I Chen said, 'Tribes like that exist on some of the Spice Islands too, I've seen them. But even those people have more things than these.'

'No brick or wood houses, no iron that I can see, meaning no guns…'

'No fields for that matter. They must cat the clams,' pointing at the great shell heaps, 'and fish. And whatever they can hunt or glean. These are poor people.'

'That won't leave much for us.'

'No.'

The sailors were shouting down at them: 'Hello! Hello!'

Kheim ordered them to be quiet. He and I Chen got in one of the little rowing boats they had on the great ship, and had four sailors row them ashore.

From the shallows Kheim stood and greeted the locals, palms up and out, as one did in the Spice Islands with the wild ones. The locals didn't understand anything he said, but his gestures made plain his peaceful intent, and they seemed to recognize it. After a while he stepped ashore, confident of a peaceful welcome, but instructing the sailors to keep their flintlocks and crossbows below the seats at the ready, just in case.

On shore he was surrounded by curious people, babbling in their own tongue. Somewhat distracted by the sight of the women's breasts, he greeted a man who stepped forward, whose elaborate and colourful headdress perhaps confirmed him as their headman. Kheim's silk neck scarf, much salt damaged and faded, had the image of a phoenix on it, and Kheim untied it and gave it to the man, holding it flat so he could see the image. The silk itself interested the man more than the image on it. 'We should have brought more silk,' Kheim said to I Chen I Chen shook his head. 'We were invading Nippon. Get their words for things if you can.'

I Chen was pointing to one thing after another, their baskets, spears, dresses, headpieces, shell mounds; repeating what they said, noting it quickly on his slate. 'Good, good. Well met, well met. The Emperor of China and his humble servants send their greetings.'

The thought of the Emperor made Kheim smile. What would the Wanli, Heavenly Envoy, make of these poor shell grubbers?

'We need to teach some of them Mandarin,' I Chen said. 'Perhaps a young boy, they are quicker.'

'Or a young girl.'

'Don't let's get into that,' I Chen said. 'We need to spend some time here, to repair the ships and restock. We don't want the men here turning on us.'

Kheim mimed their intentions to the headman. Stay for a while camp on shore – cat, drink – repair ships – go back home, beyond the, sunset to the west. It seemed they eventually understood most of this. In return he understood from them that they ate acorns and courgettes, fish and clams and birds, and larger animals, probably they meant deer. They hunted in the hills behind. There was lots of food, and the Chinese were welcome to it. They liked Kheim's silk, and would trade fine baskets and food for more of it. Their ornamental gold came from hills to the east, beyond the delta of a big river that entered the bay across from them, almost directly cast; they indicated where it flowed through a gap in the hills, somewhat like the gap leading out to the ocean.

As this information about the land obviously interested I Chen, they conveyed more to him in a most ingenious way; though they had no paper, nor ink, nor writing nor drawing, except for the patterns in their baskets, they did have maps of a particular kind, made in the sand on the beach. The headman and some other notables crouched and shaped damp sand most minutely with their hands, smoothing flat the part meant to represent the bay, then getting into spirited discussions about the true shape of the mountain between them and the ocean, which they called Tamalpi, and which they indicated by gesture was a sleeping maiden, a goddess apparently, though it was hard to be sure. They used grass to represent a broad valley inland of the hills bracketing the bay on the east, and wetted the channels of a delta and two rivers, one draining the north, the other the south part of a great valley. To the east of this big valley were foothills rising to mountains much bigger than the coastal range, snow capped (indicated by dandelion fluff) and holding in their midst a big lake or two.

All this they marked out with endless disputations concerning the details, and care over fingernail creasings and bits of grass or pine sprays; and all for a map that would be washed away in the next high tide. But when they were done, the Chinese knew that their gold came from people who lived in the foothills; their salt from the shores of the bay; their obsidian from the north and from beyond the high mountains, whence came also their turquoise; and so on. And all without any language in common, merely things displayed in mime, and their sand model of their country.

In the days that followed, however, they exchanged words for a host of daily objects and events, and I Chen kept lists and started a glossary, and started teaching one of the local children, a girl of about six years who was the child of the headman, and very forward; a constant babbler in ber own tongue, whom the Chinese sailors named Butterfly, both for her manner and for the joke that perhaps at this point they were only her dream. She delighted in telling I Chen what was what, very firmly; and quicker than Kheim could have believed possible she was using Chinese as well as her own language, mixing them together sometimes, but usually reserving her Chinese for I Chen, as if it were his private tongue and he some sort of freak, or inveterate joker, always making up fake words for things neither opinion far from the truth. Certainly her elders agreed that I Chen was a strange foreigner, feeling their pulse and abdomens, looking in their mouths, asking to inspect their urine (this they refused), and so on. They had a kind of doctor themselves, who led them in ritual purifications in a simple steam bath. This elderly raddled wild eyed man was no doctor in the sense I Chen was, but I Chen took great interest in the man's herbarium and his explanations, as far as I Chen could make them out, using ever more sophisticated sign languages, and Butterfly's growing facility in Chinese. The locals' language was called Miwok, as the people also called themselves; the word meant 'people' or something like. They made it clear with their maps that their village controlled the watershed of the stream that flowed into the bay. Other Miwok lived in the nearly watersheds of the peninsula, between bay and ocean; other people with different languages lived in other parts of the country, each with its own name and territory, though the Miwok could argue among themselves over the details of these things endlessly. They told the Chinese that the great strait leading out to the ocean had been created by an earthquake, and that the bay had been fresh water before the cataclysm had let the ocean in. This seemed unlikely to I Chen and Kheim, but then one morning after they had slept on shore, they were awakened by a severe shaking, and the earthquake lasted many heartbeats, and came back twice that morning; so that after that they were not as sure about the strait as they had been before.

They both enjoyed listening to the Miwok speak, but only I Chen was interested in how the women made the bitter acorns of the jaggedleaved oaks edible, by grinding and leeching the acorn powder in beds of leaves and sand, giving them a sort of flour; I Chen thought it was most ingenious. This flour, and salmon both fresh and dried, were the staples of their diet, which they offered the Chinese freely. They also ate deer, a kind of giant deer, rabbits, and all manner of waterfowl. Indeed, as the autumn descended mildly on them, and the months passed, the Chinese began to understand that food was so plentiful in this place that there was no need for agriculture as practised in China. Despite which there were very few people living there. That was one of the mysteries of this island.