The Years of Rice and Salt (55 page)

The Kerala answered, for as became clear, he had directed the establishment of most of the orchards they could see. “They are part of the city lands, and used to grow the sources of essential oils that we trade for the goods that come in. You smelled some of them on our walk to the basket. Vetiver, costus, valerian, and angelica, shrubs like keruda, lotes, kadam, parijat, and night queen. Grasses like citronella, lemon grass and ginger grass and palmarosa. Flowers, as you see, including tuberose, champac, roses, jasmine, frangipani. Herbs including peppermint, spearmint, patchouli, artemisia. Then there, back in the woods, those are orchards of sandalwood and agarwood. All these are bred, planted, grown, harvested, processed, and bottled or bagged for trade with Africa and Firanja and China and the New World, where formerly they had no scents and no healing substances anything near as powerful, and so are much amazed, and desire them very much. And now I have people out scouring the world to find more stock of various kind, to see what will grow here. Those that prosper are cultivated, and their oils sold round the world. Demand for them is so high it is hard to match it, and gold comes flowing into Travancore as its wondrous scents perfume the whole Earth.”

The basket turned as it came to the top of its anchor rope, and below them the heart of the kingdom was revealed, the city of Travancore as seen by the birds, or God. The land beside the bay was covered with roofs, trees, roads, docks, all as small as the toys of a princess, extending not as far as Konstantiniyye would have, but big enough, and sprinkled by a veritable arboretum of green trees, hardly displaced by the buildings and roads. Only the docks area was more roof than tree.

Just above them floated a tapestry of crosshatched cloud, moving inland on the wind. Off to sea a great line of tall white marbled clouds sailed toward them. “We'll have to get down before too long,” the Kerala said to the pilot, who nodded and checked his stove.

A flock of vultures pinioned about them curiously, and the pilot shouted once at them, pulling a fowling gun out of a bag on the inside of the basket. He had never seen it happen, he said, but he had heard of a flock of birds pecking a bag right out of the sky. Hawks, jealous of their territory, apparently; probably vultures would not be so bold; but it would be a bad thing by which to be surprised.

The Kerala laughed, looked at Ismail and gestured at the colorful and fragrant fields. “This is the world we want you to help us make,” he said. “We will go out into the world and plant gardens and orchards to the horizons, we will build roads through the mountains and across the deserts, and terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be garden everywhere, and plenty for all, and there will be no more empires or kingdoms, no more caliphs, sultans, emirs, khans, or zamindars, no more kings or queens or princes, no more qadis or mullahs or ulema, no more slavery and no more usury, no more property and no more taxes, no more rich and no more poor, no killing or maiming or torture or execution, no more jailers and no more prisoners, no more generals, soldiers, armies or navies, no more patriarchy, no more clans, no more caste, no more hunger, no more suffering than what life brings us for being born and having to die, and then we will see for the first time what kind of creatures we really are.”

3
                                                                                                            

Gold Mountain

In the twelfth year of the Xianfeng Emperor, rain inundated Gold Mountain.
It started raining in the third month of the autumn, the usual start of the rainy season on this part of the coast of Yingzhou, but then it never stopped raining until the second month of the following spring. It rained every day for half a year, and often a pounding, drenching rain, as if it were the tropics. Before that winter was halfway over the great central valley of Gold Mountain had flooded up and down its entire length, forming a shallow lake 1500 li long and 300 li wide. The water poured brownly between the green hills flanking the delta, into the great bay and out the Gold Gate, staining the ocean the color of mud all the way out to the Peng-lai Islands. The outflow ran hard both ebb and flood, but still this was not enough to empty the great valley. The Chinese towns and villages and farms on the flat valley floor were drowned to the rooftops, and the entire population of the valley had to leave for higher ground, in the coastal range or the foothills of the Gold Mountains, or, for the most part, down to the city, fabled Fangzhang. Those who lived on the eastern side of the central valley tended to move up into the foothills, ascending the rail and stage roads that ran up through apple orchards and vineyards overlooking the deep canyons that cut between the tablelands. Here they ran into the large foothill population of Japanese.

Many of these Japanese had come in the diaspora, after the Chinese armies had conquered Japan, in the Yung Cheng dynasty, a hundred and twenty years before. They were the ones who had first begun to grow rice in the central valley; but after only a generation or two, Chinese immigration filled the valley like the rains were now filling it, and most of the Japanese nisei and sansei moved up into the foothills, looking for gold, or growing grapes and apples. There they encountered a fair number of the old ones, hidden in the foothills and struggling to survive a malaria epidemic that recently had killed most of them off. The Japanese got along with the survivors, and the other old ones that came from the east, and together they resisted Chinese incursions into the foothills in every way they could, short of insurrection; for over the Gold Mountains lay high desolate alkaline deserts, where nothing could live. Their backs were to the wall.

