The Years of Rice and Salt

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  • • •

  Chained together at the ankles, Bold and Kyu were led through the narrow crowded streets to a building near the shores of a lake flanking the west edge of the old city. The first floor of the building was a restaurant. It was the fourteenth day of the first moon of the year, Shen told them, the start of the Feast of Lanterns, so they would have to learn fast, because the place was hopping.

  Tables spill out of the restaurant

  Into the broad street bordering the lakefront,

  Every chair filled all day long.

  The lake itself dotted with boats,

  Each boat sporting lanterns of all kinds

  Coloured glass painted with figures,

  Carved white and apple jade,

  Roundabouts turning on their candles’ hot air,

  Paper lanterns burning up in brief blazes.

  A dyke crowded with lantern bearers

  Extends into the lake, the opposite shore is crowded

  As well, so at the day’s end

  The lake and all the city around it

  Spark in the dusk of the festival twilight.

  Certain moments give us such unexpected beauty.

  Shen’s eldest wife, I-Li, ran the kitchen very strictly, and Bold and Kyu soon found themselves unloading hundredweight bags of rice from the canal barges tied up behind the restaurant; carrying them in; returning bags of refuse to the compost barges; cleaning the tables; and mopping and sweeping the floor. They ran in and out, also upstairs to the family compound above the restaurant. The pace was relentless, but all the while they were surrounded by the restaurant women, in white robes with paper butterflies in their hair, and by thousands of other women as well, promenading under the globes of coloured light, so that even Kyu raced about drunk on the sights and smells, and on drinks salvaged from near-empty cups. They drank lychee, honey and ginger punch, paw paw and pear juice, and teas green and black. Shen also served fifteen kinds of rice wine; they tried the dregs of them all. They drank everything but plain water, which they were warned against as dangerous to the health.

  As for the food, which again came to them mostly in the form of table scraps — well, it beggared description. They were given a plateful of rice every morning, with some kidneys or other offal thrown in, and after that they were expected to fend for themselves with what customers left behind. Bold ate everything he got his hands on, astonished at the variety. The Feast of Lanterns was a time for Shen and I-Li to offer their fullest menu, and so Bold had the chance to taste roebuck, red deer, rabbit, partridge, quail, clams cooked in rice wine, goose with apricots, lotus seed soup, pimento soup with mussels, fish cooked with plums, fritters and souffles, ravioli, pies and cornflour fruitcakes. Every kind of food, in fact, except for any beef or dairy; strangely, the Chinese had no cattle. But they had eighteen kinds of soy, Shen said, nine of rice, eleven of apricots, eight of pears. It was a feast every day.

  After the rush of the Feast of Lanterns was over, I-Li liked to take short breaks from her work in the kitchen, and visit some of the other restaurants of the city, to see what they were offering. She would return to inform Shen and the cooks that they needed to make a sweet soy soup, for instance, like that she had found at the Mixed Wares Market; or pig cooked in ashes, like that at the Longevity-and-Compassion Palace.

  She started taking Bold with her on her morning trips to the abattoir, located right in the heart of the old city. There she chose her pork ribs, and the liver and kidneys for the slaves. Here Bold learned why they were never to drink the city’s water; the offal and blood from the slaughter were washed off right into the big canal running down to the river, but often the tides pushed water back up this canal and through the rest of the city’s water network.

  Returning behind I-li with his wheelbarrow of pork one day, pausing to let a party of nine intoxicated women in white pass by, Bold felt all of a sudden that he was in a different world. Back at the restaurant he said to Kyu, “We’ve been reborn without our noticing it.”

  “Maybe you have. You’re like a baby here.”

  “Both of us! Look about you! It’s . . . “ He could not express it.

  “They are rich,” Kyu said, looking about. Then they were back to work.

