The Years of Rice and Salt (26 page)

He acted out each step of the process, looking the hostages in the eyes and speaking only a little, as he judged it would only be a distraction to their comprehension. Then he had his men release all the women captured, and a few of the men without headdresses, and sent them out with clear instructions to get the required goods. He could tell by their eyes that they understood exactly what they were to do.

After that he marched the hostages to the beach, and they waited. That same afternoon men appeared in one of the main streets, bags slung down their backs from lines hung around their foreheads. They deposited these bags on the beach, bowing, and then retreated, still facing the Chinese. Dried meat; grain cakes; the little green leaves; gold disks and ornaments (though Kheim had not asked for these); blankets and bolts of the soft cloth. Looking at it all spread on the beach, Kheim felt like a tax collector, heavy and cruel; but also relieved; powerful in a tenuous fashion only, as it was by a magic he didn't understand or control. Above all he felt content. They had what they needed to get home.

He untied the hostages himself, gestured for them to go. He gave each of them a pistol ball, curling their unresponsive fingers around them. “We'll be back someday,” he said to them. “Us, or people worse than us.” He wondered briefly if they would catch smallpox, like the Miwok; his sailors had slept on the locals' blankets at the palace.

No way to tell. The locals stumbled away, clutching their pistol balls or dropping them. Their women stood at a safe distance, happy to see that Kheim had kept his pantomimed promise, happy to see their men freed. Kheim ordered his men into the boats. They rowed out to the ships and sailed away from the big mountain island.

After all that, sailing the Great Ocean felt very familiar, very peaceful. The
days passed in their rounds. They followed the sun west, always west. Most days were hot and sunny. Then for a month clouds grew every day and broke in the afternoons, in gray thundershowers that quickly dissipated. After that the winds always blew from the southeast, making their way easy. Their memories of the great island behind them began to seem like dreams, or legends they had heard about the realm of the asuras. If it weren't for Butterfly's presence it would have been hard to believe they had done all that.

Butterfly played on the flagship. She swung through the rigging like a little monkey. There were hundreds of men on board, but the presence of one little girl changed everything: they sailed under a blessing. The other ships stayed close to the flagship in the hope of catching sight of her, or being blessed by an occasional visit. Most of the sailors believed she was the goddess Tianfei, traveling with them for their own safety, and that this was why the return voyage was going so much easier than the voyage out had. The weather was kinder, the air warmer, the fish more plentiful. Three times they passed small atolls, uninhabited, and were able to take on coconuts and palm hearts, and once water. Most important, Kheim felt, they were headed west, back home to the known world. It felt so different from the voyage out that it seemed strange it was the same activity. That orientation alone could make such a difference! But it was hard to sail into the morning sun, hard to sail away from the world.

Sailing, day after day. Sun rising at the stern, sinking at the bow, drawing them on. Even the sun was helping them—perhaps too much—it was now the seventh month, and infernally hot; then windless for most of a month. They prayed to Tianfei, ostentatiously not looking at Butterfly as they did so.

She played in the rigging, oblivious to their sidelong glances. She spoke Chinese pretty well now, and had taught I-Chin all the Miwok she could remember. I-Chin had written down every word, in a dictionary that he thought might be useful to subsequent expeditions to the new island. It was interesting, he told Kheim, because usually he was just choosing the ideogram or combination of ideograms that sounded most like the Miwok word as spoken, and writing down as precise a definition of its Miwok meaning as he could, given the source of information; but of course when looking at the ideographs for the sounds it was impossible not to hear the Chinese meanings for them as well, so that the whole Miwok language became yet another set of homonyms to add to the already giant number that existed in Chinese. Many Chinese literary or religious symbols relied on pure accidents of homonymity to make their metaphorical connection, so that one said the tenth day of the month, shi, was the birthday of the stone, shi; or a picture of a heron and lotus, lu and lian, by homynym became the message “may your path (lu) be always upward (lian); or the picture of a monkey on the back of another one could be read in a similar way as “may you rank as a governor from generation to generation.” Now to I-Chin the Miwok words for “going home” looked like wu ya, five ducks, while the Miwok for “swim” looked like Peng-zu, the legendary character who had lived for eight hundred years. So he would sing “five ducks swimming home, it will only take eight hundred years,” or “I'm going to jump off the side and become Peng-zu,” and Butterfly would shriek with laughter. Other similarities in the two languages' maritime words made I-Chin suspect that Hsu Fu's expedition to the east had made it to the ocean continent of Yingzhou after all, and left there some Chinese words if nothing else; if, indeed, the Miwok themselves were not the descendants of his expedition.

