In the twelfth year of the Xianfeng Emperor, rain inundated Gold Mountain. It started raining in the third month of the autumn, the usual start of the rainy season on this part of the coast of Yingzhou, but then it never stopped raining until the second month of the following spring. It rained every day for half a year, and often a pounding, drenching rain, as if it were the tropics. Before that winter was halfway over the great central valley of Gold Mountain had flooded up and down its entire length, forming a shallow lake fifteen hundred li long and three hundred li wide. The water poured brownly between the green hills flanking the delta, into the great bay and out of the Gold Gate, staining the ocean the colour of mud all the way out to the Peng lai Islands. The outflow ran hard both ebb and flood, but still this was not enough to empty the great valley. The Chinese towns and villages and farms on the flat valley floor were drowned to the rooftops, and the entire population of the valley had to leave for higher ground, in the coastal range or the foothills of the Gold Mountains, or, for the most part, down to the city, fabled Fangzhang. Those who lived on the eastern side of the central valley tended to move up into the foothills, ascending the rail and stage roads that ran up through apple orchards and vineyards, overlooking the deep canyons that cut between the tablelands. Here they ran into the large foothill population of Japanese.
Many of these Japanese had come in the diaspora, after the Chinese armies had conquered Japan, in the Yung Cheng dynasty, a hundred and twenty years before. They were the ones who had first begun to grow rice in the central valley; but after only a generation or two, Chinese immigration filled the valley as the rains were now filling it, and most of the Japanese nisei and sansei moved up into the foothills, looking for gold, or growing grapes and apples. There they encountered a fair number of the old ones, hidden in the foothills and struggling to survive a malaria epidemic that recently had killed most of them off. The Japanese got along with the survivors, and the other old ones that came from the east, and together they resisted Chinese incursions into the foothills in every way they could, short of insurrection; for over the Gold Mountains lay high desolate akaline deserts, where nothing could live. Their backs were to the wall.
So the arrival of so many Chinese refugee farming families was no very happy event for those already there. The foothills were composed of plateaux tilted up towards the high mountains, and cut by very deep, rugged, heavily forested river canyons. These manzanita choked canyons were impenetrable to the Chinese authorities, and hidden in them were many Japanese families, most of them panning for gold or working small diggings. Chinese road building campaigns stuck to the plateaux for the most part, and the canyons had remained substantially Japanese, despite the presence of Chinese prospectors: a Hokkaido-in exile, tucked between the Chinese valley and the great desert of the natives. Now this world was filling with soaked Chinese rice farmers.
Neither side liked it. By now bad relations between Chinese and Japanese were as natural as between dog and cat. The foothill Japanese tried to ignore the Chinese setting up refugee camps by the all the stage and railway stations; the Chinese tried to ignore the Japanese homesteads they were intruding on. Rice ran low, tempers got short, and the Chinese authorities sent troops into the area to keep order. The rain kept falling.
One group of Chinese walked out of the flooding on the stage road that followed the course of Rainbow Trout River. Overlooking the river's north bank were apple orchards and cattle pasturage, mostly owned by Chinese in Fangzhang, but worked by Japanese. This group of Chinese camped in one of the orchards, and did what they could to construct shelter from the rain, which continued to fall, day after day after day. They built a pole framed barnlike building with a shingle roof, an open fire at one end and mere sheets for walls; meagre protection, but better than none. By day the men scrambled down the canyon walls to fish in the roaring river, and others went into the forest to hunt deer, shooting great numbers of them and drying their meat.
The matriarch of one of these families, Yao Je by name, was frantic that her silkworms had been left behind on their farm, in boxes tucked in the rafters of her filature. Her husband did not think there was anything that could be done about it, but the family employed a Japanese servant boy named Kiyoaki, who volunteered to go back down to the valley and take their rowing boat out on the first calm day, and recover the silkworms. His master did not like the proposal, but his mistress approved of it, as she wanted the silkworms. So one rainy morning Kiyoaki left to try to return to their flooded farm, if he could.
