The Years of Rice and Salt

One

In the thirty-fifth year of his reign, the Wanli Emperor turned his feverish and permanently dissatisfied eye on Nippon. Ten years earlier the Nipponese general Hideyoshi had had the temerity to attempt the conquest of China, and when the Koreans had refused him passage, his army had invaded Korea as the first step in its path. It had taken a large Chinese army three years to drive the invaders off the Korean peninsula, and the twenty-six million ounces of silver it had cost the Wanli Emperor had put his treasury in acute difficulties, difficulties from which it had never recovered. The emperor was inclined to avenge this unprovoked assault (if you did not count the two unsuccessful attacks on Nippon made by Kublai Khan), and to remove the danger of any future problem arising from Nippon, by subjugating it to Chinese suzerainty. Hideyoshi had died, and Ieyasu, the head of a new Tokugawa shogunate, had successfully united all the Nipponese islands under his command, and then closed the country to foreigners. All Nipponese were forbidden to leave, and those who did were forbidden to return. The building of seaworthy ships was also forbidden, although the Wanli noted irritably in his vermilion memoranda that this did not stop hordes of Nipponese pirates from attacking the long Chinese coastline using smaller craft. He thought Ieyasu’s retreat from the world signaled weakness, and yet at the same time, a fortress nation of warriors just offshore from the Middle Kingdom was not something to be tolerated either. It pleased the Wanli to think of returning this bastard child of Chinese culture to its rightful place under the Dragon Throne, joining there Korea, Annam, Tibet, Mindanao, and the Spice Islands.

His advisors were not enthusiastic about the plan. For one thing, the treasury was still depleted. For another, the Ming court was already drained by all the previous dramatic events of the Wanli reign, not only the defense of Korea but also the racking dissension caused by the succession problem, still only nominally solved by the Wanli’s choice of his elder son, and his younger son’s banishment to the provinces; all that could change in a week. And around that highly combustible situation, like a civil war in waiting, constellated all the conflicts and jealous maneuverings of the court powers: the empress mother, the empress, the senior civil servants, the eunuchs, and the generals. Something in the Wanli’s combination of intelligence and vacillation, his permanent discontent and his occasional bursts of vengeful fury, made the court of his old age a flayed and exhausted nest of intrigues. To his advisors, particularly the generals and the heads of the treasury, conquering Nippon did not seem even remotely possible.

The emperor, true to form, insisted that it be done.

His senior generals came back with an alternative plan, which they hoped very much would satisfy his desire. They proposed that the emperor’s diplomats arrange a treaty with one of the minor Nipponese shoguns, the Tozama Daimyo, who were out of Ieyasu’s favor because they had joined him only after his military victory at Sekigahara. The treaty would stipulate that this minor shogun would invite the Chinese to come to one of his ports, and open it permanently to Chinese trade. A Chinese navy would then land at this port in force, and in essence make the port a Chinese port, defended by the full power of the Chinese navy, grown so much bigger during the Wanli’s reign in the attempt to defend the coast against pirates. Most of the pirates were from Nippon, so there was a kind of justice there; and a chance to trade with Nippon as well. After that, the treaty port could serve as the staging center of a slower conquest of Nippon, conceived of as happening in stages rather than all at once. That would make it affordable.

The Wanli grumbled about his advisors’ meager, partial, eunuchlike enactments of his desires, but patient advocacy by his most trusted advisors of that period finally won him over, and he approved the plan. A secret treaty was arranged with a local lord, Omura, who invited the Chinese to land and trade at a small fishing village with an excellent harbor, called Nagasaki. Preparations for an expedition that would arrive there with overwhelming force were made in the rebuilt shipyards of Longjiang, near Nanjing, also on the Cantonese coast. The big new ships of the invading fleet were filled with supplies to enable the landing force to withstand a long siege, and they assembled for the first time off the coast of Taiwan, with no one in Nippon except for Omura and his advisors any the wiser.

The fleet was, by the Wanli’s direct order, put under the command of one Admiral Kheim, of Annam. This admiral had already led a fleet for the emperor, in the subjugation of Taiwan some years before, but he was still seen by the Chinese bureacracy and military as an outsider, an expert in pirate suppression who had achieved his expertise by spending much of his youth as a pirate himself, plundering the Fujian coast. The Wanli Emperor did not care about this, and even regarded it as a point in Kheim’s favor; he wanted someone who could get results, and if he came from outside the military bureaucracy, with its many entanglements at court and in the provinces, so much the better.

The fleet set out in the thirty-eighth year of the Wanli, on the third day of the first month. The spring winds were constant from the northwest for eight days, and the fleet positioned itself in the Kuroshio, the Black River, that great ocean current that runs like a river a hundred li wide, up the long southern shores of the Nipponese islands.

This was as planned, and they were on their way; but then the winds died. Nothing in the air stirred. No bird was seen, and the paper sails of the fleet hung limp, their cross slats ticking the masts only because of the rippling of the Kuroshio itself, which carried them north and east past the main Nipponese islands, past Hokkaido, and out onto the empty expanse of the Dahai, the Great Ocean. This shoreless blue expanse was bisected by their invisible but powerful Black River, flowing relentlessly east.

Admiral Kheim ordered all the captains of the Eight Great Ships and of the Lesser Eighteen Ships to row over to the flagship, where they consulted. Many of the most experienced ocean sailors of Taiwan, Annam, Fujian, and Canton were among these men, and their faces were grave; to be carried off by the Kuroshio was a dangerous business. All of them had heard stories of junks that had been becalmed in the current, or dismasted by squalls, or had had to chop down their masts in order to avoid being capsized, and after that disappeared for years—in one story nine years, in another thirty—after which they had drifted back out of the southeast, bleached and empty, or manned by skeletons. These stories, and the eyewitness evidence of the flagship’s doctor, I-Chin, who claimed to have ridden around the Dahai successfully in his youth on a fishing junk disabled by a typhoon, led them to agree that there was probably a big circular current flowing around the vast sea, and that if they could stay alive long enough, they might be able to sail around in it, back to home.

It was not a plan any of them would have chosen to undertake deliberately, but at that point they had no other option but to try it. The captains sat in the admiral’s cabin on the flagship and regarded each other unhappily. Many of the Chinese there knew the legend of Hsu Fu, admiral of the Han dynasty of ancient times, who had sailed off with his fleet in search of lands to settle on the other side of the Dahai, and never been heard from again. They knew as well the story of Kublai Khan’s two attempts at invading Nippon, both demolished by unseasonable typhoons, which had given the Nipponese the conviction that there was a divine wind that would defend their home islands from foreign attack. Who could disagree? And it seemed all too possible that this divine wind was now doing its work in a kind of joke or ironic reversal, manifesting itself as a divine calm while they were in the Kuroshio, causing their destruction just as effectively as any typhoon. The calm after all was uncannily complete, its timing miraculously good; it could be they had gotten caught up in gods’ business. That being the case, they could only give their fate over to their own gods, and hope to ride things out.

This was not Admiral Kheim’s favored mode of being. “Enough,” he said darkly, ending the meeting. He had no faith in the sea gods’ goodwill, and took no stock in old stories, except as they were useful. They were caught in the Kuroshio; they had some knowledge of the currents of the Dahai—that north of the equator they ran east, south of the equator, west. They knew the prevailing winds tended to follow likewise. The doctor I-Chin had successfully ridden the entirety of this great circle, his unprepared ship’s crew living off fish and seaweed, drinking rainwater, and stopping for supplies at islands they passed. This was cause for hope. And as the air remained eerily calm, hope was all they had. It was not as if they had any other options; the ships were dead in the water, and the big ones were too big to row anywhere. In truth they had no choice but to make the best of it.

Admiral Kheim therefore ordered most of the men of the fleet to get on board the Eighteen Lesser Ships, and ordered half of these to row north, half south, with the idea they could row at an angle out of the Black Stream, and sail home when the wind returned, to get word to the emperor concerning what had happened. The Eight Great Ships, manned by the smallest crews that could sail them, with as much of the fleet’s supplies as could be fitted in their holds, settled in to wait out the ride around the ocean on the currents. If the smaller ones succeeded in sailing back to China, they were to tell the emperor to expect the Great Eight to return at some later date, out of the southeast.

In a couple of days the smaller ships all disappeared over the horizon, and the Eight Great Ships drifted on, roped together in a perfect calm, off the maps to the unknown east. There was nothing else they could do.

Thirty days passed without the slightest breeze. Each day they rode the current farther to the east.

No one had ever seen anything like it. Admiral Kheim rejected all talk of the Divine Calm, however; as he pointed out, the weather had gone strange in recent years, mostly much colder, with lakes freezing over that had never frozen before, and freak winds, such as certain whirlwinds that had stood in place for weeks at a time. Something was wrong in the heavens. This was just part of that.

When the wind returned at last, it was strong from the west, pushing them even farther along. They angled south across the prevailing wind, but cautiously now, hoping to stay within the hypothetical great circle current, as being the fastest way around the ocean and back home. In the middle of the circle there was rumored to be a permanent zone of calm, perhaps the very centerpoint of the Dahai, as it was near the equator, and perhaps equidistant from shores east and west, though no one could say for sure about that. A doldrums that no junk could escape, in any case. They had to go out far enough to the east to get around that, then head south, then, below the equator, back west again.

They saw no islands. Seabirds sometimes flew over, and they shot a few with arrows and ate them for luck. They fished day and night with nets, and caught flying fish in their sails, and pulled in snarls of seaweed that grew increasingly rare, and refilled their water casks when it rained, setting funnels like inverted umbrellas over them. And they were seldom thirsty, and never hungry.

But never a sight of land. The voyage went on, day after day, week after week, month after month. The rattan and the rigging began to wear thin. The sails grew transparent. Their skin began to grow transparent.

The sailors grumbled. They no longer approved of the plan to ride the circle of currents around the great sea; but there was no turning back, as Kheim pointed out to them. So they passed through their grumbling, as through a storm. Kheim was not an admiral anyone wanted to cross.

They rode out storms in the sky, and felt the rocking of storms under the sea. So many days passed that their lives before the voyage grew distant and indistinct; Nippon, Taiwan, even China itself began to seem like dreams of a former existence. Sailing became the whole world: a water world, with its blue plate of waves under an inverted bowl of blue sky, and nothing else. They no longer even looked for land. A mass of seaweed was as astonishing as an island would once have been. Rain was always welcome, as the occasional periods of rationing and thirst had taught them painfully their utter reliance on fresh water. This mostly came from rain, despite the little stills that I-Chin had constructed to clarify saltwater, which gave them a few buckets a day.

All things were reduced to their elemental being. Water was ocean; air was sky; earth, their ships; fire, the sun, and their thoughts. The fires banked down. Some days Kheim woke, and lived, and watched the sun go down again, and realized that he had forgotten to think a single thought that whole day. And he was the admiral.

Once they passed the bleached wreckage of a huge junk, intertwined with seaweed and whitened with bird droppings, barely afloat. Another time they saw a sea serpent out to the east, near the horizon, perhaps leading them on.

Perhaps the fire had left their minds entirely, and was in the sun alone, burning above through rainless days. But something must have remained; gray coals, almost burnt out; for when land poked over the horizon to the east, late one afternoon, they shouted as if it were all they had ever thought of, in every moment of the hundred and sixty days of their unexpected journey. Green mountainsides, falling precipitously into the sea, apparently empty; it didn’t matter; it was land. What looked to be a large island.

The next morning it was still there ahead of them. Land ho!

Very steep land, however, so steep that there was no obvious place to make landfall: no bays, no river mouths of any size; just a great wall of green hills, rising wetly out of the sea.

