Chapter 178

It has been half a month since I boarded this ship, thirteen days since we set sail from Zibo, and in all that time I have reached a conclusion that probably says something rather unflattering about my person, and it is that the best decision I have made since I left the Empire was to fight over a chair.

I have it underneath me at this precise moment, and it is spectacularly ugly. It is low, of dark and coarse wood, doesn’t have a single adornment anywhere and is nailed to the deck with six nails I can count from here without leaning over and that sink their heads into the wood just enough that no one trips over them.

And in those six nails there are two days of negotiation, which is exactly what it cost me to obtain them.

Because the problem was not the chair, but rather the problem was what came before, which was the wheelchair Chen Mo brought in the third cart and that they brought aboard the first day with all the good intention in the world.

The detail is that a ship is not solid ground.

And four hours of being moored at a quiet dock, with the water so still it seemed a plate, were enough for me to understand exactly what was going to happen the moment we went out into the current, because a wheelchair is, by definition, an object designed to roll, and it does it very well, and it does it in the direction in which the floor beneath it is tilted.

And the deck of a ship is a floor that tilts constantly even at its best moment, so I went to talk with Shen Fei and laid out the problem for him.

And the moment I laid it out for him, I realized that half the work was already done, because that man’s face took on the same expression mine had taken on, the face of someone who has just understood the problem.

What happens is that his solution and mine did not coincide.

Because his solution consisted of my staying in the cabin, which is what would have struck any captain in the world as the most sensible, and mine consisted of not spending two months shut in a room three paces by four after having spent five weeks shut in a carriage.

So I proposed the nailed-down chair to him, and there the real negotiation began.

And in that negotiation I learned quite a lot about how Shen Fei’s head works, because the man did not dispute with me a single time whether I had the right to be on deck, which is where nine out of ten people I have come across in this life would have begun, but rather he disputed the location.

That there it would be in the way of the maneuvering, that there one has to pass running when the wind changes, that there, with the mainsail up, I would have half a ton of wood moving above my head.

And I listened to each and every one of his objections, granted him the point on all of them, and asked him next what was the spot on this deck where no one ever passes.

Because in any place where people work there is a dead corner. Always. On a dig it is the corner where the empty buckets pile up, in a faculty it is the stretch of hallway between the elevator that doesn’t work and the classroom no one uses, and on a ship there had to be one too.

Shen Fei stayed quiet a moment, looked toward the stern and pointed out this piece of deck to me.

And here I am, against the wall of the quarterdeck, with the starboard rail two paces away, out of all the paths his men use to go anywhere and with nothing above my head save sky and a table in front of me, since that was the second battle and the one I truly did not expect to win.

But I managed to defend my request successfully with the promise that it would not be permanent and that we would take it out in the morning and put it away at night, so every morning Lianhua takes the table out of the cabin and every night she gathers up the table and puts it back in.

And to me that, which seen from outside is a daily nuisance, strikes me as an absolutely extravagant luxury, for me it is a place of my own, a surface where I can put papers and sunlight throughout the whole day.

That means that, right now, on that table there are eleven sheets of paper, and all eleven are held down by stones or by the Myriad of Hands, because up here there blows a constant wind that carries off anything that is not secured and because I no longer have any reason to dissimulate.

That is another of the things that have changed in these two weeks.

Shen Fei’s crew took exactly four days to stop looking at me when I move something without touching it, and now there is one of the older sailors who, every time he passes by and sees the papers floating over the table, makes a small gesture with his head like someone greeting a machine that works well.

And drawn on those papers, there is the skeleton of a ship.

Or rather there is what I have managed to reconstruct of the structure of a ship, which is not the same thing.

The idea has been circling me since the second day, and it did not come all at once, but rather it came as the ideas that are good for something always come, which is slowly and by accumulation.

