The Years of Rice and Salt

  It was a long walk to Afrasiab Hill, over the old east bridge, up a track through the ruins of the ancient city of Afrasiab, dim but visible in the starlight. The dry night air was lightly scented with verbena and rosemary and mint. Khalid was in good spirits, as always before a demonstration. He saw Paxtakor and the servants taking pulls from a bag of wine and said, “You suck harder than our void pump, be careful or you’ll suck the Buddhist void into existence, and we will all pop into your bag.”

  Up on the flat treeless top of the hill, they stood and waited for Iwang’s crew to reach Shamiana ridge, black against the stars. The peak of Afrasiab Hill, when seen from Shamiana, had the mountains of the Dzhizak Range behind it, so that Iwang would see no stars on top of Afrasiab to confuse him, but merely the black mass of the empty Dzhizaks.

  They had left marker sticks on the hill’s top pointing to the opposite station, and now Khalid grunted impatiently and said, “Let’s see if they’re there yet.”

  Bahram faced Shamiana Ridge and dropped open the box lantern’s door, then waved it back and forth. In a moment they saw the yellow gleam of Iwang’s lantern, perfectly visible just below the black line of the ridge. “Good,” Khalid said. “Now cover.” Bahram pulled up his door, and Iwang’s lantern went dark as well.

  Bahram stood on Khalid’s left. The clock and lantern were set on a folding table, and fixed together in an armature that would open the door of the lantern and start the finger of the clock in one motion. Khalid’s forefinger was on the tab that would stop the clock short. Khalid muttered ‘Now,” and Bahram, his heart pounding absurdly, flicked the armature tab down, and the light on Iwang’s lantern appeared on the Shamiana Ridge in that very same moment. Surprised, Khalid swore and stopped the clock. “Allah preserve us!” he exclaimed. “I was not ready. Let’s do it again.”

  They had arranged to make twenty trials, so Bahram merely nodded while Khalid checked the clock by a shielded second lantern, and had Paxtakor mark down the time, which was two beats and a third.

  They tried it again, and again the light appeared from Iwang the same moment Bahram opened their lantern. Once Khalid became used to the speed of the exchange, the trials all took less than a beat. For Bahram it was as if he was opening the door on the lantern across the valley; it was shocking how fast Iwang was, not to mention the light. Once he even pretended to open the door, pushing lightly then stopping, to see if the Tibetan was perhaps reading his mind.

  “All right,” Khalid said after the twentieth trial. “It’s a good thing we’re only doing twenty. We would get so good we would begin to see theirs before we opened ours.”

  Everyone laughed. Khalid had become snappish during the trials themselves, but now he seemed content, and they were relieved. They made their way down the hill to town talking loudly and drinking from the wine bag, even Khalid, who very seldom drank any more, though it had once been one of his chief pleasures. They had tested their reflexes back in the compound, and so knew that most of their trials had been timed at that very same speed, or faster. “If we throw out the first trial, and average the rest, it’s going to be about the same speed as our procedure itself.”

  Bahram said, “Light must be instantaneous.”

  “Instantaneous motion? Infinite speed? I don’t think Iwang will ever agree to that notion, certainly not as a result of this demonstration alone.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Me? I think we need to be farther apart. But we have demonstrated that light is fast, no doubt of that.”

  They traversed the empty ruins of Afrasiab by taking the ancient city’s main north-south road to the bridge. The servants began to hurry ahead, leaving Khalid and Bahram behind.

  Khalid was humming unmusically, and hearing it, remembering the full pages of the old man’s notebooks, Bahram said, “How is it you are so happy these days, Father?”

  Khalid looked at him, surprised. “Me? I’m not happy.”

  “But you are!”

  Khalid laughed. “My Bahram, you are a simple soul.”

