The Years of Rice and Salt

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  I-Chen shook his head. “We were invading Nippon. Get their words for things if you can.”

  I-Chen was pointing to one thing after another, their baskets, spears, dresses, headpieces, shell mounds; repeating what they said, noting it quickly on his slate. “Good, good. Well met, well met. The Emperor of China and his humble servants send their greetings.”

  The thought of the Emperor made Kheim smile. What would the Wanli, Heavenly Envoy, make of these poor shell-grubbers?

  “We need to teach some of them Mandarin,” I-Chen said. “Perhaps a young boy, they are quicker.”

  “Or a young girl.”

  “Don’t let’s get into that,” I-Chen said. “We need to spend some time here, to repair the ships and restock. We don’t want the men here turning on us.”

  Kheim mimed their intentions to the headman. Stay for a while camp on shore — eat, drink — repair ships — go back home, beyond the sunset to the west. It seemed they eventually understood most of this. In return he understood from them that they ate acorns and courgettes, fish and clams and birds, and larger animals, probably they meant deer. They hunted in the hills behind. There was lots of food, and the Chinese were welcome to it. They liked Kheim’s silk, and would trade fine baskets and food for more of it. Their ornamental gold came from hills to the east, beyond the delta of a big river that entered the bay across from them, almost directly cast; they indicated where it flowed through a gap in the hills, somewhat like the gap leading out to the ocean.

  As this information about the land obviously interested I-Chen, they conveyed more to him in a most ingenious way; though they had no paper, nor ink, nor writing nor drawing, except for the patterns in their baskets, they did have maps of a particular kind, made in the sand on the beach. The headman and some other notables crouched and shaped damp sand most minutely with their hands, smoothing flat the part meant to represent the bay, then getting into spirited discussions about the true shape of the mountain between them and the ocean, which they called Tamalpi, and which they indicated by gesture was a sleeping maiden, a goddess apparently, though it was hard to be sure. They used grass to represent a broad valley inland of the hills bracketing the bay on the east, and wetted the channels of a delta and two rivers, one draining the north, the other the south part of a great valley. To the east of this big valley were foothills rising to mountains much bigger than the coastal range, snow-capped (indicated by dandelion fluff) and holding in their midst a big lake or two.

  All this they marked out with endless disputations concerning the details, and care over fingernail creasings and bits of grass or pine sprays; and all for a map that would be washed away in the next high tide. But when they were done, the Chinese knew that their gold came from people who lived in the foothills; their salt from the shores of the bay; their obsidian from the north and from beyond the high mountains, whence came also their turquoise; and so on. And all without any language in common, merely things displayed in mime, and their sand model of their country.

  In the days that followed, however, they exchanged words for a host of daily objects and events, and I-Chen kept lists and started a glossary, and started teaching one of the local children, a girl of about six years who was the child of the headman, and very forward; a constant babbler in her own tongue, whom the Chinese sailors named Butterfly, both for her manner and for the joke that perhaps at this point they were only her dream. She delighted in telling I-Chen what was what, very firmly; and quicker than Kheim could have believed possible she was using Chinese as well as her own language, mixing them together sometimes, but usually reserving her Chinese for I-Chen, as if it were his private tongue and he some sort of freak, or inveterate joker, always making up fake words for things — neither opinion far from the truth. Certainly her elders agreed that I-Chen was a strange foreigner, feeling their pulse and abdomens, looking in their mouths, asking to inspect their urine (this they refused), and so on. They had a kind of doctor themselves, who led them in ritual purifications in a simple steam bath. This elderly raddled wild-eyed man was no doctor in the sense I-Chen was, but I-Chen took great interest in the man’s herbarium and his explanations, as far as I-Chen could make them out, using ever more sophisticated sign languages, and Butterfly’s growing facility in Chinese. The locals’ language was called Miwok, as the people also called themselves; the word meant ‘people’ or something like. They made it clear with their maps that their village controlled the watershed of the stream that flowed into the bay. Other Miwok lived in the nearly watersheds of the peninsula, between bay and ocean; other people with different languages lived in other parts of the country, each with its own name and territory, though the Miwok could argue among themselves over the details of these things endlessly. They told the Chinese that the great strait leading out to the ocean had been created by an earthquake, and that the bay had been fresh water before the cataclysm had let the ocean in. This seemed unlikely to I-Chen and Kheim, but then one morning after they had slept on shore, they were awakened by a severe shaking, and the earthquake lasted many heartbeats, and came back twice that morning; so that after that they were not as sure about the strait as they had been before.

