The Year of Rice and Salt

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Keeper nodded. 'Like a picture.'

  'Yes, a picture. Of the whole world, on a ball, because the world is a big ball. And you can mark it with the names of the islands and lakes.'

  Keeper didn't look convinced, but what he was put off by, Iagogeh couldn't tell. He instructed the sachems to get ready for the council.

  Iagogeh went off to help with the clean up. Fromwest brought bowls over to the lakeside to be washed.

  'Please,' Iagogeh said, embarrassed. 'We do that.'

  'I am no one's servant,' Fromwest said, and continued to bring bowls to the girls for a while, asking them about their embroidery. When he saw Iagogeh had drawn back to sit down on a bit of raised bank, he sat on the bank beside her.

  As they watched the girls, he said, 'I know that Hodenosaunee wisdom is such that the women decide who marries whom.'

  Iagogeh considered this. 'I suppose you could say that.'

  'I am a Doorkeeper now, and a Hawk. I will live the rest of my days here among you. I too hope to marry some day.'

  'I see.' She regarded him, looked at the girls. 'Do you have someone in mind?'

  'Oh no!' he said. 'I would not be so bold. That is for you to decide. After your advice concerning lacrosse players, I am sure you will know best.'

  She smiled. She looked at the festive dress of the girls, aware or unaware of their elders' presence. She said, 'How many summers have you seen?'

  'Thirty five or so, in this life.'

  'You have had other lives?'

  'We all have. Don't you remember?'

  She regarded him, unsure if he was serious. 'No.'

  'The memories come in dreams, mostly, but sometimes when something happens that you recognize.'

  ' I've had that feeling.'

  'That's what it is.'

  She shivered. It was cooling down. Time to get to the fire. Through the net of leafy branches overhead a star or two winked. 'Are you sure you don't have a preference?'

  ' None. Hodenosaunee women are the most powerful women in this world. Not just the inheritance and the family lines, but choosing the marriage partnerships. That means you are deciding who comes back into the world.'

  She scoffed at that: 'If children were like their parents.' The offspring she and Keeper had had were all very alarming people.

  'The one that comes into the world was there waiting. But many were waiting. Which one comes depends on which parents.'

  'Do you think so? Sometimes, when I watched mine – they were only strangers, invited into the Long House.'

  'Like me.'

  'Yes. Like you.'

  Then the sachems found them, and took Fromwest to his raising up.

  Iagogeh made sure the cleaning was near its finish, then went after the sachems, and joined them to help prepare the new chief. She combed his straight black hair, much the same as hers, and helped him tie it up the way he wanted, in a topknot. She watched his cheery face. An unusual man.

  He was given appropriate waist and shoulder belts, each a winter's work for some skilful woman, and in these he suddenly looked very fine, a warrior and a chief, despite his flat round face and hooded eyes. He did not look like anyone she had ever met, certainly not like the one glimpse she had had of the foreigners who had come over the eastern sea to their shores. But she was beginning to feel he was familiar anyhow, in a way that made her feel peculiar.

  He looked up at her, thanking her for her help. When she met his gaze she felt some odd sense of recognition.

  Some branches and several great logs were thrown on the central fire, and the drums and turtleshell rattles grew loud as the fifty sachems of the Hodenosaunee gathered in their great circle for the raising up. The crowd drew in behind them, manoeuvring and then sitting down so all could see, forming a kind of broad valley of faces.

  The raising up ceremony for a chief was not long compared to that of the fifty sachems. The sponsoring sachem stepped forward and announced the nomination of the chief. In this case it was Big Forehead, of the Hawk tribe, who stood forth and told them all again the story of Fromwest, how they had come across him being tortured by the Sioux, how he had been instructing the Sioux in the superior methods of torture found in his own country; how he already spoke an unfamiliar version of the Doorkeeper dialect, and how it had been his hope to come visit the people of the Long House before his capture by the Sioux. How he had lived among the Doorkeepers and learned their ways, and led a band of warriors far down the Ohio River to rescue many Senecan people enslaved by the Lakotas, guiding them so that they were able to effect the rescue and bring them home. How this and other actions had made him a candidate for chiefdom, with the support of all who knew him.

