The Years of Rice and Salt (28 page)

The Mercy of the Khan

No one expected Khalid to be spared after this debacle. His wife Fedwa was
in a state of mourning already, and Esmerine was inconsolable. All the work of the yard stopped. Bahram fretted in the strange silence of the empty workshops, waiting to be given the word that they could collect Khalid's body. He realized he didn't know enough to run the compound properly.

Eventually the call came; they were ordered to attend the execution. Iwang joined Bahram for the trip to Bokhara and the palace there. Iwang was both sad and irritated. “He should have asked me, if he was so short of cash. I could have helped him.”

Bahram was a little surprised at this, as Iwang's shop was a mere hole in the wall of the bazaar, and did not seem so very prosperous. But he said nothing. When all was said and done he had loved his father-in-law, and the black grief he felt left little room for thinking about Iwang's finances. The impending violent death of someone that close to him, his wife's father—she would be distraught for months, perhaps for years—a man so full of energy: the prospect emptied him of other thought, and left him sick with apprehension.

The next day they reached Bokhara, shimmering in the summer heat, its array of brown and sandy tones capped by its deep blue and turquoise mosque domes. Iwang pointed at one minaret. “The Tower of Death,” he noted. “They'll probably throw him off that.”

The sickness grew in Bahram. They entered the east gate of the city and made their way to the palace. Iwang explained their business. Bahram wondered if they, too, would be taken and killed as accomplices. This had not occurred to him before, and he was shaking as they were led into a room that opened onto the palace grounds.

Nadir Divanbegi arrived shortly thereafter. He looked at them with his usual steady gaze: a short elegant man, black goatee, pale blue eyes; a sayyed himself, and very wealthy.

“You are said to be as great an alchemist as Khalid,” Nadir said abruptly to Iwang. “Do you believe in the philosopher's stone, in projection, in all the so-called red work? Can base metals be transmuted to gold?”

Iwang cleared his throat. “Hard to say, Effendi. I cannot do it, and the adepts who claimed they could, never said precisely how in their writing. Not in ways that I can use.”

“Use,” Nadir repeated. “That's a word I want to emphasize. People like you and Khalid have knowledge that the khan might use. Practical things, like gunpowder that is more predictable in power. Or stronger metallurgy, or more effective medicine. These could be real advantages in the world. To waste such abilities on fraud . . . Naturally the khan is very angry.”

Iwang nodded, looking down.

“I have spoken with him at length about this matter, reminding him of Khalid's distinction as an armorer and alchemist. His past contributions as master of arms. His many other services to the khan. And the khan in his wisdom has decided to show a mercy that Muhammad himself must have approved.”

Iwang looked up.

“He will be allowed to live, if he promises to work for the khanate on things that are real.”

“I am sure he will agree to that,” Iwang said. “That is merciful indeed.”

“Yes. He will of course have his right hand chopped off for thievery, as the law requires. But considering the effrontery of his crime, this is a very light punishment indeed. As he himself has admitted.”

The punishment
was administered later that day, a Friday, after the market and before prayers, in the great plaza of Bokhara, by the side of the central pool. A big crowd gathered to witness it. They were in high spirits as Khalid was led out by guards from the palace, dressed in white robes as if celebrating Ramadan. Many of the Bokharis shouted abuse at Khalid, as a Samarqandi as well as a thief.

He knelt before Sayyed Abdul Aziz, who proclaimed the mercy of Allah, and of he himself, and of Nadir Divanbegi for arguing to spare the miscreant's life for his heinous fraud. Khalid's arm, looking from a distance like a bird's scrawny leg and claw, was lashed to the executioner's block. Then a soldier hefted a big axe overhead and dropped it on Khalid's wrist. Khalid's hand fell from the block and blood spurted onto the sand. The crowd roared. Khalid toppled onto his side, and the soldiers held him while one applied hot pitch from a pot on a brazier, using a short stick to plaster the black stuff to the end of the stump.

Bahram and Iwang took him back to Samarqand, laid out in the back of Iwang's bullock cart, which Iwang had had built in order to move weights of metal and glass that camels couldn't carry. It bumped horribly over the road, which was a broad dusty track worn in the earth by centuries of camel traffic between the two cities. The big wooden wheels jounced in every dip and over every hump, and Khalid groaned in the back, semiconscious and breathing stentorously, his left hand holding his pallid, burned right wrist. Iwang had forced an opium-laced potion down him, and if it weren't for his groans it would have seemed he was asleep.

Bahram regarded the new stump with a sickened fascination. Seeing the left hand clutching the wrist, he said to Iwang, “He'll have to eat with his left hand. Do everything with his left hand. He'll be unclean forever.”

“That kind of cleanliness doesn't matter.”

They had to sleep by the road, as darkness caught them out. Bahram sat by Khalid, and tried to get him to eat some of Iwang's soup. “Come on, Father. Come on, old man. Eat something and you'll feel better. When you feel better it'll be all right.” But Khalid only groaned and rolled from side to side. In the darkness, under the great net of stars, it seemed to Bahram that everything in their lives had been ruined.

