The Years of Rice and Salt (20 page)

So they sailed into a bay like nothing any of them had ever seen in all their travels. An inland sea, really, with three or four rocky islands in it, and hills all around, and marshes bordering most of its shores. The hills were rocky on top but mostly forested, the marshes lime green, yellowed by fall colors. Beautiful land; and empty!

They turned north and anchored in a shallow inlet, protected by a hilly spine that ran down into the water. Then some of them spotted a line of smoke rising up into the evening air.

“People,” I-Chin said. “But I don't think this can be the western end of the Muslim lands. We haven't sailed far enough for that, if Hsing Ho is correct. We shouldn't even be close yet.”

“Maybe it was a stronger current than you thought.”

“Maybe. I can refine our distance-from-equator tonight.”

“Good.”

But a distance-from-China would have been better, and that was the calculation they could not make. Dead reckoning had been impossible during the long period of their drift, and despite I-Chin's continual guesses, Kheim didn't think they knew to within a thousand li.

As for distance-from-equator, I-Chin reported that night, after measuring the stars, that they were at about the same line as Edo or Beijing—a little higher than Edo, a little lower than Beijing. I-Chin tapped his astrolabe thoughtfully. “It's the same distance-from-equator as the hui countries in the far west, in Fulan where all the people died. If Hsing Ho's map can be trusted. Fulan, see? A harbor called Lisboa. But there's no Fulan-chi here. I don't think this can be Fulan. We must have come upon an island.”

“A big island!”

“Yes, a big island.” I-Chin sighed. “If we could only solve the distance-from-China problem.”

It was an everlasting complaint with him, causing an obsession with clockmaking; an accurate clock would have made it possible to calculate the distance-from-Beijing, using an almanac to give the star times in China, and timing from there. The emperor had some fine clocks in his palace, it was said, but they had none on their ship. Kheim left him to his muttering.

The next morning they woke to find a group of locals—men, women, and children—dressed in leather skirts, shell necklaces, and feather headdresses, standing on the beach watching them. They had no cloth, it appeared, and no metal except small bits of hammered gold, copper, and silver. Their arrowheads and spear tips were flaked obsidian, their baskets woven of reeds and pine needles. Great mounds of shells lay heaped on the beach above the high-tide mark, and the visitors could see smoke rising from fires set inside wicker hovels, little shelters like those the poor farmers in China used for their pigs in winter.

The sailors laughed and chattered to see such people. They were partly relieved and partly amazed, but it was impossible to be frightened of these folk.

Kheim was not so sure. “They're like the wild people on Taiwan,” he said. “We had some terrible fights with them when we went after pirates in the mountains. We have to be careful.”

I-Chin said, “Tribes like that exist on some of the Spice Islands too, I've seen them. But even those people have more things than these.”

“No brick or wood houses, no iron that I can see, meaning no guns . . .”

“No fields for that matter. They must eat the clams,” pointing at the great shell heaps, “and fish. And whatever they can hunt or glean. These are poor people.”

“That won't leave much for us.”

“No.”

The sailors were shouting down at them: “Hello! Hello!”

Kheim ordered them to be quiet. He and I-Chin got in one of the little rowboats they had on the great ship, and had four sailors row them ashore.

From the shallows Kheim stood and greeted the locals, palms up and out, as one did in the Spice Islands with the wild ones. The locals didn't understand anything he said, but his gestures made plain his peaceful intent, and they seemed to recognize it. After a while he stepped ashore, confident of a peaceful welcome, but instructing the sailors to keep their flintlocks and crossbows below the seats at the ready, just in case.

On shore he was surrounded by curious people, babbling in their own tongue. Somewhat distracted by the sight of the women's breasts, he greeted a man who stepped forward, whose elaborate and colorful headdress perhaps confirmed him as their headman. Kheim's silk neck scarf, much salt-damaged and faded, had the image of a phoenix on it, and Kheim untied it and gave it to the man, holding it flat so he could see the image. The silk itself interested the man more than the image on it. “We should have brought more silk,” Kheim said to I-Chin.

I-Chin shook his head. “We were invading Nippon. Get their words for things if you can.”

I-Chin was pointing to one thing after another, their baskets, spears, dresses, headpieces, shell mounds; repeating what they said, noting it quickly on his slate. “Good, good. Well met, well met. The emperor of China and his humble servants send their greetings.”

The thought of the emperor made Kheim smile. What would the Wanli, Heavenly Envoy, make of these poor shell-grubbers?

“We need to teach some of them Mandarin,” I-Chin said. “Perhaps a young boy, they are quicker.”

“Or a young girl.”

