The Years of Rice and Salt Read Online Free PDF Page B

sat and watched them work. Whatever happened, it was better than the empty land. Just to see men move, to hear them talk, filled him. It was like watching horses run on the steppe. Hungrily he watched them haul a sail into the air on a mast, and the boat heeled to the side such that he threw himself the other way. They roared with laughter at this. He grinned sheepishly, gesturing at the big lateen.
    “It takes more wind than this breath to tip us.”
    “Allah protect us from it.”
    “Allah protect us.”
    Muslims. “Allah protect us,” Bold said politely. Then, in Arabic, “In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate.” In his years in Temur's army he had learned to be as much a Muslim as anyone. The Buddha did not mind what you said to be polite. Now it would not keep him from slavery, but it would perhaps earn him a little more food. The men regarded him curiously. He watched the land slide by. They untied his arms and gave him some dried mutton and bread. He tried to chew each bite a hundred times. The familiar tastes called back to him his whole life. He ate what they gave him, drank fresh water from a cup they gave him.
    “Praise be to Allah. Thank you in the name of God the compassionate, the merciful.”
    They sailed down a long bay, into a larger sea. At night they pulled behind headlands and anchored the boat and slept. Bold curled under a coil of rope. Every time he woke in the night he had to remind himself where he was.
    In the mornings they sailed south and south again, and one day they passed through a long narrows into an open sea, with big waves. The rocking of the boat was like riding a camel. Bold gestured west. The men named it, but Bold didn't catch the name. “They're all dead,” the men said.
    The sunset came and they were still on the open sea. For the first time they sailed all night long, always awake when Bold woke, watching the stars without talking to each other. For three days they sailed out of the sight of any land, and Bold wondered how long it would go on. But on the fourth morning the sky to the south grew white, then brown.

    A haze like the one that blew out of the Gobi.
    Sand in the air, sand and fine dust. Land ho!
    Very low land. The sea and sky
    Both turn the same brown
    Before catching sight of a stone tower,
    Then a great stone breakwater, fronting a harbor.

    One of the sailors happily named it: “Alexandria!” Bold had heard the name, though he knew nothing about it. Neither do we; but to find out more, you can read the next chapter.

3
                                                                                                            
    In Egypt our pilgrim is sold into slavery;
    In Zanj he encounters again the inescapable Chinese.
    His captors sailed to a beach, anchored with a stone tied to a rock, tied Bold
up securely, and left him in the boat under a blanket while they went ashore.
    It was a beach for small boats, near an immense long wooden dockfront behind the seawall, which served much bigger ships. When the men came back they were drunk and arguing. Without untying anything but his legs, and with no more words to him, they pulled Bold out of the boat and marched him down the great seafront of the city, which appeared to Bold dusty and salty and worn down, stinking in the sun like a dead fish, of which there were indeed many scattered about. On the docks before a long building were bales, boxes, great clay jars, netted bolts of cloth; then a fish market, which made his mouth water at the same time that his stomach flopped.
    They came to a slave market. A small square with a raised platform in its middle, somewhat like a lama's teaching platform. Three slaves were quickly sold. The women being sold garnered the most attention and comment from the crowd. They were stripped of all but the ropes or chains holding them, if such were necessary,