Kheim ordered them to sail south, thinking even now of the return to China. The wind was in their favor for once, and the current also. They sailed south all that day and the next, without a single harbor to be seen. Then, as light fog lifted one morning, they saw they had passed a cape, which protected a sandy southern reach; and farther south there was a gap in the hills, dramatic and obvious. A bay. There was a patch of turbulent white water on the north side of this majestic entrance strait, but beyond that it was clear sailing, and the flood tide helping to usher them in.

So they sailed into a bay like nothing any of them had ever seen in all their travels. An inland sea, really, with three or four rocky islands in it, and hills all around, and marshes bordering most of its shores. The hills were rocky on top but mostly forested, the marshes lime green, yellowed by fall colors. Beautiful land; and empty!

They turned north and anchored in a shallow inlet, protected by a hilly spine that ran down into the water. Then some of them spotted a line of smoke rising up into the evening air.

“People,” I-Chin said. “But I don’t think this can be the western end of the Muslim lands. We haven’t sailed far enough for that, if Hsing Ho is correct. We shouldn’t even be close yet.”

“Maybe it was a stronger current than you thought.”

“Maybe. I can refine our distance-from-equator tonight.”

“Good.”

But a distance-from-China would have been better, and that was the calculation they could not make. Dead reckoning had been impossible during the long period of their drift, and despite I-Chin’s continual guesses, Kheim didn’t think they knew to within a thousand li.

As for distance-from-equator, I-Chin reported that night, after measuring the stars, that they were at about the same line as Edo or Beijing—a little higher than Edo, a little lower than Beijing. I-Chin tapped his astrolabe thoughtfully. “It’s the same distance-from-equator as the hui countries in the far west, in Fulan where all the people died. If Hsing Ho’s map can be trusted. Fulan, see? A harbor called Lisboa. But there’s no Fulan-chi here. I don’t think this can be Fulan. We must have come upon an island.”

“A big island!”

“Yes, a big island.” I-Chin sighed. “If we could only solve the distance-from-China problem.”

It was an everlasting complaint with him, causing an obsession with clockmaking; an accurate clock would have made it possible to calculate the distance-from-Beijing, using an almanac to give the star times in China, and timing from there. The emperor had some fine clocks in his palace, it was said, but they had none on their ship. Kheim left him to his muttering.

The next morning they woke to find a group of locals—men, women, and children—dressed in leather skirts, shell necklaces, and feather headdresses, standing on the beach watching them. They had no cloth, it appeared, and no metal except small bits of hammered gold, copper, and silver. Their arrowheads and spear tips were flaked obsidian, their baskets woven of reeds and pine needles. Great mounds of shells lay heaped on the beach above the high-tide mark, and the visitors could see smoke rising from fires set inside wicker hovels, little shelters like those the poor farmers in China used for their pigs in winter.

The sailors laughed and chattered to see such people. They were partly relieved and partly amazed, but it was impossible to be frightened of these folk.

Kheim was not so sure. “They’re like the wild people on Taiwan,” he said. “We had some terrible fights with them when we went after pirates in the mountains. We have to be careful.”

I-Chin said, “Tribes like that exist on some of the Spice Islands too, I’ve seen them. But even those people have more things than these.”

“No brick or wood houses, no iron that I can see, meaning no guns…”

“No fields for that matter. They must eat the clams,” pointing at the great shell heaps, “and fish. And whatever they can hunt or glean. These are poor people.”

“That won’t leave much for us.”

“No.”

The sailors were shouting down at them: “Hello! Hello!”

Kheim ordered them to be quiet. He and I-Chin got in one of the little rowboats they had on the great ship, and had four sailors row them ashore.

From the shallows Kheim stood and greeted the locals, palms up and out, as one did in the Spice Islands with the wild ones. The locals didn’t understand anything he said, but his gestures made plain his peaceful intent, and they seemed to recognize it. After a while he stepped ashore, confident of a peaceful welcome, but instructing the sailors to keep their flintlocks and crossbows below the seats at the ready, just in case.

On shore he was surrounded by curious people, babbling in their own tongue. Somewhat distracted by the sight of the women’s breasts, he greeted a man who stepped forward, whose elaborate and colorful headdress perhaps confirmed him as their headman. Kheim’s silk neck scarf, much salt-damaged and faded, had the image of a phoenix on it, and Kheim untied it and gave it to the man, holding it flat so he could see the image. The silk itself interested the man more than the image on it. “We should have brought more silk,” Kheim said to I-Chin.

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

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

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

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

“Or a young girl.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For a moment, all was still.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What! Are you sure?”

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What did he say?” he asked the girl.

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

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

She looked at him, not comprehending.

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

She shivered in the bottom of the boat.

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

Ta Ma stared at him.

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

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

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

She called out to Ta Ma, sounding distraught.

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

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

“What did he say?”

“He said, what do we do?”

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

She said something to her father, miserably.

Ta Ma said something.

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

“He said, farewell.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They sailed south down the coast of the new island all this while, and every day they became more amazed that they were not reaching the southern end of it. One cape looked as if it would be the turning point, but past it they saw the land curved south again, behind some baked empty islands. Farther south they saw villages on the beaches, and they knew enough now to identify the bath temples. Kheim kept the fleet well offshore, but he did allow one canoe to approach, and he had Butterfly try speaking to them, but they didn’t understand her, nor her them. Kheim made his dumb show signifying sickness and danger, and the locals paddled quickly away.

They began to sail against a current from the south, but it was mild, and the winds were constant from the west. The fishing here was excellent, the weather mild. Day followed day in a perfect circle of sameness. The land fell away east again, then ran south, most of the way to the equator, past a big archipelago of low islands, with good anchorages and good water, and seabirds with blue feet.

They came at last to a steeply rising coastline, with great snowy volcanoes in the distance, like Fuji only twice as big, or more, punctuating the sky behind a steep coastal range, which was already tall. This final giganticism finished anyone’s ability to think of this place as an island.

“Are you sure this isn’t Africa?” Kheim said to I-Chin.

I-Chin was not sure. “Maybe. Maybe the people we left up north are the only survivors of the Fulanchi, reduced to a primitive state. Maybe this is the west coast of the world, and we sailed past the opening to their middle sea in the night, or in a fog. But I don’t think so.”

“Then where are we?”

I-Chin showed Kheim where he thought they were on the long strips of their map; east of the final markings, out where the map was entirely blank. But first he pointed to the far western strip. “See, Fulan and Africa look like this on their west sides. The Muslim cartographers are very consistent about it. And Hsing Ho calculated that the world is about seventy-five thousand li around. If he’s right, we only sailed half as far as we should have, or less, across the Dahai to Africa and Fulan.”

“Maybe he’s wrong then. Maybe the world occupies more of the globe than he thought. Or maybe the globe is smaller.”

“But his method was good. I made the same measurements on our trip to the Moluccas, and did the geometry, and found he was right.”

“But look!” Gesturing at the mountainous land before them. “If it isn’t Africa, what is it?”

“An island, I suppose. A big island, far out in the Dahai, where no one has ever sailed. Another world, like the real one. An eastern one like the western one.”

“An island no one has ever sailed to before? That no one ever knew about?” Kheim couldn’t believe it.

“Well?” I-Chin said, stubborn in the face of the idea. “Who else before us could have gotten here, and gotten back to tell about it?”

Kheim took the point. “And we’re not back either.”

“No. And no guarantee we will be able to do it. Could be that Hsu Fu got here and tried to return, and failed. Maybe we’ll find his descendants on this very shore.”

“Maybe.”

Closing on the immense land, they saw a city on the coast. It was nothing very big compared to back home, but substantial compared to the tiny villages to the north. It was mud-colored for the most part, but several gigantic buildings in the city and behind it were roofed by gleaming expanses of beaten gold. These were no Miwoks!

So they sailed inshore warily, feeling spooked, their ships’ cannons loaded and primed. They were startled to see the primitive boats pulled up on the beaches—fishing canoes like those some of them had seen in the Moluccas, mostly two-prowed and made of bundled reeds. There were no guns to be seen; no sails; no wharves or docks, except for one log pier that seemed to float, anchored out away from the beach. It was perplexing to see the terrestrial magnificence of the gold-roofed buildings combined with such maritime poverty. I-Chin said, “It must have been an inland kingdom to start with.”

“Lucky for us, the way those buildings look.”

“I suppose if the Han dynasty had never fallen, this is what the coast of China would look like.”

A strange idea. But even mentioning China was a comfort. After that they pointed at features of the town, saying “That’s like in Cham,” or “They build like that in Lanka,” and so forth; and though it still looked bizarre, it was clear, even before they made out people on the beach gaping at them, that it would be people and not monkeys or birds populating the town.

Though they had no great hope that Butterfly would be understood here, they took her near the shore with them nevertheless, in the biggest landing boat. They kept the flintlocks and crossbows concealed under their seats while Kheim stood in the bow making the peaceful gestures that had won over the Miwok. Then he got Butterfly to greet them kindly in her language, which she did in a high, clear, penetrating voice. The crowd on the beach watched, and some with hats like feathered crowns spoke to them, but it was not Butterfly’s language, nor one that any of them had ever heard.

The elaborate headdresses of part of the crowd seemed faintly military to Kheim, and so he had them row offshore a little bit, and keep a lookout for bows or spears or any other weapons. Something in the look of these people suggested the possibility of an ambush.

Nothing of the sort happened. In fact, the next day when they rowed in, a whole contingent of men, wearing checked tunics and feathered headresses, prostrated themselves on the beach. Uneasily Kheim ordered a landing, on the lookout for trouble.

All went well. Communication by gesture, and quick basic language lessons, was fair, although the locals seemed to take Butterfly to be the visitors’ leader, or rather talisman, or priestess, it was impossible to say; certainly they venerated her. Their mimed interchanges were mostly made by an older man in a headdress with a fringe hanging over his forehead to his eyes, and a badge extending high above the feathers. These communications remained cordial, full of curiosity and goodwill. They were offered cakes made of some kind of dense, substantial flower; also huge tubers that could be cooked and eaten; and a weak sour beer, which was all they ever saw the locals drink. Also a stack of finely woven blankets, very warm and soft, made of a wool from sheep that looked like sheep bred with camels, but were clearly some entirely other creature, unknown to the real world.

Eventually Kheim felt comfortable enough to accept an invitation to leave the beach and visit the local king or emperor, in the huge gold-roofed palace or temple on the hilltop behind the city. It was the gold that had done it, Kheim realized as he prepared for the trip, still feeling uneasy. He loaded a short flintlock and put it in a shoulder bag tucked under his arm, hidden by his coat; and he left instructions with I-Chin for a relief operation if one proved necessary. Off they went, Kheim and Butterfly and a dozen of the biggest sailors from the flagship, accompanied by a crowd of local men in checked tunics.

They walked up a track past fields and houses. The women in the fields carried their babies strapped to boards on their backs, and they spun wool as they walked. They hung looms from ropes tied to trees, to get the necessary tension to weave. Checked patterns seemed the only ones they used, usually black and tan, sometimes black and red. Their fields consisted of raised mounds, rectangular in shape, standing out of wetlands by the river. Presumably they grew their tubers in the mounds. They were flooded like rice fields, but not. Everything was similar but different. Gold here seemed as common as iron in China, while on the other hand there was no iron at all to be seen.

The palace above the city was huge, bigger than the Forbidden City in Beijing, with many rectangular buildings arranged in rectangular patterns. Everything was arranged like their cloth. Stone plinths in the courtyard outside the palace were carved into strange figures, birds and animals all mixed up, painted all colors, so that Kheim found it hard to look at them. He wondered if the strange creatures represented on them would be found living in the backcountry, or were their versions of dragon and phoenix. He saw lots of copper, and some bronze or brass, but mostly gold. The guards standing in rows around the palace held long spears tipped with gold, and their shields were gold too; decorative, but not very practical. Their enemies must not have had iron either.

Inside the palace they were led into a vast room with one wall open onto a courtyard, the other three covered in gold filigree. Here blankets were spread, and Kheim and Butterfly and the other Chinese were invited to sit on one.

