The Year of Rice and Salt

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.