“Don't let's get into that,” I-Chin said. “We need to spend some time here, to repair the ships and restock. We don't want the men here turning on us.”

Kheim mimed their intentions to the headman. Stay for a while—camp onshore—eat, drink—repair ships—go back home, beyond the sunset to the west. It seemed they eventually understood most of this. In return he understood from them that they ate acorns and squash, fish and clams and birds, and larger animals, probably they meant deer. They hunted in the hills behind. There was lots of food, and the Chinese were welcome to it. They liked Kheim's silk, and would trade fine baskets and food for more of it. Their ornamental gold came from hills to the east, beyond the delta of a big river that entered the bay across from them, almost directly east; they indicated where it flowed through a gap in the hills, somewhat like the gap leading out to the ocean.

As this information about the land obviously interested I-Chin, they conveyed more to him in a most ingenious way; though they had no paper, nor ink, nor writing nor drawing, except for the patterns in their baskets, they did have maps of a particular kind, made in the sand on the beach. The headman and some other notables crouched and shaped damp sand most minutely with their hands, smoothing flat the part meant to represent the bay, then getting into spirited discussions about the true shape of the mountain between them and the ocean, which they called Tamalpi, and which they indicated by gesture was a sleeping maiden, a goddess apparently, though it was hard to be sure. They used grass to represent a broad valley inland of the hills bracketing the bay on the east, and wetted the channels of a delta and two rivers, one draining the north, the other the south part of a great valley. To the east of this big valley were foothills rising to mountains much bigger than the coastal range, snow-capped (indicated by dandelion fluff) and holding in their midst a big lake or two.

All this they marked out with endless disputations concerning the details, and care over fingernail creasings and bits of grass or pine sprays; and all for a map that would be washed away in the next high tide. But when they were done, the Chinese knew that their gold came from people who lived in the foothills; their salt from the shores of the bay; their obsidian from the north and from beyond the high mountains, whence came also their turquoise; and so on. And all without any language in common, merely things displayed in mime, and their sand model of their country.

In the days that followed, however, they exchanged words for a host of daily objects and events, and I-Chin kept lists and started a glossary, and started teaching one of the local children, a girl of about six years who was the child of the headman, and very forward; a constant babbler in her own tongue, whom the Chinese sailors named Butterfly, both for her manner and for the joke that perhaps at this point they were only her dream. She delighted in telling I-Chin what was what, very firmly; and quicker than Kheim could have believed possible she was using Chinese as well as her own language, mixing them together sometimes, but usually reserving her Chinese for I-Chin, as if it were his private tongue and he some sort of freak, or inveterate joker, always making up fake words for things—neither opinion far from the truth. Certainly her elders agreed that I-Chin was a strange foreigner, feeling their pulse and abdomens, looking in their mouths, asking to inspect their urine (this they refused), and so on. They had a kind of doctor themselves, who led them in ritual purifications in a simple steam bath. This elderly raddled wild-eyed man was no doctor in the sense I-Chin was, but I-Chin took great interest in the man's herbarium and his explanations, as far as I-Chin could make them out, using ever more sophisticated sign language, and Butterfly's growing facility in Chinese. The locals' language was called “Miwok,” as the people also called themselves; the word meant “people” or something similar. They made it clear with their maps that their village controlled the watershed of the stream that flowed into the bay. Other Miwok lived in the nearby watersheds of the peninsula, between bay and ocean; other people with different languages lived in other parts of the country, each with their own name and territory, though the Miwok could argue among themselves over the details of these things endlessly. They told the Chinese that the great strait leading out to the ocean had been created by an earthquake, and that the bay had been fresh water before the cataclysm had let the ocean in. This seemed unlikely to I-Chin and Kheim, but then one morning after they had slept on shore, they were awakened by a severe shaking, and the earthquake lasted many heartbeats, and came back twice that morning; so that after that they were not as sure about the strait as they had been before.

They both enjoyed listening to the Miwok speak, but only I-Chin was interested in how the women made the bitter acorns of the jagged-leaved oaks edible, by grinding and leaching the acorn powder in beds of leaves and sand, giving them a sort of flour; I-Chin thought it was most ingenious. This flour, and salmon both fresh and dried, were the staples of their diet, which they offered the Chinese freely. They also ate deer, a kind of giant deer, rabbits, and all manner of waterfowl. Indeed, as the fall descended mildly on them, and the months passed, the Chinese began to understand that food was so plentiful in this place that there was no need for agriculture as practiced in China. Despite which there were very few people living there. That was one of the mysteries of this island.

