The Years of Rice and Salt (54 page)

“Yes, and there are other reasons for this gathering. The bankers, the shippers. But they all ride on the back of the artillery, if you will.”

“And not the doctors.”

“No. But I wish it were so! Tell me again if you see any part of military life that might be made more healthy.”

“No contact with prostitutes?”

The man laughed again. “Well, it is a religious duty for many of them, you must understand. The temple dancers are important for many ceremonies.”

“Ah. Well. Cleanliness, then. The animalcules move from body to body in dirt, by touch, in food or water, and breath. Boiled surgical instruments reduce infections. Masks on doctors and nurses and patients, to reduce spread of infection.”

The officer looked pleased. “Cleanliness is a virtue of caste purity. The Kerala does not approve of caste, but it should be possible to make cleanliness more of a priority.”

“Boiling kills the animalcules, it seems. Cooking implements, pots and pans, drinking water—all might be boiled to advantage. Not very practical, I suppose.”

“No, but possible. What other methods could be applied?”

“Certain herbs, perhaps, and things poisonous to the animalcules but not to people. But no one knows whether such things exist.”

“But trials could be made.”

“Possibly.”

“On poisoners, for instance.”

“It's been done.”

“Oh, the Kerala will be pleased. How he loves trials, records, numbers laid out by his mathematicians to show whether the impressions of one doctor are true when applied to the army as a whole body. He will want to speak to you again.”

“I will tell him all I can,” Ismail said.

The officer shook his hand, holding it in both of his. “I will bring you back to the Kerala presently. For now, the musicians are here, I see. I like to listen to them from up on the terraces.”

Ismail followed him for a while, as if in an eddy, and then one of the abbess's assistants snagged him and brought him back to the party gathered by the Kerala to watch the concert.

The singers were dressed in beautiful saris, the musicians in silk jackets cut from bolts of different color and weave, mostly of brilliant sky blue and blood-orange red. The musicians began to play; the drummers set a pattern on double-ended tablas, and others played tall stringed instruments, like long-necked ouds, making Ismail recall Konstantiniyye, the whole city called up by these twangy things so like an oud.

A singer stepped forward and sang in some foreign tongue, the notes gliding through tones without a stop anywhere, always curving through tonalities unfamiliar to Ismail, no tones or quarter tones that did not bend up or down rapidly, like certain birdcalls. The singer's companions danced slowly behind her, coming as close to still positions as she came close to steady tones, but always moving, hands extended palm outward, speaking in dance languages.

Now the two drummers shifted into a complex but steady rhythm, woven together in a braid with the singing. Ismail closed his eyes; he had never heard such music. Melodies overlapped and went on without end. The audience swayed in time with them, the soldiers dancing in place, all moving around the still center of the Kerala, and even he shimmied in place, moved by sound. When the drummers went into a final mad flurry to mark the end of the piece, the soldiers cheered and shouted and leaped in the air. The singers and musicians bowed deeply, smiling, and came forward to receive the Kerala's congratulations. He conferred for a time with the lead singer, talking to her as to an old friend. Ismail found himself in something like a reception line gathered by the abbess, and he nodded to the sweaty performers one by one as they passed. They were young. Many different perfumes filled Ismail's nostrils, jasmine, orange, sea spray, and his breathing swelled his chest. The sea smell came in stronger on a breeze, from the sea itself this time, though there had been a perfume like it. The sea lay green and blue out there, like the road to everywhere.

The party began to swirl about the garden again, in patterns determined by the Kerala's slow progress. Ismail was introduced to a quartet of bankers, two Sikhs and two Travancori, and he listened to them discuss, in Persian to be polite to him, the complicated situation in India and around the Indian Ocean and the world more generally. Towns and harbors fought over, new towns built in hitherto empty river mouths, loyalties of local populations shifting, Muslim slavers in west Africa, gold in south Africa, gold in Inka, the island west of Africa—all these things had been going on for years, but somehow it was different now. Collapse of the old Muslim empires, the mushrooming of new machines, new states, new religions, new continents, and all emanating from here, as if the violent struggle within India were vibrating change outward in waves all the way around the world, meeting again coming the other way.