It began on the dock at Zibo, looking at the hulls of the merchant ships moored in a row. It continued the first day aboard, when Shen Fei, with a pride he did not bother to disguise for a single second, showed me the internal part of his ship and explained to me about the internal bulkheads that divide it into compartments, which is the base on which the ancient Chinese ships were built.

And it finished forming some six days ago, watching how the helmsman fought with the wind.

Because the wind was coming badly, not head-on but not from behind either, and this ship, which is magnificent at many things, with the wind on the beam cannot do much other than endure and let the river do the work.

And that was where the pieces came together for me and I realized the business opportunity.

Because that is what it is, and I am not going to get dignified at this point. I have a company in my name, an agreement with the most famous commercial organization in the known world and exactly zero income of my own generated by me since I left the Empire, and a better ship is the kind of invention that can be sold like hotcakes.

So I have spent six days drawing a keel, and I have to acknowledge that I have my reservations, because I have spent two weeks traveling on a flat-bottomed ship and have had more than enough time to appreciate everything it does well beyond what I have read in several books.

A flat bottom draws little, and drawing little on a river is half of life resolved. You can approach banks where another would run aground, you can cross sandbars that are not even marked on a map because last year they were not there, and you can beach it directly on a strand to load and unload without need of a dock. It is a design that is not primitive at all, but rather it is a design perfectly adapted to the place where it works, which is exactly what I used to repeat to my students every time one of them let loose the word backward in front of an object that had spent three thousand years solving its problem.

What happens is that I have spent thirteen days looking at this river, and this river is not a river, it is a small sea twenty kilometers wide along which we have spent almost two weeks navigating without having yet seen anything resembling a sandbar, and where the argument of the draft, which is the good argument for the flat bottom, simply ceases to exist.

And where that argument ceases to exist, the keel wins.

It wins in leeway, because a keel is a vertical wall stuck into the water and that wall is what prevents the wind from pushing you sideways while you try to advance forward. It wins in stability, because it permits putting weight down low, very low, and weight down low is what makes a Keeled ship want to right itself again instead of continuing to roll. And it wins, above all, in size, because a keel is not only a fin, it is a spine, and without a spine there is no way of building anything truly large without it splitting at the seams.

And then there is the other side of the matter, which is the one that has me most entertained, and it is the sails.

Because a keel without the appropriate sail is half a solution. It is the lateen sail, which is mounted on an inclined yard and that can be oriented in almost any direction, that permits advancing against a wind coming from the side instead of limiting oneself to enduring it.

And those two things, the fin below and the triangle above, are the ones that need each other mutually. The sail permits you to push diagonally and the keel prevents that diagonal push from becoming a lateral slide, and removing either of the two the other is good for considerably less.

All of that I have crystal clear, I have it drawn, I have it explained in writing and I have gone over it so many times that I could recite it in my sleep.

And all of that is exactly the reason why I have been completely stuck since yesterday, since what I have in my head is not a plan, but rather a base of how it works, which is not by a long shot the same thing.

I know what a keel does and I know why it does it. I have the diagrams from the naval history classes I had to swallow in my day, and those I have with the exact words, because the texts I have read I remember perfectly.

But the problem is the drawings, because of the illustrations what remains to me is what remains to anyone, which is the general shape, the impression and some loose detail that stuck to me by chance.

And even if I had seen the complete plan of a hull with a keel, something I have never done because I was an archaeologist and not a naval engineer, I would not have any faith either that I would be capable of reproducing it down to the last detail.

And to all that must be added the other problem, which is much larger and which besides is one of the amusing ones.

And it is that the numbers I have in my head are the numbers of my previous world.

In that world, you reached a point at which a wooden hull, however well built it might be, could no longer grow because past a certain length it began to bend with the waves, to open its seams and to take on water in places no one had touched, and that ceiling was the one that was there for centuries until iron came to solve it.

But here there is spirit wood, and I have traveled twice inside a carriage made with it, an enormous carriage that endured weeks of dirt road without a single complaint, and I have had my hands resting on that material long enough to know that it has absolutely nothing to do with what I called wood in my other life.

