The Year of Rice and Salt

Iwang thought it was a good idea in theory, but in practice he too had a hard time coming up with questions to ask about the process. They knew how hot to make the furnace, what ores and wood and water to introduce, how long to mix it, how hard it would turn out. All questions on the matter of practice were long since answered, ever since damasking had been done in Damascus. More basic questions of cause, which yet could be answered, were hard to formulate. Bahram himself tried mightily, without a single idea coming to him. And good ideas were his strength, or so they always told him.

While Khalid worked on this problem, Iwang was getting terrifically absorbed in his mathematical labours, to the exclusion even of his glassblowing and silversmithing, which he left mostly to his new apprentices, huge gaunt Tibetan youths who had appeared without explanation some time before. He pored over his Hindu books and old Tibetan scrolls, marking up his chalk slates and then adding to the notes he saved on paper: inked diagrams, patterns of Hindu numerals, Chinese or Tibetan or Sanskrit symbols or letters; a private alphabet for a private language, or so Bahram thought. A rather useless enterprise, disturbing to contemplate, as the paper sheets seemed to radiate a palpable power, magical or perhaps just mad. All those foreign ideas, arranged in hexagonal patterns of number and ideogram; to Bahram the shop in the bazaar began to seem the dim cave of a magus, fingering the hems of reality…

Iwang himself brushed all these cobwebs aside. Out in the sun of Khalid's compound he sat down with Khalid, and Zahhar and Tazi from Sher Dor, and with Bahram shading them and looking over their shoulders, he outlined a mathematics of motion, what he called the speed of the speed.

'Everything is moving,' he said. 'That is karma. The Earth revolves around the Sun, the Sun travels through the stars, the stars too travel. But for the sake of study here, for demonstrations, we postulate a realm of non movement. Perhaps some such motionless void contains the universe, but it doesn't matter; for our purposes these are purely mathematical dimensions, which can be marked by vertical and horizontal, thusly, or by length, breadth and height, if you want the three dimensions of the world. But start with two dimensions, for simplicity's sake. And moving objects, say a cannonball, can be measured against these two dimensions. How high or low, how left or right. Placed as if on a map. Then again, the horizontal dimension can mark time passed, and the vertical, movement in a single direction. That will make for curved lines, representing the passage of objects through the air. Then, lines drawn tangent to the curve indicate the speed of the speed. So you measure what you can, mark those measurements, and it's like passing through rooms of a house. Each room has a different volume, like flasks, depending on how wide and how tall. That is to say, how far, in how much time. Quantities of movement, do you see? A bushel of movement, a dram.'

'Cannonball flights could be described precisely,' Khalid said.

'Yes. More easily than most things, because a cannonball pursues a single line. A curved line, but not something like an eagle's flight, say, or a person in his daily rounds. The mathematics for that would be…' Iwang became lost, jerked, came back to them. 'What was I saying?'

'Cannonballs.'

'Ah. Very possible to measure them, yes.'

'Meaning if you knew the speed of departure from the gun, and the angle of the gun…'

'You could say pretty closely where it was going to land, yes.'

'We should tell Nadir about this privately.'

Khalid worked up a set of tables for calculating cannon fire, with artful drawings of the curves describing the flight of shot, and a little Tibetan book filled with Iwang's careful numerics. These items were placed in an ornate carved ironwood box, encrusted with silver, turquoise and lapis, and brought to the Khanaka in Bokhara, along with a gorgeous damasked breastplate for the Khan. The steel rectangle at the centre of this breastplate was a dramatic swirl of white and grey steel, with iron flecks very lightly etched by a treatment of sulphuric acids and other caustics. The pattern was called by Khalid the Zeravshan Eddies, and indeed the swirl resembled a standing eddy in the river, spinning off the foundation of the Dagbit Bridge whenever the water was high. It was one of the handsomest pieces of metalwork Bahram had ever seen, and it seemed to him that it, and the decorated box filled with Iwang's mathematics, made for a very impressive set of gifts for Sayyed Abdul Aziz.