The Year of Rice and Salt

He had just gone inside the compound gate, and was on his way to tell Khalid about the incident at Iwang's, when the door of the chemical shed burst open and men crashed out, chased by a shouting Khalid and a dense cloud of yellow smoke. Bahram turned and ran for the house, intending to grab Esmerine and the children, but they were out and running already, and he followed them through the main gate, everyone shrieking and then, as the cloud descended on them, dropping to the ground and crawling away like rats, coughing and hacking and spitting and crying. They rolled down the hill, throats and eyes burning, lungs aching from the caustic stink of the poisonous yellow cloud. Most of them followed Khalid's lead and plunged their heads into the river, emerging only to puff shallow breaths, and then dunk themselves again. When the cloud had dispersed and he had recovered a little, Khalid began to curse.

'What was it?' Bahram said, coughing still.

'A crucible of acid exploded. We were testing it.'

'For what?'

Khalid didn't answer. Slowly the caustic burn of their delicate membranes cooled. The wet and unhappy crew straggled back into the compound. Khalid set some of the men to clean up the shed, and Bahram went with him into his study, where he changed his clothes and washed, then wrote in his big book notes, presumably about the failed demonstration.

Except it had not been completely a failure, or so Bahram began to gather from Khalid's muttering.

'What were you trying to do?'

Khalid did not answer directly. 'It seems certain to me that there are different kinds of air,' he said instead. 'Different constituents, perhaps, as in metals. Only all invisible to the eye. We smell the differences, sometimes. And some can kill, as at the bottom of wells. It isn't an absence of air, in those cases, but a bad kind of air, or part of air. The heaviest no doubt. And different distillations, different burnings… you can suppress or stoke a fire… Anyway, I thought that sal ammoniac and saltpetre and sulphur mixed, would make a different air. And it did, too, but too much of it, too fast. Like an explosion. And clearly a poison.' He coughed uncomfortably. 'It is like the Chinese alchemists' recipe for wan-jen ti, which Iwang says means "killer of myriads".. I supposed I could show Nadir this reaction, and propose it as a weapon. You could perhaps kill a whole army with it.'

They regarded the thought silently.

'Well,' Bahram said, 'it might help him keep his own position more secure with the Khan.'

He explained what he had witnessed at Iwang's.

'And so you think Nadir is in trouble at the court?'

'Yes.'

'And you think Iwang might convert to Islam?'

'He seemed to be asking about it.'

Khalid laughed, then coughed painfully. 'That would be odd.'

'People don't like to be laughed at.'

'Somehow I don't think Iwang would mind.'

'Did you know that's the name of his town, Iwang?,

'No. Is it?'

'Yes. So he seemed to say.'

Khalid shrugged.

'It means we don't know his real name.'

Another shrug. 'None of us know our real names.'

Love the Size of the World

The autumn harvests came and passed, and the caravanserai emptied for the winter, when the passes to the east would close. Bahram's days were enriched by Iwang's presence at the sufi ribat, where Iwang sat at the back and listened closely to all that the old master Ali said, very seldom speaking, and then only to ask the simplest questions, usually the meaning of one word or another. There were lots of Arabic and Persian words in the sufi terminology, and though Iwang's Sogdi Turkic was good, the religious language was opaque to him. Eventually the master gave Iwang a lexicon of sufi technical terms, or istilahat, by Ansari, titled 'One Hundred Fields and Resting Places', which had an introduction that ended with the sentence, 'The real essence of the spiritual states of the sufis is such that expressions are not adequate to describe it: nevertheless, these expressions are fully understood by those who have experienced these states.'

This, Bahram felt, was the main source of Iwang's problem: he had not experienced the states being described.

'Very possibly,' Iwang would agree when Bahram said this to him. 'But how am I to reach them?'

'With love,' Bahram would say. 'You must love everything that is, especially people. You will see, it is love that moves everything.'

Iwang would purse his lips. 'With love comes hate,' he would say. 'They are two sides of an excess of feeling. Compassion rather than love, that seems to me the best way. There is no bad obverse side to compassion.'

'Indifference,' Bahram suggested.