The Years of Rice and Salt (21 page)

He was back
on the flagship when I-Chin came to him, mouth tight. “One of them died last night. They brought me to see. It was the pox.”

“What! Are you sure?”

I-Chin nodded heavily, as grim as Kheim had ever seen him.

Kheim rocked back. “We will have to stay on board the ships.”

“We should leave,” I-Chin said. “I think we brought it to them.”

“But how? No one had pox on this trip.”

“None of the people here have any pox scars at all. I suspect it is new to them. And some of us had it as children, as you can see. Li and Peng are heavily pocked, and Peng has been sleeping with one of the local women, and it was her child died of it. And the woman is sick too.”

“No.”

“Yes. Alas. You know what happens to wild people when a new sickness arrives. I've seen it in Aozhou. Most of them die. The ones who don't will be balanced against it after that, but they may still be able to tip others of the unexposed off their balance, I don't know. In any case, it's bad.”

They could hear little Butterfly squealing up on the deck, playing some game with the sailors. Kheim gestured above. “What about her?”

“We could take her with us, I guess. If we return her to shore, she'll probably die with the rest.”

“But if she stays with us she may catch it and die too.”

“True. But I could try to nurse her through it.”

Kheim frowned. Finally he said, “We're provisioned and watered. Tell the men. We'll sail south, and get in position for a spring crossing back to China.”

Before they left, Kheim took Butterfly and rowed up to the village's beach and stopped well offshore. Butterfly's father spotted them and came down quickly, stood knee-deep in the slack tidal water and said something. His voice croaked, and Kheim saw the pox blisters on him. Kheim's hands rowed the boat out a stroke.

“What did he say?” he asked the girl.

“He said people are sick. People are dead.”

Kheim swallowed. “Say to him, we brought a sickness with us.”

She looked at him, not comprehending.

“Tell him we brought a sickness with us. By accident. Can you say that to him? Say that.”

She shivered in the bottom of the boat.

Suddenly angry, Kheim said loudly to the Miwok headman, “We brought a disease with us, by accident!”

Ta Ma stared at him.

“Butterfly, please tell him something. Say something.”

She raised her head up and shouted something. Ta Ma took two steps out, going waist-deep in the water. Kheim rowed out a couple of strokes, cursing. He was angry and there was no one to be angry at.

“We have to leave!” he shouted. “We're leaving! Tell him that,” he said to Butterfly furiously. “Tell him!”

She called out to Ta Ma, sounding distraught.

Kheim stood up in the boat, rocking it. He pointed at his neck and face, then at Ta Ma. He mimicked distress, vomiting, death. He pointed at the village and swept his hand as if erasing it from a slate. He pointed at Ta Ma and gestured that he should leave, that all of them should leave, should scatter. Not to other villages but into the hills. He pointed at himself, at the girl huddling in the boat. He mimed rowing out, sailing away. He pointed at the girl, indicating her happy, playing, growing up, his teeth clenched all the while.

Ta Ma appeared to understand not a single part of this charade. Looking befuddled, he said something.

“What did he say?”

“He said, what do we do?”

Kheim waved at the hills again, indicating dispersion. “Go!” he said loudly. “Tell him, go away! Scatter!”

She said something to her father, miserably.

Ta Ma said something.

“What did he say, Butterfly? Can you tell me?”

“He said, farewell.”

The men regarded each other. Butterfly looked back and forth between them, frightened.

“Scatter for two months!” Kheim said, realizing it was useless but speaking anyway. “Leave the sick ones and scatter. After that you can regather, and the disease won't strike again. Go away. We'll take Butterfly and keep her safe. We'll keep her on a ship without anyone who has ever had smallpox. We'll take care of her. Go!”

He gave up. “Tell him what I said,” he told Butterfly. But she only whimpered and sniveled on the bottom of the boat. Kheim rowed them back to the ship and they sailed away, out the great mouth of the bay on the ebb tide, away to the south.

Butterfly cried often for the first three days after they sailed, then ate raven
ously, and after that began to talk exclusively in Chinese. Kheim felt a stab every time he looked at her, wondering if they had done the right thing to take her. She would probably have died if they had left her, I-Chin reminded him. But Kheim wasn't sure even that was justification enough. And the speed of her adjustment to her new life only made him more uneasy. Was this what they were, then, to begin with? So tough as this, so forgetful? Able to slip into whatever life was offered? It made him feel strange to see such a thing.

