The Years of Rice and Salt

1 The Fall of Konstantiniyye

The Ottoman Sultan Caliph Selim the Third’s doctor, Ismail ibn Mani al-Dir, be gan as an Armenian qadi who studied law and medicine in Konstantiniyye. He rose quickly through the ranks of the Ottoman bureaucracy by the efficacy of his ministrations, until eventually the sultan required him to tend one of the women of his seraglio. The harem girl recovered under Ismail’s care, and shortly thereafter Sultan Selim too was cured by Ismail, of a complaint of the skin. After that the sultan made Ismail the chief doctor of the Sublime Porte and its seraglio.

Ismail then spent his time slipping about unobtrusively from patient to patient, continuing his medical education as doctors do, by practicing. He did not attend court functions. He filled thick books with case studies, recording symptoms, medicines, treatments and results. He attended the janissaries’ inquisitions as required, and kept notes there as well.

The sultan, impressed by his doctor’s dedication and skill, took an interest in his case studies. The bodies of all the janissaries he had executed in the countercoup of the year 1202 were put at Ismail’s disposal, and the religious ban on autopsy and dissection declared invalid for this case of executed criminals. A lot of work had to be completed quickly, even with the bodies on ice, and indeed the sultan participated in several of the dissections himself, asking questions at every cut. He was quick to see and suggest the advantages of vivisection.

One night in the year 1207, the sultan called his doctor to the palace in the Sublime Porte. One of his old stablehands was dying, and Selim had had him made comfortable on a bed placed on one balance of a large scale, with weights of gold piled on the other balance, so that the two big pans hung level in the middle of the room.

As the old man lay on his bed wheezing, the sultan ate a midnight meal and watched. He told the doctor that he was sure this method would allow them to determine the presence of the soul, if one existed, and its weight.

Ismail stood at the side of the stablehand’s elevated bed, fingering the old man’s wrist gently. The old man’s breaths weakened, became gasps. The sultan stood and pulled Ismail back, pointing to the scale’s extremely fine fulcrum. Nothing was to be disturbed.

The old man stopped breathing. “Wait,” the sultan whispered. “Watch.”

They watched. There were perhaps ten people in the room. It was perfectly silent and still, as if all the world had stopped to witness the test.

Slowly, very slowly, the balance tray holding the dead man and his bed began to rise. Somebody gasped. The bed rose and hung in the air overhead. The old man had lightened.

“Take away the very smallest weight from the other tray,” the sultan whispered. One of his bodyguards did so, removing a few flakes of gold leaf. Then some more. Finally the tray holding the dead man in the air began to descend, until it drifted below the height of the other one. The bodyguard put the smallest flake back on. Skillfully he rebalanced the scale. The man at dying had lost a quarter grain of weight.

“Interesting!” the sultan declared in his normal voice. He returned to his repast, gesturing to Ismail. “Come, eat. Then tell me what you think of these rabble from the east, whom we hear are attacking us.”

The doctor indicated that he did not have an opinion.

“Surely you have heard things,” the sultan encouraged him. “Tell me what you have heard.”

“Like everyone else, I have heard they come from the south of India,” Ismail said obediently. “The Mughals have been defeated by them. They have an effective army, and a navy that moves them around and shells coastal cities. Their leader styles himself the Kerala of Travancore. They have conquered the Safavids, and attacked Syria and Yemen—”

“This is all old news,” the sultan interrupted. “What I require of you, Ismail, is explanation. How have they managed to accomplish these things?”

Ismail said, “I do not know, Excellency. The few letters I have received from medical colleagues to the east do not discuss military matters. I gather their army moves quickly, I have heard a hundred leagues a day.”

“A hundred leagues! How is that possible?”

“I do not know. One of my colleagues wrote of treating burn wounds. I hear their armies spare those they capture, and set them to farm in areas they have conquered.”

“Curious. They are Hindu?”

“Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh—I get the impression they practice some mix of these three faiths, or some kind of new religion, made up by this sultan of Travancore. Indian gurus often do this, and he is apparently that kind of leader.”

Sultan Selim shook his head. “Eat,” he commanded, and Ismail took up a cup of sherbet. “Do they attack with Greek fire, or the black alchemy of Samarqand?”

“I don’t know. Samarqand itself has been abandoned, I understand, after years of plague, and then earthquakes. But its alchemy may have been developed further in India.”

“So we are being attacked by black magic,” reflected the sultan, looking intrigued.

“I cannot say.”

“What about this navy of theirs?”

“You know more than I, Excellency. I have heard they sail into the eye of the wind.”

“More black magic!”

“Machine power, Excellency. I have a Sikh correspondent who told me that they boil water in sealed pots, and force the steam through tubes, like bullets out of guns, and the steam pushes against paddles like a river pushing a waterwheel, and thus the ships are rowed forward.”

“Surely that would only move them backward in the water.”

“They could call that forward, Excellency.”

The sultan stared suspiciously at his doctor. “Do any of these ships blow up?”

“It seems as if they might, if something goes wrong.”

Selim considered it. “Well, this should be most interesting! If a cannonball hits one of their boiler pots, it should blow up the whole ship!”

“Very possibly.”

The sultan was pleased. “It will make for good target practice. Come with me.”

He led his usual train of retainers out of the room: bodyguard of six, cook and waiters, astronomer, valet, and the Chief Black Eunuch of the seraglio, all trailing him and the doctor, whom the sultan held by the shoulder. He brought Ismail through the Gate of Felicity into his harem without a word to its guards, leaving his retainers behind to figure out yet again who was intended to follow him into the seraglio. In the end only a waiter and the Chief Black Eunuch entered.

In the seraglio all was gold and marble, silk and velvet, the walls of the outer rooms covered with religious paintings and icons from the age of Byzantium. The sultan gestured to the Black Eunuch, who nodded to a guard at the far door.

One of the harem concubines emerged, trailed by four maids: a white-skinned redheaded young woman, her naked body glowing in the gaslight jets. She was not an albino, but rather a naturally pale-skinned person, one of the famous white slaves of the seraglio, among the only known survivors of the vanished Firanjis. They had been bred for several generations by the Ottoman sultans, who kept the line pure. No one outside the seraglio ever saw the women, and no one outside the sultan’s palace ever saw the men used for breeding.

This young woman’s hair was a gold-burnished red, her nipples pink, her skin a translucent white that revealed blue veins under it, especially in her breasts, which were slightly engorged. The doctor reckoned her three months pregnant. The sultan did not appear to notice; she was his favorite, and he still had her every day.

The familiar routine unfolded. The odalisque walked to the draped area of her bed, and the sultan followed, not bothering to pull the drapes. The ladies-in-waiting helped the woman to cushion herself properly, held her arms out, her legs spread and pulled up. Selim said “Ah yes,” and went to the bed. He pulled his erect member from his pantaloons and covered her. They rocked together in the usual fashion, until with a shudder and a grunt the sultan finished and sat beside her, stroking her belly and legs.

He looked over at Ismail as a thought occurred to him. “What is it like now where she came from?” he asked.

The doctor cleared his throat. “I don’t know, Excellency.”

“Tell me what you have heard.”

“I have heard that Firanja west of Vienna is mainly divided between Andalusis and the Golden Horde. The Andalusis occupy the old Frankish lands and the islands north of it. They are Sunni, with the usual Sufi and Wahhabi elements fighting for the patronage of the emirs. The east is a mix of Golden Horde and Safavid client princes, many of them Shiites. Many Sufi orders. They also have occupied the offshore islands, and the Roman peninsula, though it is mostly Berber and Maltese.”

The sultan nodded. “So they prosper.”

“I don’t know. It rains there more than on the steppes, but there are mountains everywhere, or hills. There is a plain on the north coast where they grow grapes and the like. Al-Andalus and the Roman peninsula do well, I gather. North of the mountains it is harder. It’s said the lowlands are still pestilential.”

“Why is that? What happened there?”

“It’s damp and cold all the time. So it is said.” The doctor shrugged. “No one knows. It could be that the pale skin of the people there made them more susceptible to plague. That’s what Al-Ferghana said.”

“But now good Muslims live there, with no ill effects.”

“Yes. Balkan Ottomans, Andalusis, Safavids, the Golden Horde. All Muslim, except perhaps for some Jews and Zotts.”

“But Islam is fractured.” The sultan thought it over, brushing the odalisque’s red pubic hair with his palm. “Tell me again, where did this girl’s ancestors come from?”

“The islands off the north coast of Frankland,” the doctor ventured. “England. They were very pale there, and some of the outermost islands escaped the plague, and their people were discovered and enslaved a century or two later. It is said they didn’t even know anything had changed.”

“Good land?”

“Not at all. Forest or rock. They lived on sheep or fish. Very primitive, almost like the New World.”

“Where they have found much gold.”

“England was known more for tin than gold, as I understand it.”

“How many of these survivors were taken?”

“I have read a few thousand. Most died, or were bred into the general populace. You may have the only purebreds left.”

“Yes. And this one is pregnant by one of their men, I’ll have you know. We care for the men as carefully as we do the women, to keep the line going.”

“Very wise.”

The sultan looked at his Black Eunuch. “I’m ready for Jasmina now.”

In came another girl, very black, her body almost twin to that of the white girl, though this one was not pregnant. Together they looked like chess pieces. The black girl replaced the white one on the bed. The sultan stood and went to her.

“Well, the Balkans are a sorry place,” he mused, “but farther west may be better. We could move the capital of the empire to Rome, just as they moved theirs here.”

“Yes. But the Roman peninsula is fully repopulated.”

“Venice too?”

“No. Still abandoned, Excellency. It is often flooded, and the plague was particularly bad there.”

Sultan Selim pursed his lips. “I don’t—ah—I don’t like the damp.”

“No, Excellency.”

“Well, we will have to fight them here. I will tell the troops that their souls, the most precious quarter grain of them, will rise up to the Paradise of Ten Thousand Years if they die in defense of the Sublime Porte. There they will live as I do here. We will meet these invaders down at the straits.”

“Yes, Excellency.”

“Leave me now.”

But when the Indian navy appeared it was not in the Aegean, but in the Black Sea, the Ottoman Sea. Little black ships crowding the Black Sea, ships with waterwheels on their sides, and no sails, only white plumes of smoke pouring out of chimneys topping black deckhouses. They looked like the furnaces of an ironworks, and it seemed they should sink like stones. But they didn’t. They puffed down the relatively unguarded Bosporus, blasting shore batteries to pieces, and anchored offshore the Sublime Porte. From there they fired explosive shells into Topkapi Palace, also into the mostly ceremonial batteries defending that side of the city, long neglected as there had been no one to attack Konstantiniyye for centuries. To have appeared in the Black Sea—no one could explain it.

In any case there they were, shelling the defenses until they were pounded into silence, then firing shot after shot into the walls of the palace, and the remaining batteries across the Golden Horn, in Pera. The populace of the city huddled indoors, or took refuge in the mosques, or left the city for the countryside outside the Theodosian Wall; soon the city seemed deserted, except for some young men out to watch the assault. More of these appeared in the streets as it began to seem that the iron ships were not going to bombard the city, but only Topkapi, which was taking a terrific beating despite its enormous impregnable walls.

Ismail was called into this great artillery target by the sultan. He boxed up the mass of papers that had accumulated in the last few years, all the notes and records, sketches and samples and specimens. He wished he could make arrangements to send it all out to the medical madressa in Nsara, where many of his most faithful correspondents lived and worked; or even to the hospital in Travancore, home of their assailants, but also of his other most faithful group of medical correspondents.

There was no way now to arrange such a transfer, so he left them in his rooms with a note on top describing the contents, and walked through the deserted streets to the Sublime Porte. It was a sunny day; voices came from the big blue mosque, but other than that only dogs were to be seen, as if Judgment Day had come and Ismail been left behind.

Judgment Day had certainly come for the palace; shells struck it every few minutes. Ismail ducked inside the outer gate and was taken to the sultan, whom he found seemingly exhilarated by events, as if at a fair: Selim the Third stood on Topkapi’s highest bartizan, in full view of the fleet bombarding them, watching the action through a long silver telescope.

