The Year of Rice and Salt

Admiral Kheim ordered all the captains of the Eight Great Ships and of the Lesser Eighteen Ships to row over to the flagship, where they consulted. Many of the most experienced ocean sailors of Taiwan, Annam, Fujian and Canton were among these men, and their faces were grave; to be carried off by the Kuroshio was a dangerous business. All of them had heard stories of junks that had been becalmed in the current, or dismasted by squalls, or had had to chop down their masts in order to avoid being capsized, and after that disappeared for years in onestory nine years, in another thirty – after which they had drifted back out of the southeast, bleached and empty, or manned by skeletons. These stories, and the eyewitness evidence of the flagship's doctor, I Chen, who claimed to have ridden around the Dahai successfully in his youth on a fishing junk disabled by a typhoon, led them to agree that there was probably a big circular current flowing around the vast sea, and. That if they could stay alive long enough, they might be able to sail around in it, back to home.

It was not a plan any of them would have chosen to undertake deliberately, but at that point they had no other option but to try it. The captains sat in the Admiral's cabin on the flagship and regarded each other unhappily. Many of the Chinese there knew the legend of Hsu Fu, admiral of the Han dynasty of ancient times, who had sailed off with his fleet in search of lands to settle on the other side of the Dahai, and never been heard from again. They knew as well the story of Kubla Khan's two attempts at invading Nippon, both demolished by unseasonable typhoons, which had given the Nipponese the conviction that there was a divine wind that would defend their home islands from foreign attack. Who could disagree? And it seemed all too possible that this divine wind was now doing its work in a kind of joke or ironic reversal, manifesting itself as a divine calm while they were in the Kuroshio, causing their destruction just as effectively as any typhoon. The calm after all was uncannily complete, its timing miraculously good; it could be they had got caught up in gods' business. That being the case, they could only give their fate over to their own gods, and hope to ride things out.

This was not Admiral Kheim's favoured mode of being. 'Enough,' he said darkly, ending the meeting. He had no faith in the sea gods' good will, and took no stock in old stories, except as they were useful. They were caught in the Kuroshio; they had some knowledge of the currents of the Dahai – that north of the equator they ran cast, south of the equator, west. They knew the prevailing winds tended to follow likewise. The doctor, I Chen, had successfully ridden the entirety of this great circle, his unprepared ship's crew living off fish and seaweed, drinking rainwater, and stopping for supplies at islands they passed. This was cause for hope. And as the air remained eerily calm, hope was all they had. It was not as if they had any other options; the ships were dead in the water, and the big ones were too big to row anywhere. In truth they had no choice but to make the best of it.

Admiral Kheim therefore ordered most of the men of the fleet to get on board the Eighteen Lesser Ships, and ordered half of these to row north, half south, with the idea they could row at an angle out of the Black Stream, and sail home when the wind returned, to get word to the Emperor concerning what had happened. The Eight Great Ships, manned by the smallest crews that could sail them, with as much of the fleet's supplies as could be fitted in their holds, settled in to wait out the ride around the ocean on the currents. If the smaller ones succeeded in sailing back to China, they were to tell the Emperor to expect the Great Eight to return at some later date, out of the southeast.

In a couple of days the smaller ships all disappeared over the horizon, and the Eight Great Ships drifted on, roped together in a perfect calm, off the maps to the unknown east. There was nothing else they could do.

Thirty days passed without the slightest breeze. Each day they rode the current farther to the cast.

No one had ever seen anything like it. Admiral Kheim rejected all talk of the Divine Calm, however; as he pointed out, the weather had gone strange in recent years, mostly much colder, with lakes freezing over that had never frozen before, and freak winds, such as certain whirlwinds that had stood in place for weeks at a time. Something was wrong in the heavens. This was just part of that.