The Years of Rice and Salt

1

Monkey never dies. He keeps coming back to help us in times of trouble, just as he helped Tripitaka through the dangers of the first journey to the west, to bring Buddhism back from India to China.

Now he had taken on the form of a small Mongol named Bold Bardash, horseman in the army of Temur the Lame. Son of a Tibetan salt trader and a Mongol innkeeper and spirit woman, and thus a traveler from before the day of his birth, up and down and back and forth, over mountains and rivers, across deserts and steppes, crisscrossing always the heartland of the world. At the time of our story he was already old: square face, bent nose, gray plaited hair, four chin whiskers for a beard. He knew this would be Temur’s last campaign, and wondered if it would be his too.

One day scouting ahead of the army, a small group of them rode out of dark hills at dusk. Bold was getting skittish at the quiet. Of course it was not truly quiet, forests were always noisy compared to the steppe; there was a big river ahead, spilling its sounds through the wind in the trees; but something was missing. Birdsong perhaps, or some other sound Bold could not quite identify. The horses snickered as the men kneed them on. It did not help that the weather was changing, long mare’s tails wisping orange in the highest part of the sky, wind gusting up, air damp—a storm rolling in from the west. Under the big sky of the steppe it would have been obvious. Here in the forested hills there was less sky to be seen, and the winds were fluky, but the signs were still there.

They came to an empty bridge and crossed it, hooves thwocking the planks. Now they came on some wooden buildings with thatched roofs. But no fires, no lantern light. They moved on. More buildings appeared through the trees, but still no people. The dark land was empty.

Psin urged them on, and more buildings stood on each side of the widening road. They followed a turn out of the hills onto a plain, and before them lay a black silent city. No lights, no voices; only the wind, rubbing branches together over sheeting surfaces of the big black flowing river. The city was empty.

Of course we are reborn many times. We fill our bodies like air in bubbles, and when the bubbles pop we puff away into the bardo, wandering until we are blown into some new life, somewhere back in the world. This knowledge had often been a comfort to Bold as he stumbled exhausted over battlefields in the aftermath, the ground littered with broken bodies like empty coats.

But it was different to come on a town where there had been no battle, and find everyone there already dead. Long dead; bodies dried; in the dusk and moonlight they could see the gleam of exposed bones, scattered by wolves and crows. Bold repeated the Heart Sutra to himself. “Form is emptiness, emptiness form. Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond. O, what an Awakening! All hail!”

The horses stalled on the outskirts of the town. Aside from the cluck and hiss of the river, all was still. The squinted eye of the moon gleamed on dressed stone, there in the middle of all the wooden buildings. A very big stone building, among smaller stone buildings.

Psin ordered them to put clothes over their faces, to avoid touching anything, to stay on their horses, and to keep the horses from touching anything but the ground with their hooves. Slowly they rode through narrow streets, walled by wooden buildings two or three stories high, leaning together as in Chinese cities. The horses were unhappy but did not refuse outright.

They came into a paved central square near the river, and stopped before the great stone building. It was huge. Many of the local people had come to it to die. Their lamasery, no doubt, but roofless, open to the sky—unfinished business. As if these people had only come to religion in their last days; but too late; the place was a boneyard. Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond. Nothing moved, and it occurred to Bold that the pass in the mountains they had ridden through had perhaps been the wrong one, the one to that other west which is the land of the dead. For an instant he remembered something, a brief glimpse of another life—a town much smaller than this one, a village wiped out by some great rush over their heads, sending them all to the bardo together. Hours in a room, waiting for death; this was why he so often felt he recognized the people he met. Their existences were a shared fate.

“Plague,” Psin said. “Let’s get out of here.”

His eyes glinted as he looked at Bold, his face was hard; he looked like one of the stone officers in the imperial tombs.

Bold shuddered. “I wonder why they didn’t leave,” he said.

“Maybe there was nowhere to go.”

Plague had struck in India a few years before. Mongols rarely caught it, only a baby now and then. Turks and Indians were more susceptible, and of course Temur had all kinds in his army, Persians, Turks, Mongols, Tibetans, Indians, Tajiks, Arabs, Georgians. Plague could kill them, any of them, or all of them. If that was truly what had felled these people. There was no way to be sure.

“Let’s get back and tell them,” Psin said.

The others nodded, pleased that it was Psin’s decision. Temur had told them to scout the Magyar plain and what lay beyond, west for four days’ ride. He didn’t like it when scouting detachments returned without fulfilling orders, even if they were composed of his oldest qa’uchin. But Psin could face him.

Back through moonlight they rode, camping briefly when the horses got tired. On again at dawn, back through the broad gap in the mountains the earlier scouts had called the Moravian Gate. No smoke from any village or hut they passed. They kicked the horses to their fastest long trot, rode hard all that day.

As they came down the long eastern slope of the range back onto the steppe, an enormous wall of cloud reared up in the western half of the sky.

They approached Temur’s great encampment, and the black stormcloud covered the rest of the day, causing a darkness like night. Hair rose on the back of Bold’s neck. A few big raindrops splashed down, and thunder rolled out of the west like giant iron cartwheels overhead. They hunkered down in their saddles and kicked the horses on, reluctant to return in such a storm, with such news. Temur would take it as a portent, just as they did. Temur often said that he owed all his success to an asura that visited him and gave him guidance. Bold had witnessed one of these visitations, had seen Temur engage in conversation with an invisible being, and afterward tell people what they were thinking and what would happen to them. A cloud this black could only be a sign. Evil in the west. Something bad had happened back there, something worse even than plague, maybe, and Temur’s plan to conquer the Magyars and the Franks would have to be abandoned; he had been beaten to it by the goddess of skulls herself. It was hard to imagine him accepting any such preemption, but there they were, under a storm like none of them had ever seen, and all the Magyars were dead.

Smoke rose from the vast camp’s cooking fires, looking like a great sacrifice, the smell familiar and yet distant, as if from a home they had already left forever. Psin looked at the men around him. “Camp here,” he ordered. He thought things over. “Bold.”

Bold felt the fear shoot through him.

“Come on.”

Bold swallowed and nodded. He was not courageous, but he had the stoic manner of the qa’uchin, Temur’s oldest warriors. Psin also would know that Bold was aware they had entered a different realm, that everything that happened from this point onward was freakish, something preordained and being lived through inexorably, a karma they could not escape.

Psin also was no doubt remembering a certain incident from their youth, when the two of them had been captured by a tribe of taiga hunters north of the Kama River. Together they had staged a very successful escape, knifing the hunters’ headman and running through a bonfire into the night.

The two men rode by the outer sentries and through the camp to the khan’s tent. To the west and north lightning bolts crazed the black air. Neither man had seen such a storm in all their lives. The few little hairs on Bold’s forearms stood up like pig bristles, and he felt the air crackling with hungry ghosts, pretas crowding in to witness Temur emerge from his tent. He had killed so many.

The two men dismounted and stood there. Guards came out of the tent, drawing aside the flaps of the doorway and standing at attention, ready with drawn bows. Bold’s throat was too dry to swallow, and it seemed to him a blue light glowed from within the great yurt of the khan.

Temur appeared high in the air, seated on a litter his carriers had already hefted on their shoulders. He was pale-faced and sweating, the whites of his eyes visible all the way around. He stared down at Psin.

“Why are you back?”

“Khan, a plague has struck the Magyars. They’re all dead.”

Temur regarded his unloved general. “Why are you back?”

“To tell you, Khan.”

Psin’s voice was steady, and he met Temur’s fierce gaze without fear. But Temur was not pleased. Bold swallowed; nothing here was the same as that time he and Psin had escaped the hunters, there wasn’t a single feature of that effort that could be repeated. Only the idea that they could do it remained.

Something inside Temur snapped, Bold saw it—his asura was speaking through him now, and it looked like it was wreaking great harm in him as it did. Not an asura, perhaps, but his nafs, the spirit animal that lived inside him. He rasped, “They cannot get away as easily as that! They will suffer for this, no matter how they try to escape.” He waved an arm weakly. “Go back to your detachment.”

Then to his guards he said in a calmer voice, “Take these two back and kill them and their men, and their horses. Make a bonfire and burn everything. Then move our camp two days’ ride east.”

He raised up his hand.

The world burst asunder.

A bolt of lightning had exploded among them. Bold sat deaf on the ground. Looking around stunned, he saw that all the others there had been flattened as well, that the khan’s tent was burning, Temur’s litter tipped over, his carriers scrambling, the khan himself on one knee, clutching his chest. Some of his men rushed to him. Again lightning blasted down among them.

Blindly Bold picked himself up and fled. He looked over his shoulder through pulsing green afterimages, and saw Temur’s black nafs fly out of his mouth into the night. Temur-i-Lang, Iron the Lame, abandoned by asura and nafs both. The emptied body collapsed to the ground, and rain bucketed onto it. Bold ran into the dark to the west. We do not know which way Psin went, or what happened to him; but as for Bold, you can find out in the next chapter.

2

Bold ran or walked west all that night, scrambling through the growing forest in the pouring rain, climbing into the steepest hills he could find, to evade any horsemen who might follow. No one would be too zealous in pursuit of a potential plague carrier, but he could be shot down from a good distance away, and he wanted to disappear from their world as if he had never existed. If it had not been for the uncanny storm he would certainly be dead, already embarked on another existence: now he was anyway. Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond…

He walked the next day and all the second night. Dawn of the second day found him hurrying back through the Moravian Gate, feeling that no one would dare follow him there. Once onto the Magyar plain he headed south, into trees. In the morning’s wet light he found a fallen tree and slipped deep under its exposed roots, to sleep for the rest of the day in hidden dryness.

That night the rain stopped, and on the third morning he emerged ravenous. In short order he found, pulled, and ate meadow onions, then hunted for more substantial food. It was possible that dried meat still hung in the empty villages’ storehouses, or grain in their granaries. He might also be able to find a bow and some arrows. He didn’t want to go near the dead settlements, but it seemed the best way to find food, and that took precedence over everything else.

That night he slept poorly, his stomach full and gassy with onions. At dawn he made his way south, following the big river. All the villages and settlements were empty. Any people he saw were dead on the ground. It was disturbing, but there was nothing to be done. He too was in some kind of posthumous existence, a very hungry ghost indeed. Living on from one found bite to the next, with no name or fellows, he began to close in on himself, as during the hardest campaigns on the steppes, becoming more and more an animal, his mind shrinking in like the horns of a touched snail. For many watches at a time he thought little but the Heart Sutra. Form is emptiness, emptiness form. Not for nothing had he been named Sun Wu-kong, Awake to Emptiness, in an earlier incarnation. Monkey in the void.

He came to a village that looked untouched, skirted its edge. In an empty stable he found an unstrung bow and a quiver of arrows, all very primitive and poorly made. Something moved in the pasturage outside, and he went out and whistled up a small black mare. He caught her with onions, and quickly taught her to take him on her back.

He rode her across a stone bridge over the big river, and slowly crossed the grain of the land southward, up and down, up and down. All the villages continued empty, their food rotted or scavenged by animals, but now he had the mare’s milk and blood to sustain him, so the matter was not so urgent.

It was autumn here, and he began to live like the bears, eating berries and honey, and rabbits shot with the ridiculous bow. Possibly it had been concocted by a child; he couldn’t believe anyone older would make such a thing. It was a single bend of wood, probably ash, partly carved but still misshapen; no arrowrest, no nocking point, its pull like that of a prayer-flag line. His old bow had been a laminate of horn, maplewood, and tendon glue covered by blue leather, with a sweet pull and release, and enough power to pierce body armor from over a li away. Gone now, gone altogether beyond, lost with all the rest of his few possessions, and when he shot these twig arrows with this branch bow and missed, he would shake his head and wonder if it was even worth tracking the arrow down. It was no wonder these people had died.

In one small village, five buildings clustered above a stream ford, the headman’s house proved to have a locked larder, still stocked with dried fishcakes that were spiced with something Bold did not recognize, which made his stomach queasy. But with the strange food in him he felt his spirits rise. In a stable he found sidebags for the mare, and stuffed them with more dried food. He rode on, paying more attention than he had been to the land he was passing through.

Anything but return to his previous life. Not that he harbored any resentment of Temur; Bold would have done the same in his place. Plague was plague, and could not be treated lightly. And this plague was obviously worse than most, having killed everyone in the region. Among the Mongols plague usually killed a few babies, maybe made some adults sick. You killed rats or mice on sight, and if babies got feverish and developed the bumps, their mothers took them out to live or die by the rivers. Indian cities were said to have a worse time with it, with people dying in great crowds. But never anything like this. It was possible something else had killed them.

But the terror washed through him and then away, like freshets of rain, leaving a mind as empty as the land itself. It was very still. Gone, gone, altogether gone.

For a time he thought he would ride through and out of the region of plague, and find people again. But then he came over a jagged range of black hills, and saw a big town spread below, bigger than any he had ever seen, its rooftops covering a whole valley bottom. But deserted. No smoke, no noise, no movement. In the center of the city another giant stone temple stood open to the sky. Seeing it the terror poured into him again, and he rode into the forest to escape the sight of so many people gone like the autumn leaves.

He knew roughly where he was, of course. South of here, he would eventually come into the Ottoman Turks’ holdings in the Balkans. He would be able to speak with them; he would be back in the world, but out of Temur’s empire. Something then would start up for him, some way to live.

So he rode south. But still only skeletons occupied the villages. He grew hungrier and hungrier. He drove the mare harder, while drinking more of her blood.

