The Years of Rice and Salt (56 page)

Eventually they came into a narrow strait between tall hillsides, and as the wind was shooting up this strait—the Inner Gate, Kiyoaki presumed—they let down the sail and rode the current, shifting their rudder to keep in the fast part of it, which curved with the bend around the tall hills to the south, beyond which they were through the narrows and thrust out onto the broad expanse of Golden Bay, now a rocking foam-streaked brown bay, ringed by green hills that disappeared into a ceiling of low gray cloud. As they tacked across to the city the clouds thinned in a few bands over the tall ridge of the northern peninsula, and weak light fell onto the hive of buildings and streets covering the peninsula, all the way up to the peak of Mount Tamalpi, turning certain neighborhoods white or silver or pewter, amid the general gray. It was an awesome sight.

The western side of the bay just north of the Gold Gate was broken by several peninsulas extending into the bay, and these peninsulas were covered with buildings too, indeed among the city's busiest districts, as they formed the capes of three little harbor bays. The middle of these three was the largest, the commercial harbor, and the peninsula on its south side also served the Japantown, tucked among the warehouses and a working neighborhood behind them. Here, as their sailors had said, the floating docks and the wharves were intact and functioning normally, as if the central valley were not completely flooded. Only the dirt-brown water of the bay revealed that anything was different.

As they approached the docks, the monkeys on the rowboat began to look agitated. It was a case of going from flood to frying pan for them, and eventually one slipped overboard and struck out swimming for an island to the south, and all the others immediately followed with a splash, picking up their conversation among themselves where they had left off.

“That's why they call it Monkey Island,” their pilot said.

He brought them into the middle harbor. The men on the dock included a Chinese magistrate, who looked down and said, “Still flooded out there I see.”

“Still flooded and still raining.”

“People must be getting hungry.”

“Yes.”

The Chinese men climbed onto the dock, and thanked the sailors, who got out with Kiyoaki and Peng-ti and the baby. The tillerman joined them as they followed the magistrate to the “Great Valley Refugee Office,” set up in the customs building at the back of the dock. There they were registered—their names, place of residence before the flood, and the whereabouts of their families and neighbors, if known, all recorded. The clerks gave them chits that would allow them to claim beds in the immigration-control buildings, located on the steep-sided big island out in the bay.

The tillerman shook his head. These big buildings had been built to quarantine non-Chinese immigrants to Gold Mountain, about fifty years before. They were surrounded by fences tipped with barbed wire, and contained big dormitories with men's and women's sides. Now they housed some of the stream of refugees flowing down into the bay on the flood, mostly displaced valley Chinese, but the keepers of the place had retained the prison attitude they had had with the immigrants, and the valley refugees there were complaining bitterly and doing their best to get cleared to move in with local relatives, or to relocate up or down the coast, or even to return to the flooded valley and wait around the edges until the water receded. But there had been outbreaks of cholera reported, and the governor of the province had declared a state of emergency that allowed him to act directly in the emperor's interests: martial law was in effect, enforced by army and navy.

The tillerman, having explained this, said to Kiyoaki and Peng-ti, “You can stay with us if you want. We stay at a boardinghouse in Japantown, it's clean and cheap. They'll put you up on credit if we say you're good for it.”

Kiyoaki regarded Peng-ti, who looked down. Snake or spider: refugee housing or Japantown.

“We'll come with you,” she said. “Many thanks.”

The street leading inland from the docks to the high central district of the city was lined on both sides by restaurants and hotels and small shops, the fluid calligraphy of Japanese as common as the blockier Chinese ideograms. Side streets were tight alleyways, the peaked rooftops curving up into the rain until the buildings almost met overhead. People wore oilcloth ponchos or jackets, and carried black or colorful print umbrellas, many very tattered by now. Everyone was wet, heads lowered and shoulders hunched, and the middle of the street was like an open stream, bouncing brownly to the bay. The green hills rising to the west of this quarter of the city were bright with tile roofs, red and green and a vivid blue: a prosperous quarter, despite the Japantown at its foot. Or, perhaps, because of it. Kiyoaki had been taught to call the blue of those tiles Kyoto blue.

