The Years of Rice and Salt

Transmutation

Now it so happened that as the time approached for the great alchemist’s red work to reach its culmination, in the final multiplication, the projection of the sophic hydrolith into the ferment, causing tincture—that is to say, the transmuting of base metals into gold—the son-in-law of the alchemist, one Bahram al-Bokhara, ran and jostled through the bazaar of Samarqand on last-minute errands, ignoring the calls of his various friends and creditors. “I can’t stop,” he called to them, “I’m late!”

“Late paying your debts!” said Divendi, whose coffee stall was wedged into a slot next to Iwang’s workshop.

“True,” Bahram said, but stopped for a coffee. “Always late but never bored.”

“Khalid keeps you hopping.”

“Literally so, yesterday. The big pelican cracked during a descension, and it all spilled right next to me—vitriol of Cyprus mixed with sal ammoniac.”

“Dangerous?”

“Oh my God. Where it splashed on my trousers the cloth was eaten away, and the smoke was worse. I had to run for my life!”

“As always.”

“So true. I coughed my guts out, my eyes ran all night. It was like drinking your coffee.”

“I always make yours from the dregs.”

“I know,” tossing down the last gritty shot. “So are you coming tomorrow?”

“To see lead turned into gold? I’ll be there.”

Iwang’s workshop was dominated by its brick furnace. Familiar sizzle and smell of bellowed fire, tink of hammer, glowing molten glass, Iwang twirling the rod attentively: Bahram greeted the glassblower and silversmith, “Khalid wants more of the wolf.”

“Khalid always wants more of the wolf.” Iwang continued turning his blob of hot glass. Tall and broad and big-faced, a Tibetan by birth, but long a resident of Samarqand, he was one of Khalid’s closest associates. “Did he send payment this time?”

“Of course not. He said to put it on his tab.”

Iwang pursed his lips. “He’s got too many tabs these days.”

“All paid after tomorrow. He finished the seven hundred and seventy-seventh distillation.”

Iwang put down his work and went to a wall stacked with boxes. He handed Bahram a small leather pouch, heavy with small beads of lead. “Gold grows in the earth,” he said. “Al-Razi himself couldn’t grow it in a crucible.”

“Khalid would debate that. And Al-Razi lived a long time ago. He couldn’t get the heat we can now.”

“Maybe.” Iwang was skeptical. “Tell him to be careful.”

“Of burning himself?”

“Of the khan burning him.”

“You’ll be there to see it?”

Iwang nodded reluctantly.

The day of the demonstration came, and for a wonder the great Khalid Ali Abu al-Samarqandi seemed nervous; and Bahram could understand why. If Sayyed Abdul Aziz Khan, ruler of the khanate of Bokhara, immensely rich and powerful, chose to support Khalid’s enterprises, all would be well; but he was not a man you wanted to disappoint. Even his closest advisor, his treasury secretary Nadir Divanbegi, avoided distressing him at all costs. Recently, for instance, Nadir had caused a new caravanserai to be built on the east side of Bokhara, and the khan had been brought out for its opening ceremony, and being a bit inattentive by nature, he had congratulated them for building such a fine madressa; and rather than correct him on the point, Nadir had ordered the complex turned into a madressa. That was the kind of khan Sayyed Abdul Aziz was, and he was the khan to whom Khalid was going to demonstrate the tincture. It was enough to make Bahram’s stomach tight and his pulse fast, and while Khalid sounded as he always did, sharp and impatient and sure of himself, Bahram could see that his face was unusually pale.

But he had worked on the projection for years, and studied all the alchemical texts he could obtain, including many bought by Bahram in the Hindu caravanserai, including “The Book of the End of the Search” by Jildaki, and Jabir’s “Book of Balances,” as well as “The Secret of Secrets,” once thought to be lost, and the Chinese text “Reference Book for the Penetration of Reality”; and Khalid had in his extensive workshops the mechanical capacity to repeat the required distillations at high heat and very good clarities, all seven hundred and seventy-seven times. Two weeks earlier he had declared that his final efforts had borne fruit, and now all was ready for a public demonstration, which of course had to include regal witnesses to matter.

So Bahram hurried around in Khalid’s compound on the northern edge of Samarqand, sprawling by the banks of the Zeravshan River, which provided power to the foundries and the various workshops. The walls of the establishment were ringed by great heaps of charcoal waiting to be burned, and inside there were a number of buildings, loosely grouped around the central work area, a yard dotted with vats and discolored chemical baths. Several different stinks combined to form the single harsh smell that was particular to Khalid’s place. He was the khanate’s principal gunpowder producer and metallurgist, among other things, and these practical enterprises supported the alchemy that was his ruling passion.

Bahram wove through the clutter, making sure the demonstration area was ready. The long tables in the open-walled shops were crowded with an orderly array of equipment; the walls of the shops were neatly hung with tools. The main athanor was roaring with heat.

But Khalid was not to be found. The puffers had not seen him; Bahram’s wife Esmerine, Khalid’s daughter, had not seen him. The house at the back of the compound seemed empty, and no one answered Bahram’s calls. He began to wonder if Khalid had run away in fear.

Then Khalid appeared out of the library next to his study, the only room in the compound with a door that locked.

“There you are,” Bahram said. “Come on, Father, Al-Razi and Mary the Jewess will be no help to you now. It’s time to show the world the thing itself, the projection.”

Khalid, startled to see him, nodded curtly. “I was making the last preparations,” he said. He led Bahram into the furnace shed, where the geared bellows, powered by the waterwheel on the river, pumped air into the roaring fires.

The khan and his party arrived quite late, when much of the afternoon was spent. Twenty horsemen thundered in, their finery gleaming, and then a camel train fifty beasts long, all foaming at the gallop. The khan dismounted from his white bay and walked across the yard with Nadir Divanbegi at his side, and several court officials at their heels.

Khalid’s attempt at a formal greeting, including the presentation of a gift of one of his most cherished alchemical books, was cut short by Sayyed Adbul Aziz. “Show us,” the khan commanded, taking the book without looking at it.

Khalid bowed. “The alembic I used is this one here, called a pelican. The base matter is mostly calcinated lead, with some mercurials. They have been projected by continuous distillation and redistillation, until all the matter has passed through the pelican seven hundred and seventy-seven times. At that point the spirit in the lion—well, to put it in more worldly terms, the gold condenses out at the highest athanor heat. So, we pour the wolf into this vessel, and put that in the athanor, and wait for an hour, stirring meanwhile seven times.”

“Show us.” The khan was clearly bored by the details.

Without further ado Khalid led them into the furnace shed, and his assistants opened the heavy thick door of the athanor, and after allowing the visitors to handle and inspect the ceramic bowl, Kahlid grabbed up tongs and poured the gray distillate into the bowl, and placed the tray in the athanor and slid it into the intense heat. The air over the furnace shimmered as Sayyed Abdul Aziz’s mullah said prayers, and Khalid watched the second hand of his best clock. Every five minutes he gestured to the puffers, who opened the door and pulled out the tray, at which point Khalid stirred the liquid metal, now glowing orange, with his ladle, seven times seven circles, and then back into the heat of the fire. In the last minutes of the operation, the crackle of the charcoal was the only sound in the yard. The sweating observers, including many acquaintances from the town, watched the clock tick out the last minute of the hour in a silence like that of Sufis in a trance of speechlessness, or, Bahram thought uneasily, like hawks inspecting the ground far below.

Finally Khalid nodded to the puffers, and he himself hefted the bowl off the tray with big tongs, and carried it to a table in the yard, cleared for this demonstration. “Now we pour off the dross, great Khan,” paddling the molten lead out of the bowl into a stone tub on the table. “And at the bottom we see—ah…”

He smiled and wiped his forehead with his sleeve, gestured at the bowl. “Even when molten it gleams to the eye.”

At the bottom of the bowl the liquid was a darker red. With a spatula Khalid carefully skimmed off the remaining dross, and there at the bottom of the bowl lay a cooling mass of liquid gold.

“We can pour it into a bar mold while it is still soft,” Khalid said with quiet satisfaction. “It looks to be perhaps ten ounces. That would be one seventh of the stock, as predicted.”

Sayyed Abdul Aziz’s face shone like the gold. He turned to his secretary Nadir Divanbegi, who was regarding the ceramic bowl closely.

Without expression, Nadir gestured for one of the khan’s guards to come forward. The rest of them rustled behind the alchemist’s crew. Their pikes were still upright, but they were now at attention.

“Seize the instruments,” Nadir told the head guard.

Three soldiers helped him take possession of all the tools used in the operation, including the great pelican itself. When they were all in hand, Nadir went to one guard and took up the ladle Khalid had used to stir the liquid metals. In a sudden move he smashed it down on the table. It rang like a bell. He looked over at Sayyed Abdul Aziz, who stared at his secretary, puzzled. Nadir gestured with his head to one of the pikemen, then put the ladle on the table.

“Cut it.”

The pike came down hard, and the ladle was sliced just above its scoop. Nadir picked up the handle and the scoop and inspected them. He showed them to the khan.

“You see—the shaft is hollow. The gold was in the tube inside the handle, and when he stirred, the heat melted the gold, and it slid out and into the lead in the bowl. Then as he continued to stir, it moved to the bottom of the bowl.”

Bahram looked at Khalid, shocked, and saw that it was true. His father-in-law’s face was white, and he was no longer sweating. Already a dead man.

The khan roared wordlessly, then leaped at Khalid and struck him down with the book he had been given. He beat him with the book, and Khalid did not resist.

“Take him!” Sayyed Abdul Aziz shouted at his soldiers. They picked up Khalid by the arms and dragged him through the dust, not allowing him to get to his feet, and threw him over a camel. In a minute they were all gone from the compound, leaving the air filled with smoke and dust and echoing shouts.

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.”

Aristotle Was Wrong

The very next day Khalid ordered the blacksmith apprentices to move every thing in the alchemical shops out into the yard to be destroyed. He had a black and wild look as he watched it all shed dust in the sunlight. Sand baths, water baths, descensory furnaces, stills, cucurbits, flasks, alumbixes, alembics with double or even triple spouts, all stood in a haze of antique dust. The largest battery alembic had last been used for distilling rose water, and seeing it Khalid snorted. “That’s the only thing we could make work. All this stuff, and we made rose water.”

Mortars and pestles, phials, flasks, basins and beakers, glass crystallizing dishes, jugs, casseroles, candle lamps, naphtha lamps, braziers, spatulas, tongs, ladles, shears, hammers, aludels, funnels, miscellaneous lenses, filters of hair, cloth, and linen: finally everything was out in the sun. Khalid waved it all away. “Burn it all, or if it won’t burn, break it up and throw it in the river.”

But just then Iwang arrived, carrying a small glass-and-silver mechanism. He frowned when he saw the display. “Some of this you could at least sell,” he said to Khalid. “Don’t you still have debts?”

“I don’t care,” Khalid said. “I won’t sell lies.”

“It’s not the apparatus that lies,” Iwang said. “Some of this stuff could prove very useful.”

Khalid glared at him blackly. Iwang decided to change the subject, and raised his device to Khalid’s attention. “I brought you a toy that refutes all Aristotle.”

Surprised, Khalid examined the thing. Two iron balls sat in an armature that looked to Bahram like one of the waterwheel trip-hammers in miniature.

“Water poured here will weight the rocker, here, and the two doors are one, and open at the same time. One side can’t open before the other, see?”

“Of course.”

“Yes, obvious, but consider, Aristotle says that a heavier mass will fall faster than a lighter mass, because it has more of the prediliction to join the Earth. But look. Here are the two iron balls, one big and one small, heavy and light. Place them on the doors, set the device level, using a bubble level, high on your outside wall, where there is a good distance to fall. A minaret would be better, the Tower of Death would be better yet, but even from your wall it will work.”

They did as he suggested, Khalid climbing the ladder slowly to inspect the arrangement.

“Now, pour water in the funnel, and watch.”

The water filled the lower basin until the doors suddenly fell open. The two balls fell. They hit the ground at the same time.

“Ho,” Khalid said, and clambered down the ladder to retrieve the balls and try it again, after hefting them, and even weighing them precisely on one of his scales.

“You see?” Iwang said. “You can do it with balls of unequal size or the same size, it doesn’t matter. Everything falls at the same rate, except if it is so light and broad, like a feather, that it floats down on the air.”

Khalid tried it again.

Iwang said, “So much for Aristotle.”