Effect of the Punishment

But as Khalid recovered, it seemed that he didn't see it that way. He boasted
to Bahram and Iwang about his behavior during his punishment: “I never said a word to any of them, and I had tested my limits in jail, to see how long I could hold my breath without fainting, so when I saw the time was near I simply held my breath, and I timed it so well that I was fainting anyway when the stroke fell. I never felt a thing. I don't even remember it.”

“We do,” said Iwang, frowning.

“Well it was happening to me,” Khalid said sharply.

“Fine. You can use the method again when they chop off your head. You can teach it to us for when they throw us off the Tower of Death.”

Khalid stared at him. “You're angry with me, I see.” Truculent and hurt in his feelings.

Iwang said, “You could have gotten us all killed. Sayyed Abdul would command it without a second thought. If it weren't for Nadir Divanbegi, it might have happened. You should have talked to me. To Bahram here, and to me. We could have helped you.”

“Why were you in such trouble, anyway?” asked Bahram, emboldened by Iwang's reproaches. “Surely the works here make a lot of money for you.”

Khalid sighed, ran his stump over his balding head. He got up and went to a locked cabinet, unlocked it and drew out a book and a box.

“This came from the Hindu caravanserai two years ago,” he told them, showing them the book's old pages. “It's the work of Mary the Jewess, a very great alchemist. Very ancient. Her formula for projection was very convincing, I thought. I needed only the right furnaces, and a lot of sulphur and mercury. So I paid a lot for the book, and for the preparations. And once in debt to the Armenians, it only got worse. After that, I needed the gold to pay for the gold.” He shrugged with disgust.

“You should have said so,” Iwang repeated, glancing through the old book.

“You should always let me do the trading at the caravanserai,” Bahram added. “They know you really want things, while I am ignorant, and so trade from the strength of indifference.”

Khalid frowned.

Iwang tapped the book. “This is just warmed-over Aristotle. You can't trust him to tell you anything useful. I've read the translations out of Baghdad and Seville, and I judge he's wrong more often than he's right.”

“What do you mean?” Khalid cried indignantly. Even Bahram knew Aristotle was the wisest of the ancients, the supreme authority for all alchemists.

“Where is he not wrong,” Iwang said dismissively. “The least country doctor in China can do more for you than Aristotle can. He thought the heart did the thinking, he didn't know it pumped the blood—he has no idea of the spleen or the meridian lines, and he never says a word about the pulse or the tongue. He did some fair dissections of animals, but never dissected a human as far as I can tell. Come with me to the bazaar and I can show you five things he got wrong, any Friday you like.”

Khalid was frowning. “Have you read Al-Farudi's ‘Harmony Between Aristotle and Plato'?”

“Yes, but that is a harmony that can't be made. Al-Farudi only made the attempt because he didn't have Aristotle's ‘Biology.' If he had known that work, he would have seen that for Aristotle it all remains material. His four elements all try to reach their levels, and as they try, our world results. Obviously it's not that simple.” He gestured around at the bright dusty day and the clangor of Khalid's shop, the mills, the waterworks powering the big blast furnaces, the noise and movement. “The Platonists know that. They know it is all mathematical. Things happen by number. They should be called Pythagoreans, to be accurate. They are like Buddhists, in that for them the world is alive. As is obviously the case. A great creature of creatures. For Aristotle and Ibn Rashd, it's more like a broken clock.”

Khalid grumbled at this, but he was not in a good position to argue. His philosophy had been cut off with his hand.

He was often in some pain, and smoked hashish and drank Iwang's opiated potions to dull the pain, which also dulled his wits, which dulled his spirits. He could not leap in to teach the boys the proper uses of the machinery; he could not shake people's hands, or eat with others, having only his unclean hand left to him; he was permanently unclean. That was part of the punishment.

The realization of this, and the shattering of all his philosophical and alchemical inquiries, finally caught up with him, and cast him into a melancholia. He left his sleeping quarters late in the mornings, and moped around the works watching all the activity like a ghost of himself. There everything continued much as it had before. The great mills wheeled on the river's current, powering the ore stamps and the bellows of the blast furnaces. The crews of workers came in directly after the morning prayers, making their marks on the sheets that kept record of their work hours, then scattering through the compound to shovel salt or sift saltpeter, or perform any other of the hundred activities that Khalid's enterprises demanded, under the supervision of the group of old artisans who had helped Khalid to organize the various works.

But all this was known, accomplished, routinized, and meant nothing to Khalid anymore. Wandering around aimlessly or sitting in his study, surrounded by his collections like a magpie in its nest with a broken wing, he would stare at nothing for hours, or else page through his manuscripts, Al-Razid and Jalduki and Jami, looking at who knew what. He would flick a finger against the objects of wonder that used to fascinate him so—a chunk of pitted coral, a unicorn horn, ancient Indian coins, nested polygons of ivory and horn, a goblet made of a rhinoceros horn chased with gold leaf, stone shells, a tiger leg bone, a gold tiger statue, a laughing Buddha made of some unidentified black material, Nipponese netsuke, forks and crucifixes from the lost civilization of Frengistan—all these objects, which used to give him such delight, and which he would discuss for hours in a manner that grew tedious to his regulars, now only seemed to irritate him. He sat amid his treasures and he was no longer on the hunt, as Bahram used to think of it, seeking resemblances, making conjectures and speculations. Bahram had not understood before how important this was to him.

