The Years of Rice and Salt

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Finally Khalid nodded to the puffers, and he himself hefted the bowl off the tray with big tongs, and carried it to a table in the yard, cleared for this demonstration. “Now we pour off the dross, great Khan,” paddling the molten lead out of the bowl into a stone tub on the table. “And at the bottom we see — ah . . .”

  He smiled and wiped his forehead with his sleeve, gestured at the bowl. “Even when molten it gleams to the eye.”

  At the bottom of the bowl the liquid was a darker red. With a spatula Khalid carefully skimmed off the remaining dross, and there at the bottom of the bowl lay a cooling mass of liquid gold.

  “We can pour it into a bar mould while it is still soft,” Khalid said with quiet satisfaction. “It looks to be perhaps ten ounces. That would be one seventh of the stock, as predicted.”

  Sayyed Abdul Aziz’s face shone like the gold. He turned to his secretary Nadir Devanbegi, who was regarding the ceramic bowl closely.

  Without expression, Nadir gestured for one of the Khan’s guards to come forward. The rest of them rustled behind the alchemist’s crew. Their pikes were still upright, but they were now at attention.

  “Seize the instruments,” Nadir told the head guard.

  Three soldiers helped him take possession of all the tools used in the operation, including the great pelican itself. When they were all in hand, Nadir went to one guard and took up the ladle Khalid had used to stir the liquid metals. in a sudden move he smashed it down on the table. It rang like a bell. He looked over at Sayyed Abdul Aziz, who stared at his secretary, puzzled. Nadir gestured with his head to one of the pikemen, then put the ladle on the table.

  “Cut it.”

  The pike came down hard, and the ladle was sliced just above its scoop. Nadir picked up the handle and the scoop and inspected them. He showed them to the Khan.

  “You see — the shaft is hollow. The gold was in the tube inside the handle, and when he stirred, the heat melted the gold, and it slid out and into the lead in the bowl. Then as he continued to stir, it moved to the bottom of the bowl.”

  Bahram looked at Khalid, shocked, and saw that it was true. His father-in-law’s face was white, and he was no longer sweating. Already a dead man.

  The Khan roared wordlessly, then leaped at Khalid and struck him down with the book he had been given. He beat him with the book, and Khalid did not resist.

  “Take him!” Sayyed Abdul Aziz shouted at his soldiers. They picked up Khalid by the arms and dragged him through the dust, not allowing him to get to his feet, and threw him over a camel. In a minute they were all gone from the compound, leaving the air filled with smoke and dust and echoing shouts.

  The Mercy of the Khan

  No one expected Khalid to be spared after this debacle. His wife Fedwa was in a state of mourning already, and Esmerine was inconsolable. All the work of the yard stopped. Bahram fretted in the strange silence of the empty workshops, waiting to be given the word that they could collect Khalid’s body. He realized he didn’t know enough to run the compound properly.

  Eventually the call came; they were ordered to attend the execution. Iwang joined Bahram for the trip to Bokhara and the palace there. Iwang was both sad and irritated. “He should have asked me, if he was so short of cash. I could have helped him.”

  Bahram was a little surprised at this, as Iwang’s shop was a mere hole in the wall of the bazaar, and did not seem so very prosperous. But he said nothing. When all was said and done he had loved his father-in-law, and the black grief he felt left little room for thinking about Iwang’s finances. The impending violent death of someone that close to him, his wife’s father — she would be distraught for months, perhaps for years — a man so full of energy; the prospect emptied him of other thought, and left him sick with apprehension.

  The next day they reached Bokhara, shimmering in the summer heat, its array of brown and sandy tones capped by its deep blue and turquoise mosque domes. Iwang pointed at one minaret. “The Tower of Death,” he noted. “They’ll probably throw him off that.”

  The sickness grew in Bahram. They entered the cast gate of the city and made their way to the palace. Iwang explained their business. Bahram wondered if they too would be taken and killed as accomplices. This had not occurred to him before, and he was shaking as they were led into a room that opened onto the palace grounds.