“Well,” said Khalid, looking at the balls, then lofting them in his left hand. “He could be wrong about this and right about other things.”

“No doubt. But everything he says has to be tested, if you ask me, and also compared with what Hsing Ho and Al-Razi say, and the Hindus. Demonstrated to be true or false, in the full light of day.”

Khalid was nodding. “I would have some questions, I admit.”

Iwang gestured at the alchemical equipment in the yard. “It’s the same for all this—you could test them, see what’s useful and what’s not.”

Khalid frowned. Iwang returned his attention to the falling balls. The two men dropped a number of different items from the device, chattering away all the while.

“Look, something has to be bringing them down,” Khalid said at one point. “Bringing them, forcing them, drawing them, what have you.”

“Of course,” said Iwang. “Things happen by causes. An attraction must be caused by an agent, acting according to certain laws. What the agent might be, however…”

“But this is true of everything,” Khalid said, muttering. “We know nothing, that’s what it comes down to. We live in darkness.”

“Too many conjoined factors,” Iwang said.

Khalid nodded, hefting a carved block of ironwood in his hand. “I’m tired of it, though.”

“So we try things. You do something, you get something else. It looks like a causal chain. Describable as a logical sequence, even as a mathematical operation. So that you might say, reality manifests itself thus. Without worrying too much about defining what force it is.”

“Perhaps love is the force,” Bahram offered. “The same attraction as of persons to persons, extended between things in a general way.”

“It would explain how one’s member rises away from the Earth,” Iwang said with a smile.

Bahram laughed, but Khalid said only, “A joke. What I am speaking of could not be less like love. It is as constant as the stars in their places, a physical force.”

“The Sufis say that love is a force, filling everything, impelling everything.”

“The Sufis,” Khalid said scornfully. “Those are the last people on Earth I would consult if I wanted to know how the world works. They moon about love and drink lots of wine and spin themselves. Bah! Islam was an intellectual discipline before the Sufis came along, studying the world as it is, we had Ibn Sina and Ibn Rashd and Ibn Khaldun and all the rest, and then the Sufis appeared and there hasn’t been a single Muslim philosopher or scholar since then who has advanced our understanding of things by a single whit.”

“They have too,” Bahram said. “They’ve made it clear how important love is in the world.”

“Love, oh yes, all is love, God is love, but if everything is love and all is one with Allah, then why do they have to get so drunk every day?”

Iwang laughed. Bahram said, “They don’t really, you know.”

“They do! And the good fellowship halls fill up with good fellows looking for a good time, and the madressas grow emptier, and the khans give them less, and here we are in the year 1020 arguing over the ideas of the ancient Frengis, without a single idea why things act the way they do. We know nothing! Nothing!”

“We have to start small,” Iwang said.

“We can’t start small! Everything is all tied together!”

“Well, then we need to isolate one set of actions that we can see and control, and then study that, and see if we can understand it. Then work onward from there. Something like this falling, just the simplest movement. If we understood movement, we could study its manifestations in other things.”

Khalid thought about that. He had finally stopped dropping things through the device.

“Come here with me,” Iwang said. “Let me show you something that makes me curious.”

They followed him toward the shop containing the big furnaces. “See how you obtain such hot fires now. Your waterworks drive the bellows faster than any number of puffers ever could, and the heat of the fire is accordingly higher. Now, Aristotle says fire is trapped in wood, and released by heat. Fair enough, but why does more air make the fire burn hotter? Why does wind drive a wildfire so? Does it mean air is essential to fire? Could we find out? If we built a chamber in which the air was pulled out by the bellows rather than pushed in, would the fire burn less?”

“Suck air out of a chamber?” Khalid said.

“Yes. Arrange a valve that lets air out but won’t let it back in. Pump out what’s there, and then hold any replacement air out.”

“Interesting! But what would remain in the chamber then?”

Iwang shrugged. “I don’t know. A void? A piece of the original void, perhaps? Ask the lamas about that, or your Sufis. Or Aristotle. Or just make a glass chamber, and look in it.”

“I will,” Khalid said.

“And motion is easiest of all to study,” Iwang said. “We can try all manner of things with motion. We can time this attraction of things to the Earth. We can see if the speed is the same up in the hills and down in the valleys. Things speed up as they fall, and this might be measurable too. Light itself might be measurable. Certainly the angles of refraction are constant, I’ve measured those already.”

Khalid was nodding. “First this reverse bellows, to empty a chamber. Although surely it cannot be a true void that results. Nothingness is not possible in this world, I think. There will be something in there, thinner than air.”

“That is more Aristotle,” Iwang said. “ ‘Nature abhors the void.’ But what if it doesn’t? We will only know when we try.”

Khalid nodded. If he had had two hands he would have been rubbing them together.

The three of them walked out to the waterworks. Here a canal brought a hard flow from the river, its gliding surface gleaming in the morning light. The water powered a mill, which geared out to axles turning a bank of heavy metalworking hammers and stamps, and finally the rotating bellows handles that powered the blast furnaces. It was a noisy place, filled with sounds of falling water, smashed rock, roaring fire, singed air; all the elements raging with transmutation, hurting their ears and leaving a burnt smell in the air. Khalid stood watching the waterworks for a while. This was his achievement, he was the one who had organized all the artisans’ skills into this enormous articulated machine, so much more powerful than people or horses had ever been. They were the most powerful people in all the history of the world, Bahram thought, because of Khalid’s enterprise; but with a wave Khalid dismissed it all. He wanted to understand why it worked.

He led the other two back to the shop. “We’ll need your glassblowing, and my leather and iron workers,” he said. “The valve you mention could perhaps be made of sheep intestines.”

“It might have to be stronger than that,” said Iwang. “A metal gate of some sort, pressed into a leather gasket by the suck of the void.”

“Yes.”

No Jinn in This Bottle

Khalid set his artisans to the task, and Iwang did the glassblowing, and after a few weeks they had a two-parted mechanism: a thick glass globe to be emptied, and a powerful pump to empty it. There were any number of collapses, leaks, and valve failures, but the old mechanists of the compound were ingenious, and attacking the points of failure, they ended up with five very similar versions of the device, all very heavy. The pump was massive and lathed to newly precise fits of plunger, tube, and valves; the glass globes were thick flasks, with necks even thicker, and knobs on the inside surfaces from which objects could be hung, to see what would happen to them when the air in the globe was evacuated. When they solved the leakage problems, they had to build a rack-and-pinion device to exert enough force on the pump to evacuate the final traces of air from the globe. Iwang advised them not to create such a perfect void that they ended up sucking in the pump, the compound, or perchance the whole world, like jinn returning to their confinement; and as always, Iwang’s stone face did not give them any clue as to whether he was joking or serious.

When they had the mechanisms working fairly reliably (occasionally one would still crack its glass, or break a valve), they set one on a wooden frame, and Khalid began a sequence of trials, inserting things in the glass globes, pumping out the air, and seeing what resulted. All philosophical questions on the nature of what remained inside the globe after the air was removed, he now refused to address. “Let’s just see what happens,” he said. “It is what it is.” He kept big blank-paged books on the table beside the apparatus, and he or his clerks recorded every detail of the trials, timing them on his best clock.

After a few weeks of learning the apparatus and trying things, he asked Iwang and Bahram to arrange a small party, inviting several of the qadi and teachers from the madressas in the Registan, particularly the mathematicians and astronomers of Sher Dor Madressa, who were already involved in discussions of ancient Greek and classical caliphate notions of physical reality. On the appointed day, when all those invited had gathered in the open-walled workshop next to Khalid’s study, Khalid introduced the apparatus to them, describing how it worked and indicating what they could all see, that he had hung an alarm clock from a knob inside the glass globe, so that it swung freely at the end of a short length of silk thread. Khalid cranked the piston of the rack-and-pinion down twenty times, working hard with his left arm. He explained that the alarm clock was set to go off at the sixth hour of the afternoon, shortly after the evening prayers would be sung from Samarqand’s northernmost minaret.

“To be sure the alarm is truly sounding,” Khalid said, “we have exposed the clapper, so that you can see it hitting the bells. I will also introduce air back into the globe little by little, after we have seen the first results, so you can hear for yourself the effect.”

He was gruff and direct. Bahram saw that he wanted to distance himself from the portentous, magical style he had affected during his alchemical transmutations. He made no claims, spoke no incantations. The memory of his last disastrous demonstration—his fraud—must have been in his mind, as it was in everyone else’s. But he merely gestured with his hand at the clock, which advanced steadily toward six.

Then the clock began to spin on its thread, and the clapper was visibly smashing back and forth between the little brass bells. But there was no sound coming from the glass. Khalid gestured: “You might think that the glass itself is stopping the sound, but when the air is let back into the flask, you will see that it isn’t so. First I invite you to put your ear to the glass, so you can confirm that there is no sound at all.”

They did so one by one. Then Khalid unscrewed a stopcock that released a valve set in the side of the flask, and a brief penetrating hiss was joined by the muted banging of the alarm, which grew louder quickly, until it sounded much like an alarm heard from an adjoining room.

“It seems there is no sound without air to convey it,” Khalid commented.

The visitors from the madressa were eager to inspect the apparatus, and to discuss its uses in trials of various sorts, and to speculate about what, if anything, remained in the globe when the air was pumped out. Khalid was adamant in his refusal to discuss this question, preferring to talk about what the demonstration seemed to be indicating about the nature of sound and its transmission.

“Echoes might elucidate this matter in another way,” one of the qadis said. He and all the other visiting witnesses were bright-eyed, pleased, intrigued. “Something strikes air, pushes it, and the sound is a shock moving through the air, like waves across water. They bounce back, like waves in water bounce when they strike a wall. It takes time for this movement to cross the intervening space, and thus echoes.”

Bahram said, “With the aid of an echoing cliff we could perhaps time the speed of sound.”

“The speed of sound!” Iwang said. “Very nice!”

“A capital idea, Bahram,” Khalid said. He checked to make sure his clerk was noting all done or said. He unscrewed the stopcock all the way and removed it, so that they all heard the noisy clanging of the alarm as he reached into the flask to turn off the device. It was strange that the clapper should have been so silent before. He rubbed his scalp with his right wrist. “I wonder,” he said, “if we could establish a speed for light too, using the same principle.”

“How would it echo?” Bahram asked.

“Well, if it were aimed at a distant mirror, say… a lantern unveiled, a distant mirror, a clock that one could read very precisely, or start and stop, even better…”

Iwang was shaking his head. “The mirror might have to be very far away to give the recorder time to determine an interval, and then the lantern flash would not be visible unless the mirror were perfectly angled.”

“Make a person the mirror,” Bahram suggested. “When the person on the far hill sees the first lantern light, he reveals his, and a person next to the first person times the appearance of the second light.”

“Very good,” several people said at once. Iwang added, “It may still be too fast.”

“It remains to be seen,” Khalid said cheerfully. “A demonstration will clarify the issue.”

With that Esmerine and Fedwa wheeled in the ice tray and its “demonstration of sherbets” as Iwang termed it, and the crowd fell to, talking happily, Iwang speaking of the thin sound of goraks in the high Himalaya where the air itself was thin, and so on.

The Khan Confronts the Void

So Iwang brought Khalid back out of his black melancholy, and Bahram saw the wisdom of Iwang’s approach to the matter. Every day now, Khalid woke up in a hurry to get things done. The businesses of the compound were given over to Bahram and Fedwa and the old hands heading each of the shops, and Khalid was distracted and uninterested if they came to him with matters of that sort. All his time was taken by conceiving, planning, executing, and recording his demonstrations with the void pump, and later with other equipment and phenomena. They went to the great western city wall at dawn when all was quiet, and timed the sound of wood blocks slapped together and their returning echoes, measuring their distance from the wall with a length of string one third of a li long. Iwang did the calculations, and soon declared that the speed of sound was something like two thousand li an hour, a speed that everyone marveled at. “About fifty times faster than the fastest horse,” Khalid said, regarding Iwang’s figures happily.

“And yet light will be much faster,” Iwang predicted.

“We will find out.”

Meanwhile Iwang was puzzling over the figures. “There remains the question of whether sound slows down as it moves along. Or speeds up for that matter. But presumably it would slow, if it did anything, as the air resisted the shock.”

“Noise gets quieter the farther away it is,” Bahram pointed out. “Maybe it gets quieter rather than slower.”