He found the Yao family's rowing boat still tied to the valley oak where they had left it. He untied it and rowed out over what had been the eastern rice paddies of their farm, towards their compound. A west wind churned up high waves, and both pushed him back east. His palms were blistered by the time he coasted up to the Yaos' inundated compound, scraped the flat bottom of the boat over the outer wall, and tied it to the roof of the filature, the tallest building on the farm. He climbed through a side window into the rafters, and found the sheets of damp paper covered with silkworm eggs, in their boxes filled with rocks and mulberry mulch. He gathered all the sheets into an oilcloth bag and lowered them out of the window into the rowing boat, feeling pleased.
Now rain was violently thrashing the surface of the flood, and Kiyoaki considered spending the night in the attic of the Yaos' house. But the emptiness of it frightened him, and for no better reason than that, he decided to row back. The oilcloth would protect the eggs, and he had been wet for so long that he was used to it. He was like a frog hopping in and out of its pond, it was all the same to him. So he got in the boat and began to row.
But now, perversely, the wind was from the east, blowing up waves of surprising weight and power. His hands hurt, and the boat occasionally brushed over drowned things: treetops, wiregraph poles, perhaps other things, he was too jumpy to look. Dead men's fingers! He could not see far in the growing gloom, and as night fell he lost his feeling for what direction he was headed. The rowing boat had a oiled canvas decking bunched in its bow, and he pulled it back over the gunwales, tied it in place, got under it and floated over the flood, lying in the bottom of the boat and occasionally bailing with a can. It was wet, but it would not founder. He let it bounce over the waves, and eventually fell asleep.
He woke several times in the night, but after bailing he always forced himself to sleep again. The rowing boat swirled and rocked, but the waves never broke over it. If they did the boat would founder and he would drown, but he avoided thinking about that.
Dawn made it clear he had drifted west rather than east. He was far out on the inland sea that the central valley had become. A knot of valley oaks marked a small island of higher ground that still stood above the flood, and he rowed towards it.
As he was facing away from the new little island, he did not see it well until he had thumped the bow onto it. Immediately he discovered it was coated with a host of spiders, bugs, snakes, squirrels, moles, rats, mice, raccoons and foxes, all leaping onto the rowing boat at once, as representing the new highest ground. He himself was the highest ground of all, and he was shouting in dismay and slapping desperate snakes and squirrels and spiders off him, when a young woman and baby leapt onto the boat like the rest of the crowd of animals, except the girl pushed off from the tree Kiyoaki had rowed against, weeping and crying loudly, 'They're trying to cat her, they're trying to eat my baby!'
Kiyoaki was preoccupied by the scores of creatures still crawling on him, to the point of nearly losing an oar over the side. Eventually he had squished or brushed or thrown overboard all the interlopers, and he replaced the oars in the rowlocks and rowed swiftly away. The girl and ber baby sat on the boat deck, the girl still whacking insects and spiders and shouting 'Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!' She was Chinese.
The lowering grey clouds began to leak rain yet again. They could see nothing but water in all directions, except for the trees of the little island they had so hastily vacated.
Kiyoaki rowed east. 'You're going the wrong way,' the girl complained.
'This is the way I came,' Kiyoaki said. 'The family that employs me is there.'
The girl did not reply.
'How did you get on that island?'
Again she said nothing.
Having passengers made rowing harder, and the waves came closer to breaking over the boat. Crickets and spiders continued to leap around underfoot, and an opossum had wedged itself in the bow under the decking. Kiyoaki rowed until his hands were bleeding, but they never caught sight of land; it was raining so hard now that it formed a kind of thick falling fog.
The girl complained, nursed her baby, killed insects. 'Row west,' she kept saying. 'The current will help you.'
Kiyoaki rowed cast. The boat jounced over the waves, and from time to time they bailed it out. The whole world seemed to have become a sea. Once Kiyoaki glimpsed a sight of the coastal range through a rent in the low clouds to the west, much closer than he would have expected or hoped. A current in the floodwaters must have been carrying them west.
Near dark they came on another tiny tree island.
'It's the same one!' the young woman said.
'It just looks that way.'
The wind was rising again, like the evening delta breeze they enjoyed so much during the hot dry summers. The waves were getting higher and higher, slapping hard into the bow and splashing over the canvas and in on their feet. Now they had to land, or they would sink and drown.
