The Year of Rice and Salt

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  'You say this is the same ocean as the one seen by the Moluccans and Sumatrans, on the other side of the world? How could this be?'

  'The world is most certainly a globe,' said Ibn Ezra. 'It's round like the moon, or the sun. A spherical ball. And we have come to the western end of the land in the world, and around the globe is the eastern end of the land in the world. And this ocean covers the rest of the world, you see.'

  'So we could sail to Sumatra?'

  'In theory, yes. But I've been trying to calculate the size of the earth, using some calculations made by the ancient Greeks, and Brahmagupta of south India, and by my studies of the sky, and though I cannot be sure, I believe it must be some ten thousand leagues around. Brahmagupta said five thousand yoganda, which as I understand it is about the same distance. And the land mass of the world, from Morocco to the Moluccas, I reckon to be about five thousand leagues. So this ocean we look out on covers half the world, five thousand leagues or more. No ship could make it across.'

  'Are you sure it is so big as that?'

  Ibn Ezra waggled a hand uncertainly. 'Not sure, Sultana. But I think it must be something like that.'

  'What about islands? Surely this ocean is not completely empty for five thousand leagues! Surely there are islands!'

  'Undoubtedly, Sultana. I mean, it seems likely. Andalusi fishermen have reported running into islands when storms or currents carried them far to the west, but they don't describe how far, or in what direction.'

  The Sultana looked hopeful. 'So we could perhaps sail away, and find the same islands, or others like them.'

  Ibn Ezra waggled his hand again.

  'Well?' she said sharply. 'Do you not think you could build a seaworthy ship?'

  'Possibly, Sultana. But supplying it for a voyage that long… We don't know how long it would be.'

  ' Well,' she said darkly, 'we may have to find out. With the Sultan dead, and no one for me to remarry ' and she shot a single glance at Bistami – 'there will be Andalusi villains thinking to rule us.'

  It was like a stab to his heart. That night Bistami lay twisting on his bed, seeing that short glance over and over. But what could he do? How could he be expected to help such a situation? He could not sleep, not the entire night long.

  Because a husband would have helped. There was no longer a feeling of harmony in Baraka, and word of the situation certainly had made its way over the Pyrenees, for early in the following spring, when the rivers were still running high and the mountains protecting them still stood white and jagged edged to the south, horsemen came down the road out of the hills, just ahead of a cold spring storm, pouring in from the ocean: a long column of cavalry, in fact, with pennants from Toledo and Granada flying, and swords and pikes at their hips gleaming in the sun. They rode right into the mosque plaza at the centre of town, colourful under the lowering clouds, and lowered their pikes until they all pointed forwards. Their leader was one of the Sultan's elder brothers, Said Darya, and he stood in his silver stirrups so that he towered over the people gathering there, and said, 'We claim this town in the name of the Caliph of al Andalus, to save it from apostasy, and from the witch who threw her spell over my brother and killed him in his bed.'

  'The crowd, growing by the moment, stared stupidly up at the horsemen. Some of the townspeople were red faced and tight lipped, some pleased, most confused or sullen. A few of the rabble from the original Ship of Fools were already pulling cobblestones out of the ground.

  Bistami saw all this from the avenue leading to the river, and all of a sudden something about the sight struck him like a blow; those pikes and crossbows, pointing inwards: it was like the tiger trap, back in India. These people were like the Bagh mari, the professional tiger killing clans that went about the country disposing of problem tigers for a fee. He had seen them before! And not only with the tigress, but before that as well, some other time that he couldn't remember but remembered anyway, some ambush for Katima, a death trap, men stabbing her when she was tall and black skinned – oh, this had all happened before!

  In a panic he ran across the bridge to the palace. Sultana Katima was about to get on her horse to go and confront the invaders, and he threw himself between her and the horse; she was furious and tried to brush by him, and he put his arm around her waist, as slender as a girl's, which shocked them both, and he cried, 'No, no, no, no, no! No, Sultana, I beg you, I beg you, don't go over there! They'll kill you, it's a trap! I've seen it! They will kill you!'