“Why doesn’t the iron sink the ships?” he asked Ismail. “They must be as heavy as treasure chests.”

“There must be enough air in the hulls to make them float,” the doctor said, apologetic at the inadequacy of this explanation. “If their hulls were punctured, they would surely sink faster than wooden ships.”

One of the ships fired, erupting smoke and seemingly sliding backward in the water. Their guns shot forward, one per ship. Fairly little things, like big bay dhows, or giant water bugs.

The shot exploded down the palace wall to their left. Ismail felt the jolt in his feet. He sighed.

The sultan glanced at him. “Frightened?”

“Somewhat, Excellency.”

The sultan grinned. “Come, I want you to help me decide what to take. I need the most valuable of the jewels.” But then he spotted something in the sky. “What’s that?” He clapped the telescope to his eye. Ismail looked up; there was a dot of red in the sky. It drifted on the breeze over the city, looking like a red egg. “There’s a basket hanging under it!” the sultan exclaimed, “and people in the basket!” He laughed. “They know how to make things fly in the sky!”

Ismail shaded his eyes. “May I use the spyglass, Excellency?”

Under white, puffy clouds, the red dot floated toward them. “Hot air rises,” Ismail said, shocked as it became clear to him. “They must have a brazier in the basket with them, and the hot air from its fire rises up into the bag and is caught there, and so the whole thing rises up and flies.”

The sultan laughed again. “Wonderful!” He took the glass back from Ismail. “I don’t see any flames, though.”

“It must be a small fire, or they would burn the bag. A brazier using charcoal, you wouldn’t see that. Then when they want to come down, they damp the fire.”

“I want to do that,” the sultan declared. “Why didn’t you make one of these for me?”

“I didn’t think of it.”

Now the sultan was in especially high spirits. The red floating bag was drifting their way.

“We can hope the winds carry it elsewhere,” Ismail remarked as he watched it.

“No!” the sultan cried. “I want to see what it can do.”

He got his wish. The floating bag drifted over the palace, just under the clouds, or between them, or even disappearing inside one, which gave Ismail the strongest sense yet that it was flying in the air like a bird. People in the air like birds!

“Shoot them down!” the sultan was shouting enthusiastically. “Shoot the bag!”

The palace guards tried, but the cannon that were left standing on the broken walls could not be elevated high enough to fire at it. The musketeers shot at it, the flat cracks of their muskets followed by shouts from the sultan. The acrid smoke of gunpowder filled the grounds, mixing with the smells of citrus and jasmine and pulverized dust. But as far as any of them could tell, no one hit bag or basket. Judging by the minute faces looking down from the basket’s edge, wrapped in heavy woolen scarves it appeared, Ismail thought they were perhaps out of range, too high to be hit. “The bullets probably won’t go that far up,” he said.

And yet they would never be too high to drop things on whatever lay below. The people in the basket appeared to wave at them, and then a black dot dropped like a stooping hawk, a hawk of incredible compaction and speed, crashing right into the roof of one of the inner buildings, exploding and sending shards of tile clattering all over the courtyard and garden.

The sultan was shouting ecstatically. Three more gunpowder bombs dropped onto the palace, one on a wall where soldiers surrounded one of the big guns, killing them with much damage.

Ismail’s ears hurt more from the sultan’s roars than the explosions. He pointed to the iron ships. “They’re coming in.”

The ships were close onshore, launching boats filled with men. The bombardment from other ships continued during the disembarking, more intense than ever; their boats were going to land uncontested at a section of the city walls they had blasted down. “They’ll be here soon,” Ismail ventured. Meanwhile the floating bag and basket had drifted west, past the palace and over the open fields beyond the city wall.

“Come on,” Selim said suddenly, grabbing Ismail by the arm. “I need to hurry.”

Down broken marble stairs they ran, followed by the sultan’s immediate retinue. The sultan led the way into the warren of rooms and passageways deep beneath the palace.

Down here oil lamps barely illuminated chambers filled with the loot of four Ottoman centuries, and perhaps Byzantine treasure as well, if not Roman or Greek, or Hittite or Sumerian; all the riches of the world, stacked in room after room. One was filled entirely with gold, mostly in the form of coins and bars; another with Byzantine devotional art; another with old weapons; another with furniture of rare woods and furs; another with chunks of colored rock, worthless as far as Ismail could tell. “There won’t be time to go through all this,” he pointed out, trotting behind the sultan.

Selim just laughed. He swept through a long gallery or warehouse of paintings and statues to a small side room, empty except for a line of bags on a bench. “Bring these,” he ordered his servants as they caught up; then he was off again, sure of his course.

They came to staircases descending through the rock underlying the palace: a strange sight, smooth marble stairs dropping through a craggy rock hole into the bowels of the Earth. The city’s great cistern-cavern lay some way to the south and east, as far as Ismail knew; but when they came down into a low natural cave, floored by water, they found a stone dock, and moored to it, a long narrow barge manned by imperial guards. Torches on the dock and lanterns on the barge illuminated the scene. Apparently they were in a side passage of the cistern-cavern, and could row into it.

Selim indicated to Ismail the roof around the stairwell, and Ismail saw that explosives were packed into crevices and drilled holes; when they were off and some distance away, this entrance would presumably be demolished, and some part of the palace grounds might fall onto it; in any case their escape route would be obscured, and pursuit made impossible.

Men busied themselves with loading the barge, while the sultan inspected the charges. When they were ready to leave he himself lit their fuses, grinning happily. Ismail stared at the sight, which had the lamplit quality of some of the Byzantine icons they had passed in the treasure hoards. “We’ll join the Balkan army, and cross the Adriatic into Rome,” the sultan announced. “We’ll conquer the west, then come back to smite these infidels for their impudence!”

The bargemen cheered on cue from their officers, sounding like thousands in the echoing confinement of the underground lake and its sky of rock. The sultan took the acclaim with open arms, then stepped onto the barge, balanced by three or four of his men. No one saw Ismail turn and dash up the doomed stairs to a different destiny.

2 Travancore

More bombs had been rigged by the sultan’s bodyguards to blow up the cages in the palace zoo, and when Ismail climbed back up the stairs and reemerged into the air, he found the grounds in chaos, invaders and defendants alike running around chasing or fleeing from elephants, lions, cameleopards, and giraffes. A pair of black rhinoceroses, looking like boars out of a nightmare, charged about bleeding through crowds of shouting, shooting men. Ismail raised his hands, fully expecting to be shot, and thinking escape with Selim might have been all right after all.

But no one was being shot except the animals. Some of the palace guard lay dead on the ground, or wounded, and the rest had surrendered and were under guard, and much less trouble than the animals. For now it looked as if massacre of the defeated was not part of the invaders’ routine, just as rumor had had it. In fact they were hustling their captives out of the palace, as booms were shaking the ground, and plumes of smoke shooting out of windows and stairwells, walls and roofs collapsing: the rigged explosions and the maddened beasts made it prudent to vacate Topkapi for a while.

They were regathered to the west of the Sublime Porte, just inside the Theodosian Wall, on a parade ground where the sultan had surveyed his troops and done some riding. The women of the seraglio, in full chador, were surrounded by their eunuchs and a wall of guards. Ismail sat with the household retinue that remained: the astronomer, the ministers of various administrative departments, cooks, servants, and so on.

The day passed and they got hungry. Late in the afternoon a group of the Indian army came among them with bags of flatbread. They were small dark-skinned men.

“Your name, please?” one of them asked Ismail.

“Ismail ibn Mani al-Dir.”

The man drew his finger down a sheet of paper, stopped, showed another of them what he had found.

The other one, now looking like an officer, inspected Ismail. “Are you the doctor, Ismail of Konstantiniyye, who has writen letters to Bhakta, the abbess of the hospital of Travancore?”

“Yes,” Ismail said.

“Come with me, please.”

Ismail stood and followed, devouring the bread he had been given as he went. Doomed or not, he was famished; and there was no sign that he was being taken out to be shot. Indeed, the mention of Bhakta’s name seemed to indicate otherwise.

In a plain but capacious tent a man at a desk was interviewing prisoners, none of whom Ismail recognized. He was led to the front, and the interviewing officer looked at him curiously, and said in Persian, “You are high on the list of people required to report to the Kerala of Travancore.”

“I am surprised to hear it.”

“You are to be congratulated. This appears to be at the request of Bhakta, abbess of the Travancori hospital.”

“A correspondent of many years standing, yes.”

“All is explained. Please allow the captain here to lead you to the ship departing for Travancore. But first, one question; you are reported to be an intimate of the sultan’s. Is this true?”

“It was true.”

“Can you tell us where the sultan has gone?”

“He and his bodyguards have absconded,” Ismail said. “I believe they are headed for the Balkans, with the intention of reestablishing the sultanate in the west.”

“Do you know how they escaped the palace?”

“No. I was left behind, as you see.”

Their machine ships ran by the heat of fires, as Ismail had heard, burning in furnaces that boiled water, the steam then forced by pipes to push paddlewheels, encased by big wooden housings on each side of the hull. Valves controlled the amount of steam going to each wheel, and the ship could turn on a single spot. Into the wind it thumped along, bouncing awkwardly over and through waves, throwing spray high over the ship. When the winds came from behind, the crew raised small sails, and the ship was pushed forward in the usual way, but with an extra impulse provided by the two wheels. They burned coal in the furnaces, and spoke of coal deposits in the mountains of Iran that would supply their ships till the end of time.

“Who made the ships?” Ismail asked.

“The Kerala of Travancore ordered them built. Ironmongers in Anatolia were taught to make the furnaces, boilers, and paddlewheels. Shipbuilders in the ports at the east end of the Black Sea did the rest.”

They landed at a tiny harbor near old Trebizond, and Ismail was included in a group that rode south and east through Iran, over range after range of dry hills and snowy mountains, into India. Everywhere there were short dark-skinned troops wearing white, on horseback, with many wheeled cannon prominently placed in every town and at every crossroads. All the towns looked undamaged, busy, prosperous. They changed horses at big fortified changing stations run by the army, and slept at these places as well. Many stations were placed under hills where bonfires burned through the night; intermittently blocking the light from these fires transmitted messages over great distances, all over the new empire. The Kerala was in Delhi, he would be back in Travancore in a few weeks; the abbess Bhakta was in Benares, but due back in Travancore in days. It was conveyed to Ismail that she was looking forward to meeting him.

Ismail, meanwhile, was finding out just how big the world was. And yet it was not infinite. Ten days of steady riding brought them across the Indus. On the green west coast of India, another surprise: they boarded iron carts like their iron ships, with iron wheels, and rode them on causeways that held two parallel iron rails, over which the carts rolled as smoothly as if they were flying, right through the old cities so long ruled by the Mughals. The causeway of the iron rails crossed the broken edge of the Deccan, south into a region of endless groves of coconut palms, and they rolled by the power of steam as fast as the wind, to Travancore, on the southwesternmost shore of India.

Many people had moved to this city following the recent imperial successes. After rolling slowly through a zone of orchards and fields filled with crops Ismail did not recognize, they came to the edges of the city. The outskirts were crowded with new buildings, encampments, lumber yards, holding facilities: indeed for many leagues in all directions it seemed nothing but construction sites.

Meanwhile the inner core of the city was also being transformed. Their train of linked iron carts stopped in a big yard of paired rails, and they walked out a gate into the city center. A white marble palace, very small by the standards of the Sublime Porte, had been erected there in the middle of a park that must have replaced much of the old city center. The harbor this park overlooked was filled with all manner of ships. To the south could be seen a shipyard building new vessels; a mole was being extended out into the shallow green seas; and the enclosed water, in the shelter of a long low island, was as crowded with ships as the inner harbor, with many small boats sailing or being rowed between them. Compared to the dusty torpor of Konstantiniyye’s harbors, it was a tumultuous scene.

Ismail was taken on horseback through the bustling city and down the coast farther, to a grove of palm trees behind a broad yellow beach. Here walls surrounded an extensive Buddhist monastery, and new buildings could be seen a long way through the grove. A pier extended out from the seaside buildings, and several fire-powered ships were docked there. This was apparently the home of the famous hospital of Travancore.

