The Year of Rice and Salt

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 Butterfly 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 Chen was not optimistic. 'It's more likely we've wandered into the centre of the big circular current, like a whirlpool's centre.' 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 Chen 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 come to the point at which I Chen 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 bills, 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 was surprised. As in the yin yang symbol, there were dots of calm at the core 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 got 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.