  Nadir Devanbegi arrived shortly thereafter. He looked at them with his usual steady gaze: a short elegant man, black goatee, pale blue eyes, a sayyed himself, and very wealthy.

  “You are said to be as great an alchemist as Khalid,” Nadir said abruptly to Iwang. “Do you believe in the philosopher’s stone, in projection, in all the so-called red work? Can base metals be transmuted to gold?”

  Iwang cleared his throat. “Hard to say, effendi. I cannot do it, and the adepts who claimed they could, never said precisely how in their writing. Not in ways that I can use.”

  “Use,” Nadir repeated. “That’s a word I want to emphasize. People like you and Khalid have knowledge that the Khan might use. Practical things, like gunpowder that is more predictable in power. Or stronger metallurgy, or more effective medicine. These could be real advantages in the world. To waste such abilities on fraud . . . Naturally the Khan is very angry.”

  Iwang nodded, looking down.

  “I have spoken with him at length about this matter, reminding him of Khalid’s distinction as an armourer and alchemist. His past contributions as master-of-arms. His many other services to the Khan. And the Khan in his wisdom has decided to show a mercy that Mohammed himself must have approved.”

  Iwang looked up.

  “He will be allowed to live, if he promises to work for the khanate on things that are real.”

  “I am sure he will agree to that,” Iwang said. “That is merciful indeed.”

  “Yes. He will of course have his right hand chopped off for thievery, as the law requires. But considering the effrontery of his crime, this is a very light punishment indeed. As he himself has admitted.”

  The punishment was administered later that day, a Friday, after the market and before prayers, in the great plaza of Bokhara, by the side of the central pool. A big crowd gathered to witness it. They were in high spirits as Khalid was led out by guards from the palace, dressed in white robes as if celebrating Ramadan. Many of the Bokharis shouted abuse at Khalid, as a Samarqandi as well as a thief.

  He knelt before Sayyed Abdul Aziz, who proclaimed the mercy of Allah, and of he himself, and of Nadir Devanbegi for arguing to spare the miscreant’s life for his heinous fraud. Khalid’s arm, looking from a distance like a bird’s scrawny leg and claw, was lashed to the executioner’s block. Then a soldier hefted a big axe overhead and dropped it on Khalid’s wrist. Khalid’s hand fell from the block and blood spurted onto the sand. The crowd roared. Khalid toppled onto his side, and the soldiers held him while one applied hot pitch from a pot on a brazier, using a short stick to plaster the black stuff to the end of the stump.

  Bahram and Iwang took him back to Samarqand, laid out in the back of Iwang’s bullock cart, which Iwang had had built in order to move weights of metal and glass that camels couldn’t carry. It bumped horribly over the road, which was a broad dusty track worn in the earth by centuries of camel traffic between the two cities. The big wooden wheels jounced in every dip and over every hump, and Khalid groaned in the back, semi-conscious and breathing stertorously, his left hand holding his pallid, burned right wrist. Iwang had forced an opium-laced potion down him, and if it hadn’t been for his groans it would have seemed he was asleep.

  Bahram regarded the new stump with a sickened fascination. Seeing the left hand clutching the wrist, he said to Iwang, “He’ll have to eat with his left hand. Do everything with his left hand. He’ll be unclean for ever.”

  “That kind of cleanliness doesn’t matter.”

  They had to sleep by the road, as darkness caught them out. Bahram sat by Khalid, and tried to get him to eat some of Iwang’s soup. “Come on, Fath
er. Come on, old man. Eat something and you’ll feel better. When you feel better it’ll be all right.” But Khalid only groaned and rolled from side to side. In the darkness, under the great net of stars, it seemed to Bahram that everything in their lives had been ruined.

  Effect of the Punishment

  But as Khalid recovered, it seemed that he didn’t see it that way. He boasted to Bahram and Iwang about his behaviour during his punishment: “I never said a word to any of them, and I had tested my limits in jail, to see how long I could hold my breath without fainting, so when I saw the time was near I simply held my breath, and I timed it so well that I was fainting anyway when the stroke fell. I never felt a thing. I don’t even remember it.”

