The Years of Rice and Salt (4 page)

The valleys ran south and east. He felt the shape of his travels in his mind, and found he could not remember enough of the last few weeks to be sure of his location, relative to the Moravian Gate, or the khanate of the Golden Horde. From the Black Sea they had ridden west about ten days' ride, hadn't they? It was like trying to remember things from a previous life.

It seemed possible, however, that he was nearing the Byzantine empire, coming toward Constantinople from the north and west. Sitting slumped before his nightly bonfire, he wondered if Constantinople would be dead too. He wondered if Mongolia was dead, if perhaps everyone in the world was dead. The wind soughed through the shrubs like ghost's voices, and he fell into an uneasy sleep, waking through the watches of the night to check the stars and throw more branches on his fire. He was cold.

He woke again, and there was Temur's ghost standing across the fire, the light of the flames dancing over his awesome face. His eyes were black as obsidian, and Bold could see stars gleaming in them.

“So,” Temur said heavily, “you ran away.”

“Yes,” Bold whispered.

“What's wrong? Don't want to go out on the hunt again?”

This was a thing he had said to Bold before. At the end he had been so weak he had had to be carried on a litter, but he never thought of stopping. In his last winter he had considered whether to move east in the spring, against China, or west, against the Franks. During a huge feast he weighed the advantages of each, and at one point he looked at Bold, and something on Bold's face caused the khan to jump him with his powerful voice, still strong despite his illness: “What's wrong, Bold? Don't want to go out on the hunt again?”

That earlier time Bold had said, “Always, great khan. I was there when we conquered Ferghana, Khorasan, Sistan, Khrezm, and Moghulistan. One more is fine by me.”

Temur had laughed his angry laugh. “But which way this time, Bold? Which way?”

Bold knew enough to shrug. “All the same to me, great khan. Why don't you flip a coin?”

Which got him another laugh, and a warm place in the stable that winter, and a good horse in the campaign. They had moved west in the spring of the year 784.

Now Temur's ghost, as solid as any man, glared reproachfully at Bold from across the fire. “I flipped the coin just like you said, Bold. But it must have come up wrong.”

“Maybe China would have been worse,” Bold said.

Temur laughed angrily. “How could it have been? Killed by lightning? How could it have been? You did that, Bold, you and Psin. You brought the curse of the west back with you. You never should have come back. And I should have gone to China.”

“Maybe so.” Bold didn't know how to deal with him. Angry ghosts needed to be defied as often as they needed to be placated. But those jet-black eyes, sparkling with starlight—

Suddenly Temur coughed. He put a hand to his mouth, and gagged out something red. He looked at it, then held it out for Bold to see: a red egg. “This is yours,” he said, and tossed it over the flames at Bold.

Bold twisted to catch it, and woke up. He moaned. The ghost of Temur clearly was not happy. Wandering between worlds, visiting his old soldiers like any other preta . . . in a way it was pathetic, but Bold could not shake the fear in him. Temur's spirit was a big power, no matter what realm it was in. His hand could reach into this world and grab Bold's foot at any time.

All that day Bold wandered south in a haze of memories, scarcely seeing the land before him. The last time Temur visited him in the stables had been difficult, as the khan could no longer ride. He had looked at one thick black mare as if at a woman, and smoothed its flank and said to Bold, “The first horse I ever stole looked just like this one. I started poor and life was hard. God put a sign on me. But you would think He would have let me ride to the end.” And he had stared at Bold with that vivid gaze of his, one eye slightly higher and larger than the other, just like in the dream. Although in life his eyes had been brown.

Hunger kept Bold hunting. Temur, though a hungry ghost, no longer had to worry about food; but Bold did. All the game ran south, down the valleys. One day, high on a ridge, he saw water, bronze in the distance. A large lake, or sea. Old roads led him over another pass, down into another city.

Again, no one there was alive. All was motionless and silent. Bold wandered down empty streets, between empty buildings, feeling the cold hands of pretas running down his back.

On the central hill of the city stood a copse of white temples, like bones bleaching in the sun. Seeing them, Bold decided that he had found the capital of this dead land. He had walked from peripheral towns of rude stone to capital temples of smooth white marble, and still no one had survived. A white haze filled his vision, and through it he stumbled up the dusty streets, up onto the temple hill, to lay his case before the local gods.

