The Years of Rice and Salt (51 page)

“Why doesn't the iron sink the ships?” he asked Ismail. “They must be as heavy as treasure chests.”

“There must be enough air in the hulls to make them float,” the doctor said, apologetic at the inadequacy of this explanation. “If their hulls were punctured, they would surely sink faster than wooden ships.”

One of the ships fired, erupting smoke and seemingly sliding backward in the water. Their guns shot forward, one per ship. Fairly little things, like big bay dhows, or giant water bugs.

The shot exploded down the palace wall to their left. Ismail felt the jolt in his feet. He sighed.

The sultan glanced at him. “Frightened?”

“Somewhat, Excellency.”

The sultan grinned. “Come, I want you to help me decide what to take. I need the most valuable of the jewels.” But then he spotted something in the sky. “What's that?” He clapped the telescope to his eye. Ismail looked up; there was a dot of red in the sky. It drifted on the breeze over the city, looking like a red egg. “There's a basket hanging under it!” the sultan exclaimed, “and people in the basket!” He laughed. “They know how to make things fly in the sky!”

Ismail shaded his eyes. “May I use the spyglass, Excellency?”

Under white, puffy clouds, the red dot floated toward them. “Hot air rises,” Ismail said, shocked as it became clear to him. “They must have a brazier in the basket with them, and the hot air from its fire rises up into the bag and is caught there, and so the whole thing rises up and flies.”

The sultan laughed again. “Wonderful!” He took the glass back from Ismail. “I don't see any flames, though.”

“It must be a small fire, or they would burn the bag. A brazier using charcoal, you wouldn't see that. Then when they want to come down, they damp the fire.”

“I want to do that,” the sultan declared. “Why didn't you make one of these for me?”

“I didn't think of it.”

Now the sultan was in especially high spirits. The red floating bag was drifting their way.

“We can hope the winds carry it elsewhere,” Ismail remarked as he watched it.

“No!” the sultan cried. “I want to see what it can do.”

He got his wish. The floating bag drifted over the palace, just under the clouds, or between them, or even disappearing inside one, which gave Ismail the strongest sense yet that it was flying in the air like a bird. People in the air like birds!

“Shoot them down!” the sultan was shouting enthusiastically. “Shoot the bag!”

The palace guards tried, but the cannon that were left standing on the broken walls could not be elevated high enough to fire at it. The musketeers shot at it, the flat cracks of their muskets followed by shouts from the sultan. The acrid smoke of gunpowder filled the grounds, mixing with the smells of citrus and jasmine and pulverized dust. But as far as any of them could tell, no one hit bag or basket. Judging by the minute faces looking down from the basket's edge, wrapped in heavy woolen scarves it appeared, Ismail thought they were perhaps out of range, too high to be hit. “The bullets probably won't go that far up,” he said.

And yet they would never be too high to drop things on whatever lay below. The people in the basket appeared to wave at them, and then a black dot dropped like a stooping hawk, a hawk of incredible compaction and speed, crashing right into the roof of one of the inner buildings, exploding and sending shards of tile clattering all over the courtyard and garden.

The sultan was shouting ecstatically. Three more gunpowder bombs dropped onto the palace, one on a wall where soldiers surrounded one of the big guns, killing them with much damage.

Ismail's ears hurt more from the sultan's roars than the explosions. He pointed to the iron ships. “They're coming in.”

The ships were close onshore, launching boats filled with men. The bombardment from other ships continued during the disembarking, more intense than ever; their boats were going to land uncontested at a section of the city walls they had blasted down. “They'll be here soon,” Ismail ventured. Meanwhile the floating bag and basket had drifted west, past the palace and over the open fields beyond the city wall.

“Come on,” Selim said suddenly, grabbing Ismail by the arm. “I need to hurry.”

Down broken marble stairs they ran, followed by the sultan's immediate retinue. The sultan led the way into the warren of rooms and passageways deep beneath the palace.

Down here oil lamps barely illuminated chambers filled with the loot of four Ottoman centuries, and perhaps Byzantine treasure as well, if not Roman or Greek, or Hittite or Sumerian; all the riches of the world, stacked in room after room. One was filled entirely with gold, mostly in the form of coins and bars; another with Byzantine devotional art; another with old weapons; another with furniture of rare woods and furs; another with chunks of colored rock, worthless as far as Ismail could tell. “There won't be time to go through all this,” he pointed out, trotting behind the sultan.