  “We do,” said Iwang, frowning.

  “Well, it was happening to me,” Khalid said sharply.

  “Fine. You can use the method again when they chop off your head. You can teach it to us for when they throw us off the Tower of Death.”

  Khalid stared at him. “You’re angry with me, I see.” Truculent and hurt in his feelings.

  Iwang said, “You could have got us all killed. Sayyed Abdul would command it without a second thought. If it weren’t for Nadir Devanbegi, it might have happened. You should have talked to me. To Bahram here, and to me. We could have helped you.”

  “Why were you in such trouble, anyway?” asked Bahram, emboldened by Iwang’s reproaches. “Surely the works here make a lot of money for you.”

  Khalid sighed, ran his stump over his balding head. He got up and went to a locked cabinet, unlocked it and drew out a book and a box.

  “This came from the Hindu caravanserai two years ago,” he told them, showing them the book’s old pages. “It’s the work of Mary the Jewess, a very great alchemist. Very ancient. Her formula for projection was very convincing, I thought. I needed only the right furnaces, and a lot of sulphur and mercury. So I paid a lot for the book, and for the preparations. And once in debt to the Armenians, it only got worse. After that, I needed the gold to pay for the gold.” He shrugged with disgust.

  “You should have said so,” Iwang repeated, glancing through the old book.

  “You should always let me do the trading at the caravanserai,” Bahram added. “They know you really want things, while I am ignorant, and so trade from the strength of indifference.”

  Khalid frowned.

  Iwang tapped the book. “This is just warmed-over Aristotle. You can’t trust him to tell you anything useful. I’ve read the translations out of Baghdad and Sevilla, and I judge he’s wrong more often than he’s right.”

  “What do you mean?” Khalid cried indignantly. Even Bahram knew Aristotle was the wisest of the ancients, the supreme authority for all alchemists.

  “Where is he not wrong?” Iwang said dismissively. “The least country doctor in China can do more for you than Aristotle can. He thought the heart did the thinking, he didn’t know it pumped the blood — he has no idea of the spleen or the meridian lines, and he never says a word about the pulse or the tongue. He did some fair dissections of animals, but never dissected a human as far as I can tell. Come with me to the bazaar and I can show you five things he got wrong, any Friday you like.”

  Khalid was frowning. “Have you read AI-Farudi’s “Harmony Between Aristotle and Plato”?”

  “Yes, but that is a harmony that can’t be made. AI-Farudi only made the attempt because he didn’t have Aristotle’s ‘Biology’. If he knew that work, he would see that for Aristotle it all remains material. His four elements all try to reach their levels, and as they try, our world results. Obviously it’s not that simple.” He gestured around at the bright dusty day and the clangour of Khalid’s shop, the mills, the waterworks powering the big blast furnaces, the noise and movement. “The Platonists knew that. They know it is all mathematical. Things happen by number. They should be called Pythagoreans, to be accurate. They are like Buddhists, in that for them the world is alive. As is obviously the case. A great creature of creatures. For Aristotle and Ibn Rashd, it’s more like a broken clock.”

  Khalid grumbled at this, but he was not in a good position to argue. His philosophy had been cut off with his hand.

  He was often in some pain, and smoked hashish and drank Iwang’s opiated potions to dull the pain, which also dulled his wits, which dulled his spirits. He could not leap in to teach the boys the proper uses of the machinery; he could not shake people’s hands, or eat with others, having only his unclean hand left to him; he was permanently unclean. That was part of the punishment.

  The realization of this, and the shattering of all his philosophical and alchemical inquiries, finally caught up with him, and cast him into a melancholia. He left his sleeping quarters late in the mornings, and moped around the works watching all the activity like a ghost of himself. There everything continued much as it had before. The great mills wheeled on the river’s current, powering the ore stamps and the bellows of the blast furnaces. The crews of workers came in directly after the morning prayers, making their marks on the sheets that kept record of their work hours, then scattering through the compound to shovel salt or sift saltpetre, or perform any other of the hundred activities that Khalid’s enterprises demanded, under the supervision of the group of old artisans who had helped Khalid to organize the various works.

