kinds—

Colored glass painted with figures,

Carved white and apple jade,

Roundabouts turning on their candle's hot air,

Paper lanterns burning up in brief blazes.

A dike crowded with lantern bearers

Extends into the lake, the opposite shore is crowded

As well, so at the day's end

The lake and all the city around it

Spark in the dusk of the festival twilight.

Certain moments give us such unexpected beauty.

Shen's eldest wife, I-Li, ran the kitchen very strictly, and Bold and Kyu soon found themselves unloading hundredweight bags of rice from the canal barges tied up behind the restaurant; carrying them in; returning bags of refuse to the compost barges; cleaning the tables; and mopping and sweeping the floor. They ran in and out, also upstairs to the family compound above the restaurant. The pace was relentless, but all the while they were surrounded by the restaurant women, in white robes with paper butterflies in their hair, and by thousands of other women as well, promenading under the globes of colored light, so that even Kyu raced about drunk on the sights and smells, and on drinks salvaged from near-empty cups. They drank lichee, honey and ginger punch, papaw and pear juice, and teas green and black. Shen also served fifteen kinds of rice wine; they tried the dregs of them all. They drank everything but plain water, which they were warned against as dangerous to the health.

As for the food, which again came to them mostly in the form of table scraps—well, it beggared description. They were given a plateful of rice every morning, with some kidneys or other offal thrown in, and after that they were expected to fend for themselves with what customers left behind. Bold ate everything he got his hands on, astonished at the variety. The Feast of Lanterns was a time for Shen and I-Li to offer their fullest menu, and so Bold had the chance to taste roebuck, red deer, rabbit, partridge, quail, clams cooked in rice wine, goose with apricots, lotus-seed soup, pimento soup with mussels, fish cooked with plums, fritters and soufflés, ravioli, pies, and cornflour fruitcakes. Every kind of food, in fact, except for any beef or dairy; strangely, the Chinese had no cattle. But they had eighteen kinds of soy, Shen said, nine of rice, eleven of apricots, eight of pears. It was a feast every day.

After the rush of the Feast of Lanterns was over, I-Li liked to take short breaks from her work in the kitchen, and visit some of the other restaurants of the city, to see what they were offering. She would return to inform Shen and the cooks that they needed to make a sweet soy soup, for instance, like that she had found at the Mixed Wares Market; or pig cooked in ashes, like that at the Longevity-and-Compassion Palace.

She started taking Bold with her on her morning trips to the abbatoir, located right in the heart of the old city. There she chose her pork ribs, and the liver and kidneys for the slaves. Here Bold learned why they were never to drink the city's water; the offal and blood from the slaughter were washed off right into the big canal running down to the river, but often the tides pushed water back up this canal and through the rest of the city's water network.

Returning behind I-Li with his wheelbarrow of pork one day, pausing to let a party of nine intoxicated women in white pass by, Bold felt all of a sudden that he was in a different world. Back at the restaurant he said to Kyu, “We've been reborn without our noticing it.”

“Maybe you have. You're like a baby here.”

“Both of us! Look about you! It's . . .” He could not express it.

“They are rich,” Kyu said, looking about. Then they were back to work.

The lakefront never was an ordinary place. Festival or not—and there were festivals almost every month—the lakefront was one of the main places the people of Hangzhou congregated. Every week there were private parties between the more general festivals, so the promenade was a daily celebration of greater or lesser magnitude, and although there was a great deal of work to be done supplying and maintaining the restaurant, there was also a great deal of food and drink to be scavenged, or poached in the kitchen, and both Bold and Kyu were insatiable. They soon filled out, and Kyu was also still sprouting up, looking tall among the Chinese.

Soon it was as if they had never lived any other life. Well before dawn, resonant wooden fish were struck with mallets, and the weathermen shouted their announcements from the firewatch towers: “It is raining! It is cloudy today!” Bold and Kyu and about twenty other slaves got up and were let out of their room, and most went down to the service canal that ran in from the suburbs, to meet the rice barges. The barge crews had gotten up even earlier—theirs was night work, starting at midnight many li away. All together they heaved the bulging sacks onto wheelbarrows, then the slaves wheeled them back through the alleys to Shen's.