The Miwok's hunts were big parties in the hills, all-day events that Kheim and his men were allowed to join. The bows used by the Miwok were weak but adequate. Kheim ordered his sailors to leave the crossbows and guns hidden on the ships, and the cannon were simply left to view but not explained, and none of the locals asked about them.

On one of these hunting trips Kheim and I-Chin followed the headman, Ta Ma, and some of the Miwok men up the stream that poured through their village, up into hills to a high meadow that had a view of the ocean to the west. To the east they could see across the bay, to range after range of green hills.

The meadow was marshy by the stream, grassy above it, with stands of oak and other trees tufting the air. There was a lake at the lower end of the meadow that was entirely covered with geese—a white blanket of living birds, all honking now, upset by something, complaining. Then the whole flock thrashed into the air, groups swirling and fragmenting, coming together, flying low over the hunters, squawking or silently concentrating on flight, the distinctive creak of their pumping wing feathers loud in the air. Thousands on thousands.

The men stood and watched the spectacle, eyes bright. When the geese had all departed, they saw the reason they had left; a herd of giant deer had come to the lake to drink. The stags had huge racks of antlers. They stared across the water at the men, vigilant but undeterred.

For a moment, all was still.

In the end the giant deer stepped away. Reality awoke again. “All sentient beings,” said I-Chin, who had been muttering his Buddhist sutras all along. Kheim normally had no time for such claptrap, but now, as the day continued, and they hiked over the hills on their hunt, seeing great numbers of peaceful beaver, quail, rabbits, foxes, seagulls and crows, ordinary deer, a bear and two cubs, a slinky long-tailed gray hunting creature, like a fox crossed with a squirrel—on and on—simply a whole country of animals, living together under a silent blue sky—nothing disturbed, the land flourishing on its own, the people there just a small part of it—Kheim began to feel odd. He realized that he had taken China for reality itself. Taiwan and the Mindanaos and the other islands he had seen were like scraps of land, leftovers; China had seemed to him the world. And China meant people. Built up, cultivated, parceled off ha by ha, it was so completely a human world that Kheim had never considered that there might once have been a natural world different to it. But here was natural land, right before his eyes, full as could be with animals of every kind, and obviously very much bigger than Taiwan; bigger than China; bigger than the world he had known before.

“Where on Earth are we?” he said to I-Chin.

I-Chin said, “We have found the source of the peach-blossom stream.”

Winter arrived, and yet it stayed warm during the days, cool at night. The Miwok gave them cloaks of sea-otter pelts sewn together with leather thread, and nothing could have been more comfortable against the skin, they were as luxurious as the clothes of the Jade Emperor. During storms it rained and was cloudy, but otherwise it was bright and sunny. This was all happening at the same latitude as Beijing, according to I-Chin, and at a time of year when it would have been bitterly cold and windy there, so the climate was much remarked on by the sailors. Kheim could scarcely believe the locals when they said it was like this every winter.

On the winter solstice, a sunny warm day like all the rest, the Miwok invited Kheim and I-Chin into their temple, a little round thing like a dwarves' pagoda, the floor sunken into the earth and the whole thing covered with sod, the weight of which was held up by some tree trunks forking up into a nest of branches. It was like being in a cave, and only the fire's light and the smoky sun shafting down through a smokehole in the roof illuminated the dim interior. The men were dressed in ceremonial feather headdresses and many shell necklaces, which gleamed in the firelight. To a constant drum rhythm they danced round the fire, taking turns as night followed day, going on until it seemed to the stupefied Kheim that they might never stop. He struggled to stay awake, feeling the importance of the event for these men who looked somehow like the animals they fed on. This day marked the return of the sun, after all. But it was hard to stay awake. Eventually he struggled to his feet and joined the younger dancers, and they made room for him as he galumphed about, his sea legs bandying out to the sides. On and on he danced, until it felt right to collapse in a corner, and only emerge at the last part of dawn, the sky fully lit, the sun about to burst over the hills backing the bay. The happy loose-limbed band of dancers and drummers was led by a group of the young unmarried women to their sweat lodge, and in his stupefied state Kheim saw how beautiful the women were, supremely strong, as robust as the men, their feet unbound and their eyes clear and without deference—indeed they appeared to laugh heartily at the weary men as they escorted them into the steam bath, and helped them out of their headdresses and finery, making what sounded like ribald commentary to Kheim, though it was possible he was only making it up out of his own desire. But the burnt air, the sweat pouring out of him, the abrupt clumsy plunge into their little river, blasting him awake in the morning light; all only increased his sense of the women's loveliness, beyond anything he could remember experiencing in China, where a sailor was always being taken by the precious blown flower girls in the restaurants. Wonder and lust and the river's chill battled his exhaustion, and then he slept on the beach in the sun.