  They both enjoyed listening to the Miwok speak, but only I-Chen was interested in how the women made the bitter acorns of the jaggedleaved oaks edible, by grinding and leeching the acorn powder in beds of leaves and sand, giving them a sort of flour; I-Chen thought it was most ingenious. This flour, and salmon both fresh and dried, were the staples of their diet, which they offered the Chinese freely. They also ate deer, a kind of giant deer, rabbits, and all manner of waterfowl. Indeed, as the autumn descended mildly on them, and the months passed, the Chinese began to understand that food was so plentiful in this place that there was no need for agriculture as practised in China. Despite which there were very few people living there. That was one of the mysteries of this island.

  The Miwok’s hunts were big parties in the hills, all-day events that Kheim and his men were allowed to join. The bows used by the Miwok were weak but adequate. Kheim ordered his sailors to leave the crossbows and guns hidden on the ships, and the cannon were simply left to view but not explained, and none of the locals asked about them.

  On one of these hunting trips Kheim and I-Chen followed the headman, Ta Ma, and some of the Miwok men up the stream that poured through their village, up into hills to a high meadow that had a view of the ocean to the west. To the cast they could see across the bay, to range after range of green hills.

  The meadow was marshy by the stream, grassy above it, with stands of oak and other trees tufting the air. There was a lake at the lower end of the meadow that was entirely covered with geese — a white blanket of living birds, all honking now, upset by something, complaining. Then the whole flock thrashed into the air, groups swirling and fragmenting, coming together, flying low over the hunters, squawking or silently concentrating, on flight, the distinctive creak of their pumping wing feathers loud in the air. Thousands on thousands.

  The men stood and watched the spectacle, eyes bright. When the geese had all departed, they saw the reason they had left; a herd of giant deer had come to the lake to drink. The stags had huge racks of antlers. They stared across the water at the men, vigilant but undeterred.

  For a moment, all was still.

  In the end the giant deer stepped away. Reality awoke again. “All sentient beings,” said I-Chen, who had been muttering his Buddhist sutras all along. Kheim normally had no time for such claptrap, but now, as the day continued, and they hiked over the hills on their hunt, seeing great numbers of peaceful beaver, quail, rabbits, foxes, seagulls and crows, ordinary deer, a bear and two cubs, a slinky long-tailed grey hunting creature, like a fox crossed with a squirrel — on and on — simply a whole country of animals, living together under a silent blue sky nothing disturbed, the land flourishing on its own, the people there just a small part of it — Kheim began to feel odd. He realized that he had taken China for reality itself. Taiwan and
the Mindanaos and the other islands he had seen were like scraps of land, leftovers; China had seemed to him the world. And China meant people. Built up, cultivated, parcelled off ha by ha, it was so completely a human world that Kheim had never considered that there might once have been a natural world different to it. But here was natural land, right before his eyes, full as could be with animals of every kind, and obviously very much bigger than Taiwan; bigger than China; bigger than the world he had known before.

  “Where on Earth are we?” he said to I-Chen

  I-Chen said, “We have found the source of the peach-blossom stream.”

  • • •

  Winter arrived, and yet it stayed warm during the days, cool at night. The Miwok gave them cloaks of sea otter pelts sewn together with leather thread, and nothing could have been more comfortable against the skin, they were as luxurious as the clothes of the jade Emperor. During storms it rained and was cloudy, but otherwise it was bright and sunny. This was all happening at the same latitude as Beijing, according to I-Chen, and at a time of year when it would have been bitterly cold and windy there, so the climate was much remarked on by the sailors. Kheim could scarcely believe the locals when they said it was like this every winter.

