Keita made a small reproachful sound as he bumped into me, thrown forward by another wake wave, this time from a clipper racing in the opposite direction. I put him on to his balance again, wanting to pick him up. All around us now, more clippers were running for Hong Kong, back the way we had come. A few of them steamed close as the river bottlenecked. Keita looked too little to be in the middle of it all and I nudged him inside. He was shaking in the tiny, buzzing way mice do. He didn’t like sailing at the best of times. Ships, he always said, were an unforgiving form of travel. If a horse went lame you could usually dismount and walk away. If a ship went wrong you usually drowned. I settled us in the little mess room and we played backgammon until we pulled in to the long wharves at Canton that evening, thankfully well out of sight of the ironclads. There were soldiers on the bridge over the river. Keita watched them unhappily.
I climbed down on to the wharf before the gangplank was lowered and lifted Keita with me, wishing I’d had the sense to leave him in India this time. He was normally such a collected person that it hadn’t occurred to me he might be frightened now. He didn’t mind storms, tea farmers shooting at us, mandarins threatening us. The Navy, which usually aimed well, hadn’t seemed any different.
‘If you’d tried to leave me in India I’d have settled down in the hold, thanks,’ he said flatly.
‘Stop talking to what I haven’t said. How do you do that, anyway?’
‘You’ve got one of those faces.’
‘That makes no sense.’
‘On purpose,’ he said.
‘Fine,’ I laughed. ‘Let’s get this over with. Stay in front of me,’ I added, because the wharf was crowded, not with stevedores but ordinary people holding children and bags, trying to reach Hong Kong before anything happened. We wove through them as best we could, up to the warehouses, where somebody who wasn’t our usual silk trader came out to meet us. Above the roofs, on one of the garden gantries that seemed to float with all its struts lost in wisteria, a beautiful, impassive woman smoked a tobacco pipe while she watched the river. She was in her fifties; she must have seen it all before.
‘Mr Tremayne! Mr Wang sent me out to see you. He’s, er . . . fled,’ the new man explained. ‘Nobody knows when it’s all going to start.’
‘Soon,’ I said. I had a decent grasp of Chinese. Keita was there for when things became too specific or for the people who didn’t quite trust that I knew what I was saying, which was a wholly reasonable doubt to have. ‘There are gunships coming up from Hong Kong now. Shall we get everything swapped over?’
‘There’s an extra condition,’ he said quickly.
‘You’re coming with us, of course you are.’
‘Thank God,’ he said, half-crumpling. ‘Do you suppose we have time?’
‘I think so. It’ll take the gunships two hours at least to get here. They don’t go fast. Come on, let’s get going.’
Most of the warehouse men had fled, so we had to unload the opium crates and then load the silk bales ourselves with the crew, but some of the trader’s men hurried round with a cart while we did. The opium disappeared onto the back of the cart, which sped straightaway towards the bridge, while there was still a bridge. Keita stood just inside the hold and directed. He was good at even distribution and making the best use of space, whatever the mad shape of whatever we were loading. Halfway through, he froze and his head snapped to the side, towards the river, as if he had heard something huge, but there was nothing but the rattle and chatter of the crowds. He stayed like that for a long second.
‘Is it starting?’ I asked quietly.
He nodded. ‘Soon. We’ll have to sail through it. But they won’t be aiming at ships; it should be all right. That can go over there,’ he added in his courtly Mandarin to two of our men who were bringing more silk bales. Behind us on the wharf, people were waving money at the captain for a place onboard.
‘That’s going to have to do,’ I said. If I had been a better man, I would have jettisoned the silk cargo to make room for more people, but I was too frightened to lose the work. I had nothing else, and would have no references if I made Sing angry enough. Leaving behind cargo was exactly the kind of thing that made him angry. ‘Mr Shang! There’s space.’
Shang, the captain, had been waiting to see if he could let people aboard. He had already moved women and children to the front. He put the gangplank down again and waved them across.
I shepherded Keita up the ladder to the deck to see if anything had changed on the river. There were no more incoming ships now. ‘We have to go. They’ve blocked the river further up.’
The engineer had seen too. The smoke from our funnel thickened as he stoked up the coal.
Shang climbed back into the cabin and pulled a throttle, and we leaned out into the current. The people he had let in through the hold began to come up on deck. He must have packed them in below, because it was quite a crowd. I felt the ship rock and sent the bigger men back down, to be ballast.
‘Is silk really important enough to start a war over?’ Keita said to me when I came back. He already knew the answer, but when he was worried he asked things like that in the way other children asked to be told fairytales they already knew off by heart.
‘Sit up here,’ I said, tapping the rail so that we could hear each other over everyone else talking and fretting. He climbed up and I put my arm across him in case one of the other ships bumped us. They were close. ‘It’s not about the silk. It’s about not pissing about with the East India Company. If you try and dictate terms of trade to them – if you say you can only buy silk with silver bullion – they make sure you do something stupid. They’ll run obvious smugglers, like us, until someone snaps. Some poor bastard from Customs boards a British ship to try and put a stop to it, like they did with the Arrow.’ He nodded. I explained it in the same way every time and sometimes he filled in parts if I left space, but he didn’t now. He sat back against me, fitted to my chest like he never usually would have. I squeezed his arm, worried. It was starting to bother me that he was frightened of shots that wouldn’t even be aimed at us. In the near future hung the shape of something else, something he wasn’t saying, but there was still nothing unusual on the river.
‘That’s a violation of treaty. They can’t touch our flag. So the Navy comes, shells the hell out of everything for a week, and when the Emperor folds, Britain dictates the terms of the peace treaty. This time it will hinge around the legalisation of opium.’ I could smell iron; the ship was running hot. ‘It’s a new kind of war. There’s no need to lay a siege and take someone’s capital city any more. You just have to make them sell underprice. That’s . . . I don’t really have the right sort of mind for all this, but it’s how the British Empire works, I think. There’s a queen, a prime minister, and the East India Company board of directors.’
Keita nodded. He had absolutely the right mind for it. ‘Quinine next. They’re selling it too dear, aren’t they, in Peru?’
‘Damn right they are. The sooner someone shells Lima and makes them trade the sodding stuff for tea, the better. I’m sick of getting a cough and worrying for a fortnight if Sing will spend the money on us if it’s malaria.’