Then one night in the dark of the moon, all of a sudden there were howls and wolves were on them in a snarling rush. Bold just had time to cut the mare’s tether and scramble into a tree. Most of the wolves chased the mare, but some sat panting under the tree. Bold got as comfortable as he could and prepared to wait them out. When rain came they slunk away. In the dawn he woke for the tenth time, climbed down. He took off downstream and came on the body of the mare, all skin and gristle and scattered bones. The sidebags were nowhere to be found.

He continued on foot.

One day, too weak to walk, he lay in wait by a stream, and shot a deer with one of the sorry little arrows, and made a fire and ate well, bolting down chunks of cooked haunch. He slept away from the carcass, hoping to return to it. Wolves couldn’t climb trees, but bears could. He saw a fox, and as the vixen had been his wife’s nafs, long ago, he felt better. In the morning the sun warmed him. The deer had been removed by a bear, it appeared, but he felt stronger with all that fresh meat in him, and pressed on.

He walked south for several days, keeping on ridges when he could, over hills both depopulated and deforested, the ground underfoot sluiced to stone and baked white by the glare of the sun. He watched for the vixen in the valleys at dawn, and drank from springs, and raided dead villages for scraps of food. These grew harder and harder to find, and for a while he was reduced to chewing the leather strap from a harness, an old Mongol trick from the hard campaigns on the steppes. But it seemed to him it had worked better back there, on the endless grass so much easier to cross than these baked tortured white hills.

At the end of one day, after he had long gotten used to living alone in the world, scavenging it like Monkey himself, he came into a little copse of trees to make a fire, and was shocked to see one already there, tended by a living man.

The man was short, like Bold. His hair was as red as maple leaves, his bushy beard the same color, his skin pale and brindled like a dog. At first Bold was sure the man was sick, and he kept his distance. But the man’s eyes, blue in color, were clear; and he too was afraid, absolutely on point and ready for anything. Silently they stared at each other, across a small clearing in the middle of the copse.

The man gestured at his fire. Bold nodded and came warily into the glade.

The man was cooking two fish. Bold took a rabbit that he had killed that morning out of his coat, and skinned and cleaned it with his knife. The man watched him hungrily, nodding at each familiar move. He turned his fish on the fire, and made room in the coals for the rabbit. Bold spitted it on a stick and put it in.

After the meat had cooked they ate in silence, sitting on logs on opposite sides of the fire. They both stared into the flames, glancing only occasionally at each other, shy after all their time alone. After all that it was not obvious what one could say to another human.

Finally the man spoke, first brokenly, then at length. Sometimes he used a word that sounded familiar to Bold, but not so familiar as his movements around the fire, and no matter how hard he tried, Bold could make nothing of what the man said.

Bold tried out some simple phrases himself, feeling the strangeness of words in his mouth, like pebbles. The other man listened closely, his blue eyes gleaming in firelight, out of the dirty pale skin of his lean face, but he showed no sign of comprehension, not of Mongolian, Tibetan, Chinese, Turkic, Arabic, Chagatai, or any other of the polyglot greetings Bold had learned through the years crossing the steppe.

At the end of Bold’s recitation the man’s face spasmed, and he wept. Then, wiping his eyes clear, leaving big streaks on his dirty face, he stood before Bold and said something, gesturing widely. He pointed his finger at Bold, as if angry, then stepped back and sat on his log, and began to imitate rowing a boat, or so Bold surmised. He rowed facing backward, like the fishermen on the Caspian Sea. He made the motions for fishing, then for catching fish, cleaning them, cooking them, and feeding them to little childen. By his gestures he evoked all the people he had fed, his children, his wife, the people he lived with.

Then he turned his face up at the firelit branches over the two men, and cried again. He pulled up the rough shift covering his body, and pointed at his arms—at his underarms, where he made a fist. Bold nodded, felt his stomach shrink as the man mimed the sickness and death of all the children, by lying down on the ground and mewling like a dog. Then the wife, then all the rest. All had died but this man, who walked around the fire pointing at the leaf litter on the ground intoning words, names perhaps. It was all so clear to Bold.

Then the man burned his dead village, all in gestures so clear, and mimed rowing away. He rowed on his log for a long time, so long Bold thought he had forgotten the story; but then he ground to a halt and fell back in his boat. He got out, looking around in feigned surprise. Then he began to walk. He walked around the fire a dozen times, pretend-eating grass and sticks, howling like a wolf, cowering under his log, walking some more, even rowing again. Over and over he said the same things, “Dea, dea, dea, dea,” shouting it at the branch-crossed stars quaking over them.

Bold nodded. He knew the story. The man was moaning, with a low growl like an animal, cutting at the ground with a stick. His eyes were as red as any wolf’s in the light. Bold ate more of the rabbit, then offered the stick to the man, who snatched it and ate hungrily. They sat there and looked at the fire. Bold felt both companionable and alone. He eyed the other man, who had eaten both his fish, and was now nodding off. The man jerked up, muttered something, lay curled around the fire, fell asleep. Uneasily Bold stoked the fire, took the other side of it, and tried to do the same. When he woke the fire had died and the man was gone. It was a cold dawn, dew-drenched, and the trail of the man led down the meadow to a big bend in a stream, where it disappeared. There was no sign of where the man had gone from there.

Days passed, and Bold continued south. Many watches went by in which he didn’t think a thing, only scanning the land for food and the sky for weather, humming a word or two over and over. Awake to emptiness. One day he came on a village surrounding a spring.

He did not care to test anything by trespassing, and so circled the temples, chanting “Om mane padme hum, om mane padme hum, hummm,” aware suddenly that he often spoke aloud to himself now, or hummed, without ever noticing it, as if ignoring an old companion who always said the same things.

He continued south and east, though he had forgotten why. He scrounged roadside buildings for dried food. He walked on the empty roads. It was an old land. Gnarled olive trees, black and heavy with their inedible fruit, mocked him. No person ate entirely by his own efforts, no one. He got hungrier, and food became his only focus, every day. He passed more marble ruins, foraged in the farmhouses he passed. Once he came on a big clay jar of olive oil, and stayed there four days to drink it all down. Then game became more abundant. He saw the vixen more than once. Good shots with his ridiculous bow kept him away from hunger. He made his fires larger every night, and once or twice wondered what had become of the man he had met. Had meeting Bold made him realize he would be alone no matter what happened or whom he found, so that he had killed himself to rejoin his jati? Or perhaps just slipped while drinking? Or hiked in the stream to keep Bold from tracking him? There was no way of telling, but the encounter kept coming back to Bold, especially the clarity with which he had been able to understand the man.

The valleys ran south and east. He felt the shape of his travels in his mind, and found he could not remember enough of the last few weeks to be sure of his location, relative to the Moravian Gate, or the khanate of the Golden Horde. From the Black Sea they had ridden west about ten days’ ride, hadn’t they? It was like trying to remember things from a previous life.

It seemed possible, however, that he was nearing the Byzantine empire, coming toward Constantinople from the north and west. Sitting slumped before his nightly bonfire, he wondered if Constantinople would be dead too. He wondered if Mongolia was dead, if perhaps everyone in the world was dead. The wind soughed through the shrubs like ghost’s voices, and he fell into an uneasy sleep, waking through the watches of the night to check the stars and throw more branches on his fire. He was cold.

He woke again, and there was Temur’s ghost standing across the fire, the light of the flames dancing over his awesome face. His eyes were black as obsidian, and Bold could see stars gleaming in them.

“So,” Temur said heavily, “you ran away.”

“Yes,” Bold whispered.

“What’s wrong? Don’t want to go out on the hunt again?”

This was a thing he had said to Bold before. At the end he had been so weak he had had to be carried on a litter, but he never thought of stopping. In his last winter he had considered whether to move east in the spring, against China, or west, against the Franks. During a huge feast he weighed the advantages of each, and at one point he looked at Bold, and something on Bold’s face caused the khan to jump him with his powerful voice, still strong despite his illness: “What’s wrong, Bold? Don’t want to go out on the hunt again?”

That earlier time Bold had said, “Always, great khan. I was there when we conquered Ferghana, Khorasan, Sistan, Khrezm, and Moghulistan. One more is fine by me.”

Temur had laughed his angry laugh. “But which way this time, Bold? Which way?”

Bold knew enough to shrug. “All the same to me, great khan. Why don’t you flip a coin?”

Which got him another laugh, and a warm place in the stable that winter, and a good horse in the campaign. They had moved west in the spring of the year 784.

Now Temur’s ghost, as solid as any man, glared reproachfully at Bold from across the fire. “I flipped the coin just like you said, Bold. But it must have come up wrong.”

“Maybe China would have been worse,” Bold said.

Temur laughed angrily. “How could it have been? Killed by lightning? How could it have been? You did that, Bold, you and Psin. You brought the curse of the west back with you. You never should have come back. And I should have gone to China.”

“Maybe so.” Bold didn’t know how to deal with him. Angry ghosts needed to be defied as often as they needed to be placated. But those jet-black eyes, sparkling with starlight—

Suddenly Temur coughed. He put a hand to his mouth, and gagged out something red. He looked at it, then held it out for Bold to see: a red egg. “This is yours,” he said, and tossed it over the flames at Bold.

Bold twisted to catch it, and woke up. He moaned. The ghost of Temur clearly was not happy. Wandering between worlds, visiting his old soldiers like any other preta… in a way it was pathetic, but Bold could not shake the fear in him. Temur’s spirit was a big power, no matter what realm it was in. His hand could reach into this world and grab Bold’s foot at any time.

All that day Bold wandered south in a haze of memories, scarcely seeing the land before him. The last time Temur visited him in the stables had been difficult, as the khan could no longer ride. He had looked at one thick black mare as if at a woman, and smoothed its flank and said to Bold, “The first horse I ever stole looked just like this one. I started poor and life was hard. God put a sign on me. But you would think He would have let me ride to the end.” And he had stared at Bold with that vivid gaze of his, one eye slightly higher and larger than the other, just like in the dream. Although in life his eyes had been brown.

Hunger kept Bold hunting. Temur, though a hungry ghost, no longer had to worry about food; but Bold did. All the game ran south, down the valleys. One day, high on a ridge, he saw water, bronze in the distance. A large lake, or sea. Old roads led him over another pass, down into another city.

Again, no one there was alive. All was motionless and silent. Bold wandered down empty streets, between empty buildings, feeling the cold hands of pretas running down his back.

On the central hill of the city stood a copse of white temples, like bones bleaching in the sun. Seeing them, Bold decided that he had found the capital of this dead land. He had walked from peripheral towns of rude stone to capital temples of smooth white marble, and still no one had survived. A white haze filled his vision, and through it he stumbled up the dusty streets, up onto the temple hill, to lay his case before the local gods.

On the sacred plateau three smaller temples flanked a large one, a rectangular beauty with double rows of smooth columns on all four sides, supporting a gleaming roof of marble tiles. Under the eaves carved figures fought, marched, flew, and gestured, in a great stone tableau depicting the absent people, or their gods. Bold sat on a marble drum from a long-toppled column and stared up at the carving in stone, seeing the world that had been lost.

Finally he approached the temple, entered it praying aloud. Unlike the big stone temples in the north, it had been no place of congregation in the end; there were no skeletons inside. Indeed it looked as if it had been abandoned for many years. Bats hung in the rafters, and the darkness was lanced by sunbeams leaking through broken rooftiles. At the far end of the temple it looked as though an altar had been hastily erected. On it a single candlewick burned in a pot of oil. Their last prayer, flickering even after they had died.

Bold had nothing to offer by way of sacrifice, and the great white temple stood silent above him. “Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond! O what an awakening! All hail!” His words echoed hollowly.

He stumbled back outside into the afternoon glare, and saw to the south the blink of the sea. He would go there. There was nothing here to keep him; the people and their gods too had died.

A long bay cut in between hills. A harbor at the head of the bay was empty, except for a few small rowboats slapping against the waves, or upturned on the shingle beach stretching away from the docks. He did not risk the boats, he knew nothing about them. He had seen Issyk Kul and Lake Qinghai, and the Aral, Caspian, and Black seas, but he had never been in a boat in his life, except for ferries crossing rivers. He did not want to start now.

On the beach he scooped a handful of water to drink—spat it out—it was salty, like the Black Sea, or the springs in the Tarim basin. It was strange to see so much wastewater. He had heard there was an ocean surrounding the world. Perhaps he was at the edge of the world, the western edge, or the southern. Possibly the Arabs lived south of this sea. He didn’t know; and for the first time in all his wandering, he had the feeling that he had no idea where he was.

He was asleep on the warm sand of a beach, dreaming of the steppes, trying to keep Temur out of the dream by force of will alone, when he was rousted by strong hands, rolling him over and tying his legs together and his arms behind his back. He was hauled to his feet.

A man said “What have we here?” or something to that effect. He spoke something like Turkic, Bold didn’t know many of the words, but it was some kind of Turkic, and he could usually catch the drift of what they were saying. They looked like soldiers or perhaps brigands, big hard-handed ruffians, wearing gold earrings and dirty cotton clothes. He wept while grinning foolishly at the sight of them; he felt his face stretch and his eyes burn. They regarded him warily.

“A madman,” one ventured.

Bold shook his head at this. “I—I haven’t seen anyone,” he said in Ulu Turkic. His tongue was big in his mouth, for despite all his babbling to himself and the gods, he had forgotten how to talk to people. “I thought everyone was dead.”

He gestured to the north and west.

They did not seem to understand him.

“Kill him,” one said, as dismissive as Temur.

“The Christians all died,” another said.