  The lakefront never was an ordinary place. Festival or not — and there were festivals almost every month — the lakefront was one of the main places the people of Hangzhou congregated. Every week there were private parties between the more general festivals, so the promenade was a daily celebration of greater or lesser magnitude, and although there was a great deal of work to be done supplying and maintaining the restaurant, there was also a great deal of food and drink to be scavenged, or poached in the kitchen, and both Bold and Kyu were insatiable. They soon filled out, and Kyu was also still sprouting up, looking tall among the Chinese.

  Soon it was as if they had never lived any other life. Well before dawn, resonant wooden fish were struck with mallets, and the weathermen shouted their announcements from the firewatch towers: ‘It is raining! It is cloudy today!” Bold and Kyu and about twenty other slaves got up and were let out of their room, and most went down to the service canal that ran in from the suburbs, to meet the rice barges. The barge crews had got up even earlier — theirs was night work, starting at midnight many li away. All together they heaved the bulging sacks onto wheelbarrows, then the slaves wheeled them back through the alleys to Shen’s.

  They sweep up the restaurant,

  Light the stove fires, set the tables,

  Wash bowls and chopsticks, chop vegetables,

  Cook, carry supplies and food

  Out to Shen’s two pleasure boats,

  And then as dawn breaks

  And people begin slowly to appear

  On the lakefront for breakfast,

  They help the cooks, wait on tables,

  Wait and clean tables — anything needed,

  Lost in the meditation of labour

  though usually the hardest work in the place was theirs, as they were the newest slaves. But even the hardest work wasn’t very hard, and with the constant availability of food, Bold considered their placement a windfall; a chance to put some meat on their bones, and learn better the local dialect and the ways of the Chinese. Kyu pretended never to notice any of these things, indeed pretended not to understand most of the Chinese spoken to him, but Bold saw that he was actually soaking in everything like a dishwasher’s sponge, watching sideways so that it seemed he never watched, when he always watched. That was Kyu’s way. He already knew more Chinese than Bold.

  The eighth day of the fourth moon was another big festival, celebrating a deity who was patron to many of the guilds of the town. The guilds organized a procession, down the broad imperial way that divided the old city north to south, then over to West Lake for dragon boat jousts, among all the other more usual pleasures of the lakefront. Each guild wore its particular costume and mask, and brandished identical umbrellas, flags or bouquets as they marched in squares together, shouting “Ten thousand years! Ten thousand years!” as they had done ever since the emperors had actually lived in Hangzhou, and heard these shouted hopes for their longevity. Spread out along the lakefront at the end of the parade, they watched a dance of a hundred little eunuchs in a circle, a particular celebration of that festival. Kyu almost looked directly at these children.

  Later that day he and Bold were assigned to one of Shen’s pleasure boats, which were floating extensions of his restaurant. “We have a wonderful feast for our passengers today,” Shen cried as they arrived and filed aboard. “We’ll be serving the Eight Dainties today — dragon livers, phoenix marrow, bear paws, lips of apes, rabbit embryo, carp tail, broiled osprey, and kumiss.”

  Bold smiled to think of kumiss, which was simply fermented mares’ milk, included among the Eight Dainties; he had practically grown up on it. “Some of those are easier to obtain than others,” he said, and Shen laughed and kicked him into the boat.

  Onto the lake they paddled
. “How come your lips are still on your face?” Kyu called back at Shen, who was out of hearing.

  Bold laughed. “The Eight Dainties,” he said. “What these people think of!”

  “They do love their numbers,” Kyu agreed. “The Three Pure Ones, the Four Emperors, the Nine Luminaries —”

  “The Twenty-eight Constellations —”

  “The Twelve Horary Branches, the Five Elders of the Five Regions . . .”

  “The Fifty Star Spirits.”

  “The Ten Unforgivable Sins.”

  “The Six Bad Recipes.”

  Kyu cackled briefly. “It’s not numbers they like, it’s lists. Lists of all the things they have.”

  Out on the lake Bold and Kyu saw up close the magnificent decoration of the day’s dragon boats, bedecked with flowers, feathers, coloured flags and spinners. Musicians on each boat played madly, trying with drum and horn to drown out the sound of all the others, while pikemen in the bows reached out with padded staves to knock people on other boats into the water.