They walked through alleys to a big merchant house and chandlery in the warren of Japantown, and the two Japanese men—the older named Gen, they learned—introduced the young castaways to the proprietress of a boardinghouse next door. She was a toothless old Japanese woman, in a simple brown kimono, with a shrine in her hallway and reception room. They stepped in her door and began to shed their wet raingear, and she regarded them with a critical eye. “Everyone so wet these days,” she complained. “You look like they pulled you off the bottom of the bay. Chewed by crabs.”

She gave them dry clothes, and had theirs sent to a laundry. There were women and men's wings to her establishment, and Kiyoaki and Peng-ti were assigned mats, then fed a hot meal of rice and soup, followed by cups of warm sake. Gen was paying for them, and he waved off their thanks in the usual brusque Japanese manner. “Payment on return home,” Gen said. “Your families will be happy to repay me.”

Neither of the castaways had much to say to that. Fed, dry; there was nothing left but to go to their rooms and sleep as if felled.

Next day Kiyoaki woke
to the sound of the chandler next door, shouting at an assistant. Kiyoaki looked out the window of his room into a window of the chandlery, and saw the angry chandler hit the unfortunate youth on the side of the head with an abacus, the beads rattling back and forth.

Gen had come in the room, and he regarded the scene in the next building impassively. “Come on,” he said to Kiyoaki. “I've got some errands to do, it'll be a way to show you some of the city.”

Off they went, south on the big coastal street fronting the bay, connecting all of the smaller harbors facing the big bay and the islands in it. The southernmost harbor was tighter than the one fronting Japantown, its bay a forest of masts and smokestacks, the city behind and above it jammed together in a great mass of three- and four-story buildings, all wooden with tile roofs, crammed together in what Gen said was the usual Chinese city style, and running right down to the high-tide line, in places even built out over the water. This compact mass of buildings covered the whole end of the peninsula, its streets running straight east and west from the bay to the ocean, and north and south until they ended in parks and promenades high over the Gold Gate. The strait was obscured by a fog that floated in over the yellow spill of floodwater pouring out to sea; the yellow-brown plume was so extensive that there was no blue ocean to be seen. On the ocean side of the point lay the long batteries of the city defenses, concrete fortresses that Gen said commanded the strait and the waters outside it for up to fifty li offshore.

Gen sat on the low wall of one of the promenades overlooking the strait. He waved a hand to the north, where streets and rooftops covered everything they could see.

“The greatest harbor on Earth. The greatest city in the world, some say.”

“It's big, that's for sure. I didn't know it would be so—”

“A million people here now, they say. And more coming all the time. They just keep building north, on up the peninsula.”

Across the strait, on the other hand, the southern peninsula was a waste of marshes and bare steep hills. It looked very empty compared to the city, and Kiyoaki remarked on it.

Gen shrugged: “Too marshy, I guess, and too steep for streets. I suppose they'll get to it eventually, but it's better over here.”

The islands dotting the bay were occupied by the compounds of the imperial bureaucrats. Out on the biggest island the governor's mansion was roofed with gold. The brown foam-streaked surface of the water was dotted with little bay boats, mostly sail, some smoking two-strokes. Little marinas of square houseboats were tucked against the islands. Kiyoaki surveyed the scene happily. “Maybe I'll move here. There must be jobs.”

“Oh yeah. Down at the docks, unloading the freighters—get a room at the boardinghouse—there's lots of work. In the chandlery too.”

Kiyoaki recalled his awakening. “Why was that man so angry?”

Gen frowned. “That was unfortunate. Tagomi-san is a good man, he doesn't usually beat his help, I assure you. But he's frustrated. We can't get the authorities to release supplies of rice to feed the people stranded in the valley. The chandler is very high in the Japanese community here, and he's been trying for months now. He thinks the Chinese bureaucrats, over on the island there”—gesturing—“are hoping that most of the people inland will starve.”

“But that's crazy! Most of them are Chinese.”

“Yeah sure, a lot are Chinese, but it would mean even more Japanese.”

“How so?”

