The Years of Rice and Salt (35 page)

Theories Without Application Make Trouble

Bahram's days became busier than ever, as was true for everyone in the
compound. Khalid and Iwang continued to debate the ramifications of Iwang's great figure, and to run demonstrations of all kinds, either testing it or investigating matters related to it. But their investigations did little to help Bahram in his work at the forge, it being difficult or impossible to apply the two explorers' esoteric and highly mathematical arguments to the daily effort to make stronger steel or more powerful cannons. To the khan, bigger was better, and he had heard of new cannons of the Chinese emperor that dwarfed even the old giants left stranded in Byzantium by the great plagues of the seventh century. Bahram was trying to match these rumored guns, and finding it hard to cast them, hard to move them, and hard to fire them without causing them to crack. Khalid and Iwang both had suggestions, but these did not work out, and Bahram was left with the same old trial-and-error that metallurgists had used for centuries, always coming back to the idea that if he could only get the molten iron hot enough, and the right mix of feed stocks, then the resulting metal of the cannon would be stronger. So it was a matter of increasing the amount of the river's force applied to the blast furnaces, to create temperatures that turned the melts incandescent white, so brilliant it hurt to look at them. Khalid and Iwang observed the scene at dusk, and argued till dawn about the origins of such vivid light, released out of iron by heat.

All well and good, but no matter how much air they blasted into the charcoal fire, causing the iron to run white as the sun and liquid as water, or even thinner, the cannons that resulted were just as prone to cracks as before. And Nadir would appear, unannounced, aware of even the latest results. Clearly he had his spies in the compound, and did not care if Bahram knew it. Or wanted him to know it. And so he would show up, not pleased. His look would say, More, and quickly!—even as his words reassured them that he was confident they were doing the best they could, that the khan was pleased with the flight tables. He would say, “The khan is impressed by the power of mathematics to stave off Chinese invaders,” and Bahram would nod unhappily, to indicate he had gotten the message even if Khalid had studiously avoided seeing it, and he would hold back from asking after the assurance of an aman for Iwang the following spring, thinking it might be best to trust to Nadir's goodwill at a better time, and go back to the shop to try something else.

A New Metal,
A New Dynasty, A New Religion

Just as a practical matter, then, Bahram was getting interested in a dull gray
metal that looked like lead on the outside and tin on its interior. There was obviously very much sulphur in the mercury—if that whole description of metals could be credited—and it was, at first, so nondescript as to pass notice. But it was proving in various little demonstrations and trials to be less brittle than iron, more ductile than gold, and, in short, a different metal than those mentioned by al-Razi and Ibn Sina, strange though that was to contemplate. A new metal! And it mixed with iron to form a kind of steel that seemed as if it would work well as cannon barrel material.

“How could there be a new metal?” Bahram asked Khalid and Iwang. “And what should it be called? I can't just keep calling it ‘the gray stuff.' ”

“It's not new,” Iwang said. “It was always there among the rest, but we're achieving heats never before reached, and so it expresses out.”

Khalid called it “leadgold” as a joke, but the name stuck for lack of another. And the metal, found now every time they smelted certain bluish copper ores, became part of their armory.

Days passed
in a fever of work. Rumors of war to the east increased. In China, it was said, barbarians were again crashing over the Great Wall, bringing down the rotten Ming dynasty and setting that whole giant off in a ferment of violence that was now rippling outward from it. This time the barbarians came not from Mongolia but Manchuria, northeast of China, and they were the most accomplished warriors ever yet seen in the world, it was said, and very likely to conquer and destroy everything in their path, including Islamic civilization, unless something was done to make a defense against them possible.

So people said in the bazaar, and Nadir too, in his more circuitous way, confirmed that something was happening; and the feeling of danger grew as the winter passed, and the time for military campaigns came around again. Spring, the time for war and for plague, the two biggest arms of six-armed death, as Iwang put it.