“Kill him, let’s go. Boats are full.”

“Bring him,” the other said. “The slavers will pay for him. He won’t bring down the boat, thin as he is.”

Something like that. They hauled him behind them down the beach. He had to hurry so the rope wouldn’t pull him around backward, and the effort made him dizzy. He didn’t have much strength. The men smelled of garlic and that made him ravenous, though it was a foul smell. But if they meant to sell him to slavers, they would have to feed him. His mouth was watering so heavily that he slobbered like a dog, and he was weeping as well, nose running, and with his hands tied behind his back he couldn’t wipe his face.

“He’s foaming at the mouth like a horse.”

“He’s sick.”

“He’s not sick. Bring him. Come on,” this to Bold, “don’t be scared. Where we take you even the slaves live a better life than you barbarian dogs.”

Then he was shoved over the side of a beached boat, and with great jerks it was pulled off into the water, where it rocked violently. Immediately he fell sideways into the wooden wall of the thing.

“Up here, slave. On that pile of rope. Sit!”

He sat and watched them work. Whatever happened, it was better than the empty land. Just to see men move, to hear them talk, filled him. It was like watching horses run on the steppe. Hungrily he watched them haul a sail into the air on a mast, and the boat heeled to the side such that he threw himself the other way. They roared with laughter at this. He grinned sheepishly, gesturing at the big lateen.

“It takes more wind than this breath to tip us.”

“Allah protect us from it.”

“Allah protect us.”

Muslims. “Allah protect us,” Bold said politely. Then, in Arabic, “In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate.” In his years in Temur’s army he had learned to be as much a Muslim as anyone. The Buddha did not mind what you said to be polite. Now it would not keep him from slavery, but it would perhaps earn him a little more food. The men regarded him curiously. He watched the land slide by. They untied his arms and gave him some dried mutton and bread. He tried to chew each bite a hundred times. The familiar tastes called back to him his whole life. He ate what they gave him, drank fresh water from a cup they gave him.

“Praise be to Allah. Thank you in the name of God the compassionate, the merciful.”

They sailed down a long bay, into a larger sea. At night they pulled behind headlands and anchored the boat and slept. Bold curled under a coil of rope. Every time he woke in the night he had to remind himself where he was.

In the mornings they sailed south and south again, and one day they passed through a long narrows into an open sea, with big waves. The rocking of the boat was like riding a camel. Bold gestured west. The men named it, but Bold didn’t catch the name. “They’re all dead,” the men said.

The sunset came and they were still on the open sea. For the first time they sailed all night long, always awake when Bold woke, watching the stars without talking to each other. For three days they sailed out of the sight of any land, and Bold wondered how long it would go on. But on the fourth morning the sky to the south grew white, then brown.

One of the sailors happily named it: “Alexandria!” Bold had heard the name, though he knew nothing about it. Neither do we; but to find out more, you can read the next chapter.

3

His captors sailed to a beach, anchored with a stone tied to a rock, tied Bold up securely, and left him in the boat under a blanket while they went ashore.

It was a beach for small boats, near an immense long wooden dockfront behind the seawall, which served much bigger ships. When the men came back they were drunk and arguing. Without untying anything but his legs, and with no more words to him, they pulled Bold out of the boat and marched him down the great seafront of the city, which appeared to Bold dusty and salty and worn down, stinking in the sun like a dead fish, of which there were indeed many scattered about. On the docks before a long building were bales, boxes, great clay jars, netted bolts of cloth; then a fish market, which made his mouth water at the same time that his stomach flopped.

They came to a slave market. A small square with a raised platform in its middle, somewhat like a lama’s teaching platform. Three slaves were quickly sold. The women being sold garnered the most attention and comment from the crowd. They were stripped of all but the ropes or chains holding them, if such were necessary, and stood there listlessly, or cowered. Most were black, some brown. They seemed to be at the butt end of auction day, people selling off leftovers. Before Bold an emaciated girl of about ten years was sold to a fat black man in dirty silk robes. The transaction was completed in a kind of Arabic; she sold for some unit of currency Bold had never heard of before, the payment in little gold coins. He helped his captors get his crusted old clothes off. “I don’t need tying,” he tried to tell them in Arabic, but they ignored him and chained his ankles. He walked onto the platform feeling the baked air settle on him. Even to himself he emitted a powerful smell, and looking down he saw that his time in the empty land had left him about as fleshless as the little girl before him. But what was left was muscle, and he stood up straight, looking into the sun as the bidding went on, thinking the part of the Lapis Lazuli Sutra that went, “The ruffian demons of unkindness roam the earth, begone! begone! The Buddha renounces slavery!”

“Does he speak Arabic?” someone asked.

One of his captors prodded him, and in Arabic he said, “In the name of God the merciful, the compassionate, I speak Arabic, also Turkic, Mongolian, Ulu, Tibetan, and Chinese,” and he began to chant the first chapter of the Quran as far as he remembered it, until they pulled his chain and he took this as a sign to stop. He was very thirsty.

A short, slight Arab bought him for twenty somethings. His captors seemed pleased. They handed him his clothes as he stepped down, slapped him on the back and were off. He began to put on his greasy coat, but his new owner stopped him, handing him a length of clean cotton cloth.

“Wrap that around you. Leave the other filth here.”

Surprised, Bold looked down at the last vestiges of his previous life. Dirty rags only, but they had accompanied him this far. He pulled his amulet out of them, leaving his knife hidden in a sleeve, but his owner intervened and threw it back onto the clothes.

“Come on. I know a market in Zanj where I can sell a barbarian like you for three times what I just paid. Meanwhile you can help me get ready for the voyage there. Do you understand? Help, and it will go easier for you. I’ll feed you more.”

“I understand.”

“Be sure that you do. Don’t think of trying to escape. Alexandria is a very fine city. The Mamluks keep things stricter than sharia here. They are not forgiving of slaves that try to escape. They’re orphans brought here from north of the Black Sea, men whose parents were killed by barbarians like you.”

In fact Bold himself had killed quite a few of the Golden Horde, so he nodded without comment.

His owner said, “They have been trained by Arabs in the way of Allah, and now they are more than Muslim.” He whistled at the thought. “Trained to rule Egypt apart from all lesser influences, to be true only to the sharia. You don’t want to cross them.”

Bold nodded again. “I understand.”

Crossing the Sinai was like traveling with a caravan crossing one of the deserts of the heartland, except this time Bold was walking with the slaves, in the cloud of dust at the back of the camel train. They were part of the year’s haj. Enormous numbers of camels and people had tramped over this road through the desert, and now it was a broad dusty smooth swath through rockier hills. Smaller parties going north passed by to their left. Bold had never seen so many camels.

The caravanserai were beaten and ashy. The ropes tying him to his new master’s other slaves were never untied, and they slept in circles on the ground at night. The nights were warmer than Bold was used to, and this almost made up for the heat of the days. Their master, whose name was Zeyk, kept them well watered and fed them adequately at night and at dawn, treating them about as well as his camels, Bold observed: a tradesman, taking care of the goods in his possession. Bold approved of the attitude, and did what he could to keep the bedraggled string of slaves in good form. If they all kept the pace it made the walking that much easier. One night he looked up and saw the Archer looking down on him, and he remembered his nights alone in the empty land.

They came to the Red Sea, and boarded a ship three or four times as long as the one that had brought him to Alexandria, a dhow or zambuco, people called it both. The wind always blew from the west, sometimes hard, and they hugged the western shore with their big lateen sail bellied out to the east. They made good time. Zeyk fed his string of slaves more and more, fattening them for the market. Bold happily downed the extra rice and cucumbers, and saw the sores around his ankles begin to heal. For the first time in a long time he was not perpetually hungry, and he felt like he was coming out of a fog or a dream, waking up more each day. Of course now he was a slave, but he wouldn’t always be one. Something would happen.

After a stop at a dry brown port called Massawa, one of the hajjira depots, they sailed east across the Red Sea and rounded the low red cape marking the end of Arabia, to Aden, a big seaside oasis, indeed the biggest port Bold had ever seen, a very rich town of green palms waving over ceramic roofs, citrus trees, and numberless minarets. Zeyk did not disembark his goods or slaves here, however; after a day on shore he came back shaking his head.

“Mombasa,” he said to the ship’s captain, and paid him more, and they sailed south across the strait again, around the horn and Ras Hafun, then down the coast of Zanj, sailing much farther south than Bold had ever been. The sun at noon was nearly directly overhead, and beat on them most cruelly all day, day after day, with never a cloud in the sky. The air baked as if the world were an oven. The coast appeared either dead brown or else vibrant green, nothing in between. They stopped at Mogadishu, Lamu, and Malindi, each a prosperous Arab trading port, but Zeyk only got off briefly at them.

As they sailed into Mombasa, the grandest harbor yet, they came on a fleet of giant ships, ships bigger than Bold had imagined possible. Each one was as big as a small town, with a long line of masts down its center. There were about ten of these gigantic outlandish ships, with another twenty smaller ones anchored among them. “Ah good,” said Zeyk to the zambuco’s captain and owner. “The Chinese are here.”

The Chinese! Bold had had no idea they owned such a great fleet as this one. It made sense, though. Their pagodas, their great wall; they liked to build big.

The fleet was like an archipelago. All on board the zambuco looked at the great ships, abashed and apprehensive, as if faced with seagoing gods. The large Chinese ships were as long as a dozen of the biggest dhows, and Bold counted nine masts on one of them. Zeyk saw him and nodded. “Look well. Those will soon be your home, God willing.”

The zambuco’s master brought them inshore on a breath of a breeze. The town’s waterfront was entirely occupied by the landing boats of the visitors, and after some discussion with Zeyk, the zambuco’s owner beached his craft just south of the waterfront. Zeyk and his man rolled up their robes and stepped over the freeboard into the water, and helped the whole string of slaves over the side onto land. The green water was as warm as blood, or even hotter.

Bold spotted some Chinese, wearing their characteristic red felt coats even here, where they were certainly much too warm. They wandered the market, fingering the goods on display and chattering among themselves, trading with the aid of a translator Zeyk knew. Zeyk approached and greeted him effusively, asked about direct trade with the Chinese visitors. The translator introduced him to some of the Chinese, who seemed polite, even affable, in their usual way. Bold found himself trembling slightly, perhaps from heat and hunger, perhaps from the sight of the Chinese, after all these years, on the other side of the world. Still pursuing their business.

Zeyk and his assistant led the slaves through the market. It was a riot of smell, color, and sound. People as black as pitch, their eyeballs and teeth flashing white or yellow against their skin, offered goods and bartered happily. Bold followed the others past.

And then the slave market, again in a square of its own, next to the main market, with a central auction block, so much like a lama’s dais when empty.

The locals were gathered around a sale to one side, not a full auction. They were mostly Arabs here, and often dressed in blue cloth robes and red leather shoes. Behind the market a mosque and minaret stood before rows of four- and even five-story buildings. The clamor was great, but surveying the scene, Zeyk shook his head. “We’ll wait for a private audience,” he said.

He fed the slaves barley cakes and led them to one of the big buildings next to the mosque. There some Chinese arrived with their translator, and they all went inside to an inner courtyard of the building, shaded and full of green broad-leaved plants and a burbling fountain. A room opening onto this courtyard had shelves on all its walls, with bowls and figures placed on them in an elaborate, beautiful display: Bold recognized pottery from Samarqand, and painted figurines from Persia, among Chinese white porcelain bowls painted in blue, gold leaf, and copper.

“Very elegant,” Zeyk said.

Then they were to business. The Chinese officers inspected Zeyk’s string of slaves. They spoke to the translator, and Zeyk conferred in private with the man, nodding frequently. Bold found he was sweating, though he felt cold. They were being sold to the Chinese as a single lot.

One of the Chinese strolled down the line of slaves. He looked Bold over.

“How did you get here?” he asked Bold in Chinese.

Bold gulped, waved north. “I was a trader.” His Chinese was really rusty. “The Golden Horde took me and brought me to Anatolia. Then to Alexandria, then here.”

The Chinese nodded, then moved on. Soon after the slaves were led off by Chinese sailors in trousers and short shirts, back to the waterfront. There several other strings and groups of slaves were gathered. They were stripped, washed down with fresh water, an astringent, more fresh water. They were given new robes of plain cotton, led to boats, and rowed out to the huge side of one of the great ships. Bold climbed a ladder forty-one steps up the wooden wall of the ship’s side, following a skinny black slave boy. They were taken together below the main deck, to a room near the rear of the ship. What happened in there we don’t want to tell you, but the story won’t make sense unless we do, so on to the next chapter. These things happened.

4

The ship was so big it did not rock on the waves. It was like being on an is land. The room they were kept in was low and broad, extending the width of the ship. Gratings on both sides let in air and some light, though it was dim. A hole under one grating overhung the ship’s side and served as the place of relief.

The skinny black boy looked down it as if judging whether he could escape through the hole. He spoke Arabic better than Bold, though it was not his native tongue either; he had a guttural accent that Bold had never heard before. “They trot you like derg.” He came from the hills behind the sahil, he said, staring down the hole. He stuck one foot through, then another. He wasn’t going to get through.

Then the doorlock rattled and he pulled his feet out and sprang away like an animal. Three men came in and had them all stand before them. Ship’s petty officers, Bold judged. Checking the cargo. One of them inspected the black boy closely. He nodded to the others, and they put wooden bowls of rice on the floor, and a big bamboo tube bucket of water, and left.