“But why would that be?” Khalid asked, and then he and Iwang were into a deep discussion of sound, movement, causation, and action at a distance. Quickly Bahram was out of his depth, being no philosopher, and indeed Khalid did not like the metaphysical aspect of the discussion, and concluded as he always did these days: “We will test it.”

Iwang was agreeable. Ruminating over his figures, he said, “We need a mathematics that could deal not only with fixed speeds, but with the speed of the change of a speed. I wonder if the Hindus have considered this.” He often said that the Hindu mathematicians were the most advanced in the world, very far ahead of the Chinese. Khalid had long ago given him access to all the books of mathematics in his study, and Iwang spent many hours in there reading, or making obscure calculations and drawings, on slates with chalk.

The news of their void pump spread, and they frequently met with the interested parties in the madressas, usually the masters teaching mathematics and natural philosophy. These meetings were often contentious, but everyone kept to the ostentatiously formal disputation style of the madressa’s theological debates.

Meanwhile the Hindu caravanserai frequently sheltered booksellers, and these men called Bahram over to have a look at old scrolls, leather-or wood-bound books, or boxes of loose-leaved pages. “Old One-Hand will be interested in what this Brahmagupta has to say about the size of the Earth, I assure you,” they would say, grinning, knowing that Bahram could not judge.

“This one here is the wisdom of a hundred generations of Buddhist monks, all killed by the Mughals.”

“This one is the compiled knowledge of the lost Frengis, of Archimedes and Euclid.”

Bahram would look through the pages as if he could tell, buying for the most part by bulk and antiquity, and the frequent appearance of numbers, especially Hindi numbers, or the Tibetan ticks that only Iwang could decipher. If he thought Khalid and Iwang would be interested, he haggled with a firmness based on ignorance, “Look this isn’t even in Arabic or Hindi or Persian or Sanskrit, I don’t even recognize this alphabet! How is Khalid to make anything of this?”

“Oh, but this is from the Deccan, Buddhists everywhere can read it, your Iwang will be very happy to learn this!”

Or, “This is the alphabet of the Sikhs, their last guru invented an alphabet for them, it’s a lot like Sanskrit, and the language is a form of Punjabi,” and so on. Bahram came home with his finds, nervous at having spent good money on dusty tomes incomprehensible to him, and Khalid and Iwang would inspect them, and either page through them like vultures, congratulating Bahram on his judgment and haggling skills, or else Khalid would curse him for a fool while Iwang stared at him, marveling that he could not identify a Travancori accounting book full of shipping invoices (this was the Deccan volume that any Buddhist could read).

Other attention drawn by their new device was not so welcome. One morning Nadir Divanbegi appeared at the gate with some of the khan’s guards. Khalid’s servant Paxtakor ushered them across the compound, and Khalid, carefully impassive and hospitable, ordered coffee brought to his study.

Nadir was as friendly as could be, but soon came to the point. “I argued to the khan that your life be spared because you are a great scholar, philosopher, and alchemist, an asset to the khanate, a jewel of Samarqand’s great glory.”

Khalid nodded uncomfortably, looking at his coffee cup. He lifted a finger briefly, as if to say, Enough, and then muttered, “I am grateful, Effendi.”

“Yes. Now it is clear that I was right to argue for your life, as word comes to us of your many activities, and wonderful investigations.”

Khalid looked up at him to see if he were being mocked, and Nadir lifted a palm to show his sincerity. Khalid looked down again.

“But I came here to remind you that all these fascinating trials take place in a dangerous world. The khanate lies at the center of all the trade routes in the world, with armies in all directions. The khan is concerned to protect his subjects from attack, and yet we hear of cannon that would reduce our cities’ walls in a week or less. The khan wishes you to help him with this problem. He is sure you will be happy to bring him some small part of the fruits of your learning, to help him to defend the khanate.”

“All my trials are the khan’s,” Khalid said seriously. “My every breath is the khan’s.”

Nadir nodded his acknowledgment of this truth. “And yet you did not invite him to your demonstration with this pump that creates a void in the air.”

“I did not think he would be interested in such a small matter.”

“The khan is interested in everything.”

None of them could tell by Nadir’s face whether he was joking or not.

“We would be happy to display the void pump to him.”

“Good. That would be appreciated. But remember also that he wishes specific help with cannonry, and with defense against cannonry.”

Khalid nodded. “We will honor his wish, Effendi.”

After Nadir was gone, Khalid grumbled unhappily. “Interested in everything! How can he say that and not laugh!” Nevertheless he sent a servant with a formal invitation to the khan, to witness the new apparatus. And before the visit occurred he had the whole compound at work, developing a new demonstration of the pump that he hoped would impress the khan.

When Sayyed Abdul Aziz and his retinue made their visit, the globe that was to hold the void this time was made of two half-globes, one edge mortised to fit the other precisely, with a thin oiled leather gasket placed between the two before the air was pumped out of the space between them, and thick steel braces for each globe, to which ropes could be tied.

Sayyed Abdul sat on his cushions and inspected the two halves of the globe closely. Khalid explained to him: “When the air is removed, the two halves of the globe will adhere together with great strength.” He placed the halves together, pulled them apart; placed them together again, screwed the pump into the one that had the hole for it, and gestured for Paxtakor to wind the pump out and in and out again, ten times. Then he brought the device over to the khan, and invited him to try to pull the two halves of the globe apart.

It could not be done. The khan looked bored. Khalid took the device out to the central yard of the compound, where two teams of three horses each were held waiting. Their draft harnesses were hooked to the two sides of the globe, and the horses led apart until the globe hung in the air between them. When the horses were steadied, still facing away from each other, the horseboys cracked their whips, and the two teams of horses snorted and shoved and skipped as they attempted to pull away; they skittered sideways, shifted, struggled, and all the while the globe hung from the quivering horizontal ropes. The globe could not be pulled apart; even little charges made by the horse teams only brought them up short, staggering.

The khan watched the horses with interest, but the globe he seemed to disregard. After a few minutes of straining, Khalid had the horses stopped, and he unhooked the apparatus and brought it over to the khan and Nadir and their group. When he unscrewed the stopcock, the air hissed back into the globe, and the two halves came apart as easily as slices of an orange. Khalid stripped out the smashed leather gasket. “You see,” he said, “it was the force of the air, or rather the pull of the void, that kept the halves together so strongly.”

The khan got up to leave, and his retainers rose with him. It seemed he was almost falling asleep. “So?” he said. “I want to blow my enemies apart, not hold them together.” With a wave of his hand he left.

Inside the Night, Inside the Light

This unenthusiastic response on the part of the khan worried Bahram. No interest in an apparatus that had fascinated the scholars of the madressa; instead, a command to discover some new weapon or fortification that had eluded the hard search of all the armorers of all the ages. And if they failed, the possible punishments were only too easy to imagine. Khalid’s absent hand mocked them from its own kind of void. Khalid would stare at the end of his wrist and say, “Someday all of me will look like you.”

Now he merely looked around the compound. “Tell Paxtakor to obtain new cannon from Nadir for testing. Three at each weight, and all manner of powder and shot.”

“We have powder here.”

“Of course.” A withering glare: “I want to see what they have that is not ours.”

In the days that followed, he revisited all the old buildings of the compounds, the ones he and his old ironmongers had built when they were first making guns and gunpowder for the khan. In those days, before he and his men had followed the Chinese system and connected the power of their waterwheel to the furnaces, making their first river-powered blast furnaces and freeing up their crew of young puffers for other work, everything had been small and primitive, the iron more brittle, everything they made rougher, bulkier. The buildings themselves showed it. Now the gears of the waterwheels whirred with all the power of the river, pouring into the bellows and roaring as fire. The chemical pits steamed lemon and lime in the sun, and the puffers packed boxes and ran camels and moved immense mounds of charcoal around the yards. Khalid shook his head at the sight of it all, and made a new gesture, a kind of sweep and punch with his ghost hand. “We need better clocks. We can only make progress if our measurement of time is more exact.”

Iwang puffed his lips when he heard this. “We need more understanding.”

“Yes, yes, of course. Who could dispute that in this miserable world. But all the wisdom of the ages cannot tell us how long it takes flashpowder to ignite a charge.”

When the days ended the great compound fell silent, except for the grinding of the watermill on the canal. After the resident workers had washed and eaten and said their last prayers of the day, they went to their apartments at the river end of the compound, and fell asleep. The town workers went home.

Bahram dropped onto his bed beside Esmerine, across the room from their two small children, Fazi and Laila. Most nights he was out as soon his head hit the silk of his pillow, exhausted. Blessed slumber.

But often he and Esmerine woke sometime after midnight, and sometimes they lay there breathing, touching, whispering conversations that were usually brief and disjointed, other times the longest and deepest conversations they ever had; and if ever they were to make love, now that the children were there to exhaust Esmerine, it would be in the blessed cool and quiet of these midnight hours.

Afterward Bahram might get up and walk around the compound, to see it in moonlight and check that all was well, feeling the afterglow of love pulse in him; and usually on these occasions he would see the lamplight in Khalid’s study, and pad by to find Khalid slumped over a book, or scribbling left-handed at his writing stand, or recumbent on his couch, in murmured conversation with Iwang, both of them holding tubes of a narghile wreathed by the sweet smell of hashish. If Iwang was there and the men seemed awake, Bahram would sometimes join them for a while, before he got sleepy again and returned to Esmerine. Khalid and Iwang might be speaking of the nature of motion, or the nature of vision, sometimes holding up one of Iwang’s lenses to look through as they talked. Khalid held the position that the eye received small impressions or images of things, sent through the air to it. He had found many an old philosopher, from China to Frengistan, who held the same view, calling the little images “eidola” or “simulacra” or “species” or “image” or “idol” or “phantasm” or “form” or “intention” or “passion” or “similitude of the agent,” or “shadow of the philosophers,” a name that made Iwang smile. He himself believed the eye sent out projections of a fluid as quick as light itself, which returned to the eye like an echo, with the contours of objects and their colors intact.

Bahram always maintained that none of these explanations was adequate. Vision could not be explained by optics, he would say; sight was a matter of spirit. The two men would hear him out, then Khalid would shake his head. “Perhaps optics are not sufficient to explain it, but they are necessary to begin an explanation. It’s the part of the phenomenon that can be tested, you see, and described mathematically, if we are clever enough.”

The cannon arrived from the khan, and Khalid spent part of every day out on the bluff over the curve in the river, shooting them off with old Jalil and Paxtakor; but by far the bulk of his time was spent thinking about optics and proposing tests to Iwang. Iwang returned to his shop, blowing thick glass balls with cut sides, mirrors concave and convex, and big, perfectly polished triangular rods, which were for him objects of almost religious reverence. He and Khalid spent afternoon hours in the old man’s study with the door closed, having made a little hole in the south wall letting in a chink of light. They put the prism over the hole, and its straight rainbow shone on the walls or a screen they set up. Iwang said there were seven colors, Khalid six, as he called Iwang’s purple and lavender two parts of the same color. They argued endlessly about everything they saw, at least at first. Iwang made diagrams of their arrangement that gave the precise angles each band of color bent as it went through the prism. They held up glass balls and wondered why the light did not fractionate in these balls as it did in the prism, when everyone could see that a sky full of minuscule clear balls, that is to say, raindrops, hit by low afternoon sunlight, created the towering rainbows that hung east of Samarqand after a rainshower had passed. Many a time when black storms had passed over the city, Bahram stood outside with the two older men observing some truly beautiful rainbows, often double rainbows, a lighter one arched over the brighter one—and sometimes even a third very faint one above that. Eventually Iwang worked up a law of refraction which he assured Khalid would account for all the colors. “The primary rainbow is produced by a refraction as the light enters the raindrop, an internal reflection at the back surfaces, and a second refraction out of the raindrop. The secondary bow is created by light reflected two or three times inside the raindrops. Now look you, each color has its own index of refraction, and so to bounce around inside the raindrop is to separate each color out from the others, with them appearing to the eye always in their correct sequence, reversed in the secondary because there is an extra bounce making it upside down, as in my drawing here, see?”

“So if raindrops were crystalline, there would be no rainbows.”

