The Scent of Cinnamon - SCP Foundation

It was from that port that the Blue Princess herself sailed, to marry a king who'd been dead for a year.

The ships from Zaiton came via Ma'bar, carrying with them all the stuff of the Yuan to the Western Regions. Sandalwood, spices, jewels; silk to compete with the Il-khan's own wares, gems unique to the Khaghan's realms. It was from that port that the Blue Princess herself sailed, to marry a king who'd been dead for a year.

I remember Zaiton, city of my birth. I remember its gardens; I remember fleets of a hundred junks, their battened sails flicking like fans over carved and painted woods. But I do not remember much else. I wonder, sometimes, if I remember any of it.

This came about in the seven hundredth and ninety-seventh year of my travail, as I skirted Hy-Brasil again. I saw a formation of three rocks, lichen-soaked and sea-sprayed, and remembered the Luoyang Bridge, that solid and ancient stone of the northern Song, and remembered where I came from. I remembered its name as Zaiton. But its name is not Zaiton, a western name given it by Polo, Ibn Battuta and others. Its name is Quanzhou.

When was I born? I searched my memories in vain. I found those from China; then those from India and Iran; further still, those from Africa, England, Utopia, Prester John, the Island of Tomorrow, the Patchwork Archipelago. And now, the more I think of them, the less certain I am. Where did they come from? Which souls did I draw them away from?

But through all these questions, some core of me still existed; some part of me remained an I, a fixed point, a first-person-pronoun. I stared upon those rocks and felt, dimly, that something had gone wrong.

I - the central I - was born in Quanzhou in the Christian year 1266. I was the fifth child of a wealthy family; my father had done well under the old dynasty, rising to high office. But then the Mongols came, and suddenly the south Chinese were at the bottom of the imperial hierarchy. So my father retired to Quanzhou and began to build a fleet of merchant ships.

With those ships, he took advantage of the new links with the West which the era had ushered in. He became known as an exporter of cinnamon, using links with Muslim merchants to become even wealthier in private life. His new wife bore him three more children, in addition to the four sons from his youth; I was the first, my brother the second.

My brother would snivel around behind me while I stood behind pillars, peeping out at conversations and meetings. My father was a stern man; my feet were bound, my body and mind prepared for my future, a rote and sterile world.

I wish I could say I was bold, adventurous. I wish I could say I was a rebel, chafing against the ties that held me down. But I was not. I was a dutiful girl; I loved and honoured my father, and wished to do what was right, what was moral. I left home by chance, not by my will.

My father's wealth was well-known around the city. They came by day, paying a member of the household guard. I was in a courtyard at that time, only eighteen, wandering between the flowers alone. The grass was a thick, dark green. The clouds were moving quickly across the sky. The air smelled of cinnamon.

I was kidnapped; my father, overloaded with debts that suddenly came due, would or could not pay my ransom. I was, in the end, sold to a Persian merchant from the isle of Qish. I remember the hold of a junk, beams of light peeping out between slats in the wood. And that, more or less, should have been the end of my story. The details are different, but it's still the same; a rearrangement of specific parts, a bag of wood-block pages.

The argument inside my head has been raging for centuries. I do not recall who the individuals were who began it, or their names; only their argument, which began long before me and will continue long after I am gone.

One of them believes that, when I touched the map, that was what sent us along the wrong sea-path; that was why we ended up in Madagascar when we should have been in Madurai, and a false Madagascar at that. This one marshals his arguments logically, sneeringly; of course it took place in this fashion. Everyone knows that some routine cause must create any change in conditions. Are you simple? You must be simple. There's no shame in that. I picture him wearing an American hat, pushing his eyeglasses up and up his nose.

The other one screeches and simpers, swearing and cursing that he doesn't get his way. But I think he's the one that's right. He says that the map appeared in the hold after we entered that other place. He pleads, begs, screams, punches the walls. But he always gives up, storms off, smashing his own eyeglasses underfoot.

I was a prized slave. I had a large, airy cabin. I knew it well. I do not see how I could have failed to notice the map's presence before. The cold, slimy one, he says that the map was placed there to induce me to touch it. But in that case, what is the difference? The break in time was inevitable. By sundown, the air had taken an uncharacteristic chill. We were within the map.

What kind of map? It was Frankish, from Europe; another memory says it was English, from a cathedral or church; but even that's still not quite right. Jerusalem lies in its centre. Around it range continents, cities, little illustrations of wonders and imaginings. Old St Peter's. The dwelling-place of Hermes Trismegistus. The Pyramids. Ayasofya. And then, beyond that…

We have been sailing for centuries, and still I do not understand the whole of this place. The waters are real waters, but blink and they wave like parchment. They are a dark, inky blue - a truly inky blue. Sometimes I come in here to stare at the map; I have considered, many times, ripping it up, or casting it into its own seas. But I don't.