So the arrival of so many Chinese refugee farming families was no very happy event for those already there. The foothills were composed of plateaus tilted up toward the high mountains, and cut by very deep, rugged, heavily forested river canyons. These manzanita-choked canyons were impenetrable to the Chinese authorities, and hidden in them were many Japanese families, most of them panning for gold or working small diggings. Chinese road-building campaigns stuck to the plateaus for the most part, and the canyons had remained substantially Japanese, despite the presence of Chinese prospectors: a Hokkaido-in-exile, tucked between the Chinese valley and the great desert of the natives. Now this world was filling with soaked Chinese rice farmers.

Neither side liked it. By now bad relations between Chinese and Japanese were as natural as dog and cat. The foothill Japanese tried to ignore the Chinese setting up refugee camps by all the stage and railroad stations; the Chinese tried to ignore the Japanese homesteads they were intruding on. Rice ran low, tempers got short, and the Chinese authorities sent troops into the area to keep order. The rain kept falling.

One group of Chinese
walked out of the flooding on the stage road that followed the course of Rainbow Trout River. Overlooking the river's north bank were apple orchards and cattle pasturage, mostly owned by Chinese in Fangzhang, but worked by Japanese. This group of Chinese camped in one of the orchards, and did what they could to construct shelter from the rain, which continued to fall, day after day after day. They built a pole-framed barnlike building with a shingle roof, an open fire at one end, and mere sheets for walls; meager protection, but better than none. By day the men scrambled down the canyon walls to fish in the roaring river, and others went into the forest to hunt deer, shooting great numbers of them and drying their meat.

The matriarch of one of these families, Yao Je by name, was frantic that her silkworms had been left behind on their farm, in boxes tucked in the rafters of her filature. Her husband did not think there was anything that could be done about it, but the family employed a Japanese servant boy named Kiyoaki, who volunteered to go back down to the valley and take their rowboat out on the first calm day, and recover the silkworms. His master did not like the proposal, but his mistress approved of it, as she wanted the silkworms. So one rainy morning Kiyoaki left to try to return to their flooded farm, if he could.

He found the Yao family's rowboat still tied to the valley oak where they had left it. He untied it and rowed out over what had been the eastern rice paddies of their farm, toward their compound. A west wind churned up high waves, and both pushed him back east. His palms were blistered by the time he coasted up to the Yaos' inundated compound, scraped the flat bottom of the boat over the outer wall, and tied it to the roof of the filature, the tallest building on the farm. He climbed through a side window into the rafters, and found the sheets of damp paper covered with silkworm eggs, in their boxes filled with rocks and mulberry mulch. He gathered all the sheets into an oilcloth bag and lowered them out the window into the rowboat, feeling pleased.

Now rain was violently thrashing the surface of the flood, and Kiyoaki considered spending the night in the attic of the Yaos' house. But the emptiness of it frightened him, and for no better reason than that, he decided to row back. The oilcloth would protect the eggs, and he had been wet for so long that he was used to it. He was like a frog hopping in and out of its pond, it was all the same to him. So he got in the boat and began to row.

But now, perversely, the wind was from the east, blowing up waves of surprising weight and power. His hands hurt, and the boat occasionally brushed over drowned things: treetops, wiregraph poles, perhaps other things, he was too jumpy to look. Dead men's fingers! He could not see far in the growing gloom, and as night fell he lost his feeling for what direction he was headed. The rowboat had a oiled canvas decking bunched in its bow, and he pulled it back over the gunwales, tied it in place, got under it and floated over the flood, lying in the bottom of the boat and occasionally bailing with a can. It was wet, but it would not founder. He let it bounce over the waves, and eventually fell asleep.

He woke several times in the night, but after bailing he always forced himself to sleep again. The rowboat swirled and rocked, but the waves never broke over it. If they did the boat would founder and he would drown, but he avoided thinking about that.

Dawn made it clear he had drifted west rather than east. He was far out on the inland sea that the central valley had become. A knot of valley oaks marked a small island of higher ground that still stood above the flood, and he rowed toward it.

As he was facing away from the new little island, he did not see it well until he had thumped the bow onto it. Immediately he discovered it was coated with a host of spiders, bugs, snakes, squirrels, moles, rats, mice, raccoons, and foxes, all leaping onto the rowboat at once, as representing the new highest ground. He himself was the highest ground of all, and he was shouting in dismay and slapping desperate snakes and squirrels and spiders off him, when a young woman and baby leaped onto the boat like the rest of the crowd of animals, except the girl pushed off from the tree Kiyoaki had rowed against, weeping and crying loudly, “They're trying to eat her, they're trying to eat my baby!”

Kiyoaki was preoccupied by the scores of creatures still crawling on him, to the point of nearly losing an oar over the side. Eventually he had squished or brushed or thrown overboard all the interlopers, and he replaced the oars in the oarlocks and rowed swiftly away. The girl and her baby sat on the boat deck, the girl still whacking insects and spiders and shouting, “Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!” She was Chinese.

The lowering gray clouds began to leak rain yet again. They could see nothing but water in all directions, except for the trees of the little island they had so hastily vacated.

Kiyoaki rowed east. “You're going the wrong way,” the girl complained.