On the sacred plateau three smaller temples flanked a large one, a rectangular beauty with double rows of smooth columns on all four sides, supporting a gleaming roof of marble tiles. Under the eaves carved figures fought, marched, flew, and gestured, in a great stone tableau depicting the absent people, or their gods. Bold sat on a marble drum from a long-toppled column and stared up at the carving in stone, seeing the world that had been lost.

Finally he approached the temple, entered it praying aloud. Unlike the big stone temples in the north, it had been no place of congregation in the end; there were no skeletons inside. Indeed it looked as if it had been abandoned for many years. Bats hung in the rafters, and the darkness was lanced by sunbeams leaking through broken rooftiles. At the far end of the temple it looked as though an altar had been hastily erected. On it a single candlewick burned in a pot of oil. Their last prayer, flickering even after they had died.

Bold had nothing to offer by way of sacrifice, and the great white temple stood silent above him. “Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond! O what an awakening! All hail!” His words echoed hollowly.

He stumbled back outside into the afternoon glare, and saw to the south the blink of the sea. He would go there. There was nothing here to keep him; the people and their gods too had died.

A long bay
cut in between hills. A harbor at the head of the bay was empty, except for a few small rowboats slapping against the waves, or upturned on the shingle beach stretching away from the docks. He did not risk the boats, he knew nothing about them. He had seen Issyk Kul and Lake Qinghai, and the Aral, Caspian, and Black seas, but he had never been in a boat in his life, except for ferries crossing rivers. He did not want to start now.

No traveler seen on this long road,

No boats from afar return for the night.

Nothing moves in this dead harbor.

On the beach he scooped a handful of water to drink—spat it out—it was salty, like the Black Sea, or the springs in the Tarim basin. It was strange to see so much wastewater. He had heard there was an ocean surrounding the world. Perhaps he was at the edge of the world, the western edge, or the southern. Possibly the Arabs lived south of this sea. He didn't know; and for the first time in all his wandering, he had the feeling that he had no idea where he was.

He was asleep on the warm sand of a beach, dreaming of the steppes, trying to keep Temur out of the dream by force of will alone, when he was rousted by strong hands, rolling him over and tying his legs together and his arms behind his back. He was hauled to his feet.

A man said “What have we here?” or something to that effect. He spoke something like Turkic, Bold didn't know many of the words, but it was some kind of Turkic, and he could usually catch the drift of what they were saying. They looked like soldiers or perhaps brigands, big hard-handed ruffians, wearing gold earrings and dirty cotton clothes. He wept while grinning foolishly at the sight of them; he felt his face stretch and his eyes burn. They regarded him warily.

“A madman,” one ventured.

Bold shook his head at this. “I—I haven't seen anyone,” he said in Ulu Turkic. His tongue was big in his mouth, for despite all his babbling to himself and the gods, he had forgotten how to talk to people. “I thought everyone was dead.”

He gestured to the north and west.

They did not seem to understand him.

“Kill him,” one said, as dismissive as Temur.

“The Christians all died,” another said.

“Kill him, let's go. Boats are full.”

“Bring him,” the other said. “The slavers will pay for him. He won't bring down the boat, thin as he is.”

Something like that. They hauled him behind them down the beach. He had to hurry so the rope wouldn't pull him around backward, and the effort made him dizzy. He didn't have much strength. The men smelled of garlic and that made him ravenous, though it was a foul smell. But if they meant to sell him to slavers, they would have to feed him. His mouth was watering so heavily that he slobbered like a dog, and he was weeping as well, nose running, and with his hands tied behind his back he couldn't wipe his face.

“He's foaming at the mouth like a horse.”

“He's sick.”

“He's not sick. Bring him. Come on,” this to Bold, “don't be scared. Where we take you even the slaves live a better life than you barbarian dogs.”

Then he was shoved over the side of a beached boat, and with great jerks it was pulled off into the water, where it rocked violently. Immediately he fell sideways into the wooden wall of the thing.

“Up here, slave. On that pile of rope. Sit!”

He sat and watched them work. Whatever happened, it was better than the empty land. Just to see men move, to hear them talk, filled him. It was like watching horses run on the steppe. Hungrily he watched them haul a sail into the air on a mast, and the boat heeled to the side such that he threw himself the other way. They roared with laughter at this. He grinned sheepishly, gesturing at the big lateen.

