The Years of Rice and Salt (34 page)

Bad Air

Bahram had just gone inside the compound gate, and was on his way to tell
Khalid about the incident at Iwang's, when the door of the chemical shed burst open and men crashed out, chased by a shouting Khalid and a dense cloud of yellow smoke. Bahram turned and ran for the house, intending to grab Esmerine and the children, but they were out and running already, and he followed them through the main gate, everyone shrieking, and then, as the cloud descended on them, dropping to the ground and crawling away like rats, coughing and hacking and spitting and crying. They rolled down the hill, throats and eyes burning, lungs aching with the caustic stink of the poisonous yellow cloud. Most of them followed Khalid's lead and plunged their heads into the river, emerging only to puff shallow breaths, and then dunk themselves again.

When the cloud had dispersed and he had recovered a little, Khalid began to curse.

“What was it?” Bahram said, coughing still.

“A crucible of acid exploded. We were testing it.”

“For what?”

Khalid didn't answer. Slowly the caustic burn of their delicate membranes cooled. The wet and unhappy crew straggled back into the compound. Khalid set some of the men to clean up the shed, and Bahram went with him into his study, where he changed his clothes and washed, then wrote notes in his big book, presumably about the failed demonstration.

Except it had not been completely a failure, or so Bahram began to gather from Khalid's muttering.

“What were you trying to do?”

Khalid did not answer directly. “It seems certain to me that there are different kinds of air,” he said instead. “Different constituents, perhaps, as in metals. Only all invisible to the eye. We smell the differences, sometimes. And some can kill, as at the bottom of wells. It isn't an absence of air, in those cases, but a bad kind of air, or part of air. The heaviest no doubt. And different distillations, different burnings . . . you can suppress or stoke a fire . . . Anyway, I thought that sal ammoniac and saltpeter and sulphur mixed, would make a different air. And it did, too, but too much of it, too fast. Like an explosion. And clearly a poison.” He coughed uncomfortably. “It is like the Chinese alchemists' recipe for wan-jen-ti, which Iwang says means ‘killer of myriads.' I supposed I could show Nadir this reaction, and propose it as a weapon. You could perhaps kill a whole army with it.”

They regarded the thought silently.

“Well,” Bahram said, “it might help him keep his own position more secure with the khan.”

He explained what he had witnessed at Iwang's.

“And so you think Nadir is in trouble at the court?”

“Yes.”

“And you think Iwang might convert to Islam?”

“He seemed to be asking about it.”

Khalid laughed, then coughed painfully. “That would be odd.”

“People don't like to be laughed at.”

“Somehow I don't think Iwang would mind.”

“Did you know that's the name of his town, Iwang?”

“No. Is it?”

“Yes. So he seemed to say.”

Khalid shrugged.

“It means we don't know his real name.”

Another shrug. “None of us know our real names.”

Love the Size of the World

The fall harvests came and passed, and the caravanserai emptied for the
winter, when the passes to the east would close. Bahram's days were enriched by Iwang's presence at the Sufi ribat, where Iwang sat at the back and listened closely to all that the old master Ali said, very seldom speaking, and then only to ask the simplest questions, usually the meaning of one word or another. There were lots of Arabic and Persian words in the Sufi terminology, and though Iwang's Sogdi-Turkic was good, the religious language was opaque to him. Eventually the master gave Iwang a lexicon of Sufi technical terms, or istilahat, by Ansari, titled “One Hundred Fields and Resting Places,” which had an introduction that ended with the sentence “The real essence of the spiritual states of the Sufis is such that expressions are not adequate to describe it: nevertheless, these expressions are fully understood by those who have experienced these states.”

This, Bahram felt, was the main source of Iwang's problem: he had not experienced the states being described.

“Very possibly,” Iwang would agree when Bahram said this to him. “But how am I to reach them?”

“With love,” Bahram would say. “You must love everything that is, especially people. You will see, it is love that moves everything.”

Iwang would purse his lips. “With love comes hate,” he would say. “They are two sides of an excess of feeling. Compassion rather than love, that seems to me the best way. There is no bad obverse side to compassion.”

“Indifference,” Bahram suggested.

Iwang would nod, thinking things over. But Bahram wondered if he could ever come to the right view. The fount of Bahram's own love, like a powerful artesian spring in the hills, was his feeling for his wife and children, then for Allah, who had allowed him the privilege of living his life among such beautiful souls—not only the three of them, but Khalid and Fedwa and all their relatives, and the community of the compound, the mosque, the ribat, Sher Dor, and indeed all of Samarqand and the wide world, when he was feeling it. Iwang had no such starting point, being single and childless, as far as Bahram knew, and an infidel to boot. How was he to begin to feel the more generalized and diffuse loves, if the specific ones were not there for him?