That was the routine for two days. The black boy, whose name was Kyu, spent much of his time looking down the shithole, at the water it seemed, or at nothing. On the third day they were led up and out to help load the ship’s cargo. It was hauled aboard on ropes running through pulleys on the masts, then guided down hatches into holds below. The loaders followed instructions from the officer of the watch, usually a big moon-faced Han. Bold learned that the hold was broken by interior walls into nine individual compartments, each several times bigger than the biggest Red Sea dhows. The slaves who had been on ships before said that would make the great ship impossible to sink; if one compartment leaked it could be emptied and repaired, or even left to flood, but the others would keep the ship afloat. It was like being on nine ships tied together.

One morning the deck overhead reverberated with the drumming of sailors’ feet, and they could feel the two giant stone anchors being raised. Big sails were hauled up on crossbeams, one for each mast. The ship began a slow stately rocking over the water, heeling slightly.

It was indeed a floating town. Hundreds lived on it; moving bags and boxes from hold to hold, Bold counted five hundred different people, and there were no doubt many more. It was astonishing how many people were aboard. Very Chinese, the slaves all agreed. The Chinese didn’t notice it was crowded, to them it was normal, no different from any other Chinese town.

The admiral of the great fleet was on their ship: Zheng He, a giant of a man, a flat-faced western Chinese, a hui as some slaves called him under their breath. Because of his presence the upper deck was crowded with officers, dignitaries, priests, and supernumeraries of every sort. Belowdecks there were a lot of black men, Zanjis and Malays, doing the hardest work.

That night four men came into the slaves’ room. One was Hua Man, Zheng’s first officer. They stopped before Kyu and grabbed him up. Hua struck him on the head with a short club. The other three pulled off the boy’s robe and separated his legs. They tied bandages tightly around his thighs and around his waist. They held the semiconscious boy up, and Hua took a small curved knife from his sleeve. He grasped the boy’s penis and pulled it out, and with a single deft slice cut off penis and balls, right next to the body. The boy groaned as Hua squeezed the bleeding wound and slipped a leather thong around it. He leaned down and inserted a slender metal plug into the wound, then pulled the thong tight and tied it off. He went to the shithole and dropped the boy’s genitals through it into the sea. Then from one of his assistants he took a wet wad of paper and held it against the wound he had made, while the others bandaged it in place. When it was secured two of them put the boy’s arms over their shoulders, and walked him out the door.

They returned with him a watch or so later, and let him lie down. Apparently they had been walking him the whole time. “Don’t let him drink,” Hua said to the cowed slaves. “If he drinks or eats in the next three days, he’ll die.”

The boy moaned through the night. The other slaves moved instinctively to the other side of the room, too scared to talk about it yet. Bold, who had gelded quite a few horses in his time, went and sat by him. The boy was perhaps ten or twelve years old. His gray face had some quality that drew Bold, and he stayed by him. For three days the boy moaned for water, but Bold didn’t give him any.

On the night of the third day the eunuchs returned. “Now we see whether he will live or die,” Hua said. They held up the boy, took off the bandages, and with a swift jerk Hua pulled the plug from the boy’s wound. Kyu yelped and groaned as a hard stream of urine sprayed out of him into a porcelain chamber pot held in place by the second eunuch.

“Good,” Hua said to the silent slaves. “Keep him clean. Remind him to take out the plug to relieve himself, and to get it back in quick, until he heals.”

They left and locked the door.

Now the Abyssinian slaves would talk to the boy. “If you keep it clean it will heal right up. Urine cleans it too, so that’s all right, I mean, if you wet yourself when you go.”

“Lucky they didn’t do it to all of us.”

“Who says they won’t?”

“They don’t do it to men. Too many die of it. Only boys can sustain the loss.”

The next morning Bold led the boy to the shithole and helped him to get the bandage off, so he could pull the plug and pee again. Then Bold put it back for him, showing him where it went, trying to be delicate as the boy whimpered. “You have to have the plug, or the tube will close up and you’ll die.”

The boy lay on his cotton shift, feverish. The others tried not to look at the horrible wound, but it was hard not to see it once in a while.

“How could they do it?” one said in Arabic, when the boy was sleeping.

“They’re eunuchs themselves,” one of the Abyssinians said. “Hua is a eunuch. The admiral himself is a eunuch.”

“You’d think they’d be the ones to know.”

“They know and that’s why they do it. They hate us all. They rule the Chinese emperor, and they hate everyone else. You can see how it will be,” waving around at the immense ship. “They’ll castrate all of us. It’s the end coming.”

“You Christians like to say that, but so far it’s only been true for you.”

“God took us first to shorten our suffering. Your turn will come.”

“It’s not God I fear, but Admiral Zheng He, the Three Jewel Eunuch. He and the Yongle Emperor were friends when they were boys, and the emperor ordered him castrated when they were both thirteen. Can you believe it? Now the eunuchs do it to all the boys they take prisoner.”

In the days that followed Kyu got hotter and hotter, and was seldom conscious. Bold sat by his side and put wet rags in his mouth, reciting sutras in his mind. The last time he had seen his own son, almost thirty years before, the boy had been about this age. This one’s lips were gray and parched, his dark skin dull, and very dry and hot. Bold had never felt anyone that hot who had not died, so it was probably a waste of time for all concerned; best to let the poor sexless creature slip away, no doubt. But he kept giving him water anyway. He recalled the boy looking around the ship as they had loaded it, his gaze intense and searching. Now the body lay there looking like some sad little African girl, sick to death from an infection in her loins.

But the fever passed. Kyu ate more and more. Even when he was active again, however, he spoke little compared to before. His eyes were not the same either; they stared at people like a bird’s eyes do, as if they did not quite believe anything they saw. Bold realized that the boy had traveled out of his body, gone into the bardo and come back someone else. All different. That black boy was dead; this one started anew.

“What is your name now?” he asked him.

“Kyu,” the boy said, but unsurprised, as if he didn’t remember telling Bold before.

“Welcome to this life, Kyu.”

Sailing on the open ocean was a strange way to travel. The skies flew by overhead, but it never looked like they had moved anywhere. Bold tried to figure what a day’s ride was for the fleet, wondering if it was faster in the long run than horses, but he couldn’t do it. He could only watch the weather and wait.

Twenty-three days later the fleet sailed into Calicut, a city much bigger than any of the ports of Zanj, as big as Alexandria, or bigger.

Despite the city’s great size, all activity stopped at the arrival of the Chinese fleet. Bold and Kyu and the Ethiopians looked through their grating at the shouting crowds, all those people in their colors waving their arms overhead in awe.

“These Chinese will conquer the whole world.”

“Then the Mongols will conquer China,” Bold said.

He saw Kyu watching the throng on shore. The boy’s expression was that of a preta, unburied at death. Certain demon masks had that look, the old Bön look, like Bold’s father when enraged, staring into a person’s soul and saying I’m taking this along with me, you can’t stop me and you’d better not try. Bold shuddered to see such a face on a mere boy.

They were put to work unloading cargo into boats, and taking other loads out of boats onto the ship, but none of the slaves were sold, and only once were they taken ashore, to help break up a mass of cloth bolts and carry them to the long low dugouts being used to transfer goods from the beaches to the treasure fleet.

During this work Zheng He came ashore in his personal barge, which was painted, gilded, and encrusted with jewelry and porcelain mosaics, and had a gold statue facing forward from the bow. Zheng stepped down a walkway from the barge, wearing golden robes embroidered in red and blue. His men had laid a carpet strip on the beach for him to walk on, but he left it to come over and observe the loading of the new cargo. He was truly an immense man, tall, broad, and with a deep draft fore and aft. He had a broad face, not Han; and a eunuch; he was all the Abyssinians had claimed. Bold watched him out of the corner of his eye, and then noticed that Kyu was standing bolt upright staring at him too, work forgotten, eyes fixed like a hawk’s on a mouse. Bold grabbed the boy and hauled him back to work. “Come on, Kyu, we’re chained together here, move or I’ll knock you down and drag you across the ground. I don’t want to get in trouble here, Tara knows what happens to a slave in trouble with such people as these.”

From Calicut they sailed south to Lanka. Here the slaves were left aboard the ship, while the soldiers went ashore and disappeared for several days. The behavior of the officers left behind made Bold think the detachment was out on a campaign, and he watched them as closely as he could as the days passed and they grew more nervous. Bold could not guess what they might do if Zheng He did not return, but he did not think they would sail away. Indeed the fire officers were hard at work laying out their array of incendiaries, when the admiral’s barge and the other boats came flying back out of Lanka’s inner harbor, and their men came aboard shouting triumphantly. Not only had they fought their way out of an inland trap, they said, but they had captured the treacherous local usurper who had laid the trap, and taken the rightful king as well—though there seemed to be some confusion in the story as to which was which, and why they should abduct the rightful king as well as the usurper. Most amazing of all, they said that the rightful king had had in his possession the island’s holiest relic, a tooth of the Buddha, called the Dalada. Zheng held up the little gold reliquary to show all aboard this prize. An eyetooth, apparently. Crew, passengers, slaves, all spontaneously roared their acclaim, in throat-tearing shouts that went on and on.

“This is a great bit of fortune,” Bold told Kyu when the awful noise died down, pressing his hands together and reciting the Descent Into Lanka Sutra. In fact it was so much good fortune it frightened him. And there was no doubt that fright had been a big part of the roar of the crew. The Buddha had blessed Lanka, it was one of his special lands, with a branch of his Bodhi Tree growing in its soil, and his mineralized tears still falling off the sides of the sacred mountain in the island’s center, the one that was topped by Adam’s footprint. Surely it was not right to take the Dalada away from its rightful place in such a holy land. There was an affront in the act that could not be denied.

As they sailed east, the story circulated through the ship that the Dalada was proof of the deposed king’s right to rule; it would be returned to Lanka when the Yongle Emperor determined the rights of the case. The slaves were reassured by this news.

“So the emperor of China will decide who rules that island,” Kyu said. Bold nodded. The Yongle Emperor had himself come to the throne in a violent coup, so it was not clear to Bold which of the two Lankan contenders he would favor. Meanwhile, they had the Dalada on board. “It’s good,” he said to Kyu after thinking it over some more. “Nothing bad can happen to us on this voyage, anyway.”

And so it proved. Black squalls, bearing directly down on them, unaccountably evaporated just as they struck. Giant seas rocked all the horizons, great dragon tails visibly whipping up the waves, while they sailed serenely over a moving flat calm at their center. They even sailed through the Malacca Strait without hindrance from Palembanque, or, north of that, from the myriad pirates of Cham, or the Japanese wakou—though, as Kyu pointed out, no pirate in his right mind would challenge a fleet so huge and powerful, tooth of the Buddha or not.

Then as they sailed into the South China Sea, someone saw the Dalada floating about the ship at night, as if, he said, it were a little candle flame. “How does he know it wasn’t a candle flame?” Kyu asked. But the next morning the sky dawned red. Black clouds rolled over the horizon in a line from the south, in a way that reminded Bold strongly of the storm that had killed Temur.

Driving rain struck, then a violent wind that turned the sea white. Shooting up and down in their dim little room, Bold realized that such a storm was even more frightening at sea than on land. The ship’s astrologer cried out that a great dragon under the sea was angry, and thrashing the water under them. Bold joined the other slaves in holding to the gratings and looking out their little holes to see if they could catch sight of spine or claw or snout of this dragon, but the spume flying over the white water obscured the surface. Bold thought he might have seen part of a dark green tail in the foam.

Up on the great poop deck the officers and astrologers performed some sort of ceremony of appeasement, and Zheng He himself could be heard calling out to Tianfei, the Chinese goddess of safety at sea.

“Let the dark water dragons go down into the sea, and leave us free from calamity! Humbly, respectfully, piously, we offer up this flagon of wine, offer it once and offer it again, pouring out this fine, fragrant wine! That our sails may meet favorable winds, that the sea-lanes be peaceful, that the all-seeing and all-hearing spirit-soldiers of winds and seasons, the wave-quellers and swell-drinkers, the airborne immortals, the god of the year, and the protectress of our ship, the Celestial Consort, brilliant, divine, marvelous, responsive, mysterious Tianfei might save us!”

Looking up through the dripping cracks in the deck Bold could see a composite vision of sailors watching this ceremony, mouths all open wide shouting against the wind’s roar. Their guard yelled at them, “Pray to Tianfei, pray to the Celestial Consort, the sailor’s only friend! Pray for her intercession! All of you! Much more of this wind and the ship will be torn apart!”

“Tianfei preserve us,” Bold chanted, squeezing Kyu to indicate he should do the same. The black boy said nothing. He pointed up at the forward masts, however, which they could see through the hatchway grating, and Bold looked up and saw red filaments of light dancing between the masts: balls of light, like Chinese lanterns without the paper or the fire, glowing at the top of the mast and over it, illuminating the flying rain and even the black bottoms of the clouds that were peeling by overhead. The otherworldly beauty of the sight tempered the terror of it; Bold and everyone else moved outside the realm of terror, it was too strange and awesome a sight to worry any longer about life or death. All the men were crying out, praying at the top of their lungs. Tianfei coalesced out of the dancing red light, her figure gleaming brightly over them, and the wind diminished all at once. The seas calmed around them. Tianfei dissipated, ran redly out the rigging and back into the air. Now their grateful voices could be heard above the wind. Whitecaps still toppled and rolled, but all at a distance from them, halfway to the horizon.

“Tianfei!” Bold shouted with the rest. “Tianfei!”