  Suddenly he waved his right wrist with its stump under Bahram’s nose. “Look at this, boy. Look at this! How could I be happy with this? Of course I couldn’t. It’s dishonour, it’s all my stupidity and greed, right there for everyone to see and remember, every day. Allah is wise, even in his punishments. I am dishonoured for ever in this life, and will never be able to recover from it. Never eat cleanly, never clean myself cleanly, never stroke Fedwa’s hair at night. That life is over. And all because of fear, and pride. Of course I’m ashamed, of course I’m angry — at Nadir, the Khan, at myself, at Allah, yes Him too! At all of you! I’ll never stop being angry, never!”

  “Ah,” Bahram said, shocked.

  They walked along a while in silence, through the starlit ruins.

  Khalid sighed. “But look you, youth — given all that — what am I supposed to do? I’m only fifty years old, I have some time left before Allah takes me, and I have to fill that time. And I have my pride, despite all. And people are watching me, of course. I was a prominent man, and people enjoyed watching my fall, of course they did, and they watch still! So what kind of story am I going to give them next? Because that’s what we are to other people, boy, we are their gossip. That’s all civilization is, a giant mill grinding out gossip. And so I could be the story of the man who rode high and fell hard, and had his spirit broken and crawled off into a hole like a dog, to die as soon as he could manage it. Or I could be the story of a man who rode high and fell hard, and then got up defiant, and walked away in a new direction. Someone who never looked back, someone who never gave the mob any satisfaction. And that’s the story I’m going to make them all eat. They can fuck themselves if they want any other kind of a story out of me. I’m a tiger, boy, I was a tiger in a previous existence, I must have been, I dream about it all the time, stalking through trees and hunting things. Now I have my tiger hitched to my chariot, and off we go!” He skimmed his left hand off towards the city ahead of them. “This is the key, youth, you must learn to hitch your tiger to your chariot.”

  Bahram nodded. “Demonstrations to make.”

  “Yes! Yes!” Khalid stopped and gestured up at the spangle of stars. “And this is the best part, boy, the most marvellous thing, because it is all so very damned interesting! It isn’t just something to while away the time, or to get away from this,” waving his stump again, “it’s the only thing that matters! I mean, why are we here, youth? Why are we here?”

  “To make more love.”

  “All right, fair enough. But how do we best love this world Allah gave us? We do it by learning it! It’s here, all of a piece, beautiful every morning, and we go and rub it in the dust, making our khans and our caliphates and such. It’s absurd. But if you try to understand things, if you look at the world and say why does that happen, why do things fall, why does the sun come up every morning and shine on us, and warm the air and fill the leaves with green — how does all this happen? What rules has Allah used to make this beautiful world? Then it is all transformed. God sees that you appreciate it. And even if He doesn’t, even if you never know anything in the end, even if it’s impossible to know, you can still try.”

  “And you’re learning a lot,” Bahram said.

  “Not really. Not at all. But with a mathematician like Iwang on hand, we can maybe work out a few simple things, or make little beginnings to pass on to others. This is God’s real work, Bahram. God didn’t give us this world for us to stand around in it chewing our food like camels. Mohammed himself said, Pursue learning even if it take you to China! And now with Iwang, we have brought China to us. It makes it all the more interesting.”

  “So you are happy, you see? just as I said.”

  “Happy and angry. Happily angry. Everything, all at once. That’s life, boy. You just keep getting fuller, until you burst and Allah takes you and casts your soul into another life later on. And so everything just keeps getting fuller.”

  An early cock crowed on th
e edge of the town. In the sky to the east the stars were winking out. The servants reached Khalid’s compound ahead of them and opened up, but Khalid stopped outside among the great piles of charcoal, looking around with evident satisfaction. “There’s Iwang now,” he said quietly.

  The big Tibetan slouched up to them like a bear, body weary but a grin on his face.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Too fast to measure,” Khalid admitted.

  Iwang grunted.

  Khalid handed him the wine bag, and he took a long swig.

  “Light,” he said. “What can you say?”