“This is the way I came,” Kiyoaki said. “The family that employs me is there.”

The girl did not reply.

“How did you get on that island?”

Again she said nothing.

Having passengers made rowing harder, and the waves came closer to breaking over the boat. Crickets and spiders continued to leap around underfoot, and an opossum had wedged itself in the bow under the decking. Kiyoaki rowed until his hands were bleeding, but they never caught sight of land; it was raining so hard now that it formed a kind of thick falling fog.

The girl complained, nursed her baby, killed bugs. “Row west,” she kept saying. “The current will help you.”

Kiyoaki rowed east. The boat jounced over the waves, and from time to time they bailed it out. The whole world seemed to have become a sea. Once Kiyoaki glimpsed a sight of the coastal range through a rent in the low clouds to the west, much closer than he would have expected or hoped. A current in the floodwaters must have been carrying them west.

Near dark they came on another tiny tree island.

“It's the same one!” the young woman said.

“It just looks that way.”

The wind was rising again, like the evening delta breeze they enjoyed so much during the hot dry summers. The waves were getting higher and higher, slapping hard into the bow and splashing over the canvas and in on their feet. Now they had to land, or they would sink and drown.

So Kiyoaki landed the boat. Again a tide of animal and insect life overran them. The Chinese girl cursed with surprising fluency, beating the larger creatures away from her baby. The smaller ones you just had to get used to. Up in the vast branches of the valley oaks sat a miserable troop of snow monkeys, staring down on them. Kiyoaki tied the boat to a branch and got off, arranged a wet blanket on the squirming mud between two roots, pulled the rowboat's decking off, and draped it over the girl and her baby, weighing it down as best he could with broken branches. He crawled underneath the canvas with her, and they and an entire menagerie of bugs and snakes and rodents settled in for the long night. It was hard to sleep.

The next morning was as rainy as ever. The young woman had put her baby between the two of them to protect her from the rats. Now she nursed her. Under the canvas it was warmer than outside. Kiyoaki wished he could start a fire to cook some snakes or squirrels, but nothing was dry. “We might as well get going,” he said.

They went out into the chill drizzle and got back in the boat. As Kiyoaki cast off about ten of the snow monkeys leaped down through the branches and climbed into the boat with them. The girl shrieked and pulled her shirt over her baby, huddling over it and staring at the monkeys. They sat there like passengers, looking down or off into the rain, pretending to be thinking about something else. She threatened one and it shrank back.

“Leave them alone,” Kiyoaki said. The monkeys were Japanese; the Chinese didn't like them, and complained about their presence on Yingzhou.

They spun over the great inland sea. The young woman and her baby were dotted with spiders and fleas, as if they were dead bodies. The monkeys began to groom them, eating some insects and throwing others overboard.

“My name is Kiyoaki.”

“I am Peng-ti,” the young Chinese woman said, brushing things off the babe and ignoring the monkeys.

Rowing hurt the blisters on Kiyoaki's hands, but after a while the pain would subside. He headed west, giving in to the current that had already taken them so far that way.

Out of the drizzle appeared a small sailboat. Kiyoaki shouted, waking the girl and baby, but the men on the sailboat had already spotted them, and they sailed over.

There were two sailors on board, two Japanese men. Peng-ti watched them with narrowed eyes.

One told the castaways to climb into their boat. “But tell the monkeys to stay there,” he said with a laugh.

Peng-ti passed her baby up to them, then hauled herself over the gunwale.

“You're lucky they're just monkeys,” the other one said. “Up north valley, Black Fort is high ground for a lot of country that hadn't been cleared, and the animals that swam onto it were more than you see here in your rice paddies. They closed the gates, but walls are nothing much to bears, brown bears and gold bears, and they were shooting them when the magistrate ordered them to stop, because it was just going to use up all their ammunition and then they'd still have a whole town of bears. And the giant gold bears opened the gates and in came wolves, elk, the whole damn Hsu Fu walking the streets of Black Fort, and the people all locked up in their attics waiting it out.” The men laughed with pleasure at the thought.

“We're hungry,” Peng-ti said.

“You look it,” they said.

“We were going east,” Kiyoaki mentioned.

“We're going west.”

“Good,” Peng-ti said.

It continued to rain. They passed another knot of trees on an embankment just covered by water, and sitting in the branches like the monkeys were a dozen soaked and miserable Chinese men, very happy to leap on the sailboat. They had been there six days, they said. The fact that Japanese had rescued them did not seem to register with them one way or the other.

Now the sailboat and rowboat were carried on a current of brown water, between misted green hills.

“We're going over to the city,” their tillerman said. “It's the only place where the docks are still secure. Besides, we want to get dry and have a big dinner in Japantown.”

Across the rain-spattered brown water they sailed. The delta and its diked islands were all under the flood, it was all a big brown lake with occasional lines of treetops sticking out of it, giving the sailors a fix on their position, apparently. They pointed at certain lines and discussed them with great animation, their fluid Japanese a great contrast to their rough Chinese.