  'I have to go,' she said, cheeks flushed. 'The people need me 'No they don't! They need you alive! We can leave and they can follow! They will follow! We have to let those people have this town, the buildings mean nothing, we can move north and your people will follow! Listen to me, listen!' And he caught her up by the shoulders and held her fast, looked ber in the eye: 'I have seen all this play out before. I have been given knowledge. We have to escape or we will be killed.'

  Across the river they could hear screams. The Andalusi horsemen were not used to opposition from a population without any soldiers, without cavalry, and they were charging down the streets after mobs who threw stones as they fled. A lot of Barakis were crazy with rage, certainly the one handed ones would die to the man to defend her, and the invaders were not going to have as easy a time of it as they had thought. Snow was now twirling down through the dark air, flying sideways on the wind out of grey clouds streaming low overhead, and already there were fires in the city, the district around the grand mosque beginning to burn.

  'Come on, Sultana, there's no time to waste! I've seen how this happens, they'll have no mercy, they're on their way here to the palace, we need to leave now! This has happened before! We can make a new city in the north, some of the people will come with us, gather a caravan and start over, defend ourselves properly!'

  ' All right!' Sultana Katima shouted suddenly, looking across at the burning town. The wind gusted, and they could just hear screaming in the town over the whoosh of the air. 'Damn them! Damn them! Get a horse then, come on, all of you come on! We'll need to ride hard.'

  Nine. Another Meeting in the Bardo

  And so it was that when they all reconvened in the bardo, many years later, after going north and founding the city of Nsara at the mouth of the Lawiyya River, and defending it successfully from the Andalusi taifa sultans coming up to attack them in after years, and building the beginnings of a maritime power, fishing all the way across the sea, and trading farther yet than that, Bistami was well pleased. He and Katima had never married, the matter had never come up again, but he had been Nsara's principal ulema for many years, and had helped to create a religious legitimacy for this new thing, a queen in Islam. And he and Katima had worked together on this project almost every day of those lives.

  'I recognized you!' he reminded Katima. 'In the midst of life, through the veil of forgetting, when it mattered, I saw who you were, and you – you saw something too. You knew something from a higher reality was going on! We're making progress.'

  Katima did not reply. They were sitting on the flagstones of a courtyard in a place very like Chishti's shrine in Fatepur Sikri, except that the courtyard was vastly bigger. People waited in a line to go in the shrine and be judged. They looked like hajjis in line to see the Kaaba. Bistami could hear Mohammed's voice inside, praising some, admonishing others. 'You need to try again,' be heard a voice like Mohammed's say to someone. Everything was quiet and subdued. It was the hour before sunrise, cool and damp, the air filled with distant birdsong. Sitting there beside her, Bistami could see very clearly now how Katima was not at all like Akbar. Akbar had no doubt been sent down to a lower realm, and was even now prowling the jungle hunting for his food, as Katima had been in the existence before last, when she had been a tigress, a killer who had nevertheless befriended Bistami. She had saved him from the Hindu rebels, then picked him out of the ribat in al Andalus: 'You recognized me too,' he said. 'And we both knew Ibn Ezra,' who was at this moment inspecting the wall of the courtyard, running
his fingernail down the line between two blocks, admiring the stonework of the bardo.

  'This is genuine progress,' Bistami repeated. 'We are finally getting somewhere!'

  Katima gave him a sceptical glance. 'You call that progress? Chased to a hole at the far corner of the world?'

  'But who cares where we were? We recognized each other, you didn't get killed '

  'Wonderful.'

  'It was wonderful! I saw through time, I felt the touch of the eternal. We made a place where people could love the good. Little steps, life after life; and eventually we will be there for good, in the white light.'

  Katima gestured; her brother in law, Said Darya, was entering the palace of judgment.

  'Look at him, a miserable creature, and yet he is not thrown down into hell, nor even become a worm or a jackal, as he deserves. He will return to the human realm, and wreak havoc all over again. He too is part of our jati, did you recognize him? Did you know he was part of our little band, like Ibn Ezra here?'