  Big Forehead went on to say that the sachems had conferred that morning, and approved the choice of the Doorkeepers, even before Fromwest's display of skill in lacrosse. Then with a roar of acclamation Fromwest was led into the circle of sachems, his flat face shiny in the firelight, his grin so broad that his eyes disappeared in their folds of flesh.

  He held out a hand, indicating he was ready to make his speech. The sachems sat on the beaten ground so that the whole congregation could see him. He said, 'This is the greatest day of my life. Never as long as I live will I forget any moment of this beautiful day. Let me tell you now how I came to this day. You have beard only part of the story. I was born on the island Hokkaido, in the island nation Nippon, and grew up there as a young monk and then a samurai, a warrior. My name was Busho.

  'In Nippon people arranged their affairs differently. We had a group of sachems with a single ruler, called the Emperor, and a tribe of warriors were trained to fight for the rulers, and make the farmers give part of their crops to them. I left the service of my first ruler because of his cruelty to his farmers, and became a ronin, a warrior without tribe.

  ' I lived like that for years, wandering the mountains of Hokkaido and Honshu as beggar, monk, singer, warrior. Then all Nippon was invaded by people from farther west, on the great island of the world. These people, the Chinese, rule half the other side of the world, or more. When they invaded Nippon no great kamikaze storm wind came to sink their canoes, as always had happened before. The old gods abandoned Nippon, perhaps because of the Allah worshippers who had taken over its southernmost islands. In any case, with the water passable at last, they were unstoppable. We used banks of guns, chains in the water, fire, ambush in the night, swimming attacks over the inner sea, and we killed a great many of them, fleet after fleet, but they kept coming. They established a fort on the coast we could not eject them from, a fort protecting a long peninsula, and in a month they had filled that peninsula. Then they attacked the whole island at once, landing on every west beach with thousands of men. All the people of the Hodenosaunee league would have been but a handful in that host. And though we fought and fought, back up into the hills and mountains where only we knew the caves and ravines, they conquered the flatlands, and Nippon, my nation and my tribe, was no more.

  'By then I should have died a hundred times over, but in every battle some fluke or other would save me, and I would prevail over the enemy at hand, or slip away and live to fight another time. Finally there were only scores of us left in all Honshu, and we made a plan, and joined together one night and stole three of the Chinese transport canoes, huge vessels like many floating long houses tied together. We sailed them cast under the command of those among us who had been to Gold Mountain before.

  'These ships had cloth wings held up on poles to catch the wind, like you may have seen the foreigners from the east use, and most winds come from the west, there as here. So we sailed east for a few moons, and when the winds were bad drifted on a great current in the sea.

  'When we reached Gold Mountain we found other Nipponese had arrived there before us, either by months, or years, or scores of years. There were great-grandchildren of settlers there, speaking an older form of Nipponese. They were happy to see a band of samurai land, they said we were like the legendary fifty-three ronin, because Ch
inese ships had already arrived, and sailed into the harbour and shelled the villages with their great guns, before leaving to return to China to tell their emperor that we were there to be put to the needle,' poking to show how death from a giant needle would take place, his mimicry horribly suggestive.

  'We resolved to help our tribes there defend the place and make it a new Nippon, with the idea of eventually returning to our true home. But a few years later the Chinese appeared again, not on ships coming in through the Gold Gate, but on foot from the north, with a great army, building roads and bridges as they went, and speaking of gold in the hills. Once again the Nipponese were exterminated like rats in a granary, sent reeling south or east, into a waste of steep mountains where only one in ten survived.