Inside the monastery grounds it was windless and calm. Ismail was led to a dining room and given a meal, then invited to wash off the grime of his travel. The baths were tiled, the water either warm or cool, depending on which pool he preferred, and the last ones were under the sky.

Beyond the baths stood a small pavilion on a green lawn, surrounded by flowers. Ismail donned a clean brown robe he was offered, and padded barefoot across the cut grass to the pavilion, where an old woman was in conversation with a number of others.

She stopped when she saw them, and Ismail’s guide introduced him.

“Ah. A great pleasure,” the woman said in Persian. “I am Bhakta, the abbess here, and your humble correspondent.” She stood and bowed to Ismail, hands together. Her fingers were twisted, her walk stiff; it looked to Ismail like arthritis. “Welcome to our home. Let me pour you some tea, or coffee if you prefer.”

“Tea will be fine,” Ismail said.

“Bodhisattva,” a messenger said to the abbess, “we will be visited by the Kerala on the next new moon.”

“A great honor,” the abbess said. “The moon will be in close conjunction with the morning star. Will we have time to complete the mandalas?”

“They think so.”

“Very good.”

The abbess continued to sip her tea.

“He called you bodhisattva?” Ismail ventured.

The abbess grinned like a girl. “A sign of affection, with no basis in reality. I am simply a poor nun, given the honor of guiding this hospital for a time, by our Kerala.”

Ismail said, “When we corresponded, you did not mention this. I thought you were simply a nun, in something like a madressa and hospital.”

“For a long time that was the case.”

“When did you become the abbess?”

“In your year, what would it be, 1194. The previous abbot was a Japanese lama. He practiced a Japanese form of Buddhism, which was brought here by his predecessor, with many more monks and nuns, after the Chinese conquered Japan. The Chinese persecute even the Buddhists of their own country, and in Japan it was worse. So they came here, or first to Lanka, then here.”

“And they made studies in medicine, I take it.”

“Yes. My predecessor in particular had very clear sight, and a great curiosity. Generally we see as if it were night, but he stood in the light of morning, because he tested the truth of what we say we know, in regularized trials. He could sense the strengths of things, the force of movement, and devise tests of them in trials of various kinds. We are still walking through the doors he opened for us.”

“Yet I think you have been following him into new places.”

“Yes, more is always revealed, and we have been working hard since he left that body. The great increase in shipping has brought us many useful and remarkable documents, including some from Firanja. It’s becoming clear to me that the island England was a sort of Japan-about-to-happen, on the other side of the world. Now they have a forest uncut for centuries, regrown over the ruins, and so they have wood to trade, and they build ships themselves. They bring us books and manuscripts found in the ruins, and scholars here and all around Travancore have learned the languages and translated the books, and they are very interesting. People like the Master of Henly were more advanced than you might think. They advocated efficient organization, good accounting, auditing, the use of trial and record to determine yields—in general, to run their farms on a rational basis, as we do here. They had water-powered bellows, and could get their furnaces white hot, or high yellow at least. They were even concerned with the loss of forest in their time. Henly calculated that one furnace could burn all the trees within a yoganda’s radius, in only forty days.”

“Presumably that will be happening again,” Ismail said.

“No doubt even faster. But meanwhile, it’s making them rich.”

“And here?”

“Here we are rich in a different fashion. We help the Kerala, and he extends the reach of the kingdom every month, and within its bounds, all tends to improvement. More food is grown, more cloth made. Less war and brigandage.”

After tea Bhakta showed him around the grounds. A lively river ran through the center of the monastery, and its water ran through four big wooden mills and their wheels, and a big sluice gate at the bottom end of a catchment pond. All around this rushing stream was green lawn and palm trees, but the big wooden halls built next to the mills on both banks hummed and clanked and roared, and smoke billowed out of tall brick chimneys rising out of them.

“The foundry, ironworks, sawmill, and manufactory.”

“You wrote of an armory,” Ismail said, “and a gunpowder facility.”

“Yes. But the Kerala did not want to impose that burden on us, as Buddhism is generally against violence. We taught his army some things about guns, because they protect Travancore. We asked the Kerala about this—we told him it was important to Buddhists to work for good, and he promised that in all the lands that came under his control, he would impose a rule of laws that would keep the people from violence or evil dealing. In effect, we help him to protect people. Of course one is suspicious of that, seeing what rulers do, but this one is very interested in law. In the end he does what he likes, of course. But he likes laws.”

Ismail thought of the nearly bloodless aftermath of the conquest of Konstantiniyye. “There must be some truth in it, or I would not be alive.”

“Yes, tell me about that. It sounded as if the Ottoman capital was not so vigorously defended.”

“No. But that is partly because of the vigor of the assault. People were unnerved by the fireships, and the flying bags overhead.”

Bhakta looked interested. “Those were our doing, I must admit. And yet the ships do not seem that formidable.”

“Consider each ship to be a mobile artillery battery.”

The abbess nodded. “Mobility is one of the Kerala’s watchwords.”

“As well it might be. In the end mobility prevails, and all within shot of the sea can be destroyed. And Konstantiniyye is all within shot of the sea.”

“I see what you mean.”

After tea the abbess took Ismail through the monastery and workshops, down to the docks and shipworks, which were loud. Late in the day they walked over to the hospital, and Bhakta led Ismail to the rooms used for teaching monks to become doctors. The teachers gathered to greet him, and they showed him the shelf on one wall of books and papers that they had devoted to the letters and drawings he had sent to Bhakta over the years, all catalogued according to a system he did not understand. “Every page has been copied many times,” one of the men said.

“Your work seems very different from Chinese medicine,” one of the others said. “We were hoping you might speak to us about the differences between their theory and yours.”

Ismail shook his head, fingering through these vestiges of his former existence. He would not have said he had written so much. Perhaps there were multiple copies even on this shelf.

“I have no theories,” he said. “I have only noted what I have seen.” His face tightened. “I will be happy to speak with you about whatever you like, of course.”

The abbess said, “It would be very good if you would speak to a gathering about these things; there are many who would like to hear you, and to ask questions.”

“My pleasure, of course.”

“Thank you. We will convene tomorrow for that, then.”

A clock somewhere struck the bells that marked every hour and watch.

“What kind of clock do you employ?”

“A version of Bhaskara’s mercury wheel,” Bhakta said, and led Ismail by the tall building that housed it. “It does very well for the astronomical calculations, and the Kerala has decreed a new year using it, more accurate than any before. But to tell the truth, we are now trying horologues with weight-driven mechanical escapements. We are also trying clocks with spring drives, which would be useful at sea, where accurate timekeeping is essential for determining longitude.”

“I know nothing of that.”

“No. You have been attending to medicine.”

“Yes.”

The next day they returned to the hospital, and in a large room where surgeries were performed, a great number of monks and nuns in brown and maroon and yellow robes sat on the floor to hear him. Bhakta had assistants bring several thick wide books to the table where Ismail was to speak, all of them filled with anatomical drawings, most Chinese.

They seemed to be waiting for him to speak, so he said, “I am pleased to tell you what I have observed. Perhaps it will help you, I don’t know. I know little of any formal medical system. I studied some of the ancient Greek knowledge as it was translated by Ibn Sina and others, but I never could profit much from it. Very little from Aristotle, somewhat more from Galen. Ottoman medicine itself was no very impressive thing. In truth, nowhere have I found a general explanation that fits what I have seen with my own eyes, and so, long ago I gave up on all hypothesis, and decided to try to draw and to write down only what I saw. So you must tell me about these Chinese ideas, if you can express them in Persian, and I will see if I can tell you how my observations match with them.” He shrugged. “That’s all I can do.”

They stared at him, and he continued nervously: “So useful, Persian. The language that bridges Islam and India.” He waggled a hand. “Any questions?”

Bhakta herself broke the silence. “What about the meridian lines that the Chinese speak of, running through the body from the skin inward and back again?”

Ismail looked at the drawings of the body she turned to in one of the books. “Could they be nerves?” he said. “Some of these lines follow the paths of major nerves. But then they diverge. I have not seen nerves crisscrossing like this, cheek to neck, down spine to thigh, up into back. Nerves generally branch like an almond tree’s branches, while the blood vessels branch like a birch tree. Neither tangle like these are shown to.”

“We don’t think meridian lines refer to the nerves.”

“To what, then? Do you see anything there when you do autopsies?”

“We do not do autopsies. When opportunity has allowed us to inspect torn bodies, their parts look as you have described them in your letters to us. But the Chinese understanding is of great antiquity and elaboration, and they get good results by sticking pins in the right meridian points, among other methods. They very often get good results.”

“How do you know?”

“Well—some of us have seen it. Mostly we understand it from what they have said. We wonder if they are finding systems too small to be seen. Can we be sure that the nerves are the only messengers of motion to the musculature?”

“I think so,” Ismail said. “Cut the right nerve and the muscles beyond it will not move. Prick a nerve and the appropriate muscle will jump.”

His audience stared at him. One of the older men said, “Perhaps some other kind of energy transference is happening, not necessarily through the nerves, but through the lines, and this is needed as much as the nerves.”

“Perhaps. But look here,” pointing at one diagram, “they show no pancreas. No adrenal glands either. These both perform necessary functions.”

Bhakta said, “For them the crucial organs are eleven, five yin and six yang. Heart, lungs, spleen, liver, and kidneys, they are yin.”

“A spleen is not essential.”

“…Then the six yang organs are gall bladder, stomach, small intestine, large intestine, bladder, and triple burner.”

“Triple burner? What is that?”

She read from the Chinese notations by the drawing: “They say, ‘It has a name but no shape. It combines the effects of the organs that regulate water, as a fire must control water. The upper burner is a mist, the middle burner a foam, the lower burner a swamp. Thus top to bottom, corresponding to head and upper body, middle from nipples to navel, lower the abdomen below the navel.”

Ismail shook his head. “Do they find it in dissections?”

“Like us, they rarely do dissections. There are similar religious barriers. Once in their Sung dynasty, about year 390 in Islam, they dissected forty-six rebels.”

“I doubt that would have helped. You have to see a lot of dissections, and vivisections, with no preconceptions in mind, before it begins to come clear.”

Now the monks and nuns were staring at him with an odd expression, but he forged on as he examined the drawings. “This flow through the body and all its parts, do they not mean blood?”

“A harmonious balance of fluids, some material, like blood, some spiritual, like jing and shen and qi, the so-called Three Treasures—”

“What are they, please?”

“Jing is the source of change,” one nun said hesitantly, “supportive and nutritive, like a fluid. ‘Essence’ is another Persian word we could use to translate it. In Sanskrit, ‘semen,’ or the generative possibility.”

“And shen?”

“Shen is awareness, consciousness. Like our spirit, but a part of the body too.”

Ismail was interested in this. “Have they weighed it?”

Bhakta led the laughter. “Their doctors do not weigh things. With them it is not things, but forces and relationships.”

“Well, I am just an anatomist. What animates the parts is beyond me. Three treasures, one, a myriad—I cannot tell. It does seem there is some animating vitality, that comes and goes, waxes and wanes. Dissection cannot find it. Our souls, perhaps. You believe that the soul returns, do you not?”

“We do.”

“The Chinese also?”

“Yes, for the most part. For their Daoists there is no pure spirit, it is always mixed with material things. So their immortality requires movement from one body to another. And all Chinese medicine is strongly influenced by Daoism. Their Buddhism is mostly like ours, although again, more materialist. It is chiefly what the women do in their older years, to help the community, and prepare for their next life. The official Confucian culture does not speak much of the soul, even though they acknowledge its existence. In most Chinese writing the line drawn between spirit and matter is vague, sometimes nonexistent.”

“Evidently,” Ismail said, looking at the meridian-line drawing again. He sighed. “Well. They have studied long, and helped living people, while I have only drawn dissections.”

