The next time they were down at Gold Gate Park, looking at the brown flood still pouring, he sat by Peng ti on a bench. 'Listen,' he said, 'I'm going to stay here in the city. I'll go back out to the valley on a trip, and get Madam Yao's silkworms to her, but I'm going to live here.'

She nodded. 'Me too.' She waved at the bay. 'How could you not?' She picked up Hu Die and held her up in the air, face out towards the bay, and turned her around to face the four winds. 'This is your new home, Hu Die! This is where you are going to grow up!' Hu Die goggled at the view.

Kiyoaki laughed. 'Yes. She will like it here. But listen, Peng ti, I'm going to be…' He considered how to say it. 'I'm going to work for Japan. Do you understand?'

'No.'

'I'm going to work for Japan, against China.'

'I see.'

'I'm going to be working against China.'

Her jaw clenched. She said harshly, 'Do you think I care?' She looked across the bay to the Inner Gate, where brown water split the green hills. 'I'm so glad to be out of there.' She looked him in the eye, and he felt his heart jump. 'I'll help you.'

Chapter Four. Black Clouds

Because China's emerging empire was now chiefly maritime, its shipping again became the biggest in the world. The emphasis was on carrying capacity, and so the typical Chinese fleet of the early modern period was very big, and slow. Speed was not a consideration. This made difficulties for them later, in naval disputes with the Indians and with the Muslims of Africa, the Mediterranean and Firanja. In the Mediterranean, the Islamic Sea, Muslims developed ships that were smaller but much faster and nimbler than their Chinese contemporaries, and in several decisive naval encounters of the tenth and eleventh centuries, Muslim fleets defeated larger Chinese fleets, preserving the balance of power and preventing Qing China from achieving world hegemony. Indeed Muslim privateering in the Dahai became a major source of revenue to Islamic governments, and a source of friction between Islamic and Chinese, one of the many factors leading to war. In fact, with the sea far surpassing land as a means of commercial and military travel, the superior speed and manoeuvrability of Muslim ships was one of the advantages they held which allowed them to challenge Chinese sea power.

The development of steam power and metal hulls in Travancore was quickly taken up by both of the other major Old World hegemons, but its lead in this technology and others allowed the Indian League also to compete with the larger rivals on both sides of it.

Thus the twelfth and thirteenth Muslim centuries, or the Qing dynasty in China, was a period of rising competition between the three major Old World cultures, to dominate and extract the wealth of the New World, Aozhou, and the hinterlands of the Old World, now being fully occupied and exploited.

The problem was that the stakes became too high. The two biggest empires were both the strongest and the weakest at the same time. The Qing dynasty continued to grow to the south, north, in the New World, and inside itself. Meanwhile Islam controlled a huge part of the Old World, and the eastern coasts of the New as well. Yingzhou had a Muslim east coast, the League of Tribes in the middle, Chinese settlements in the west, and new Travancori trading ports. Inka was a battleground between Chinese, Travancori and the Muslims of west Africa.

So the world was fractured into the two big old hegemons, China and Islam, and the two new and smaller leagues, the Indian and the Yingzhou. Chinese ocean trade and conquest slowly extended their hegemony over the Dahai, settling Aozhou, the west coasts of Yingzhou and Inka, and making inroads by sea in many other places; becoming the Middle Kingdom in fact as well as by name, the centre of the world by sheer numbers alone, as well as by the new power of its navies. A danger to all the other peoples on Earth, in fact, despite the various problems in the Qing bureaucracy.

At the same time the Dar al Islam kept spreading, through all Africa, the east coasts of the New World, across central Asia, and even into India, where it had never really left, and into southeast Asia as well, even onto the isolated west coast of Aozhou.

And in the middle, caught between these two expansions, so to speak, was India. Travancore took the lead here, but the Punjab, Bengal, Rajistan, all the other states of the subcontinent were active and prospering at home and abroad, in turmoil and conflict, always at odds, and yet free of emperors and caliphs, and in their ferment the scientific leaders of the world, with trading posts on every continent, constantly in opposition against the hegemons, the ally of anyone against Islam, and often against the Chinese, with whom they kept a most uneasy relationship, both fearing them and needing them; but as the decades went by, and the old Muslim empires showed more and more aggression to the cast, across Transoxiana and into all north Asia,

More and more inclined to court China, as a counterweight, trusting the Himalaya and the great jungles of Burma to keep them out from under the big umbrella of Chinese patronage.

Thus it was that the Indian states were often uneasily allied with China in hope of aid against their ancient foe Islam. So that when Islam and the Chinese finally fell into active war, first in central Asia, then all over the world, Travancore and the Indian League were pulled into it, and Muslim Hindu violence began yet another deadly round.

It began in the twenty first year of the Kuang Hsu Emperor, the last of the Qing dynasty, when south China's Muslim enclaves all revolted at once. The Manchu banners were sent south and the rebellion put down, more or less, over the course of the next several years. But the suppression may have worked too well, for the Muslims of west China had been chafing under Qing military rule for many generations, and with their fellow believers to the east being exterminated, it became a matter of jihad or death. So they revolted, out in the vast empty deserts and mountains of central Asia, and the brown towns in their green valleys quickly turned red.

The Qing government, corrupt but massively entrenched, massively wealthy, made its move against its Muslim rebellions by initiating another campaign of conquest, west across Asia. This succeeded for a time, because there was no strong state in the abandoned centre of the world to oppose them. But eventually it triggered a defensive jihad from the Muslims of west Asia, whom nothing would have united at that point except for the threat of Chinese conquest.

This unintended consolidation of Islam was quite an accomplishment. Wars between the remnants of the Safavid and Ottoman empires, between Shiite and Sunni, Sufi and Wahhabi, the Firanji states and the Maghrib, had been continuous throughout the period of consolidation of states and boundaries, and even with sovereign borders more or les fixed, except for ongoing struggles here and there, they were not initially in a position to respond as a civilization to the threat from China.

But when threatened by a Chinese expansion across all Asia, the fractured Islamic states pulled together, and began to fight back as a united force. A collision that had been building for centuries now came to a head: for both of the big old civilizations, global hegemony or complete annihilation were thinkable possibilities. The stakes could not be higher.

The Indian League tried at first to remain neutral, as did the Hodenosaunee. But the war drew them in too, when Islamic invaders crossed into north India, as they had so many times before, and conquered it south to the Deccan, across Bengal and down into Burma. Similarly, Muslim armies began to conquer Yingzhou east to west, attacking both the Hodenosaunee League and the Chinese in the west. All the world descended into this realm of conflict together.