As his mood grew blacker, Bahram went to the Sufi ribat in the Registan, and asked Ali, the Sufi master in charge of the place, about it. “Mowlana, he has been punished worse than he thought at first. He's no longer the same man.”

“He is the same soul,” said Ali. “You are simply seeing another aspect of him. There is a secret core in everyone that not even Gabriel can know by trying to know. Listen now. The intellect derives from the senses, which are limited, and come from the body. The intellect therefore is also limited, and it can never truly know reality, which is infinite and eternal. Khalid wanted to know reality with his intellect, and he can't. Now he knows that, and is downcast. Intellect has no real mettle, you see, and at the first threat, into a hole it scuttles. But love is divine. It comes from the realm of the infinite, and is entrusted to the heart as a gift from God. Love has no calculation in it. ‘God loves you' is the only possible sentence! So it's love you must follow to the heart of your father-in-law. Love is the pearl of an oyster living in the ocean, and intellect lives on the shore and cannot swim. Bring up the oyster, sew the pearl onto your sleeve for all to see. It will bring courage to the intellect. Love is the king that must rescue his coward slave. Do you understand?”

“I think so.”

“You must be sincere and open, your love must be bright as the lightning flash itself! Then his inner consciousness might see it, and be snatched from itself in a twinkling. Go, feel the love course through you, and out to him.”

Bahram tried this strategy. Waking in his bed with Esmerine, he felt the love rising in him, for his wife and her beautiful body, the child after all of the mutilated old man he regarded so fondly. Full of love, he would make his way through the workshops or into town, feeling the cool of the springtime air on his skin, and the trees around the pools would gleam dustily, like great living jewels, and the intense white clouds would accentuate the deep blue of the sky, echoed underneath by the turquoise and cobalt tiles of the mosque domes. Beautiful town on a beautiful morning, at the very center of the world, and the bazaar its usual massed chaos of noise and color, all human intercourse there to be seen at once, and yet pointless as an anthill, unless it was infused with love. Everyone did what they did for love of the people in their lives, day after day—or so it seemed to Bahram on those mornings, as he took on more and more of Khalid's old assignments at the compound—and in the nights too, as Esmerine enfolded him.

But he could not seem to convey this apprehension to Khalid. The old man snarled at any expression of high spirits, much less love, and became irritated at any gesture of affection, not just from Bahram but from his wife Fedwa, or Esmerine, or Bahram and Esmerine's children, Fazi and Laila, or anyone else. The bustle of the workshops would surround them in the sunlight with their clangor and stink, all the protocols of metalworking and gunpowder-making that Khalid had formulated going on before them as if in a giant loud dance, and Bahram would make a gesture encompassing it all and say, “Love fills all this so full!” and Khalid would snarl, “Shut up! Don't be a fool!”

One day he slammed out of his study with his single hand holding two of his old alchemical texts, and threw them into the door of a blazing athanor. “Complete nonsense,” he replied bitterly when Bahram cried out for him to stop. “Get out of my way, I'm burning them all.”

“But why?” Bahram cried. “Those are your books! Why, why, why?”

Khalid took a lump of dusty cinnabar in his one hand, and shook it before Bahram. “Why? I'll tell you why! Look at this! All the great alchemists, from Jabir to Al-Razi to Ibn Sina, all agree that all the metals are various combinations of sulphur and mercury. Iwang says the Chinese and Hindu alchemists agree on this matter. But when we combine sulphur and mercury, as pure as we can make them, we get exactly this: cinnabar! What does that mean? The alchemists who actually speak to this problem, who are very few I might add, say that when they talk about sulphur and mercury, they don't really mean the substances we usually call sulphur and mercury, but rather purer elements of dryness and moisture, that are like sulphur and mercury, but finer! Well!” He threw the chunk of cinnabar across the yard at the river. “What use is that? Why even call them that? Why believe anything they say?” He waved his stump at his study and alchemical workshop, and all the apparatus littering the yard outside. “It's all so much junk. We don't know anything. They never knew what they were talking about.”

“All right, Father, maybe so, but don't burn the books! There may be something useful in some of them, you need to make distinctions. And besides, they were expensive.”

Khalid only snarled and made the sound of spitting.

Bahram told Iwang
about this incident the next time he was in town. “He burned a lot of books. I couldn't talk him out of it. I try to get him to see the love filling everything, but he doesn't see it.”

The big Tibetan blew air through his lips like a camel. “That approach will never work with Khalid,” he said. “It's easy for you to be full of love, being young and whole. Khalid is old and one-handed. He is out of balance, yin and yang are disarranged. Love has nothing to do with it.” Iwang was no Sufi.

Bahram sighed. “Well, I don't know what to do then. You need to help me, Iwang. He's going to burn all his books and destroy all his apparatus, and then who knows what will happen to him.”

Iwang grumbled something inaudible.

“What?”

“I'll think it over. Give me some time.”

“There isn't much time. He'll break all the apparatus next.”