Into the room came their emperor. All bowed and then sat on the ground. The emperor sat on a checked cloth next to the visitors, and said something politely. He was a man of about forty years, white-toothed and handsome, with a broad forehead, high prominent cheekbones, clear brown eyes, a pointed chin and a strong hawkish nose. His crown was gold, and was decorated with small gold heads, dangling in holes cut into the crown, like pirates’ heads at the gates of Hangzhou.

This too made Kheim uneasy, and he shifted his pistol under his coat, looking around surreptitiously. There were no other signs to trouble him. Of course there were hard-looking men there, clearly the emperor’s guard, ready to pounce if anything threatened him; but other than that, nothing; and that seemed an ordinary precaution to take when strangers were around.

A priest wearing a cape made of cobalt-blue bird feathers came in, and performed a ceremony for the emperor, and after that they feasted through the day, on a meat like lamb, and vegetables and mashes that Kheim did not recognize. The weak beer was all they drank, except for a truly fiery brandy. Eventually Kheim began to feel drunk, and he could see his men were worse. Butterfly did not like any of the flavors, and ate and drank very little. Out on the courtyard, men danced to drums and reed pipes, sounding very like Korean musicians, which gave Kheim a start; he wondered if these people’s ancestors had drifted over from Korea ages ago, carried on the Kuroshio. Perhaps just a few lost ships had populated this whole land, many dynasties before; indeed the music sounded like an echo from a past age. But who could say. He would talk to I-Chin about it when he got back to the ship.

At sundown Kheim indicated their desire to return to their ships. The emperor only looked at him, and gestured to his caped priest, and then rose. Everyone stood and bowed again. He left the room.

When he had gone, Kheim stood and took Butterfly by the hand, and tried to lead her out the way they had come (although he was not sure he could remember it); but the guards blocked them, their gold-tipped spears held crossways, in a position as ceremonial as their dances had been.

Kheim mimed displeasure, very easy to do, and indicated that Butterfly would be sad and angry if she were kept from their ships. But the guards did not move.

So. There they were . Kheim cursed himself for leaving the beach with such strange people. He felt the pistol under his coat. One shot only. He would have to hope that I-Chin could rescue them. It was a good thing he had insisted the doctor stay behind, as he felt I-Chin would do the best job of organizing such an operation.

The captives spent the night huddled together on their blanket, surrounded by standing guards who did not sleep, but spent their time chewing small leaves they took from shoulder bags tucked under their checkered tunics. They watched bright-eyed. Kheim huddled around Butterfly, and she snuggled like a cat against him. It was cold. Kheim got the others to crowd around, all of them together, protecting her by a single touch or at least the proximity of their warmth.

At dawn the emperor returned, dressed like a giant peacock or phoenix, accompanied by women wearing gold breast cones, shaped uncannily like real breasts, with ruby nipples. The sight of these women gave Kheim an absurd hope that they would be all right. Then behind them entered the caped high priest, and a checkered masked figure, whose headdress dangled everywhere with tiny gold skulls. Some form of their death god, there was no mistaking it. He was there to execute them, Kheim thought, and the realization jolted him into a heightened state of awareness, in which all the gold sheeted white in the sun, and the space they walked through had an extra dimension of depth and solidity, the checkered people as solid and vivid as festival demons.

They were led out into the misty horizontal light of dawn, east and uphill. Uphill all that day, and the next day too, until Kheim gasped as he climbed, and looked back amazed from the occasional ridge, down and down to the sea, which was a blue textured surface, extremely flat and very far below. He had never imagined he could get so far above the ocean, it was like flying. And yet there were higher hills still ahead to the east, and on certain crests of the range, massive white volcanoes, like super-Fujis.

They walked up toward these. They were fed well, and given a tea as bitter as alum; and then, in a musical ritual ceremony, given little bags of the tea leaves, the same ragged-edged green leaves their guards had been chewing on the first night. The leaves also were bitter to the taste, but they soon numbed the mouth and throat, and after that Kheim felt better. The leaves were a stimulant, like tea or coffee. He told Butterfly and his men to chew theirs down as well. The thin strength that poured through his nerves gave him the qi energy to think about the problem of escape.

It did not seem likely that I-Chin would be able to get through the mud-and-gold city to follow them, but Kheim could not stop hoping for it, a kind of furious hope, felt every time he looked at Butterfly’s face, unblemished yet by doubt or fear; as far as she was concerned this was just the next stage of a journey that was already as strange as it could get. This part was interesting to her, in fact, with its bird-throat colors, its gold and its mountains. She didn’t seem affected by the height to which they had climbed.

Kheim began to understand that clouds, which often now lay below them, existed in a colder and less fulfilling air than the precious salty soup they breathed on the sea surface. Once he caught a whiff of that sea air, perhaps just the salt still in his hair, and he longed for it as for food. Hungry for air! He shuddered to think how high they were.

Yet they were not done. They climbed to a ridge covered by snow. The trail was pounded glistening into the hard white stuff. They were given soft wood-soled boots with fur on the inside, and heavier tunics, and blankets with holes for the head and arms, all elaborately checked, with small figures filling small squares. The blanket given to Buttefly was so long it looked as if she were wearing a Buddhist nun’s dress, and it was made of such fine cloth that Kheim grew suddenly afraid. There was another child traveling with them, a boy Kheim thought, though he was not sure; and this child too, was dressed as finely as the caped priest.

They came to a campsite made of flat rocks set on the snow. They made a big fire in a sunken pit in this platform, and around it erected a number of yurts. Their captors settled on their blankets and ate a meal, followed by many ritual cups of their hot tea, and beer, and brandy, after which they performed a ceremony to honor the setting sun, which fell into clouds scudding over the ocean. They were well above the clouds now, yet above them to the east a great volcano poked the indigo sky, its snowy flanks glowing a deep pink in the moments after sunset.

That night was frigid. Again Kheim held Butterfly, fear waking him whenever he stirred. The girl even seemed to stop breathing from time to time, but she always started again.

At dawn they were roused, and Kheim was thankful to be given more of the hot tea, then a substantial meal, followed by more of the little green leaves to chew; though these last were handed to them by the executioner god.

They started up the side of the volcano while it was still a gray snow slope under a white dawn sky. The ocean to the west was covered by clouds, but they were breaking up, and the great blue plate lay there far, far below, looking to Kheim like his home village or his childhood.

It got colder as they ascended, and hard to walk. The snow was brittle underfoot, and icy bits of it clinked and glittered. It was extremely bright, but everything else was too dark: the sky blue-black, the row of people dim. Kheim’s eyes ran, and the tears were cold on his face and in his thin gray whiskers. On he hiked, placing his feet carefully in the footsteps of the guard ahead of him, reaching back awkwardly to hold Butterfly’s hand and pull her along.

Finally, after he had forgotten to look up for a while, no longer expecting anything ever to change, the slope of the snow laid back. Bare black rocks appeared, thrusting out of the snow left and right, and especially ahead, where he could see nothing higher.

Indeed, it was the peak: a broad jumbled wasteland of rock like torn and frozen mud, mixed with ice and snow. At the highest point of the tortured mass a few poles obtruded, cloth streamers and flags flying from them, as in the mountains of Tibet. Perhaps these were Tibetans then.

The caped priest and the executioner god and the guards assembled at the foot of these rocks. The two children were taken to the priest, guards restraining Kheim all the while. He stepped back as if giving up, put his hands under his blanket as if they were cold, which they were; they fumbled like ice for the handle of his flintlock. He cocked the lock and pulled the pistol free of his coat, hidden only under the blanket.

The children were given more hot tea, which they drank willingly. The priest and his minions sang facing the sun, drums pounding like the painful pulse behind Kheim’s half-blinded eyes. He had a bad headache, and everything looked like a shadow of itself.

Below them on the snowy ridge, figures were climbing fast. They wore the local blankets, but Kheim thought they looked like I-Chin and his men. Much farther below them, another group straggled up in pursuit.

Kheim’s heart was already pounding; now it rolled inside him like the ceremonial drums. The executioner god took a gold knife out of an elaborate carved wooden scabbard, and cut the little boy’s throat. The blood he caught in a gold bowl, where it steamed in the sun. To the sound of the drums and pipes and sung prayers, the body was wrapped in a mantle of the soft checkered cloth, and lowered tenderly into the peak, in a crack between two great rocks.

The executioner and the caped priest then turned to Butterfly, who was tugging uselessly to get away. Kheim pulled his pistol free of the blanket and checked the flint, then aimed it with both hands at the executioner god. He shouted something, then held his breath. The guards were moving toward him, the executioner had looked his way. Kheim pulled the trigger and the pistol boomed and blossomed smoke, knocking Kheim two steps back. The executioner god flew backward and skidded over a patch of snow, bleeding copiously from the throat. The gold knife fell from his opened hand.

All the onlookers stared at the executioner god, stunned; they didn’t know what had happened.

Kheim kept the pistol pointed at them, while he rooted in his belt bag for charge, plunger, ball, wad. He reloaded the pistol right in front of them, shouting sharply once or twice, which made them jump.

Pistol reloaded, he aimed it at the guards, who fell back. Some kneeled, others stumbled away. He could see I-Chin and his sailors toiling up the snow of the last slope. The caped priest said something, and Kheim aimed his pistol carefully at him and shot.

Again the loud bang of the explosion, like thunder in the ear, and the plume of white smoke jetting out. The caped priest flew back as if struck by a giant invisible fist, tumbled down and lay writhing in the snow, his cape stained with blood.

Kheim strode through the smoke to Butterfly. He lifted her away from her captors, who quivered as if paralyzed. He carried her in his arms down the trail. She was only semiconscious; very possibly the tea had been drugged.

He came to I-Chin, who was huffing and puffing at the head of a gang of their sailors, all armed with flintlocks, a pistol and musket for each. “Back to the ships,” Kheim ordered. “Shoot any that get in the way.”

Going down the mountain was tremendously easier than going up had been, indeed it was a danger in that it felt so easy, while at the same time they were still light-headed and half-blinded, and so tired that they tended to slip, and more and more as it warmed and the snow softened and smashed under their feet. Carrying Butterfly, Kheim had his view of his footing obscured as well, and he slipped often, sometimes heavily. But two of his men walked at his sides when it was possible, holding him up by the elbows when he slipped, and despite all they made good time.

Crowds of people gathered each time they approached one of the high villages, and Kheim then gave over Butterfly to the men, so that he could hold the pistol aloft for all to see. If the crowds got in their way, he shot the man with the biggest headdress. The boom of the shot appeared to frighten the onlookers even more than the sudden collapse and bloody death of their priests and headmen, and Kheim thought it was probably a system in which local leaders were frequently executed for one thing or another by the guards of the emperor.

In any case, the people they passed seemed paralyzed mostly by the Chinese command of sound. Claps of thunder, accompanied by instant death, as in a lightning strike—that must have happened often enough in these exposed mountains to give them an idea of what the Chinese had mastered. Lightning in a tube.

Eventually Kheim gave Butterfly to his men, and marched down heavily at their head, reloading his gun and firing at any crowd close enough to hit, feeling a strange exultation rise in him, a terrible power over these ignorant primitives who could be awed to paralysis by a gun. He was their executioner god made real, and he passed through them as if they were puppets whose strings had been cut.

He stopped his crew late in the day, to seize food from a village and eat it, then continued down again until nightfall. They took refuge in a storage building, a big stone-walled wooden-roofed barn, stuffed to the rafters with cloth, grain, and gold. The men would have killed themselves carrying gold on their backs, but Kheim restricted them to one item apiece, either jewelry or a single disk ingot. “We’ll all come back someday,” he told them, “and end up richer than the emperor.” He chose for himself a hummingbird moth figured in gold.

