The Year of Rice and Salt

'Listen,' Bold said one day as they walked. 'You can't go to the capital and kill the Emperor. It isn't possible. And why would you want to anyway?'

Hunched, sullen, the boy eventually said in Arabic, 'To bring them down.'

Again the term he used came from camel driving.

'To what?'

'To stop them.'

'But killing the Emperor, even if you could, wouldn't do that. They'd just replace him with another one, and it would all go on the same as before. That's how it works.'

Much trudging, and then: 'They wouldn't fight over who got to be the new emperor?'

'Over the succession? Sometimes that happens. It depends on who's in line to succeed. I don't know about that any more. This Emperor, the Yongle, is a usurper himself. He took it away from his nephew, or uncle. But usually the eldest son has a clear right. Or the Emperor designates a different successor. In any case the dynasty continues. It isn't often there is a problem.'

'But there might be?'

'There might be and there might not. Meanwhile they'd be staying up at night working out better ways to torture you. What they did to you on the ship would be nothing compared to it. The Ming emperors have the best torturers in the world, everyone knows that.'

More trudging. 'They have the best everything in the world,' the boy complained. 'The best canals, the best cities, the best ships, the best armies. They sail around the seas and everywhere they go people kotow to them. They land and see the tooth of the Buddha, they take it with them. They instal a king that will serve them, and move on and do the same everywhere they go. They'll conquer the whole world, cut all the boys, and all the children will be theirs, and the whole world will end up Chinese.'

'Maybe so,' Bold said. 'It's possible. There certainly are a lot of them. And those treasure ships are impressive, no doubt of that. But you can't sail into the heart of the world, the steppes where I came from. And the people out there are much tougher than the Chinese. They've conquered the Chinese before. So things should be all right. And listen, no matter what happens, you can't do anything about it.'

'We'll see about that in Nanjing.'

It was crazy, of course. The boy was deluded. Nevertheless there was that look that came into his eye – inhuman, totemic, his nafs looking out at things – the sight of which gave Bold a chill down the chakra nerve right to the first centre, behind his balls. Aside from the raptor nafs, which he had been born with, there was something scary in the hatred of a eunuch, something impersonal and uncanny. Bold had no doubt that he was travelling with some kind of power, some African witch child or shaman, a tulku, who had been captured out of the jungles and mutilated, so that his power had been redoubled, and was now turning to revenge. Revenge, against the Chinese! Despite his belief that it was crazy, Bold was curious to see what might come of that.

Nanjing was bigger even than Hangzhou. Bold had to give up being amazed. It was also the home harbour for the great treasure fleet. An entire city of shipbuilders had been established down by the Yangzi River estuary, the shipyards including seven enormous drydocks running perpendicular to the river, behind high dams with guards patrolling their gates so that no one could sabotage them. Thousands of shipwrights, carpenters and sailmakers lived in quarters behind the drydocks, and this sprawling town of workshops, called Longjiang, included scores of inns for visiting labourers, and sailors ashore. Evening discussions in these inns concerned mainly the fate of the treasure fleet and of Zheng He, who currently was occupied building a temple to Tianfei, while he worked on another great expedition to the west.

It was easy for Bold and Kyu to slip into this scene as small time trader and slave, and they rented sleeping spaces on the mattresses at the South Sea Inn. Here in the evenings they learned of the construction of a new capital up in Beiping, a project which was absorbing a great deal of the Yongle Emperor's attention and cash. Beiping, a provin cial northern outpost except during the Mongol dynasties, had been Zhu Di's first power base before he usurped the Dragon Throne and became the Yongle Emperor, and he was now rewarding it by making it the imperial capital once again, changing its name from Beiping ('northern peace') to Beijing ('northern capital'). Hundreds of thousands of workers had been sent north from Nanjing to build a truly enormous palace, indeed from all accounts the whole city was being made into a kind of palace the Great Within, it was called, forbidden to any but the Emperor and his concubines and eunuchs. Outside this precious ground was to be a larger imperial city, also new.