“It takes more wind than this breath to tip us.”

“Allah protect us from it.”

“Allah protect us.”

Muslims. “Allah protect us,” Bold said politely. Then, in Arabic, “In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate.” In his years in Temur's army he had learned to be as much a Muslim as anyone. The Buddha did not mind what you said to be polite. Now it would not keep him from slavery, but it would perhaps earn him a little more food. The men regarded him curiously. He watched the land slide by. They untied his arms and gave him some dried mutton and bread. He tried to chew each bite a hundred times. The familiar tastes called back to him his whole life. He ate what they gave him, drank fresh water from a cup they gave him.

“Praise be to Allah. Thank you in the name of God the compassionate, the merciful.”

They sailed down a long bay, into a larger sea. At night they pulled behind headlands and anchored the boat and slept. Bold curled under a coil of rope. Every time he woke in the night he had to remind himself where he was.

In the mornings they sailed south and south again, and one day they passed through a long narrows into an open sea, with big waves. The rocking of the boat was like riding a camel. Bold gestured west. The men named it, but Bold didn't catch the name. “They're all dead,” the men said.

The sunset came and they were still on the open sea. For the first time they sailed all night long, always awake when Bold woke, watching the stars without talking to each other. For three days they sailed out of the sight of any land, and Bold wondered how long it would go on. But on the fourth morning the sky to the south grew white, then brown.

A haze like the one that blew out of the Gobi.

Sand in the air, sand and fine dust. Land ho!

Very low land. The sea and sky

Both turn the same brown

Before catching sight of a stone tower,

Then a great stone breakwater, fronting a harbor.

One of the sailors happily named it: “Alexandria!” Bold had heard the name, though he knew nothing about it. Neither do we; but to find out more, you can read the next chapter.

3
                                                                                                            

In Egypt our pilgrim is sold into slavery;

In Zanj he encounters again the inescapable Chinese.

His captors sailed to a beach, anchored with a stone tied to a rock, tied Bold
up securely, and left him in the boat under a blanket while they went ashore.

It was a beach for small boats, near an immense long wooden dockfront behind the seawall, which served much bigger ships. When the men came back they were drunk and arguing. Without untying anything but his legs, and with no more words to him, they pulled Bold out of the boat and marched him down the great seafront of the city, which appeared to Bold dusty and salty and worn down, stinking in the sun like a dead fish, of which there were indeed many scattered about. On the docks before a long building were bales, boxes, great clay jars, netted bolts of cloth; then a fish market, which made his mouth water at the same time that his stomach flopped.

They came to a slave market. A small square with a raised platform in its middle, somewhat like a lama's teaching platform. Three slaves were quickly sold. The women being sold garnered the most attention and comment from the crowd. They were stripped of all but the ropes or chains holding them, if such were necessary, and stood there listlessly, or cowered. Most were black, some brown. They seemed to be at the butt end of auction day, people selling off leftovers. Before Bold an emaciated girl of about ten years was sold to a fat black man in dirty silk robes. The transaction was completed in a kind of Arabic; she sold for some unit of currency Bold had never heard of before, the payment in little gold coins. He helped his captors get his crusted old clothes off. “I don't need tying,” he tried to tell them in Arabic, but they ignored him and chained his ankles. He walked onto the platform feeling the baked air settle on him. Even to himself he emitted a powerful smell, and looking down he saw that his time in the empty land had left him about as fleshless as the little girl before him. But what was left was muscle, and he stood up straight, looking into the sun as the bidding went on, thinking the part of the Lapis Lazuli Sutra that went, “The ruffian demons of unkindness roam the earth, begone! begone! The Buddha renounces slavery!”

“Does he speak Arabic?” someone asked.

One of his captors prodded him, and in Arabic he said, “In the name of God the merciful, the compassionate, I speak Arabic, also Turkic, Mongolian, Ulu, Tibetan, and Chinese,” and he began to chant the first chapter of the Quran as far as he remembered it, until they pulled his chain and he took this as a sign to stop. He was very thirsty.

A short, slight Arab bought him for twenty somethings. His captors seemed pleased. They handed him his clothes as he stepped down, slapped him on the back and were off. He began to put on his greasy coat, but his new owner stopped him, handing him a length of clean cotton cloth.