One of his officers came to him. “Peng isn't on board any of the ships. We think he must have swum ashore and stayed with them.”

Butterfly too fell ill, and I-Chin sequestered her in the bow of the flagship, in an airy nest under the bowsprit and over the figurehead, which was a gold statue of Tianfei. He spent many hours tending the girl through the six stages of the disease, from the high fever and floating pulse of the Greater Yang, through the Lesser Yang and Yang Brightness, with chills and fever coming alternately; then into Greater Yin. He took her pulse every watch, checked all her vital signs, lanced some of the blisters, dosed her from his bags of medicines, mostly an admixture called Gift of the Smallpox God, which contained ground rhinoceros horn, snow worms from Tibet, crushed jade and pearl; but also, when it seemed she was stuck in the Lesser Yin, and in danger of dying, tiny doses of arsenic. The progress of the disease did not seem to Kheim to be like the usual pox, but the sailors made the appropriate sacrifices to the smallpox god nevertheless, burning incense and paper money over a shrine that was copied on all eight of the ships.

Later, I-Chin said that he thought being out on the open sea had proven the key to her recovery. Her body lolled in its bed on the groundswell, and her breathing and pulse fell into a rhythm with it, he noticed, four breaths and six beats per swell, in a fluttering pulse, over and over. This kind of confluence with the elements was extremely helpful. And the salt air filled her lungs with qi, and made her tongue less coated; he even fed her little spoonfuls of ocean water, as well as all she would take of fresh water, just recently removed from her home stream. And so she recovered and got well, only lightly scarred by pox on her back and neck.

They sailed south down the coast of the new island all this while, and every day they became more amazed that they were not reaching the southern end of it. One cape looked as if it would be the turning point, but past it they saw the land curved south again, behind some baked empty islands. Farther south they saw villages on the beaches, and they knew enough now to identify the bath temples. Kheim kept the fleet well offshore, but he did allow one canoe to approach, and he had Butterfly try speaking to them, but they didn't understand her, nor her them. Kheim made his dumb show signifying sickness and danger, and the locals paddled quickly away.

They began to sail against a current from the south, but it was mild, and the winds were constant from the west. The fishing here was excellent, the weather mild. Day followed day in a perfect circle of sameness. The land fell away east again, then ran south, most of the way to the equator, past a big archipelago of low islands, with good anchorages and good water, and seabirds with blue feet.

They came at last to a steeply rising coastline, with great snowy volcanoes in the distance, like Fuji only twice as big, or more, punctuating the sky behind a steep coastal range, which was already tall. This final giganticism finished anyone's ability to think of this place as an island.

“Are you sure this isn't Africa?” Kheim said to I-Chin.

I-Chin was not sure. “Maybe. Maybe the people we left up north are the only survivors of the Fulanchi, reduced to a primitive state. Maybe this is the west coast of the world, and we sailed past the opening to their middle sea in the night, or in a fog. But I don't think so.”

“Then where are we?”

I-Chin showed Kheim where he thought they were on the long strips of their map; east of the final markings, out where the map was entirely blank. But first he pointed to the far western strip. “See, Fulan and Africa look like this on their west sides. The Muslim cartographers are very consistent about it. And Hsing Ho calculated that the world is about seventy-five thousand li around. If he's right, we only sailed half as far as we should have, or less, across the Dahai to Africa and Fulan.”

“Maybe he's wrong then. Maybe the world occupies more of the globe than he thought. Or maybe the globe is smaller.”

“But his method was good. I made the same measurements on our trip to the Moluccas, and did the geometry, and found he was right.”

“But look!” Gesturing at the mountainous land before them. “If it isn't Africa, what is it?”

“An island, I suppose. A big island, far out in the Dahai, where no one has ever sailed. Another world, like the real one. An eastern one like the western one.”

“An island no one has ever sailed to before? That no one ever knew about?” Kheim couldn't believe it.

“Well?” I-Chin said, stubborn in the face of the idea. “Who else before us could have gotten here, and gotten back to tell about it?”