Though exhausted, he found it hard to lie down, or even to stop walking. After a nightmare interval, sitting half-asleep by Butterfly’s side, he woke them all before dawn and began the march downhill again, their guns all loaded and ready.

As they descended to the coast it became apparent that runners had passed them in the night, and warned the locals below of the disaster on the summit. A fighting force of men held the crossroads just above the great coastal city, shouting to the beat of drums, brandishing clubs, shields, spears, and pikes. The descending Chinese were obviously outnumbered, the fifty men I-Chin had brought approaching some four or five hundred local warriors.

“Spread out,” Kheim told his men. “March right down the road at them, singing ‘Drunk Again on the Grand Canal.’ Get all the guns out front, and when I say stop, stop and aim at their leaders—whoever has the most feathers on their head. All of you shoot together when I say fire, and then reload. Reload as fast as you can, but don’t shoot again unless you hear me say so. If I do, fire and reload yet again.”

So they marched down the road, roaring the old drinking song at the top of their lungs, then stopped and fired a volley, and their flintlocks might as well have been a row of cannon, they had such an effect: many men knocked down and bleeding, the survivors among them running in a complete panic.

It had only taken one volley, and the coastal city was theirs. They could have burned it to the ground, taken anything in it; but Kheim marched them through the streets as quickly as possible, still singing as loudly as they could, until they were on the beach among the Chinese landing boats, and safe. They never even had to fire a second time.

Kheim went to I-Chin and shook his hand. “Many thanks,” he said to him formally before all the others. “You saved us. They would have sacrificed Butterfly like a lamb, and killed the rest of us like flies.”

It seemed to Kheim only reasonable that the locals would soon recover from the shock of the guns, after which they would be dangerous in their numbers. Even now crowds were gathering at a safe distance to observe them. So after getting Butterfly and most of the men onto the ships, Kheim consulted with I-Chin and their ships’ provision masters, to see what they were still lacking for a voyage back across the Dahai. Then he took a big armed party ashore one last time, and after the ships’ cannons were fired at the city, he and his men marched straight for the palace, singing again and stepping to the beat of their drums. At the palace they raced around the wall, and caught a group of priests and women escaping at a gate on the other side, and Kheim shot one priest, and had his men tie the others up.

After that he stood before the priests, and mimed his demands. His head still pounded painfully, he remained floating in the strange exhilaration of killing, and it was remarkable how easy it was to convey by mime alone a fairly elaborate list of demands. He pointed to himself and his men, then to the west, and made one hand sail away on the wind of the other one. He held up samples of food and the bags of tea leaves, indicated that these were wanted. He mimed them being brought to the beach. He went to the chief hostage and imitated untying him and waving farewell. If the goods didn’t arrive… he pointed the gun at each hostage. But if they did, the Chinese would release everyone and sail away.

He acted out each step of the process, looking the hostages in the eyes and speaking only a little, as he judged it would only be a distraction to their comprehension. Then he had his men release all the women captured, and a few of the men without headdresses, and sent them out with clear instructions to get the required goods. He could tell by their eyes that they understood exactly what they were to do.

After that he marched the hostages to the beach, and they waited. That same afternoon men appeared in one of the main streets, bags slung down their backs from lines hung around their foreheads. They deposited these bags on the beach, bowing, and then retreated, still facing the Chinese. Dried meat; grain cakes; the little green leaves; gold disks and ornaments (though Kheim had not asked for these); blankets and bolts of the soft cloth. Looking at it all spread on the beach, Kheim felt like a tax collector, heavy and cruel; but also relieved; powerful in a tenuous fashion only, as it was by a magic he didn’t understand or control. Above all he felt content. They had what they needed to get home.

He untied the hostages himself, gestured for them to go. He gave each of them a pistol ball, curling their unresponsive fingers around them. “We’ll be back someday,” he said to them. “Us, or people worse than us.” He wondered briefly if they would catch smallpox, like the Miwok; his sailors had slept on the locals’ blankets at the palace.

No way to tell. The locals stumbled away, clutching their pistol balls or dropping them. Their women stood at a safe distance, happy to see that Kheim had kept his pantomimed promise, happy to see their men freed. Kheim ordered his men into the boats. They rowed out to the ships and sailed away from the big mountain island.

After all that, sailing the Great Ocean felt very familiar, very peaceful. The days passed in their rounds. They followed the sun west, always west. Most days were hot and sunny. Then for a month clouds grew every day and broke in the afternoons, in gray thundershowers that quickly dissipated. After that the winds always blew from the southeast, making their way easy. Their memories of the great island behind them began to seem like dreams, or legends they had heard about the realm of the asuras. If it weren’t for Butterfly’s presence it would have been hard to believe they had done all that.

Butterfly played on the flagship. She swung through the rigging like a little monkey. There were hundreds of men on board, but the presence of one little girl changed everything: they sailed under a blessing. The other ships stayed close to the flagship in the hope of catching sight of her, or being blessed by an occasional visit. Most of the sailors believed she was the goddess Tianfei, traveling with them for their own safety, and that this was why the return voyage was going so much easier than the voyage out had. The weather was kinder, the air warmer, the fish more plentiful. Three times they passed small atolls, uninhabited, and were able to take on coconuts and palm hearts, and once water. Most important, Kheim felt, they were headed west, back home to the known world. It felt so different from the voyage out that it seemed strange it was the same activity. That orientation alone could make such a difference! But it was hard to sail into the morning sun, hard to sail away from the world.

Sailing, day after day. Sun rising at the stern, sinking at the bow, drawing them on. Even the sun was helping them—perhaps too much—it was now the seventh month, and infernally hot; then windless for most of a month. They prayed to Tianfei, ostentatiously not looking at Butterfly as they did so.

She played in the rigging, oblivious to their sidelong glances. She spoke Chinese pretty well now, and had taught I-Chin all the Miwok she could remember. I-Chin had written down every word, in a dictionary that he thought might be useful to subsequent expeditions to the new island. It was interesting, he told Kheim, because usually he was just choosing the ideogram or combination of ideograms that sounded most like the Miwok word as spoken, and writing down as precise a definition of its Miwok meaning as he could, given the source of information; but of course when looking at the ideographs for the sounds it was impossible not to hear the Chinese meanings for them as well, so that the whole Miwok language became yet another set of homonyms to add to the already giant number that existed in Chinese. Many Chinese literary or religious symbols relied on pure accidents of homonymity to make their metaphorical connection, so that one said the tenth day of the month, shi, was the birthday of the stone, shi; or a picture of a heron and lotus, lu and lian, by homynym became the message “may your path (lu) be always upward (lian); or the picture of a monkey on the back of another one could be read in a similar way as “may you rank as a governor from generation to generation.” Now to I-Chin the Miwok words for “going home” looked like wu ya, five ducks, while the Miwok for “swim” looked like Peng-zu, the legendary character who had lived for eight hundred years. So he would sing “five ducks swimming home, it will only take eight hundred years,” or “I’m going to jump off the side and become Peng-zu,” and Butterfly would shriek with laughter. Other similarities in the two languages’ maritime words made I-Chin suspect that Hsu Fu’s expedition to the east had made it to the ocean continent of Yingzhou after all, and left there some Chinese words if nothing else; if, indeed, the Miwok themselves were not the descendants of his expedition.

Some men already spoke of returning to the new land, usually to the golden kingdom in the south, to subdue it by arms and take its gold back to the real world. They did not say, We will do this, which would be bad luck, obviously, but rather, If one were to do this. Other men listened to this talk from a distance behind their eyes, knowing that if Tianfei allowed them to reach home, nothing ever again would induce them to cross the great ocean.

Then they became entirely becalmed, in a patch of ocean devoid of rain, cloud, wind, or current. It was as if a curse had fallen on them, possibly from the loose talk of return for gold. They began to bake. There were sharks in the water, so they could not swim freely to cool off, but had to set a sail in the water between two of the ships, and let it sink until they could jump off into a pool, very warm, about chest deep. Kheim had Butterly wear a shift and let her jump in. To refuse her wish would have been to astound and infuriate the crew. It turned out she could swim like an otter. The men treated her like the goddess she was, and she laughed to see them sporting like boys. It was a relief to do something different, but the sail couldn’t sustain the wetness and bouncing on it, and gradually came apart. So they only did it once.

The doldrums began to endanger them. They would run out of water, then food. Possibly subtle currents continued to carry them west, but I-Chin was not optimistic. “It’s more likely we’ve wandered into the center of the big circular current, like a whirlpool’s center.” He advised sailing south when possible, to get back into both wind and current, and Kheim agreed, but there was no wind to sail. It was much like the first month of their expedition, only without the Kuroshio. Again they discussed putting out the boats and rowing the ships, but the vast junks were too big to move by oar power alone, and I-Chin judged it dangerous to tear the skin off the palms of the men when they were already so dried out. There was no recourse but to clean their stills, and keep them in the sun and primed all day long, and ration what water remained in the casks. And keep Butterfly fully watered, no matter what she said about doing like all the rest. They would have given her the last cask in the fleet.

It had gotten to the point where I-Chin was proposing that they save their dark yellow urine and mix it with their remaining water supplies, when black clouds appeared from the south, and it quickly became clear that their problem was going to change very swiftly from having too little water to having too much. Wind struck hard, clouds rolled over them, water fell in sheets, and the funnels were deployed over the casks, which refilled almost instantly. Then it was a matter of riding out the storm. Only junks as big as theirs were high enough and flexible enough to survive such an onslaught for long; and even the Eight Great Ships, desiccated above the water as they had been in the doldrums, now swelled in the rain, snapping many of the ropes and pins holding them together, so that riding out the storm became a continuous drenched frantic stemming of leaks, and fixing of broken spars and staves and ropes.

All this time the waves were growing bigger, until eventually the ships were rising and falling as over enormous smoking hills, rolling south to north at a harried but inexorable, even majestic pace. In the flagship they shot up the face of these and crested in a smear of white foam over the deck, after which they had a brief moment’s view of the chaos from horizon to horizon, with perhaps two or three of the other ships visible, bobbing in different rhythms and being blown away into the watery murk. For the most part there was nothing to do but hunker down in the cabins, drenched and apprehensive, unable to hear each other over the roar of wind and wave.

At the height of the storm they entered the fish’s eye, that strange and ominous calm in which disordered waves sloshed about in all directions, crashing into each other and launching solid bolts of white water into the dark air, while all around them low black clouds obscured the horizon. A typhoon, therefore, and none were surprised. As in the yin-yang symbol, there were dots of calm at the center of the wind. It would soon return from the opposite direction.

So they worked on repairs in great haste, feeling as one always did, that having gotten halfway through it they should be able to reach the end. Kheim peered through the murk at the nearest ship to them, which appeared to be in difficulty. The men crowded its railing, staring longingly at Butterfly, some even crying out to her. No doubt they thought their trouble resulted from the fact they did not have her on board with them. Its captain shouted to Kheim that they might have to cut down their masts in the second half of the storm to keep from being rolled over, and that the others should hunt for them if necessary, after it had passed.

But when the other side of the typhoon struck, things went badly on the flagship as well. An odd wave threw Butterfly into a wall awkwardly, and after that the fear in the men was palpable. They lost sight of the other ships. The huge waves again were torn to foam by the wind, and their crests crashed over the ship as if trying to sink it. The rudder snapped off at the rudder post, and after that, though they tried to get a yard over the side to replace the rudder, they were in effect a hulk, struck in the side by every passing wave. While men fought to get steerage and save the ship, and some were swept overboard, or drowned in the lines, I-Chin attended to Butterfly. He shouted to Kheim that she had broken an arm and apparently some ribs. She was gasping for breath, Kheim saw. He returned to the struggle for steerage, and finally they got a sea anchor over the side, which quickly brought their bow around into the wind. This saved them for the moment, but even coming over the bow the waves were heavy blows, and it took every effort they could make to keep the hatches from tearing off and the ship’s compartments from filling. All done in an agony of apprehension about Butterfly; men shouted angrily that she should have been cared for better, that it was inexcusable that something like this should happen. Kheim knew that was his responsibility.