  On the winter solstice, a sunny warm day like all the rest, the Miwok invited Kheim and I-Chen into their temple, a little round thing like a dwarves’ pagoda, the floor sunken into the earth and the whole thing covered with sod, the weight of which was held up by some tree trunks forking up into a nest of branches. It was like being in a cave, and only the fire’s light and the smoky sun shafting down through a smokehole in the roof illuminated the dim interior. The men were dressed in ceremonial feather headdresses and many shell necklaces, which gleamed in the firelight. To a constant drum rhythm they danced round the fire, taking turns as night followed day, going on until it seemed to the stupefied Kheim that they might never stop. He struggled to stay awake, feeling the importance of the event for these men who looked somehow like the animals they fed on. This day marked the return of the sun, after all. But it was hard to stay awake. Eventually he struggled to his feet and joined the younger dancers, and they made room for him as he galumphed about, his sea legs bandying out to the sides. On and on he danced, until it felt right to collapse in a corner, and only emerge at the last part of dawn, the sky fully lit, the sun about to burst over the hills backing the bay. The happy loose-limbed band of dancers and drummers was led by a group of the young unmarried women to their sweat lodge, and in his stupefied state Kheim saw how beautiful the women were, supremely strong, as robust as the men, their feet unbound and their eyes clear and without deference — indeed they appeared to laugh heartily at the weary men as they escorted them into the steam bath, and helped them out of their headdresses and finery, making what sounded like ribald commentary to Kheim, though it was possible he was only making it up out of his own desire. But the burnt air, the sweat pouring out of him, the abrupt clumsy plunge into their little river, blasting him awake in the morning light; all only increased his sense of the women’s loveliness, beyond anything he could remember experencing in China, where a sailor was always being taken by the precious blown flower girls in the restaurants. Wonder and lust and the river’s chill battled his exhaustion, and then he slept on the beach in the sun.

  • • •

  He was back on the flagship when I-Chen came to him, mouth tight. “One of them died last night. They brought me to see. It was the pox.”

  “What! Are you sure?”

  I-Chen nodded heavily, as grim as Kheim had ever seen him.

  Kheim rocked back. “We will have to stay on board the ships.”

  “We should leave,” I-Chen said. “I think we brought it to them.”

  “But how? No one had pox on this trip.”

  “None of the people here have any pox scars at all. I suspect it is new to them. And some of us had it as children, as you can see. Li and Peng are heavily pocked, and Peng has been sleeping with one of the local women, and it was her child died of it. And the woman is sick too.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. Alas. You know what happens to wild people when a new sickness arrives. I’ve seen it in Aozhou. Most of them die. The ones who don’t will be balanced against it after that, but they may still be able to tip others of the unexposed off their balance, I don’t know. In any case, it’s bad.”

  They could hear little Butterfly squealing up on the deck, playing some game with the sailors. Kheim gestured above. “What about her?”

  “We could take her with us, I suppose. If we return her to shore, she’ll probably die with the rest.”

  “But if she stays with us she may catch it and die too.”

  “True. But I could try to nurse her through it.”

  Kheim frowned. Finally he said, “We’re provisioned and watered. Tell the men. We’ll sail south, and get in position for a spring crossing back to China.”

  • • •

  Before they left, Kheim took Butterfly and rowed up to the village’s beach and stopped well offshore. Butterfly’s father spotted them and came down quickly, stood knee deep in the slack tidal water and said something. His voice croaked, and Kheim saw the pox blisters on him. Kheim’s hands rowed the boat out a stroke.

  “What did he say?” he asked the girl.

  “He said people are sick. People are dead.”

  Kheim swallowed. “Say to him, we brought a sickness with us.”

  She looked at him, not comprehending.

  “Tell him we brought a sickness with us. By accident. Can you say that to him? Say that.”

  She shivered in the bottom of the boat.

  Suddenly angry, Kheim said loudly to the Miwok headman, “We brought a disease with us, by accident!”