Bhakta introduced another man to Ismail, and the two men nodded to each other, bowing slightly. The man's name was Wasco, and he was from the New World, the big island west of Firanja, which the Chinese called Yingzhou. Wasco indentified it as Hodenosauneega, “meaning territories of the peoples of the Longhouse,” he said in passable Persian. He represented the Hodenosaunee League, Bhakta explained. He looked like a Siberian or Mongolian, or a Manchu who did not shave his forehead. Tall, hawk nosed, striking to the eye, even there in the intense sunlight of the Kerala himself; he looked as if those isolated islands on the other side of the world might have produced a more healthy and vigorous race. No doubt sent by his people for that very reason.

Bhakta left them, and Ismail said politely, “I come from Konstantiniyye. Do your people have music like what we heard?”

Wasco thought about it. “We do sing and dance, but they are done by all together, informally and by chance, if you see what I am driving at. The drumming here was much more fluid and complicated. Thick sound. I found it fascinating. I would like to hear more of it, to see if I heard what I heard.” He waggled a hand in a way Ismail didn't understand—amazement, perhaps, at the drummers' virtuosity.

“They play beautifully,” Ismail said. “We have drummers too, but these have taken drumming to a higher level.”

“Truly.”

“What about cities, ships, all that? Does your land have a harbor like this one?” Ismail asked.

Wasco's expression of surprise looked just like anyone else's, which, Ismail thought, made perfect sense, as one saw the same look on the faces of babies just birthed. In fact, with his fluent Persian, it was impressive to Ismail how immediately comprehensible he was, despite his exotic home.

“No. Where I come from we do not gather in such numbers. More people live around this bay than in all my country, I think.”

Now Ismail was the surprised one. “So few as that?”

“Yes. Although there are a lot of people here, I think. But we live in a great forest, extremely thick and dense. The rivers make the best ways. Until you people arrived, we hunted and grew some crops, we made only what we needed, with no metal or ships. The Muslims brought those to our east coast, and set up forts in a few harbors, in particular at the mouth of the East River, and on Long Island. There were not so many of them, at first, and we learned a lot from them that we put to use for ourselves. But we have been stricken by sicknesses we never knew before, and many have died, at the same time that many more Muslims have come, bringing slaves from Africa to help them. But our land is very big, and the coast itself, where the Muslims cluster, is not very good land. So we trade with them, and even better, with ships from here, when the Travancoris arrived. We were very happy to see these ships, truly, because we were worried about the Firanji Muslims. We still are. They have lots of cannon, and they go where they want, and tell us we do not know Allah, and that we should pray to him, and so on. So we liked to see the coming of other people, in good ships. People who were not Muslim.”

“Did the Travancoris attack the Muslims already there?”

“Not yet. They landed at the mouth of the Mississippi, a big river. It may be they will come to blows eventually. They both are very well armed, and we are not, not yet.” He looked Ismail in the eye and smiled cheerfully. “I must remember you are Muslim yourself, no doubt.”

Ismail said, “I do not insist on it for others. Islam allows you to choose.”

“Yes, they said that. But here in Travancore you see it really happening. Sikh, Hindu, Africans, Japanese, you see them all here. The Kerala does not seem to care. Or he likes it.”

“Hindus absorb all that touch them, they say.”

“That sounds all right to me,” said Wasco. “Or in any case, preferable to Allah at gunpoint. We're making our own ships now in our great lakes, and soon we can come around Africa to you. Or, now the Kerala is proposing to dig a canal through the desert of Sinai, connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, and giving us more direct access to you. He proposes to conquer all Egypt to make this possible. No, there is much talk to be made, many decisions to be made. My league is very fond of leagues.”

Then Bhakta came by and took Ismail off again. “You have been honored with an invitation to join the Kerala in one of the sky chariots.”

“The floating bags?”

Bhakta smiled. “Yes.”

“Oh joy.”