Zheng He stood at the poop rail and raised both hands in a light rain. He shouted “Tianfei! Tianfei has saved us!” and they all bellowed it with him, filled with joy in the same way the air had been filled with the red light of the goddess. Later the wind blew hard again, but they had no fear.

How the rest of the voyage home went is not really material; nothing of note happened, they made it back safely, and what happened after that you can find out by reading the next chapter.

5

Storm-tossed, Tianfei-protected, the treasure fleet sailed into a big estuary. Ashore, behind a great seawall, stood the rooftops of a vast city. Even the part visible from the ship was bigger than all the cities Bold had ever seen put together—all the bazaars of central Asia, the Indian cities Temur had razed, the ghost towns of Frengistan, the white seaside towns of Zanj, Calicut—all combined would have occupied only a quarter or a third of the land covered by this forest of rooftops, this steppe of rooftops, extending all the way to distant hills visible to the west.

The slaves stood in the waist of the big ship, silent in the midst of the cheering Chinese, who cried out. “Tianfei, Celestial Consort, thank you!” and “Hangzhou, my home, never thought to be seen again!” “Home, wife, new year festival!” “We happy, happy men, to have traveled all the way to the other side of the world and then make it back home!” and so on.

The ships’ huge anchor stones were dropped over the side. Where the Chientang River entered the estuary there was a powerful tidal bore, and any ship not securely anchored could be swept far up into the shallows, or flushed out to sea. When the ships were anchored the work of unloading began. This was a massive operation, and once as he ate rice between watches at the hoist, Bold noted that there were no horses, camels, water buffalo, mules, or asses to help with the job, or with any other job in the city: just thousands of laborers, endless lines of them, moving the food and goods in, or taking out the refuse and manure, mostly by canal—in and out, in and out, as if the city were a monstrous imperial body lying on the land, being fed and relieved by all its subjects together.

Many days passed in the labor of unloading, and Bold and Kyu saw a bit of the harbor Kanpu, and Hangzhou itself, when manning barges on trips to state warehouses under the southern hill compound that had once been the imperial palace, hundreds of years before. Now lesser aristocrats and even high-ranking bureaucrats and eunuchs lived in the old palace grounds. North of these extended the walled enclosure of the old city, impossibly crowded with warrens of wooden buildings that were five, six, and even seven stories tall—old buildings that overhung the canals, people’s bedding spread out from balconies to dry in the sun, grass growing out of the roofs.

Bold and Kyu gawked up from the canals while unloading the barges. Kyu looked with his bird’s gaze, seeming unsurprised, unimpressed, unafraid. “There are a lot of them,” he conceded. Constantly he was asking Bold the Chinese words for things, and in the attempt to answer Bold learned many more words himself.

When the unloading was done, the slaves from their ship were gathered together and taken to Phoenix Hill, “the hill of the foreigners,” and sold to a local merchant named Shen. No slave market here, no auction, no fuss. They never learned what they had been sold for, or who in particular had owned them during their sea passage. Possibly it had been Zheng He himself.

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.

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 colored light, so that even Kyu raced about drunk on the sights and smells, and on drinks salvaged from near-empty cups. They drank lichee, honey and ginger punch, papaw 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 soufflés, 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 abbatoir, 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 gotten 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.

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 mare’s 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, colored 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 toward the fire, some toward their own neighborhoods. As they hurried over to the restaurant Bold and Kyu saw for the first time a fire brigade. Each neighborhood 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 practiced. Bold and Kyu ran behind Shen up to the burning neighborhood, 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 semihuman in fact, which was the usual attitude of the Chinese toward black slaves in the city.

Bold spent more and more time working for I-Li. She appeared to prefer him on her trips out, and he hustled to keep up with her, maneuvering 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, jewelry, 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.

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 harbored practicing 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 trelliswork 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 honored 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 through 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 for her. 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 practiced. 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 week, Bold learned a lot about Hangzhou. He learned that 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.”

Stunned, Bold scrambled to his feet, whispering “Why, why, why, why? We had a good thing here, you should have asked me first if I wanted any part of this!”

“I want to escape,” Kyu said, “and I need you to do it. I need a master to get around.”

“Get around where?”

But now Bold was following Kyu through the silent household, stepping blindly with complete assurance, so well had he come to know this building, the first one he had ever lived in. He liked it. Kyu led him into the kitchen, took a branch sticking out of the smoldering stove fire; he must have put it in before rousing Bold, for the pitchy knot at the end was now blazing. “We’re going north to the capital,” Kyu said over his shoulder as he led Bold outdoors. “I’m going to kill the emperor.”

“What!”

“More about that later,” Kyu said, and applied the flaming torch to a bundle of rush and kindling and balls of wax he had put against the walls, in a corner. When it had caught fire he ran outside, and Bold followed him appalled. Kyu lit another bundle of kindling against the house next door, and placed the brand against a third house, and all the while Bold stayed right behind him, too shocked to think properly. He would have stopped the boy if it weren’t for the fact that Shen was already murdered. Kyu’s and Bold’s lives were forfeit; setting the district on fire was probably their only chance, as it might burn the body so that the killing would not show. It also might be assumed that some slaves had been burned up entire, locked in their room as they were. “Hopefully they’ll all burn,” Kyu said, echoing this thought.

We are as shocked as you are by this development, and don’t know what happened next, but no doubt the next chapter will tell us.

6

They ran north up the dark alleys paralleling the service canal. Behind them the alarm was being raised already, people screaming, fire bells ringing, a fresh dawn wind blowing in off West Lake.

“Did you take some cash?” Bold thought to ask.

“Many strings,” Kyu said. He had a full bag under his arm.

They would need to get as far away as they could, as quickly as possible. With a black like Kyu it would be hard to be inconspicuous. Necessarily he would have to remain a young black eunuch slave, Bold therefore his master. Bold would have to do all the talking; this was why Kyu had brought him along. This was why he had not murdered Bold along with the rest of the household.

“What about I-Li! Did you kill her too?”

“No. Her bedroom has a window. She’ll do fine.”

Bold wasn’t so sure; widows had a hard time of it; she’d end up like Wei Big Knife, on the street cooking meals on a brazier for passersby. Although for her that might be opportunity enough.

Wherever there were a lot of slaves, there were usually quite a few blacks. The canal boats were often moved along through the countryside by slaves, turning capstans or pulling their ropes directly, like mules or camels. Possibly the two of them could take on such a role and hide in it; he could pretend to be a slave himself—but no, they needed a master to account for them. If they could slip onto the end of a rope line… He couldn’t believe he was thinking about joining a canal boat rope line, when he had been bussing tables in a restaurant! It made him so angry at Kyu that he hissed.

And now Kyu needed him. Bold could abandon the boy and he would stand a much better chance of slipping into obscurity, among the many traders and Buddhist monks and beggars on the roads of China; even their famous bureaucracy of local yamens and district officials could not keep track of all the poor people slipping around in the hills and the backcountry. While with a black boy he stood out like a festival clown with his monkey.

But he was not going to abandon Kyu, not really, so he just hissed. On they ran through the outer city, Kyu pulling Bold by the hand from time to time and urging him in Arabic to hurry. “You know this is what you really wanted, you’re a great Mongol warrior, you told me, a barbarian of the steppes, feared by all the peoples, you were only just pretending not to mind being someone’s kitchen slave, you’re good at not thinking about things, about not seeing things, but it’s all an act, of course you always knew, you just pretend not to know, you wanted to escape all the while.” Bold was amazed to think anyone could have misunderstood him that completely.

The suburbs of Hangzhou were much greener than the old central quarter, every household compound marked by trees, even small mulberry orchards. Behind them the fire alarm bells were waking the whole city, the day starting in a panic. From a slight rise they could look back between walls and see the lakefront aglow; the entire district appeared to have caught fire as quickly as Kyu’s little balls of wax and kindling, fanned by a good stiff west wind. Bold wondered if Kyu had waited for a windy night to make his break. The thought chilled him. He had known the boy was clever, but this ruthlessness he had never suspected, despite the preta look he sometimes had, which reminded Bold of Temur’s look—some intensity of focus, some totemic aspect, his raptor nafs looking out no doubt. Each person was in some crucial sense his or her nafs, and Bold had already concluded Kyu’s was a falcon, hooded and tied. Temur’s had been an eagle on high, stooping to tear at the world.

So he had seen some sign, had had some idea. And there was that closed aspect of Kyu too, the sense that his true thoughts were many rooms away, ever since his castration. Of course that would have had its effects. The original boy was gone, leaving the nafs to negotiate with some new person.

They hurried through the northernmost subprefecture of Hangzhou, and out the gate in the last city wall. The road rose higher into the Su Tung-po Hills, and they got a view back to the lakefront district, the flames less visible in the dawn, more a matter of clouds of black smoke, no doubt throwing sparks east to spread the blaze. “This fire will kill a lot of people!” Bold exclaimed.

“They’re Chinese,” Kyu said. “There’s more than enough to take their place.”

Walking hard to the north, paralleling the Grand Canal on its west side, they saw again how crowded China was. Up here a whole country of rice paddies and villages fed the great city on the coast. Farmers were out in the morning light,

“I don’t see why they all don’t move to the city,” Kyu said. “I would.”

“They never think of it,” Bold said, marveling that Kyu would suppose other people thought like he did. “Besides, their families are here.”

They could just see the Grand Canal through the trees lining it, some two or three li to the east. Mounds of earth and timber stood by it, marking repairs or improvements. They kept their distance, hoping to avoid any army detachments or prefecture posses that might be patrolling the canal on this unfortunate day.

“Do you want a drink of water?” Kyu asked. “Do you think we can drink it here?”

He was very solicitous, Bold saw; but of course now he had to be. Near the Grand Canal the sight of Kyu would probably pass for normal, but Bold had no paperwork, and local prefects or canal officials might very well ask him to produce some. So neither the Grand Canal nor the country away from it would work all the time. They would have to slip on and off it as they went, depending on who was around. They might even have to move by night, which would slow them down and be more dangerous. Then again it seemed unlikely that all the hordes of people moving up and down the canal and its corridor were being checked for papers, or had them either.

So they moved over into the crowd walking the canal road, and Kyu carried his bundle and wore his chains, and fetched water for Bold, and pretended ignorance of any but the simplest commands. He could do a scarily believable imitation of an idiot. Gangs of men hauled barges, or turned the capstans that raised and lowered the lock gates that interrupted the flow of the canal at regular intervals. Pairs of men, master and servant or slave, were common. Bold ordered Kyu about, but was too worried to enjoy it. Who knew what trouble Kyu might cause in the north. Bold didn’t know what he felt, it changed minute by minute. He still couldn’t believe Kyu had forced this escape on him. He hissed again; he had life-or-death power over the boy, yet he remained afraid of him.

At a new little paved square, next to locks made of new raw timber, a local yamen and his deputies were stopping every fourth or fifth group. Suddenly they waved at Bold, and when he led Kyu over, suddenly hopeless, they asked to see his papers. The yamen was accompanied by a higher official in robes, a prefect wearing a patch with twinned sparrow hawks embroidered on it. The prefects’ symbols of rank were easy to read—the lowest rank showed quail pecking the ground, the highest, cranes sporting over the clouds. So this was a fairly senior figure here, possibly on the hunt for the arsonist of Hangzhou, and Bold was trying to think of lies, his body tensing to run, when Kyu reached into his bag and gave Bold a packet of papers tied with a silk ribbon. Bold undid the ribbon’s knot and gave the packet to the yamen, wondering what it said. He knew the Tibetan letters for “Om Mani Padme Hum,” as who could not with them carved on every rock in the Himalaya, but other than that he was illiterate, and the Chinese alphabet looked like chicken tracks, each letter different from all the rest.

The yamen and the sparrow hawk official read the top two sheets, then handed them back to Bold, who tied them up and gave them to Kyu without looking at him.

“Take care around Nanjing,” Sparrow Hawk said. “There are bandits in the hills just south of it.”

“We’ll stick to the canal,” Bold said.

When they were out of sight of the patrol, Bold struck Kyu hard for the first time. “What was that! Why didn’t you tell me about the papers! How can you expect me to know what to say to people?”

“I was afraid you would take them and leave me.”

“What do you mean? If they say I have a black slave, then I need a black slave, don’t I? What do they say?”

“They say you are a horse merchant from the treasure fleet, traveling to Nanjing to complete business in horses. And that I am your slave.”

“Where did you get them?”

“A rice boatman who does them wrote one for me.”

“So he knows our plans?”

Kyu said nothing, and Bold wondered if the boatman too was dead. The boy seemed capable of anything. Getting a key, getting papers forged, preparing the little fireballs… If the time came when he thought he didn’t need Bold, Bold would no doubt wake up one morning with a slit throat. He would most certainly be safer on his own.

As they trudged past the barge ropelines, he brooded on this. He could abandon the boy to whatever fate befell him—more enslavement, or quick death as a runaway, or slow death as an arsonist and murderer—and then work his way north and west to the great wall and the steppes beyond, and thence home.

From the way Kyu avoided his gaze and slunk behind him, it was apparent that he knew more or less what Bold was thinking. So for a day or two Bold ordered him about harshly, and Kyu jumped at every word.

But Bold did not leave him, and Kyu did not slit Bold’s throat. Thinking it over, Bold had to admit to himself that his karma was somehow tied up with the boy’s. He was part of it somehow. Very possibly he was there to help the boy.

“Listen,” Bold said one day as they walked. “You can’t go to the capital and kill the emperor. It isn’t possible. And why would you want to anyway?”

Hunched, sullen, the boy eventually said in Arabic, “To bring them down.”

Again the term he used came from camel driving.