  In the midst of this happy tumult, screams of a different tone caught the attention of those on the water, and they looked ashore and saw that there was a fire. Instantly the games ended and all the boats made a beeline for land, piling up five deep against the docks. People ran right over the boats in their haste, some towards the fire, some towards their own neighbourhoods. As they hurried over to the restaurant Bold and Kyu saw for the first time a fire brigade. Each neighbourhood had one, with its own equipment, and they would all follow the signal flags from the watchtowers around the city, soaking roofs in districts threatened by the blaze, or putting out flying embers. Hangzhou’s buildings were all wood or bamboo, and most districts had gone up in flames at one time or another, so the routine was well-practised. Bold and Kyu ran behind Shen up to the burning neighbourhood, which was to the north of theirs and upwind, so that they too were in danger.

  At the fire’s edge thousands of men and women were at work, many in bucket lines that extended to the nearest canals. The buckets were run upstairs into smoky buildings, and tossed down onto the flames. There were also quite a number of men carrying staves, pikes, and even crossbows, and questioning men hauled out of the fiery alleyways bordering the conflagration. Suddenly these men beat one of those that emerged to a bloody mass, right there amid the firefighting. Looter, someone said. Army detachments would soon arrive to help capture more and kill them on the spot, after public torture, if there was time.

  Despite this threat, Bold saw now that there were figures without buckets, darting in and out of the burning buildings. The fight against looters was as intense as that against the fire! Kyu too saw this as he passed wooden or bamboo buckets down the line, openly watching everything.

  • • •

  Days flew by, each busier than the last. Kyu was still nearly mute, head always lowered, a mere beast of burden or kitchen swab — incapable of learning Chinese, or so everyone in the restaurant believed. Only semi-human in fact, which was the usual attitude of the Chinese towards black slaves in the city.

  Bold spent more and more time working for I-li. She appeared to prefer to take him on her trips out, and he hustled to keep up with her, manoeuvring the wheelbarrow through the crowd. She was always in a tearing hurry, mostly in her quest for new foods; she seemed anxious to try everything. Bold saw that the restaurant’s success had resulted from her efforts. Shen himself was more an impediment than a help, as he was bad with his abacus and couldn’t remember much, especially about his debts, and he kicked his slaves and his girls for hire.

  So Bold was pleased to follow I-Li They visited Mother Sung’s outside the Cash-reserve Gate, to try her white soy soup. They watched Wei Big Knife at the Cat Bridge boil pork, and Chou Number Five in front of the Five-span Pavilion, making his honey fritters. Back in the kitchen I-Li would try to reproduce these foods exactly, shaking her head ominously as she did. Sometimes she would retire to her room to think, and a few times she called Bold up the stairs, to order him out in search of some spice or ingredient she had thought of that might help with a dish.

  Her room had a table by the bed, covered with cosmetic bottles, jewellery, perfume sachets, mirrors and little boxes of lacquered wood, jade, gold and silver. Gifts from Shen, apparently. Bold glanced at them while she sat there thinking.

  A tub of white foundation powder,

  Still flat and shiny on top.

  A deep rose shade of grease blush,

  For cheeks already chapped dark red.

  A box of pink balsam leaves

  Crushed in alum, for tinted nails,

  Which many women in the restaurant displayed.

  I-Li’s nails were bitten to the quick.

  Cosmetics never used, jewellery never worn,

  Mirrors never looked into. The outward gaze.

  Once she stained her palms with the pink balsam dye; another time, all the dogs and cats in the kitchen. just to see what would happen, as far as Bold could tell.

  But she was interested in the things of the city. Half her trips out were occupied by talk, by asking questions. Once she came home troubled: “Bold, they say that northerners here go to restaurants that serve human flesh. ‘Two-legged mutton’, have you heard that? Different names for old men, women, young girls, children? Are they really such monsters up there?”