Bahram worked through these months as if a great thunderstorm were always visible, just topping the horizon to the east, moving backward against the prevailing winds, portending catastrophe. Such a painful edge this added to the pleasure he took in his little family, and in the larger familial existence of the compound: his son and daughter racing about or fidgeting at prayers, dressed impeccably by Esmerine, and the very politest of children, except when enraged, which both of them had a tendency to become to a degree that astonished both their parents. It was one of their chief topics of conversation, in the depths of the night, when they would stir and Esmerine go out briefly to relieve herself, then return and pull off her shift again, her breasts silvery raindrops spilling down her ribs in the moonlight, over Bahram's hands as he warmed them, in that somnolent world of second-watch sex that was one of the beautiful spaces of daily life, the salvation of sleep, the body's dream, so much warmer and more loving than any other part of the day that it was sometimes hard in the mornings to believe it had really happened, that he and Esmerine, so severe in dress and manner, Esmerine who ran the women at their work as hard as Khalid had at his most tryrannical, and who never spoke to Bahram or looked at him except in the most businesslike way, as was only fitting and proper, had in fact been transported together with him to whole other worlds of rapture, in the depths of the night in their bed. As he watched her work in the afternoons, Bahram thought: love changed everything. They were all just animals after all, creatures God had made not much different from monkeys, and there was no real reason why a woman's breasts should not be like the udders on a cow, swinging together inelegantly as she leaned forward to work at one labor or another; but love made them orbs of the utmost beauty, and the same was true of the whole world. Love put all things under a description, and only love could save them.

In searching for a provenance
for this new “leadgold,” Khalid read through some of the more informative of his old tomes, and he was interested when he came on a passage in Jabir Ibn Hayyam's ancient classic “The Book of Properties,” penned in the first years of the jihad, in which Jabir listed seven metals, namely gold, silver, lead, tin, copper, iron, and kharsini, meaning “Chinese iron”—dull gray, silver when polished, known to the Chinese themselves as paitung, or “white copper.” The Chinese, Jabir wrote, had made mirrors of it capable of curing the eye diseases of those who looked into them. Khalid, whose eyes got weaker every year, immediately set to the manufacture of a little mirror of their own leadgold, just to see. Jabir also suggested kharsini made bells of a particularly melodious tone, and so Khalid had the rest of the quantity they had on hand cast into bells, to see if their tone was especially pretty, which might help secure the identification of the metal. All agreed that the bells tinkled very prettily; but Khalid's eyes did not improve after looking into a mirror of the metal.

“Call it kharsini,” Khalid said. He sighed. “Who knows what it is. We don't know anything.”

But he continued to try various demonstrations, writing voluminous commentaries on each test, through the nights and on to many a sleepless dawn. He and Iwang pursued their studies. Khalid directed Bahram and Paxtakor and Jalil and the rest of his old artisans in the shops to build new telescopes, and microsopes, and pressure gauges, and pumps. The compound had become a place where their skills in metallurgy and mechanical artisanry combined to give them great power to make new things; if they could imagine something, they could make some rude first approximation of it. Every time the old artisans were able to make their molds and tools more exactly, it allowed them to set their tolerances finer still, and thus as they progressed, anything from the intricacies of clockwork to the massive strength of waterwheels or cannon barrels could be improved. Khalid took apart a Persian carpet-making device to study all its little metal pieces, and remarked to Iwang that combined with a rack-and-pinion, the device might be fitted with stamps shaped like letters, instead of threaders, in arrays that could be inked and then pressed against paper, and a whole page thus written all at once, and repeated as many times as one liked, so that books became as common as cannonballs. And Iwang had laughed, and said that in Tibet the monks had carved just such inkblocks, but that Khalid's idea was better.

Meanwhile Iwang worked on his mathematical concerns. Once he said to Bahram, “Only a god could have thought these things in the first place. And then to have used them to embody a world! If we trace even a millionth part of it, we may find out more than any sentient beings have ever known through all the ages, and see plainly the divine mind.”