Following the hobbling abbess,
Ismail passed through terraces each with its own perfume scenting it, through nutmeg, lime, cinnamon, mint, rose, rising level by level in short stone staircases, feeling as he went something like a step into some higher realm, where both senses and emotions were keener: a faint terror of the body, as the odors cast him farther and farther into a higher state. His head whirled. He did not fear death, but his body did not like the idea of what would happen to take him to that final moment. He caught up to the abbess and walked by her, to stabilize himself by her calm. By the way she went up the stairs he saw that she was always in pain. And yet she never spoke of it. Now she looked back down at the ocean, catching her breath, and put one gnarled hand to Ismail's arm, and told him how glad she was that he was there among them, how much they might accomplish together working under the guidance of the Kerala, who was creating the space for greatness to occur. They were going to change the world. As she spoke Ismail reeled again on the scents in the air, he seemed to catch sight of things to come, of the Kerala sending back people and things from all over the world as he conquered one place after another, sending back to the monastery books, maps, instruments, medicines, tools, people with unusual diseases or new skills, from west of the Urals and east of the Pamirs, from Burma and Siam and the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra and Java, from the east coast of Africa, Ismail saw a witch doctor from Madagascar showing him the nearly transparent wings of a kind of bat, which allowed for a full examination of living veins and arteries, at which point he would give the Kerala a complete description of the circulation of the blood, and the Kerala would be very pleased at this, and then Ismail saw a Chinese Sumatran doctor showing him what the Chinese meant by qi and shen, which turned out to be what Ismail had always called lymph, produced by small glands under the arms, which might be affected by poultices of steamed herbs and drugs, as the Chinese had always claimed, and then he saw a group of Buddhist monks arranging charts of different elements in different families, depending on chemical and physical properties, all laid out in a very beautiful mandala, the subject of endless discussions in reading rooms, workshops, foundries and hospitals, everyone exploring even if they did not sail around the world, even if they never left Travancore, all of them anxious to have something interesting to tell the Kerala the next time he came by—not so the Kerala would reward them, though he would, but because he would be so happy at the new information. There was a look on his face everyone craved to see, and that was the whole story of Travancore, right there.

They came to a broad terrace where the flying basket was tethered. Already its huge silken bag was full of heated air, and straining up in jerks against its anchor ropes. The bamboo wicker basket was as big as a large carriage or a small pavilion; the rigging connecting it to the bottom of the silk bag was a network of lines, each slender, but clearly strong in the aggregate. The silk of the bag was diaphanous. A coal-fired enclosed brazier, with a hand bellows affixed to its side, was bolted to a bamboo frame affixed beneath the bag, just over head level when they stepped through a carriage door up into the basket.

The Kerala, the singer, Bhakta, and Ismail crowded in and stood at the corners. Pyidaungsu looked in and said, “Alas, it does not look as if there is room for me, I will crowd you uncomfortably; I will go up next time, regretful though I am to have lost the opportunity.”

The ropes were cast off by the pilot and his passengers, except for a single line; it was a nearly windless day, and this, Ismail was told, was to be a controlled flight. They were to ascend like a kite, the pilot explained, and then when they were near the full extension of the line, they would shut the stove down, and stabilize in that one spot like any other kite, hanging some thousand hands over the landscape. The usual slight onshore afternoon breeze would insure that they would float inland, if the line happened to part.

Up they rose. “It is like Arjuna's chariot,” the Kerala said to them, and they all nodded, eyes shining with excitement. The singer was beautiful, the memory of her singing like a song in the air around them; and the Kerala more beautiful still; and Bhakta the most beautiful of all. The pilot pumped the bellows once or twice. The wind whistled in the rigging.

From the air the world proved to be flat-looking. It extended a tremendous distance to the horizon—green hills to the northeast and south, and to the west the flat blue plate of the sea, the sunlight on it gleaming like gold on blue ceramic. Things down there were small but distinct. The trees were like green tufts of wool. It looked like the landscapes painted in Persian miniatures, spread out and laid in space below them, gorgeously articulated. Fields of rice were banked and bordered by sinuous lines of palm trees, and beyond them were orchards of small trees, planted in rows and lines, looking like a tight weave of cloth, all the way out to the dark green hills in the east. “What kind of trees are those?” Ismail asked.