  Ibn Ezra sat beside them. The line moved up and they shifted with it. 'The walls are solid,' he reported. 'Very well built, in fact. I don't think we're going to able to escape.'

  'Escape!' Bistami cried. 'This is God's judgment! No one escapes that!'

  Katima and Ibn Ezra looked at each other. Ibn Ezra said, 'My impression is that any improvement in the tenor of existence will have to be anthropogenic.'

  'What?' Bistami cried.

  'It's up to us. No one will help us.'

  'I'm not saying they will. Although God always helps if you ask. But it is up to us, that's what I've been saying all along, and we are doing what we can, we are making progress.'

  Katima was not at all convinced. 'We'll see,' she said. 'Time will tell. For now, I myself withhold judgment.' She faced the white tomb, drew herself up queenlike, spoke with a tigerish curl of the lip: 'And no one judges me.'

  With a wave of the hand she dismissed the tomb. 'It's not here that matters. What matters is what happens in the world.'

  * * *

  In the thirty fifth year of his reign, the Wanli Emperor turned his feverish and permanently dissatisfied eye on Nippon. Ten years earlier the Nipponese general Hideyoshi had had the temerity to attempt the conquest of China, and when the Koreans had refused him passage, his army had invaded Korea as the first step in its path. It had taken a large Chinese army three years to drive the invaders off the Korean peninsula, and the twenty six million ounces of silver it had cost the Wanli Emperor had put his treasury in acute difficulties, difficulties from which it had never recovered. The Emperor was inclined to avenge this unprovoked assault (if you did not count the two unsuccessful attacks on Nippon made by Kublai Khan), and to remove the danger of any future problem arising from Nippon, by subjugating it to Chinese suzerainty. Hideyoshi had died, and leyasu, the head of a new Tokugawa. Shogunate, had successfully united all the Nipponese islands under his command, and then closed the country to foreigners. All Nipponese were forbidden to leave, and those who did were forbidden to return. The building of seaworthy ships was also forbidden, although the Wanli noted irritably in his vermilion memoranda that this did not stop hordes of Nipponese pirates attacking on the long Chinese coastline using smaller craft. He thought leyasu's retreat from the world signalled weakness, and yet at the same time, a fortress nation of warriors just offshore from the Middle Kingdom was not something to be tolerated either. It pleased the Wanli to think of returning this bastard child of Chinese culture to its rightful place under the Dragon Throne, joining there Korea, Annam, Tibet, Mindanao and the Spice Islands.

  His advisers were not enthusiastic about the plan. For one thing, the treasury was still depleted. For another, the Ming court was already drained by all the previous dramatic events of the Wanli reign, not only the defence of Korea but also the racking dissension caused by the succession problem, still only nominally solved by the Wanli's choice of his elder son, and his younger son's banishment to the provinces; all that could change in a week. And around that highly combustible situation, like a civil war in waiting, constellated all the conflicts and jealous manoeuvrings of the court powers: the Empress Mother, the Empress, the senior civil servants, the eunuchs and the generals. Something in the Wanli's combination of intelligence and vacillation, his permanent discontent and his occasional bursts of vengeful fury, made the court of his old age a flayed and exhausted nest of intrigues. To his advisers, particularly the generals and the heads of the treasury, conquering Nippon did not seem even remotely possible.

  The Emperor, true to form, insisted that it be done.

  His senior generals came back with an alternative plan, which they hoped very much would satisfy his desire. They proposed that the Emperor's diplomats arrange a treaty with one of the minor Nipponese shoguns, the Tozama Daimyo, who were out of leyasu's favour because they had joined him only after his military victory at Sekigahara. The treaty would stipulate that this minor shogun would invite the Chinese to come to one of his ports, and open it permanently to Chinese trade. A Chinese navy would then land at this port in force, and in essence make the port a Chinese port, defended by the full power of the Chinese navy, grown so much bigger during the Wanli's reign in the attempt to defend the coast against pirates. Most of the pirates were from Nippon, so there was a kind of justice there; and a chance to trade with Nippon as well. After that, the treaty port could serve as the staging centre of a slower conquest of Nippon, conceived of as happening in stages rather than all at once. That would make it affordable.