  Ta Ma stared at him.

  “Butterfly, please tell him something. Say something.”

  She raised her head up and shouted something. Ta Ma took two steps out, going waist-deep in the water. Kheim rowed out a couple of strokes, cursing. He was angry and there was no one to be angry at.

  “We have to leave!” he shouted. “We’re leaving! Tell him that,” he said to Butterfly furiously. “Tell him!”

  She called out to Ta Ma, sounding distraught.

  Kheim stood up in the boat, rocking it. He pointed at his neck and face, then at Ta Ma. He mimicked distress, vomiting, death. He pointed at the village and swept his hand as if erasing it from a slate. He pointed at Ta Ma and gestured that he should leave, that all of them should leave, should scatter. Not to other villages but into the hills. He pointed at himself, at the girl huddling in the boat. He mimed rowing out, sailing away. He pointed at the girl, indicating her happy, playing, growing up, his teeth clenched all the while.

  Ta Ma appeared to understand not a single part of this charade. Looking befuddled, he said something.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, what do we do?”

  Kheim waved at the bills again, indicating dispersion. “Go!” he said loudly. “Tell him, go away! Scatter!”

  She said something to her father, miserably.

  Ta Ma said something.

  “What did he say, Butterfly? Can you tell me?”

  “He said, fare well.”

  The men regarded each other. Butterfly looked back and forth between them, frightened.

  “Scatter for two months!” Kheim said, realizing it was useless but speaking anyway. “Leave the sick ones and scatter. After that you can regather, and the disease won’t strike again. Go away. We’ll take Butterfly and keep her safe. We’ll keep her on a ship without anyone who has ever had smallpox. We’ll take care of her. Go!”

  He gave up. “Tell him what I said,” he asked Butterfly. But she only whimpered and snivelled on the bottom of the boat. Kheim rowed them back to the ship and they sailed away, out the great mouth of the bay on the ebb tide, away to the south.

  TWO

  Butterfly cried often for the first three days after they sailed, th
en ate ravenously, and after that began to talk exclusively in Chinese. Kheim felt a stab every time he looked at her, wondering if they had done the right thing to take her. She would probably have died if they had left her, I-Chen reminded him. But Kheim wasn’t sure even that was justification enough. And the speed of her adjustment to her new life only made him more uneasy. Was this what they were, then, to begin with? So tough as this, so forgetful? Able to slip into whatever life was offered? It made him feel strange to see such a thing.

  One of his officers came to him. “Peng isn’t on board any of the ships. We think he must have swum ashore and stayed with them.”

  • • •

  Butterfly too fell ill, and I-Chen sequestered her in the bow of the flagship, in an airy nest under the bowsprit and over the figurehead, which was a gold statue of Tianfei. He spent many hours tending the girl through the six stages of the disease, from the high fever and floating pulse of the Greater Yang, through the Lesser Yang and Yang Brightness, with chills and fever coming alternately; then into Greater Yin. He took her pulse every watch, checked all her vital signs, lanced some of the blisters, dosed her from his bags of medicines, mostly an admixture called Gift of the Smallpox God, which contained ground rhinoceros horn, snow worms from Tibet, crushed jade and pearl; but also, when it seemed she was stuck in the Lesser Yin, and in danger of dying, tiny doses of arsenic. The progress of the disease did not seem to Kheim to be like the usual pox, but the sailors made the appropriate sacrifices to the smallpox god nevertheless, burning incense and paper money over a shrine that was copied on all eight of the ships.

  Later, I-Chen said that he thought being out on the open sea had proven the key to her recovery. Her body lolled in its bed on the groundswell, and her breathing and pulse fell into a rhythm with it, he noticed, four breaths and six beats per swell, in a fluttering pulse, over and over. This kind of confluence with the elements was extremely helpful. And the salt air filled her lungs with qi, and made her tongue less coated; he even fed her little spoonfuls of ocean water, as well as all she would take of fresh water, just recently removed from her home stream. And so she recovered and got well, only lightly scarred by pox on her back and neck.