“Wrap that around you. Leave the other filth here.”

Surprised, Bold looked down at the last vestiges of his previous life. Dirty rags only, but they had accompanied him this far. He pulled his amulet out of them, leaving his knife hidden in a sleeve, but his owner intervened and threw it back onto the clothes.

“Come on. I know a market in Zanj where I can sell a barbarian like you for three times what I just paid. Meanwhile you can help me get ready for the voyage there. Do you understand? Help, and it will go easier for you. I'll feed you more.”

“I understand.”

“Be sure that you do. Don't think of trying to escape. Alexandria is a very fine city. The Mamluks keep things stricter than sharia here. They are not forgiving of slaves that try to escape. They're orphans brought here from north of the Black Sea, men whose parents were killed by barbarians like you.”

In fact Bold himself had killed quite a few of the Golden Horde, so he nodded without comment.

His owner said, “They have been trained by Arabs in the way of Allah, and now they are more than Muslim.” He whistled at the thought. “Trained to rule Egypt apart from all lesser influences, to be true only to the sharia. You don't want to cross them.”

Bold nodded again. “I understand.”

Crossing the Sinai
was like traveling with a caravan crossing one of the deserts of the heartland, except this time Bold was walking with the slaves, in the cloud of dust at the back of the camel train. They were part of the year's haj. Enormous numbers of camels and people had tramped over this road through the desert, and now it was a broad dusty smooth swath through rockier hills. Smaller parties going north passed by to their left. Bold had never seen so many camels.

The caravanserai were beaten and ashy. The ropes tying him to his new master's other slaves were never untied, and they slept in circles on the ground at night. The nights were warmer than Bold was used to, and this almost made up for the heat of the days. Their master, whose name was Zeyk, kept them well watered and fed them adequately at night and at dawn, treating them about as well as his camels, Bold observed: a tradesman, taking care of the goods in his possession. Bold approved of the attitude, and did what he could to keep the bedraggled string of slaves in good form. If they all kept the pace it made the walking that much easier. One night he looked up and saw the Archer looking down on him, and he remembered his nights alone in the empty land.

The ghost of Temur,

The last survivor of the fisherfolk,

The empty stone temples open to the sky,

The days of hunger, the little mare,

That ridiculous bow and arrow,

A red bird and blue bird, sitting side by side.

They came to the Red Sea, and boarded a ship three or four times as long as the one that had brought him to Alexandria, a dhow or zambuco
,
people called it both. The wind always blew from the west, sometimes hard, and they hugged the western shore with their big lateen sail bellied out to the east. They made good time. Zeyk fed his string of slaves more and more, fattening them for the market. Bold happily downed the extra rice and cucumbers, and saw the sores around his ankles begin to heal. For the first time in a long time he was not perpetually hungry, and he felt like he was coming out of a fog or a dream, waking up more each day. Of course now he was a slave, but he wouldn't always be one. Something would happen.

After a stop at a dry brown port called Massawa, one of the hajjira depots, they sailed east across the Red Sea and rounded the low red cape marking the end of Arabia, to Aden, a big seaside oasis, indeed the biggest port Bold had ever seen, a very rich town of green palms waving over ceramic roofs, citrus trees, and numberless minarets. Zeyk did not disembark his goods or slaves here, however; after a day on shore he came back shaking his head.

“Mombasa,” he said to the ship's captain, and paid him more, and they sailed south across the strait again, around the horn and Ras Hafun, then down the coast of Zanj, sailing much farther south than Bold had ever been. The sun at noon was nearly directly overhead, and beat on them most cruelly all day, day after day, with never a cloud in the sky. The air baked as if the world were an oven. The coast appeared either dead brown or else vibrant green, nothing in between. They stopped at Mogadishu, Lamu, and Malindi, each a prosperous Arab trading port, but Zeyk only got off briefly at them.

As they sailed into Mombasa, the grandest harbor yet, they came on a fleet of giant ships, ships bigger than Bold had imagined possible. Each one was as big as a small town, with a long line of masts down its center. There were about ten of these gigantic outlandish ships, with another twenty smaller ones anchored among them. “Ah good,” said Zeyk to the zambuco's captain and owner. “The Chinese are here.”