  The eastern sky was filling with this mysterious substance or quality. Iwang swayed side to side like a bear dancing to music, as obviously happy as Bahram had ever seen him. The two old men had enjoyed their night’s work. Iwang’s party had had a night of mishaps, drinking wine, getting lost, falling in ditches, singing songs, mistaking other lights for Khalid’s lantern, and then, during the tests, having no idea what kind of times were being registered back on Afrasiab Hill, an ignorance which had struck them as funny. They had become silly.

  But these adventures were not the source of Iwang’s good humour rather it was some train of thought of his own, which had put him under a description, as the sufis said, murmuring things in his own language, hummed deep in his chest. The servants were singing a song for the coming of dawn.

  He said to Khalid and Bahram, “Coming down the ridge I was falling asleep on my feet, and thinking about your demonstration cast me into a vision. Thinking of your light, winking in the darkness across the valley, I thought, if I could see all moments at once, each distinct and alone as the world sailed through the stars, each that little bit different . . . if I moved through each moment as if through different rooms in space, I could map the world’s own travel. Every step I took down the ridge was as it were a separate world, a slice of infinity made up of that step’s world. So I stepped from world to world, step by step, never seeing the ground in the dark, and it seemed to me that if there was a number that would bespeak the location of each footfall, then the whole ridge would be revealed thereby, by drawing a line from one footfall to the next. Our blind feet do it instinctively in the dark, and we are equally blind to the ultimate reality, but we could nevertheless grasp the whole by regular touches. Then we could say this is what is there, or that, trusting that there were no great boulders or potholes between steps, and so the whole shape of the ridge would be known. With every step I walked from world to world.”

  He looked at Khalid. “Do you see what I mean?”

  “Maybe,” Khalid said. “You propose to chart movement with numbers.”

  “Yes, and also the movement within movement, changes in speed, you know, which must always be occurring in this world, as there is resistance or encouragement.”

  “Resistance of air,” Khalid said luxuriously. “We live at the bottom of an ocean of air. It has weight, as the mercury scales have shown. It bears down on us. It carries the beams of the sun to us.”

  “Which warm us,” Bahram added.

  The sun cracked the distant mountains to the east, and Bahram said, “All praise and thanks to Allah for the glorious sun, sign in this world of his infinite love.”

  “And so,” Khalid said, yawning hugely, “to bed.”

  A Demonstration of Flight

  Inevitably, however, all their various activities brought them another visit from Nadir Devanbegi. This time Bahram was in the bazaar, sack over his shoulder, buying melons, oranges, chickens and rope, when Nadir suddenly appeared before him with his personal bodyguard. It was an event Bahram could not regard as a coincidence.

  “Well met, Bahram. I hear you are busy these days.”

  “Always, effendi,” Bahram said, ducking his head. The two bodyguards were eyeing him like falcons, wearing armour and carrying long-barrelled muskets.

  “And these many fine activities must include many undertaken for the sake of Sayyed Abdul Aziz Khan, and the glory of Samarqand?”

  “Of course, effendi.”

  “Tell me about them,” Nadir said. “List them for me, and tell me how each one is progressing.”

  Bahram gulped apprehensively. Of course Nadir had nabbed him in a public place like this because he thought he would learn more from Bahram than from Khalid or Iwang, and more in a public space, where Bahram might be too flustered to prevaricate.

  So he frowned and tried to look serious but foolish, not really much of a stretch at this moment. “They do much that I don’t understand, effendi. But the work seems to fall roughly into the camps of weapons and of fortifications.”

  Nadir nodded, and Bahram gestured at the melon market they were standing beside. “Do you mind?”

  “Not at all,” Nadir said, following him in.

  So Bahram went to the honey and muskmelon trays, and began to lift some onto the scale. He was certainly going to get a good deal for them with Nadir Devanbegi and his bodyguards in the shop!

  “In weapons,” Bahram improvised as he pointed out the red melons to a sullen seller, “we are working on strengthening the metal of cannon barrels, so they can be both lighter and stronger. Then again, we have been conducting demonstrations of the flight of cannonballs in different conditions, with different gunpowders and guns, you know, and recording them and studying the results, so that one would be able to determine where precisely one’s shots would land.”