When he could spare a moment he went to her side, in the highest cabin on the rear deck, and looked beseechingly at I-Chin, who would not reassure him. She was coughing up a foamy blood, very red, and I-Chin was sucking her throat clear of it from time to time with a tube he stuck down her mouth. “A rib has punctured a lung,” he said shortly, keeping his eyes on her. She meanwhile was conscious, wide-eyed, in pain but quiet. She said only, “What’s happening to me?” After I-Chin cleared her throat of another mass of blood, he told her what he had told Kheim. She panted like a dog, shallow and fast.

Kheim went back into the watery chaos abovedecks. The wind and waves were no worse than before, perhaps a bit better. There were scores of problems large and small to attend to, and he threw himself at them in a fury, muttering to himself, or shouting at the gods; it didn’t matter, no one could hear anything abovedecks, unless it was shouted directly in their ears. “Please, Tianfei, stay with us! Don’t leave us! Let us go home. Let us return to tell the emperor what we have found for him. Let the girl live.”

They survived the storm: but Butterfly died the next day.

Only three ships found each other and regathered on the quiet blank of the sea. They sewed Butterfly’s body in a man’s robe and tied two of the gold disks from the mountain empire into it, and let it slide over the side into the waves. All the men were weeping, even I-Chin, and Kheim could barely speak the words of the funeral prayer. Who was there to pray to? It seemed impossible that after all they had gone through, a mere storm could kill the sea goddess; but there she was, slipping under the waves, sacrificed to the sea just as that island boy had been sacrificed to the mountain. Sun or seafloor, it was all the same.

“She died to save us,” he told the men shortly. “She gave that avatar of herself to the storm god, so he would let us be. Now we have to carry on to honor her. We have to get back home.”

So they repaired the ship as best they could, and endured another month of desiccated life. This was the longest month of the trip, of their lives. Everything was breaking down, on the ships, in their bodies. There wasn’t enough food and water. Sores broke out in their mouths and on their skin. They had very little qi, and could hardly eat what food was left.

Kheim’s thoughts left him. He found that when thoughts left, things just did themselves. Doing did not need thinking.

One day he thought: sail too big cannot be lifted. Another day he thought: more than enough is too much. Too much is less. Therefore least is most. Finally he saw what the Daoists meant by that.

Go with the way. Breathe in and out. Move with the swells. Sea doesn’t know ship, ship doesn’t know sea. Floating does itself. A balance in balance. Sit without thinking.

The sea and sky melded. All blue. There was no one doing, nothing being done. Sailing just happened.

Thus, when a great sea was crossed, there was no one doing it.

Someone looked up and noticed an island. It turned out to be Mindanao, and after the rest of its archipelago, Taiwan, and all the familiar landfalls of the Inland Sea.

The three remaining Great Ships sailed into Nanjing almost exactly twenty months after their departure, surprising all the inhabitants of the city, who thought they had joined Hsu Fu at the bottom of the sea. And they were happy to be home, no doubt about it, and bursting with stories to tell of the amazing giant island to the east.

But any time Kheim met the eye of any of his men, he saw the pain there. He saw also that they blamed him for her death. So he was happy to leave Nanjing and travel with a gang of officials up the Grand Canal to Beijing. He knew that his sailors would scatter up and down the coast, go their ways so they wouldn’t have to see each other and remember; only after years had passed would they want to meet, so that they could remember the pain when it had become so distant and faint that they actually wanted it back, just to feel again they had done all those things, that life had held all those things.

But for now it was impossible not to feel they had failed. And so when Kheim was led into the Forbidden City, and brought before the Wanli Emperor to accept the acclaim of all the officials there, and the interested and gracious thanks of the emperor himself, he said only, “When a great sea has been crossed, there is no one to take credit.”

The Wanli Emperor nodded, fingering one of the gold disk ingots they had brought back, and then the big hummingbird moth of beaten gold, its feathers and antennae perfectly delineated with the utmost delicacy and skill. Kheim stared at the Heavenly Envoy, trying to see in to the hidden emperor, the Jade Emperor inside him. Kheim said to him, “That far country is lost in time, its streets paved with gold, its palaces roofed with gold. You could conquer it in a month, and rule over all its immensity, and bring back all the treasure that it has, endless forest and furs, turquoise and gold, more gold than there is yet now in the world; and yet still the greatest treasure in that land is already lost.”

Snowy peaks, towering over a dark land. The first blinding crack of sunlight flooding all. He could have made it then—everything was so bright, he could have launched himself into pure whiteness at that moment and never come back, flowed out forever into the All. Release, release. You have to have seen a lot to want release that much.

But the moment passed and he was on the black stage floor of the bardo’s hall of judgment, on its Chinese side, a nightmare warren of numbered levels and legal chambers and bureaucrats wielding lists of souls to be remanded to the care of meticulous torturers. Above this hellish bureaucracy loomed the usual Tibet of a dais, occupied by its menagerie of demonic gods, chopping up condemned souls and chasing the pieces off to hell or a new life in the realm of preta or beast. The lurid glow, the giant dais like the side of a mesa towering above, the hallucinatorily colorful gods roaring and dancing, their swords flashing in the black air; it was judgment—an inhuman activity—not the pot calling the kettle black, but true judgment, by higher authorities, the makers of this universe. Who were the ones, after all, that had made humans as weak and craven and cruel as they so often were—so that there was a sense of doom enforced, of loaded dice, karma lashing out at whatever little pleasures and beauties the miserable subdivine sentiences might have concocted out of the mud of their existence. A brave life, fought against the odds? Go back as a dog! A dogged life, persisting despite all? Go back as a mule, go back as a worm. That’s the way things work.

Thus Kheim reflected as he strode up through the mists in a growing rage, as he banged through the bureaucrats, smashing them with their own slates, their lists and tallies, until he caught sight of Kali and her court, standing in a semicircle taunting Butterfly, judging her—as if that poor simple soul had anything to answer for, compared to these butcher gods and their eons of evil—evil insinuated right into the heart of the cosmos they themselves had made!

Kheim roared in wordless fury, and charged up and seized a sword from one of the death goddess’s six arms, and cut off a brace of them with a single stroke; the blade was very sharp. The arms lay scattered and bleeding on the floor, flopping about—then, to Kheim’s unutterable consternation, they were grasping the floorboards and moving themselves crabwise by the clenching of the fingers. Worse yet, new shoulders were growing back behind the wounds, which still bled copiously. Kheim screamed and kicked them off the dais, then turned and chopped Kali in half at the waist, ignoring the other members of his jati who stood up there with Butterfly, all of them jumping up and down and shouting “Oh no, don’t do that Kheim, don’t do that, you don’t understand, you have to follow protocol,” even I-Chin, who was shouting loudly over the rest of them, “At least we might direct our efforts at the dais struts, or the vials of forgetting, something a little more technical, a little less direct!” Meanwhile Kali’s upper body fisted itself around the stage, while her legs and waist staggered, but continued to stand; and the missing halves grew out of the cut parts like snail horns. And then there were two Kalis advancing on him, a dozen arms flailing swords.

He jumped off the dais, thumped down on the bare boards of the cosmos. The rest of his jati crashed down beside him, crying out in pain at the impact. “You got us in trouble,” Shen whined.

“It doesn’t work like that,” Butterfly informed him as they panted off together into the mists. “I’ve seen a lot of people try. They lash out in fury and cut the hideous gods down, and how they deserve it—and yet the gods spring back up, redoubled in other people. A karmic law of this universe, my friend. Like conservation of yin and yang, or gravity. We live in a universe ruled by very few laws, but the redoubling of violence by violence is one of the main ones.”

“I don’t believe it,” Kheim said, and stopped to fend off the two Kalis now pursuing them. He took a hard swing and decapitated one of the new Kalis. Swiftly another head grew back, swelling atop the gusher on the neck of the black body, and the new white teeth of her new head laughed at him, while her bloody red eyes blazed. He was in trouble, he saw; he was going to be hacked to pieces. For resisting these evil unjust absurd and horrible deities he was going to be hacked to pieces and returned to the world as a mule or a monkey or a maimed old geezer—

Two

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

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

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

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

They sailed south down the coast of the new island all this while, and every day they became more amazed that they were not reaching the southern end of it. One cape looked as if it would be the turning point, but past it they saw the land curved south again, behind some baked empty islands. Farther south they saw villages on the beaches, and they knew enough now to identify the bath temples. Kheim kept the fleet well offshore, but he did allow one canoe to approach, and he had Butterfly try speaking to them, but they didn’t understand her, nor her them. Kheim made his dumb show signifying sickness and danger, and the locals paddled quickly away.

They began to sail against a current from the south, but it was mild, and the winds were constant from the west. The fishing here was excellent, the weather mild. Day followed day in a perfect circle of sameness. The land fell away east again, then ran south, most of the way to the equator, past a big archipelago of low islands, with good anchorages and good water, and seabirds with blue feet.

They came at last to a steeply rising coastline, with great snowy volcanoes in the distance, like Fuji only twice as big, or more, punctuating the sky behind a steep coastal range, which was already tall. This final giganticism finished anyone’s ability to think of this place as an island.

“Are you sure this isn’t Africa?” Kheim said to I-Chin.

I-Chin was not sure. “Maybe. Maybe the people we left up north are the only survivors of the Fulanchi, reduced to a primitive state. Maybe this is the west coast of the world, and we sailed past the opening to their middle sea in the night, or in a fog. But I don’t think so.”

“Then where are we?”

I-Chin showed Kheim where he thought they were on the long strips of their map; east of the final markings, out where the map was entirely blank. But first he pointed to the far western strip. “See, Fulan and Africa look like this on their west sides. The Muslim cartographers are very consistent about it. And Hsing Ho calculated that the world is about seventy-five thousand li around. If he’s right, we only sailed half as far as we should have, or less, across the Dahai to Africa and Fulan.”

“Maybe he’s wrong then. Maybe the world occupies more of the globe than he thought. Or maybe the globe is smaller.”

“But his method was good. I made the same measurements on our trip to the Moluccas, and did the geometry, and found he was right.”

“But look!” Gesturing at the mountainous land before them. “If it isn’t Africa, what is it?”

“An island, I suppose. A big island, far out in the Dahai, where no one has ever sailed. Another world, like the real one. An eastern one like the western one.”

“An island no one has ever sailed to before? That no one ever knew about?” Kheim couldn’t believe it.

“Well?” I-Chin said, stubborn in the face of the idea. “Who else before us could have gotten here, and gotten back to tell about it?”

Kheim took the point. “And we’re not back either.”

“No. And no guarantee we will be able to do it. Could be that Hsu Fu got here and tried to return, and failed. Maybe we’ll find his descendants on this very shore.”

“Maybe.”

Closing on the immense land, they saw a city on the coast. It was nothing very big compared to back home, but substantial compared to the tiny villages to the north. It was mud-colored for the most part, but several gigantic buildings in the city and behind it were roofed by gleaming expanses of beaten gold. These were no Miwoks!

So they sailed inshore warily, feeling spooked, their ships’ cannons loaded and primed. They were startled to see the primitive boats pulled up on the beaches—fishing canoes like those some of them had seen in the Moluccas, mostly two-prowed and made of bundled reeds. There were no guns to be seen; no sails; no wharves or docks, except for one log pier that seemed to float, anchored out away from the beach. It was perplexing to see the terrestrial magnificence of the gold-roofed buildings combined with such maritime poverty. I-Chin said, “It must have been an inland kingdom to start with.”

“Lucky for us, the way those buildings look.”

“I suppose if the Han dynasty had never fallen, this is what the coast of China would look like.”

