The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
• • •
In searching for a provenance for this new “leadgold”, Khalid read through some of the more informative of his old tomes, and he was interested when he came on a passage in jabir Ibn Hayyam’s ancient classic ‘The Book of Properties’, penned in the first years of the jihad, in which Jabir listed seven metals, namely gold, silver, lead, tin, copper, iron and kharsini, meaning ‘Chinese iron’; dull grey, silver when polished, known to the Chinese themselves as paitung, or ‘white copper’. The Chinese, Jabir wrote, had made mirrors of it capable of curing the eye diseases of those who looked into them. Khalid, whose eyes got weaker every year, immediately set to the manufacture of a little mirror of their own leadgold, just to see. Jabir also suggested kharsini made bells of a particularly melodious tone, and so Khalid had the rest of the quantity they had on hand cast into bells, to see if their tone was especially pretty, which might help secure the identification of the metal. All agreed that the bells tinkled very prettily; but Khalid’s eyes did not improve after looking into a mirror of the metal.
“Call it kharsini,” Khalid said. He sighed. “Who knows what it is? We don’t know anything.”
But he continued to try various demonstrations, writing voluminous commentaries on each test, through the nights and on to many a sleepless dawn. He and Iwang pursued their studies. Khalid directed Bahram and Paxtakor and Jalil and the rest of his old artisans in the shops to build new telescopes, and microscopes, and pressure gauges, and pumps. The compound had become a place where their skills in metallurgy and mechanical artisanry combined to give them great power to make new things; if they could imagine something, they could make some rude first approximation of it. Every time the old artisans were able to make their moulds and tools more exactly, it allowed them to set their tolerances finer still, and thus as they progressed, anything from the intricacies of clockwork to the massive strength of waterwheels or cannon barrels could be improved. Khalid took apart a Persian carpetmaking device to study all its little metal pieces, and remarked to Iwang that combined with a rack-and-pinion, the device might be fitted with stamps shaped like letters, instead of threaders, in arrays that could be inked and then pressed against paper, and a whole page thus written all at once, and repeated as many times as one liked, so that books became as common as cannonballs. And Iwang had laughed, and said that in Tibet the monks had carved just such inkblocks, but that Khalid’s idea was better.
Meanwhile Iwang worked on his mathematical concerns. Once he said to Bahram, “Only a god could have thought these things in the first place. And then to have used them to embody a world! if we trace even a millionth part of it, we may find out more than any sentient beings have ever known through all the ages, and see plainly the divine mind.”
Bahram nodded uncertainly. By now he knew that he did not want Iwang to convert to Islam. It seemed false to God and to Iwang. He knew it was selfishness to feel so, and that God would take care of it. As indeed it seemed He already had, as Iwang no longer was coming to the mosque on Fridays, or to the religious studies at the ribat. God or Iwang, or both, had taken Bahram’s point. Religion could not be faked or used for worldly purposes.
Dragon Bites World
>Now when Bahram visited the caravanserai, he heard many disquieting stories from the east. Things were in turmoil, China’s new Manchu dynasty was in an expansive temper; the new Manchu Emperor, usurper that he was, was not content with the old and fading empire he had conquered, but was determined to reinvigorate it by war, extending his conquests into the rich rice kingdoms to the south, Annam and Siam and Burma, as well as the parched wastelands in the middle of the world, the deserts and mountains separating China from the Dar, crossed by the threads of the Silk Road. After crossing that waste they would run into India, the Islamic khanates, and the Savafid empire. In the caravanserai it was said that Yarkand and Kashgar were already taken — perfectly believable, as they had been defended for decades by the merest remnants of the Ming garrisons, and by bandit warlords. Nothing lay between the khanate of Bokhara and these wastelands but the Tarim Basin and the Ferghana Mountains, and the Silk Road crossed those in two or three places. Where caravans went, banners could certainly follow.
And soon after that, they did. News came that Manchu banners had taken Torugart Pass, which was the high point of one of the silk routes, between Tashkent and the Takla Makan. Caravan travel from the east would be disrupted for a little while at least, which meant that Samarqand and Bokhara would go from being the centrepoint of the great world exchange, to a largely useless endpoint. It was a catastrophe for trade.
A final group of caravan people, Armenian, Zott, Jewish and Hindu, turned up with this news. They had been forced to run for their lives and leave their goods behind. Apparently the Dzungarian Gate, between Sinkiang and the Khazakh steppe, was also about to be taken. As the news raced through the caravanserai ringing Samarqand, most of the caravans resting in them changed their plans. Many decided to return to Frengistan, which though full of petty taifa conflict, was at least Muslim entire, its little khanates and emirates and sultanates trading between themselves most of the time, even when fighting.
Such decisions as these would soon cripple Samarqand. As an endpoint in itself it was nothing, the mere edge of Dar al-Islam. Nadir was worried, and the Khan in a rage. Sayyed Abdul Aziz ordered the Dzungarian Gate retaken, and an expedition sent to help defend the Khyber Pass, so that trade relations with India at the least would remain secure.
Nadir, accompanied by a heavy guard, described these orders very briefly to Khalid and Iwang. He presented the problem as if it were somehow Khalid’s fault. At the end of his visit, he informed them that Bahram and his wife and children were to return with Nadir to the Khanaka in Bokhara. They would be allowed to return to Samarqand only when Khalid and Iwang devised a weapon capable of defeating the Chinese.
“They will be allowed to receive guests at the palace. You are welcome to visit them, or indeed join them there, though I believe your work is best pursued here with all your men and machines. If I thought you would work faster in the palace, I would move you there too, believe me.”
Khalid glared at him, too angry to speak without endangering them all.
“Iwang will move out here with you, as I judge him most useful here. He will be given an extension on his aman in advance, in recognition of his importance to matters of state. Indeed he is forbidden to leave. Not that he could. The wakened dragon to the east has already eaten Tibet. So you are taking on a godly task, one that you can be proud to have been yoked to.”
He spared one glance for Bahram. “We will take good care of your family, and you will take good care of things here. You can live in the palace with them, or here helping the work, whichever you please.”
Bahram nodded, speechless with dismay and fear. “I will do both,” he managed to say, looking at Esmerine and the children.
Nothing was ever normal again.
Many lives change like that — all of a sudden, and for ever.
A Weapon from God
In deference to Bahram’s feelings, Khalid and Iwang organized the whole compound as an armoury, 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 children, 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 f
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 cast, 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 fulfil 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 armoury, 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 welldigging 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.
Rumours 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 rumours. 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 depleted, 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 favourite 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 wai-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 leapt away from it, two pulling out their stakes and galloping off, a few falling over when the ropes pulled them back. All the while the smoke spread outwards 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
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 advisers.
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.”