  , When the remnants were safely hidden away in caves and ravines, I resolved that I would not see the Chinese overrun Turtle Island as they are overrunning the great world island to the west, if I could help it. I lived with tribes and learned some language, and over the years I made my way east, over deserts and great mountains, a bare waste of rock and sand held so high up to the sun that it is cooked everywhere and the ground is like burned corn, it crunches underfoot. The mountains are enormous rock peaks with narrow canyons leading through them. On the broad eastern slope of these mountains are the grasslands beyond your rivers, covered with great herds of buffalo, and tribes of people who live off them in encampments. They move north or south with the buffalo, wherever they go. These are dangerous people, always fighting each other despite their plenty, and I took care to hide myself when I travelled among them. I walked cast until I came on some slave farmers who were from the Hodenosaunee, and from what they told me, in a language that to my surprise I could already understand, the Hodenosaunee were the first people I had heard of who might be able to defeat the invasion of the Chinese.

  'So I sought the Hodenosaunee, and came here, sleeping inside logs, and creeping about like a snake to see what I could of you. I came up the Ohio and explored all around this land, and rescued a Senecan slave girl and learned more words from her, and then one day we were captured by a Sioux war party. It was the girl's mistake, and she fought so hard they killed her. And they were killing me too, when you arrived and saved me. As they were testing me, I thought, a Senecan war party will rescue you – there is one out there even now. There are their eyes, reflecting the firelight. And then you were there.'

  He threw out his arms, and cried, 'Thank you, people of the Long House!' He took tobacco leaves from his waist belt and tossed them gracefully into the fire. 'Thank you Great Spirit, One Mind holding us all.'

  'Great Spirit,' murmured all the people together in response, feeling their concourse.

  Fromwest took a long ceremonial pipe from Big Forehead, and filled it with tobacco very carefully. As he crumbled the leaves into the bowl he continued his speech.

  'What I saw of your people astonished me. Everywhere else in the world, guns rule. Emperors put the gun to the heads of sachems, who put it to warriors, who put it to farmers, and they all together Put it to the women, and only the Emperor and some sachems have any say in their affairs. They own the land like you own your clothes, and the rest of the people are slaves of one kind or another. In all the world there are perhaps five or ten of these empires, but fewer and fewer as they run into each other, and fight until one wins. They rule the world, but no one likes them, and when the guns aren't pointed at them, people go away or rebel, and all is violence of one against another, of man against man, and men against women. And despite all that, their numbers grow, for they herd cattle, like elk, who provide meat and milk and leather. They herd pigs, like boars, and sheep and goats, and horses that they ride on, like little buffalo. And so their numbers are grown huge, more than the stars in the sky. Between their tame animals and their vegetables, like your three sisters, squash and beans and corn, and a corn they call rice, that grows in water, they can feed so many that in each of your valleys, they might have living as many people as all the Hodenosaunee together. This is true, I have seen it with my own eyes. On your own island it is already beginning, on the far western coast, and perhaps on the eastern coast as well.'

  He nodded at them all, paused to pluck a brand from the fire and light the filled pipe. He handed the smoking instrument to Keeper of the Wampum, and continued as the sachems each took one great puff from the pipe.

  'Now, I have watched the Hodenosaunee as closely as a child watches its mother. I see how sons are brought up through their motherline, and cannot inherit anything from their fathers, so that there can be no accumulation of power in any one man. There can be no emperors here. I have seen how the women choose the marriages and advise all aspects of life, how the elderly and orphans are cared for. How the nations are divided into the tribes, woven so that you are all brothers and sisters through the league, warp and weft. How the sachems are chosen by the people, including the women. How if a sachem were to do something bad they would be cast out. How their sons are nothing special, but men like any other men, soon to marry out and have sons of their own who will leave, and daughters who will stay, until all have their say. I have seen how this system of affairs brings peace to your league. It is, in all this world, the best system of rule ever invented by human beings.'