They continued. The questions came from more and more of them, with comments and observations. Ismail answered every question as best he could. The movement of the blood in the chambers of the heart; the function of the spleen, if there was one; location of the ovaries; shock reactions to amputation of the legs; flooding of punctured lungs; movement of the various limbs when parts of the exposed brain were prodded with needles: he described what he had seen in each case, and as the day wore on, the crowd sitting on the floor looked up at him with expressions more and more guarded, or odd. A pair of nuns left quietly. As Ismail was describing the coagulation of the blood after extraction of teeth, the room went completely silent. Few of them met his eye, and noticing that, he faltered. “As I said, I am a mere anatomist… We will have to see if we can reconcile what I have seen with your theoretical texts…” He looked hot, as if he had a fever, but only in his face.

Finally the abbess Bhakta rose to her feet, stepped stiffly to him, and held his shaking hands in hers. “No more,” she said gently. All the monks and nuns rose to their feet, their hands placed together before them, as in prayer, and bowed toward him. “You have made good from bad,” Bhakta said. “Rest now, and let us take care of you.”

So Ismail settled into a small room in the monastery provided for him, and studied Chinese texts freshly translated into the Persian by the monks and nuns, and taught anatomy.

One afternoon he and Bhakta walked from the hospital to the dining hall, through hot and muggy air, the premonsoon air, like a warm wet blanket. The abbess pointed to a little girl running through the rows of melons in the big garden. “There is the new incarnation of the previous lama. She just came to us last year, but she was born the very hour the old lama died, which is very unusual. It took a while for us to find her, of course. We did not start the search until last year, and immediately she showed up.”

“His soul moved from man to woman?”

“Apparently. The search certainly looked among the little boys, as is traditional. That was one of the things that made identifying her so easy. She insisted on being tested, despite her sex. At four years of age. And she identified all of Peng Roshi’s things, many more than the new incarnation usually can do, and told me the contents of my final conversation with Peng, almost word for word.”

“Really!” Ismail stared at Bhakta.

Bhakta met his gaze. “It was like looking into his eyes again. So, we say that Peng has come back to us as a Tara bodhisattva, and we started paying more attention to the girls and the nuns, something of course that I have always encouraged. We have emulated the Chinese habit of inviting the old women of Travancore to come to the monastery and give their lives over to studying the sutras, but also to studying medicine, and going back out to care for those in their villages, and to teach their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”

The little girl disappeared into the palm trees at the end of the garden. The new moon sickled the sky, pendant under a bright evening star. The sound of drumming came on a breeze. “The Kerala has been delayed,” Bhakta said as she listened to the drums. “He will be here tomorrow.”

The drumming became audible again at dawn, just after the clock bells had clonged the coming of day. Distant drums, like thunder or gunfire, but more rhythmic than either, announced his arrival. As the sun rose it seemed the ground shook. Monks and nuns and their families living in the monastery poured out of the dormitories to witness the arrival, and the great yard inside the gate was hastily cleared.

The first soldiers danced in a rapid walk, all stepping together, taking a skip forward at every fifth step, and shouting as they reversed their rifles from one shoulder to the other. The drummers followed, skipping in step as their hands beat their tablas. A few snapped hand cymbals. They wore uniform shirts with red patches sewn to the shoulders, and came circling in a column around the great yard, until perhaps five hundred men stood in curved ranks facing the gate. When the Kerala and his officers rode in on horseback, the soldiers presented their arms and shouted three times. The Kerala raised a hand, and his detachment commander shouted orders: the tabla players rolled out the surging beat, and the soldiers danced into the dining hall.

“They are fast, just as everyone said,” Ismail said to Bhakta. “And everything is so together.”

“Yes, they live in unison. In battle they are the same. The reloading of their rifles has been broken down into ten movements, and there are ten command drumbeats, and different groups of them are coordinated to different points of the cycle, so they fire in rotating mass, to very devastating effect, I am told. No army can stand up to them. Or at least, that was true for many years. Now it seems the Golden Horde are beginning to train their armies in similar ways. But even with that, and with modern weapons, they won’t be able to withstand the Kerala.”

Now the man himself dismounted, and Bhakta approached him, bringing Ismail along. The Kerala waved aside their bows, and Bhakta said without preamble, “This is Ismail of Konstantiniyye, the famous Ottoman doctor.”

The Kerala stared at him intently, and Ismail gulped, feeling the heat of that impatient eye. The Kerala was short and compact, black haired, narrow faced, quick of movement. His torso seemed just a touch too long for his legs. His face was very handsome, chiseled like a Greek statue.

“I hope you are impressed by the hospital here,” he said in clear Persian.

“It is the best I have ever seen.”

“What was the state of Ottoman medicine when you left it?”

Ismail said, “We were making progress in understanding a little of the parts of the body. But much remained mysterious.”

Bhakta added, “Ismail has examined the medical theories of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, and brought what was useful in them to us, as well as making very many new discoveries of his own, correcting the ancients or adding to their knowledge. His letters to us have formed one of the main bases of our work in the hospital.”

“Indeed.” Now the Kerala’s gaze was even more piercing. His eyes were protuberant, their irises a jumble of colors, like circles of jasper. “Interesting! We must speak more of these things. But first I want to discuss recent developments with you alone, Mother Bodhisattva.”

The abbess nodded, and walked hand-in-hand with the Kerala to a pavilion overlooking the dwarf orchard. No bodyguard accompanied them, but only settled back and watched from the yard, rifles at the ready, with guards posted on the monastery wall.

Ismail went with some monks to the streamside, where they were arranging a ceremony of sand mandalas. Monks and nuns in maroon and saffron robes flowed everywhere about the bankside, setting out rugs and flower baskets, happily chattering and in no great hurry, as the Kerala often conferred with their abbess for half the day, or longer. They were famous friends.

Today, however, they were done earlier, and the pace quickened considerably as word came back that the two were leaving the pavilion. Flower baskets were cast on the stream, and the soldiers reappeared to the sound of the pulse-quickening tablas. They skipped to the banksides without their rifles and sat, cleaving an aisle for their leader’s approach. He came among them, stopping to put a hand to one shoulder or another, greeting men by name, asking after their wounds, and so on. The monks who had led the mandala effort came out of their studio, chanting to a gong and the blast of bass trumpets, carrying two mandalas—wooden disks as big as millstones, each held level by two men, with the vibrantly colored mandalas laid in unfixed sand on their tops. One was a complex geometrical figure in bold red, green, yellow, blue, white, and black. The other was a map of the world, with Travancore a red dot like a bindi, and India occupying the center of the circle, and the rest of the mandala depicting almost the whole width of the world, from Firanja to Korea and Japan, with Africa and the Indies curved around the bottom. All was colored naturally, the oceans dark blue, inland seas lighter blue, land green or brown, as the case might be, with the mountain ranges marked by dark green and snowy white. Rivers ran in blue threads, and a vivid red line enclosed what Ismail took to be the border of the Kerala’s conquests, now including the Ottoman empire up through Anatolia and Konstantiniyye, though not the Balkans or the Crimea. A most beautiful object, like looking down on the world from the vantage of the sun.

The Kerala of Travancore walked with the abbess, helping her with her footing down the path. At the riverside they stopped, and the Kerala inspected the mandalas closely, slowly, pointing and asking the abbess and her monks questions about one feature or another. Other monks chanted in low voices, and the soldiers helped to sing a song. Bhakta faced them and sang over their sound in a high thin voice. The Kerala took the mandala in his hands and lifted it up carefully; it was almost too large for one man to hold. He stepped down into the river with it, and bouquets of hydrangea and azalea floated into his legs. He held the geometrical mandala over his head, offering it to the sky, and then, at a shift in the song, and the growling entry of trumpets, he lowered the disk in front of him, and very slowly tilted it up on its side. The sand slid off all at once, the colors pouring into the water and blurring together, staining the Kerala’s silken leggings. He dipped the disk into the water and washed the rest of the sand away in a multicolored cloud that dissipated in the flow. He cleared the surface with his bare hand, then strode out of the water. His shoes were muddy, his wet leggings stained green and red and blue and yellow. He took the other mandala from its makers, bowed over it to them, turned, and took it into the river. This time the soldiers shifted and bowed forehead to ground, chanting a prayer together. The Kerala lowered the disk slowly, and like a god offering a world to a higher god, rested it on the water and let it float, spinning slowly round and round under his fingers, a floating world that at the height of the song he plunged down into the stream as far as it would go, releasing all the sand into the water to float up over his arms and legs. As he walked to shore, spangled with color, his soldiers stood and shouted three times, then three again.

Later, over tea scented with delicate perfumes, the Kerala sat in repose and spoke with Ismail. He heard all Ismail could tell him of Sultan Selim the Third, and then he told Ismail the history of Travancore, his eyes never leaving Ismail’s face.

“Our struggle to throw off the yoke of the Mughals began long ago with Shivaji, who called himself Lord of the Universe, and invented modern warfare. Shivaji used every method possible to free India. Once he called the aid of a giant Deccan lizard to help him climb the cliffs guarding the Fortress of the Lion. Another time he was surrounded by the Bijapuri army, commanded by the great Mughal general Afzal Khan, and after a siege Shivaji offered to surrender to Afzal Khan in person, and appeared before that man clad only in a cloth shirt, that nevertheless concealed a scorpion-tail dagger; and the fingers of his hidden left hand were sheathed in razor-edged tiger claws. When he embraced Afzul Khan he slashed him to death before all, and on that signal his army set on the Mughals and defeated them.

“After that Alamgir attacked in earnest, and spent the last quarter century of his life reconquering the Deccan, at a cost of a hundred thousand lives per year. By the time he subdued the Deccan his empire was hollowed. Meanwhile there were other revolts against the Mughals to the northwest, among Sikhs, Afghans, and the Safavid empire’s eastern subjects, as well as Rajputs, Bengalis, Tamils, and so forth, all over India. They all had some success, and the Mughals, who had overtaxed for years, suffered a revolt of their own zamindars, and a general breakdown of their finances. Once Marathas and Rajputs and Sikhs were successfully established, they all instituted tax systems of their own, you see, and the Mughals got no more money from them, even if they still swore alliegance to Delhi.

“So things went poorly for the Mughals, especially here in the south. But even though the Marathas and Rajputs were both Hindu, they spoke different languages, and hardly knew each other, so they developed as rivals, and this lengthened the Mughals’ hold on mother India. In these end days the Nazim became premier to a khan completely lost to his harem and hookah, and this nazim went south to form the principality that inspired our development of Travancore on a similar system.

“Then Nadir Shah crossed the Indus at the same ford used by Alexander the Great, and sacked Delhi, slaughtering thirty thousand and taking home a billion rupees of gold and jewels, and the Peacock Throne. With that the Mughals were finished.

“Marathas have been expanding their territory ever since, all the way into Bengal. But the Afghans freed themselves from the Safavids, and surged east all the way to Delhi, which they sacked also. When they withdrew the Sikhs were given control of the Punjab, for a tax of one-fifth of the harvests. After that the Pathans sacked Delhi yet once more, rampaging for an entire month in a city become nightmare. The last emperor with a Mughal title was blinded by a minor Afghan chieftain.

“After that a Marathan cavalry of thirty thousand marched on Delhi, picking up two hundred thousand Rajput volunteers as they moved north, and on the fateful field of Panipat, where India’s fate has so often been decided, they met an army of Afghan and ex-Mughal troops, in full jihad against the Hindus. The Muslims had the support of the local populace, and the great general Shah Abdali at their head, and in the battle a hundred thousand Marathas died, and thirty thousand were captured for ransom. But afterward the Afghan soldiers tired of Delhi, and forced their khan to return to Kabul.

“The Marathas, however, were likewise broken. The Nazim’s successors secured the south, and the Sikhs took the Punjab, and the Bengalese Bengal and Assam. Down here we found the Sikhs to be our best allies. Their final guru declared their sacred writings to be the embodiment of the guru from that point on, and after that they prospered greatly, creating in effect a mighty wall between us and Islam. And the Sikhs taught us as well. They are a kind of mix of Hindu and Muslim, unusual in Indian history, and instructive. So they prospered, and learning from them, coordinating our efforts with them, we have prospered too.

“Then in my grandfather’s time a number of refugees from the Chinese conquest of Japan arrived in this region, Buddhists drawn to Lanka, the heart of Buddhism. Samurai, monks, and sailors, very good sailors—they had sailed the great eastern ocean that they call the ‘Dahai,’ in fact they sailed to us both by heading east and by heading west.”