“That’s right, yes. That’s snow. If there was only reflection, the sky might sparkle everywhere with white light, as if filled with mirrors. Sometimes you see that in a snowstorm too. But the roundness of raindrops means there is a steady change in the angle of incidence between zero and ninety degrees, and that spreads the different rays to an observer here, who must always stand at an angle from forty to forty-two degrees off from the incoming sunlight. The secondary one appears when the angle is between fifty and a half degrees and fifty-four and a half. See, the geometry predicts the angles, and out here we measure, using this wonderful sky viewer Bahram found for you at the Chinese caravanserai, and it confirms, as precisely as hand can hold, the mathematical prediction!”

“Well, of course,” Khalid said, “but that’s circular reasoning. You get your angles of incidence by observation of a prism, then confirm the angles in the sky by more observation.”

“But one was colors on the wall, the other rainbows in the sky!”

“As above, so below.” This of course was a truism of the alchemists, so there was a dark edge to Khalid’s comment.

The current rainbow was waning as a cloud in the west blocked the sun. The two old men did not notice, however, absorbed as they were in their discussion. Bahram alone was left to enjoy the vibrant colors arcing across the sky, Allah’s gift to show that he would never again drown the world. The two men jabbed fingers at Iwang’s chalkboard and Khalid’s sky device.

“It’s leaving,” Bahram said, and they looked up, slightly annoyed to be interrupted. While the rainbow had been bright, the sky under it had been distinctly lighter than the sky over it; now the inside and outside were the same shade of slate blue again.

The rainbow left the world, and they squelched back to the compound, Khalid cheering up with every step, many of them landing right in puddles, as he was still staring at Iwang’s chalkboard.

“So—so—well. I must admit, it is as neat as a proof of Euclid. Two refractions, two or three reflections—rain and sun, an observer to see—and there you have it! The rainbow!”

“And light itself, divisible into a banding of colors,” Iwang mused, “traveling all together out of the sun. So bright it is! And when it strikes anything at all, it bounces off and into an eye, if there be an eye to see it, and whatever part of the band, hmm, how would that work… are the surfaces of the world all variously rounded, if you could but look at them close enough…”

“It’s a wonder things don’t change color when you move,” Bahram said, and the other two went silent, until Khalid started laughing.

“Another mystery! Allah preserve us! They will just keep coming forever, until we are one with God.”

This thought appeared to please him immensely.

He set up a permanent dark room in the compound, all boarded and draped until it was much darker than his study had been, with shuttered chinks in the east wall that could let in small shafts of light, and many a morning he was in there with assistants, running in and out, arranging demonstrations one way or another. With one he was pleased enough to invite the scholars of the Sher Dor Madressa to witness it, because it so neatly refuted Ibn Rashd’s contention that white light was whole, and the colors created by a prism an effect of the glass. If this were so, Khalid argued, then light twice bent would change color twice. To test this, his assistants allowed sunlight in through the wall, and a first prism’s array was spread across a screen in the center of the room. Khalid himself opened an aperture in the screen small enough only to allow the red part of the little rainbow through it, into a draped closet where it immediately encountered another prism, directing it onto another screen inside the closet.

“Now, if the bend of refraction caused by itself the change in color, surely the red band would change at this second refraction. But look: it remains red. Each of the colors holds when put through a second prism.” He moved the aperture slowly from color to color, to demonstrate. His guests crowded around the door of the closet, examining the results closely.

“What does this mean?” one asked.

“Well, this you must help me with, or ask Iwang. I am no philosopher, myself. But I think it proves the change in color is not just a matter of bending per se. I think it shows sunlight, white light if you will, or full light, or simply sunlight, is composed of all the individual colors traveling together.”

The witnesses nodded. Khalid ordered the room opened up, and they retired blinking into the sun to have coffee and cakes.

“This is wonderful,” Zahhar, one of Sher Dor’s senior mathematicians said, “very illuminating, so to speak. But what does it tell us about light, do you think? What is light?”

Khalid shrugged. “God knows, but not men. I think only that we have clarified, so to speak, some of light’s behavior. And that behavior has a geometrical aspect. It seems regulated by number, you see. As do so many things in this world. Allah appears to like mathematics, as you yourself have often said, Zahhar. As for the substance of light, what a mystery! It moves quickly, how quickly we do not know; it would be good to find out. And it is hot, as we know by the sun. And it will cross a void, if indeed there is any such thing as a void in this world, in a way that sound will not. It could be that the Hindus are right and there is another element besides earth, fire, air and water, an ether so fine we do not see it, that fills the universe to a plenum and is the medium of movement. Perhaps little corpuscles, bouncing off whatever they strike, as in a mirror, but usually less directly. Depending on what it strikes, a particular color band is reflected into the eye. Perhaps.” He shrugged. “It is a mystery.”

The Madressas Weigh In

The color demonstrations caused a great deal of discussion and debate in the madressas, and Khalid learned during this period never to speak of causes in any opinionated way, or to impinge on the realm of the madressa scholars by speaking of Allah’s will, or any other aspect of the nature of reality. He would only say, “Allah gave us our intelligence to better understand the glory of his work,” or, “The world often works mathematically. Allah loves numbers, and mosquitoes in springtime, and beauty.”

The scholars went away amused, or irritated, but in any case in a ferment of philosophy. The madressas of Registan Square and elsewhere in the city, and out at Ulug Bek’s old observatory, were buzzing with the new fashion of making demonstrations of various physical phenomena, and Khalid’s was not the only mechanical workshop that could build an ever more complex array of new machines and devices. The mathematicians of Sher Dor Madressa, for instance, interested everyone with a surprising new mercury scale, simple to construct—a bowl containing a pool of mercury, with a narrow tube of mercury, sealed at the top but not the bottom, set upright in the liquid in the bowl. The mercury in the tube dropped a certain distance, creating another mysterious void in the gap left at the top of the tube; but the remainder of the tube stayed filled with a column of mercury. The Sher Dor mathematicians asserted that it was the weight of the world’s air on the mercury in the bowl that pushed down on it enough to keep the mercury in the cylinder from falling all the way down into the bowl. Others maintained it was the disinclination of the void in the top of the tube to grow. Following a suggestion of Iwang’s, they took their device to the top of Snow Mountain, in the Zeravshan Range, and all there saw that the level of mercury in the tube had dropped, presumably because there was less weight of air on it up there, two or three thousand hands higher than the city. This was a great support for Khalid’s previous contention that air weighed on them, and a refutation of Aristotle, and al-Farabi and the rest of the Aristotelian Arabs, who claimed that the four elements want to be in their proper places, high or low. This claim Khalid openly ridiculed, at least in private. “As if stones or the wind could want to be someplace or other, as a man does. It’s really nothing but circular definition again. ‘Things fall because they want to fall,’ as if they could want. Things fall because they fall, that’s all it means. Which is fine, no one knows why things fall, certainly not me, it is a very great mystery. All the seeming cases of action at a distance are a mystery. But first we must say so, we must distinguish the mysteries as mysteries, and proceed from there, demonstrating what happens, and then seeing if that leads us to any thoughts concerning the how or the why.”

The Sufi scholars were still inclined to extrapolate from any given demonstration to the ultimate nature of the cosmos, while the mathematically inclined were fascinated by the purely numerical aspects of the results, the geometry of the world as it was revealed. These and other approaches combined in a burst of activity, consisting of demonstrations and talk, and private work on slates over mathematical formulations, and artisanal labor on new or improved devices. On some days it seemed to Bahram that these investigations had filled all Samarqand: Khalid’s compound and the others, the madressas, the ribat, the bazaars, the coffee stalls, the caravanserai, where the traders would take the news out to all the world… it was beautiful.

The Chest of Wisdom

Out beyond the western wall of the city, where the old Silk Road ran toward Bokhara, the Armenians were quiet in their little caravanserai, tucked beside the large and raucous Hindu one. The Armenians were cooking in the dusk over their braziers. Their women were bareheaded and bold-eyed, laughing among themselves in their own language. Armenians were good traders, and yet reclusive for all that. They trafficked only in the most expensive goods, and knew everything about everywhere, it seemed. Of all the trading peoples, they were the most rich and powerful. Unlike the Jews and Nestorians and Zott, they had a little homeland in the Caucasus to which most of them regularly returned, and they were Muslim, most of them, which gave them a tremendous advantage across Dar al-Islam—which was to say all the world, except for China, and India below the Deccan. Rumors that they only pretended to be Muslim, and were secretly Christians all the while, struck Bahram as envious backstabbing by other traders, probably the tricky Zott, who had been cast out of India long before (some said Egypt), and now wandered the world homeless, and did not like the Armenians’ inside position in so many of the most lucrative markets and products.

Bahram wandered among their fires and lamplight, stopping to chat and accept a swallow of wine with familiars of his, until an old man pointed out the bookseller Mantuni, even older, a wizened hunchbacked little man who wore spectacles that made his eyes appear the size of lemons. His Turkic was basic and heavily accented, and Bahram switched to Persian, which Mantuni acknowledged with a grateful dip of the head. The old man indicated a wooden box on the ground, filled entirely with books he had obtained for Khalid in Frengistan. “Will you be able to carry it?” he asked Bahram anxiously.

“Sure,” Bahram said, but he had his own worry: “How much is this going to cost?”

“Oh no, it’s already paid for. Khalid sent me off with the funds, otherwise I would not have been able to afford to buy these. They’re from an estate sale in Damascus, a very old alchemical family that came to an end with a hermit who had no issue. See here, Zosimos’ ‘Treatise on Instruments and Furnaces,’ printed just two years ago, that’s for you. I’ve got the rest arranged chronologically by date of composition, as you can see, here is Jabir’s ‘Sum of Perfection,’ and his ‘Ten Books of Rectification,’ and look, ‘The Secret of Creation.’ ”

This was a huge sheepskin-bound volume. “Written by the Greek Apollonius. One of its chapters is the fabled ‘Emerald Table,’ ” tapping its cover delicately. “That chapter alone is worth twice what I paid for this whole collection, but they didn’t know. The original of ‘The Emerald Table’ was found by Sara the wife of Abraham, in a cave near Hebron, sometime after the Great Flood. It was inscribed on a plate of emerald, which Sara found clasped in the hands of the mummified corpse of Thrice-greatest Hermes, the father of all alchemy. The writing was in Phoenician characters. Although I must admit I have read other accounts that have it discovered by Alexander the Great. In any case here it is, in an Arabic translation from the time of the Baghdad caliphate.”

“Fine,” Bahram said. He wasn’t sure Khalid would still be interested in this stuff.

“You will also find ‘The Complete Biographies of the Immortals,’ a rather slender volume, considering, and ‘The Chest of Wisdom,’ and a book by a Frengi, Bartholomew the Englishman, ‘On the Properties of Things,’ also ‘The Epistle of the Sun to the Crescent Moon,’ and ‘The Book of Poisons,’ perhaps useful, and ‘The Great Treasure,’ and ‘The Document Concerning the Three Similars,’ in Chinese—”

“Iwang will be able to read that,” Bahram said. “Thank you.” He tried to pick up the box. It was as if filled with rocks, and he staggered.

“Are you sure you’ll be able to get it back to the city, and safely?”

“I’ll be fine. I’m going to take them to Khalid’s, where Iwang has a room for his work. Thanks again. I’m sure Iwang will want to call on you to talk about these, and perhaps Khalid too. How long will you be in Samarqand?”

“Another month, no more.”

“They’ll be out to talk to you about these.”

Bahram hiked along with the box balanced on his head. He took breaks from time to time to give his head a break, and fortify himself with more wine. By the time he got back to the compound it was late and his head was swimming, but the lamps were lit in Khalid’s study, and Bahram found the old man in there reading and dropped the box triumphantly before him.

“More to read,” he said, and collapsed on a chair.

The End of Alchemy

Shaking his head at Bahram’s drunkenness, Khalid began going through the box, whistling and chirping. “Same old crap,” he said at one point. Then he pulled one out and opened it. “Ah,” he said, “a Frengi text, translated from Latin to Arabic by an Ibn Rabi of Nsara. Original by one Bartholomew the Englishman, written sometime in the sixth century. Let’s see what he has to say, hmm, hmm…” He read with the forefinger of his left hand leading his eyes on a rapid chase over the pages. “What! That’s Ibn Sina direct!… And this too!” He looked up at Bahram. “The alchemical sections are taken right out of Ibn Sina!”

He read on, laughed his brief unamused laugh. “Listen to this! ‘Quicksilver,’ that’s mercury, ‘is of so great virtue and strength, that though thou do a stone of an hundred pound weigh upon quicksilver of the weight of two pounds, the quicksilver anon withstandeth the weight.’ ”

“What?”

