The Years of Rice and Salt (36 page)

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.