So Kiyoaki landed the boat. Again a tide of animal and insect life overran them. The Chinese girl cursed with surprising fluency, beating the larger creatures away from her baby. The smaller ones you just had to get used to. Up in the vast branches of the valley oaks sat a miserable troop of snow monkeys, staring down on them. Kiyoaki tied the boat to a branch and got off, arranged a wet blanket on the squirming mud between two roots, pulled the rowing boat's decking off, and draped it over the girl and her baby, weighing it down as best he could with broken branches. He crawled underneath the canvas with her, and they and an entire menagerie of bugs and snakes and rodents settled in for the long night. It was hard to sleep.
The next morning was as rainy as ever. The young woman had put her baby between the two of them to protect her from the rats. Now she nursed her. Under the canvas it was warmer than outside. Kiyoaki wished he could start a fire to cook some snakes or squirrels, but nothing was dry. 'We might as well get going,' he said.
They went out into the chill drizzle and got back in the boat. As Kiyoaki cast off about ten of the snow monkeys leaped down through the branches and climbed into the boat with them. The girl shrieked and pulled her shirt over ber baby, huddling over it and staring at the monkeys. They sat there like passengers, looking down or off into the rain, pretending to be thinking about something else. She threatened one and it shrank back.
'Leave them alone,' Kiyoaki said. The monkeys were Japanese; the Chinese didn't like them, and complained about their presence on Yingzhou.
They spun over the great inland sea. The young woman and her baby were dotted with spiders and fleas, as if they were dead bodies. The monkeys began to groom them, eating some insects and throwing others overboard.
'My name is Kiyoaki.'
'I am Peng ti,' the young Chinese woman said, brushing things off the babe and ignoring the monkeys.
Rowing hurt the blisters on Kiyoaki's hands, but after a while the pain would subside. He headed west, giving in to the current that had already taken them so far that way.
Out of the drizzle appeared a small sailing boat. Kiyoaki shouted, waking the girl and baby, but the men on the sailing boat had already spotted them, and they sailed over.
There were two sailors on board, two Japanese men. Peng ti watched them with narrowed eyes.
One told the castaways to climb into their boat. 'But tell the monkeys to stay there,' he said with a laugh.
Peng ti passed her baby up to them, then hauled herself over the gunwale.
'You're lucky they're just monkeys,' the other one said. 'Up north valley, Black Fort is high ground for a lot of country that hadn't been cleared, and the animals that swam onto it were more than you see here in your rice paddies. They had closed the gates but walls were nothing much to the bears, brown bears and gold bears, and they were shooting them when the magistrate ordered them to stop, because it was just going to use up all their ammunition and then they'd still have a whole town of bears. And the giant gold bears opened the gates and in come wolves, elk, the whole damn Hsu Fu walking the streets of Black Fort, and the people all locked up in their attics waiting it out.' The men laughed with pleasure at the thought.
'We're hungry,' Peng ti said.
'You look it,' they said.
'We were going east,' Kiyoaki mentioned.
'We're going west.'
'Good,' Peng ti said.
It continued to rain. They passed another knot of trees on an embankment just covered by water, and sitting in the branches like the monkeys were a dozen soaked and miserable Chinese men, very happy to leap on the sailboat. They had been there six days, they said. The fact that Japanese had rescued them did not seem to register with them one way or the other.
Now the sailing boat and rowing boat were carried on a current of brown water, between misted green hills.
'We're going over to the city,' their tillerman said. 'It's the only place where the docks are still secure. Besides we want to get dry and have a big dinner in Japantown.'
Across the rain spattered brown water they sailed. The delta and its diked islands were all under the flood, it was all a big brown lake with occasional lines of treetops sticking out of it, giving the sailors a fix on their position, apparently. They pointed at certain lines and discussed them with great animation, their fluid Japanese a great contrast to their rough Chinese.
Eventually they came into 'a narrow strait between tall hillsides, and as the wind was shooting up this strait – the Inner Gate, Kiyoaki presumed – they let down the sail and rode the current, shifting their rudder to keep in the fast part of it, which curved with the bend around the tall hills to the south, beyond which they were through the narrows and thrust out onto the broad expanse of Golden Bay, now a rocking foam streaked brown bay, ringed by green hills that disappeared into a ceiling of low grey cloud. As they tacked across to the city the clouds thinned in a few bands over the tall ridge of the northern peninsula, and weak light fell onto the hive of buildings and streets covering the peninsula, all the way up to the peak of Mount Tamalpi, turning certain neighbourhoods white or silver or pewter, amidst the general grey. It was an awesome sight.