And to add more variables, on top of it there are formations and enchantments, so I would bet that this ship carries, at minimum, a durability enchantment on the hull, because any navigator with two fingers of forehead and a reasonable fear of going to the bottom with all their cargo would pay for something like that before anything else.

Which means that all my speculations and measurements may be totally mistaken.

So I have spent since yesterday looking at my diagrams while I arrive over and over at the same conclusion, which is that I cannot advance alone a single step further and that it is now time to do what one does in these cases, which is to ask someone who knows.

I lift my gaze from the table, look around me and don’t see Shen Fei anywhere, which doesn’t surprise me too much either because at this hour he is usually below. I don’t see Xia either, and that makes me let out a sigh because I know perfectly where she is.

She is in the galley.

Like yesterday, like the day before yesterday and like every day since the second cook of this ship committed the irreparable error of letting her watch while he made the food, so I turn my head toward the other side, where Lianhua is standing three paces from my chair, in that posture of repose she always seems to have when I look.

“Lianhua”, I tell her.

And she turns her head toward me immediately upon hearing me.

“I need to speak with Captain Shen Fei”, I tell her. “Can you go down and fetch him?”

A note on provenance: www. has the author's chapter, while this copy appeared without approval; the source supports them.

“Of course, Xiaojie”, she answers me.

“But tell him exactly the following”, I add. “Tell him that, if he has nothing to do right now, I would like him to do me the favor of coming to see me because I want to make some inquiries of him.”

And Lianhua, who has been at my side long enough not to need these things explained to her, catches the nuance on the fly.

“As you say, Xiaojie”, she answers me.

And she goes down through the hatch while I stay alone with the papers, and I take advantage to order them, which is a very dignified way of saying that I take advantage to get nervous with my hands occupied.

I arrange them in the order in which I want to show them, and by the time I finish arranging them, Lianhua is already coming back and behind her comes Shen Fei.

He comes up through the hatch with that way of moving that people who have spent half their lives on a ship have, without holding on to anything and without looking at where he puts his feet, crosses the deck toward me and the first thing he does upon arriving is not to look at me, but rather to look at the table.

And he stays a couple of seconds looking at the papers with a curiosity he doesn’t disguise in the least.

“Your handmaiden has told me that you wanted to consult me about something”, he tells me at last, lifting his gaze.

“That is so, Captain”, I answer him. “And I thank you very much for having come up.”

“I was reviewing the inventory of the hold, so you have done me a favor”, he answers me.

At this point, I take a second because what comes now I have had thought out since last night and I want to do it in the correct order, since what I am going to ask this man is that he take seriously an idea about ships brought to him by a thirteen-year-old kid who cannot walk, and I have lived long enough in both worlds to know that ideas are not judged on their own, they are judged by the person who brings them.

So first a base has to be established that makes me credible.

“Before the inquiry, I want to ask you something”, I tell him. “Do you know what my company does?”

Shen Fei furrows his brow.

“The House of the Long Journey?” he asks me.

“That very one”, I confirm to him.

“Well, no”, he answers me, and he shrugs his shoulders. “But by the name, something related to travel. Transport, caravans or something of the sort.”

And I smile, because that is exactly the answer I imagine everyone would give.

“Well, no”, I tell him. “In spite of the name, it has absolutely nothing to do with travel. My company is dedicated to inventing things.”

Shen Fei raises his eyebrows.

“And the agreement we have with the Tower of the Five Dragons consists of that”, I continue. “We hand over the inventions to them and they take charge of commercializing them, which is something they know how to do infinitely better than I do.”

Shen Fei furrows his brow a bit more.

“Very well”, he tells me. “And what does that have to do with what you want to ask me?”

“Nothing yet”, I answer him with all the tranquility I can. “I am only giving you some facts you are going to need in a moment. Give me two minutes and you will see that it makes sense.”