“Around the world?”

“Around. And they taught our shipbuilders much, and the Buddhist monasteries here were already centers of metalworking and mechanics, and ceramics. The local mathematicians brought calculation to full flower for use in navigation, gunnery, and mechanics. All came together here in the great shipyards, and our merchant and naval fleets were soon greater even than China’s. Which is a good thing, as the Chinese empire subdues more and more of the world—Korea, Japan, Mongolia, Turkestan, Annam and Siam, the islands in the Malay chain—the region we used to called Greater India, in fact. So we need our ships to protect us from that power. By sea we are safe, and down here, below the gnarled wildlands of the Deccan, we are not easily conquered by land. And Islam seems to have had its day in India, if not the whole of the West.”

“You have conquered its most powerful city,” Ismail observed.

“Yes. I will always smite Muslims, so that they will never be able to attack India again. There have been enough rapes of Delhi. So I had a small navy built on the Black Sea to attack Konstantiniyye, breaking the Ottomans like the Nazim broke the Mughals. We will establish small states across Anatolia, taking their land under our influence, as we have done in Iran and Afghanistan. Meanwhile we continue to work with the Sikhs, treating them as chief allies and partners in what is becoming a larger Indian confederation of principalities and states. The unification of India on that basis is not something many people resist, because when it succeeds, it means peace. Peace for the first time since the Mughals invaded more than four centuries ago. So India has emerged from its long night. And now we will spread the day everywhere.”

The following day Bhakta took Ismail to a garden party at the Kerala’s palace in Travancore. The big park containing the little marble building overlooked the northern end of the harbor, away from the great noise and smoke of the shipworks, visible at the south side of the shallow bay, but innocuous at that distance. Outside the park, more elaborate white palaces belonged not to the Kerala, but to the local merchant leaders, who had become rich in shipbuilding, trade expeditions, and most of all, the financing of other such expeditions. Among the Kerala’s guests were many men of this sort, all richly dressed in silks and jewelry. Especially prized in this society, it seemed to Ismail, were semiprecious stones—turquoise, jade, lapis, malachite, onyx, jasper, and the like—polished into big round buttons and necklace beads. The wives and daughters of the men wore brilliant saris, and some walked with tamed cheetahs on leashes.

People circulated in the shade of the garden’s arbors and palm trees, eating at long tables of delicacies, or sipping from glass goblets. Buddhist monks stood out in their maroon or saffron, and Bhakta was approached by quite a few of these. The abbess introduced some of them to Ismail. She pointed out to him the Sikhs in attendance, men who wore turbans and were bearded; and Marathas; and Bengalis; also Africans, Malaysians, Burmese, Sumatrans, Japanese, and Hodenosaunee from the New World. The abbess either knew all these people personally, or could identify them by some characteristic of dress or figure.

“So very many different peoples here,” Ismail observed.

“Shipping brings them.”

Many of them seemed to crave a word with Bhakta, and she introduced Ismail to one of the Kerala’s “most trusted assistants,” in the person of one Pyidaungsu, a short dark man who, he said, had grown up in Burma and on the eastern side of India’s tip. His Persian was excellent, which was no doubt why the abbess had introduced Ismail to him, as she dealt with her own press of conversants.

“The Kerala was most pleased to meet you,” Pyidaungsu said immediately, drawing Ismail off to one side. “He is very desirous of making progress in certain medical matters, especially infectious diseases. We lose more soldiers to disease or infection than to our enemies in battle, and this grieves him.”

“I know only a little of that,” Ismail said. “I am an anatomist, attempting to learn the structures of the body.”

“But all advances in understanding of the body help us in what the Kerala wants to know.”

“In theory, anyway. Over time.”

“But could you not examine the army’s procedures, in search of some aspects of them that contribute perhaps to diseases spreading?”

“Perhaps,” Ismail said. “Although some aspects cannot be changed, like traveling together, sleeping together.”

“Yes, but the way those things are done…”

“Possibly. There seems to be a likelihood that some diseases are transmitted by creatures smaller than the eye can see—”

“The creatures in microscopes?”

“Yes, or smaller. Exposure to a very small amount of these, or to some that are killed beforehand, seems to give people a resistance to later exposures, as happens with survivors of pox.”

“Yes, variolation. The troops are already scabbed for pox.”

Ismail was surprised to hear this, and the officer saw it.

“We are trying everything,” he said with a laugh. “The Kerala believes all habits must be reexamined with an eye to changing them, improving them as much as possible. Eating habits, bathing, evacuation—he began as an artillery officer when he was very young, and he learned the value of regular procedure. He proposed that the barrels of cannons be bored out rather than cast, as the casting could never be done with any true smoothness. With uniform bores cannons become more powerful and lighter at once, and ever so much more accurate. He tested all these things, and reduced gunnery to a set of settled motions, like a dance, much the same for cannon of all sizes, making them capable of deployment as quickly as infantry, almost as quick as cavalry. And easily carried on ships. Results have been prodigious, as you see.” Waving around complacently at the party.

“You have been an artillery officer, I suppose.”

The man laughed. “Yes, I was.”

“So now you enjoy a celebration here.”

“Yes, and there are other reasons for this gathering. The bankers, the shippers. But they all ride on the back of the artillery, if you will.”

“And not the doctors.”

“No. But I wish it were so! Tell me again if you see any part of military life that might be made more healthy.”

“No contact with prostitutes?”

The man laughed again. “Well, it is a religious duty for many of them, you must understand. The temple dancers are important for many ceremonies.”

“Ah. Well. Cleanliness, then. The animalcules move from body to body in dirt, by touch, in food or water, and breath. Boiled surgical instruments reduce infections. Masks on doctors and nurses and patients, to reduce spread of infection.”

The officer looked pleased. “Cleanliness is a virtue of caste purity. The Kerala does not approve of caste, but it should be possible to make cleanliness more of a priority.”

“Boiling kills the animalcules, it seems. Cooking implements, pots and pans, drinking water—all might be boiled to advantage. Not very practical, I suppose.”

“No, but possible. What other methods could be applied?”

“Certain herbs, perhaps, and things poisonous to the animalcules but not to people. But no one knows whether such things exist.”

“But trials could be made.”

“Possibly.”

“On poisoners, for instance.”

“It’s been done.”

“Oh, the Kerala will be pleased. How he loves trials, records, numbers laid out by his mathematicians to show whether the impressions of one doctor are true when applied to the army as a whole body. He will want to speak to you again.”

“I will tell him all I can,” Ismail said.

The officer shook his hand, holding it in both of his. “I will bring you back to the Kerala presently. For now, the musicians are here, I see. I like to listen to them from up on the terraces.”

Ismail followed him for a while, as if in an eddy, and then one of the abbess’s assistants snagged him and brought him back to the party gathered by the Kerala to watch the concert.

The singers were dressed in beautiful saris, the musicians in silk jackets cut from bolts of different color and weave, mostly of brilliant sky blue and blood-orange red. The musicians began to play; the drummers set a pattern on double-ended tablas, and others played tall stringed instruments, like long-necked ouds, making Ismail recall Konstantiniyye, the whole city called up by these twangy things so like an oud.

A singer stepped forward and sang in some foreign tongue, the notes gliding through tones without a stop anywhere, always curving through tonalities unfamiliar to Ismail, no tones or quarter tones that did not bend up or down rapidly, like certain birdcalls. The singer’s companions danced slowly behind her, coming as close to still positions as she came close to steady tones, but always moving, hands extended palm outward, speaking in dance languages.

Now the two drummers shifted into a complex but steady rhythm, woven together in a braid with the singing. Ismail closed his eyes; he had never heard such music. Melodies overlapped and went on without end. The audience swayed in time with them, the soldiers dancing in place, all moving around the still center of the Kerala, and even he shimmied in place, moved by sound. When the drummers went into a final mad flurry to mark the end of the piece, the soldiers cheered and shouted and leaped in the air. The singers and musicians bowed deeply, smiling, and came forward to receive the Kerala’s congratulations. He conferred for a time with the lead singer, talking to her as to an old friend. Ismail found himself in something like a reception line gathered by the abbess, and he nodded to the sweaty performers one by one as they passed. They were young. Many different perfumes filled Ismail’s nostrils, jasmine, orange, sea spray, and his breathing swelled his chest. The sea smell came in stronger on a breeze, from the sea itself this time, though there had been a perfume like it. The sea lay green and blue out there, like the road to everywhere.

The party began to swirl about the garden again, in patterns determined by the Kerala’s slow progress. Ismail was introduced to a quartet of bankers, two Sikhs and two Travancori, and he listened to them discuss, in Persian to be polite to him, the complicated situation in India and around the Indian Ocean and the world more generally. Towns and harbors fought over, new towns built in hitherto empty river mouths, loyalties of local populations shifting, Muslim slavers in west Africa, gold in south Africa, gold in Inka, the island west of Africa—all these things had been going on for years, but somehow it was different now. Collapse of the old Muslim empires, the mushrooming of new machines, new states, new religions, new continents, and all emanating from here, as if the violent struggle within India were vibrating change outward in waves all the way around the world, meeting again coming the other way.

Bhakta introduced another man to Ismail, and the two men nodded to each other, bowing slightly. The man’s name was Wasco, and he was from the New World, the big island west of Firanja, which the Chinese called Yingzhou. Wasco indentified it as Hodenosauneega, “meaning territories of the peoples of the Longhouse,” he said in passable Persian. He represented the Hodenosaunee League, Bhakta explained. He looked like a Siberian or Mongolian, or a Manchu who did not shave his forehead. Tall, hawk nosed, striking to the eye, even there in the intense sunlight of the Kerala himself; he looked as if those isolated islands on the other side of the world might have produced a more healthy and vigorous race. No doubt sent by his people for that very reason.

Bhakta left them, and Ismail said politely, “I come from Konstantiniyye. Do your people have music like what we heard?”

Wasco thought about it. “We do sing and dance, but they are done by all together, informally and by chance, if you see what I am driving at. The drumming here was much more fluid and complicated. Thick sound. I found it fascinating. I would like to hear more of it, to see if I heard what I heard.” He waggled a hand in a way Ismail didn’t understand—amazement, perhaps, at the drummers’ virtuosity.

“They play beautifully,” Ismail said. “We have drummers too, but these have taken drumming to a higher level.”

“Truly.”

“What about cities, ships, all that? Does your land have a harbor like this one?” Ismail asked.

Wasco’s expression of surprise looked just like anyone else’s, which, Ismail thought, made perfect sense, as one saw the same look on the faces of babies just birthed. In fact, with his fluent Persian, it was impressive to Ismail how immediately comprehensible he was, despite his exotic home.

“No. Where I come from we do not gather in such numbers. More people live around this bay than in all my country, I think.”

Now Ismail was the surprised one. “So few as that?”

“Yes. Although there are a lot of people here, I think. But we live in a great forest, extremely thick and dense. The rivers make the best ways. Until you people arrived, we hunted and grew some crops, we made only what we needed, with no metal or ships. The Muslims brought those to our east coast, and set up forts in a few harbors, in particular at the mouth of the East River, and on Long Island. There were not so many of them, at first, and we learned a lot from them that we put to use for ourselves. But we have been stricken by sicknesses we never knew before, and many have died, at the same time that many more Muslims have come, bringing slaves from Africa to help them. But our land is very big, and the coast itself, where the Muslims cluster, is not very good land. So we trade with them, and even better, with ships from here, when the Travancoris arrived. We were very happy to see these ships, truly, because we were worried about the Firanji Muslims. We still are. They have lots of cannon, and they go where they want, and tell us we do not know Allah, and that we should pray to him, and so on. So we liked to see the coming of other people, in good ships. People who were not Muslim.”

“Did the Travancoris attack the Muslims already there?”

“Not yet. They landed at the mouth of the Mississippi, a big river. It may be they will come to blows eventually. They both are very well armed, and we are not, not yet.” He looked Ismail in the eye and smiled cheerfully. “I must remember you are Muslim yourself, no doubt.”