The western side of the bay just north of the Gold Gate is broken by several peninsulas extending into the bay, and these peninsulas were covered with buildings too, indeed among the city's busiest districts, as they formed the capes of three little harbour bays. The middle of these three was the largest, the commercial harbour, and the peninsula on its south side also served the Japantown, tucked among the warehouses and a working neighbourhood behind them. Here, as their sailors had said, the floating docks and the wharves were intact and functioning normally, as if the central valley were not completely flooded. Only the dirt brown water of the bay revealed that anything was different.
As they approached the docks, the monkeys on the rowing boat began to look agitated. It was a case of from flood to frying pan for them, and eventually one slipped overboard and struck out swimming for an island to the south, and all the others immediately followed with a splash, picking up their conversation among themselves where they had left off.
'That's why they call it Monkey Island,' their pilot said.
He brought them into the middle harbour. The men on the dock included a Chinese magistrate, who looked down and said, 'Still flooded out there I see.'
'Still flooded and still raining.'
'People must be getting hungry.'
'Yes.'
The Chinese men climbed onto the dock, and thanked the sailors, who got out with Kiyoaki and Peng ti and the baby. The tillerman joined them as they followed the magistrate to the Great Valley Refugee Office, set up in the customs building at the back of the dock. There they were registered – their names, place of residence before the flood, and the whereabouts of their families and neighbours, if known, all recorded. The clerks gave them chits that would allow them to claim beds in the immigration control buildings, located on the steep sided big island out in the bay.
The tillerman shook his head. These big buildings had been built to quarantine non Chinese immigrants to Gold Mountain, about fifty years before. They were surrounded by fences tipped with barbed wire, and contained big dormitories with men's and women's sides. Now they housed some of the stream of refugees flowing down into the bay on the flood, mostly displaced valley Chinese, but the keepers of the place had retained the prison attitude they had had with the immigrants, and the valley refugees there were complaining bitterly and doing their best to get cleared to move in with local relatives, or to relocate up or down the coast, or even to return to the flooded valley and wait around the edges until the water receded. But there had been outbreaks of cholera reported, and the governor of the province had declared a state of emergency that allowed him to act directly in the Emperor's interests: martial law was in effect, enforced by army and navy.
The tillerman, having explained this, said to Kiyoaki and Peng ti, 'You can stay with us if you want. We stay at a boarding house in Japantown, it's clean and cheap. They'll put you up on credit if we say you're good for it.'
Kiyoaki regarded Peng ti, who looked down. Snake or spider: refugee housing or Japantown.
'We'll come with you,' she said. 'Many thanks.'
The street leading inland from the docks to the high central district of the city was lined on both sides by restaurants and hotels and small shops, the fluid calligraphy of Japanese as common as the blockier Chinese ideograms. Side streets were tight alleyways, the peaked rooftops curving up into the rain until the buildings almost met overhead. People wore oilcloth ponchos or jackets, and carried black or colourful print umbrellas, many very tattered by now. Everyone was wet, heads lowered and shoulders hunched, and the middle of the street was like an open stream, bouncing brownly to the bay. The green hills rising to the west of this quarter of the city were bright with tile roofs, red and green and a vivid blue: a prosperous quarter, despite the Japantown at its foot. Or, perhaps, because of it. Kiyoaki had been taught to call the blue of those tiles Kyoto blue.
They walked through alleys to a big merchant house and chandlery in the warren of Japantown, and the two Japanese men – the older named Gen, they learned introduced the young castaways to the proprietress of a boarding house next door. She was a toothless old Japanese woman, in a simple brown kimono, with a shrine in her hallway and reception room. They stepped in ber door and began to shed their wet raingear, and she regarded them with a critical eye. 'Everyone so wet these days,' she complained. 'You look as if they pulled you off the bottom of the bay. Chewed by crabs.'