“Have you ever heard such nonsense. If he was going to speak of measures of weight at all, you’d think he would have the sense to understand them.”

He read on. “Ah,” he said after a while. “Here he quotes Ibn Sina directly. ‘Glass, as Avicenna saith, is among stones as a fool among men, for it taketh all manner of color and painting.’ Spoken by a very mirror glass of a man… Ha… Look, here is a story that could be about our Sayyed Abdul Aziz. ‘Long time past, there was one that made glass pliant, which might be amended and wrought with an hammer, and brought a vial made of such glass before Tiberius the Emperor, and threw it down on the ground, and it was not broken, but bent and folded. And he made it right and amended it with a hammer,’ We must demand this glass from Iwang! ‘Then the Emperor commanded to smite off his head anon, lest that this craft were known. For then gold should be no better than clay, and all other metal should be of little worth, for certain if glass vessels were not brittle, they should be accounted of more value than vessels of gold,’ that’s a curious proposition. I suppose glass was rare in his time.” He stood up, stretched, sighed. “Tiberiuses, on the other hand, will always be common.”

Most of the other books he paged through quickly and dropped back in the box. He did go through “The Emerald Table” page by page, enlisting Iwang, and later some of the Sher Dor mathematicians, to help him test every sentence in it that contained any tangible suggestion for action in the shops, or out in the world at large. They agreed in the end that it was mostly false information, and that what was true in it was the most trivial of commonplace observations in metallurgy or natural behavior.

Bahram thought this might be a disappointment to Khalid, but in fact, after all that had passed, he actually seemed pleased at these results, even reassured. Suddenly Bahram understood: Khalid would have been shocked if something magical had occurred, shocked and disappointed, for that would have rendered irregular and unfathomable the very order that he now assumed must exist in nature. So he watched all the tests fail with grim satisfaction, and put the old book containing the wisdom of Hermes Trimestigus high on a shelf with all its brethren, and ignored them from then on. After that it was only his blank books that he cared about, filling them immediately after his demonstrations, and later through the long nights; they lay open everywhere, mostly on the tables and floors of his study. One cold night when Bahram was out for a walk around the compound, he went into Khalid’s study and found the old man asleep on his couch, and he pulled a blanket over him and snuffed most of the lamps, but by the light of the one left burning, he looked at the big books open on the floor. Khalid’s left-handed writing was jagged to the point of illegibility, a private code, but the little sketched drawings were rather fine in their abrupt way: a cross section of an eyeball, a big cart, bands of light, cannonball flights, bird’s wings, gearing systems, lists of many varieties of damasked steel, athanor interiors, thermometers, altimeters, clockworks of all kinds, little stick figures fighting with swords or hanging from giant spirals like linden seeds, leering nightmare faces, tigers couchant or rampant, roaring at the scribbles from the margins.

Too cold to look at any more pages, Bahram stared at the sleeping old man, his father-in-law whose brain was so crowded. Strange the people who surround us in this life. He stumbled back to bed and the warmth of Esmerine.

The Speed of Light

The many tests of light in a prism brought back to Khalid the question of how fast it moved, and despite the frequent visits from Nadir or his minions, he could only speak of making a demonstration to determine this speed. Finally he made his arrangements for a test of the matter: they were to divide into two parties, with lanterns in hand, and Khalid’s party would bring along his most accurate timing clock, which now could be stopped instantly with the push of a lever that blocked its movement. A preliminary trial had determined that during the dark of the moon, the biggest lanterns’ light could be seen from the top of Afrasiab Hill to the Shamiana Ridge, across the river valley, about ten li as the crow flies. Using small bonfires blocked and unblocked by rugs would no doubt have extended the maximum distance visible, but Khalid did not think it would be necessary.

They therefore went out at midnight during the next dark of the moon, Bahram with Khalid and Paxtakor and several other servants to Afrasiab Hill, Iwang and Jalil and other servants to the Shamiana Ridge. Their lanterns had doors that would drop open in an oiled groove at a speed they had timed, and was as close to an instantaneous reply as they could devise. Khalid’s team would reveal a light and start the clock; when Iwang’s team saw the light, they would open their lantern, and when Khalid’s team saw its light, they would stop the clock. A very straightforward test.

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 were 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 gotten 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 anymore, 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 dishonor, 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 dishonored forever 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 toward 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 marvelous 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 figure 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. Muhammad 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 like 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 the 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 funny. They had gotten silly.

But these adventures were not the source of Iwang’s good humor—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 Divanbegi. 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 armor and carrying long-barreled 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 Divanbegi 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 furor of activity in the compound took a new turn. Khalid took out all the cannon 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.

“Now,” Khalid said. “See what happens when a ball of the same size, from the same gun loaded with the same charge, strikes the next target.”

This was an earthen mound, dug at great effort by Khalid’s ex-puffers. The gun was fired, the acrid smoke cleared; the earthen mound stood unchanged, except for a barely visible scar at its center.

“The cannonball can do nothing. It merely sinks into the dirt and is swallowed up. A hundred balls would make no difference to such a wall. They would merely become part of it.”

The khan heard this and was not amused. “You’re suggesting we pile dirt all around Samarqand? Impossible! It would be too ugly! The other khans and emirs would laugh at us. We cannot live like ants in an anthill!”

Khalid turned to Nadir, his face a polite blank.

“Next?” Nadir said.

“Of course. Now see, we have determined that at the distances a gun can cast a ball, it cannot shoot straight. The balls are tumbling through the air, and they can spin off in any direction, and they do.”

“Surely air cannot offer any significant resistance to iron,” Nadir said, sweeping a hand in illustration.

“Only a little resistance, it is true, but consider that the ball passes through more than two lis of air. Think of air as a kind of thinned water. It certainly has an effect. We can see this better with light wooden balls of the same size, thrown by hand so you can still see their movement. We will throw into the wind, and you can see how the balls dart this way and that.”

Bahram and Paxtakor palmed the light wooden balls off, and they veered into the wind like bats.

“But this is absurd!” the khan said. “Cannonballs are much heavier, they cut through the wind like knives through butter!”

Khalid nodded. “Very true, great Khan. We only use these wooden balls to exaggerate an effect that must act on any object, be it heavy as lead.”

“Or gold,” Sayyed Abdul Aziz joked.

“Or gold. In that case the cannonballs veer only slightly, but over the great distances they are cast, it becomes significant. And so one can never say exactly what the balls will hit.”

“This must ever be true,” Nadir said.

Khalid waved his stump, oblivious for the moment of how it looked. “We can reduce the effect quite a great deal. See how the wooden balls fly if they are cast with a spin to them.”

Bahram and Paxtakor threw the balsam balls with a final pull of the fingertips to impart a spin to them. Though some of these balls curved in flight, they went farther and faster than the palmed balls had. Bahram hit an archery target with five throws in a row, which pleased him greatly.

“The spin stabilizes their flight through the wind,” Khalid explained. “They are still pushed by the wind, of course. That cannot be avoided. But they no longer dart unexpectedly when they are caught on the face by a wind. It is the same effect you get by fletching arrows to spin.”

“So you propose to fletch cannonballs?” the khan inquired with a guffaw.

“Not exactly, Your Highness, but yes, in effect. To try to get the same kind of spin. We have tried two different methods to achieve this. One is to cut grooves into the balls. But this means the balls fly much less far. Another is to cut the grooves into the inside of the gun barrel, making a long spiral down the barrel, only a turn or a bit less down the whole barrel’s length. This makes the balls leave the gun with a spin.”

Khalid had his men drag out a smaller cannon. A ball was fired from it, and the ball tracked down by the helpers standing by, then marked with a red flag. It was farther away than the bigger gun’s ball, though not by much.

“It is not distance so much as accuracy that would be improved,” Khalid explained. “The balls would always fly straight. We are working up tables that would enable one to choose the gunpowder by type and weight, and weigh the balls, and thus, with the same cannons, of course, always send the balls precisely where one wanted to.”

“Interesting,” Nadir said.

Sayyed Abdul Aziz Khan called Nadir to his side. “We’re going back to the palace,” he said, and led his retinue to the horses.

“But not that interesting,” Nadir said to Khalid. “Try again.”

Better Gifts for the Khan

“I suppose I should make the khan a new suit of damasked armor,” Khalid said afterward. “Something pretty.”

Iwang grinned. “Do you know how to do it?”

“Of course. It’s watered steel. Not very mysterious. The crucible charge is an iron sponge called a wootz, forged into an iron plate together with wood, which yields its ash into the mix, and some water too. Some crucibles are placed in the furnace, and when they are melted their contents are poured into molten cast iron, at a temperature below that of complete fusion of the two elements. The resulting steel is then etched with a mineral sulfate of one kind or another. You get different patterns and colors depending on which sulfate you use, and what kind of wootz, and what kind of temperatures. This blade here”—he rose and took down a thick curved dagger with an ivory handle, and a blade covered with a dense pattern of cross-hatchings in white and dark gray—“is a good example of the etching called ‘Muhammad’s Ladder.’ Persian work, reputed to be from the forge of the alchemist Jundi-Shapur. They say there is alchemy in it.” He paused, shrugged.

“And you think the khan…”

“If we systematically played with the composition of the wootz, the structure of the cakes, the temperatures, the etching liquid, then we would certainly find some new patterns. I like some of the swirls I’ve gotten with very woody steel.”

The silence stretched out. Khalid was unhappy, that was clear.

Bahram said, “You could treat it as a series of tests.”

“As always,” Khalid said, irritated. “But in this case you can only do things in ignorance of their causes. There are too many materials, too many substances and actions, all mixed together. I suppose it is all happening at a level too small to see. The breaks you see after the casting look like crystalline structures when they are broken. It’s interesting, what happens, but there’s no way to tell why, or predict it ahead of time. This is the thing about a useful demonstration, you see. It tells you something distinct. It answers a question.”

“We can try to ask questions that steelwork can answer,” Bahram suggested.

Khalid nodded, still dissatisfied. But he glanced at Iwang to see what he thought of this.

Iwang thought it was a good idea in theory, but in practice, he too had a hard time coming up with questions to ask about the process. They knew how hot to make the furnace, what ores and wood and water to introduce, how long to mix it, how hard it would turn out. All questions on the matter of practice were long since answered, ever since damasking had been done in Damascus. More basic questions of cause, which yet could be answered, were hard to formulate. Bahram himself tried mightily, without a single idea coming to him. And good ideas were his strength, or so they always told him.

While Khalid worked on this problem, Iwang was getting terrifically absorbed in his mathematical labors, to the exclusion even of his glassblowing and silversmithing, which he left mostly to his new apprentices, huge gaunt Tibetan youths who had appeared without explanation some time before. He pored over his Hindi books and old Tibetan scrolls, marking up his chalk slates and then adding to the notes he saved on paper: inked diagrams, patterns of Hindi numerals, Chinese or Tibetan or Sanskrit symbols or letters; a private alphabet for a private language, or so Bahram thought. A rather useless enterprise, disturbing to contemplate, as the paper sheets seemed to radiate a palpable power, magical or perhaps just mad. All those foreign ideas, arranged in hexagonal patterns of number and ideogram; to Bahram the shop in the bazaar began to seem the dim cave of a magus, fingering the hems of reality…

Iwang himself brushed all these cobwebs aside. Out in the sun of Khalid’s compound he sat down with Khalid, and Zahhar and Tazi from Sher Dor, and with Bahram shading them and looking over their shoulders, he outlined a mathematics of motion, what he called the speed-of-the-speed.

“Everything is moving,” he said. “That is karma. The Earth revolves around the Sun, the Sun travels through the stars, the stars too travel. But for the sake of study here, for demonstrations, we postulate a realm of nonmovement. Perhaps some such motionless void contains the universe, but it doesn’t matter; for our purposes these are purely mathematical dimensions, which can be marked by vertical and horizontal, thusly, or by length, breadth, and height, if you want the three dimensions of the world. But start with two dimensions, for simplicity’s sake. And moving objects, say a cannonball, can be measured against these two dimensions. How high or low, how left or right. Placed as if on a map. Then again, the horizontal dimension can mark time passed, and the vertical movement in a single direction. That will make for curved lines, representing the passage of objects through the air. Then, lines drawn tangent to the curve indicate the speed of the speed. So you measure what you can, mark those measurements, and it’s like passing through rooms of a house. Each room has a different volume, like flasks, depending on how wide and how tall. That is to say, how far, in how much time. Quantities of movement, do you see? A bushel of movement, a dram.”

