The Year of Rice and Salt

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.'