She gave them dry clothes, and had theirs sent to a laundry. There were women's and men's wings to her establishment, and Kiyoaki and Peng ti were assigned mats, then fed a hot meal of rice and soup, followed by cups of warm sake. Gen was paying for them, and he waved off their thanks in the usual brusque Japanese manner. 'Payment on return home,' Gen said. 'Your families will be happy to repay me.'
Neither of the castaways had much to say to that. Fed, dry; there was nothing left but to go to their rooms and sleep as if felled.
Next day Kiyoaki woke to the sound of the chandler next door, shouting at an assistant. Kiyoaki looked out of the window of his room into a window of the chandlery, and saw the angry chandler hit the unfortunate youth on the side of the head with an abacus, the beads rattling back and forth.
Gen had come in the room, and he regarded the scene in the next building impassively. 'Come on,' he said to Kiyoaki. 'I've got some errands to do, it'll be a way to show you some of the city.'
Off they went, south on the big coastal street fronting the bay, connecting all of the smaller harbours facing the big bay and the islands in it. The southernmost harbour was tighter than the one fronting Japantown, its bay a forest of masts and smokestacks, the city behind and above it jammed together in a great mass of three- and four-storey buildings, all wooden with tile roofs, crammed together in what Gen said was the usual Chinese city style, and running right down to the high tide line, in places even built out over the water. This compact mass of buildings covered the whole end of the peninsula, its streets running straight east and west from the bay to the ocean, and north and south until they ended in parks and promenades high over the Gold Gate. The strait was obscured by a fog that floated in over the yellow spill of floodwater pouring out to sea; the yellow brown plume was so extensive that there was no blue ocean to be seen. On the ocean side of the point lay the long batteries of the city defences, concrete fortresses which Gen said commanded the strait and the waters outside it for up to fifty li offshore.
Gen sat on the low wall of one of the promenades overlooking the strait. He waved a hand to the north, where streets and rooftops covered everything they could see.
'The greatest harbour on Earth. The greatest city in the world, some say.'
'It's big, that's for sure. I didn't know it would be so..
'A million people here now, they say. And more coming all the time. They just keep building north, on up the peninsula.'
Across the strait, on the other hand, the southern peninsula was a waste of marshes and bare steep hills. It looked very empty compared to the city, and Kiyoaki remarked on it.
Gen shrugged: 'Too marshy, I guess, and too steep for streets. I suppose they'll get to it eventually, but it's better over here.'
The islands dotting the bay were occupied by the compounds of the imperial bureaucrats. Out on the biggest island the governor's mansion was roofed with gold. The brown foam streaked surface of the water was dotted with little bay boats, mostly sail, some smoking two strokes. Little marinas of square houseboats were tucked against the islands. Kiyoaki surveyed the scene happily. 'Maybe I'll move here. There must be jobs.'
'Oh yeah. Down at the docks, unloading the freighters – get a room at the boarding house – there's lots of work. In the chandlery too.'
Kiyoaki recalled his awakening. 'Why was that man so angry?'
Gen frowned. 'That was unfortunate. Tagomi san is a good man, he doesn't usually beat his help, I assure you. But he's frustrated. We can't get the authorities to release supplies of rice to feed the people stranded in the valley. The chandler is very high in the Japanese community here, and he's been trying for months now. He thinks the Chinese bureaucrats, over on the island there,' gesturing, 'are hoping that most of the people inland will starve.'
'But that's crazy! Most of them are Chinese.'
'Yeah sure, a lot are Chinese, but it would mean even more Japanese.'
'How so?'
Gen regarded him. 'There are more of us in the central valley than there are Chinese. Think about it. It may not be so obvious, because the Chinese are the only ones allowed to own land, and so they run the rice paddies, especially where you came from, over east side. But up valley, down valley – it's mostly Japanese at the ends, and in the foothills, the coastal range, even more so. We were here first, you understand? Now comes this big flood, people are driven away, flooded out, starving. The bureaucrats are thinking, when it's over and the land reemerges, assuming it will some day, if most of the Japanese and natives have died of hunger, then new immigrants can be sent in to take over the valley. And they'll all be Chinese.'
Kiyoaki didn't know what to say to this.