A strange idea. But even mentioning China was a comfort. After that they pointed at features of the town, saying “That’s like in Cham,” or “They build like that in Lanka,” and so forth; and though it still looked bizarre, it was clear, even before they made out people on the beach gaping at them, that it would be people and not monkeys or birds populating the town.

Though they had no great hope that Butterfly would be understood here, they took her near the shore with them nevertheless, in the biggest landing boat. They kept the flintlocks and crossbows concealed under their seats while Kheim stood in the bow making the peaceful gestures that had won over the Miwok. Then he got Butterfly to greet them kindly in her language, which she did in a high, clear, penetrating voice. The crowd on the beach watched, and some with hats like feathered crowns spoke to them, but it was not Butterfly’s language, nor one that any of them had ever heard.

The elaborate headdresses of part of the crowd seemed faintly military to Kheim, and so he had them row offshore a little bit, and keep a lookout for bows or spears or any other weapons. Something in the look of these people suggested the possibility of an ambush.

Nothing of the sort happened. In fact, the next day when they rowed in, a whole contingent of men, wearing checked tunics and feathered headresses, prostrated themselves on the beach. Uneasily Kheim ordered a landing, on the lookout for trouble.

All went well. Communication by gesture, and quick basic language lessons, was fair, although the locals seemed to take Butterfly to be the visitors’ leader, or rather talisman, or priestess, it was impossible to say; certainly they venerated her. Their mimed interchanges were mostly made by an older man in a headdress with a fringe hanging over his forehead to his eyes, and a badge extending high above the feathers. These communications remained cordial, full of curiosity and goodwill. They were offered cakes made of some kind of dense, substantial flower; also huge tubers that could be cooked and eaten; and a weak sour beer, which was all they ever saw the locals drink. Also a stack of finely woven blankets, very warm and soft, made of a wool from sheep that looked like sheep bred with camels, but were clearly some entirely other creature, unknown to the real world.

Eventually Kheim felt comfortable enough to accept an invitation to leave the beach and visit the local king or emperor, in the huge gold-roofed palace or temple on the hilltop behind the city. It was the gold that had done it, Kheim realized as he prepared for the trip, still feeling uneasy. He loaded a short flintlock and put it in a shoulder bag tucked under his arm, hidden by his coat; and he left instructions with I-Chin for a relief operation if one proved necessary. Off they went, Kheim and Butterfly and a dozen of the biggest sailors from the flagship, accompanied by a crowd of local men in checked tunics.

They walked up a track past fields and houses. The women in the fields carried their babies strapped to boards on their backs, and they spun wool as they walked. They hung looms from ropes tied to trees, to get the necessary tension to weave. Checked patterns seemed the only ones they used, usually black and tan, sometimes black and red. Their fields consisted of raised mounds, rectangular in shape, standing out of wetlands by the river. Presumably they grew their tubers in the mounds. They were flooded like rice fields, but not. Everything was similar but different. Gold here seemed as common as iron in China, while on the other hand there was no iron at all to be seen.

The palace above the city was huge, bigger than the Forbidden City in Beijing, with many rectangular buildings arranged in rectangular patterns. Everything was arranged like their cloth. Stone plinths in the courtyard outside the palace were carved into strange figures, birds and animals all mixed up, painted all colors, so that Kheim found it hard to look at them. He wondered if the strange creatures represented on them would be found living in the backcountry, or were their versions of dragon and phoenix. He saw lots of copper, and some bronze or brass, but mostly gold. The guards standing in rows around the palace held long spears tipped with gold, and their shields were gold too; decorative, but not very practical. Their enemies must not have had iron either.

Inside the palace they were led into a vast room with one wall open onto a courtyard, the other three covered in gold filigree. Here blankets were spread, and Kheim and Butterfly and the other Chinese were invited to sit on one.

Into the room came their emperor. All bowed and then sat on the ground. The emperor sat on a checked cloth next to the visitors, and said something politely. He was a man of about forty years, white-toothed and handsome, with a broad forehead, high prominent cheekbones, clear brown eyes, a pointed chin and a strong hawkish nose. His crown was gold, and was decorated with small gold heads, dangling in holes cut into the crown, like pirates’ heads at the gates of Hangzhou.

This too made Kheim uneasy, and he shifted his pistol under his coat, looking around surreptitiously. There were no other signs to trouble him. Of course there were hard-looking men there, clearly the emperor’s guard, ready to pounce if anything threatened him; but other than that, nothing; and that seemed an ordinary precaution to take when strangers were around.

A priest wearing a cape made of cobalt-blue bird feathers came in, and performed a ceremony for the emperor, and after that they feasted through the day, on a meat like lamb, and vegetables and mashes that Kheim did not recognize. The weak beer was all they drank, except for a truly fiery brandy. Eventually Kheim began to feel drunk, and he could see his men were worse. Butterfly did not like any of the flavors, and ate and drank very little. Out on the courtyard, men danced to drums and reed pipes, sounding very like Korean musicians, which gave Kheim a start; he wondered if these people’s ancestors had drifted over from Korea ages ago, carried on the Kuroshio. Perhaps just a few lost ships had populated this whole land, many dynasties before; indeed the music sounded like an echo from a past age. But who could say. He would talk to I-Chin about it when he got back to the ship.

At sundown Kheim indicated their desire to return to their ships. The emperor only looked at him, and gestured to his caped priest, and then rose. Everyone stood and bowed again. He left the room.

When he had gone, Kheim stood and took Butterfly by the hand, and tried to lead her out the way they had come (although he was not sure he could remember it); but the guards blocked them, their gold-tipped spears held crossways, in a position as ceremonial as their dances had been.

Kheim mimed displeasure, very easy to do, and indicated that Butterfly would be sad and angry if she were kept from their ships. But the guards did not move.

So. There they were . Kheim cursed himself for leaving the beach with such strange people. He felt the pistol under his coat. One shot only. He would have to hope that I-Chin could rescue them. It was a good thing he had insisted the doctor stay behind, as he felt I-Chin would do the best job of organizing such an operation.

The captives spent the night huddled together on their blanket, surrounded by standing guards who did not sleep, but spent their time chewing small leaves they took from shoulder bags tucked under their checkered tunics. They watched bright-eyed. Kheim huddled around Butterfly, and she snuggled like a cat against him. It was cold. Kheim got the others to crowd around, all of them together, protecting her by a single touch or at least the proximity of their warmth.

At dawn the emperor returned, dressed like a giant peacock or phoenix, accompanied by women wearing gold breast cones, shaped uncannily like real breasts, with ruby nipples. The sight of these women gave Kheim an absurd hope that they would be all right. Then behind them entered the caped high priest, and a checkered masked figure, whose headdress dangled everywhere with tiny gold skulls. Some form of their death god, there was no mistaking it. He was there to execute them, Kheim thought, and the realization jolted him into a heightened state of awareness, in which all the gold sheeted white in the sun, and the space they walked through had an extra dimension of depth and solidity, the checkered people as solid and vivid as festival demons.

They were led out into the misty horizontal light of dawn, east and uphill. Uphill all that day, and the next day too, until Kheim gasped as he climbed, and looked back amazed from the occasional ridge, down and down to the sea, which was a blue textured surface, extremely flat and very far below. He had never imagined he could get so far above the ocean, it was like flying. And yet there were higher hills still ahead to the east, and on certain crests of the range, massive white volcanoes, like super-Fujis.

They walked up toward these. They were fed well, and given a tea as bitter as alum; and then, in a musical ritual ceremony, given little bags of the tea leaves, the same ragged-edged green leaves their guards had been chewing on the first night. The leaves also were bitter to the taste, but they soon numbed the mouth and throat, and after that Kheim felt better. The leaves were a stimulant, like tea or coffee. He told Butterfly and his men to chew theirs down as well. The thin strength that poured through his nerves gave him the qi energy to think about the problem of escape.

It did not seem likely that I-Chin would be able to get through the mud-and-gold city to follow them, but Kheim could not stop hoping for it, a kind of furious hope, felt every time he looked at Butterfly’s face, unblemished yet by doubt or fear; as far as she was concerned this was just the next stage of a journey that was already as strange as it could get. This part was interesting to her, in fact, with its bird-throat colors, its gold and its mountains. She didn’t seem affected by the height to which they had climbed.

Kheim began to understand that clouds, which often now lay below them, existed in a colder and less fulfilling air than the precious salty soup they breathed on the sea surface. Once he caught a whiff of that sea air, perhaps just the salt still in his hair, and he longed for it as for food. Hungry for air! He shuddered to think how high they were.

Yet they were not done. They climbed to a ridge covered by snow. The trail was pounded glistening into the hard white stuff. They were given soft wood-soled boots with fur on the inside, and heavier tunics, and blankets with holes for the head and arms, all elaborately checked, with small figures filling small squares. The blanket given to Buttefly was so long it looked as if she were wearing a Buddhist nun’s dress, and it was made of such fine cloth that Kheim grew suddenly afraid. There was another child traveling with them, a boy Kheim thought, though he was not sure; and this child too, was dressed as finely as the caped priest.

They came to a campsite made of flat rocks set on the snow. They made a big fire in a sunken pit in this platform, and around it erected a number of yurts. Their captors settled on their blankets and ate a meal, followed by many ritual cups of their hot tea, and beer, and brandy, after which they performed a ceremony to honor the setting sun, which fell into clouds scudding over the ocean. They were well above the clouds now, yet above them to the east a great volcano poked the indigo sky, its snowy flanks glowing a deep pink in the moments after sunset.

That night was frigid. Again Kheim held Butterfly, fear waking him whenever he stirred. The girl even seemed to stop breathing from time to time, but she always started again.

At dawn they were roused, and Kheim was thankful to be given more of the hot tea, then a substantial meal, followed by more of the little green leaves to chew; though these last were handed to them by the executioner god.

They started up the side of the volcano while it was still a gray snow slope under a white dawn sky. The ocean to the west was covered by clouds, but they were breaking up, and the great blue plate lay there far, far below, looking to Kheim like his home village or his childhood.

It got colder as they ascended, and hard to walk. The snow was brittle underfoot, and icy bits of it clinked and glittered. It was extremely bright, but everything else was too dark: the sky blue-black, the row of people dim. Kheim’s eyes ran, and the tears were cold on his face and in his thin gray whiskers. On he hiked, placing his feet carefully in the footsteps of the guard ahead of him, reaching back awkwardly to hold Butterfly’s hand and pull her along.

Finally, after he had forgotten to look up for a while, no longer expecting anything ever to change, the slope of the snow laid back. Bare black rocks appeared, thrusting out of the snow left and right, and especially ahead, where he could see nothing higher.

Indeed, it was the peak: a broad jumbled wasteland of rock like torn and frozen mud, mixed with ice and snow. At the highest point of the tortured mass a few poles obtruded, cloth streamers and flags flying from them, as in the mountains of Tibet. Perhaps these were Tibetans then.

The caped priest and the executioner god and the guards assembled at the foot of these rocks. The two children were taken to the priest, guards restraining Kheim all the while. He stepped back as if giving up, put his hands under his blanket as if they were cold, which they were; they fumbled like ice for the handle of his flintlock. He cocked the lock and pulled the pistol free of his coat, hidden only under the blanket.

The children were given more hot tea, which they drank willingly. The priest and his minions sang facing the sun, drums pounding like the painful pulse behind Kheim’s half-blinded eyes. He had a bad headache, and everything looked like a shadow of itself.

Below them on the snowy ridge, figures were climbing fast. They wore the local blankets, but Kheim thought they looked like I-Chin and his men. Much farther below them, another group straggled up in pursuit.

Kheim’s heart was already pounding; now it rolled inside him like the ceremonial drums. The executioner god took a gold knife out of an elaborate carved wooden scabbard, and cut the little boy’s throat. The blood he caught in a gold bowl, where it steamed in the sun. To the sound of the drums and pipes and sung prayers, the body was wrapped in a mantle of the soft checkered cloth, and lowered tenderly into the peak, in a crack between two great rocks.