  The Wanli grumbled about his advisers' meagre, partial, eunuchlike enactments of his desires, but patient advocacy by his most trusted advisers of that period finally won him over, and he approved the plan. A secret treaty was arranged with a local lord, Omura, who invited the Chinese to land and trade at a small fishing village with an excellent harbour, called Nagasaki. Preparations for an expedition that would arrive there with overwhelming force were made in the rebuilt shipyards of Longjiang, near Nanjing, also on the Cantonese coast. The big new ships of the invading fleet were filled with supplies to enable the landing force to withstand a long siege, and they assembled for the first time off the coast of Taiwan, with no one in Nippon except for Omura and his advisers any the wiser.

  The fleet was, by the Wanli's direct order, put under the command of one Admiral Kheim, of Annam. This admiral had already led a fleet for the Emperor, in the subjugation of Taiwan some years before, but he was still seen by the Chinese bureaucracy and military as an outsider, an expert in pirate suppression who had achieved his expertise by spending much of his youth as a pirate himself, plundering the Fujian coast. The Wanli Emperor did not care about this, and even regarded it as a point in Kheim's favour; he wanted someone who could get results, and if he came from outside the military bureaucracy, with its many entanglements at court and in the provinces, so much the better.

  The fleet set out in the thirty eighth year of the Wanli, on the third day of the first month. The spring winds were constant from the northwest for eight days, and the fleet positioned itself in the Kuroshio, the Black River, that great ocean current which runs like a river a hundred li wide, up the long southern shores of the Nipponese islands.

  This was as planned, and they were on their way; but then the winds died. Nothing in the air stirred. No bird was seen, and the paper sails of the fleet hung limp, their cross slats ticking the masts only because of the rippling of the Kuroshio itself, which carried them north and east past the main Nipponese islands, past Hokkaido, and out onto the empty expanse of the Dahai, the Great Ocean. This shoreless blue expanse was bisected by their invisible but powerful Black River, flowing relentlessly cast.

  Admiral Kheim ordered all the captains of the Eight Great Ships and of the Lesser Eighteen Ships to row over to the flagship, where they consulted. Many of the most experienced ocean sailors of Taiwan, Annam, Fujian and Canton were among these men, and their faces were grave; to be carried off by the Kuroshio was a dangerous business. All of
them had heard stories of junks that had been becalmed in the current, or dismasted by squalls, or had had to chop down their masts in order to avoid being capsized, and after that disappeared for years in onestory nine years, in another thirty – after which they had drifted back out of the southeast, bleached and empty, or manned by skeletons. These stories, and the eyewitness evidence of the flagship's doctor, I Chen, who claimed to have ridden around the Dahai successfully in his youth on a fishing junk disabled by a typhoon, led them to agree that there was probably a big circular current flowing around the vast sea, and. That if they could stay alive long enough, they might be able to sail around in it, back to home.

  It was not a plan any of them would have chosen to undertake deliberately, but at that point they had no other option but to try it. The captains sat in the Admiral's cabin on the flagship and regarded each other unhappily. Many of the Chinese there knew the legend of Hsu Fu, admiral of the Han dynasty of ancient times, who had sailed off with his fleet in search of lands to settle on the other side of the Dahai, and never been heard from again. They knew as well the story of Kubla Khan's two attempts at invading Nippon, both demolished by unseasonable typhoons, which had given the Nipponese the conviction that there was a divine wind that would defend their home islands from foreign attack. Who could disagree? And it seemed all too possible that this divine wind was now doing its work in a kind of joke or ironic reversal, manifesting itself as a divine calm while they were in the Kuroshio, causing their destruction just as effectively as any typhoon. The calm after all was uncannily complete, its timing miraculously good; it could be they had got caught up in gods' business. That being the case, they could only give their fate over to their own gods, and hope to ride things out.