The Years of Rice and Salt (31 page)

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.”