The Year of Rice and Salt

Nothing of the sort happened. In fact, the next day when they rowed in, a whole contingent of men, wearing checked tunics and feathered headdresses, 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 good will. They were offered cakes made of some kind of dense, substantial flour; 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 goldroofed 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 Chen 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 colours, 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 back country, 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' beads 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.