Bold and Kyu gawked up from the canals while unloading the barges. Kyu looked with his bird's gaze, seeming unsurprised, unimpressed, unafraid. 'There are a lot of them,' he conceded. Constantly he was asking Bold the Chinese words for things, and in the attempt to answer Bold learned many more words himself.
When the unloading was done, the slaves from their ship were gathered together and taken to Phoenix Hill, 'the hill of the foreigners', and sold to a local merchant named Shen. No slave market here, no auction, no fuss. They never learned what they had been sold for, or who in particular had owned them during their sea passage. Possibly it had been Zheng He himself.
Chained together at the ankles, Bold and Kyu were led through the narrow crowded streets to a building near the shores of a lake flanking the west edge of the old city. The first floor of the building was a restaurant. It was the fourteenth day of the first moon of the year, Shen told them, the start of the Feast of Lanterns, so they would have to learn fast, because the place was hopping.
Tables spill out of the restaurant Into the broad street bordering the lakefront, Every chair filled all day long.
The lake itself dotted with boats,
Each boat sporting lanterns of all kinds Coloured glass painted with figures,
Carved white and apple jade, Roundabouts turning on their candles' hot air, Paper lanterns burning up in brief blazes. A dyke crowded with lantern bearers Extends into the lake, the opposite shore is crowded As well, so at the day's end The lake and all the city around it Spark in the dusk of the festival twilight. Certain moments give us such unexpected beauty.
Shen's eldest wife, I Ii, ran the kitchen very strictly, and Bold and Kyu soon found themselves unloading hundredweight bags of rice from the canal barges tied up behind the restaurant; carrying them in; returning bags of refuse to the compost barges; cleaning the tables; and mopping and sweeping the floor. They ran in and out, also upstairs to the family compound above the restaurant. The pace was relentless, but all the while they were surrounded by the restaurant women, in white robes with paper butterflies in their hair, and by thousands of other women as well, promenading under the globes of coloured light, so that even Kyu raced about drunk on the sights and smells, and on drinks salvaged from near empty cups. They drank lychee, honey and ginger punch, paw paw and pear juice, and teas green and black. Shen also served fifteen kinds of rice wine; they tried the dregs of them all. They drank everything but plain water, which they were warned against as dangerous to the health.
As for the food, which again came to them mostly in the form of table scraps – well, it beggared description. They were given a plateful of rice every morning, with some kidneys or other offal thrown in, and after that they were expected to fend for themselves with what customers left behind. Bold ate everything he got his hands on, astonished at the variety. The Feast of Lanterns was a time for Shen and I Ii to offer their fullest menu, and so Bold had the chance to taste roebuck, red deer, rabbit, partridge, quail, clams cooked in rice wine, goose with apricots, lotus seed soup, pimento soup with mussels, fish cooked with plums, fritters and souffles, ravioli, pies and cornflour fruitcakes. Every kind of food, in fact, except for any beef or dairy; strangely, the Chinese had no cattle. But they had eighteen kinds of soy, Shen said, nine of rice, eleven of apricots, eight of pears. It was a feast every day.
After the rush of the Feast of Lanterns was over, I Ii liked to take short breaks from her work in the kitchen, and visit some of the other,,, restaurants of the city, to see what they were offering. She would return" to inform Shen and the cooks that they needed to make a sweet soy soup, for instance, like that she had found at the Mixed Wares Market; or pig cooked in ashes, like that at the Longevity and Compassion Palace.
She started taking Bold with her on her morning trips to the abattoir, located right in the heart of the old city. There she chose her pork ribs, and the liver and kidneys for the slaves. Here Bold learned why they were never to drink the city's water; the offal and blood from the slaughter were washed off right into the big canal running down to the river, but often the tides pushed water back up this canal and through the rest of the city's water network.
Returning behind I li with his wheelbarrow of pork one day, pausing to let a party of nine intoxicated women in white pass by, Bold felt all of a sudden that he was in a different world. Back at the restaurant he said to Kyu, 'We've been reborn without our noticing it.'
'Maybe you have. You're like a baby here.'
'Both of us! Look about you! It's…' He could not express it.
'They are rich,' Kyu said, looking about. Then they were back to work.
The lakefront never was an ordinary place. Festival or not – and there were festivals almost every month – the lakefront was one of the main places the people of Hangzhou congregated. Every week there were private parties between the more general festivals, so the promenade was a daily celebration of greater or lesser magnitude, and although there was a great deal of work to be done supplying and maintaining the restaurant, there was also a great deal of food and drink to be scavenged, or poached in the kitchen, and both Bold and Kyu were insatiable. They soon filled out, and Kyu was also still sprouting up, looking tall among the Chinese.
Soon it was as if they had never lived any other life. Well before dawn, resonant wooden fish were struck with mallets, and the weathermen shouted their announcements from the firewatch towers: 'It is raining! It is cloudy today!' Bold and Kyu and about twenty other slaves got up and were let out of their room, and most went down to the service canal that ran in from the suburbs, to meet the rice barges. The barge crews had got up even earlier – theirs was night work, starting at midnight many li away. All together they heaved the bulging sacks onto wheelbarrows, then the slaves wheeled them back through the alleys to Shen's. They sweep up the restaurant,
Light the stove fires, set the tables,
Wash bowls and chopsticks, chop vegetables, Cook, carry supplies and food Out to Shen's two pleasure boats, And then as dawn breaks And people begin slowly to appear On the lakefront for breakfast,
They help the cooks, wait on tables,
Wait and clean tables – anything needed, Lost in the meditation of labour though usually the hardest work in the place was theirs, as they were the newest slaves. But even the hardest work wasn't very hard, and with the constant availability of food, Bold considered their placement a windfall; a chance to put some meat on their bones, and learn better the local dialect and the ways of the Chinese. Kyu pretended never to notice any of these things, indeed pretended not to understand most of the Chinese spoken to him, but Bold saw that he was actually soaking in everything like a dishwasher's sponge, watching sideways so that it seemed he never watched, when he always watched. That was Kyu's way. He already knew more Chinese than Bold.
The eighth day of the fourth moon was another big festival, celebrating a deity who was patron to many of the guilds of the town. The guilds organized a procession, down the broad imperial way that divided the old city north to south, then over to West Lake for dragon boat jousts, among all the other more usual pleasures of the lakefront. Each guild wore its particular costume and mask, and brandished identical umbrellas, flags or bouquets as they marched in squares together, shouting 'Ten thousand years! Ten thousand years!' as they had done ever since the emperors had actually lived in Hangzhou, and heard these shouted hopes for their longevity. Spread out along the lakefront at the end of the parade, they watched a dance of a hundred little eunuchs in a circle, a particular celebration of that festival. Kyu almost looked directly at these children.