Bahram nodded uncertainly. By now he knew that he did not want Iwang to convert to Islam. It seemed false to God and to Iwang. He knew it was selfishness to feel so, and that God would take care of it. As indeed it seemed He already had, as Iwang no longer was coming to the mosque on Fridays, or to the religious studies at the ribat. God or Iwang, or both, had taken Bahram's point. Religion could not be faked or used for worldly purposes.

Dragon Bites World

Now when Bahram visited the caravanserai, he heard many disquieting sto
ries from the east. Things were in turmoil, China's new Manchu dynasty was in an expansive temper; the new Manchu emperor, usurper that he was, was not content with the old and fading empire he had conquered, but was determined to reinvigorate it by war, extending his conquests into the rich rice kingdoms to the south, Annam and Siam and Burma, as well as the parched wastelands in the middle of the world, the deserts and mountains separating China from the Dar, crossed by the threads of the Silk Road. After crossing that waste they would run into India, the Islamic khanates, and the Savafid empire. In the caravanserai it was said that Yarkand and Kashgar were already taken—perfectly believable, as they had been defended for decades by the merest remnants of the Ming garrisons, and by bandit warlords. Nothing lay between the khanate of Bokhara and these wastelands but the Tarim basin and the Ferghana mountains, and the Silk Road crossed those in two or three places. Where caravans went, banners could certainly follow.

And soon after that, they did. News came that Manchu banners had taken Torugart Pass, which was the high point of one of the silk routes, between Tashkent and the Takla Makan. Caravan travel from the east would be disrupted for a little while at least, which meant that Samarqand and Bokhara would go from being the centerpoint of the great world exchange, to a largely useless end point. It was a catastrophe for trade.

A final group of caravan people, Armenian, Zott, Jewish, and Hindu, showed up with this news. They had been forced to run for their lives and leave their goods behind. Apparently the Dzungarian Gate, between Xinjiang and the Khazakh steppe, was also about to be taken. As the news raced through the caravanserai ringing Samarqand, most of the caravans resting in them changed their plans. Many decided to return to Frengistan, which though full of petty taifa conflict was at least Muslim entire, its little khanates and emirates and sultanates trading between themselves most of the time, even when fighting.

Such decisions as these would soon cripple Samarqand. As an end point in itself it was nothing, the mere edge of Dar al-Islam. Nadir was worried, and the khan in a rage. Sayyed Abdul Aziz ordered the Dzungarian Gate retaken, and an expedition sent to help defend Khyber Pass, so that trade relations with India at the least would remain secure.

Nadir, accompanied by a heavy guard, described these orders very briefly to Khalid and Iwang. He presented the problem as if it were somehow Khalid's fault. At the end of his visit, he informed them that Bahram and his wife and children were to return with Nadir to the Khanaka in Bokhara. They would be allowed to return to Samarqand only when Khalid and Iwang devised a weapon capable of defeating the Chinese.

“They will be allowed to receive guests at the palace. You are welcome to visit them, or indeed join them there, though I believe your work is best pursued here with all your men and machines. If I thought you would work faster in the palace, I would move you there too, believe me.”

Khalid glared at him, too angry to speak without endangering them all.

“Iwang will move out here with you, as I judge him most useful here. He will be given an extension on his aman in advance, in recognition of his importance to matters of state. Indeed he is forbidden to leave. Not that he could. The wakened dragon to the east has already eaten Tibet. So you are taking on a godly task, one that you can be proud to have been yoked to.”

He spared one glance for Bahram. “We will take good care of your family, and you will take good care of things here. You can live in the palace with them, or here helping the work, whichever you please.”

Bahram nodded, speechless with dismay and fear. “I will do both,” he managed to say, looking at Esmerine and the children.

Nothing was ever normal again.

Many lives change like that—all of a sudden, and forever.