“To what?”

“To stop them.”

“But killing the emperor, even if you could, wouldn’t do that. They’d just replace him with another one, and it would all go on the same as before. That’s how it works.”

Much trudging, and then: “They wouldn’t fight over who got to be the new emperor?”

“Over the succession? Sometimes that happens. It depends on who’s in line to succeed. I don’t know about that anymore. This emperor, the Yongle, is a usurper himself. He took it away from his nephew, or uncle. But usually the eldest son has a clear right. Or the emperor designates a different successor. In any case the dynasty continues. It isn’t often there is a problem.”

“But there might be?”

“There might be and there might not. Meanwhile they’d be staying up nights figuring out better ways to torture you. What they did to you on the ship would be nothing compared to it. The Ming emperors have the best torturers in the world, everyone knows that.”

More trudging. “They have the best everything in the world,” the boy complained. “The best canals, the best cities, the best ships, the best armies. They sail around the seas and everywhere they go people kowtow to them. They land and see the tooth of the Buddha, they take it with them. They install a king who will serve them, and move on and do the same everywhere they go. They’ll conquer the whole world, cut all the boys, and all the children will be theirs, and the whole world will end up Chinese.”

“Maybe so,” Bold said. “It’s possible. There certainly are a lot of them. And those treasure ships are impressive, no doubt of that. But you can’t sail into the heart of the world, the steppes where I came from. And the people out there are much tougher than the Chinese. They’ve conquered the Chinese before. So things should be all right. And listen, no matter what happens, you can’t do anything about it.”

“We’ll see about that in Nanjing.”

It was crazy, of course. The boy was deluded. Nevertheless there was that look that came into his eye—inhuman, totemic, his nafs looking out at things—the sight of which gave Bold a chill down the chakra nerve right to the first center, behind his balls. Aside from the raptor nafs, which Kyu had been born with, there was something scary in the hatred of a eunuch, something impersonal and uncanny. Bold had no doubt that he was traveling with some kind of power, some African witch child or shaman, a tulku, who had been captured out of the jungles and mutilated, so that his power had been redoubled, and was now turning to revenge. Revenge, against the Chinese! Despite his belief that it was crazy, Bold was curious to see what might come of that.

Nanjing was bigger even than Hangzhou. Bold had to give up being amazed. It was also the home harbor for the great treasure fleet. An entire city of shipbuilders had been established down by the Yangzi River estuary, the shipyards including seven enormous dry docks running perpendicular to the river, behind high dams with guards patrolling their gates so that no one could sabotage them. Thousands of shipwrights, carpenters, and sailmakers lived in quarters behind the dry docks, and this sprawling town of workshops, called Longjiang, included scores of inns for visiting laborers, and sailors ashore. Evening discussions in these inns concerned mainly the fate of the treasure fleet and of Zheng He, who currently was occupied building a temple to Tianfei, while he worked on another great expedition to the west.

It was easy for Bold and Kyu to slip into this scene as small-time trader and slave, and they rented sleeping spaces on the mattresses at the South Sea Inn. Here in the evenings they learned of the construction of a new capital up in Beiping, a project which was absorbing a great deal of the Yongle Emperor’s attention and cash. Beiping, a provincial northern outpost except during the Mongol dynasties, had been Zhu Di’s first power base before he usurped the Dragon Throne and became the Yongle Emperor, and he was now rewarding it by making it the imperial capital once again, changing its name from Beiping (“northern peace”) to Beijing (“northern capital”). Hundreds of thousands of workers had been sent north from Nanjing to build a truly enormous palace, indeed from all accounts the whole city was being made into a kind of palace—the Great Within, it was called, forbidden to any but the emperor and his concubines and eunuchs. Outside this precious ground was to be a larger imperial city, also new.

All this construction was said to be opposed by the Confucian bureaucracy who ruled the country for the emperor. The new capital, like the treasure fleet, was a huge expense, an imperial extravagance that the officials disliked, for it bled the country of its wealth. They must not have seen the treasures being unloaded, or did not believe them equal to what had been spent to gain them. They understood Confucius to say that the wealth of the empire ought to be land-based, a matter of expanded agriculture and assimilation of border people, in the traditional style. All this innovation, this shipbuilding and travel, seemed to them to be manifestations of the growing power of the imperial eunuchs, whom they hated as their rivals in influence. The talk in the sailors’ inns supported the eunuchs, for the most part, as the sailors were loyal to sailing, to the fleet and Zheng He, and the other eunuch admirals. But the officials didn’t agree.

Bold saw the way Kyu picked up on this talk, and even asked further questions to learn more. After only a few days in Nanjing, he had found out all kinds of gossip Bold had not heard: the emperor had been thrown by a horse given to him by the Temurid emissaries, a horse once owned by Temur himself (Bold wondered which horse it was; strange to think an animal had lived so long, though on reflection he realized it had been less than two years since Temur’s death). Then lightning had struck the new palace in Beijing and burned it all down. The emperor had released an edict blaming himself for this disfavor from heaven, causing fear and confusion and criticism. In the wake of these events, certain bureaucrats had openly criticized the monstrous expenditures of the new capital and the treasure fleet, draining the treasury surplus just as famine and rebellion in the south cried out for imperial relief. Very quickly the Yongle Emperor had tired of this criticism, and had had one of the most prominent critics exiled from China, and the rest banished to the provinces.

“That’s all bad,” one sailor said, a little bit the worse for drink, “but worst of all for the emperor is the fact that he’s sixty years old. There’s no help for that, even when you’re emperor. It may even be worse for him.”

Everyone nodded. “Bad, very bad.” “He won’t be able to keep the eunuchs and officials from fighting.” “We could see a civil war before too long.”

“To Beijing,” Kyu said to Bold.

But before they left, Kyu insisted they go up to Zheng He’s house, a rambling mansion with a front door carved to look like the stern of one of his treasure ships. The rooms inside (seventy-two, the sailors said) were each supposed to be decorated to resemble a different Muslim country, and in the courtyard the gardens were planted to resemble Yunnan.

Bold complained all the way up the hill. “He will never see a poor trader and his slave. His servants will kick us away from the door, this is ridiculous!”

It happened just as Bold had predicted. The gatekeeper sized them up and told them to be on their way.

“All right,” Kyu said. “Off to the temple for Tianfei.”

This was a grand complex of buildings, built by Zheng He to honor the Celestial Consort, and to thank her for her miraculous rescue of them in the storm.

There in the midst of the construction, conversing with men who looked no better than Bold or Kyu, was Zheng He himself. He looked at Kyu as they approached, and paused to talk to him. Bold shook his head to see this example of the boy’s power revealing itself.

Zheng nodded as Kyu explained they had been part of his last expedition. “You looked familiar.” He frowned, however, when Kyu went on to explain that they wanted to serve the emperor in Beijing.

“Zhu Di is off campaigning in the west. On horseback, with his rheumatism.” He sighed. “He needs to understand that the fleet’s way of conquering is best. Arrive with the ships, start trading, install a local ruler who will cooperate, and for the rest, simply let them be. Trade with them. Make sure the man at the top is friendly. There are sixteen countries sending tribute to the emperor as a direct result of the voyages of our fleet. Sixteen!”

“It’s hard to get the fleet to Mongolia,” Kyu said, frightening Bold. But Zheng He laughed.

“Yes, the Great Without is high and dry. We have to convince the emperor to forget the Mongols, and look to the sea.”

“We want to do that,” Kyu said earnestly. “In Beijing we will argue the case every chance we get. Will you give us introductions to the eunuch officials at the palace? I could join them, and my master here would be good in the imperial stables.”

Zheng looked amused. “It won’t make any difference. But I’ll help you for old times’ sake, and wish you luck.”

He shook his head as he wrote a memorial, his brush wielded like a little hand broom. What happened to him afterward is well known: grounded by the emperor, given a landlocked military command, spending his days constructing the nine-storied porcelain pagoda honoring Tianfei; we imagine he missed his voyages over the distant seas of the world, but cannot say for sure. But we do know what happened to Bold and Kyu, and we will tell you in the next chapter.

7

Beijing was raw in every sense, the wind frigid and damp, the wood of the buildings still white and dripping with sap, the smell of pitch and turned earth and wet cement everywhere. It was crowded, too, though not like Hangzhou or Nanjing, so that Bold and Kyu felt cosmopolitan and sophisticated, as if this huge construction site were beneath them somehow. A lot of people here had that attitude.

They made their way to the eunuch clinic named in Zheng He’s memorial, located just south of the Meridian Gate, the southern entrance to the Forbidden City. Kyu presented his introduction, and he and Bold were whisked inside to see the clinic’s head eunuch. “A reference from Zheng He will take you far in the palace,” this eunuch told them, “even if Zheng himself is having troubles with the imperial officials. I know the palace’s Director of Ceremonies, Wu Han, very well, and will introduce you. He is an old friend of Zheng’s, and needs eunuchs in the Literary Depth Pavilion for rescript writing. But wait, you are not literate, are you. But Wu also administers the eunuch priests maintained to attend to the spiritual welfare of the concubines.”

“My master here is a lama,” Kyu said, indicating Bold. “He has trained me in all the mysteries of the bardo.”

The eunuch regarded Bold skeptically. “Be that as it may, one way or another the memorial from Zheng will get you in. He has recommended you very highly. But you will need your pao, of course.”

“Pao?” Kyu said. “My precious?”

“You know.” The eunuch gestured at Kyu’s groin. “It is necessary to prove your status, even after I have inspected and certified you. Also, more importantly perhaps, when you die you will be buried with it on your chest, to fool the gods. You don’t want to come back as a she-mule, after all.” He glanced at Kyu curiously. “You don’t have yours?”

Kyu shook his head.

“Well, we have many here you can choose from, left over from patients who died. I doubt you can tell black from Chinese after the pickling!” He laughed and led them down a hall.

His name was Jiang, he said; he was an ex-sailor from Fukian, and was puzzled that anyone young and fit would ever leave the coast to come to a place like Beijing. “But as black as you are, you’ll be like the quillin that the fleet brought back last time for the emperor, the spotted unicorn with the long neck. I think it also was from Zanj. Do you know it?”

“It was a big fleet,” Kyu said.

“I see. Well, Wu and the other palace eunuchs love exotics like you and the quillin, and so does the emperor, so you’ll be fine. Keep quiet and don’t get mixed up in any conspiracies, and you’ll do well.”

In a cool storage building they went into a room filled with sealed porcelain and glass jars, and found a black penis for Kyu to take with him. The head eunuch then inspected him personally, to make sure he was what he said he was, and then brushed his certification onto the introduction from Zheng, and put his chop to it in red ink. “Some people try to fake it, of course, but if they’re caught they get it handed to them, and then they aren’t faking it anymore, are they. You know, I noticed they didn’t put in a quill when they cut you. You should have a quill to keep it open, and then the plug goes in the quill. It’s much more comfortable that way. They should have done that when you were cut.”

“I seem to be all right without it,” Kyu said. He held the glass jar up against the light, looking closely at his new pao. Bold shuddered and led the way out of the creepy room.

While further arrangements were made in the palace, Kyu was assigned a bed in the dorm, and Bold was offered a room in the clinic’s men’s building. “Temporary, you understand. Unless you care to join us in the main building. Great opportunities for advancement…”

“No thank you,” Bold said politely. But he saw that many men were coming in to request the operation, desperate for a job. When there was famine in the countryside there was no shortage of applicants, they even had to turn people away. As with everything in China, there was a whole bureaucracy at work here, the palace requiring as it did several thousand eunuchs for its operation. This clinic was just a small part of that.

So they were launched in Beijing. Indeed, things had gone so well that Bold wondered if Kyu, no longer needing Bold as he had during their journey north, would now abandon him—move into the Forbidden City and disappear from his life. The idea made him sad, despite all.

But Kyu, after being assigned to the concubines of Zhu Gaozhi, the emperor’s eldest legitimate son and the Heir Designate, asked Bold to come with him and apply to be a stabler for the heir. “I still need your help,” he said simply, looking like the boy who had boarded the treasure ship so long ago.

“I’ll try,” Bold said.

Kyu was able to ask the favor of an interview from Zhu Gaozhi’s stablemaster, and Bold went in and displayed his expertise with some big beautiful horses, and was given a job. Mongolians had the same kind of advantage in the stable that eunuchs had in the palace.

It was easy work, Bold found; the Heir Designate was an indolent man, his horses seldom ridden, so that the stablers had to exercise them on a track, and in the new parks of the palace grounds. The horses were all very big and white, but slow and weak-winded; Bold saw now why the Chinese could never go north of their Great Wall and attack the Mongols to any great effect, despite their stupendous numbers. Mongols lived on their horses, and lived off them too—made their clothes and shelter from their felt and wool, drank their milk and blood, ate them when they had to. Mongolian horses were the life of the people; whereas these big clodhoppers might as well have been driving millstones in a circle with blinders on, for all the wind and spirit they had.

It turned out Zhu Gaozhi spent a lot of time in Nanjing, where he had been brought up, visiting his mother the Empress Xu. So as the months passed, Bold and Kyu made the trip between the two capitals many times, traveling on barges on the Grand Canal, or on horseback beside it. Zhu Gaozhi preferred Nanjing to Beijing, for obvious reasons of climate and culture; late at night, after drinking vast quantities of rice wine, he could be heard declaring to his intimates that he would move the capital back to Nanjing on the very day of his father’s death. This made the enormous labor of building Beijing look odd to them when they were there.

