The Years of Rice and Salt

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  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 boarding house — 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 up valley, down valley — 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 some day, 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 neighbourhoods 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 boarding house.

  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 boarding house 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.

  Here were the accounting rooms and the offices. The chandler’s big office door was closed, but voices came through it. Kiyoaki approached, heard men speaking Japanese:

  “— I don’t see how we could coordinate our efforts, how we could be sure it was all going off at once —”

  The door flew open and Kiyoaki was seized by the neck and dragged into the room. Eight or nine Japanese men glared at him, all seated around one elderly bald foreigner, in the chair of the honoured guest. The chandler roared, “Who let him in here!”

  “There’s no one downstairs,” Kiyoaki said. “I was just looking for someone to ask for a —”

  “How long were you listening?” The old man looked as if he was ready to hit Kiyoaki with his abacus, or worse. “How dare you eavesdrop on us, you could get rocks tied to your ankles and thrown in the bay for that!”

  “He’s just one of the folks we plucked out of the valley,” Gen said from a corner. “I’ve been getting to know him. Might as well enlist him, since he’s here. I’ve already vetted him. He hasn’t got anything better to do. In fact he’ll be good.”

  While the old man spluttered some objection, Gen got up and grabbed Kiyoaki by the shirt front.

  “Get someone to lock the front door,” he told one of the younger men there, who left quickly. Gen turned to Kiyoaki:

  “Listen, youth. We’re trying to help the Japanese here, as I told you down at the Gate.”

  “That’s good.”

  “We’re working to free the Japanese, actually. Not only here, but in Japan itself.”

  Kiyoaki gulped, and Gen shook him. “That’s right, Japan itself! A war of independence for the old country, and here too. You can work for us, and join one of the greatest things possible for a Japanese. Are you in or are you out?”

  “In!” Kiyoaki said. “I’m in, of course! Just tell me what I can do!”

  “You can sit down and shut up,” Gen said. “First of all. Listen and then you’ll be told more.”

  The elderly foreigner seated in the chair of the honoured guest asked a question in his language.r />
  Another of the men waved Kiyoaki aside, answered in the same language. In Japanese he said to Kiyoaki, “This is Dr Ismail, visiting us from Travancore, the capital of the Indian League. He’s here to help us organize our resistance to the Chinese. If you are to stay in this meeting, you must swear never to tell anyone what you see and hear. It means you are committed to the cause without a chance of backing out. If we find out you’ve ever told anyone about this, you’ll be killed, do you understand?”

  “I understand,” Kiyoaki said. “I’m in, I said. You can proceed with no fear from me. I’ve worked like a slave for the Chinese in the valley, all my life.”

  The men in the room stared at him; only Gen grinned at the spectacle of such a youth using the phrase “all my life”. Kiyoaki saw that and blushed hotly. But it was true no matter how old he was. He set his jaw and sat on the floor in the corner by the door.

  The men resumed their conversation. They were asking questions of the foreigner, who watched them with a birdlike blank expression, fingering a white moustache, until the man translating spoke to him, in a fluid language that did not seem to have enough sounds to create all the words; but the old foreigner understood him, and replied to the questions carefully and at length, taking pauses every few sentences to let the young translator speak in Japanese. He was obviously very used to working with a translator.

  “He says, his country was under the yoke of the Mughals for many centuries, and finally they freed themselves in a military campaign run by their Kerala. The methods used have been systematized, and can be taught. The Kerala himself was assassinated, about twenty years ago. Dr Ismail says this was a, a disaster beyond telling, you can see it still upsets him to talk about it. But the only cure is to go on and do what the Kerala would have wanted them to do. And he wanted everyone everywhere free of all empires. So Travancore itself is now part of an Indian League, which has its disagreements, even violent disagreements, but mostly they work out their differences as equals. He says this kind of league was first developed here in Yingzhou, out in the east, among the Hodenosaunee natives. The Firanjis have taken most of the cast coast of Yingzhou, as we have the west, and many of the old ones out there have died of disease, as here, but the Hodenosaunee still hold the area around the great lakes, and the Travancoris have helped them to fight the Muslims. He says that is the key to success; those fighting the great empires have to help each other. He says they have helped some Africans as well, down in the south, a King Moshesh of the Basutho tribe. The doctor here travelled there himself, and arranged for aid to the Basuthos that allowed them to defend themselves from Muslim slave traders and the Zulu tribe as well. Without their help the Basuthos probably wouldn’t have survived.”

  “Ask him what he means when he says help.”

  The foreign doctor nodded when the question was put to him. He used fingers to enumerate his answer.

  “He says, first, they help by teaching the system their Kerala worked out, for organizing a fighting force, and fighting armies when those armies are much bigger. Then second, they can in some instances help with weapons. They will smuggle them in for us, if they think we are serious. And third, rare but possible, they can join the fight, if they think it will turn the tide.”

  “They fought Muslims, and so do the Chinese. Why should they help us?”

  “He says, good question. He says, it’s a matter of keeping a balance, and of setting the two great powers against each other. The Chinese and the Muslims are fighting each other everywhere, even in China itself, where there are Muslim rebellions. But right now the Muslims in Firanja and Asia are splintered and weak, they are always fighting each other, even here in Yingzhou. Meanwhile China continues to fatten on its colonies here and around the Dahai. Even though the Qing bureaucracy is corrupt and inefficient, their manufacturers are always busy, and gold keeps coming, from here and from Inka. So no matter how inefficient they are, they keep getting richer. At this point, he says, the Travancoris are interested in keeping China from becoming so strong they take over the whole world.”