Gen stared at him curiously. He seemed to like what he saw: 'So, you know, Tagomi has been trying to organize private relief, and we've been taking it inland on the flood. But it isn't going well, and it's been expensive, and so the old man is getting testy. His poor workers are paying for it.' Gen laughed.
'But you rescued those Chinese stuck in the trees.'
'Yeah, yeah. Our job. Our duty. Good must result from good, eh? That's what the old woman boarding you says. Of course she's always getting taken.'
They regarded a new tongue of fog licking into the strait. Rain clouds on the horizon looked like a great treasure fleet arriving. A black broom of rain already swept the desolate southern peninsula.
Gen clapped him on the shoulder in a friendly way. 'Come on, I have to get her some stuff at the store.'
He led Kiyoaki up to a tram station, and they got on the next tram that ran up the western side of the city, overlooking the ocean. Up streets and down, past shady residential districts, then another government district, high on the slopes overlooking the stained ocean, wide esplanades lined with cherry trees; then another fortress. The hilly neighbourhoods north of these guns held many of the city's richest mansions, Gen said. They gazed at some of them from the tram as it squeaked past. From the tops of the precipitous streets they could see the temples on the summit of Mount Tamalpi. Then down into a valley, off that tram, and east on another one, across the peninsula and back to Japantown, with bags of food from a market for the proprietress of the boarding house.
Kiyoaki looked in the women's wing to see how Peng ti and her baby were doing. She was sitting in a window embrasure holding the child, looking blank and desolate. She had not gone to find any Chinese relatives, or to seek help from the Chinese authorities, not that there appeared to be much help from that direction; but she seemed not at all interested. Staying with the Japanese, as if in hiding. But she spoke no Japanese, and that was all they used here, unless they thought to speak to her directly in Chinese.
'Come out with me,' he said to her in Chinese. 'I have some money from Gen for the tram, we can see the Gold Gate.'
She hesitated, then agreed. Kiyoaki led her onto the tram system he had just learned, and they went down to the park overlooking the strait. The fog had almost burned off, and the next line of storm clouds were not yet arrived, and the spectacle of the city and the bay shone in wet blinking sunlight. The brown flood continued to pour out to sea, the scraps and lines of foam showing how fast the current was; it must have been ebb tide. That was every rice paddy in the central valley, scoured away and flushed out into the big ocean. Inland everything would have to be built anew. Kiyoaki said something to this effect, and a flash of anger crossed Peng ti's face, quickly suppressed.
'Good,' she said. 'I never want to see that place again.'
Kiyoaki regarded ber, shocked. She could not have been more than about sixteen. What about her parents, her family? She wasn't saying, and he was too polite to ask.
Instead they sat in the rare sun, watching the bay. The babe whimpered, and unobtrusively Peng ti nursed it. Kiyoaki watched her face and the tidal race in the Gold Gate, thinking about the Chinese, their implacable bureaucracy, their huge cities, their rule of Japan, Korea, Mindanao, Aozhou, Yingzhou and Inka.
'What's your baby's name?' Kiyoaki said.
'Hu Die,' the girl said. 'It means '
'Butterfly,' Kiyoaki said, in Japanese. 'I know.' He fluttered with a hand, and she smiled and nodded.
Clouds obscured the sun again, and it cooled rapidly in the onshore breeze. They took the tram back to Japantown.
At the boarding house Peng ti went to the women's wing, and as the men's wing was empty, Kiyoaki entered the chandlery next door, thinking to inquire about a job. The shop on the first floor was deserted, and he heard voices on the second floor, so he went up the stairs.
Here were the accounting rooms and the offices. The chandler's big office door was closed, but voices came through it. Kiyoaki approached, heard men speaking Japanese: ' I don't see how we could coordinate our efforts, how we could be sure it was all going off at once '
The door flew open and Kiyoaki was seized by the neck and dragged into the room. Eight or nine Japanese men glared at him, all seated around one elderly bald foreigner, in the chair of the honoured guest. The chandler roared, 'Who let him in here!'
'There's no one downstairs,' Kiyoaki said. 'I was just looking for someone to ask for a '
'How long were you listening?' The old man looked as if he was ready to hit Kiyoaki with his abacus, or worse. 'How dare you eavesdrop on us, you could get rocks tied to your ankles and thrown in the bay for that!'