“Cannonball flights could be described precisely,” Khalid said.

“Yes. More easily than most things, because a cannonball pursues a single line. A curved line, but not something like an eagle’s flight, say, or a person in his daily rounds. The mathematics for that would be…” Iwang became lost, jerked, came back to them. “What was I saying?”

“Cannonballs.”

“Ah. Very possible to measure them, yes.”

“Meaning if you knew the speed of departure from the gun, and the angle of the gun…”

“You could say pretty closely where it was going to land, yes.”

“We should tell Nadir about this privately.”

Khalid worked up a set of tables for calculating cannonfire, with artful drawings of the curves describing the flight of shot, and a little Tibetan book filled with Iwang’s careful numerics. These items were placed in an ornate carved ironwood box, encrusted with silver, turquoise, and lapis, and brought to the Khanaka in Bokhara, along with a gorgeous damasked breastplate for the khan. The steel rectangle at the center of this breastplate was a dramatic swirl of white and gray steel, with iron flecks very lightly etched by a treatment of sulphuric acids and other caustics. The pattern was called by Khalid the “Zeravshan Eddies,” and indeed the swirl resembled a standing eddy in the river, spinning off the foundation of the Dagbit Bridge whenever the water was high. It was one of the handsomest pieces of metalwork Bahram had ever seen, and it seemed to him that it, and the decorated box filled with Iwang’s mathematics, made for a very impressive set of gifts for Sayyed Abdul Aziz.

He and Khalid dressed in their best finery for their audience, and Iwang joined them in the dark red robes and conical winged hat of a Tibetan monk, indeed a lama of the highest distinction. So the presenters were as impressive as their presents, Bahram thought; although once in the Registan, under the vast arch of the gold-covered Tilla Kari Madressa, he felt less imposing. And once in the company of the court he felt slightly plain, even shabby, as if they were children pretending to be courtiers, or, simply, bumpkins.

The khan, however, was delighted by the breastplate, and praised Khalid’s art highly, even putting the piece on over his finery and leaving it there. The box he also admired, while handing the papers inside to Nadir.

After a few moments more they were dismissed, and Nadir guided them to the Tilla Kari garden. The diagrams were very interesting, he said as he looked them over; he wanted to inquire more closely into them; meanwhile, the khan had been informed by his armorers that cutting a spiral into the insides of their cannon barrels had caused one to explode on firing, the rest to lose range. So Nadir wanted Khalid to visit the armorers and speak to them about it.

Khalid nodded easily, though Bahram could see the thought in his eyes; once again he would be taken away from what he wanted to be doing. Nadir did not see this, though he watched Khalid’s face closely. In fact, he went on cheerfully to say how much the khan appreciated Khalid’s great wisdom and craft, and how much all the people of the khanate and in Dar al-Islam generally would owe to Khalid if, as seemed likely, his efforts helped them to stave off any further encroachments of the Chinese, reputed to be on the march in the west borders of their empire. Khalid nodded politely, and the men were dismissed.

Walking back out the river road, Khalid was irritated. “This trip accomplished nothing.”

“We don’t know yet,” Iwang said, and Bahram nodded.

“We do. The khan is a…” He sighed. “And Nadir clearly thinks of us as his servants.”

“We are all servants of the khan,” Iwang reminded him.

That silenced him.

As they came back toward Samarqand, they passed by the ruins of old Afrasiab. “If only we had the Sogdian kings again,” Bahram said.

Khalid shook his head. “Those are not the ruins of the Sogdian kings, but of Markanda, which stood here before Afrasiab. Alexander the Great called it the most beautiful city he ever conquered.”

“And look at it now,” Bahram said. Dusty old foundations, broken walls…

Iwang said, “Samarqand too will come to this.”

“So it doesn’t matter if we are at Nadir’s beck and call?” Khalid snapped.

“Well, it too will pass,” Iwang said.

Jewels in the Sky

Nadir asked for more and more of Khalid’s time, and Khalid grew very restive. One time he went to Divanbegi with a proposal to build a complete system of drains underneath both Bokhara and Samarqand, to move the water of the scores of stagnant pools that dotted both cities, especially Bokhara. This would keep the water from becoming foul, and decrease the number of mosquitoes and the incidence of disease, including the plague, which the Hindu caravans reported to be devastating parts of Sind. Khalid suggested sequestering all travelers outside the city whenever they heard such news, and causing delays in caravans that came from affected areas, to be sure of cleanliness. A purification delay, analogous to the spiritual purifications of Ramadan.

But Nadir ignored all these ideas. An underground system of pipes, though common in Persia from before the invasions of the Mongols, was too expensive now to contemplate. Khalid was being asked for military aid, not physic. Nadir did not believe he knew anything about physic.

So Khalid returned to his compound and put the whole place to work on the khan’s artillery, making every aspect of the cannons a matter for demonstrations, but without trying to learn anything of primary causes, as he called them, except occasionally in motion. He worked on metal strength with Iwang, and made use of Iwang’s mathematics to do cannonflight studies, and tried a number of methods to cause the cannonballs to spiral reliably in flight.

All this was done with reluctance and ill-humor; and only in the afternoon, after a nap and a meal of yogurt, or late in the evening, after smoking from one of his narghiles, did he recover his equanimity, and pursue his studies with soap bubbles and prisms, air pumps and mercury scales. “If you can measure the weight of air you should be able to measure heat, up to temperatures far beyond what we can distinguish with our blisters and ouches.”

Nadir sent his men by on a monthly basis to receive the latest news of Khalid’s studies, and from time to time dropped by himself unannounced, throwing the compound into a flurry, like an anthill hit by water. Khalid was polite at all times, but complained to Bahram bitterly about the monthly request for news, particularly since they had very little. “I thought I escaped the moon curse when Fedwa went through menopause,” he groused.

Ironically, these unwelcome visits were also losing him allies in the madressas, as he was thought to be favored by the treasurer, and he could not risk telling them the real situation. So there were cold looks, and slights in the bazaar and the mosque; also, many examples of grasping obsequiousness. It made him irritable, indeed sometimes he rose to a veritable fury of irritability. “A little power and you see how awful people are.”

To keep him from plunging back into black melancholy, Bahram scoured the caravanserai for things that might please him, visiting the Hindus and the Armenians in particular, also the Chinese, and coming back with books, compasses, clocks, and a curious nested astrolabe, which purported to show that the six planets occupied orbits that filled polygons that were progressively simpler by one side, so that Mercury circled inside a decagon, Venus a nonagon just large enough to hold the decagon, Earth an octagon outside the nonagon, and so on up to Saturn, circling in a big square. This object astonished Khalid, and caused night-long discussions with Iwang and Zahhar about the disposition of the planets around the sun.

This new interest in astronomy quickly superseded all others in Khalid, and grew to a passion after Iwang brought by a curious device he had made in his shop, a long silver tube, hollow except for glass lenses placed in both ends. Looking through the tube, things appeared closer than they really were, with their detail more fine.

“How can that work?” Khalid demanded when he looked through it. The look of suprise on his face was that of the puppets in the bazaar, pure and hilarious. It made Bahram happy to see it.

“Like the prism?” Iwang suggested uncertainly.

Khalid shook his head. “Not that you can see things as bigger, or closer, but that you can see so much more detail! How can that be?”

“The detail must always be there in the light,” Iwang said. “And the eye only powerful enough to discern part of it. I admit I am surprised, but consider, most people’s eyes weaken as they age, especially for things close by. I know mine have. I made my first set of lenses to use as spectacles, you know, one for each eye, in a frame. But while I was assembling one I looked through the two lenses lined up together.” He grinned, miming the action. “I was really very anxious to confirm that you two saw the same things I saw, to tell the truth. I couldn’t quite believe my own eyes.”

Khalid was looking through the thing again.

So now they looked at things. Distant ridges, birds in flight, approaching caravans. Nadir was shown the glass, and its military uses were immediately obvious to him. He took one they had made for him, encrusted with garnets, to the khan, and word came back that the khan was pleased. That did not ease the presence of the khanate in Khalid’s compound, of course; on the contrary, Nadir mentioned casually that they were looking forward to the next remarkable development out of Khalid’s shop, as the Chinese were said to be in a turmoil. Who knew where that kind of thing might end.

“It will never end,” Khalid said bitterly when Nadir had gone. “It’s like a noose that tightens with our every move.”

“Feed him your discoveries in little pieces,” Iwang suggested. “It will seem like there are more of them.”

Khalid followed this advice, which gave him a little more time, and they worked on all manner of things that it seemed would help the khan’s troops in battle. Khalid indulged his interest in primary causes mostly at night, when they trained the new spyglass on the stars, and later that month on the moon, which proved to be a very rocky, mountainous, desolate world, ringed by innumerable craters, as if fired upon by the cannon of some superemperor. Then on one memorable night they looked through the spyglass at Jupiter, and Khalid said, “By God it’s a world too, clearly. Banded by latitude—and look, those three stars near it, they’re brighter than stars. Could they be moons of Jupiter’s?”

They could. They moved fast, around Jupiter, and the ones closer to Jupiter moved faster, just like the planets around the sun. Soon Khalid and Iwang had seen a fourth one, and mapped all four orbits, so that they could prepare new viewers to comprehend the sight, by looking at the diagrams first. They made it all into a book, another gift to the khan—a gift with no military use, but they named the moons after the khan’s four oldest wives, and he liked that, it was clear. He was reported to have said, “Jewels in the sky! For me!”

Who Is the Stranger

There were factions in town who did not like them. When Bahram walked through the Registan, and saw the eyes watching him, the conversations begun or ended by his passage, he saw that he was part of a coterie or a faction, no matter how innocuous his behavior had been. He was related to Khalid, who was allied with Iwang and Zahhar, and together they formed part of Nadir Divanbegi’s power. They were therefore Nadir’s allies, even if he had forced them to it like wet pulp in a paper press; even if they hated him. Many other people in Samarqand hated Nadir, no doubt even more than Khalid did, as Khalid was under his protection, while these other people were his enemies: relatives of his dead or imprisoned or exiled foes, perhaps, or the losers of many earlier palace struggles. The khan had other advisors—courtiers, generals, relatives at court—all jealous of their own share of his regard, and envious of Nadir’s great influence. Bahram had heard rumors from time to time of palace intrigues against Nadir, but he remained unaware of the details. The fact that their involuntary association with Nadir could cause them trouble elsewhere struck him as grossly unfair; the association itself was already trouble enough.

One day this sense of hidden enemies became more material: Bahram was visiting Iwang, and two qadis Bahram had never seen before appeared in the door of the Tibetan’s shop, backed by two of the khan’s soldiers, and a small gaggle of ulema from the Tilla Kari Madressa, demanding that Iwang produce his tax receipts.

“I am not a dhimmi,” Iwang said with his customary calm.

The dhimmi, or people of the pact, were those nonbelievers who were born and lived their lives in the khanate, who had to pay a special tax. Islam was the religion of justice, and all Muslims were equal before God and the law; but of the lesser ones, women, slaves and the dhimmi, the dhimmi were the ones who could change their status by a simple decision to convert to true belief. Indeed there had been times in the past when it had been “the book or the sword” for all pagans, and only people of the book—Jews, Zoroastrians, Christians, and Sabians—had been allowed to keep their faith, if they insisted on it. Nowadays pagans of all sort were allowed to keep their various religions, as long as they were registered with the qadis, and paid the annual dhimma tax.

This was clear, and ordinary. Ever since the Shiite Safavids had come to the throne in Iran, however, the legal position of dhimmi had worsened—markedly in Iran, where the Shiite mullahs were so concerned with purity, but also in the khanates to the east, at least sometimes. It was a matter for discretion, really. As Iwang had once remarked, the uncertainty itself was a part of the tax.

“You are not a dhimmi?” one of the qadis said, surprised.

“No, I come from Tibet. I am mustamin.”

The mustamin were foreign visitors, permitted to live in Muslim lands for specified periods of time.

“Do you have an aman?”

“Yes.”

This was the safe-conduct pass issued to mustamin, renewed by the Khanaka on an annual basis. Now Iwang brought a sheet of parchment out of his back room, and showed it to the qadis. There were a number of wax seals at the bottom of the document, and the qadis inspected these closely.

“He’s been here eight years!” one of them complained. “That’s longer than allowed by the law.”

