The Years of Rice and Salt

  “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 signalling 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 marvelled. “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, Bon 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 are 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 husbands’ 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 alter, Iwang k
nocked 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 worked 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 Beg. 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 pondwater 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?”

  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 rumoured 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 of 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 got the message even if Khalid had studiously avoided seeing it, and he would hold back from asking after the assurance of an amun for Iwang the following spring, thinking it might be best to trust to Nadir’s good will 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 grey 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 grey 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 lead-gold as a joke, but the stuck name stuck for lack of another. And the metal, found now every time they smelted certain bluish copper ores, became part of their armoury.

  Days passed in a fever of work. Rumours 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 outwards 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 defence 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 backwards 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 tyrannical, 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 forwards to work at one labour 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.