Shen Fei makes a gesture with his hand that means go ahead.

“While you were in the port of Zibo”, I tell him. “Did you hear about a book called Journey to the West?”

And there Shen Fei’s face uncrosses a bit.

“Of course”, he answers me right away. “What’s more, I am carrying quite a few in the hold to sell downriver because of the very strange way they are written. In Sanjiang they are going to fetch a good price.”

“Perfect”, I tell him. “Second question. Have you heard of the mop?”

And Shen Fei lets out a noise through his nose.

“Evidently”, he answers me. “Everyone has heard of the mop. In fact I even thought about buying a few for the ship.”

“And didn’t you?” I ask him.

“I did”, he answers me. “I bought three, and all three fell apart on me in less than two months. On a deck of unplaned wood they last far less because old wood has splinters and the splinters eat up the strips.”

And I, at that, rub my chin without realizing I am doing it.

“I did not take that environment into account”, I say aloud. “When I chose the materials I thought about interior floors, about stone and about tile. Unplaned wood did not even cross my mind.”

And at the exact instant in which I finish the sentence I realize what I have just said, but it is already too late, because Shen Fei has stayed completely still in front of me.

And I see how he puts two and two together.

“One moment”, he tells me, and there is a very sincere surprise in his voice. “Are you telling me that the mop was invented by your company?”

And I smile at him.

“I am telling you”, I answer him. “And while we are at it, Journey to the West I also wrote.”

Shen Fei opens his mouth.

“And that game your men play at night on the forecastle, the Tiàoyuè”, I add. “That one too, one day when I was bored.”

And that is when the matter goes wrong for me, because the surprise leaves Shen Fei’s face all at once and what remains underneath is not admiration at all.

It is the furrowed brow and clenched jaw of a man who has just decided that someone is wasting his time.

“Have you made me come up here to show off?” he asks me, and the tone comes out considerably more brusque than anything else he has said to me in two weeks.

And I raise both hands immediately.

“No”, I tell him. “And I apologize to you, Captain, truly. If it has struck you that way, it is my fault and I have done it terribly.”

Shen Fei says nothing, but he doesn’t leave either, so I continue.

“I have told you all that for a single reason”, I tell him. “And it is that in a moment I am going to ask you a question about ships, and you have spent half your life on the river while I am thirteen years old and have little practical knowledge about ships.”

I lower my hands and rest them on the edge of the table.

“And I know perfectly well what that looks like”, I continue. “So the only thing I intended was that, when you listen to me, you would know that the person speaking to you has already done a couple of things before that worked. Nothing more than that.”

I make a very brief pause.

“And I have overdone it”, I finish. “I acknowledge it.”

Shen Fei stays looking at me for a couple of seconds with an expression that gives me no clue, and afterward he uncrosses his arms.

“Very well”, he tells me, and the tone has already returned to the usual one. “Ask.”

After hearing him, I breathe and launch in.

“I have had an idea while traveling on your ship”, I tell him. “And I believe, although I may be completely mistaken, that better ships can be made.”

“Better”, he repeats.

“Better for some things”, I qualify right away. “Worse for others, but you are the one who has to judge while I show it to you.”

I take the first sheet and place it in front of him with the Myriad of Hands, flat and motionless, at the exact height of his eyes along with a small stick to serve as a pointer that I also make float.

Shen Fei looks at the floating sheet, then looks at me, and then looks at the sheet again and leans forward.

“This is a cross-section”, I tell him. “It is the ship seen from the front and split in half, as if we had sawed it. This line up here is the deck, this curve is the sides, and this down here, this piece that protrudes downward through the center is what I call the keel.”

And I give a little tap on the paper with the pointer right above the drawing.

“It is a piece that runs the entire ship from bow to stern, underneath, like a spine”, I continue. “And it does three things at once.”

I change sheets, and the first moves aside on its own and stays floating there, still.

