The Year of Rice and Salt

While further arrangements were made in the palace, Kyu was assigned a bed in the dorm, and Bold was offered a room in the clinic's men's building. 'Temporary, you understand. Unless you care to join us in the main building. Great opportunities for advancement… 'No thank you,' Bold said politely. But he saw that many men were coming in to request the operation, desperate for a job. When there was famine in the countryside there was no shortage of applicants, they even had to turn people away. As with everything in China, there was a whole bureaucracy at work here, the palace requiring as it did several thousand eunuchs for its operation. This clinic was just a small part of that.

So they were launched in Beijing. Indeed, things had gone so well that Bold wondered if Kyu, no longer needing Bold as he had during their journey north, would now abandon him – move into the Forbidden City and disappear from his life. The idea made him sad, despite all.

But Kyu, after being assigned to the concubines of Zhu Gaozhi, the Emperor's eldest legitimate son and the Heir Designate, asked Bold to come with him and apply to be a stabler for the Heir. 'I still need your help,' he said simply, looking like the boy who had boarded the treasure ship so long ago.

'I'll try,' Bold said.

Kyu was able to ask the favour of an interview from Zhu Gaozhi's stable master, and Bold went in and displayed his expertise with some big beautiful horses, and was given a job. Mongolians had the same kind of advantage in the stable that eunuchs had in the palace.

It was easy work, Bold found; the Heir Designate was an indolent man, his horses seldom ridden, so that the stablers had to exercise them on a track, and in the new parks of the palace grounds. The horses were all very big and white, but slow and weak winded; Bold saw now why the Chinese could never go north of their Great Wall and attack the Mongols to any great effect, despite their stupendous numbers. Mongols lived on their horses, and lived off them too made their clothes and shelter from their felt and wool, drank their milk and blood, ate them when they had to. Mongolian horses were the life of the people; whereas these big clodhoppers might as well have been driving millstones in a circle with blinkers on, for all the wind and spirit they had.

It turned out Zhu Gaozhi spent a lot of time in Nanjing, where he had been brought up, visiting his mother the Empress Xu. So as the months passed, Bold and Kyu made the trip between the two capitals many times, travelling on barges on the Grand Canal, or on horseback beside it. Zhu Gaozhi preferred Nanjing to Beijing, for obvious reasons of climate and culture; late at night, after drinking vast quantities of rice wine, he could be heard declaring to his intimates that he would move the capital back to Nanjing on the very day of his father's death. This made the enormous labour of building Beijing look odd to them when they were there.

But more and more they were in Nanjing. Kyu helped run the Heir's harem, and spent most of his time inside their enclosure. He never told Bold a thing about what he did in there, except one time, when he came out to the stables late at night, a bit drunk. This was almost the only time Bold saw him any more, and he looked forward to these nocturnal visits, despite the way they made him nervous.

On this occasion Kyu remarked that his main task these days was to find husbands for those of the Emperor's concubines who had reached the age of thirty without ever having relations with the Emperor. Zhu Di farmed these out to his son, with instructions to marry them off.

'Would you like a wife?' Kyu asked Bold slyly. 'A thirty year old virgin, expertly trained?'

'No thanks,' Bold said uneasily. He already had an arrangement with one of the servant women in the compound in Nanking, and though he supposed Kyu was joking, it made him feel strange.

Usually when Kyu made these midnight visits out to the stables, he was deep in thought. He did not hear things Bold said to him, or answered oddly, as if replying to some other question. Bold had heard that the young eunuch was well liked, knew many people in the palace, and had the favour of Wu, the Director of Ceremonies. But what they all did in the concubines' quarters during the long nights of the Beijing winters, he had no idea. Usually Kyu came out to the stables reeking of wine and perfume, sometimes urine, once even vomit. 'To stink like a eunuch' – the common phrase came back to Bold at those times with unpleasant force. He saw how people made fun of the mincing eunuch walk, the hunched little steps with feet pointing outwards, something that was either a physical necessity or a group style, Bold didn't know. They were called crows for their falsetto voices, among other names; but always behind their backs; and everyone agreed that as they fattened and then wizened in their characteristic fashion, they came to look like bent old women.