The Chinese! Bold had had no idea they owned such a great fleet as this one. It made sense, though. Their pagodas, their great wall; they liked to build big.

The fleet was like an archipelago. All on board the zambuco looked at the great ships, abashed and apprehensive, as if faced with seagoing gods. The large Chinese ships were as long as a dozen of the biggest dhows, and Bold counted nine masts on one of them. Zeyk saw him and nodded. “Look well. Those will soon be your home, God willing.”

The zambuco's master brought them inshore on a breath of a breeze. The town's waterfront was entirely occupied by the landing boats of the visitors, and after some discussion with Zeyk, the zambuco's owner beached his craft just south of the waterfront. Zeyk and his man rolled up their robes and stepped over the freeboard into the water, and helped the whole string of slaves over the side onto land. The green water was as warm as blood, or even hotter.

Bold spotted some Chinese, wearing their characteristic red felt coats even here, where they were certainly much too warm. They wandered the market, fingering the goods on display and chattering among themselves, trading with the aid of a translator Zeyk knew. Zeyk approached and greeted him effusively, asked about direct trade with the Chinese visitors. The translator introduced him to some of the Chinese, who seemed polite, even affable, in their usual way. Bold found himself trembling slightly, perhaps from heat and hunger, perhaps from the sight of the Chinese, after all these years, on the other side of the world. Still pursuing their business.

Zeyk and his assistant led the slaves through the market. It was a riot of smell, color, and sound. People as black as pitch, their eyeballs and teeth flashing white or yellow against their skin, offered goods and bartered happily. Bold followed the others past

Great mounds of green and yellow fruit,

Rice, coffee, dried fish and squid,

Lengths and bolts of colored cotton cloth,

Some spotted, others striped white and blue;

Bales of Chinese silk, piles of Mecca carpets;

Huge brown nuts, copper pans

Filled with colored beads or gemstones,

Or round balls of sweet-smelling opium;

Pearls, raw copper, carnelian, quicksilver;

Daggers and swords, turbans, shawls;

Elephant tusks, rhinoceros horns,

Yellow sandalwood, ambergris,

Ingots and coin-strings of gold and silver,

White cloth, red cloth, porcelain,

All the things of this world, solid in the sun.

And then the slave market, again in a square of its own, next to the main market, with a central auction block, so much like a lama's dais when empty.

The locals were gathered around a sale to one side, not a full auction. They were mostly Arabs here, and often dressed in blue cloth robes and red leather shoes. Behind the market a mosque and minaret stood before rows of four- and even five-story buildings. The clamor was great, but surveying the scene, Zeyk shook his head. “We'll wait for a private audience,” he said.

He fed the slaves barley cakes and led them to one of the big buildings next to the mosque. There some Chinese arrived with their translator, and they all went inside to an inner courtyard of the building, shaded and full of green broad-leaved plants and a burbling fountain. A room opening onto this courtyard had shelves on all its walls, with bowls and figures placed on them in an elaborate, beautiful display: Bold recognized pottery from Samarqand, and painted figurines from Persia, among Chinese white porcelain bowls painted in blue, gold leaf, and copper.

“Very elegant,” Zeyk said.

Then they were to business. The Chinese officers inspected Zeyk's string of slaves. They spoke to the translator, and Zeyk conferred in private with the man, nodding frequently. Bold found he was sweating, though he felt cold. They were being sold to the Chinese as a single lot.

One of the Chinese strolled down the line of slaves. He looked Bold over.

“How did you get here?” he asked Bold in Chinese.

Bold gulped, waved north. “I was a trader.” His Chinese was really rusty. “The Golden Horde took me and brought me to Anatolia. Then to Alexandria, then here.”

The Chinese nodded, then moved on. Soon after the slaves were led off by Chinese sailors in trousers and short shirts, back to the waterfront. There several other strings and groups of slaves were gathered. They were stripped, washed down with fresh water, an astringent, more fresh water. They were given new robes of plain cotton, led to boats, and rowed out to the huge side of one of the great ships. Bold climbed a ladder forty-one steps up the wooden wall of the ship's side, following a skinny black slave boy. They were taken together below the main deck, to a room near the rear of the ship. What happened in there we don't want to tell you, but the story won't make sense unless we do, so on to the next chapter. These things happened.