“The heart which is greater than the intellect is not that which beats in the chest.” So Ali would say. It was a matter of opening his heart to God, and letting the love appear from there first. Iwang was already good at calming himself, at paying attention to the world in its quiet moments, sitting out at the compound some dawns after he had spent the night on a couch in the shops. Bahram once or twice joined him in these sittings, and once he was inspired by a windless pure gold sky to recite from Rumi.

How silent it has become in the house of the heart!

The heart as hearth and home

Has encompassed the world.

When Iwang finally responded, after the sun had broken over the eastern ridges and flooded the valley with buttered light, it was only to say, “I wonder if the world is as big as Brahmagupta said it was.”

“He said it was a sphere, right?”

“Yes, of course. You can see that out on the steppes, when a caravan comes over the horizon heads first. We are on the surface of a great ball.”

“The heart of God.”

No reply but the swaying head, which meant that Iwang did not agree but did not want to disagree. Bahram desisted, and asked about the Hindu's estimate of the size of the earth, which was clearly what interested Iwang now.

“Brahmagupta noticed that the sun shone straight down a well in the Deccan on a certain day, and the next year he arranged to be a thousand yoganda north of there, and he measured the angle of the shadows, and used spherical geometry to calculate what percentage of the circle that arc of a thousand yoganda was. Very simple, very interesting.”

Bahram nodded; no doubt true; but they would only ever see a small fraction of those yoganda, and here, now, Iwang was in need of spiritual illumination. Or—in need of love. Bahram invited him to eat with his family, to observe Esmerine serve the meals, and instruct the children in their manners. The children were a pleasure all their own, their liquid eyes huge in their faces as they stopped in their racing about to listen impatiently to Esmerine's lectures. Their racing about the compound was a pleasure as well. Iwang nodded at all this. “You're a lucky man,” he told Bahram.

“We are all lucky men,” Bahram replied. And Iwang agreed.

The Goddess and the Law

Parallel to his new religious studies, Iwang continued his investigations and
demonstrations with Khalid. They devoted the greater portion of these efforts to their projects for Nadir and the khan. They worked out a long-range signaling system for the army that used mirrors and small telescopes; they also cast bigger and bigger cannons, with giant wagons to haul them by horse or camel train from one battlefield to the next.

“We will need cart roads for these, if we are ever to move them,” Iwang noted. Even the great Silk Road itself was nothing but a camel track for most of its length.

Their latest private investigation into causes concerned a little telescope which magnified objects too small to be seen by the eye alone. The astronomers from the Ulug Bek Madressa had devised the thing, which could only be focused on a very narrow slice of air, so that translucent items caught between two plates of glass were best, lit by mirrored sunlight from below. Then new little worlds appeared, right under their fingers.

The three men spent hours looking through this telescope at pond water, which proved to be full of strangely articulated creatures, all swimming about. They looked at translucently thin slabs of stone, wood, and bone; and at their own blood, which was filled with blobs that were frighteningly like the animals in the pond water.

“The world just keeps getting smaller,” Khalid marveled. “If we could draw the blood of those little creatures in our blood, and put it under a lens even more powerful than this one, I have no doubt that their blood would contain animalcules just like ours does; and so on for those animals as well, and down to . . .” He trailed off, awe giving him a dazed look. Bahram had never seen him so happy.

“There is probably some smallest possible size of things,” Iwang said practically. “So the ancient Greeks postulated. The ultimate particulates, out of which all else is constructed. No doubt smaller than we will ever see.”

Khalid frowned. “This is just a start. Surely stronger lenses will be made. And then who knows what will be seen. Maybe it will allow us to understand the composition of metals at last, and work the transmutations.”

“Maybe,” Iwang allowed. He stared into the eye of the lens, humming to himself. “Certainly the little crystals in granite are made clear.”

Khalid nodded, wrote notes in one of his notebooks. He returned to the glass, then drew the shapes he saw on the page. “The very small and the very large,” he said.

“These lenses are a great gift from God,” Bahram said, “reminding us that it is all one world. One substance, all interpenetrated with structure, but still one, big to small.”

Khalid nodded. “Thus the stars may have their sway over us after all. Maybe the stars are animals too, like these creatures, could we only see them better.”

Iwang shook his head. “All one, yes. It seems more and more obvious. But not all animal, surely. Perhaps the stars are more like rocks than these fine creatures.”

“The stars are fire.”

“Rocks, fire—but not animals.”

“But all one,” Bahram insisted.

And both of the older men nodded, Khalid emphatically, Iwang reluctantly, and with a low humming in his throat.

After that day
it seemed to Bahram that Iwang was always humming. He came to the compound and joined Khalid in his demonstrations, and went with Bahram to the ribat and listened to Ali's lectures, and whenever Bahram visited him in his shop he was playing with numbers, or clicking a Chinese abacus back and forth, and always distracted, always humming. On Fridays he came to the mosque and stood outside the door, listening to the prayers and the readings, facing Mecca and blinking at the sun, but never kneeling or prostrating or praying; and always humming.

