The Years of Rice and Salt (27 page)

The Wanli Emperor nodded, fingering one of the gold disk ingots they had brought back, and then the big hummingbird moth of beaten gold, its feathers and antennae perfectly delineated with the utmost delicacy and skill. Kheim stared at the Heavenly Envoy, trying to see in to the hidden emperor, the Jade Emperor inside him. Kheim said to him, “That far country is lost in time, its streets paved with gold, its palaces roofed with gold. You could conquer it in a month, and rule over all its immensity, and bring back all the treasure that it has, endless forest and furs, turquoise and gold, more gold than there is yet now in the world; and yet still the greatest treasure in that land is already lost.”

Snowy peaks, towering over a dark land. The first blinding crack of sunlight
flooding all. He could have made it then—everything was so bright, he could have launched himself into pure whiteness at that moment and never come back, flowed out forever into the All. Release, release. You have to have seen a lot to want release that much.

But the moment passed and he was on the black stage floor of the bardo's hall of judgment, on its Chinese side, a nightmare warren of numbered levels and legal chambers and bureaucrats wielding lists of souls to be remanded to the care of meticulous torturers. Above this hellish bureaucracy loomed the usual Tibet of a dais, occupied by its menagerie of demonic gods, chopping up condemned souls and chasing the pieces off to hell or a new life in the realm of preta or beast. The lurid glow, the giant dais like the side of a mesa towering above, the hallucinatorily colorful gods roaring and dancing, their swords flashing in the black air; it was judgment—an inhuman activity—not the pot calling the kettle black, but true judgment, by higher authorities, the makers of this universe. Who were the ones, after all, that had made humans as weak and craven and cruel as they so often were—so that there was a sense of doom enforced, of loaded dice, karma lashing out at whatever little pleasures and beauties the miserable subdivine sentiences might have concocted out of the mud of their existence. A brave life, fought against the odds? Go back as a dog! A dogged life, persisting despite all? Go back as a mule, go back as a worm. That's the way things work.

Thus Kheim reflected as he strode up through the mists in a growing rage, as he banged through the bureaucrats, smashing them with their own slates, their lists and tallies, until he caught sight of Kali and her court, standing in a semicircle taunting Butterfly, judging her—as if that poor simple soul had anything to answer for, compared to these butcher gods and their eons of evil—evil insinuated right into the heart of the cosmos they themselves had made!

Kheim roared in wordless fury, and charged up and seized a sword from one of the death goddess's six arms, and cut off a brace of them with a single stroke; the blade was very sharp. The arms lay scattered and bleeding on the floor, flopping about—then, to Kheim's unutterable consternation, they were grasping the floorboards and moving themselves crabwise by the clenching of the fingers. Worse yet, new shoulders were growing back behind the wounds, which still bled copiously. Kheim screamed and kicked them off the dais, then turned and chopped Kali in half at the waist, ignoring the other members of his jati who stood up there with Butterfly, all of them jumping up and down and shouting “Oh no, don't do that Kheim, don't do that, you don't understand, you have to follow protocol,” even I-Chin, who was shouting loudly over the rest of them, “At least we might direct our efforts at the dais struts, or the vials of forgetting, something a little more technical, a little less direct!” Meanwhile Kali's upper body fisted itself around the stage, while her legs and waist staggered, but continued to stand; and the missing halves grew out of the cut parts like snail horns. And then there were two Kalis advancing on him, a dozen arms flailing swords.

He jumped off the dais, thumped down on the bare boards of the cosmos. The rest of his jati crashed down beside him, crying out in pain at the impact. “You got us in trouble,” Shen whined.

“It doesn't work like that,” Butterfly informed him as they panted off together into the mists. “I've seen a lot of people try. They lash out in fury and cut the hideous gods down, and how they deserve it—and yet the gods spring back up, redoubled in other people. A karmic law of this universe, my friend. Like conservation of yin and yang, or gravity. We live in a universe ruled by very few laws, but the redoubling of violence by violence is one of the main ones.”

“I don't believe it,” Kheim said, and stopped to fend off the two Kalis now pursuing them. He took a hard swing and decapitated one of the new Kalis. Swiftly another head grew back, swelling atop the gusher on the neck of the black body, and the new white teeth of her new head laughed at him, while her bloody red eyes blazed. He was in trouble, he saw; he was going to be hacked to pieces. For resisting these evil unjust absurd and horrible deities he was going to be hacked to pieces and returned to the world as a mule or a monkey or a maimed old geezer—

BOOK 4

THE ALCHEMIST

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.