Selim just laughed. He swept through a long gallery or warehouse of paintings and statues to a small side room, empty except for a line of bags on a bench. “Bring these,” he ordered his servants as they caught up; then he was off again, sure of his course.

They came to staircases descending through the rock underlying the palace: a strange sight, smooth marble stairs dropping through a craggy rock hole into the bowels of the Earth. The city's great cistern-cavern lay some way to the south and east, as far as Ismail knew; but when they came down into a low natural cave, floored by water, they found a stone dock, and moored to it, a long narrow barge manned by imperial guards. Torches on the dock and lanterns on the barge illuminated the scene. Apparently they were in a side passage of the cistern-cavern, and could row into it.

Selim indicated to Ismail the roof around the stairwell, and Ismail saw that explosives were packed into crevices and drilled holes; when they were off and some distance away, this entrance would presumably be demolished, and some part of the palace grounds might fall onto it; in any case their escape route would be obscured, and pursuit made impossible.

Men busied themselves with loading the barge, while the sultan inspected the charges. When they were ready to leave he himself lit their fuses, grinning happily. Ismail stared at the sight, which had the lamplit quality of some of the Byzantine icons they had passed in the treasure hoards. “We'll join the Balkan army, and cross the Adriatic into Rome,” the sultan announced. “We'll conquer the west, then come back to smite these infidels for their impudence!”

The bargemen cheered on cue from their officers, sounding like thousands in the echoing confinement of the underground lake and its sky of rock. The sultan took the acclaim with open arms, then stepped onto the barge, balanced by three or four of his men. No one saw Ismail turn and dash up the doomed stairs to a different destiny.

2
                                                                                                            

Travancore

More bombs had been rigged by the sultan's bodyguards to blow up the
cages in the palace zoo, and when Ismail climbed back up the stairs and reemerged into the air, he found the grounds in chaos, invaders and defendants alike running around chasing or fleeing from elephants, lions, cameleopards, and giraffes. A pair of black rhinoceroses, looking like boars out of a nightmare, charged about bleeding through crowds of shouting, shooting men. Ismail raised his hands, fully expecting to be shot, and thinking escape with Selim might have been all right after all.

But no one was being shot except the animals. Some of the palace guard lay dead on the ground, or wounded, and the rest had surrendered and were under guard, and much less trouble than the animals. For now it looked as if massacre of the defeated was not part of the invaders' routine, just as rumor had had it. In fact they were hustling their captives out of the palace, as booms were shaking the ground, and plumes of smoke shooting out of windows and stairwells, walls and roofs collapsing: the rigged explosions and the maddened beasts made it prudent to vacate Topkapi for a while.

They were regathered to the west of the Sublime Porte, just inside the Theodosian Wall, on a parade ground where the sultan had surveyed his troops and done some riding. The women of the seraglio, in full chador, were surrounded by their eunuchs and a wall of guards. Ismail sat with the household retinue that remained: the astronomer, the ministers of various administrative departments, cooks, servants, and so on.

The day passed and they got hungry. Late in the afternoon a group of the Indian army came among them with bags of flatbread. They were small dark-skinned men.

“Your name, please?” one of them asked Ismail.

“Ismail ibn Mani al-Dir.”

The man drew his finger down a sheet of paper, stopped, showed another of them what he had found.

The other one, now looking like an officer, inspected Ismail. “Are you the doctor, Ismail of Konstantiniyye, who has writen letters to Bhakta, the abbess of the hospital of Travancore?”

“Yes,” Ismail said.

“Come with me, please.”

Ismail stood and followed, devouring the bread he had been given as he went. Doomed or not, he was famished; and there was no sign that he was being taken out to be shot. Indeed, the mention of Bhakta's name seemed to indicate otherwise.

In a plain but capacious tent a man at a desk was interviewing prisoners, none of whom Ismail recognized. He was led to the front, and the interviewing officer looked at him curiously, and said in Persian, “You are high on the list of people required to report to the Kerala of Travancore.”

“I am surprised to hear it.”

“You are to be congratulated. This appears to be at the request of Bhakta, abbess of the Travancori hospital.”

“A correspondent of many years standing, yes.”

“All is explained. Please allow the captain here to lead you to the ship departing for Travancore. But first, one question; you are reported to be an intimate of the sultan's. Is this true?”

“It was true.”

“Can you tell us where the sultan has gone?”

“He and his bodyguards have absconded,” Ismail said. “I believe they are headed for the Balkans, with the intention of reestablishing the sultanate in the west.”

“Do you know how they escaped the palace?”

“No. I was left behind, as you see.”