'He's just one of the folks we plucked out of the valley,' Gen said from a corner. 'I've been getting to know him. Might as well enlist him, since he's here. I've already vetted him. He hasn't got anything better to do. In fact he'll be good.'
While the old man spluttered some objection, Gen got up and grabbed Kiyoaki by the shirt front.
'Get someone to lock the front door,' he told one of the younger men there, who left quickly. Gen turned to Kiyoaki: 'Listen, youth. We're trying to help the Japanese here, as I told you down at the Gate.'
'That's good.'
'We're working to free the Japanese, actually. Not only here, but in Japan itself.'
Kiyoaki gulped, and Gen shook him. 'That's right, Japan itself! A war of independence for the old country, and here too. You can work for us, and join one of the greatest things possible for a Japanese. Are you in or are you out?'
'In!' Kiyoaki said. 'I'm in, of course! just tell me what I can do!'
'You can sit down and shut up,' Gen said. 'First of all. Listen and then you'll be told more.'
The elderly foreigner seated in the chair of the honoured guest asked a question in his language.
Another of the men waved Kiyoaki aside, answered in the same language. In Japanese he said to Kiyoaki, 'This is Dr Ismail, visiting us from Travancore, the capital of the Indian League. He's here to help us organize our resistance to the Chinese. If you are to stay in this meeting, you must swear never to tell anyone what you see and hear. It means you are committed to the cause without a chance of backing out. If we find out you've ever told anyone about this, you'll be killed, do you understand?'
' I understand,' Kiyoaki said. 'I'm in, I said. You can proceed with no fear from me. I've worked like a slave for the Chinese in the valley, all my life.'
The men in the room stared at him; only Gen grinned at the spectacle of such a youth using the phrase 'all my life'. Kiyoaki saw that and blushed hotly. But it was true no matter how old he was. He set his jaw and sat on the floor in the corner by the door.
The men resumed their conversation. They were asking questions of the foreigner, who watched them with a birdlike blank expression, fingering a white moustache, until the man translating spoke to him, in a fluid language that did not seem to have enough sounds to create all the words; but the old foreigner understood him, and replied to the questions carefully and at length, taking pauses every few sentences to let the young translator speak in Japanese. He was obviously very used to working with a translator.
'He says, his country was under the yoke of the Mughals for many centuries, and finally they freed themselves in a military campaign run by their Kerala. The methods used have been systematized, and can be taught. The Kerala himself was assassinated, about twenty years ago. Dr Ismail says this was a, a disaster beyond telling, you can see it still upsets him to talk about it. But the only cure is to go on and do what the Kerala would have wanted them to do. And he wanted everyone everywhere free of all empires. So Travancore itself is now part of an Indian League, which has its disagreements, even violent disagreements, but mostly they work out their differences as equals. He says this kind of league was first developed here in Yingzhou, out in the east, among the Hodenosaunee natives. The Firanjis have taken most of the cast coast of Yingzhou, as we have the west, and many of the old ones out there have died of disease, as here, but the Hodenosaunee still hold the area around the great lakes, and the Travancoris have helped them to fight the Muslims. He says that is the key to success; those fighting the great empires have to help each other. He says they have helped some Africans as well, down in the south, a King Moshesh of the Basutho tribe. The doctor here travelled there himself, and arranged for aid to the Basuthos that allowed them to defend themselves from Muslim slave traders and the Zulu tribe as well. Without their help the Basuthos probably wouldn't have survived.'
'Ask him what he means when he says help.'
The foreign doctor nodded when the question was put to him. He used fingers to enumerate his answer.
'He says, first, they help by teaching the system their Kerala worked out, for organizing a fighting force, and fighting armies when those armies are much bigger. Then second, they can in some instances help with weapons. They will smuggle them in for us, if they think we are serious. And third, rare but possible, they can join the fight, if they think it will turn the tide.'
'They fought Muslims, and so do the Chinese. Why should they help Us?'