The first port we came to was not a real port in Madagascar, but one in the Madagascar of the mind. I do not know whose. It was full of white-knuckle sandstone, carved soap springing from the earth.

The port had many taverns, each more rousing than the last. I entered one, and there I met an Englishman. He, eight hundred years after my time, had been a bookseller. He had a shop in Bloomsbury; a little one, the kind of one that had existed for so long that it had become part of the landscape. He'd inherited it from his father, and had used to sit at the window, sipping tea, watching the rain drizzle down.

He had been just as caged as me.

Then he'd unfurled an antique map, and things began to change. He walked home, took the tube, found himself in Lagos. He tried to walk out, get a train, a taxi, and found himself in Malanje, wandering between houses burnt by the Portuguese. Had the Portuguese burnt houses? He didn't know. The Black Rocks seemed to loom above the city, their sides cascading downwards.

He had wandered on, and on, and had found himself here. Was it the same map, we wondered? Had we touched the same parchment in one world, sending us to quite another? I do not know. I don't think we'd ever know. He drank dark beer, and stared at the bottom of the glass, staring and staring from every angle.

I returned to the ship and sailed on. The sea became glassier; the sky's blue shifted, imperceptibly, downwards. Things, people, smoothed out. It took me the better part of a month to notice that I had not eaten; two before I noticed that nobody else was on the ship with me. I was free. I should head home, back to my father.

I turned the ship around, heading northwards. How did I know how to do that? Memories came to me, unbidden. The sericulture of Yazd. The scents and sights of Madurai. The burning of Lin'an, the lights of fire reflected on water. I knew what ropes to put where; but that was only half of it. The ship was cleaner, brighter; it moved according to my will, not my effort. It sailed because it had to sail; no ship ever drowns on a map, except in the face of sea monsters, except when carrying treasure.

Where had the slavers gone? Where was the rest of them, that was not inside my head?

I sailed north, desperate for home. I never found it. Instead, I landed in Utopia; then England, a fat and merrie England; then Hy-Brasil, for the first time, its twisting milk and honey enveloping me; and so on, and so on, picking up memory after memory that had fallen into this place with me, each part glossier, each part the same.

I saw mirror-worlds burn over San Francisco's sky. I saw a feast laid for Prester John, who ran away to sea for me and drowned just as easily. I murdered billionaires in the star-fields of New Portland. I pruned the silver tree of Karakorum, its harbour listing gently away.

I was bored out of my mind.

When you have all the wonder of a map locked up with you, you start to go insane. Whether it's real or not doesn't matter; you possess with you every memory it's inspired, or will inspire. You are within the random matter that has been implanted into it.

I wanted to die, at times. I wanted to cast myself to the bottom of the paper sea. But I knew I wouldn't drown. If I were to drown, it would be in some way fitting of a map's illustration, and I didn't know how to do that. I didn't know where to begin.

Cities, stars, civilisations passed me by. Each one was more wondrous than the last. Jewel after jewel passed me by. I ate only when I wanted to, or when the situation demanded it. I would recruit vast crews, act the pirate queen, and cry myself to sleep in silken bedclothes as each of them, one by one, went away, leaving only memory.

I returned to Hy-Brasil again, skirting its promontories with the skill of a master. I saw the three rocks.

When I saw them, I knew at once what was wrong; they were real. Slowly, they turned themselves into bricks, stones - a bridge. The Luoyang Bridge. It was real. Humans were using it for the exact purpose it was made; to walk across. I could smell it, sense it, feel it. There was no dreamlike quality about it, no fantasy, no mind that moulded it. I'd found a crack, a way out. I'd found reality.

I set my ship towards it. I clambered out, climbed the slippery rock, caught a foothold, another -

And I smelt a distant, fiery smell. I smelt cinnamon. I froze, uncertain, reality above me and fiction below me. A paper boat one way, a cold, cloying wind the other.

I have been frozen in that spot for a decade. I do not know if I'm real any more, or if I have become part of the melting, melded rock.

I hear their conversations. My father is long dead. Quanzhou is decaying; a new dynasty is on the throne in the north. I could join them, find a place, become what I once was.

Far away, I feel them flow towards me; the memories of more who have fallen in, become trapped. I know my own have done the same; all that I was, splitting and reforming and diverting.

My Zaiton. I want my own Zaiton; I want a home that is not my home. I want a home that is a refreshing port to return to at the close of day. I want the sting of wind, the grey of gulls; I want the smell of another spice, another foodstuff. I do not want this place, my father's grey eyes, the firmness of the bridge.

I want the sunset at the close of day; the reddening sky already darkened. Away, a few minutes, woodland; a silence suspended in the trees, an awareness of the distance of a world that cannot be seen, here. An owl calls out. A long-distant light is emblazoned on a farmhouse.

But what I have is stone, grand stone, filling me up, dominating me, overwhelming me…