As they sailed cast, the story circulated through the ship that the Dalada was only proof of the deposed king's right to rule; it would be returned to Lanka when the Yongle Emperor determined the rights of the case. The slaves were reassured by this news.

'So the Emperor of China will decide who rules that island,' Kyu said. Bold nodded. The Yongle Emperor had himself come to the throne in a violent coup, so it was not clear to Bold which of the two Lankan contenders he would favour. Meanwhile, they had the Dalada on board. 'It's good,' he said to Kyu after thinking it over some more. 'Nothing bad can happen to us on this voyage, anyway.'

And so it proved. Black squalls, bearing directly down on them, unaccountably evaporated just as they struck. Giant seas rocked all the horizons, great dragon tails visibly whipping up the waves, while they sailed serenely over a moving flat calm at their centre. They even sailed through the Malacca Strait without hindrance from Palembanque, or, north of that, from the myriad pirates of Cham, or the Japanese wakou – though, as Kyu pointed out, no pirate in his right mind would chal lenge a fleet so huge and powerful, tooth of the Buddha or no.

Then as they sailed into the south China Sea, someone saw the Dalada floating about the ship at night, as if, he said, it were a little candle flame. 'How does he know it wasn't a candle flame?' Kyu asked. But the next morning the sky dawned red. Black clouds rolled over the horizon in a line from the south, in a way that reminded Bold strongly of the storm that had killed Temur.

Driving rain struck, then a violent wind that turned the sea white. Shooting up and down in their dim little room, Bold realized that such a storm was even more frightening at sea than on land. The ship's astrologer cried out that a great dragon under the sea was angry, and thrashing the water under them. Bold joined the other slaves in holding to the gratings and looking out of their little holes to see if they could catch sight of spine or claw or snout of this dragon, but the spume flying over the whitewater obscured the surface. Bold thought he might have seen part of a dark green tail in the foam.

Wind shrieks through the nine masts,

All bare of sail. The great ship tilts in the wind, Rolls side to side, and the little ships Accompanying them bob like corks,

In and out of view through the grating.

In storms like this, nothing to be done but hold on! Bold and Kyu cling fast to the wall, Listening through the howl for the officers' shouts And the thumping feet of the sailors Doing what they can to secure the sails And then to tie the tiller securely in place. They hear the fear in the officers, And sense it in the sailors' feet. Even belowdecks they are wet with spray.

Up on the great poop deck the officers and astrologers performed some sort of ceremony of appeasement, and Zheng He himself could be heard calling out to Tianfei, the Chinese goddess of safety at sea.

'Let the dark water dragons go down into the sea, and leave us free from calamity! Humbly, respectfully, piously, we offer up this flagon of wine, offer it once and offer it again, pouring out this fine, fragrant wine! That our sails may meet favourable winds, that the sea lanes be peaceful, that the all seeing and all hearing spirit soldiers of winds and seasons, the wave quellers and swell drinkers, the airborne immortals, the god of the year, and the protectress of our ship, the Celestial Consort, brilliant, divine, marvellous, responsive, mysterious Tianfei might save us!'

Looking up through the dripping cracks in the deck Bold could see a composite vision of sailors watching this ceremony, mouths all open wide shouting against the wind's roar. Their guard yelled at them, 'Pray to Tianfei, pray to the Celestial Consort, the sailor's only friend! Pray for her intercession! All of you! Much more of this wind and the ship will be torn apart!'

'Tianfei preserve us,' Bold chanted, squeezing Kyu to indicate he should do the same. The black boy said nothing. He pointed up at the forward masts, however, which they could see through the hatchway grating, and Bold looked up and saw red filaments of light dancing between the masts: balls of light, like Chinese lanterns without the paper or the fire, glowing at the top of the mast and over it, illuminating the flying rain and even the black bottoms of the clouds that were peeling by overhead. The otherworldly beauty of the sight tempered the terror of it; Bold and everyone else moved outside the realm of terror, it was too strange and awesome a sight to worry any longer about life or death. All the men were crying out, praying at the top of their lungs. Tianfei coalesced out of the dancing red light, her figure gleaming brightly over them, and the wind diminished all at once. The seas calmed around them. Tianfei dissipated, ran redly out of the rigging and back into the air. Now their grateful voices could be heard above the wind. Whitecaps still toppled and rolled, but all at a distance from them, halfway to the horizon.

Tianfei!' Bold shouted with the rest. 'Tianfei!'

Zheng He stood at the poop rail and raised both hands in a light rain. He shouted 'Tianfei! Tianfei has saved us!' and they all bellowed it with him, filled with joy in the same way the air had been filled with the red light of the goddess. Later the wind blew hard again, but they had no fear.

How the rest of the voyage home went is not really material; nothing of note happened, they made it back safely, and what happened after that you can find out by reading the next chapter.

Storm tossed, Tianfei protected, the treasure fleet sailed into a big estuary. Ashore, behind a great seawall, stood the rooftops of a vast city. Even the part visible from the ship was bigger than all the cities Bold had ever seen put together – all the bazaars of central Asia, the Indian cities Temur had razed, the ghost towns of Frengistan, the white seaside towns of Zanj, Calicut all combined would have occupied only a quarter or a third of the land covered by this forest of rooftops, this steppe of rooftops, extending all the way to distant hills visible to the west.

The slaves stood in the waist of the big ship, silent in the midst of the cheering Chinese, who cried out 'Tianfei, Celestial Consort, thank you!' and 'Hangzhou, my home, never thought to be seen again!' 'Home, wife, new year festival!' 'We happy, happy men, to have travelled all the way to the other side of the world and then make it back home!' and so on.

The ships' huge anchor stones were dropped over the side. Where the Chientang River entered the estuary there was a powerful tidal bore, and any ship not securely anchored could be swept far up into the shal lows, or flushed out to sea. When the ships were anchored the work of unloading began. This was a massive operation, and once as he ate rice between watches at the hoist, Bold noted that there were no horses, camels, water buffalo, mules or asses to help with the job, or with any other job in the city: just thousands of labourers, endless lines of them, moving the food and goods in, or taking out the refuse and manure,

Mostly by canal – in and out, in and out, as if the city were a monstrous imperial body lying on the land, being fed and relieved by all its subjects together.

Many days passed in the labour of unloading, and Bold and Kyu saw a bit of the harbour Kanpu, and Hangzhou itself, when manning barges on trips to state warehouses under the southern bill compound that had once been the imperial palace, hundreds of years before. Now lesser aristocrats and even high ranking bureaucrats and eunuchs lived in the old palace grounds. North of these extended the walled enclosure of the old city, impossibly crowded with warrens of wooden buildings that were five, six and even seven storeys tall – old buildings that overhung the canals, people's bedding spread out from balconies to dry in the sun, grass growing out of the roofs.