“The first is that it prevents the ship from sliding sideways”, I tell him. “When the wind comes at you from the side, that wind pushes you mainly sideways. And you endure it as best you can, because underneath you have nothing that grips the water. With this piece, that vertical wall does not let the water move you sideways, so almost all that push becomes forward motion.”

Shen Fei says nothing, but he doesn’t take his eyes off the paper either.

“The second is the weight”, I continue. “A hull with this shape permits putting cargo much lower down. And the lower the weight is, the more the ship tends to right itself when something tries to knock it over instead of continuing to tilt.”

I change sheets again.

“And the third is the one that strikes me as most important”, I tell him. “And it is that that piece is a spine. A hull without it holds itself up by the sides, and that works up to a certain size. Past that, the ship begins to bend with the waves and to open at the seams. With a spine that endures the stresses, that limit rises.”

Here I change and place the sheet of the sails in front of him.

“And this is the other half”, I tell him. “Because the keel alone is not good for much if nothing changes up above. This sail is mounted on an inclined yard, and yes, it is triangular in shape, which makes it possible to orient it at far more angles than a square sail.”

And here I slow the rhythm a bit, because this is what I want him to understand.

“With those two things together, a ship can advance against a wind that comes at it from the side”, I tell him. “Not head-on, no one can do that. But diagonally, first toward one side and then toward the other, in zigzag, until reaching where it wants to go. The sail gives you the diagonal push and the keel prevents that push from becoming a lateral slide. One without the other is much less efficient.”

And then, before he says anything, I take the last three sheets.

“And now I will tell you what your ship does better”, I tell him.

And there, for the first time since he came up, Shen Fei lifts his gaze from the papers and looks me in the face.

“The flat bottom draws very little”, I continue. “And that means that you can get into places where a ship with a keel would run aground without remedy. You can approach a bank without a dock, you can cross over a sandbar that was not there last year and you can beach it on a strand to load and unload. A ship with a keel cannot do any of that, because it has half its hull stuck under the water.”

I leave the sheets.

“So this is not a better ship than yours”, I tell him. “This is a better ship for deep waters and worse for shallow ones. If they put me to going up a narrow tributary three handspans deep, I would climb aboard yours without hesitating a second.”

And after those words I fall silent. Shen Fei stays a good while silent as well, looking at the five papers that keep floating in front of him in a row, and finally he raises his hand and rubs his chin exactly as I rubbed mine a while ago.

“It is feasible”, he tells me at last.

And there is something in how he says it that indicates to me that the sentence has not ended, so I wait.

“I say it seriously, I don’t say it out of courtesy”, he continues. “I am not a shipwright, but I have watched hulls being built all my life and this that you are showing me is no fantasy, it could be done.”

He lowers his hand.

“But I don’t see much future in it”, he tells me.

And he doesn’t say it with contempt, but rather he says it with the tranquil assurance of one who knows their trade, which is exactly what I had asked of him without asking him.

“Why?” I ask him.

“Because I work on the river”, he answers me. “And on the river, what you are telling me is of almost no use to me. Here the current does half the work, the wind does what it can and the rest is done by the oars and the pole. And what is useful to me, which is being able to approach any bank and not having to pray every time I cross a ford, you are taking away from me.”

He shrugs his shoulders.

“A ship like that is more expensive to build, more difficult to repair and can only go where there is depth”, he finishes. “Who would buy it from me?”

I open my mouth to answer him, but I don’t manage to because the answer arrives from my left, in a voice I have spent a month hearing every day.

“On the river, no”, says Chen Mo. “On the sea, perhaps yes.”

And I turn my head so fast that my neck cracks, because I have not the remotest idea how long that man has been standing there, leaning against the wall of the quarterdeck five paces from my chair, with his arms crossed and the face of one who is enjoying himself.

Shen Fei turns around too, and from his face I deduce that he had not heard him arrive either.