Ismail said, “I do not insist on it for others. Islam allows you to choose.”

“Yes, they said that. But here in Travancore you see it really happening. Sikh, Hindu, Africans, Japanese, you see them all here. The Kerala does not seem to care. Or he likes it.”

“Hindus absorb all that touch them, they say.”

“That sounds all right to me,” said Wasco. “Or in any case, preferable to Allah at gunpoint. We’re making our own ships now in our great lakes, and soon we can come around Africa to you. Or, now the Kerala is proposing to dig a canal through the desert of Sinai, connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, and giving us more direct access to you. He proposes to conquer all Egypt to make this possible. No, there is much talk to be made, many decisions to be made. My league is very fond of leagues.”

Then Bhakta came by and took Ismail off again. “You have been honored with an invitation to join the Kerala in one of the sky chariots.”

“The floating bags?”

Bhakta smiled. “Yes.”

“Oh joy.”

Following the hobbling abbess, Ismail passed through terraces each with its own perfume scenting it, through nutmeg, lime, cinnamon, mint, rose, rising level by level in short stone staircases, feeling as he went something like a step into some higher realm, where both senses and emotions were keener: a faint terror of the body, as the odors cast him farther and farther into a higher state. His head whirled. He did not fear death, but his body did not like the idea of what would happen to take him to that final moment. He caught up to the abbess and walked by her, to stabilize himself by her calm. By the way she went up the stairs he saw that she was always in pain. And yet she never spoke of it. Now she looked back down at the ocean, catching her breath, and put one gnarled hand to Ismail’s arm, and told him how glad she was that he was there among them, how much they might accomplish together working under the guidance of the Kerala, who was creating the space for greatness to occur. They were going to change the world. As she spoke Ismail reeled again on the scents in the air, he seemed to catch sight of things to come, of the Kerala sending back people and things from all over the world as he conquered one place after another, sending back to the monastery books, maps, instruments, medicines, tools, people with unusual diseases or new skills, from west of the Urals and east of the Pamirs, from Burma and Siam and the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra and Java, from the east coast of Africa, Ismail saw a witch doctor from Madagascar showing him the nearly transparent wings of a kind of bat, which allowed for a full examination of living veins and arteries, at which point he would give the Kerala a complete description of the circulation of the blood, and the Kerala would be very pleased at this, and then Ismail saw a Chinese Sumatran doctor showing him what the Chinese meant by qi and shen, which turned out to be what Ismail had always called lymph, produced by small glands under the arms, which might be affected by poultices of steamed herbs and drugs, as the Chinese had always claimed, and then he saw a group of Buddhist monks arranging charts of different elements in different families, depending on chemical and physical properties, all laid out in a very beautiful mandala, the subject of endless discussions in reading rooms, workshops, foundries and hospitals, everyone exploring even if they did not sail around the world, even if they never left Travancore, all of them anxious to have something interesting to tell the Kerala the next time he came by—not so the Kerala would reward them, though he would, but because he would be so happy at the new information. There was a look on his face everyone craved to see, and that was the whole story of Travancore, right there.

They came to a broad terrace where the flying basket was tethered. Already its huge silken bag was full of heated air, and straining up in jerks against its anchor ropes. The bamboo wicker basket was as big as a large carriage or a small pavilion; the rigging connecting it to the bottom of the silk bag was a network of lines, each slender, but clearly strong in the aggregate. The silk of the bag was diaphanous. A coal-fired enclosed brazier, with a hand bellows affixed to its side, was bolted to a bamboo frame affixed beneath the bag, just over head level when they stepped through a carriage door up into the basket.

The Kerala, the singer, Bhakta, and Ismail crowded in and stood at the corners. Pyidaungsu looked in and said, “Alas, it does not look as if there is room for me, I will crowd you uncomfortably; I will go up next time, regretful though I am to have lost the opportunity.”

The ropes were cast off by the pilot and his passengers, except for a single line; it was a nearly windless day, and this, Ismail was told, was to be a controlled flight. They were to ascend like a kite, the pilot explained, and then when they were near the full extension of the line, they would shut the stove down, and stabilize in that one spot like any other kite, hanging some thousand hands over the landscape. The usual slight onshore afternoon breeze would insure that they would float inland, if the line happened to part.

Up they rose. “It is like Arjuna’s chariot,” the Kerala said to them, and they all nodded, eyes shining with excitement. The singer was beautiful, the memory of her singing like a song in the air around them; and the Kerala more beautiful still; and Bhakta the most beautiful of all. The pilot pumped the bellows once or twice. The wind whistled in the rigging.

From the air the world proved to be flat-looking. It extended a tremendous distance to the horizon—green hills to the northeast and south, and to the west the flat blue plate of the sea, the sunlight on it gleaming like gold on blue ceramic. Things down there were small but distinct. The trees were like green tufts of wool. It looked like the landscapes painted in Persian miniatures, spread out and laid in space below them, gorgeously articulated. Fields of rice were banked and bordered by sinuous lines of palm trees, and beyond them were orchards of small trees, planted in rows and lines, looking like a tight weave of cloth, all the way out to the dark green hills in the east. “What kind of trees are those?” Ismail asked.

The Kerala answered, for as became clear, he had directed the establishment of most of the orchards they could see. “They are part of the city lands, and used to grow the sources of essential oils that we trade for the goods that come in. You smelled some of them on our walk to the basket. Vetiver, costus, valerian, and angelica, shrubs like keruda, lotes, kadam, parijat, and night queen. Grasses like citronella, lemon grass and ginger grass and palmarosa. Flowers, as you see, including tuberose, champac, roses, jasmine, frangipani. Herbs including peppermint, spearmint, patchouli, artemisia. Then there, back in the woods, those are orchards of sandalwood and agarwood. All these are bred, planted, grown, harvested, processed, and bottled or bagged for trade with Africa and Firanja and China and the New World, where formerly they had no scents and no healing substances anything near as powerful, and so are much amazed, and desire them very much. And now I have people out scouring the world to find more stock of various kind, to see what will grow here. Those that prosper are cultivated, and their oils sold round the world. Demand for them is so high it is hard to match it, and gold comes flowing into Travancore as its wondrous scents perfume the whole Earth.”

The basket turned as it came to the top of its anchor rope, and below them the heart of the kingdom was revealed, the city of Travancore as seen by the birds, or God. The land beside the bay was covered with roofs, trees, roads, docks, all as small as the toys of a princess, extending not as far as Konstantiniyye would have, but big enough, and sprinkled by a veritable arboretum of green trees, hardly displaced by the buildings and roads. Only the docks area was more roof than tree.

Just above them floated a tapestry of crosshatched cloud, moving inland on the wind. Off to sea a great line of tall white marbled clouds sailed toward them. “We’ll have to get down before too long,” the Kerala said to the pilot, who nodded and checked his stove.

A flock of vultures pinioned about them curiously, and the pilot shouted once at them, pulling a fowling gun out of a bag on the inside of the basket. He had never seen it happen, he said, but he had heard of a flock of birds pecking a bag right out of the sky. Hawks, jealous of their territory, apparently; probably vultures would not be so bold; but it would be a bad thing by which to be surprised.

The Kerala laughed, looked at Ismail and gestured at the colorful and fragrant fields. “This is the world we want you to help us make,” he said. “We will go out into the world and plant gardens and orchards to the horizons, we will build roads through the mountains and across the deserts, and terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be garden everywhere, and plenty for all, and there will be no more empires or kingdoms, no more caliphs, sultans, emirs, khans, or zamindars, no more kings or queens or princes, no more qadis or mullahs or ulema, no more slavery and no more usury, no more property and no more taxes, no more rich and no more poor, no killing or maiming or torture or execution, no more jailers and no more prisoners, no more generals, soldiers, armies or navies, no more patriarchy, no more clans, no more caste, no more hunger, no more suffering than what life brings us for being born and having to die, and then we will see for the first time what kind of creatures we really are.”

3 Gold Mountain

In the twelfth year of the Xianfeng Emperor, rain inundated Gold Mountain. It started raining in the third month of the autumn, the usual start of the rainy season on this part of the coast of Yingzhou, but then it never stopped raining until the second month of the following spring. It rained every day for half a year, and often a pounding, drenching rain, as if it were the tropics. Before that winter was halfway over the great central valley of Gold Mountain had flooded up and down its entire length, forming a shallow lake 1500 li long and 300 li wide. The water poured brownly between the green hills flanking the delta, into the great bay and out the Gold Gate, staining the ocean the color of mud all the way out to the Peng-lai Islands. The outflow ran hard both ebb and flood, but still this was not enough to empty the great valley. The Chinese towns and villages and farms on the flat valley floor were drowned to the rooftops, and the entire population of the valley had to leave for higher ground, in the coastal range or the foothills of the Gold Mountains, or, for the most part, down to the city, fabled Fangzhang. Those who lived on the eastern side of the central valley tended to move up into the foothills, ascending the rail and stage roads that ran up through apple orchards and vineyards overlooking the deep canyons that cut between the tablelands. Here they ran into the large foothill population of Japanese.

Many of these Japanese had come in the diaspora, after the Chinese armies had conquered Japan, in the Yung Cheng dynasty, a hundred and twenty years before. They were the ones who had first begun to grow rice in the central valley; but after only a generation or two, Chinese immigration filled the valley like the rains were now filling it, and most of the Japanese nisei and sansei moved up into the foothills, looking for gold, or growing grapes and apples. There they encountered a fair number of the old ones, hidden in the foothills and struggling to survive a malaria epidemic that recently had killed most of them off. The Japanese got along with the survivors, and the other old ones that came from the east, and together they resisted Chinese incursions into the foothills in every way they could, short of insurrection; for over the Gold Mountains lay high desolate alkaline deserts, where nothing could live. Their backs were to the wall.

So the arrival of so many Chinese refugee farming families was no very happy event for those already there. The foothills were composed of plateaus tilted up toward the high mountains, and cut by very deep, rugged, heavily forested river canyons. These manzanita-choked canyons were impenetrable to the Chinese authorities, and hidden in them were many Japanese families, most of them panning for gold or working small diggings. Chinese road-building campaigns stuck to the plateaus for the most part, and the canyons had remained substantially Japanese, despite the presence of Chinese prospectors: a Hokkaido-in-exile, tucked between the Chinese valley and the great desert of the natives. Now this world was filling with soaked Chinese rice farmers.

Neither side liked it. By now bad relations between Chinese and Japanese were as natural as dog and cat. The foothill Japanese tried to ignore the Chinese setting up refugee camps by all the stage and railroad stations; the Chinese tried to ignore the Japanese homesteads they were intruding on. Rice ran low, tempers got short, and the Chinese authorities sent troops into the area to keep order. The rain kept falling.

One group of Chinese walked out of the flooding on the stage road that followed the course of Rainbow Trout River. Overlooking the river’s north bank were apple orchards and cattle pasturage, mostly owned by Chinese in Fangzhang, but worked by Japanese. This group of Chinese camped in one of the orchards, and did what they could to construct shelter from the rain, which continued to fall, day after day after day. They built a pole-framed barnlike building with a shingle roof, an open fire at one end, and mere sheets for walls; meager protection, but better than none. By day the men scrambled down the canyon walls to fish in the roaring river, and others went into the forest to hunt deer, shooting great numbers of them and drying their meat.

The matriarch of one of these families, Yao Je by name, was frantic that her silkworms had been left behind on their farm, in boxes tucked in the rafters of her filature. Her husband did not think there was anything that could be done about it, but the family employed a Japanese servant boy named Kiyoaki, who volunteered to go back down to the valley and take their rowboat out on the first calm day, and recover the silkworms. His master did not like the proposal, but his mistress approved of it, as she wanted the silkworms. So one rainy morning Kiyoaki left to try to return to their flooded farm, if he could.

