The Year of Rice and Salt

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 grey 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, travelling 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 importantly, 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 Chen all the Miwok she could remember. I Chen 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 Chen 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 Chen suspect that Hsu Fus expedition to the cast had made it to the ocean continent of Ying zhou 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.