  Nadir said, “That would be useful indeed. Have they done that?”

  “They are working on it, effendi.”

  “And fortifications?”

  “Strengthening walls,” Bahram said simply. Khalid would be furious to hear of all these promises Bahram was so rashly making, but Bahram did not see any good way out of it, except to make his descriptions as vague as possible, and hope for the best.

  “Of course,” Nadir said. “Please do me the courtesy of arranging one of these famous demonstrations for the court’s edification.” He caught Bahram’s eye to emphasize this was not a casual invitation. “Soon.”

  “Of course, effendi.”

  “Something that will get the Khan’s attention as well. Something exciting to him.”

  “Of course.”

  Nadir gestured with a finger to his men, and they moved off through the bazaar, leaving behind a swirling wake in the press of the crowd.

  Bahram heaved a deep breath, wiped his brow. “Hey there,” he said sternly to the seller, who was slipping a melon off the scale.

  “Not fair,” the seller said.

  “True,” Bahram said, “but a deal’s a deal.”

  The seller couldn’t deny it; in fact he grinned under his moustache as Bahram sighed again.

  Bahram went back to the compound and reported the exchange to Khalid, who growled to hear it, as Bahram knew he would. Khalid finished eating his evening meal in silence, stabbing chunks of rabbit out of a bowl with a small silver prong held in his left hand. He put the prong down and wiped his face with a cloth, rose heavily. “Come to my study and tell me exactly what you said to him.”

  Bahram repeated the conversation as closely as he could, while Khalid spun a leather globe on which he had tried to map the world. Most of it he had left blank, dismissing the claims of the Chinese cartographers he had studied, their golden islands swimming about in the ocean to the east of Nippon, located differently on every map. He sighed when Bahram finished. “You did well,” he said. “Your promises were vague, and they follow good lines. We can pursue them more or less directly, and they may even tell us some things we wanted to know anyway.”

  “More demonstrations,” Bahram said.

  “Yes.” Khalid brightened at the thought.

  In the weeks that followed, the furore of activity in the compound took a new turn. Khalid took out all the cannons he had obtained from Nadir, and the loud booms of the guns filled their days. Khalid and Iwang and Bahram and the gunpowder artisans from the shop fired the big things west of the city on the plain, where they could
relocate the cannonballs, after shots aimed at targets that were very seldom struck.

  Khalid growled, picking up one of the ropes they used to pull the gun back up to the mark. “I wonder if we could stake the gun to the ground,” he said. “Strong ropes, thick stakes . . . it might make the balls fly farther.”

  “We can try it.”

  They tried all manner of things. At the end of the days their ears rang with reverberations, and Khalid took to stuffing them with cotton balls to protect them some little bit.

  Iwang became more and more absorbed in the flights of the cannonballs. He and Khalid conferred over mathematical formulas and diagrams that Bahram did not understand. It seemed to Bahram they were losing sight of the goal of the exercise, and treating the gun merely as a mechanism for making demonstrations of motion, of speed and the change of speed.

  But then Nadir came calling with news. The Khan and his retinue were to visit the next day, to witness improvements and discoveries.

  Khalid spent the entire night awake in his study, making lists of demonstrations to be considered. The next day at noon everyone congregated on the sunny plain beside the Zeravshan River. A big pavilion was set up for the Khan to rest under while he observed events.

  He did so lying on a couch covered with silks, spooning sherbet and talking with a young courtesan more than watching the demonstrations. But Nadir stood by the guns and watched everything very closely, taking the cotton out of his ears to ask questions after every shot.

  “As to fortifications,” Khalid replied to him at one point, “this is an old matter, solved by the Frengis before they died. A cannonball will break anything hard.” He had his men shoot the gun at a wall of dressed stone that they had cemented together. The ball shattered the wall very nicely, and the Khan and his party cheered, although as a matter of fact both Samarqand and Bokhara were protected by sandstone walls much like the one that had just fallen.