' He says, good question. He says, it's a matter of keeping a balance, and of setting the two great powers against each other. The Chinese and the Muslims are fighting each other everywhere, even in China itself, where there are Muslim rebellions. But right now the Muslims in Firanja and Asia are splintered and weak, they are always fighting each other, even here in Yingzhou. Meanwhile China continues to fatten on its colonies here and around the Dahai. Even though the Qing bureaucracy is corrupt and inefficient, their manufacturers are always busy, and gold keeps coming, from here and from Inka. So no matter how inefficient they are, they keep getting richer. At this point, he says, the Travancoris are interested in keeping China from becoming so strong they take over the whole world.'
One of the Japanese men snorted. 'No one can take over the world,' he said. 'It's too big.'
The foreigner inquired what had been said, and the translator translated for him. Dr Ismail raised a finger as he heard it, and replied.
'He says, that may have been true before, but now, with steamships, and communication by qi, and trade and travel everywhere by ocean, and machines exerting several thousandcamels of power, it could be that some dominant country could get an advantage and keep growing. There is a kind of, what, multiplying power to power. So that it's best to try to keep any one country from getting powerful enough to start that process. It was Islam that looked to be taking over the world for a while, he says, before their Kerala went at the heart of the old Muslim empires and broke them. It could be that China needs a similar treatment, and then there will be no empires, and people can do as they choose, and form leagues with whoever helps them.'
'But how can we stay in contact with them, on the other side of the world?'
'He agrees it is not easy. But steamships are fast. It can be done. They have done it in Africa, and in Inka. Qi wires can be strung very quickly between groups.'
They went on, the questions becoming more practical and detailed, losing Kiyoaki, as he didn't know where many of the places mentioned were: Basutho, Nsara, Seminole and so on. Eventually Dr Ismail appeared to tire, and they ended the meeting with tea. Kiyoaki helped Gen pour cups and pass them around, and then Gen took him downstairs and reopened the chandlery.
'You almost got me in trouble there,' he told Kiyoaki, 'and yourself too. You'll have to work hard for us to make up for scaring me that bad.'
'Sorry – I will. Thanks for helping me.'
'Oh that poisonous feeling. No thanks. You do your job, I do mine.'
'Right.'
'Now, the old man will take you in at the chandlery here, and you can live next door. He'll hit you with his abacus, as you saw. But your main job will be running messages for us and the like. If the Chinese get wind of what we're doing, it will get ugly, I warn you. It will be war, do you understand? It may be a secret war, at night, in the alleyways and out on the bay. Do you understand?'
'I understand.'
Gen regarded him. 'We'll see. First thing, we'll go back into the valley and get the word into the foothills, to some friends of mine. Then back to the city, to work here.'
'Whatever you say.'
An assistant gave Kiyoaki a tour of the chandlery, which he was soon to know so well. After that he went back to the boarding house next door. Peng ti was helping the old woman chop vegetables; Hu Die was sunning in a laundry basket. Kiyoaki sat next to the baby, entertaining it with a finger and thinking things over. He watched Peng ti, learning the Japanese words for the vegetables. She didn't want to go back to the valley either. The old woman spoke pretty good Chinese, and the two women were talking, but Peng ti wasn't telling her any more about her past than she had told Kiyoaki. It was warm in the kitchen. Rain was coming down again outside. The baby smiled at him, as if to reassure him. As if telling him that it would be all right.
The next time they were down at Gold Gate Park, looking at the brown flood still pouring, he sat by Peng ti on a bench. 'Listen,' he said, 'I'm going to stay here in the city. I'll go back out to the valley on a trip, and get Madam Yao's silkworms to her, but I'm going to live here.'
She nodded. 'Me too.' She waved at the bay. 'How could you not?' She picked up Hu Die and held her up in the air, face out towards the bay, and turned her around to face the four winds. 'This is your new home, Hu Die! This is where you are going to grow up!' Hu Die goggled at the view.
Kiyoaki laughed. 'Yes. She will like it here. But listen, Peng ti, I'm going to be…' He considered how to say it. 'I'm going to work for Japan. Do you understand?'
'No.'
'I'm going to work for Japan, against China.'
'I see.'
'I'm going to be working against China.'
Her jaw clenched. She said harshly, 'Do you think I care?' She looked across the bay to the Inner Gate, where brown water split the green hills. 'I'm so glad to be out of there.' She looked him in the eye, and he felt his heart jump. 'I'll help you.'