Some men already spoke of returning to the new land, usually to the golden kingdom in the south, to subdue it by arms and take its gold back to the real world. They did not say, We will do this, which would be bad luck, obviously, but rather, If one were to do this. Other men listened to this talk from a distance behind their eyes, knowing that if Tianfei allowed them to reach home, nothing ever again would induce them to cross the great ocean.

Then they became entirely becalmed, in a patch of ocean devoid of rain, cloud, wind, or current. It was as if a curse had fallen on them, possibly from the loose talk of return for gold. They began to bake. There were sharks in the water, so they could not swim freely to cool off, but had to set a sail in the water between two of the ships, and let it sink until they could jump off into a pool, very warm, about chest deep. Kheim had Butterly wear a shift and let her jump in. To refuse her wish would have been to astound and infuriate the crew. It turned out she could swim like an otter. The men treated her like the goddess she was, and she laughed to see them sporting like boys. It was a relief to do something different, but the sail couldn't sustain the wetness and bouncing on it, and gradually came apart. So they only did it once.

The doldrums began to endanger them. They would run out of water, then food. Possibly subtle currents continued to carry them west, but I-Chin was not optimistic. “It's more likely we've wandered into the center of the big circular current, like a whirlpool's center.” He advised sailing south when possible, to get back into both wind and current, and Kheim agreed, but there was no wind to sail. It was much like the first month of their expedition, only without the Kuroshio. Again they discussed putting out the boats and rowing the ships, but the vast junks were too big to move by oar power alone, and I-Chin judged it dangerous to tear the skin off the palms of the men when they were already so dried out. There was no recourse but to clean their stills, and keep them in the sun and primed all day long, and ration what water remained in the casks. And keep Butterfly fully watered, no matter what she said about doing like all the rest. They would have given her the last cask in the fleet.

It had gotten to the point where I-Chin was proposing that they save their dark yellow urine and mix it with their remaining water supplies, when black clouds appeared from the south, and it quickly became clear that their problem was going to change very swiftly from having too little water to having too much. Wind struck hard, clouds rolled over them, water fell in sheets, and the funnels were deployed over the casks, which refilled almost instantly. Then it was a matter of riding out the storm. Only junks as big as theirs were high enough and flexible enough to survive such an onslaught for long; and even the Eight Great Ships, desiccated above the water as they had been in the doldrums, now swelled in the rain, snapping many of the ropes and pins holding them together, so that riding out the storm became a continuous drenched frantic stemming of leaks, and fixing of broken spars and staves and ropes.

All this time the waves were growing bigger, until eventually the ships were rising and falling as over enormous smoking hills, rolling south to north at a harried but inexorable, even majestic pace. In the flagship they shot up the face of these and crested in a smear of white foam over the deck, after which they had a brief moment's view of the chaos from horizon to horizon, with perhaps two or three of the other ships visible, bobbing in different rhythms and being blown away into the watery murk. For the most part there was nothing to do but hunker down in the cabins, drenched and apprehensive, unable to hear each other over the roar of wind and wave.

At the height of the storm they entered the fish's eye, that strange and ominous calm in which disordered waves sloshed about in all directions, crashing into each other and launching solid bolts of white water into the dark air, while all around them low black clouds obscured the horizon. A typhoon, therefore, and none were surprised. As in the yin-yang symbol, there were dots of calm at the center of the wind. It would soon return from the opposite direction.

So they worked on repairs in great haste, feeling as one always did, that having gotten halfway through it they should be able to reach the end. Kheim peered through the murk at the nearest ship to them, which appeared to be in difficulty. The men crowded its railing, staring longingly at Butterfly, some even crying out to her. No doubt they thought their trouble resulted from the fact they did not have her on board with them. Its captain shouted to Kheim that they might have to cut down their masts in the second half of the storm to keep from being rolled over, and that the others should hunt for them if necessary, after it had passed.