  One of the Japanese men snorted. “No one can take over the world,” he said. “It’s too big.”

  The foreigner inquired what had been said, and the translator translated for him. Dr Ismail raised a finger as he heard it, and replied.

  “He says, that may have been true before, but now, with steamships, and communication by qi, and trade and travel everywhere by ocean, and machines exerting several thousand camels of power, it could be that some dominant country could get an advantage and keep growing. There is a kind of, what, multiplying power to power. So that it’s best to try to keep any one country from getting powerful enough to start that process. It was Islam that looked to be taking over the world for a while, he says, before their Kerala went at the heart of the old Muslim empires and broke them. It could be that China needs a similar treatment, and then there will be no empires, and people can do as they choose, and form leagues with whoever helps them.”

  “But how can we stay in contact with them, on the other side of the world?”

  “He agrees it is not easy. But steamships are fast. It can be done. They have done it in Africa, and in Inka. Qi wires can be strung very quickly between groups.”

  They went on, the questions becoming more practical and detailed, losing Kiyoaki, as he didn’t know where many of the places mentioned were: Basutho, Nsara, Seminole and so on. Eventually Dr Ismail appeared to tire, and they ended the meeting with tea. Kiyoaki helped Gen pour cups and pass them around, and then Gen took him downstairs and reopened the chandlery.

  “You almost got me in trouble there,” he told Kiyoaki, “and yourself too. You’ll have to work hard for us to make up for scaring me that bad.”

  “Sorry — I will. Thanks for helping me.”

  “Oh that poisonous feeling. No thanks. You do your job, I do mine.”

  “Right.”

  “Now, the old man will take you in at the chandlery here, and you can live next door. He’ll hit you with his abacus, as you saw. But your main job will be running messages for us and the like. If the Chinese get wind of what we’re doing, it will get ugly, I warn you. It will be war, do you understand? It may be a secret war, at night, in the alleyways and out on the bay. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  Gen regarded him. “We’ll see. First thing, we’ll go back into the valley and get the word into the foothills, to some friends of mine. Then back to the city, to work here.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  An assistant gave Kiyoaki a tour of the chandlery, which he was soon to know so well. After that he went back to the boarding house next door. Peng-ti was helping the old woman chop vegetables; Hu Die was sunning in a laundry basket. Kiyoaki sat next to the baby, entertaining it with a finger and thinking things over. He watched Peng-ti, learning the Japanese words for the vegetables. She didn’t want to go back to the valley either. The old woman spoke pretty good Chinese, and the two women were talking, but Peng-ti wasn’t telling her any more about her past than she had told Kiyoaki. It was warm in the kitchen. Rain was coming down again outside. The baby smiled at him, as if to reassure him. As if telling him that it would be all right.

  The next time they were down at Gold Gate Park, looking at the brown flood still pouring, he sat by Peng-ti on a bench. “Listen,” he said, “I’m going to stay here in the city. I’ll go back out to the valley on a trip, and get Madam Yao’s silkworms to her, but I’m going to live here.”

  She nodded. “Me too.” She waved at the bay. “How could you not?” She picked up Hu Die and held her up in the air, face out towards the bay, and turned her around to face the four winds. “This is your new home, Hu Die! This is where you are going to grow up!” Hu Die goggled at the view.

  Kiyoaki laughed. “Yes. She will like it here. But listen, Peng-ti, I’m going to be . . . “ He considered how to say it. “I’m going to work for Japan. Do you understand?”

  “No.”

&n
bsp; “I’m going to work for Japan, against China.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m going to be working against China.”

  Her jaw clenched. She said harshly, “Do you think I care?” She looked across the bay to the Inner Gate, where brown water split the green hills. “I’m so glad to be out of there.” She looked him in the eye, and he felt his heart jump. “I’ll help you.”

  Chapter Four

  Black Clouds

  Because China’s emerging empire was now chiefly maritime, its shipping again became the biggest in the world. The emphasis was on carrying capacity, and so the typical Chinese fleet of the early modern period was very big, and slow. Speed was not a consideration. This made difficulties for them later, in naval disputes with the Indians and with the Muslims of Africa, the Mediterranean and Firanja. In the Mediterranean, the Islamic Sea, Muslims developed ships that were smaller but much faster and nimbler than their Chinese contemporaries, and in several decisive naval encounters of the tenth and eleventh centuries, Muslim fleets defeated larger Chinese fleets, preserving the balance of power and preventing Qing China from achieving world hegemony. Indeed Muslim privateering in the Dahai became a major source of revenue to Islamic governments, and a source of friction between Islamic and Chinese, one of the many factors leading to war. In fact, with the sea far surpassing land as a means of commercial and military travel, the superior speed and manoeuvrability of Muslim ships was one of the advantages they held which allowed them to challenge Chinese sea power.

  The development of steam power and metal hulls in Travancore was quickly taken up by both of the other major Old World hegemons, but its lead in this technology and others allowed the Indian League also to compete with the larger rivals on both sides of it.

  Thus the twelfth and thirteenth Muslim centuries, or the Qing dynasty in China, was a period of rising competition between the three major Old World cultures, to dominate and extract the wealth of the New World, Aozhou, and the hinterlands of the Old World, now being fully occupied and exploited.