  He raised his hands in thanksgiving. He refilled the pipe and got it burning again, and shot a plume of smoke into the greater smoke rising from the fire. He cast more leaves on the fire, and gave the pipe to another sachem in the circle, Man Frightened, who indeed at this moment appeared a little awed. But the Hodenosaunee reward skills in oratory as well as skills in war, and now all listened happily as Fromwest continued.

  'The best government, yes. But look you – your island is so bountiful in food that you do not have to make tools to feed yourselves. You live in peace and plenty, but you have few tools, and your numbers have not grown. Nor have you metals, or weapons made of metal. This is how it has happened; you can dig deep in the earth and find water, but why should you when there are streams and lakes everywhere? This is the way you live.

  'But the big island's people have fought each other for many generations, and made many tools and weapons, and now they can sail across the great seas on all sides of this island, and land here. And so they are coming, driven as the deer by crowds of wolves behind. You see it on your cast coast, beyond Beyond the Opening. These are people from the other side of the same great island I escaped, stretching halfway around the world.

  'They will keep coming! And I will tell you what will happen, if you do not defend yourselves in this island of yours. They will come, and they will build more forts on the coast, as they have begun to do already. They will trade with you, cloth for furs – cloth! cloth for the right to own this land as if it were their clothing. When your warriors object, they will shoot you with guns, and bring more and more warriors with guns, and you will not be able to oppose them for long, no matter how many of them you kill, for they have as many people as grains of sand on the long beaches. They will pour over you like Niagara.'

  He paused to let that potent image sink in.

  He raised his hands. 'It does not have to happen that way. A people as great as the Hodenosaunee, with its wise women and its wily warriors, a nation that every single person would gladly die for, as if for family – a people like this can learn to prevail over empires, empires in which only the emperors truly believe.

  'How can we? you ask. How can we stop Niagara's water from falling?'

  He made another pause, refilling the pipe and casting more tobacco on the fire. He passed the pipe out beyond the ring of sachems.

  'Here is how. Your league is expandable, as you have shown already by the inclusion of the Shirt Weavers, the Shawnee, the Choctaw and the Lakota. You should invite all the neighbouring nations to join you, then teach them your ways, and tell them of the danger from the big island. Each nation can bring its own skill and devotion to the defence of this island. If you work together, the invaders will never
be able to make headway into the depths of the great forest, which is nearly impenetrable even without opposition.

  'Also, and most importantly, you need to be able to make your own guns.'

  Now the attention of the crowd was fixed very closely. One of the sachems held up for all to regard the musket he had obtained from the coast. Wooden stock, metal barrel, metal trigger and sparking apparatus, holding a flint. It looked sleek and unearthly in the orange firelight, gleaming like their faces, something born not made.

  But Fromwest pointed at it. 'Yes. Like that. Fewer parts than any basket. The metal comes from crushed rocks put in a fire. The pots and moulds to hold the melted metal are made of yet harder metal, that doesn't melt any more. Or in clay. Same with the rod you wrap a sheet of hot metal around, to make the barrel of the gun. The fire is made hot enough by using charcoal and coal for fuel, and blowing on the fire with bellows. Also, you can stick a wheel spinning in the river's flow, that will squeeze a bellows open and closed with the force of a thousand men.'

  He went into a description of this process that appeared to be mostly in his own language. The something did something to the something. He illustrated by blowing on a glowing branch end held before his mouth, till it burst back into yellow flame.

  'Bellows are like deerskin bags, squeezed over and over in wooden hands, wooden walls on a hinge,' flapping his hands vigorously. 'The devices can be pushed by the river. All work can be linked to the power of the rivers flowing by, and greatly increased. Thus the river's power becomes yours. Niagara's power becomes yours to command. You can make metal discs with toothed edges, connect them to the river, and cut through trees like sticks, cut trees longways into planks for houses and boats.' He gestured around them. 'A forest covers the whole eastern half of Turtle Island. Numberless trees. You could make anything. Great ships to cross the great seas, to bring the fight to their shores. Anything. You could sail there and ask their people if they want to be slaves of an empire, or a tribe woven into the league. Anything!'