Their machine ships
ran by the heat of fires, as Ismail had heard, burning in furnaces that boiled water, the steam then forced by pipes to push paddlewheels, encased by big wooden housings on each side of the hull. Valves controlled the amount of steam going to each wheel, and the ship could turn on a single spot. Into the wind it thumped along, bouncing awkwardly over and through waves, throwing spray high over the ship. When the winds came from behind, the crew raised small sails, and the ship was pushed forward in the usual way, but with an extra impulse provided by the two wheels. They burned coal in the furnaces, and spoke of coal deposits in the mountains of Iran that would supply their ships till the end of time.

“Who made the ships?” Ismail asked.

“The Kerala of Travancore ordered them built. Ironmongers in Anatolia were taught to make the furnaces, boilers, and paddlewheels. Shipbuilders in the ports at the east end of the Black Sea did the rest.”

They landed at a tiny harbor near old Trebizond, and Ismail was included in a group that rode south and east through Iran, over range after range of dry hills and snowy mountains, into India. Everywhere there were short dark-skinned troops wearing white, on horseback, with many wheeled cannon prominently placed in every town and at every crossroads. All the towns looked undamaged, busy, prosperous. They changed horses at big fortified changing stations run by the army, and slept at these places as well. Many stations were placed under hills where bonfires burned through the night; intermittently blocking the light from these fires transmitted messages over great distances, all over the new empire. The Kerala was in Delhi, he would be back in Travancore in a few weeks; the abbess Bhakta was in Benares, but due back in Travancore in days. It was conveyed to Ismail that she was looking forward to meeting him.

Ismail, meanwhile, was finding out just how big the world was. And yet it was not infinite. Ten days of steady riding brought them across the Indus. On the green west coast of India, another surprise: they boarded iron carts like their iron ships, with iron wheels, and rode them on causeways that held two parallel iron rails, over which the carts rolled as smoothly as if they were flying, right through the old cities so long ruled by the Mughals. The causeway of the iron rails crossed the broken edge of the Deccan, south into a region of endless groves of coconut palms, and they rolled by the power of steam as fast as the wind, to Travancore, on the southwesternmost shore of India.

Many people
had moved to this city following the recent imperial successes. After rolling slowly through a zone of orchards and fields filled with crops Ismail did not recognize, they came to the edges of the city. The outskirts were crowded with new buildings, encampments, lumber yards, holding facilities: indeed for many leagues in all directions it seemed nothing but construction sites.

Meanwhile the inner core of the city was also being transformed. Their train of linked iron carts stopped in a big yard of paired rails, and they walked out a gate into the city center. A white marble palace, very small by the standards of the Sublime Porte, had been erected there in the middle of a park that must have replaced much of the old city center. The harbor this park overlooked was filled with all manner of ships. To the south could be seen a shipyard building new vessels; a mole was being extended out into the shallow green seas; and the enclosed water, in the shelter of a long low island, was as crowded with ships as the inner harbor, with many small boats sailing or being rowed between them. Compared to the dusty torpor of Konstantiniyye's harbors, it was a tumultuous scene.

Ismail was taken on horseback through the bustling city and down the coast farther, to a grove of palm trees behind a broad yellow beach. Here walls surrounded an extensive Buddhist monastery, and new buildings could be seen a long way through the grove. A pier extended out from the seaside buildings, and several fire-powered ships were docked there. This was apparently the home of the famous hospital of Travancore.

Inside the monastery grounds it was windless and calm. Ismail was led to a dining room and given a meal, then invited to wash off the grime of his travel. The baths were tiled, the water either warm or cool, depending on which pool he preferred, and the last ones were under the sky.

Beyond the baths stood a small pavilion on a green lawn, surrounded by flowers. Ismail donned a clean brown robe he was offered, and padded barefoot across the cut grass to the pavilion, where an old woman was in conversation with a number of others.

She stopped when she saw them, and Ismail's guide introduced him.

“Ah. A great pleasure,” the woman said in Persian. “I am Bhakta, the abbess here, and your humble correspondent.” She stood and bowed to Ismail, hands together. Her fingers were twisted, her walk stiff; it looked to Ismail like arthritis. “Welcome to our home. Let me pour you some tea, or coffee if you prefer.”

“Tea will be fine,” Ismail said.

“Bodhisattva,”
a messenger said to the abbess, “we will be visited by the Kerala on the next new moon.”

“A great honor,” the abbess said. “The moon will be in close conjunction with the morning star. Will we have time to complete the mandalas?”