But more and more they were in Nanjing. Kyu helped run the heir’s harem, and spent most of his time inside their enclosure. He never told Bold a thing about what he did in there, except one time, when he came out to the stables late at night, a bit drunk. This was almost the only time Bold saw him anymore, and he looked forward to these nocturnal visits, despite the way they made him nervous.

On this occasion Kyu remarked that his main task these days was to find husbands for those of the emperor’s concubines who had reached the age of thirty without ever having relations with the emperor. Zhu Di farmed these out to his son, with instructions to marry them off.

“Would you like a wife?” Kyu asked Bold slyly. “A thirty-year-old virgin, expertly trained?”

“No thanks,” Bold said uneasily. He already had an arrangement with one of the servant women in the compound in Nanking, and though he supposed Kyu was joking, it made him feel strange.

Usually when Kyu made these midnight visits out to the stables, he was deep in thought. He did not hear things Bold said to him, or answered oddly, as if replying to some other question. Bold had heard that the young eunuch was well liked, knew many people in the palace, and had the favor of Wu, the Director of Ceremonies. But what they all did in the concubines’ quarters during the long nights of the Beijing winters, he had no idea. Uusally Kyu came out to the stables reeking of wine and perfume, sometimes urine, once even vomit. “To stink like a eunuch”—the common phrase came back to Bold at those times with unpleasant force. He saw how people made fun of the mincing eunuch walk, the hunched little steps with feet pointing outward, something that was either a physical necessity or a group style, Bold didn’t know. They were called crows for their falsetto voices, among other names; but always behind their backs; and everyone agreed that as they fattened and then wizened in their characteristic fashion, they came to look like bent old women.

Kyu was still young and pretty, however, and drunk and disheveled as he was during his night visits to Bold, he seemed very pleased with himself. “Let me know if you ever want women,” he said. “We’ve got more than we need in there.”

During one of the heir’s visits to Beijing, Bold caught a glimpse of the emperor and his heir together, as he brought their perfectly groomed horses out to the Gate of Heavenly Purity, so that the two could ride together in the parks of the imperial garden. Except the emperor wanted to leave the enclosure and ride well to the north of the city, apparently, and sleep out in tents. Clearly the Heir Designate was unenthusiastic, and the officials accompanying the emperor were as well. Finally he gave in and agreed to make it a day ride, but outside the imperial city, by the river.

As they were mounting the horses he exclaimed to his son, “You have to learn to fit the punishment to the crime! People need to feel the justice of your decision! When the Board of Punishments recommended that Xu Pei-yi be put to the lingering death, and all his male relations over sixteen put to death and all his female relations and children enslaved, I was merciful! I lowered his sentence to beheading, sparing all the relatives. And so they say, ‘The emperor has a sense of proportion, he understands things.’ ”

“Of course they do,” the heir agreed blandly.

The emperor glanced sharply at him, and off they rode.

When they returned, late in the day, he was still lecturing his son, sounding even more peeved than he had in the morning. “If you know nothing but the court, you will never be able to rule! The people expect the emperor to understand them, to be a man who rides and shoots as well as the Heavenly Envoy! Why do you think your governors will do what you say if they think you are womanly? They will only obey you to your face, and behind your back they will mock you and do whatever they like.”

“Of course they will,” said the heir, looking the other way.

The emperor glared at him. “Off the horse,” he said in a heavy voice.

The heir sighed and slid from his mount. Bold caught the reins and calmed the horse with a quick hand while leading it toward the emperor’s mount, ready when the emperor leaped off and roared, “Obey!”

The heir fell to his knees and kowtowed.

“You think the bureaucrats care about you,” the emperor shouted, “but they don’t! Your mother is wrong about that, like she is about everything else! They have their own ideas, and they won’t support you when there’s the least trouble. You need your own men.”

“Or eunuchs,” the heir said into the gravel.

The Yongle Emperor stared at him. “Yes. My eunuchs know they depend on my goodwill above all else. No one else will back them. So they’re the only people in the world you know will back you.”

No reply from the prostrated elder son. Bold, facing away and moving to the very edge of earshot, risked a glance back. The emperor, shaking his head heavily, was walking away, leaving his son kneeling on the ground.

“You may be backing the wrong horse,” Bold said to Kyu the next time they met, on one of Kyu’s increasingly rare night visits to the stables. “The emperor is going out with his second son now. They ride, they hunt, they laugh. One day they killed three hundred deer we had enclosed. While with the Heir Designate, the emperor has to drag him out of doors, can’t get him off the palace grounds, and spends the whole time yelling at him. And the heir nearly mocks him to his face. Comes as close as he dares. And the emperor knows it too. I wouldn’t be surprised if he changed the Heir Designate.”

“He can’t,” Kyu said. “He wants to, but he can’t.”

“Whyever not?”

“The eldest is the son of the empress. The second-born is the son of a courtesan. A low-ranking courtesan at that.”

“But the emperor can do what he wants, right?”

“Wrong. It only works when they all follow the laws together. If anyone breaks the laws, it can mean civil war, and the end of the dynasty.”

Bold had seen this in the Chinggurid wars of succession, which had gone on for generations. Indeed it was said now that Temur’s sons had been fighting ever since his death, with the khan’s empire divided into four parts, and no sign of it ever coming together again.

But Bold also knew that a strong ruler could get away with things. “You’re parroting what you’ve heard from the empress and the heir and their officials. But it isn’t that simple. People make the laws, and sometimes they change them. Or ignore them. And if they’ve got the swords, that’s it.”

Kyu considered this in silence. Then he said, “There’s talk that the countryside is suffering. Famine in Hunan, piracy on the coast, diseases in the south. The officials don’t like it. They think the great treasure fleet brought back disease instead of treasure, and wasted huge sums of money. They don’t understand what trade brings back, they don’t believe in it. They don’t believe in the new capital. They tell the empress and the heir that they should help the people, that we should get back to agriculture, and quit wasting so much cash on extravagant projects.”

Bold nodded. “I’m sure they do.”

“But the emperor persists. He does what he wants, and he has the army behind him, and his eunuchs. The eunuchs like the foreign trade, as they see it makes them rich. And they like the new capital, and all the rest. Right?”

Bold nodded again. “So it seems.”

“The regular officials hate the eunuchs.”

Bold glanced at him. “Do you see that yourself?”

“Yes. Although it’s the emperor’s eunuchs they really hate.”

“No doubt. Whoever is closest to power is feared by all the rest.”

Again Kyu thought things over. He seemed to Bold to be happy, these days; but then again Bold had thought that in Hangzhou. So it always made Bold nervous to see Kyu’s little smile.

Soon after that conversation, when they were all in Beijing, a great storm came.

Running back and forth with terrified horses, then with buckets of water, Bold kept an eye out, and finally, at dawn, when they had given up fighting the blaze, for it was useless, he caught sight of Kyu there among the evacuated imperial concubines. All the Heir Designate’s people had a hectic look, but Kyu in particular seemed to Bold elated, the whites of his eyes visible all the way around. Like a shaman after a successful voyage to the spirit world. He started this fire, Bold thought, just like in Hangzhou, this time using the lightning as his cover.

The next time Kyu made one of his midnight visits to the stables, Bold was almost afraid to speak to him.

Nevertheless he said, “Did you set that fire?” Whispering in Arabic, even though they were alone, outside the stables, with no chance of being overheard.

Kyu just stared at him. The look said yes, but he didn’t elaborate.

Finally he said calmly, “An exciting night, wasn’t it. I saved one of the Script Pavilion’s cabinets, and some concubines as well. The redjackets were very grateful for their documents.”

He went on about the beauty of the fire, and the panic of the concubines, and the rage, and later the fear, of the emperor, who took the fire to be a sign of heavenly disapproval, the worst bad portent ever to smite him; but Bold could not follow the boy’s talk, his mind filled as it was with images of the various forms of the lingering death. To burn down a merchant in Hangzhou was one thing, but the emperor of all China! The Dragon Throne! He glimpsed again that thing inside the boy, the black nafs banging its wings around inside, and felt the distance between them grown vast and unbridgeable.

“Be quiet!” he said sharply in Arabic. “You’re a fool. You’ll get yourself killed, and me too.”

Kyu smiled grimly. “On to a better life, right? Isn’t that what you told me? Why should I fear dying?”

Bold had no answer.

After that they saw less of each other than ever. Days passed, festivals, seasons. Kyu grew up. When Bold caught sight of him, he saw a tall slender black eunuch, pretty and perfumed, mincing along with a flash of the eye, and, once, that raptor look as he regarded the people around him. Bejeweled, plump, perfumed, dressed in elaborate silk: a favorite of the empress and the heir, even though they hated the eunuchs of the emperor. Kyu was their pet, and perhaps even a spy in the emperor’s harem. Bold feared for him at the same time that he feared him. The boy was wreaking havoc among the concubines of both emperor and heir, many said, even people in the stables who had no way of knowing directly. The way he moved through them was too forward, he was bound to be making enemies. Cliques would be plotting to bring him down. He must know that, he must be courting it; he laughed in their faces, so that they would hate him even more. It all seemed to delight him. But imperial revenge had a long reach. If someone fell, everyone he knew came down too.

So when the news spread that two of the emperor’s concubines had hanged themselves, and the furious emperor demanded an accounting, and the whole nest of corruption began to unravel before everyone, fear rippling through the court like the plague itself, lies spreading the blame wider and wider, until fully three thousand concubines and eunuchs were implicated in the scandal, Bold expected to hear any hour of his young friend’s torture and lingering death, perhaps from the mouths of guards come to execute him as well.

But it didn’t happen. Kyu existed under a spell of protection like that of a sorcerer, it was so obvious that everyone saw it. The emperor executed forty of his concubines with his own hand, swinging the sword furiously, cutting them in half or decapitating them with single strokes, or running them through over and over, until the steps of the rebuilt Hall of Great Harmony ran with their blood; but Kyu stood just to the side, unharmed. One concubine even cried out toward Kyu as she stood naked before them all, a wordless shriek, and then she cursed the emperor to his face, “It’s your fault, you’re too old, your yang is gone, the eunuchs do it better than you!” Then snick, her head was falling into the puddles of blood like a sacrificed sheep’s. All that beauty wasted. And yet no one touched Kyu; the emperor dared not look at him; and the black youth watched it all with a gleam in his eye, enjoying the wastage, and the way the bureaucrats hated him for it. The court was literally a shambles, they were feeding on each other now; and yet none of them had the courage to take on the weird black eunuch.

Bold’s last meeting with him happened just before Bold was to accompany the emperor on an expedition to the west, to destroy the Tartars led by Arughtai. It was a hopeless cause; the Tartars were too fast, the emperor not well. Nothing would come of it. They would be back when winter came on, in just a few months. So Bold was surprised when Kyu came by the stables to say farewell.

It was like talking to a stranger now. But the youth clasped Bold by the arm suddenly, affectionate and serious, like a prince talking to a trusted old retainer.

“Do you never want to go home?” he asked.

“Home,” Bold said.

“Isn’t your family out there?”

“I don’t know. It’s been years. I’m sure they think I died. They could be anywhere.”

“But not just anywhere. You could find them.”

“Maybe.” He looked at Kyu curiously. “Why do you ask?”

Kyu didn’t answer at first. He was still clutching Bold’s arm. Finally he said, “Do you know the story of the eunuch Chao Kao, who caused the downfall of the Chin dynasty?”

“No. Surely you’re not still talking about that.”

Kyu smiled. “No.” He pulled a little carving from his sleeve—half of a tiger, carved from black ironwood, its stripes cut into the smooth surface. The amputation across its middle was mortised; it was a tally, like those used by officials to authenticate their communications with the capital when they were in the provinces. “Take this with you when you go. I’ll keep the other half. It will help you. We’ll meet again.”

Bold took it, frightened. It seemed to him like Kyu’s nafs, but of course that was something that couldn’t be given away.

“We’ll meet again. In our lives to come at least, as you always used to tell me. Your prayers for the dead give them instructions on how to proceed in the bardo, right?”

“That’s right.”

“I must go.” And with a kiss to the cheek Kyu was off into the night.

The expedition to conquer the Tartars was a miserable failure, as expected, and one rainy night the Yongle Emperor died. Bold stayed up all through that night, pumping the bellows for a fire the officers used to melt all the tin cups they had, to make a coffin to carry the imperial body back to Beijing. It rained all the way back, the heavens crying. Only when they reached Beijing did the officers let the news be known.

The imperial body lay in state in a proper coffin for a hundred days. Music, weddings, and all religious ceremonies were forbidden during this interval, and all the temples in the land were required to ring their bells thirty thousand times.

For the funeral Bold joined the ten thousand members of the escort.

The day the Heir Designate ascended the Dragon Throne, his first edict was read aloud to all in the Great Within and the Great Without. Near the end of the edict, the reader in the palace proclaimed to all assembled there before the Hall of Great Harmony:

“All voyages of the treasure fleet are to be stopped. All the ships moored in Hangzhou are ordered to return to Nanjing, and all goods on the ships are to be turned over to the Department of Internal Affairs, and stored. Officials abroad on business are to return to the capital immediately; and all those called to go on future voyages are ordered back to their homes. The building and repair of all treasure ships is to stop immediately. All official procurement for going abroad must also be stopped, and all those involved in purchasing should return to the capital.”

When the reader was done, the new emperor, who had just named himself the Hongxi Emperor, spoke for himself. “We have spent too much on extravagance. The capital will return to Nanjing, and Beijing will be designated an auxiliary capital. There will be no more waste of imperial resources. The people are suffering. Relieving people’s poverty ought to be handled as though one were rescuing them from fire, or saving them from drowning. One cannot hesitate.”