Kheim took the point. “And we're not back either.”

“No. And no guarantee we will be able to do it. Could be that Hsu Fu got here and tried to return, and failed. Maybe we'll find his descendants on this very shore.”

“Maybe.”

Closing on the immense land, they saw a city on the coast. It was nothing very big compared to back home, but substantial compared to the tiny villages to the north. It was mud-colored for the most part, but several gigantic buildings in the city and behind it were roofed by gleaming expanses of beaten gold. These were no Miwoks!

So they sailed inshore warily, feeling spooked, their ships' cannons loaded and primed. They were startled to see the primitive boats pulled up on the beaches—fishing canoes like those some of them had seen in the Moluccas, mostly two-prowed and made of bundled reeds. There were no guns to be seen; no sails; no wharves or docks, except for one log pier that seemed to float, anchored out away from the beach. It was perplexing to see the terrestrial magnificence of the gold-roofed buildings combined with such maritime poverty. I-Chin said, “It must have been an inland kingdom to start with.”

“Lucky for us, the way those buildings look.”

“I suppose if the Han dynasty had never fallen, this is what the coast of China would look like.”

A strange idea. But even mentioning China was a comfort. After that they pointed at features of the town, saying “That's like in Cham,” or “They build like that in Lanka,” and so forth; and though it still looked bizarre, it was clear, even before they made out people on the beach gaping at them, that it would be people and not monkeys or birds populating the town.

Though they had no great hope that Butterfly would be understood here, they took her near the shore with them nevertheless, in the biggest landing boat. They kept the flintlocks and crossbows concealed under their seats while Kheim stood in the bow making the peaceful gestures that had won over the Miwok. Then he got Butterfly to greet them kindly in her language, which she did in a high, clear, penetrating voice. The crowd on the beach watched, and some with hats like feathered crowns spoke to them, but it was not Butterfly's language, nor one that any of them had ever heard.

The elaborate headdresses of part of the crowd seemed faintly military to Kheim, and so he had them row offshore a little bit, and keep a lookout for bows or spears or any other weapons. Something in the look of these people suggested the possibility of an ambush.

Nothing of the sort happened. In fact, the next day when they rowed in, a whole contingent of men, wearing checked tunics and feathered headresses, prostrated themselves on the beach. Uneasily Kheim ordered a landing, on the lookout for trouble.

All went well. Communication by gesture, and quick basic language lessons, was fair, although the locals seemed to take Butterfly to be the visitors' leader, or rather talisman, or priestess, it was impossible to say; certainly they venerated her. Their mimed interchanges were mostly made by an older man in a headdress with a fringe hanging over his forehead to his eyes, and a badge extending high above the feathers. These communications remained cordial, full of curiosity and goodwill. They were offered cakes made of some kind of dense, substantial flower; also huge tubers that could be cooked and eaten; and a weak sour beer, which was all they ever saw the locals drink. Also a stack of finely woven blankets, very warm and soft, made of a wool from sheep that looked like sheep bred with camels, but were clearly some entirely other creature, unknown to the real world.

Eventually Kheim felt comfortable enough to accept an invitation to leave the beach and visit the local king or emperor, in the huge gold-roofed palace or temple on the hilltop behind the city. It was the gold that had done it, Kheim realized as he prepared for the trip, still feeling uneasy. He loaded a short flintlock and put it in a shoulder bag tucked under his arm, hidden by his coat; and he left instructions with I-Chin for a relief operation if one proved necessary. Off they went, Kheim and Butterfly and a dozen of the biggest sailors from the flagship, accompanied by a crowd of local men in checked tunics.

They walked up a track past fields and houses. The women in the fields carried their babies strapped to boards on their backs, and they spun wool as they walked. They hung looms from ropes tied to trees, to get the necessary tension to weave. Checked patterns seemed the only ones they used, usually black and tan, sometimes black and red. Their fields consisted of raised mounds, rectangular in shape, standing out of wetlands by the river. Presumably they grew their tubers in the mounds. They were flooded like rice fields, but not. Everything was similar but different. Gold here seemed as common as iron in China, while on the other hand there was no iron at all to be seen.