The executioner and the caped priest then turned to Butterfly, who was tugging uselessly to get away. Kheim pulled his pistol free of the blanket and checked the flint, then aimed it with both hands at the executioner god. He shouted something, then held his breath. The guards were moving toward him, the executioner had looked his way. Kheim pulled the trigger and the pistol boomed and blossomed smoke, knocking Kheim two steps back. The executioner god flew backward and skidded over a patch of snow, bleeding copiously from the throat. The gold knife fell from his opened hand.

All the onlookers stared at the executioner god, stunned; they didn’t know what had happened.

Kheim kept the pistol pointed at them, while he rooted in his belt bag for charge, plunger, ball, wad. He reloaded the pistol right in front of them, shouting sharply once or twice, which made them jump.

Pistol reloaded, he aimed it at the guards, who fell back. Some kneeled, others stumbled away. He could see I-Chin and his sailors toiling up the snow of the last slope. The caped priest said something, and Kheim aimed his pistol carefully at him and shot.

Again the loud bang of the explosion, like thunder in the ear, and the plume of white smoke jetting out. The caped priest flew back as if struck by a giant invisible fist, tumbled down and lay writhing in the snow, his cape stained with blood.

Kheim strode through the smoke to Butterfly. He lifted her away from her captors, who quivered as if paralyzed. He carried her in his arms down the trail. She was only semiconscious; very possibly the tea had been drugged.

He came to I-Chin, who was huffing and puffing at the head of a gang of their sailors, all armed with flintlocks, a pistol and musket for each. “Back to the ships,” Kheim ordered. “Shoot any that get in the way.”

Going down the mountain was tremendously easier than going up had been, indeed it was a danger in that it felt so easy, while at the same time they were still light-headed and half-blinded, and so tired that they tended to slip, and more and more as it warmed and the snow softened and smashed under their feet. Carrying Butterfly, Kheim had his view of his footing obscured as well, and he slipped often, sometimes heavily. But two of his men walked at his sides when it was possible, holding him up by the elbows when he slipped, and despite all they made good time.

Crowds of people gathered each time they approached one of the high villages, and Kheim then gave over Butterfly to the men, so that he could hold the pistol aloft for all to see. If the crowds got in their way, he shot the man with the biggest headdress. The boom of the shot appeared to frighten the onlookers even more than the sudden collapse and bloody death of their priests and headmen, and Kheim thought it was probably a system in which local leaders were frequently executed for one thing or another by the guards of the emperor.

In any case, the people they passed seemed paralyzed mostly by the Chinese command of sound. Claps of thunder, accompanied by instant death, as in a lightning strike—that must have happened often enough in these exposed mountains to give them an idea of what the Chinese had mastered. Lightning in a tube.

Eventually Kheim gave Butterfly to his men, and marched down heavily at their head, reloading his gun and firing at any crowd close enough to hit, feeling a strange exultation rise in him, a terrible power over these ignorant primitives who could be awed to paralysis by a gun. He was their executioner god made real, and he passed through them as if they were puppets whose strings had been cut.

He stopped his crew late in the day, to seize food from a village and eat it, then continued down again until nightfall. They took refuge in a storage building, a big stone-walled wooden-roofed barn, stuffed to the rafters with cloth, grain, and gold. The men would have killed themselves carrying gold on their backs, but Kheim restricted them to one item apiece, either jewelry or a single disk ingot. “We’ll all come back someday,” he told them, “and end up richer than the emperor.” He chose for himself a hummingbird moth figured in gold.

Though exhausted, he found it hard to lie down, or even to stop walking. After a nightmare interval, sitting half-asleep by Butterfly’s side, he woke them all before dawn and began the march downhill again, their guns all loaded and ready.

As they descended to the coast it became apparent that runners had passed them in the night, and warned the locals below of the disaster on the summit. A fighting force of men held the crossroads just above the great coastal city, shouting to the beat of drums, brandishing clubs, shields, spears, and pikes. The descending Chinese were obviously outnumbered, the fifty men I-Chin had brought approaching some four or five hundred local warriors.

“Spread out,” Kheim told his men. “March right down the road at them, singing ‘Drunk Again on the Grand Canal.’ Get all the guns out front, and when I say stop, stop and aim at their leaders—whoever has the most feathers on their head. All of you shoot together when I say fire, and then reload. Reload as fast as you can, but don’t shoot again unless you hear me say so. If I do, fire and reload yet again.”

So they marched down the road, roaring the old drinking song at the top of their lungs, then stopped and fired a volley, and their flintlocks might as well have been a row of cannon, they had such an effect: many men knocked down and bleeding, the survivors among them running in a complete panic.

It had only taken one volley, and the coastal city was theirs. They could have burned it to the ground, taken anything in it; but Kheim marched them through the streets as quickly as possible, still singing as loudly as they could, until they were on the beach among the Chinese landing boats, and safe. They never even had to fire a second time.

Kheim went to I-Chin and shook his hand. “Many thanks,” he said to him formally before all the others. “You saved us. They would have sacrificed Butterfly like a lamb, and killed the rest of us like flies.”

It seemed to Kheim only reasonable that the locals would soon recover from the shock of the guns, after which they would be dangerous in their numbers. Even now crowds were gathering at a safe distance to observe them. So after getting Butterfly and most of the men onto the ships, Kheim consulted with I-Chin and their ships’ provision masters, to see what they were still lacking for a voyage back across the Dahai. Then he took a big armed party ashore one last time, and after the ships’ cannons were fired at the city, he and his men marched straight for the palace, singing again and stepping to the beat of their drums. At the palace they raced around the wall, and caught a group of priests and women escaping at a gate on the other side, and Kheim shot one priest, and had his men tie the others up.

After that he stood before the priests, and mimed his demands. His head still pounded painfully, he remained floating in the strange exhilaration of killing, and it was remarkable how easy it was to convey by mime alone a fairly elaborate list of demands. He pointed to himself and his men, then to the west, and made one hand sail away on the wind of the other one. He held up samples of food and the bags of tea leaves, indicated that these were wanted. He mimed them being brought to the beach. He went to the chief hostage and imitated untying him and waving farewell. If the goods didn’t arrive… he pointed the gun at each hostage. But if they did, the Chinese would release everyone and sail away.

He acted out each step of the process, looking the hostages in the eyes and speaking only a little, as he judged it would only be a distraction to their comprehension. Then he had his men release all the women captured, and a few of the men without headdresses, and sent them out with clear instructions to get the required goods. He could tell by their eyes that they understood exactly what they were to do.

After that he marched the hostages to the beach, and they waited. That same afternoon men appeared in one of the main streets, bags slung down their backs from lines hung around their foreheads. They deposited these bags on the beach, bowing, and then retreated, still facing the Chinese. Dried meat; grain cakes; the little green leaves; gold disks and ornaments (though Kheim had not asked for these); blankets and bolts of the soft cloth. Looking at it all spread on the beach, Kheim felt like a tax collector, heavy and cruel; but also relieved; powerful in a tenuous fashion only, as it was by a magic he didn’t understand or control. Above all he felt content. They had what they needed to get home.

He untied the hostages himself, gestured for them to go. He gave each of them a pistol ball, curling their unresponsive fingers around them. “We’ll be back someday,” he said to them. “Us, or people worse than us.” He wondered briefly if they would catch smallpox, like the Miwok; his sailors had slept on the locals’ blankets at the palace.

No way to tell. The locals stumbled away, clutching their pistol balls or dropping them. Their women stood at a safe distance, happy to see that Kheim had kept his pantomimed promise, happy to see their men freed. Kheim ordered his men into the boats. They rowed out to the ships and sailed away from the big mountain island.

Three

After all that, sailing the Great Ocean felt very familiar, very peaceful. The days passed in their rounds. They followed the sun west, always west. Most days were hot and sunny. Then for a month clouds grew every day and broke in the afternoons, in gray thundershowers that quickly dissipated. After that the winds always blew from the southeast, making their way easy. Their memories of the great island behind them began to seem like dreams, or legends they had heard about the realm of the asuras. If it weren’t for Butterfly’s presence it would have been hard to believe they had done all that.

Butterfly played on the flagship. She swung through the rigging like a little monkey. There were hundreds of men on board, but the presence of one little girl changed everything: they sailed under a blessing. The other ships stayed close to the flagship in the hope of catching sight of her, or being blessed by an occasional visit. Most of the sailors believed she was the goddess Tianfei, traveling with them for their own safety, and that this was why the return voyage was going so much easier than the voyage out had. The weather was kinder, the air warmer, the fish more plentiful. Three times they passed small atolls, uninhabited, and were able to take on coconuts and palm hearts, and once water. Most important, Kheim felt, they were headed west, back home to the known world. It felt so different from the voyage out that it seemed strange it was the same activity. That orientation alone could make such a difference! But it was hard to sail into the morning sun, hard to sail away from the world.

Sailing, day after day. Sun rising at the stern, sinking at the bow, drawing them on. Even the sun was helping them—perhaps too much—it was now the seventh month, and infernally hot; then windless for most of a month. They prayed to Tianfei, ostentatiously not looking at Butterfly as they did so.

She played in the rigging, oblivious to their sidelong glances. She spoke Chinese pretty well now, and had taught I-Chin all the Miwok she could remember. I-Chin had written down every word, in a dictionary that he thought might be useful to subsequent expeditions to the new island. It was interesting, he told Kheim, because usually he was just choosing the ideogram or combination of ideograms that sounded most like the Miwok word as spoken, and writing down as precise a definition of its Miwok meaning as he could, given the source of information; but of course when looking at the ideographs for the sounds it was impossible not to hear the Chinese meanings for them as well, so that the whole Miwok language became yet another set of homonyms to add to the already giant number that existed in Chinese. Many Chinese literary or religious symbols relied on pure accidents of homonymity to make their metaphorical connection, so that one said the tenth day of the month, shi, was the birthday of the stone, shi; or a picture of a heron and lotus, lu and lian, by homynym became the message “may your path (lu) be always upward (lian); or the picture of a monkey on the back of another one could be read in a similar way as “may you rank as a governor from generation to generation.” Now to I-Chin the Miwok words for “going home” looked like wu ya, five ducks, while the Miwok for “swim” looked like Peng-zu, the legendary character who had lived for eight hundred years. So he would sing “five ducks swimming home, it will only take eight hundred years,” or “I’m going to jump off the side and become Peng-zu,” and Butterfly would shriek with laughter. Other similarities in the two languages’ maritime words made I-Chin suspect that Hsu Fu’s expedition to the east had made it to the ocean continent of Yingzhou after all, and left there some Chinese words if nothing else; if, indeed, the Miwok themselves were not the descendants of his expedition.

Some men already spoke of returning to the new land, usually to the golden kingdom in the south, to subdue it by arms and take its gold back to the real world. They did not say, We will do this, which would be bad luck, obviously, but rather, If one were to do this. Other men listened to this talk from a distance behind their eyes, knowing that if Tianfei allowed them to reach home, nothing ever again would induce them to cross the great ocean.

Then they became entirely becalmed, in a patch of ocean devoid of rain, cloud, wind, or current. It was as if a curse had fallen on them, possibly from the loose talk of return for gold. They began to bake. There were sharks in the water, so they could not swim freely to cool off, but had to set a sail in the water between two of the ships, and let it sink until they could jump off into a pool, very warm, about chest deep. Kheim had Butterly wear a shift and let her jump in. To refuse her wish would have been to astound and infuriate the crew. It turned out she could swim like an otter. The men treated her like the goddess she was, and she laughed to see them sporting like boys. It was a relief to do something different, but the sail couldn’t sustain the wetness and bouncing on it, and gradually came apart. So they only did it once.