They sweep up the restaurant,

Light the stove fires, set the tables,

Wash bowls and chopsticks, chop vegetables,

Cook, carry supplies and food

Out to Shen's two pleasure boats,

And then as dawn breaks

And people begin slowly to appear

On the lakefront for breakfast,

They help the cooks, wait on tables,

Bus and clean tables—anything needed,

Lost in the meditation of labor,

though usually the hardest work in the place was theirs, as they were the newest slaves. But even the hardest work wasn't very hard, and with the constant availability of food, Bold considered their placement a windfall; a chance to put some meat on their bones, and learn better the local dialect and the ways of the Chinese. Kyu pretended never to notice any of these things, indeed pretended not to understand most of the Chinese spoken to him, but Bold saw that he was actually soaking in everything like a dishwasher's sponge, watching sideways so that it seemed he never watched, when he always watched. That was Kyu's way. He already knew more Chinese than Bold.

The eighth day of the fourth moon was another big festival, celebrating a deity who was patron to many of the guilds of the town. The guilds organized a procession, down the broad imperial way that divided the old city north to south, then over to West Lake for dragon-boat jousts, among all the other more usual pleasures of the lakefront. Each guild wore its particular costume and mask, and brandished identical umbrellas, flags or bouquets as they marched in squares together, shouting “Ten thousand years! Ten thousand years!” as they had done ever since the emperors had actually lived in Hangzhou, and heard these shouted hopes for their longevity. Spread out along the lakefront at the end of the parade, they watched a dance of a hundred little eunuchs in a circle, a particular celebration of that festival. Kyu almost looked directly at these children.

Later that day he and Bold were assigned to one of Shen's pleasure boats, which were floating extensions of his restaurant. “We have a wonderful feast for our passengers today,” Shen cried as they arrived and filed aboard. “We'll be serving the Eight Dainties today—dragon livers, phoenix marrow, bear paws, lips of apes, rabbit embryo, carp tail, broiled osprey, and kumiss.”

Bold smiled to think of kumiss, which was simply fermented mare's milk, included among the Eight Dainties; he had practically grown up on it. “Some of those are easier to obtain than others,” he said, and Shen laughed and kicked him into the boat.

Onto the lake they paddled. “How come your lips are still on your face?” Kyu called back at Shen, who was out of hearing.

Bold laughed. “The Eight Dainties,” he said. “What these people think of!”

“They do love their numbers,” Kyu agreed. “The Three Pure Ones, the Four Emperors, the Nine Luminaries—”

“The Twenty-eight Constellations—”

“The Twelve Horary Branches, the Five Elders of the Five Regions . . .”

“The Fifty Star Spirits.”

“The Ten Unforgivable Sins.”

“The Six Bad Recipes.”

Kyu cackled briefly. “It's not numbers they like, it's lists. Lists of all the things they have.”

Out on the lake Bold and Kyu saw up close the magnificent decoration of the day's dragon boats, bedecked with flowers, feathers, colored flags and spinners. Musicians on each boat played madly, trying with drum and horn to drown out the sound of all the others, while pikemen in the bows reached out with padded staves to knock people on other boats into the water.

In the midst of this happy tumult, screams of a different tone caught the attention of those on the water, and they looked ashore and saw that there was a fire. Instantly the games ended and all the boats made a beeline for land, piling up five deep against the docks. People ran right over the boats in their haste, some toward the fire, some toward their own neighborhoods. As they hurried over to the restaurant Bold and Kyu saw for the first time a fire brigade. Each neighborhood had one, with its own equipment, and they would all follow the signal flags from the watchtowers around the city, soaking roofs in districts threatened by the blaze, or putting out flying embers. Hangzhou's buildings were all wood or bamboo, and most districts had gone up in flames at one time or another, so the routine was well practiced. Bold and Kyu ran behind Shen up to the burning neighborhood, which was to the north of theirs and upwind, so that they too were in danger.

At the fire's edge thousands of men and women were at work, many in bucket lines that extended to the nearest canals. The buckets were run upstairs into smoky buildings, and tossed down onto the flames. There were also quite a number of men carrying staves, pikes, and even crossbows, and questioning men hauled out of the fiery alleyways bordering the conflagration. Suddenly these men beat one of those that emerged to a bloody mass, right there amid the firefighting. Looter, someone said. Army detachments would soon arrive to help capture more and kill them on the spot, after public torture, if there was time.

Despite this threat, Bold saw now that there were figures without buckets, darting in and out of the burning buildings. The fight against looters was as intense as that against the fire! Kyu too saw this as he passed wooden or bamboo buckets down the line, openly watching everything.

Days flew by, each busier than the last. Kyu was still nearly mute, head always lowered, a mere beast of burden or kitchen swab—incapable of learning Chinese, or so everyone in the restaurant believed. Only semihuman in fact, which was the usual attitude of the Chinese toward black slaves in the city.