  “I don’t think so,” Bold said. “I never met any.”

  She was not entirely reassured. She often saw hungry ghosts in her sleep, and they had to come from somewhere. And they sometimes complained to her of having had their bodies eaten. It made sense to her that they might cluster around restaurants in search of some kind of retribution. Bold nodded; it made sense to him too, though it was hard to believe the teeming city harboured practising cannibals when there was so much other food to be had.

  As the restaurant prospered, I-Li made Shen improve the place, cutting holes in the side walls and putting in windows, filling them with square trellis-works supporting oiled paper, which blazed or glowed with sunlight, depending on the hour and weather. She opened the front of the building entirely to the lakefront promenade, and paved the downstairs with glazed bricks. She burned pots of mosquito smoke during the summer, when they were at their worst. She built in a number of small wall shrines devoted to various gods — deities of place, animal spirits, demons and hungry ghosts, even, at Bold’s humble request, one to Tianfei the Celestial Consort, despite her suspicion that this was only another name for Tara, already much honoured in the nooks and crannies of the house. If it annoyed Tara, she said, it would be on Bold’s head.

  Once she came home retailing a story of a number of people who had died and come back to life shortly thereafter, apparently because of the mistakes of careless celestial scribes, who had written down the wrong names. Bold smiled; the Chinese imagined a complicated bureaucracy for the dead, just like the ones they had established for everything else. “They came back with information for their living relatives, things that turned out to be correct even though the briefly deceased person couldn’t have known about it!”

  “Marvels,” Bold said.

  “Marvels happen every day,” I-li replied. It was, as far as she was concerned, a universe peopled by spirits, genies, demons, ghosts — as many kinds of beings as tastes. She had never had the bardo explained to her, and so she didn’t understand the six levels of reality that organized cosmic existence; and Bold did not feel that he was in a position to teach her. So it remained at the level of ghosts and demons. Malignant ones could be held off by various practices that annoyed them; firecrackers, drums and gongs, these things chased them away. It was also possible to strike them with a stick, or burn artemisia, a Sechuan custom that I-Li practised. She also bought magic writing on miniature papers or cylinders of silver, and put up white jade square tiles in every doorway; dark demons disliked the light of these. And the restaurant and its household prospered, so she felt she had done the right things.

  Following her out several times a w
eek, Bold learned a lot about Hangzhou. He learned the best rhinoceros skins were found at Chien’s, as you went down from the service canal to little Chinghu Lake; the finest turbans were at Kang Number Eight’s, in the Street of the Worn Cash Coin, or at Yang Number Three’s, going down the canal after the Three Bridges. The largest display of books was at the bookstalls under the big trees near the summer house of the Orange Tree Garden. Wicker cages for birds and crickets could be found in Ironwire Lane, ivory combs at Fei’s, painted fans at the Coal Bridge. I-Li liked to know of these places, even though she only bought what they sold as gifts for her friends or her mother-in-law. A very curious person indeed. Bold could hardly keep up with her. One day in the street, rattling off some story or other, she stopped and looked up at him, surprised, and said, “I want to know everything!”

  But all the while, Kyu had been watching without watching. And one night, during the tidal bore of the eighth moon, when the Chientang River roared with high waves and there were many visitors in the city, in the hour before the woodblocks and the weathermen’s cries, Bold was awakened by a gentle tug on the ear, then the firm pressure of a hand over his mouth.

  It was Kyu. He held a key to their room in his hand. “I stole the key.” Bold pulled Kyu’s hand away from his mouth. “What are you doing?” he whispered.

  “Come on,” Kyu said in Arabic, in the phrase used for a balking camel. “We’re escaping.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “We’re escaping, I said.”

  “But where will we go?”

  “Away from this city. North to Nanjing.”

  “But we have it good here!”

  “Come on, none of that. We’re finished here. I’ve already killed Shen.”

  “You what!”

  “Shhhh. We need to set the fires and get out of here before the wake-up.”