Iwang shrugged impassively. “Renewal was granted this spring.”

A heavy silence ruled as the men checked the document’s seals again.

“A mustamin cannot own property,” someone noted.

“Do you own this shop?” the chief qadi asked, surprised again.

“No,” Iwang said. “Naturally not. Rental only.”

“Monthly?”

“Lease by year. After my aman is renewed.”

“Where are you from?”

“Tibet.”

“You have a house there?”

“Yes. In Iwang.”

“A family?”

“Brothers and sisters. No wives or children.”

“So who’s in your house?”

“Sister.”

“When are you going back?”

A short pause. “I don’t know.”

“You mean you have no plans to return to Tibet.”

“No, I plan to return. But—business has been good. Sister sends raw silver, I make it into things. This is Samarqand.”

“And so business will always be good! Why would you ever leave? You should be dhimmi, you are a permanent resident here, a nonbelieving subject of the khan.”

Iwang shrugged, gestured at the document. That was something Nadir had brought to the khanate, it occurred to Bahram, something from deep in the heart of Islam: the law was the law. Dhimmi and mustamin were both protected by contract, each in their way.

“He is not even one of the people of the book,” one of the qadis said indignantly.

“We have many books in Tibet,” Iwang said calmly, as if he had misunderstood.

The qadis were offended. “What is your religion?”

“I am Buddhist.”

“So you don’t believe in Allah, you don’t pray to Allah.”

Iwang did not reply.

“Buddhists are polytheists,” one of them said. “Like the pagans Muhammad converted in Arabia.”

Bahram stepped before them. “ ‘There is no compulsion in religion,’ ” he recited hotly. “ ‘To you your religion, to me my religion.’ That’s what the Quran tells us!”

The visitors stared at him coldly.

“Are you not Muslim?” one said.

“I certainly am! You would know it if you knew the Sher Dor mosque! I’ve never seen you there—where do you pray on Friday?”

“Tilla Kari Mosque,” the qadi said, angry now.

This was interesting, as the Tilla Kari Madressa was the center for the Shiite study group, which was opposed to Nadir.

“ ‘Al-kufou millatun wahida,’ ” one of them said; a counterquote, as theologians called it. Unbelief is one religion.

“Only digaraz can make complaint to the law,” Bahram snapped back. Digaraz were those who spoke without grudge or malice, disinterested Muslims. “You don’t qualify.”

“Neither do you, young man.”

“You come here! Who sent you? You challenge the law of the aman, who gives you the right? Get out of here! You have no idea what this man does for Samarqand! You attack Sayyed Abdul himself here, you attack Islam itself! Get out!”

The qadis did not move, but something in their gazes had grown more guarded. Their leader said, “Next spring we will talk again,” with a glance at Iwang’s aman. With a wave of his hand that was just like the khan’s, he led the others out and down the narrow passage of the bazaar.

For a long while the two friends stood silently in the shop, awkward with each other.

Finally Iwang sighed. “Did not Muhammad set laws concerning the way men should be treated in Dar al-Islam?”

“God set them. Muhammad only transmitted them.”

“All free men equal before the law. Women, children, slaves, and unbelievers less under the law.”

“Equal beings, but they all have their particular rights, protected by law.”

“But not as many rights as those of Muslim free men.”

“They are not as strong, so their rights are not so burdensome. They are all people to be protected by Muslim free men, upholding God’s laws.”

Iwang pursed his lips. Finally he said, “God is the force moving in everything. The shapes things take when they move.”

“God is love moving through all,” Bahram agreed. “The Sufis say this.”

Iwang nodded. “God is a mathematician. A very great and subtle mathematician. As our bodies are to the crude furnaces and stills of your compound, so God’s mathematics is to our mathematics.”

“So you agree there is a God? I thought Buddha denied there was any God.”

“I don’t know. I suppose some Buddhists might say not. Being springs out of the Void. I don’t know, myself. If there is only the Void enveloping all we see, where did the mathematics come from? It seems to me it could be the result of something thinking.”

Bahram was surprised to hear Iwang say this. And he could not be quite sure how sincere Iwang was, given what had just happened with the qadis from Tilla Kari. Although it made sense, in that it was obviously impossible that such an intricate and glorious thing as the world could have come to pass without some very great and loving God to make it.

“You should come to the Sufi fellowship, and listen to what my teacher there says,” Bahram finally said, smiling at the thought of the big Tibetan in their group. Although their teacher would probably like it.

Bahram returned to the compound by way of the western caravanserai, where the Hindu traders were camped in their smell of incense and milktea. Bahram completed the other business he had there, buying scents and bags of calcinated minerals for Khalid, and then when he saw Dol, an acquaintance from Ladakh, he joined him and sat with him and drank tea for a while, then rakshi, looking over the trader’s pallets of spices and small bronze figurines. Bahram gestured at the detailed little statues. “Are these your gods?”

Dol looked at him, surprised and amused. “Some are gods, yes. This is Shiva—this Kali, the destroyer—this Ganesh.”

“An elephant god?”

“This is how we picture him. They have other forms.”

“But an elephant?”

“Have you ever seen an elephant?”

“No.”

“They’re impressive.”

“I know they’re big.”

“It’s more than that.”

Bahram sipped his tea. “I think Iwang might convert to Islam.”

“Trouble with his aman?”

Dol laughed at Bahram’s expression, urged him to drink from the jar of rakshi.

Bahram obliged him, then persisted. “Do you think it’s possible to change religions?”

“Many people have.”

“Could you? Could you say, There is only one God?” Gesturing at the figurines.

Dol smiled. “They are all aspects of Brahman, you know. Behind all, the great God Brahman, all one in him.”

“So Iwang could be like that too. He might already believe in the one great God, the God of Gods.”

“He could. God manifests in different ways to different people.”

Bahram sighed.

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.

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?”

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.

A Weapon from God

In deference to Bahram’s feelings, Khalid and Iwang organized the whole compound as an armory, and all their tests and demonstrations were devoted to increasing the powers of the khan’s army. Stronger cannon, more explosive gunpowder, spinning shot, killer-of-myriads; also firing tables, logistical protocols, mirror alphabets to talk over great distances; all this and more they produced, while Bahram lived half in the Khanaka with Esmerine and the kids, and half out at the compound, until the Bokhara Road became like the courtyard path to him, traversed at all hours of the day and night, sometimes asleep on horses that knew the way blind.

The increases they made in the khan’s war-making powers were prodigious; or would have been, if the commanders of Sayyed Abdul’s army could have been made to submit to Khalid’s instruction, and if Khalid had had the patience to teach them. But both sides were too proud for accommodation, and though it seemed to Bahram a critical failure on Nadir’s part not to force the issue and command the generals to obey Khalid, also not to spend more of the khan’s treasury on hiring more soldiers with more experience, nothing was done. Even the great Nadir Divanbegi had limits to his power, which came down in the end to the sway of his advice over the khan. Other advisors had different advice, and it was possible Nadir’s power was in fact waning just at the moment it was most needed, and despite Khalid and Iwang’s innovations—or, who knew, perhaps even because of them. It was not as if the khan had distinguished himself for good judgment. And possibly his pocket was not as bottomless as it had seemed back in the days when the bazaars and caravanserai and building sites were all bustling like beehives, and paying taxes.

So Esmerine seemed to suggest, though Bahram had mostly to deduce this from her looks and silences. She seemed to believe they were spied upon at all times, even during their sleepless hours in the dead of night, which was a rather terrible thought. The children had taken to life in the palace as if falling into some dream out of the Arabian Nights, and Esmerine did nothing to disabuse them of this notion, although she of course knew that they were prisoners, and their lives forfeit if the khan should happen to experience a fit of bad temper at the way things were going at Khalid’s, or to the east, or anywhere else. So naturally she avoided saying anything objectionable, and mentioned only how well fed and kindly treated they were, how much the children and she were thriving. Only the look in her eye when they were alone told Bahram how afraid she was, and how much she wished to encourage him to fulfill the khan’s desires.

Khalid of course knew all this without his daughter’s glances to tell him. Bahram could see him putting more and more effort into improving the military capacity of the khan, not only by exerting himself in the armory, but by trying to ingratiate himself with the most amenable of the generals, and by making suggestions discreet or direct on all manner of subjects, from the renovation of the walls of the city, in keeping with his demonstrations of the strength of raw earthworks, to plans for well-digging and drainage of stale water in Bokhara and Samarqand. All purely theoretical demonstrations went by the board in this effort, with no time spent grumbling about it either. But progress was uneven.

Rumors began to fly about the city like bats, sucking the light out of the day. The Manchurian barbarians had conquered Yunnan, Mongolia, Cham, Tibet, Annam, and the eastern extensions of the Mughal empire; every day it was somewhere different, somewhere closer. There was no way to confirm any of these assertions, and indeed they were often denied, either by direct contradiction, or simply by the fact that caravans kept coming from some of those regions, and the traders had seen nothing unusual, though they too had heard rumors. Nothing was certain but that there was turmoil to the east. The caravans certainly came less often, and included not only traders but whole families, Muslim or Jewish or Hindu, driven out by fear of the new dynasty, called the Qing. Centuries-old foreign settlements dissipated like frost in the sun, and the exiles streamed west with the idea things would be better in Dar al-Islam, under the Mughals or the Ottomans or in the taifa sultanates of Frengistan. No doubt true, as Islam was lawful; but Bahram saw the misery on their faces, the destitution and fear, the need for their men to angle and beg for provisions, their goods for trade already depeleted, and all the wide western half of the world still before them to be traversed.

At least it would be the Muslim half of the world. But visits to the caravanserai, once one of Bahram’s favorite parts of the day, now left him anxious and fearful, as intent as Nadir to see Khalid and Iwang come up with ways to defend the khanate from invasion.

“It’s not us slowing things down,” Khalid said bitterly, late one night in his study. “Nadir himself is no great general, and his influence over the khan is shaky, and getting shakier. And the khan himself—” He blew through his lips.

Bahram sighed. No one could contradict it. Sayyed Abdul Aziz was not a wise man.

“We need something both deadly and spectacular,” Khalid said. “Something both for the khan and for the Manchu.” Bahram left him looking at various recipes for explosives, and made the long cold ride back to the palace in Bokhara.

Khalid arranged a meeting with Nadir, and came back muttering that if all went well with the demonstration he had proposed, Nadir would release Esmerine and the children back to the compound. Bahram was elated, but Khalid warned him: “It depends on the khan being pleased, and who knows what will impress such a man.”

“What demonstration do you have in mind?”

“We must manufacture shells containing the Chinese wan-jen-ti formula, shells that won’t break on firing, but will when they hit the ground.”

They tried out several different designs, and even the demonstrations proved quite dangerous; more than once people had to run for their lives. It would be a terrible weapon if it could be made to work. Bahram hurried around all day every day, imagining his family returned, Samarqand saved from infidels; surely if Allah meant these things to be, then the weapon was a gift from Him. It was not hard to overlook the terror of it.

Eventually they manufactured hollow flat-backed shells, pumped full of the liquid constituents of the killer-of-myriads, in two chambers separated by a tin wall. A packet of flashpowder in the nose of the shell exploded on contact, blowing the interior wall apart and mixing the constituents of the gas.

They got them to work about eight times out of ten. Another kind of shell, entirely filled with gunpowder and an igniter, exploded on impact most deafeningly, scattering the shell like fragmented bullets.

They made fifty of each, and arranged a demonstration out on their test grounds by the river. Khalid bought a small herd of broken nags from the gluemaker, with the promise of selling them back ready for rendering. The ostlers staked these poor beasts out at the extreme range of the test cannon, and when the khan and his courtiers arrived in their finery, looking somewhat bored by now with this routine, Khalid kept his face turned away in as close to a gesture of contempt as he could risk, pretending to attend busily to the gun. Bahram saw that this would not do, and went to Nadir and Sayyed Abdul Aziz and made obeisances and pleasantries, explaining the mechanism of the weapon, and introducing Khalid with a little flourish as the old man approached, sweating and puffing.