“They think so.”

“Very good.”

The abbess continued to sip her tea.

“He called you bodhisattva?” Ismail ventured.

The abbess grinned like a girl. “A sign of affection, with no basis in reality. I am simply a poor nun, given the honor of guiding this hospital for a time, by our Kerala.”

Ismail said, “When we corresponded, you did not mention this. I thought you were simply a nun, in something like a madressa and hospital.”

“For a long time that was the case.”

“When did you become the abbess?”

“In your year, what would it be, 1194. The previous abbot was a Japanese lama. He practiced a Japanese form of Buddhism, which was brought here by his predecessor, with many more monks and nuns, after the Chinese conquered Japan. The Chinese persecute even the Buddhists of their own country, and in Japan it was worse. So they came here, or first to Lanka, then here.”

“And they made studies in medicine, I take it.”

“Yes. My predecessor in particular had very clear sight, and a great curiosity. Generally we see as if it were night, but he stood in the light of morning, because he tested the truth of what we say we know, in regularized trials. He could sense the strengths of things, the force of movement, and devise tests of them in trials of various kinds. We are still walking through the doors he opened for us.”

“Yet I think you have been following him into new places.”

“Yes, more is always revealed, and we have been working hard since he left that body. The great increase in shipping has brought us many useful and remarkable documents, including some from Firanja. It's becoming clear to me that the island England was a sort of Japan-about-to-happen, on the other side of the world. Now they have a forest uncut for centuries, regrown over the ruins, and so they have wood to trade, and they build ships themselves. They bring us books and manuscripts found in the ruins, and scholars here and all around Travancore have learned the languages and translated the books, and they are very interesting. People like the Master of Henly were more advanced than you might think. They advocated efficient organization, good accounting, auditing, the use of trial and record to determine yields—in general, to run their farms on a rational basis, as we do here. They had water-powered bellows, and could get their furnaces white hot, or high yellow at least. They were even concerned with the loss of forest in their time. Henly calculated that one furnace could burn all the trees within a yoganda's radius, in only forty days.”

“Presumably that will be happening again,” Ismail said.

“No doubt even faster. But meanwhile, it's making them rich.”

“And here?”

“Here we are rich in a different fashion. We help the Kerala, and he extends the reach of the kingdom every month, and within its bounds, all tends to improvement. More food is grown, more cloth made. Less war and brigandage.”

After tea Bhakta showed him around the grounds. A lively river ran through the center of the monastery, and its water ran through four big wooden mills and their wheels, and a big sluice gate at the bottom end of a catchment pond. All around this rushing stream was green lawn and palm trees, but the big wooden halls built next to the mills on both banks hummed and clanked and roared, and smoke billowed out of tall brick chimneys rising out of them.

“The foundry, ironworks, sawmill, and manufactory.”

“You wrote of an armory,” Ismail said, “and a gunpowder facility.”

“Yes. But the Kerala did not want to impose that burden on us, as Buddhism is generally against violence. We taught his army some things about guns, because they protect Travancore. We asked the Kerala about this—we told him it was important to Buddhists to work for good, and he promised that in all the lands that came under his control, he would impose a rule of laws that would keep the people from violence or evil dealing. In effect, we help him to protect people. Of course one is suspicious of that, seeing what rulers do, but this one is very interested in law. In the end he does what he likes, of course. But he likes laws.”

Ismail thought of the nearly bloodless aftermath of the conquest of Konstantiniyye. “There must be some truth in it, or I would not be alive.”

“Yes, tell me about that. It sounded as if the Ottoman capital was not so vigorously defended.”

“No. But that is partly because of the vigor of the assault. People were unnerved by the fireships, and the flying bags overhead.”

Bhakta looked interested. “Those were our doing, I must admit. And yet the ships do not seem that formidable.”

“Consider each ship to be a mobile artillery battery.”

The abbess nodded. “Mobility is one of the Kerala's watchwords.”

“As well it might be. In the end mobility prevails, and all within shot of the sea can be destroyed. And Konstantiniyye is all within shot of the sea.”

“I see what you mean.”

After tea the abbess took Ismail through the monastery and workshops, down to the docks and shipworks, which were loud. Late in the day they walked over to the hospital, and Bhakta led Ismail to the rooms used for teaching monks to become doctors. The teachers gathered to greet him, and they showed him the shelf on one wall of books and papers that they had devoted to the letters and drawings he had sent to Bhakta over the years, all catalogued according to a system he did not understand. “Every page has been copied many times,” one of the men said.