The doldrums began to endanger them. They would run out of water, then food. Possibly subtle currents continued to carry them west, but I-Chin was not optimistic. “It’s more likely we’ve wandered into the center of the big circular current, like a whirlpool’s center.” He advised sailing south when possible, to get back into both wind and current, and Kheim agreed, but there was no wind to sail. It was much like the first month of their expedition, only without the Kuroshio. Again they discussed putting out the boats and rowing the ships, but the vast junks were too big to move by oar power alone, and I-Chin judged it dangerous to tear the skin off the palms of the men when they were already so dried out. There was no recourse but to clean their stills, and keep them in the sun and primed all day long, and ration what water remained in the casks. And keep Butterfly fully watered, no matter what she said about doing like all the rest. They would have given her the last cask in the fleet.

It had gotten to the point where I-Chin was proposing that they save their dark yellow urine and mix it with their remaining water supplies, when black clouds appeared from the south, and it quickly became clear that their problem was going to change very swiftly from having too little water to having too much. Wind struck hard, clouds rolled over them, water fell in sheets, and the funnels were deployed over the casks, which refilled almost instantly. Then it was a matter of riding out the storm. Only junks as big as theirs were high enough and flexible enough to survive such an onslaught for long; and even the Eight Great Ships, desiccated above the water as they had been in the doldrums, now swelled in the rain, snapping many of the ropes and pins holding them together, so that riding out the storm became a continuous drenched frantic stemming of leaks, and fixing of broken spars and staves and ropes.

All this time the waves were growing bigger, until eventually the ships were rising and falling as over enormous smoking hills, rolling south to north at a harried but inexorable, even majestic pace. In the flagship they shot up the face of these and crested in a smear of white foam over the deck, after which they had a brief moment’s view of the chaos from horizon to horizon, with perhaps two or three of the other ships visible, bobbing in different rhythms and being blown away into the watery murk. For the most part there was nothing to do but hunker down in the cabins, drenched and apprehensive, unable to hear each other over the roar of wind and wave.

At the height of the storm they entered the fish’s eye, that strange and ominous calm in which disordered waves sloshed about in all directions, crashing into each other and launching solid bolts of white water into the dark air, while all around them low black clouds obscured the horizon. A typhoon, therefore, and none were surprised. As in the yin-yang symbol, there were dots of calm at the center of the wind. It would soon return from the opposite direction.

So they worked on repairs in great haste, feeling as one always did, that having gotten halfway through it they should be able to reach the end. Kheim peered through the murk at the nearest ship to them, which appeared to be in difficulty. The men crowded its railing, staring longingly at Butterfly, some even crying out to her. No doubt they thought their trouble resulted from the fact they did not have her on board with them. Its captain shouted to Kheim that they might have to cut down their masts in the second half of the storm to keep from being rolled over, and that the others should hunt for them if necessary, after it had passed.

But when the other side of the typhoon struck, things went badly on the flagship as well. An odd wave threw Butterfly into a wall awkwardly, and after that the fear in the men was palpable. They lost sight of the other ships. The huge waves again were torn to foam by the wind, and their crests crashed over the ship as if trying to sink it. The rudder snapped off at the rudder post, and after that, though they tried to get a yard over the side to replace the rudder, they were in effect a hulk, struck in the side by every passing wave. While men fought to get steerage and save the ship, and some were swept overboard, or drowned in the lines, I-Chin attended to Butterfly. He shouted to Kheim that she had broken an arm and apparently some ribs. She was gasping for breath, Kheim saw. He returned to the struggle for steerage, and finally they got a sea anchor over the side, which quickly brought their bow around into the wind. This saved them for the moment, but even coming over the bow the waves were heavy blows, and it took every effort they could make to keep the hatches from tearing off and the ship’s compartments from filling. All done in an agony of apprehension about Butterfly; men shouted angrily that she should have been cared for better, that it was inexcusable that something like this should happen. Kheim knew that was his responsibility.

When he could spare a moment he went to her side, in the highest cabin on the rear deck, and looked beseechingly at I-Chin, who would not reassure him. She was coughing up a foamy blood, very red, and I-Chin was sucking her throat clear of it from time to time with a tube he stuck down her mouth. “A rib has punctured a lung,” he said shortly, keeping his eyes on her. She meanwhile was conscious, wide-eyed, in pain but quiet. She said only, “What’s happening to me?” After I-Chin cleared her throat of another mass of blood, he told her what he had told Kheim. She panted like a dog, shallow and fast.

Kheim went back into the watery chaos abovedecks. The wind and waves were no worse than before, perhaps a bit better. There were scores of problems large and small to attend to, and he threw himself at them in a fury, muttering to himself, or shouting at the gods; it didn’t matter, no one could hear anything abovedecks, unless it was shouted directly in their ears. “Please, Tianfei, stay with us! Don’t leave us! Let us go home. Let us return to tell the emperor what we have found for him. Let the girl live.”

They survived the storm: but Butterfly died the next day.

Only three ships found each other and regathered on the quiet blank of the sea. They sewed Butterfly’s body in a man’s robe and tied two of the gold disks from the mountain empire into it, and let it slide over the side into the waves. All the men were weeping, even I-Chin, and Kheim could barely speak the words of the funeral prayer. Who was there to pray to? It seemed impossible that after all they had gone through, a mere storm could kill the sea goddess; but there she was, slipping under the waves, sacrificed to the sea just as that island boy had been sacrificed to the mountain. Sun or seafloor, it was all the same.

“She died to save us,” he told the men shortly. “She gave that avatar of herself to the storm god, so he would let us be. Now we have to carry on to honor her. We have to get back home.”

So they repaired the ship as best they could, and endured another month of desiccated life. This was the longest month of the trip, of their lives. Everything was breaking down, on the ships, in their bodies. There wasn’t enough food and water. Sores broke out in their mouths and on their skin. They had very little qi, and could hardly eat what food was left.

Kheim’s thoughts left him. He found that when thoughts left, things just did themselves. Doing did not need thinking.

One day he thought: sail too big cannot be lifted. Another day he thought: more than enough is too much. Too much is less. Therefore least is most. Finally he saw what the Daoists meant by that.

Go with the way. Breathe in and out. Move with the swells. Sea doesn’t know ship, ship doesn’t know sea. Floating does itself. A balance in balance. Sit without thinking.

The sea and sky melded. All blue. There was no one doing, nothing being done. Sailing just happened.

Thus, when a great sea was crossed, there was no one doing it.

Someone looked up and noticed an island. It turned out to be Mindanao, and after the rest of its archipelago, Taiwan, and all the familiar landfalls of the Inland Sea.

The three remaining Great Ships sailed into Nanjing almost exactly twenty months after their departure, surprising all the inhabitants of the city, who thought they had joined Hsu Fu at the bottom of the sea. And they were happy to be home, no doubt about it, and bursting with stories to tell of the amazing giant island to the east.

But any time Kheim met the eye of any of his men, he saw the pain there. He saw also that they blamed him for her death. So he was happy to leave Nanjing and travel with a gang of officials up the Grand Canal to Beijing. He knew that his sailors would scatter up and down the coast, go their ways so they wouldn’t have to see each other and remember; only after years had passed would they want to meet, so that they could remember the pain when it had become so distant and faint that they actually wanted it back, just to feel again they had done all those things, that life had held all those things.

But for now it was impossible not to feel they had failed. And so when Kheim was led into the Forbidden City, and brought before the Wanli Emperor to accept the acclaim of all the officials there, and the interested and gracious thanks of the emperor himself, he said only, “When a great sea has been crossed, there is no one to take credit.”

The Wanli Emperor nodded, fingering one of the gold disk ingots they had brought back, and then the big hummingbird moth of beaten gold, its feathers and antennae perfectly delineated with the utmost delicacy and skill. Kheim stared at the Heavenly Envoy, trying to see in to the hidden emperor, the Jade Emperor inside him. Kheim said to him, “That far country is lost in time, its streets paved with gold, its palaces roofed with gold. You could conquer it in a month, and rule over all its immensity, and bring back all the treasure that it has, endless forest and furs, turquoise and gold, more gold than there is yet now in the world; and yet still the greatest treasure in that land is already lost.”

Four

Snowy peaks, towering over a dark land. The first blinding crack of sunlight flooding all. He could have made it then—everything was so bright, he could have launched himself into pure whiteness at that moment and never come back, flowed out forever into the All. Release, release. You have to have seen a lot to want release that much.

But the moment passed and he was on the black stage floor of the bardo’s hall of judgment, on its Chinese side, a nightmare warren of numbered levels and legal chambers and bureaucrats wielding lists of souls to be remanded to the care of meticulous torturers. Above this hellish bureaucracy loomed the usual Tibet of a dais, occupied by its menagerie of demonic gods, chopping up condemned souls and chasing the pieces off to hell or a new life in the realm of preta or beast. The lurid glow, the giant dais like the side of a mesa towering above, the hallucinatorily colorful gods roaring and dancing, their swords flashing in the black air; it was judgment—an inhuman activity—not the pot calling the kettle black, but true judgment, by higher authorities, the makers of this universe. Who were the ones, after all, that had made humans as weak and craven and cruel as they so often were—so that there was a sense of doom enforced, of loaded dice, karma lashing out at whatever little pleasures and beauties the miserable subdivine sentiences might have concocted out of the mud of their existence. A brave life, fought against the odds? Go back as a dog! A dogged life, persisting despite all? Go back as a mule, go back as a worm. That’s the way things work.

Thus Kheim reflected as he strode up through the mists in a growing rage, as he banged through the bureaucrats, smashing them with their own slates, their lists and tallies, until he caught sight of Kali and her court, standing in a semicircle taunting Butterfly, judging her—as if that poor simple soul had anything to answer for, compared to these butcher gods and their eons of evil—evil insinuated right into the heart of the cosmos they themselves had made!

Kheim roared in wordless fury, and charged up and seized a sword from one of the death goddess’s six arms, and cut off a brace of them with a single stroke; the blade was very sharp. The arms lay scattered and bleeding on the floor, flopping about—then, to Kheim’s unutterable consternation, they were grasping the floorboards and moving themselves crabwise by the clenching of the fingers. Worse yet, new shoulders were growing back behind the wounds, which still bled copiously. Kheim screamed and kicked them off the dais, then turned and chopped Kali in half at the waist, ignoring the other members of his jati who stood up there with Butterfly, all of them jumping up and down and shouting “Oh no, don’t do that Kheim, don’t do that, you don’t understand, you have to follow protocol,” even I-Chin, who was shouting loudly over the rest of them, “At least we might direct our efforts at the dais struts, or the vials of forgetting, something a little more technical, a little less direct!” Meanwhile Kali’s upper body fisted itself around the stage, while her legs and waist staggered, but continued to stand; and the missing halves grew out of the cut parts like snail horns. And then there were two Kalis advancing on him, a dozen arms flailing swords.

He jumped off the dais, thumped down on the bare boards of the cosmos. The rest of his jati crashed down beside him, crying out in pain at the impact. “You got us in trouble,” Shen whined.

“It doesn’t work like that,” Butterfly informed him as they panted off together into the mists. “I’ve seen a lot of people try. They lash out in fury and cut the hideous gods down, and how they deserve it—and yet the gods spring back up, redoubled in other people. A karmic law of this universe, my friend. Like conservation of yin and yang, or gravity. We live in a universe ruled by very few laws, but the redoubling of violence by violence is one of the main ones.”

“I don’t believe it,” Kheim said, and stopped to fend off the two Kalis now pursuing them. He took a hard swing and decapitated one of the new Kalis. Swiftly another head grew back, swelling atop the gusher on the neck of the black body, and the new white teeth of her new head laughed at him, while her bloody red eyes blazed. He was in trouble, he saw; he was going to be hacked to pieces. For resisting these evil unjust absurd and horrible deities he was going to be hacked to pieces and returned to the world as a mule or a monkey or a maimed old geezer—