He found the Yao family’s rowboat still tied to the valley oak where they had left it. He untied it and rowed out over what had been the eastern rice paddies of their farm, toward their compound. A west wind churned up high waves, and both pushed him back east. His palms were blistered by the time he coasted up to the Yaos’ inundated compound, scraped the flat bottom of the boat over the outer wall, and tied it to the roof of the filature, the tallest building on the farm. He climbed through a side window into the rafters, and found the sheets of damp paper covered with silkworm eggs, in their boxes filled with rocks and mulberry mulch. He gathered all the sheets into an oilcloth bag and lowered them out the window into the rowboat, feeling pleased.

Now rain was violently thrashing the surface of the flood, and Kiyoaki considered spending the night in the attic of the Yaos’ house. But the emptiness of it frightened him, and for no better reason than that, he decided to row back. The oilcloth would protect the eggs, and he had been wet for so long that he was used to it. He was like a frog hopping in and out of its pond, it was all the same to him. So he got in the boat and began to row.

But now, perversely, the wind was from the east, blowing up waves of surprising weight and power. His hands hurt, and the boat occasionally brushed over drowned things: treetops, wiregraph poles, perhaps other things, he was too jumpy to look. Dead men’s fingers! He could not see far in the growing gloom, and as night fell he lost his feeling for what direction he was headed. The rowboat had a oiled canvas decking bunched in its bow, and he pulled it back over the gunwales, tied it in place, got under it and floated over the flood, lying in the bottom of the boat and occasionally bailing with a can. It was wet, but it would not founder. He let it bounce over the waves, and eventually fell asleep.

He woke several times in the night, but after bailing he always forced himself to sleep again. The rowboat swirled and rocked, but the waves never broke over it. If they did the boat would founder and he would drown, but he avoided thinking about that.

Dawn made it clear he had drifted west rather than east. He was far out on the inland sea that the central valley had become. A knot of valley oaks marked a small island of higher ground that still stood above the flood, and he rowed toward it.

As he was facing away from the new little island, he did not see it well until he had thumped the bow onto it. Immediately he discovered it was coated with a host of spiders, bugs, snakes, squirrels, moles, rats, mice, raccoons, and foxes, all leaping onto the rowboat at once, as representing the new highest ground. He himself was the highest ground of all, and he was shouting in dismay and slapping desperate snakes and squirrels and spiders off him, when a young woman and baby leaped onto the boat like the rest of the crowd of animals, except the girl pushed off from the tree Kiyoaki had rowed against, weeping and crying loudly, “They’re trying to eat her, they’re trying to eat my baby!”

Kiyoaki was preoccupied by the scores of creatures still crawling on him, to the point of nearly losing an oar over the side. Eventually he had squished or brushed or thrown overboard all the interlopers, and he replaced the oars in the oarlocks and rowed swiftly away. The girl and her baby sat on the boat deck, the girl still whacking insects and spiders and shouting, “Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!” She was Chinese.

The lowering gray clouds began to leak rain yet again. They could see nothing but water in all directions, except for the trees of the little island they had so hastily vacated.

Kiyoaki rowed east. “You’re going the wrong way,” the girl complained.

“This is the way I came,” Kiyoaki said. “The family that employs me is there.”

The girl did not reply.

“How did you get on that island?”

Again she said nothing.

Having passengers made rowing harder, and the waves came closer to breaking over the boat. Crickets and spiders continued to leap around underfoot, and an opossum had wedged itself in the bow under the decking. Kiyoaki rowed until his hands were bleeding, but they never caught sight of land; it was raining so hard now that it formed a kind of thick falling fog.

The girl complained, nursed her baby, killed bugs. “Row west,” she kept saying. “The current will help you.”

Kiyoaki rowed east. The boat jounced over the waves, and from time to time they bailed it out. The whole world seemed to have become a sea. Once Kiyoaki glimpsed a sight of the coastal range through a rent in the low clouds to the west, much closer than he would have expected or hoped. A current in the floodwaters must have been carrying them west.

Near dark they came on another tiny tree island.

“It’s the same one!” the young woman said.

“It just looks that way.”

The wind was rising again, like the evening delta breeze they enjoyed so much during the hot dry summers. The waves were getting higher and higher, slapping hard into the bow and splashing over the canvas and in on their feet. Now they had to land, or they would sink and drown.

So Kiyoaki landed the boat. Again a tide of animal and insect life overran them. The Chinese girl cursed with surprising fluency, beating the larger creatures away from her baby. The smaller ones you just had to get used to. Up in the vast branches of the valley oaks sat a miserable troop of snow monkeys, staring down on them. Kiyoaki tied the boat to a branch and got off, arranged a wet blanket on the squirming mud between two roots, pulled the rowboat’s decking off, and draped it over the girl and her baby, weighing it down as best he could with broken branches. He crawled underneath the canvas with her, and they and an entire menagerie of bugs and snakes and rodents settled in for the long night. It was hard to sleep.

The next morning was as rainy as ever. The young woman had put her baby between the two of them to protect her from the rats. Now she nursed her. Under the canvas it was warmer than outside. Kiyoaki wished he could start a fire to cook some snakes or squirrels, but nothing was dry. “We might as well get going,” he said.

They went out into the chill drizzle and got back in the boat. As Kiyoaki cast off about ten of the snow monkeys leaped down through the branches and climbed into the boat with them. The girl shrieked and pulled her shirt over her baby, huddling over it and staring at the monkeys. They sat there like passengers, looking down or off into the rain, pretending to be thinking about something else. She threatened one and it shrank back.

“Leave them alone,” Kiyoaki said. The monkeys were Japanese; the Chinese didn’t like them, and complained about their presence on Yingzhou.

They spun over the great inland sea. The young woman and her baby were dotted with spiders and fleas, as if they were dead bodies. The monkeys began to groom them, eating some insects and throwing others overboard.

“My name is Kiyoaki.”

“I am Peng-ti,” the young Chinese woman said, brushing things off the babe and ignoring the monkeys.

Rowing hurt the blisters on Kiyoaki’s hands, but after a while the pain would subside. He headed west, giving in to the current that had already taken them so far that way.

Out of the drizzle appeared a small sailboat. Kiyoaki shouted, waking the girl and baby, but the men on the sailboat had already spotted them, and they sailed over.

There were two sailors on board, two Japanese men. Peng-ti watched them with narrowed eyes.

One told the castaways to climb into their boat. “But tell the monkeys to stay there,” he said with a laugh.

Peng-ti passed her baby up to them, then hauled herself over the gunwale.

“You’re lucky they’re just monkeys,” the other one said. “Up north valley, Black Fort is high ground for a lot of country that hadn’t been cleared, and the animals that swam onto it were more than you see here in your rice paddies. They closed the gates, but walls are nothing much to bears, brown bears and gold bears, and they were shooting them when the magistrate ordered them to stop, because it was just going to use up all their ammunition and then they’d still have a whole town of bears. And the giant gold bears opened the gates and in came wolves, elk, the whole damn Hsu Fu walking the streets of Black Fort, and the people all locked up in their attics waiting it out.” The men laughed with pleasure at the thought.

“We’re hungry,” Peng-ti said.

“You look it,” they said.

“We were going east,” Kiyoaki mentioned.

“We’re going west.”

“Good,” Peng-ti said.

It continued to rain. They passed another knot of trees on an embankment just covered by water, and sitting in the branches like the monkeys were a dozen soaked and miserable Chinese men, very happy to leap on the sailboat. They had been there six days, they said. The fact that Japanese had rescued them did not seem to register with them one way or the other.

Now the sailboat and rowboat were carried on a current of brown water, between misted green hills.

“We’re going over to the city,” their tillerman said. “It’s the only place where the docks are still secure. Besides, we want to get dry and have a big dinner in Japantown.”

Across the rain-spattered brown water they sailed. The delta and its diked islands were all under the flood, it was all a big brown lake with occasional lines of treetops sticking out of it, giving the sailors a fix on their position, apparently. They pointed at certain lines and discussed them with great animation, their fluid Japanese a great contrast to their rough Chinese.

Eventually they came into a narrow strait between tall hillsides, and as the wind was shooting up this strait—the Inner Gate, Kiyoaki presumed—they let down the sail and rode the current, shifting their rudder to keep in the fast part of it, which curved with the bend around the tall hills to the south, beyond which they were through the narrows and thrust out onto the broad expanse of Golden Bay, now a rocking foam-streaked brown bay, ringed by green hills that disappeared into a ceiling of low gray cloud. As they tacked across to the city the clouds thinned in a few bands over the tall ridge of the northern peninsula, and weak light fell onto the hive of buildings and streets covering the peninsula, all the way up to the peak of Mount Tamalpi, turning certain neighborhoods white or silver or pewter, amid the general gray. It was an awesome sight.

The western side of the bay just north of the Gold Gate was broken by several peninsulas extending into the bay, and these peninsulas were covered with buildings too, indeed among the city’s busiest districts, as they formed the capes of three little harbor bays. The middle of these three was the largest, the commercial harbor, and the peninsula on its south side also served the Japantown, tucked among the warehouses and a working neighborhood behind them. Here, as their sailors had said, the floating docks and the wharves were intact and functioning normally, as if the central valley were not completely flooded. Only the dirt-brown water of the bay revealed that anything was different.

As they approached the docks, the monkeys on the rowboat began to look agitated. It was a case of going from flood to frying pan for them, and eventually one slipped overboard and struck out swimming for an island to the south, and all the others immediately followed with a splash, picking up their conversation among themselves where they had left off.

“That’s why they call it Monkey Island,” their pilot said.

He brought them into the middle harbor. The men on the dock included a Chinese magistrate, who looked down and said, “Still flooded out there I see.”

“Still flooded and still raining.”

“People must be getting hungry.”

“Yes.”

The Chinese men climbed onto the dock, and thanked the sailors, who got out with Kiyoaki and Peng-ti and the baby. The tillerman joined them as they followed the magistrate to the “Great Valley Refugee Office,” set up in the customs building at the back of the dock. There they were registered—their names, place of residence before the flood, and the whereabouts of their families and neighbors, if known, all recorded. The clerks gave them chits that would allow them to claim beds in the immigration-control buildings, located on the steep-sided big island out in the bay.

The tillerman shook his head. These big buildings had been built to quarantine non-Chinese immigrants to Gold Mountain, about fifty years before. They were surrounded by fences tipped with barbed wire, and contained big dormitories with men’s and women’s sides. Now they housed some of the stream of refugees flowing down into the bay on the flood, mostly displaced valley Chinese, but the keepers of the place had retained the prison attitude they had had with the immigrants, and the valley refugees there were complaining bitterly and doing their best to get cleared to move in with local relatives, or to relocate up or down the coast, or even to return to the flooded valley and wait around the edges until the water receded. But there had been outbreaks of cholera reported, and the governor of the province had declared a state of emergency that allowed him to act directly in the emperor’s interests: martial law was in effect, enforced by army and navy.

The tillerman, having explained this, said to Kiyoaki and Peng-ti, “You can stay with us if you want. We stay at a boardinghouse in Japantown, it’s clean and cheap. They’ll put you up on credit if we say you’re good for it.”

Kiyoaki regarded Peng-ti, who looked down. Snake or spider: refugee housing or Japantown.

“We’ll come with you,” she said. “Many thanks.”

The street leading inland from the docks to the high central district of the city was lined on both sides by restaurants and hotels and small shops, the fluid calligraphy of Japanese as common as the blockier Chinese ideograms. Side streets were tight alleyways, the peaked rooftops curving up into the rain until the buildings almost met overhead. People wore oilcloth ponchos or jackets, and carried black or colorful print umbrellas, many very tattered by now. Everyone was wet, heads lowered and shoulders hunched, and the middle of the street was like an open stream, bouncing brownly to the bay. The green hills rising to the west of this quarter of the city were bright with tile roofs, red and green and a vivid blue: a prosperous quarter, despite the Japantown at its foot. Or, perhaps, because of it. Kiyoaki had been taught to call the blue of those tiles Kyoto blue.

They walked through alleys to a big merchant house and chandlery in the warren of Japantown, and the two Japanese men—the older named Gen, they learned—introduced the young castaways to the proprietress of a boardinghouse next door. She was a toothless old Japanese woman, in a simple brown kimono, with a shrine in her hallway and reception room. They stepped in her door and began to shed their wet raingear, and she regarded them with a critical eye. “Everyone so wet these days,” she complained. “You look like they pulled you off the bottom of the bay. Chewed by crabs.”

