'Good,' Hua said to the silent slaves. 'Keep him clean. Remind him to take out the plug to relieve himself, and to get it back in quick, until he heals.'

They left and locked the door.

Now the Abyssinian slaves would talk to the boy. 'If you keep it clean it will heal right up. Urine cleans it too, so that's all right, I mean, if you wet yourself when you go.'

'Lucky they didn't do it to all of us.'

'Who says they won't?'

'They don't do it to men. Too many die of it. Only boys can sustain the loss.'

The next morning Bold led the boy to the shithole and helped him to get the bandage off, so he could pull the plug and pee again. Then Bold put it back for him, showing him where it went, trying to be delicate as the boy whimpered. 'You have to have the plug, or the tube will close up and you'll die.'

The boy lay on his cotton shift, feverish. The others tried not to look at the horrible wound, but it was hard not to see it once in a while.

'How could they do it?' one said in Arabic, when the boy was sleeping.

'They're eunuchs themselves,' one of the Abyssinians said. 'Hua is a eunuch. The admiral himself is a eunuch.'

'You'd think they'd be the ones to know.'

'They know and that's why they do it. They hate us all. They rule the Chinese Emperor, and they hate everyone else. You can see how it will be,' waving around at the immense ship. 'They'll castrate all of us. It's the end coming.'

'You Christians like to say that, but so far it's only been true for you.'

'God took us first to shorten our suffering. Your turn will come.'

'It's not God I fear, but Admiral Zheng He, the Three Jewel Eunuch. He and the Yongle Emperor were friends when they were boys, and the Emperor ordered him castrated when they were both thirteen. Can you believe it? Now the eunuchs do it to all the boys they take prisoner.'

In the days that followed Kyu got hotter and hotter, and was seldom conscious. Bold sat by his side and put wet rags in his mouth, reciting sutras in his mind. The last time he had seen his own son, almost thirty years before, the boy had been about this age. This one's lips were grey and parched, his dark skin dull, and very dry and hot. Bold had never felt anyone that hot who had not died, so it was probably a waste of time for all concerned; best to let the poor sexless creature slip away, no doubt. But he kept giving him water anyway. He recalled the boy looking around the ship as they had loaded it, his gaze intense and searching. Now the body lay there looking like some sad little African girl, sick to death from an infection in her loins.

But the fever passed. Kyu ate more and more. Even when he was active again, however, he spoke little compared to before. His eyes were not the same either; they stared at people like a bird's eyes do, as if they did not quite believe anything they saw. Bold realized that the boy had travelled out of his body, gone into the bardo and come back someone else. All different. That black boy was dead; this one started anew.

'What is your name now?' he asked him.

'Kyu,' the boy said, but unsurprised, as if he didn't remember telling Bold before.

'Welcome to this life, Kyu.'

Sailing on the open ocean was a strange way to travel. The skies flew by overhead, but it never looked as if they had moved anywhere. Bold tried to reckon what a day's ride was for the fleet, wondering if it was faster in the long run than horses, but he couldn't do it. He could only watch the weather and wait.

…

Twenty three days later the fleet sailed into Calicut, a city much bigger than any of the ports of Zanj, as big as Alexandria, or bigger.

Sandstone towers bulbed, walls crenellated,

All overgrown by a riot of greens.

This close to the sun life fountains into the sky. Around the stone of the central districts,

Light wooden buildings fill the green bush Up the coast in both directions,

Into the hills behind; the city extends As far as the eye can see, up the sides Of a mountain ringing the town.

Despite its great size, all activity in the city stopped at the arrival of the Chinese fleet. Bold and Kyu and the Ethiopians looked through their grating at the shouting crowds, all those people in their colours waving their arms overhead in awe.

'These Chinese will conquer the whole world.'

'Then the Mongols will conquer China,' Bold said.

He saw Kyu watching the throng on shore. The boy's expression was that of a preta, unburied at death. Certain demon masks had that look, the old Bon look, like Bold's father when enraged, staring into a person's soul and saying I'm taking this along with me, you can't stop me and you'd better not try. Bold shuddered to see such a face on a mere boy.

They were put to work unloading cargo into boats, and taking other loads out of boats onto the ship, but none of the slaves was sold, and only once were they taken ashore, to help break up a mass of cloth bolts and carry them to the long low dug outs being used to transfer goods from the beaches to the treasure fleet.

During this work Zheng He came ashore in his personal barge, which was painted, gilded and encrusted with jewellery and porcelain mosaics, and had a gold statue facing forwards from the bow. Zheng stepped down a walkway from the barge, wearing golden robes embroidered in red and blue. His men had laid a carpet strip on the beach for him to walk on, but he left it to come over and observe the loading of the new cargo. He was truly an immense man, tall, broad, and with a deep draught fore and aft. He had a broad face, not Han; and he was a eunuch; he was all the Abyssinians had claimed. Bold watched him out of the corner of his eye, and then noticed that Kyu was standing bolt upright staring at him too, work forgotten, eyes fixed like a hawk's on a mouse. Bold grabbed the boy and hauled him back to work. 'Come on, Kyu, we're chained together here, move or I'll knock you down and drag you across the ground. I don't want to get in trouble here, Tara knows what happens to a slave in trouble with such people as these.'

From Calicut they sailed south to Lanka. Here the slaves were left aboard the ship, while the soldiers went ashore and disappeared for several days. The behaviour of the officers left behind made Bold think the detachment was out on a campaign, and he watched them as closely as he could as the days passed and they grew more nervous. Bold could not guess what they might do if Zheng He did not return, but he did not think they would sail away. Indeed the fire officers were hard at work laying out their array of incendiaries, when the admiral's barge and the other boats came flying back out of Lanka's inner harbour, and their men came aboard shouting triumphantly. Not only had they fought their way out of an inland trap, they said, but they had captured the treacherous local usurper who had laid the trap, and taken the rightful king as well though there seemed to be some confusion in the story as to which was which, and why they should abduct the rightful king as well as the usurper. Most amazing of all, they said that the rightful king had had in his possession the island's holiest relic, a tooth of the Buddha, called the Dalada. Zheng held up the little gold reliquary to show all aboard this prize. An eyetooth, apparently. Crew, passengers, slaves, all spontaneously roared their acclaim, in throattearing shouts that went on and on.

'This is a great bit of fortune,' Bold told Kyu when the awful noise died down, pressing his hands together and reciting the Descent into Lanka Sutra. In fact it was so much good fortune it frightened him. And there was no doubt that fright had been a big part of the roar of the crew. The Buddha had blessed Lanka, it was one of his special lands, with a branch of his Bodhi tree growing in its soil, and his mineralized tears still falling off the sides of the sacred mountain in the island's centre, the one that was topped by Adam's footprint. Surely it was not right to take the Dalada away from its rightful place in such a holy land. There was an affront in the act that could not be denied.