[continuing chapter 2]
The next two weeks passed in a fatigue-fed
haze. Mah the Knife was a small man but
he wielded a big sword. And a spear, and
even a halberd. In addition, he could
put out the eye of a mannequin in military armor with an arrow at a range of
two hundred feet. Worse, he saw no
reason why anyone larger than he shouldn't be able to do all he could do. At the end of the first day Wen's shoulders
and upper arms burned and his upper legs and torso were bruised so extensively
he looked like bad enamel work; at the end of the first week he decided he
would never properly be able to lift anything heavier than a brush ever
again. Mah seemed to have been working
out his dislike of Wen's ancestors on Wen himself.
At the end of the second week, though, he could reliably hit
the back wall of Pocapetl's wine-shop with an arrow at a range of forty feet,
and he had become expert at decapitating straw soldiers who never fought back.
He was also in debt to Pocapetl to the extent of two hundred
copper cash, and had learned how to say "mescal"—though he could only
do it properly after his first cup of the fiery drink, which he had learned was
made from the juice and pulp of a sort of blue-colored plant that was the most
alien-looking growing thing he had ever seen.
And he had, without quite realizing it, learned all of the
things about his homeland that his father's lifetime of study had somehow never
managed to uncover.
Fusang, the country on the far side of the Eastern Ocean,
had been settled by Chinese during the reign of the Xuangde Emperor, some 250
years ago. At that time the Ming looked
outward, and trade with foreign lands was believed to be good for the empire
and its people. The legendary eunuch
admiral, Zheng He, had led giant trading fleets to much of the world, ignoring
only the far western lands called Europe; those places produced nothing but
sheep and wine, and so were of no interest to the Chinese. Fusang, however, produced gold and silver,
and the natives—the waiguoren—had no
interest in the work required to obtain the precious metals. So the Chinese came and settled, and to feed
the miners farmers were necessary, and to clothe them weavers and spinners were
needed, and cultivators of silkworms, and by the time of the reign of the
Zhengtong Emperor, the colony in Fusang was over a hundred thousand strong.
And then everything changed.
Wen had never learned exactly what happened, and Mah the Knife was no
better informed. But everyone agreed on
the gist of the story: the emperors decided that accepting tribute or riches
from outside the empire was an indication of weakness, not strength, and so
decrees were issued forbidding journeys beyond China. Then it was decreed that even to build
long-range sailing ships was a crime punishable by death. And so Fusang was left to its own devices,
and the role of prince, once assigned to the descendants of a son of the
founder of the Ming dynasty, became instead the hereditary property of the
descendants of the last Ming princeling to arrive from China aboard one of the
giant, eight-masted treasure ships. For
over two centuries Fusang had plotted its own course, and only the most daring—or
desperate—left Fusang and sailed westward in an attempted journey back to the
homeland.
Those who left never returned.
Next Prologue Chapter 1 Chapter 2
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