She gave them dry clothes, and had theirs sent to a laundry. There were women and men’s wings to her establishment, and Kiyoaki and Peng-ti were assigned mats, then fed a hot meal of rice and soup, followed by cups of warm sake. Gen was paying for them, and he waved off their thanks in the usual brusque Japanese manner. “Payment on return home,” Gen said. “Your families will be happy to repay me.”

Neither of the castaways had much to say to that. Fed, dry; there was nothing left but to go to their rooms and sleep as if felled.

Next day Kiyoaki woke to the sound of the chandler next door, shouting at an assistant. Kiyoaki looked out the window of his room into a window of the chandlery, and saw the angry chandler hit the unfortunate youth on the side of the head with an abacus, the beads rattling back and forth.

Gen had come in the room, and he regarded the scene in the next building impassively. “Come on,” he said to Kiyoaki. “I’ve got some errands to do, it’ll be a way to show you some of the city.”

Off they went, south on the big coastal street fronting the bay, connecting all of the smaller harbors facing the big bay and the islands in it. The southernmost harbor was tighter than the one fronting Japantown, its bay a forest of masts and smokestacks, the city behind and above it jammed together in a great mass of three- and four-story buildings, all wooden with tile roofs, crammed together in what Gen said was the usual Chinese city style, and running right down to the high-tide line, in places even built out over the water. This compact mass of buildings covered the whole end of the peninsula, its streets running straight east and west from the bay to the ocean, and north and south until they ended in parks and promenades high over the Gold Gate. The strait was obscured by a fog that floated in over the yellow spill of floodwater pouring out to sea; the yellow-brown plume was so extensive that there was no blue ocean to be seen. On the ocean side of the point lay the long batteries of the city defenses, concrete fortresses that Gen said commanded the strait and the waters outside it for up to fifty li offshore.

Gen sat on the low wall of one of the promenades overlooking the strait. He waved a hand to the north, where streets and rooftops covered everything they could see.

“The greatest harbor on Earth. The greatest city in the world, some say.”

“It’s big, that’s for sure. I didn’t know it would be so—”

“A million people here now, they say. And more coming all the time. They just keep building north, on up the peninsula.”

Across the strait, on the other hand, the southern peninsula was a waste of marshes and bare steep hills. It looked very empty compared to the city, and Kiyoaki remarked on it.

Gen shrugged: “Too marshy, I guess, and too steep for streets. I suppose they’ll get to it eventually, but it’s better over here.”

The islands dotting the bay were occupied by the compounds of the imperial bureaucrats. Out on the biggest island the governor’s mansion was roofed with gold. The brown foam-streaked surface of the water was dotted with little bay boats, mostly sail, some smoking two-strokes. Little marinas of square houseboats were tucked against the islands. Kiyoaki surveyed the scene happily. “Maybe I’ll move here. There must be jobs.”

“Oh yeah. Down at the docks, unloading the freighters—get a room at the boardinghouse—there’s lots of work. In the chandlery too.”

Kiyoaki recalled his awakening. “Why was that man so angry?”

Gen frowned. “That was unfortunate. Tagomi-san is a good man, he doesn’t usually beat his help, I assure you. But he’s frustrated. We can’t get the authorities to release supplies of rice to feed the people stranded in the valley. The chandler is very high in the Japanese community here, and he’s been trying for months now. He thinks the Chinese bureaucrats, over on the island there”—gesturing—“are hoping that most of the people inland will starve.”

“But that’s crazy! Most of them are Chinese.”

“Yeah sure, a lot are Chinese, but it would mean even more Japanese.”

“How so?”

Gen regarded him. “There are more of us in the central valley than there are Chinese. Think about it. It may not be so obvious, because the Chinese are the only ones allowed to own land, and so they run the rice paddies, especially where you came from, over east side. But upvalley, downvalley—it’s mostly Japanese at the ends, and in the foothills, the coastal range, even more so. We were here first, you understand? Now comes this big flood, people are driven away, flooded out, starving. The bureaucrats are thinking, when it’s over and the land reemerges, assuming it will someday, if most of the Japanese and natives have died of hunger, then new immigrants can be sent in to take over the valley. And they’ll all be Chinese.”

Kiyoaki didn’t know what to say to this.

Gen stared at him curiously. He seemed to like what he saw. “So, you know, Tagomi has been trying to organize private relief, and we’ve been taking it inland on the flood. But it isn’t going well, and it’s been expensive, and so the old man is getting testy. His poor workers are paying for it.” Gen laughed.

“But you rescued those Chinese stuck in the trees.”

“Yeah, yeah. Our job. Our duty. Good must result from good, eh? That’s what the old woman boarding you says. Of course she’s always getting taken.”

They regarded a new tongue of fog licking into the strait. Rain clouds on the horizon looked like a great treasure fleet arriving. A black broom of rain already swept the desolate southern peninsula.

Gen clapped him on the shoulder in a friendly way. “Come on, I have to get her some stuff at the store.”

He led Kiyoaki up to a tram station, and they got on the next tram that ran up the western side of the city, overlooking the ocean. Up streets and down, past shady residential districts, then another government district, high on the slopes overlooking the stained ocean, wide esplanades lined with cherry trees; then another fortress. The hilly neighborhoods north of these guns held many of the city’s richest mansions, Gen said. They gazed at some of them from the tram as it squeaked past. From the tops of the precipitous streets they could see the temples on the summit of Mount Tamalpi. Then down into a valley, off that tram, and east on another one, across the peninsula and back to Japantown, with bags of food from a market for the proprietress of the boardinghouse.

Kiyoaki looked in the women’s wing to see how Peng-ti and her baby were doing. She was sitting in a window embrasure holding the child, looking blank and desolate. She had not gone to find any Chinese relatives, or to seek help from the Chinese authorities, not that there appeared to be much help from that direction; but she seemed not at all interested. Staying with the Japanese, as if in hiding. But she spoke no Japanese, and that was all they used here, unless they thought to speak to her directly in Chinese.

“Come out with me,” he said to her in Chinese. “I have some money from Gen for the tram, we can see the Gold Gate.”

She hesitated, then agreed. Kiyoaki led her onto the tram system he had just learned, and they went down to the park overlooking the strait. The fog had almost burned off, and the next line of storm clouds were not yet arrived, and the spectacle of the city and the bay shone in wet blinking sunlight. The brown flood continued to pour out to sea, the scraps and lines of foam showing how fast the current was; it must have been ebb tide. That was every rice paddy in the central valley, scoured away and flushed out into the big ocean. Inland everything would have to be built anew. Kiyoaki said something to this effect, and a flash of anger crossed Peng-ti’s face, quickly suppressed.

“Good,” she said. “I never want to see that place again.”

Kiyoaki regarded her, shocked. She could not have been more than about sixteen. What about her parents, her family? She wasn’t saying, and he was too polite to ask.

Instead they sat in the rare sun, watching the bay. The babe whimpered, and unobtrusively Peng-ti nursed it. Kiyoaki watched her face and the tidal race in the Gold Gate, thinking about the Chinese, their implacable bureaucracy, their huge cities, their rule of Japan, Korea, Mindanao, Aozhou, Yingzhou, and Inka.

“What’s your baby’s name?” Kiyoaki said.

“Hu Die,” the girl said. “It means—”

“Butterfly,” Kiyoaki said, in Japanese. “I know.” He fluttered with a hand, and she smiled and nodded.

Clouds obscured the sun again, and it cooled rapidly in the onshore breeze. They took the tram back to Japantown.

At the boardinghouse Peng-ti went to the women’s wing, and as the men’s wing was empty, Kiyoaki entered the chandlery next door, thinking to inquire about a job. The shop on the first floor was deserted, and he heard voices on the second floor, so he went up the stairs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s good.”

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

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

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

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

The elderly foreigner asked a question in his language.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Right.”

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

“I understand.”

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

“Whatever you say.”

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

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

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

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

“No.”

“I’m going to work for Japan, against China.”

“I see.”

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

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

4 Black Clouds

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

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

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

The problem was that the stakes became too high. The two biggest empires were both the strongest and the weakest at the same time. The Qing dynasty continued to grow to the south, north, in the New World, and inside itself. Meanwhile Islam controlled a huge part of the Old World, and the eastern coasts of the New as well. Yingzhou had a Muslim east coast, the League of Tribes in the middle, Chinese settlements in the west, and new Travancori trading ports. Inka was a battleground between Chinese, Travancori, and the Muslims of west Africa.

So the world was fractured into the two big old hegemons, China and Islam, and the two new and smaller leagues, the Indian and the Yingzhou. Chinese ocean trade and conquest slowly extended their hegemony over the Dahai, settling Aozhou, the west coasts of Yingzhou and Inka, and making inroads by sea in many other places; becoming the Middle Kingdom in fact as well as by name, the center of the world by sheer numbers alone, as well as by the new power of its navies. A danger to all the other peoples on Earth, in fact, despite the various problems in the Qing bureaucracy.

At the same time Dar al-Islam kept spreading, through all Africa, the east coasts of the New World, across central Asia, and even into India, where it had never really left, and into southeast Asia as well, even onto the isolated west coast of Aozhou.

And in the middle, caught between these two expansions, so to speak, was India. Travancore took the lead here, but the Punjab, Bengal, Rajistan, and all the other states of the subcontinent were active and prospering at home and abroad, in turmoil and conflict, always at odds, and yet free of emperors and caliphs, and in their ferment the scientific leaders of the world, with trading posts on every continent, constantly in opposition against the hegemons, the ally of anyone against Islam, and often against the Chinese, with whom they kept a most uneasy relationship, both fearing them and needing them; but as the decades went by, and the old Muslim empires showed more and more aggression to the east, across Transoxiana and into all north Asia, more and more inclined to court China, as a counterweight, trusting the Himalaya and the great jungles of Burma to keep them out from under the big umbrella of Chinese patronage.

Thus it was that the Indian states were often uneasily allied with China in hope of aid against their ancient foe Islam. So that when Islam and Chinese finally fell into active war, first in central Asia, then all over the world, Travancore and the Indian League were pulled into it, and Muslim-Hindu violence began yet another deadly round.

It began in the twenty-first year of the Kuang Hsu emperor, the last of the Qing dynasty, when south China’s Muslim enclaves all revolted at once. The Manchu banners were sent south and the rebellion put down, more or less, over the course of the next several years. But the suppression may have worked too well, for the Muslims of west China had been chafing under Qing military rule for many generations, and with their fellow believers to the east being exterminated, it became a matter of jihad or death. So they revolted, out in the vast empty deserts and mountains of central Asia, and the brown towns in their green valleys quickly turned red.

The Qing government, corrupt but massively entrenched, massively wealthy, made its move against its Muslim rebellions by initiating another campaign of conquest, west across Asia. This succeeded for a time, because there was no strong state in the abandoned center of the world to oppose them. But eventually it triggered a defensive jihad from the Muslims of west Asia, whom nothing would have united at that point except for the threat of Chinese conquest.

This unintended consolidation of Islam was quite an accomplishment. Wars between the remnants of the Safavid and Ottoman empires, between Shiite and Sunni, Sufi and Wahhabi, the Firanji states and the Maghrib, had been continuous throughout the period of consolidation of states and boundaries, and even with sovereign borders more or less fixed, except for ongoing struggles here and there, they were not initially in a position to respond as a civilization to the threat from China.

But when threatened by a Chinese expansion across all Asia, the fractured Islamic states pulled together, and began to fight back as a united force. A collision that had been building for centuries now came to a head: for both of the big old civilizations, global hegemony or complete annihilation were thinkable possibilities. The stakes could not be higher.

The Indian League tried at first to remain neutral, as did the Hodenosaunee. But the war drew them in too, when Islamic invaders crossed into north India, as they had so many times before, and conquered it south to the Deccan, across Bengal and down into Burma. Similarly, Muslim armies began to conquer Yingzhou east to west, attacking both the Hodenosaunee League and the Chinese in the west. All the world descended into this realm of conflict together.

And so the long war came.