Gen regarded him. “There are more of us in the central valley than there are Chinese. Think about it. It may not be so obvious, because the Chinese are the only ones allowed to own land, and so they run the rice paddies, especially where you came from, over east side. But upvalley, downvalley—it's mostly Japanese at the ends, and in the foothills, the coastal range, even more so. We were here first, you understand? Now comes this big flood, people are driven away, flooded out, starving. The bureaucrats are thinking, when it's over and the land reemerges, assuming it will someday, if most of the Japanese and natives have died of hunger, then new immigrants can be sent in to take over the valley. And they'll all be Chinese.”

Kiyoaki didn't know what to say to this.

Gen stared at him curiously. He seemed to like what he saw. “So, you know, Tagomi has been trying to organize private relief, and we've been taking it inland on the flood. But it isn't going well, and it's been expensive, and so the old man is getting testy. His poor workers are paying for it.” Gen laughed.

“But you rescued those Chinese stuck in the trees.”

“Yeah, yeah. Our job. Our duty. Good must result from good, eh? That's what the old woman boarding you says. Of course she's always getting taken.”

They regarded a new tongue of fog licking into the strait. Rain clouds on the horizon looked like a great treasure fleet arriving. A black broom of rain already swept the desolate southern peninsula.

Gen clapped him on the shoulder in a friendly way. “Come on, I have to get her some stuff at the store.”

He led Kiyoaki up to a tram station, and they got on the next tram that ran up the western side of the city, overlooking the ocean. Up streets and down, past shady residential districts, then another government district, high on the slopes overlooking the stained ocean, wide esplanades lined with cherry trees; then another fortress. The hilly neighborhoods north of these guns held many of the city's richest mansions, Gen said. They gazed at some of them from the tram as it squeaked past. From the tops of the precipitous streets they could see the temples on the summit of Mount Tamalpi. Then down into a valley, off that tram, and east on another one, across the peninsula and back to Japantown, with bags of food from a market for the proprietress of the boardinghouse.

Kiyoaki looked in the women's wing to see how Peng-ti and her baby were doing. She was sitting in a window embrasure holding the child, looking blank and desolate. She had not gone to find any Chinese relatives, or to seek help from the Chinese authorities, not that there appeared to be much help from that direction; but she seemed not at all interested. Staying with the Japanese, as if in hiding. But she spoke no Japanese, and that was all they used here, unless they thought to speak to her directly in Chinese.

“Come out with me,” he said to her in Chinese. “I have some money from Gen for the tram, we can see the Gold Gate.”

She hesitated, then agreed. Kiyoaki led her onto the tram system he had just learned, and they went down to the park overlooking the strait. The fog had almost burned off, and the next line of storm clouds were not yet arrived, and the spectacle of the city and the bay shone in wet blinking sunlight. The brown flood continued to pour out to sea, the scraps and lines of foam showing how fast the current was; it must have been ebb tide. That was every rice paddy in the central valley, scoured away and flushed out into the big ocean. Inland everything would have to be built anew. Kiyoaki said something to this effect, and a flash of anger crossed Peng-ti's face, quickly suppressed.

“Good,” she said. “I never want to see that place again.”

Kiyoaki regarded her, shocked. She could not have been more than about sixteen. What about her parents, her family? She wasn't saying, and he was too polite to ask.

Instead they sat in the rare sun, watching the bay. The babe whimpered, and unobtrusively Peng-ti nursed it. Kiyoaki watched her face and the tidal race in the Gold Gate, thinking about the Chinese, their implacable bureaucracy, their huge cities, their rule of Japan, Korea, Mindanao, Aozhou, Yingzhou, and Inka.

“What's your baby's name?” Kiyoaki said.

“Hu Die,” the girl said. “It means—”

“Butterfly,” Kiyoaki said, in Japanese. “I know.” He fluttered with a hand, and she smiled and nodded.

Clouds obscured the sun again, and it cooled rapidly in the onshore breeze. They took the tram back to Japantown.

At the boardinghouse Peng-ti went to the women's wing, and as the men's wing was empty, Kiyoaki entered the chandlery next door, thinking to inquire about a job. The shop on the first floor was deserted, and he heard voices on the second floor, so he went up the stairs.