But when the other side of the typhoon struck, things went badly on the flagship as well. An odd wave threw Butterfly into a wall awkwardly, and after that the fear in the men was palpable. They lost sight of the other ships. The huge waves again were torn to foam by the wind, and their crests crashed over the ship as if trying to sink it. The rudder snapped off at the rudder post, and after that, though they tried to get a yard over the side to replace the rudder, they were in effect a hulk, struck in the side by every passing wave. While men fought to get steerage and save the ship, and some were swept overboard, or drowned in the lines, I-Chin attended to Butterfly. He shouted to Kheim that she had broken an arm and apparently some ribs. She was gasping for breath, Kheim saw. He returned to the struggle for steerage, and finally they got a sea anchor over the side, which quickly brought their bow around into the wind. This saved them for the moment, but even coming over the bow the waves were heavy blows, and it took every effort they could make to keep the hatches from tearing off and the ship's compartments from filling. All done in an agony of apprehension about Butterfly; men shouted angrily that she should have been cared for better, that it was inexcusable that something like this should happen. Kheim knew that was his responsibility.

When he could spare a moment he went to her side, in the highest cabin on the rear deck, and looked beseechingly at I-Chin, who would not reassure him. She was coughing up a foamy blood, very red, and I-Chin was sucking her throat clear of it from time to time with a tube he stuck down her mouth. “A rib has punctured a lung,” he said shortly, keeping his eyes on her. She meanwhile was conscious, wide-eyed, in pain but quiet. She said only, “What's happening to me?” After I-Chin cleared her throat of another mass of blood, he told her what he had told Kheim. She panted like a dog, shallow and fast.

Kheim went back into the watery chaos abovedecks. The wind and waves were no worse than before, perhaps a bit better. There were scores of problems large and small to attend to, and he threw himself at them in a fury, muttering to himself, or shouting at the gods; it didn't matter, no one could hear anything abovedecks, unless it was shouted directly in their ears. “Please, Tianfei, stay with us! Don't leave us! Let us go home. Let us return to tell the emperor what we have found for him. Let the girl live.”

They survived the storm: but Butterfly died the next day.

Only three ships
found each other and regathered on the quiet blank of the sea. They sewed Butterfly's body in a man's robe and tied two of the gold disks from the mountain empire into it, and let it slide over the side into the waves. All the men were weeping, even I-Chin, and Kheim could barely speak the words of the funeral prayer. Who was there to pray to? It seemed impossible that after all they had gone through, a mere storm could kill the sea goddess; but there she was, slipping under the waves, sacrificed to the sea just as that island boy had been sacrificed to the mountain. Sun or seafloor, it was all the same.

“She died to save us,” he told the men shortly. “She gave that avatar of herself to the storm god, so he would let us be. Now we have to carry on to honor her. We have to get back home.”

So they repaired the ship as best they could, and endured another month of desiccated life. This was the longest month of the trip, of their lives. Everything was breaking down, on the ships, in their bodies. There wasn't enough food and water. Sores broke out in their mouths and on their skin. They had very little qi, and could hardly eat what food was left.

Kheim's thoughts left him. He found that when thoughts left, things just did themselves. Doing did not need thinking.

One day he thought: sail too big cannot be lifted. Another day he thought: more than enough is too much. Too much is less. Therefore least is most. Finally he saw what the Daoists meant by that.

Go with the way. Breathe in and out. Move with the swells. Sea doesn't know ship, ship doesn't know sea. Floating does itself. A balance in balance. Sit without thinking.

The sea and sky melded. All blue. There was no one doing, nothing being done. Sailing just happened.

Thus, when a great sea was crossed, there was no one doing it.

Someone looked up
and noticed an island. It turned out to be Mindanao, and after the rest of its archipelago, Taiwan, and all the familiar landfalls of the Inland Sea.

The three remaining Great Ships sailed into Nanjing almost exactly twenty months after their departure, surprising all the inhabitants of the city, who thought they had joined Hsu Fu at the bottom of the sea. And they were happy to be home, no doubt about it, and bursting with stories to tell of the amazing giant island to the east.

But any time Kheim met the eye of any of his men, he saw the pain there. He saw also that they blamed him for her death. So he was happy to leave Nanjing and travel with a gang of officials up the Grand Canal to Beijing. He knew that his sailors would scatter up and down the coast, go their ways so they wouldn't have to see each other and remember; only after years had passed would they want to meet, so that they could remember the pain when it had become so distant and faint that they actually wanted it back, just to feel again they had done all those things, that life had held all those things.

But for now it was impossible not to feel they had failed. And so when Kheim was led into the Forbidden City, and brought before the Wanli Emperor to accept the acclaim of all the officials there, and the interested and gracious thanks of the emperor himself, he said only, “When a great sea has been crossed, there is no one to take credit.”