Khalid declared the demonstration ready. The khan flicked a hand casually, his characteristic gesture, and Khalid gave the sign to the men at the gun, who applied the match. The cannon boomed and expelled white smoke, rolled back. Its barrel had been set at a fairly high angle, so that the shell would come down hard on its tip. The smoke swirled, all stared down the plain at the staked horses; nothing happened; Bahram held his breath—

A puff of yellow smoke exploded among the horses, and they leaped away from it, two pulling out of their stakes and galloping off, a few falling over when the ropes pulled them back. All the while the smoke spread outward as from an invisible brushfire, a thick mustard-yellow smoke, obscuring the horses as it passed over them. It covered one that had burst its tether but charged by accident back into a tendril of the cloud; this was the one they could see rear up in the mist, fall and struggle wildly to get back on its feet, then collapse, twitching.

The yellow cloud cleared slowly, drifting away downvalley on the prevailing wind, seeming heavy and clinging long in the hollows of the ground. There lay two dozen dead horses, scattered in a circle that encompassed two hundred paces at least.

“If there was an army in that circle,” Khalid said, “then, most excellent servant of the one true God, Supreme Khan, they would be just as dead as those horses. And you could have a score of cannon loaded with such shells, or a hundred. And no army ever born could conquer Samarqand.”

Nadir, looking faintly shocked, said, “What if the wind changed its course and blew our way?”

Khalid shrugged. “Then we too would die. It is important to make small shells, that can be fired a long distance, and always downwind, if possible. The gas does disperse, so if the wind was mildly toward you, it might not matter much.”

The khan himself looked startled at the demonstration, but more and more pleased, as at a new form of fireworks; it was hard to be sure with him. Bahram suspected that he sometimes pretended to be oblivious to things, in order to make a veil between himself and his advisors.

Now he nodded to Nadir, and led his court off on the road to Bokhara.

“You have to understand,” Khalid reminded Bahram on the way back to the compound, “there are men in that very group around the khan who want to bring Nadir down. For them it doesn’t matter how good our weapon is. The better the worse, in fact. So it’s not just a matter of them being utter simpletons.”

These Things Happened

The next day Nadir was out with his full guard, and they had with them Esmerine and the children. Nadir nodded brusquely at Bahram’s fulsome thanks and then said to Khalid, “The poison air shells may become necessary, and I want you to compile as many as you can, five hundred at least, and the khan will reward you accordingly on his return, and he makes promise of that reward in advance, by the return of your family.”

“He’s going away?”

“The plague has appeared in Bokhara. The caravanserai and the bazaars, the mosques and madressas and the Khanaka are all closed. The crucial members of the court will accompany the khan to his summer residence. I will be making all his arrangements for him from there. Look to yourselves. If you can leave the city and still do your work, the khan does not forbid it, but he hopes you can close yourself up here in your compound, and carry on. When the plague passes we can reconvene.”

“And the Manchu?” Khalid asked.

“We have word that they too have been struck. As you might expect. It may be they have brought it with them. They may even have sent their sick among us to pass along the infection. It would be little different than casting poisoned air on an enemy.”

Khalid colored at that but said nothing. Nadir left, clearly on his way to other tasks necessary before his flight from Samarqand. Khalid slammed the gate shut after him, cursed him under his breath. Bahram, ecstatic at the unexpected return of Esmerine and the children, hugged them until Esmerine cried out that he would crush them. They wept with joy, and only later, in the midst of shutting the compound off from the city, something they had done successfully ten years before when a plague of distemper had passed through the city, losing only one servant who had slipped into town to see his girlfriend and never come back—only later did Bahram see that his daughter Laila was red-cheeked, with a hectic flush, and lying listlessly on a chest of drawers.

They put her in a room with a bed. Esmerine’s face was pinched with fear. Khalid decreed that Laila be sequestered there, and fed and kept in drink from the door, by poles and net bags and plates and gourds that were not to be returned to the rest of them. But Esmerine hugged the little girl, of course, before all this regime was introduced, and the next day in their bedroom Bahram saw her red cheeks, and how she groaned awake and lifted her arms, and there were the tokens in her armpits, hard yellow protuberances emerging from the skin, even (he seemed to see as she put down her arm) faceted as if they were carbuncles, or as if she were turning to jewels from the inside.

After that they were a sickhouse, and Bahram spent his days nursing the others, running about all hours of the day and night, in a fever of a different kind than that of the sick ones, urged by Khalid never to touch or come within the breath of his stricken family. Sometimes Bahram tried, sometimes he didn’t, holding them as if he could clasp them to this world. Or drag them back into it, when the children died.

Then the adults started dying too, and they were locked out of the town as a sickhouse rather than a safe house. Fedwa died but Esmerine held on; Khalid and Bahram took turns caring for her, and Iwang joined them in the compound.

One night Iwang and Khalid had Esmerine breathe on a glass, and they looked at the moisture through their small-lens, and said little. Bahram looked briefly and glimpsed the host of little dragons, gargoyles, bats, and other creatures. He could not look again, but knew they were doomed.

Esmerine died and Khalid showed the tokens that same hour. Iwang could not rise from his couch in Khalid’s workshop, but studied his own breath and blood and bile through the smallscope, trying to make a clear record of the disease’s progress through him. One night as he lay there gasping he said in his low voice, “I’m glad I did not convert. I know you did not want it. And now I would be a blasphemer, for if there is a God I would want to rebuke Him for this.”

Bahram said nothing. It was a judgment, but of what? What had they done? Were the gas shells an affront to God?

“Old men live to be seventy,” Iwang said. “I’m just over thirty. What will I do with those years?”

Bahram couldn’t think. “You said we return,” he said dully.

“Yes. But I liked this life. I had plans for this life.”

He lingered on his couch but could take no food, and his skin was very hot. Bahram did not tell him that Khalid had died already, very swiftly, felled by grief or anger at the loss of Fedwa and Esmerine and the children—as if by apoplexy rather than plague. Bahram only sat with the Tibetan in the silent compound.

At one point Iwang croaked, “I wonder if Nadir knew they were infected, and gave them back to kill us.”

“But why?”

“Perhaps he feared the killer-of-myriads. Or some faction of the court. He had other considerations than us. Or it might have been someone else. Or no one.”

“We’ll never know.”

“No. The court itself might be gone by now. Nadir, the khan, all of them.”

“I hope so,” Bahram’s mouth said.

Iwang nodded. He died at dawn, wordless and struggling.

Bahram got all the compound’s survivors to put cloths over their faces and move the bodies into a closed workshop beyond the chemical pits. He was so far outside himself that the movements of his numb limbs surprised him, and he spoke as if he were someone else. Do this—do that. Let’s eat. Then, carrying a big pot to the kitchen, he felt the lump in his armpit, and sat down as if the tendons in the back of his knees had been cut, thinking I guess it’s my turn now.

Back in the Bardo

Well, it was, as might be imagined after an end like that, a very discouraged and dispirited little jati that huddled together on the black floor of the bardo this time around. Who could blame them? Why should they have had any will to continue? It was hard to discern any reward for virtue, any forward progress—any dharmic justice of any kind. Even Bahram could not find the good in it, and no one else even tried. Looking back down the vale of the ages at the endless recurrence of their reincarnations, before they were forced to drink their vials of forgetting and all became obscure to them again, they could see no pattern at all to their efforts; if the gods had a plan, or even a set of procedures, if the long train of transmigrations was supposed to add up to anything, if it was not just mindless repetition, time itself nothing but a succession of chaoses, no one could discern it; and the story of their transmigrations, rather than being a narrative without death, as the first experiences of reincarnation perhaps seemed to suggest, had become instead a veritable charnel house. Why read on? Why pick up their book from the far wall where it has been thrown away in disgust and pain, and read on? Why submit to such cruelty, such bad karma, such bad plotting?

The reason is simple: these things happened. They happened countless times, just like this. The oceans are salt with our tears. No one can deny that these things happened.

And so there is no choice in the matter. They cannot escape the wheel of birth and death, not in the experience of it, or in the contemplation of it afterward; and their anthologist, Old Red Ink himself, must tell their stories honestly, must deal in reality, or else the stories mean nothing. And it is crucial that the stories mean something.

So. No escape from reality: they sat there, a dozen sad souls, huddled together at a far corner of the great stage of the hall of judgment. It was dim, and cold. The perfect white light had lasted this time for only the briefest of moments, a flash like the eyeball exploding; after that, here they were again. Up on the dais the dogs and demons and black gods capered, in a hazy mist that shrouded all, that damped all sound.

Bahram tried, but could think of nothing to say. He was still stunned by the events of their last days in the world; he was still ready to get up and go out and start another day, on another morning just like all the rest. Deal with the crisis of an invasion from the east, the taking of his family, if that was what it meant—whatever problems the day happened to bring, trouble, crisis, sure, that was life. But not this. Not this already. Salt tears of timely death, alum tears of untimely death: bitterness filled the air like smoke. I liked that life! I had plans for that life!

Khalid sat there just as Khalid always had, as if esconced in his study thinking over some problem. The sight gave Bahram a deep pang of regret and sorrow. All that life, gone. Gone, gone, gone altogether beyond… The past is gone. Even if you can remember it, it’s gone. And even at the time it was happening Bahram had known how he had loved it, he had lived in a state of nostalgia-for-the-present, every day of it.

Now gone.

The rest of the jati sat or sprawled on the cheap wooden floor around Khalid. Even Sayyed Abdul looked distraught, not just sorry for himself, but distraught for them all, sad to have left that turbulent but oh-so-interesting world.

An interval passed; a moment, a year, an age, the kalpa itself, who could tell in such a terrible place?

Bahram took a deep breath, exerted himself, sat up.

“We’re making progress,” he announced firmly.

Khalid snorted. “We are like mice to the cats.” He gestured up at the stage, where the grotesqueries continued to unfold. “They are petty assholes, I say. They kill us for sport. They don’t die and they don’t understand.”

“Forget them,” Iwang advised. “We’re going to have to do this on our own.”

“God judges, and sends us out again,” Bahram said. “Man proposes, God disposes.”

Khalid shook his head. “Look at them. They’re a bunch of vicious children playing. No one leads them, there is no god of gods.”

Bahram looked at him, surprised. “Do you not see the one enfolding all the rest, the one we rest within? Allah, or Brahman, or what have you, the one only true God of Gods?”

“No. I see no sign of him at all.”

“You aren’t looking! You’ve never looked yet! When you look, you will see it. When you see it, everything will change for you. Then it will be all right.”

Khalid scowled. “Don’t insult us with that fatuous nonsense. Good Lord, Allah, if you are there, why have you inflicted me with this fool of a boy!” He kicked at Bahram. “It’s easier without you around! You and your damned all right! It’s not all right! It’s a fucking mess! You only make it worse with that nonsense of yours! Did you not see what just happened to us, to your wife and children, to my daughter and grandchildren? It’s not all right! Start from that, if you will! We may be in a hallucination here, but that’s no excuse for being delusional!”

Bahram was hurt by this. “It’s you who give up on things,” he protested. “Every time. That’s what your cynicism is—you don’t even try. You don’t have the courage to carry on.”

“The hell I don’t. I’ve never given up yet. I’m just not willing to go at it babbling lies. No, it’s you who are the one who never tries. Always waiting for me and Iwang to do the hard things. You do it for once! Quit babbling about love and try it yourself one time, damn it! Try it yourself, and see how hard it is to keep a sunny face when you’re looking the truth of the situation eye to eye.”

“Ho!” said Bahram, stung. “I do my part. I have always done my part. Without me none of you would be able to carry on. It takes courage to keep love at the center when you know just as well as anyone else the real state of things! It’s easy to get angry, anyone can do that. It’s making good that’s the hard part, it’s staying hopeful that’s the hard part! It’s staying in love that’s the hard part.”

Khalid waggled his left hand. “All very well, but it only matters if the truth is faced and fought. I’m sick of love and happiness—I want justice.”

“So do I!”

“All right, then show me. Show me what you can do this next time out in the miserable world, something more than happy happy.”

“I will then!”

“Good.”

Heavily Khalid pulled himself up, and limped over to Sayyed Abdul Aziz, and without any warning kicked him sprawling across the stage. “And you!” he roared. “What is your EXCUSE! Why are you always so bad? Consistency is no excuse, your CHARACTER is NO EXCUSE!”

Sayyed glared up at him from the floor, sucking on a torn knuckle. Daggers in his stare: “Leave me alone.”

Khalid made as if to kick him again, then gave up on it. “You’ll get yours,” he promised. “One of these days, you’ll get yours.”

“Forget about him,” Iwang advised. “He’s not the real problem, and he’ll always be part of us. Forget about him, forget about the gods. Let’s concentrate on doing it ourselves. We can make our own world.”