“How long have you been there?” he asks him.

“Since the spine”, Chen Mo answers him tranquilly.

Afterward he separates from the wall and approaches the table.

“Shen Fei, you think about your ship, and you do well because it is your ship”, he tells him. “But I spend my life moving merchandise through places that are not this river, and I assure you there are coastal routes where we lose weeks making detours for not being able to go against the wind.”

And then he turns toward me, and all the joking tone drops out of his voice at once.

“Xiaojie”, he tells me. “I am going to ask you a question, and I ask you to think about it before answering.”

“Go ahead”, I tell him.

“With that idea of yours”, he tells me, and points with his chin at the papers that keep floating in the air. “How large can ships come to be made?”

And there it is, the exact question I have spent two days unable to answer for myself, formulated by a man who saw it coming the moment I minimally described the functioning of the keel.

For a very brief instant the temptation crosses my mind of answering him anything at all, of giving him a figure that sounds good and coming off well, but I push it aside because it is the worst idea I have had all week.

This man has spent a month watching me work, he dedicates himself professionally to not having bad merchandise passed off on him and the moment I invent a number and he realizes it, everything else I tell him from today on will be in doubt for him.

“I don’t know”, I tell him.

Chen Mo raises an eyebrow.

“And I am not being modest with you, I am telling you literally”, I continue. “I don’t know because the answer does not depend on my drawing, but rather it depends on the material.”

I settle myself a bit in the chair.

“In the Empire there was a limited quantity of materials I could know”, I tell him, choosing my words with a great deal of care. “Past a certain length, a normal wooden hull would begin to bend, to open at the seams and to take on water in unforeseen places, and that limit is not fixed by any carpenter however good they may be because it is not a problem of skill, it is a problem of how far the wood holds up.”

And then I lift my gaze and look at the two of them.

“But spirit wood exists”, I tell them.

And I notice perfectly how that changes both their faces at once.

“I have traveled twice inside a carriage built with it”, I continue. “And it resembles in no way the wood with which I learned to manage. So if someone built a hull with a spirit wood resistant enough, and on top of that put a reinforcement enchantment on it, in theory that ship could be made as large as one wanted.”

And I make a pause, because now comes the other half, which is the one that must always be said.

“And I say in theory on purpose”, I add. “Because size does not come for free.”

“Why not?” Chen Mo asks me.

“Because the larger a ship is, the more surface it presents to a storm”, I answer him. “More weight to move, more inertia and more time it takes to react to anything. An enormous hull endures a normal sea far better, but when a storm comes, it has every chance of taking the hardest blows.”

And there, to my own surprise, it is Shen Fei who nods before Chen Mo.

“That is true”, he says, and he says it almost reluctantly, as if it annoyed him to be granting me the point after having told me he didn’t see a future in it. “It is the same thing that happens to large ships, whatever their shape may be. The longer you make them, the worse they behave when the water gets rough.”

And after that sentence a silence falls on the deck.

It is not an uncomfortable silence, but one of those that happen when two people who know about something have been left thinking and neither of the two is in any hurry to speak again.

Shen Fei has stayed looking at the drawing of the cross-section with his brow furrowed and his lips pressed together, and I could swear he is doing calculations.

Chen Mo, on the other hand, is not looking at the papers, but rather he is looking at the river, with that expression of seeing something that is not in front of him that I have already seen a couple of times and that, if I am right, means he is calculating how much this is worth on the desk of someone who is thousands of Li from here.

And I stay still in my chair, letting that silence last as long as it has to last, because I have just obtained exactly what I wanted. That two men who know more than I do about this take it seriously.

And I know, besides, that the moment one of the two opens his mouth again, the conversation I need truly begins, the one about proportions, possibilities and all the things I don’t have.

But that conversation never gets to begin, because from the bow, above the noise of the water and the constant creaking of the wood, there comes a shout.

“Ships off the bow!” screams one of the sailors. “Several!”