Bahram did not think he should convert. Even if he had to move back to Tibet for a time and then return, it seemed clear to Bahram that he was no Muslim. And so it would not be right.

Indeed, as the weeks passed he began to seem more strange and foreign, rather than less; even more an unbeliever; performing little demonstrations for himself, that were like sacrifices to light, or magnetism, or the void, or gravity. An alchemist, precisely, but in an eastern tradition stranger than any Sufi's, as if he were not only reverting to Buddhism but going beyond it, back to Tibet's older religion, Bön as Iwang called it.

That winter he sat in his shop with Bahram, before the open fire of his furnace, hands extended to keep the fingers warm as they poked out of the glove ends like his little babies, smoking hashish from a long-stemmed pipe and handling it to Bahram occasionally, until the two men sat there watching the coals' film dance over the hot orange underneath. One night, deep in a snowstorm, Iwang went out to get more wood for the fire, and Bahram looked over at a movement and saw an old Chinese woman sitting by the stove, dressed in a red dress, with her hair pulled up in a knot on top of her head. Bahram jerked; the old woman turned her head and looked at him, and he saw her black eyes were filled with stars. He promptly fell off his stool, and groped to his feet to find her no longer there. When Iwang came back in the room and Bahram described her, Iwang shrugged, smiled slyly:

“There's lots of old women in this quarter of the city. This is where the poor people live, among them the widows, who have to sleep in their dead husband's shops on the floor, on the sufferance of the new owners, and do what they can to keep hunger from the door.”

“But the red dress—her face—her eyes!”

“That all sounds like the goddess of the stove, actually. She appears next to the hearth, if you're lucky.”

“I'm not smoking any more of your hashish.”

Iwang laughed. “If only that was all it took!”

Another frosty night, a few weeks later, Iwang knocked on the gate of the compound, and came in greatly excited—drunk, one would have said of another man—a man possessed.

“Look!” he said to Khalid, taking him by his shortened arm and pulling him into the old man's study. “Look, I've figured it out at last.”

“The philosopher's stone?”

“No no! Nothing so trivial! It's the one law, the law above all the others. An equation. See here.”

He got out a slate and chalked on it rapidly, using the alchemical symbols Khalid and he had decided on to mark quantities that were different in different situations.

“Same above, same below, just as Bahram is always saying. Everything is attracted to everything else by precisely this level of attraction. Multiply the two masses attracting each other, divide that by the square of the distance they are apart from each other—multiply by whatever speed away from the central body there might be, and the force of the attraction results. Here—try it with the planets' orbits around the sun, they all work. And they travel in ellipses around the sun, because they all attract each other as well as being pulled down to the sun, so the sun sits at one focus of the ellipse, while the sum of all other attractions make the other focus.” He was sketching furiously as he spoke, as agitated as Bahram had ever seen him. “It explains the discrepancies in the observations out at Ulug Bek. It works for the planets, the stars in their constellations no doubt, and the flight of a cannonball over the Earth, and the movement of those little animalcules in pond water or in our blood!”

Khalid was nodding. “This is the power of gravity itself, portrayed mathematically.”

“Yes.”

“The attraction is in inverse proportion to the square of the distance away.”

“Yes.”

“And it acts on everything.”

“I think so.”

“What about light?”

“I don't know. Light itself must have so little mass. If any. But what mass it has, is being attracted to all other masses. Mass attracts mass.”

“But this,” Khalid said, “is again action at a distance.”

“Yes.” Iwang grinned. “Your universal spirit, perhaps. Acting through some agency we don't know. Thus gravity, magnetism, lightning.”

“A kind of invisible fire.”

“Or perhaps to fire as the tiniest animals are to us. Some subtle force. And yet nothing escapes it. Everything has it. We all live within it.”

“An active spirit in all things.”

“Like love,” Bahram put in.

“Yes, like love,” Iwang agreed for once. “In that without it, all would be dead on Earth. Nothing would attract or repel, or circulate, or change form, or live in any way, but merely lie there, dead and cold.”

And then he smiled, he grinned outright, his smooth shiny Tibetan cheeks dimpled by deep creases, his big horsey teeth gleaming: “And here we are! So it must be, do you see? It all moves—it all lives. And the force acts exactly in inverse proportion to the distance between things.”

Khalid began, “I wonder if this could help us to transmute—”

But the other two men cut him off: “Lead into gold! Lead into gold!” Laughing at him.

“It's all gold already,” Bahram said, and Iwang's eyes suddenly gleamed, it was as if the goddess of the stove had filled him, he pulled Bahram to him and gave him a rough wet woolly hug, humming again.

“You're a good man, Bahram. A very good man you are. Listen, if I believe in your love, can I stay here? Will it be blasphemy to you, if I believe in gravity and love, and the oneness of all things?”