The Year of Rice and Salt

They would need to get as far away as they could, as quickly as possible. With a black like Kyu it would be hard to be inconspicuous. Necessarily he would have to remain a young black eunuch slave, Bold therefore his master. Bold would have to do all the talking; this was why Kyu had brought him along. This was why he had not murdered Bold along with the rest of the household.

'What about I Ii Did you kill her too?'

'No. Her bedroom has a window. She'll do fine.'

Bold wasn't so sure; widows had a hard time of it; she'd end up like Wei Big Knife, on the street cooking meals on a brazier for passers by. Although for her that might be opportunity enough.

Wherever there were a lot of slaves, there were usually quite a few blacks. The canal boats were often moved along through the countryside by slaves, turning capstans or pulling their ropes directly, like mules or camels. Possibly the two of them could take on such a role and hide in it; he could pretend to be a slave himself but no, they needed a master to account for them. If they could slip onto the end of a rope line… He couldn't believe he was thinking about joining a canal boat ropeline, when he had been waiting tables in a restaurant! It made him so angry at Kyu that he hissed.

And now Kyu needed him. Bold could abandon the boy and he would stand a much better chance of slipping into obscurity, among the many traders and Buddhist monks and beggars on the roads of China; even their famous bureaucracy of local yamens and district officials could not keep track of all the poor people slipping around in the hills and the back country. While with a black boy he stood out like a festival clown with his monkey.

But he was not going to abandon Kyu, not really, so he just hissed. On they ran through the outer city, Kyu pulling Bold by the hand from time to time and urging him in Arabic to hurry. 'You know this is what you really wanted, you're a great Mongol warrior, you told me, a barbarian of the steppes, feared by all the peoples, you were only just pretending not to mind being someone's kitchen slave, you're good at not thinking about things, about not seeing things, but it's all an act, of course you always knew, you just pretend not to know, you wanted to escape all the while.' Bold was amazed to think anyone could have misunderstood him that completely.

The suburbs of Hangzhou were much greener than the old central quarter, every household compound marked by trees, even small mulberry orchards. Behind them the fire alarm bells were waking the whole city, the day starting in a panic. From a slight rise they could look back between walls and see the lakefront aglow; the entire district appeared to have caught fire as quickly as Kyu's little balls of wax and kindling, fanned by a good stiff west wind. Bold wondered if Kyu had waited for a windy night to make his break. The thought chilled him. He had known the boy was clever, but this ruthlessness he had never suspected, despite the preta look he sometimes had, which reminded Bold of Temur's look – some intensity of focus, some totemic aspect, his raptor nafs looking out no doubt. Each person was in some crucial sense his or her nafs, and Bold had already concluded Kyu's was a falcon, hooded and tied. Temur's had been an eagle on high, stooping to tear at the world.

So he had seen some sign, had had some idea. And there was that closed aspect of Kyu too, the sense that his true thoughts were many rooms away, ever since his castration. Of course that would have had its effects. The original boy was gone, leaving the nafs to negotiate with some new person.

They hurried through the northernmost sub prefecture of Hangzhou, and out of the gate in the last city wall. The road rose higher into the Su Tung po Hills, and they got a view back to the lakefront district, the flames less visible in the dawn, more a matter of clouds of black smoke, no doubt throwing sparks east to spread the blaze. 'This fire will kill a lot of people!' Bold exclaimed.

'They're Chinese,' Kyu said. 'There's more than enough to take their place.'

Walking hard to the north, paralleling the Grand Canal on its west side, they saw again how crowded China was. Up here a whole country of rice paddies and villages fed the great city on the coast. Farmers were out in the morning light,

Sticking rice starts into the submerged fields, Bending over time after time. A man walks Behind a water buffalo. Strange to see Such rain polished black poverty,

Tiny farms, rundown crossroad villages,

After all the colourful glories of Hangzhou.

'I don't see why they all don't move to the city,' Kyu said. 'I would.'

'They never think of it,' Bold said, marvelling that Kyu would suppose other people thought like he did. 'Besides, their families are here.'