  But all this was known, accomplished, routinized, and meant nothing to Khalid any more. Wandering around aimlessly or sitting in his study, surrounded by his collections like a magpie in its nest with a broken wing, he would stare at nothing for hours, or else page through his manuscripts, Al-Razid and jildaki and jami, looking at who knew what. He would flick a finger against the objects of wonder that used to fascinate him so — a chunk of pitted coral, a unicorn horn, ancient Indian coins, nested polygons of ivory and horn, a goblet made of a rhinoceros horn chased with gold leaf, stone shells, a tiger legbone, a gold tiger statue, a laughing Buddha made of some unidentified black material, Nipponese netsuke, forks and crucifixes from the lost civilization of Frengistan — all these objects, which used to give him such delight, and which he would discuss for hours in a manner that grew tedious to his regulars, now only seemed to irritate him. He sat amid his treasures and he was no longer on the hunt, as Bahram used to think of it, seeking resemblances, making conjectures and speculations. Bahram had not understood before how important this was to him.

  As his mood grew blacker, Bahram went to the sufi ribat in the Registan, and asked Ali, the sufi master in charge of the place, about it. “Mowlana, he has been punished worse than he thought at first. He’s no longer the same man.”

  “He is the same soul,” said Ali. “You are simply seeing another aspect of him. There is a secret core in everyone that not even Gabriel can know by trying to know. Listen now. The intellect derives from the senses, which are limited, and come from the body. The intellect therefore is also limited, and it can never truly know reality, which is infinite and eternal. Khalid wanted to know reality with his intellect, and he can’t. Now he knows that, and is downcast. Intellect has no real mettle, you see, and at the first threat, into a hole it scuttles. But love is divine. It comes from the realm of the infinite, and is entrusted to the heart as a gift from God. Love has no calculating in it. “God loves you” is the only possible sentence! So it’s love you must follow to the heart of your father-in-law. Love is the pearl of an oyster living in the ocean, and intellect lives on the shore and cannot swim. Bring up the oyster, sew the pearl onto your sleeve for all to see. It will bring courage to the intellect. Love is the king that must rescue his coward slave. Do you understand?”

  “I think so.”

  “You must be sincere and open, your love must be bright as the lightning flash itself! Then his inner consciousness might see it, and be snatched from itself in a twinkling. Go, feel the love course through you, and out to him.”

  Bahram tried this strategy. Waking in his bed with Esmerine, he felt the love rising in him, for his wife and her beautiful body, the child after
all of the mutilated old man he regarded so fondly. Full of love, he would make his way through the workshops or into town, feeling the cool of the springtime air on his skin, and the trees around the pools would gleam dustily, like great living jewels, and the intense white clouds would accentuate the deep blue of the sky, echoed underneath by the turquoise and cobalt tiles of the mosque domes.

  Beautiful town on a beautiful morning, at the very centre of the world and the bazaar its usual massed chaos of noise and colour, all human intercourse there to be seen at once, and yet pointless as an anthill, unless it was infused with love. Everyone did what they did for love of the people in their lives, day after day — or so it seemed to Bahram on those mornings, as he took on more of Khalid’s old assignments at the compound — and in the nights too, as Esmerine enfolded him.

  But he could not seem to convey this apprehension to Khalid. The old man snarled at any expression of high spirits, much less love, and became irritated at any gesture of affection, not just from Bahram but from his wife Fedwa, or Esmerine, or Bahram and Esmerine’s children, Fazi and Laila, or anyone else. The bustle of the workshops would surround them in the sunlight with their clangour and stink, all the protocols of metalworking and gunpowder making that Khalid had formulated going on before them as if in a giant loud dance, and Bahram would make a gesture encompassing it all and say, “Love fills all this so full!” and Khalid would snarl, “Shut up! Don’t be a fool!”