Bold saw Kyu’s face across the great courtyard, a little black figurine with blazing eyes. The new emperor turned to look at his dead father’s retinue, so many of them eunuchs. “For years you eunuchs have only been thinking of yourselves, at the expense of China. The Yongle Emperor thought you were on his side. But you were not. You have betrayed all China.”

Kyu spoke up before his fellows could stop him. “Your Highness, it’s the officials who are betraying China! They are trying to be as regent to you, and make you a boy emperor forever!”

With a roar a gang of the officials rushed at Kyu and some of the other eunuchs, pulling knives from their sleeves as they pounced. The eunuchs struggled or fled, but many were cut down on the spot. Kyu they stabbed a thousand times.

The Hongxi Emperor stood and watched. When it was over he said, “Take the bodies and hang them outside the Meridian Gate. Let all the eunuchs beware.”

Later, in the stables, Bold sat holding the half-tiger tally in his hand. He had thought they would kill him too, and was ashamed of how much that thought had dominated him during the slaughter of the eunuchs; but no one had paid the slightest attention to him. It was possible no one else even remembered his connection to Kyu.

He knew he was leaving, but he didn’t know where to go. If he went to Nanjing and helped burn the treasure fleet, and all its docks and warehouses, he would certainly be continuing his young friend’s project. But all that would be done in any case.

Bold recalled their last conversation. Time to go home, perhaps, to start a new life.

But guards appeared in the doorway. We know what happened next; and so do you; so let’s go on to the next chapter.

8

At the moment of death Kyu saw the clear white light. It was everywhere, it bathed the void in itself, and he was part of it, and sang it out into the void.

Some eternity later he thought: this is what you strive for.

And so he fell out of it, into awareness of himself. His thoughts were continuing in their tumbling monologue revelry, even after death. Incredible but true. Perhaps he wasn’t dead yet. But there was his body, hacked to pieces on the sand of the Forbidden City.

He heard Bold’s voice, there inside his thoughts, speaking a prayer.

I’m past that, Kyu thought. What happens next? But Bold couldn’t know where he was along his way. Prayers for the dead were useless in that regard.

I’m past that! Kyu thought. Get to the next part!

“Use the mind to question the mind. Don’t sleep at this crucial time. Your soul must leave your body awake, and go out through the Brahma hole.”

The dead can’t sleep, Kyu thought irritably. And my soul is already out of my body.

His guide was far behind him. But it had always been that way with Bold. Kyu would have to find his own way. Emptiness still surrounded the single thread of his thoughts. Some of the dreams he had had during his life had been of this place.

He blinked, or slept, and then he was in a vast court of judgment. The dais of the judge was on a broad deck, a plateau in a sea of clouds. The judge was a huge black-faced deity, sitting potbellied on the dais. Its hair was fire, burning wildly on its head. Behind it a black man held a pagoda roof that might have come straight out of the palace in Beijing. Above the roof floated a little seated Buddha, radiating calm. To his left and right were peaceful deities, standing with gifts in their arms; but these were all a great distance away, and not for him. The righteous dead were climbing long flying roads up to these gods. On the deck surrounding the dais, less fortunate dead were being hacked to pieces by demons, demons as black as the Lord of Death, but smaller and more agile. Below the deck more demons were torturing yet more souls. It was a busy scene and Kyu was annoyed. This is my judgment, and it’s like a morning abbatoir! How am I supposed to concentrate?

A creature like a monkey approached him and raised a hand: “Judgment,” it said in a deep voice.

Bold’s prayer sounded in his mind, and Kyu realized that Bold and this monkey were related somehow. “Remember, whatever you suffer now is the result of your own karma,” Bold was saying. “It’s yours and no one else’s. Pray for mercy. A little white god and a little black demon will appear, and count out the white and black pebbles of your good and evil deeds.”

Indeed it was so. The white imp was pale as an egg, the black imp like onyx; and they were hoeing great piles of white and black stones into heaps, which to Kyu’s surprise appeared about equal in size. He could not remember doing any good deeds.

“You will be frightened, awed, terrified.”

I will not! These prayers were for a different kind of dead, for people like Bold.

“You will attempt to tell lies, saying I have not committed any evil deed.”

I will not say any such ridiculous thing.

Then the Lord of Death, up on its throne, suddenly took notice of Kyu, and despite himself Kyu flinched.

“Bring the mirror of karma,” the god said, grinning horribly. Its eyes were burning coals.

“Don’t be frightened,” Bold’s voice said inside him. “Don’t tell any lies, don’t be terrified, don’t fear the Lord of Death. The body you’re in now is only a mental body. You can’t die in the bardo, even if they hack you to pieces.”

Thanks, Kyu thought uneasily. That is such a comfort.

“Now comes the moment of judgment. Hold fast, think good thoughts; remember, all these events are your own hallucinations, and what life comes next depends on your thoughts now. In a single moment of time a great difference is created. Don’t be distracted when the six lights appear. Regard them all with compassion. Face the Lord of Death without fear.”

The black god held a mirror up with such practiced accuracy that Kyu saw in the glass his own face, dark as the god’s. He saw that the face is the naked soul itself, always, and that his was as dark and dire as the Lord of Death’s. This was the moment of truth! And he had to concentrate on it, as Bold kept reminding him. And yet all the while the whole antic festival shouted and shrieked and clanged around him, every possible punishment or reward given out at once, and he couldn’t help it, he was annoyed.

“Why is black evil and white good?” he demanded of the Lord of Death. “I never saw it that way. If this is all my own thinking, then why is that so? Why is my Lord of Death not a big Arab slave trader, as it would be in my own village? Why are your agents not lions and leopards?”

But the Lord of Death was an Arab slave trader, he saw now, an Arab intaglioed in miniature in the surface of the god’s black forehead, looking out at Kyu and waving. The one who had captured him and taken him to the coast. And among the shrieks of the rendered there were lions and leopards, hungrily gnawing the intestines of living victims.

All just my thoughts, Kyu reminded himself, feeling fear rise in his throat. This realm was like the dream world, but more solid; more solid even than the waking world of his just completed life; everything trebly stuffed with itself, so that the leaves on the round ornamental bushes (in ceramic pots!) hung like jade leaves, while the jade throne of the god pulsed with a solidity far beyond that of stone. Of all the worlds the bardo was the one of the utmost reality.

The white Arab face in the black forehead laughed and squeaked, “Condemned!” and the huge black face of the Lord of Death roared, “Condemned to hell!” It threw a rope around Kyu’s neck and dragged him off the dais. It cut off Kyu’s head, tore out his heart, pulled out his entrails, drank his blood, gnawed his bones; yet Kyu did not die. Body hacked to pieces, yet it revived. And it all began again. Intense pain throughout. Tortured by reality. Life is a thing of extreme reality; death also.

Ideas are planted in the mind of the child like seeds, and may grow to completely dominate the life.

The plea: I have done no evil.

Agony disassembled into anguish, regret, remorse; nausea at his past lives and how little they had gained him. In this terrible hour he sensed them all without actually being able to remember them. But they had happened. Oh, to get off the endless wheel of fire and tears. The sorrow and grief he felt then was worse than the pain of dismemberment. The solidity of the bardo fell apart, and he was bombarded by light exploding in his thoughts, through which the palace of judgment could only be seen as a kind of veil, or a painting on the air.

But there was Bold up there, being judged in his turn. Bold, a cowering monkey, the only person after Kyu’s capture who had meant anything at all to him. Kyu wanted to cry out to him for help, but stifled the thought, as he did not want to distract his friend at the very moment, of all the infinity of moments, when he needed not to be distracted. Nevertheless something must have escaped from Kyu, some groan of the mind, some anguished thought or cry for help; for a gang of furious four-armed demons dragged Kyu down and away, out of sight of Bold’s judgment.

Then he was indeed in hell, and pain the least of his burdens, as superficial as mosquito bites, compared to the deep, oceanic ache of his loss. The anguish of solitude! Colored explosions, tangerine, lime, quicksilver, each shade more acid than the last, burned his consciousness with an anguish ever deeper. I’m wandering in the bardo, rescue me, rescue me!

And then Bold was there with him.

They stood in their old bodies, looking at each other. The lights grew clearer, less painful to the eyes; a single ray of hope pierced the depth of Kyu’s despair, like a lone paper lantern seen across West Lake. You found me, Kyu said.

Yes.

It’s a miracle you could find me here.

No. We always meet in the bardo. We will cross paths for as long as the six worlds turn in this cycle of the cosmos. We are part of a karmic jati.

What’s that?

Jati, subcaste, family, village. It manifests differently. We all came into the cosmos together. New souls are born out of the void, but infrequently, especially at this point in the cycle, for we are in the Kali-yuga, the Age of Destruction. When new souls do appear it happens like a dandelion pod, souls like seeds, floating away on the dharma wind. We are all seeds of what we could be. But the new seeds float together and never separate by much, that’s my point. We have gone through many lives together already. Our jati has been particularly tight since the avalanche. That fate bound us together. We rise or fall together.

But I don’t remember any other lives. And I don’t remember anyone from this past life but you. I only recognize you! Where are the rest of them?

You didn’t recognize me either. We found you. You have been falling away from the jati for many reincarnations now, down and down into yourself alone, in lower and lower lokas. There are six lokas: they are the worlds, the realms, of rebirth and illusion. Heaven, the world of the devas; then the world of the asuras, those giants full of dissension; then the human world; then the animal world; then the world of pretas, or hungry ghosts; then hell. We move between them as our karma changes, life by life.

How many of us are there in this jati?

I don’t know. A dozen perhaps, or half a dozen. The group blurs at the boundaries. Some go away and don’t come back until much later. We were a village, that time in Tibet. But there were visitors, traders. Fewer every time. People get lost, or fall away. As you have been doing. When the despair strikes.

At the mere sound of the word it washed through Kyu: despair. Bold’s figure grew transparent.

Bold, help me! What do I do?

Think good thoughts. Listen, Kyu, listen—as we think, so we are. Both here and hereafter, in all the worlds. For thoughts are things, the parents of all actions, good and bad alike. And as the sowing has been, so the harvest will be.

I’ll think good thoughts, or try, but what should I do? What should I look for?

The lights will lead you. Each world has its own color. White light from the devas, green from the asuras, yellow from the human, blue from the beasts, red from ghosts, smoke-colored from hell. Your body will appear the color of the world you are to return to.

But we’re yellow! Kyu said, looking at his hand. And Bold was as yellow as a flower.

That means we must try again. We try and try again, life after life, until we achieve Buddha-wisdom, and are released at last. Or some then choose to return to the human world, to help others along their way to release. Those are called bodhisattvas. You could be one of those, Kyu. I can see it inside you. Listen to me now. Soon you’ll run for it. Things will chase you, and you’ll hide. In a house, a cave, a jungle, a lotus blossom. These are all wombs. You’ll want to stay in your hiding place, to escape the terrors of the bardo. That way lies preta, and you will become a ghost. You must emerge again to have any hope. Choose your womb door without any feelings of attraction or repulsion. Looks can be deceiving. Go as you see fit. Follow the heart. Try helping other spirits first, as if you were a bodhisattva already.

I don’t know how!

Learn. Pay attention and learn. You must follow, or lose the jati for good.

Then they were attacked by huge male lions, manes already matted with blood, roaring angrily. Bold took off in one direction and Kyu in another. Kyu ran and ran, the lion on his heels. He dodged through two trees and onto a path. The lion ran on and lost him.

To the east he saw a lake, adorned with black-and-white swans. To the west, a lake with horses standing in it; to the south, a scattering of pagodas; to the north a lake with a castle in it. He moved south toward the pagodas, feeling vaguely that this would have been Bold’s choice; feeling also that Bold and the rest of his jati were already there, in one of the temples waiting for him.

He reached the pagodas. He wandered from one building to the next, looking in doorways, shocked by visions of crowds in disarray, fighting or fleeing from hyena-headed guards and wardens; a hell of a village, each possible future catastrophic, terrifying. Death’s hometown.

A long time passed in this horrible search, and then he was looking through the gates of a temple at his jati, his cohort, Bold and all the rest of them, Shen, I-Li, Dem his mother, Zheng He, all of them immediately known to him—oh, he thought, of course. They were naked and bloodied, but putting on the gear of war nevertheless. Then hyenas howled, and Kyu fled through the raw yellow light of morning, through trees into the protection of elephant grass. The hyenas prowled between the huge tufts of grass, and he pressed through the knife edges of one broken-down clump to take refuge inside it.

For a long time he cowered in the grass, until the hyenas went away, also the cries of his jati as they looked for him, telling him to stick with them. He hid there through a long night of awful sounds, creatures being killed and eaten; but he was safe; and morning came again. He decided to venture forth, and found the way out was closed. The knife-edged grass blades had grown, and were like long swords caging him, even pressing in on him, cutting him as they grew. Ah, he realized; this is a womb. I’ve chosen one without trying to, without listening to Bold’s advice, separated from my family, unaware and in fear. The worst kind of choosing.

And yet to stay here would be to become a hungry ghost. He would have to submit. He would have to be born again. He groaned at the thought, cursed himself for a fool. Try to have a little more presence of mind next time, he thought, a little more courage! It would not be easy; the bardo was a scary place. But now, when it was too late, he decided he had to try. Next time!

And so he reentered the human realm. What happened to him and to his companions the next time around, it is not our task to tell. Gone, gone, gone altogether beyond! All hail!