'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, embold ened 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 Al Farudi's "Harmony Between Aristotle and Plato"?'
'Yes, but that is a harmony that can't be made. Al 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 cat 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 co
nvey 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!'
One day he slammed out of his study with his single hand holding two of his old alchemical texts, and threw them into the door of a blazing athanor. 'Complete nonsense,' he replied bitterly when Bahram cried out for him to stop. 'Get out of my way, I'm burning them all.'
'But why?' Bahram cried. 'Those are your books! Why, why, why?'
Khalid took a lump of dusty cinnabar in his one hand, and shook it before Bahram. 'Why? I'll tell you why! Look at this! All the great alchemists, from jabir to al Razi to Ibn Sina, all agree that all the metals are various combinations of sulphur and mercury. Iwang says the Chinese and Hindu alchemists agree on this matter. But when we combine sulphur and mercury, as pure as we can make them, we get exactly this: cinnabar! What does that mean? The alchemists who actually speak to this problem, who are very few I might add, say that when they talk about sulphur and mercury, they don't really mean the substances we usually call sulphur and mercury, but rather purer elements of dryness and moisture, that are like sulphur and mercury, but finer! Well!' He threw the chunk of cinnabar across the yard at the river. 'What use is that? Why even call them that? Why believe anything they say?' He waved his stump at his study and alchemical workshop, and all the apparatus littering the yard outside. 'It's all so much junk. We don't know anything. They never knew what they were talking about.'
'All right, Father, maybe so, but don't burn the books! There may be something useful in some of them, you need to make distinctions. And besides, they were expensive.'
Khalid only snarled and made the sound of spitting.
Bahram told Iwang about this incident the next time he was in town. 'He burned a lot of books. I couldn't talk him out of it. I try to get him to see the love filling everything, but he doesn't see it.'
The big Tibetan blew air through his lips like a camel. 'That approach will never work with Khalid,' he said. 'It's easy for you to be full of love, being young and whole. Khalid is old and one handed. He is out of balance, yin and yang are disarranged. Love has nothing to do with it.' Iwang was no sufi.
Bahram sighed. 'Well, I don't know what to do then. You need to help me, Iwang. He's going to burn all his books and destroy all his apparatus, and then who knows what will happen to him.'
Iwang grumbled something inaudible.
'what?'
'I'll think it over. Give me some time.'
'There isn't much time. He'll break all the apparatus next.'
Aristotle was Wrong
The very next day Khalid ordered the blacksmith apprentices to move everything in the alchemical shops out into the yard to be destroyed. He had a black and wild look as he watched it all shed dust in the sunlight. Sand baths, water baths, descensory furnaces, stills, cucurbits, flasks, alumbixes, alembics with double or even triple spouts; all stood in a haze of antique dust. The largest battery alembic had last been used for distilling rose water, and seeing it Khalid snorted. 'That's the only thing we could make work. All this stuff, and we made rose water.'
Mortars and pestles, phials, flasks, basins and beakers, glass crystallizing dishes, jugs, casseroles, candle lamps, naphtha lamps, braziers, spatulas, tongs, ladles, shears, hammers, aludels, funnels, miscellaneous lenses, filters of hair, cloth and linen: finally everything was out in the sun. Khalid waved it all away. 'Burn it all, or if it won't burn, break it up and throw it in the river.'
But just then Iwang arrived, carrying a small glass and silver mechanism. He frowned when he saw the display. 'Some of this you could at least sell,' he said to Khalid. 'Don't you still have debts?'
'I don't care,' Khalid said. 'I won't sell lies.'
'It's not the apparatus that lies,' Iwang said. 'Some of this stuff could prove very useful.'
Khalid glared at him blackly. Iwang decided to change the subject, and raised his device to Khalid's attention. 'I brought you a toy that refutes all Aristotle.'
Surprised, Khalid examined the thing. Two iron balls sat in an arna ture that looked to Bahram like one of the waterwheel triphammers in miniature.
'Water poured here will weight the rocker, here, and the two doors are one, and open at the same time. One side can't open before the other, see?'
'Of course.'
'Yes, obvious, but consider, Aristotle says that a heavier mass will fall faster than a lighter mass, because it has more of the predilection to join the Earth. But look. Here are the two iron balls, one big and one small, heavy and light. Place them on the doors, set the device level, using a bubble level, high on your outside wall, where there is a good distance to fall. A minaret would be better, the Tower of Death would be better yet, but even from your wall it will work.'
They did as he suggested, Khalid climbing the ladder slowly to inspect the arrangement.
'Now, pour water in the funnel, and watch.'
The water filled the lower basin until the doors suddenly fell open. The two balls fell. They hit the ground at the same time.
'Ho,' Khalid said, and clambered down the ladder to retrieve the balls and try it again, after hefting them, and even weighing them precisely on one of his scales.
'You see?' Iwang said. 'You can do it with balls of unequal size or the same size, it doesn't matter. Everything falls at the same rate, except if it is so light and broad, like a feather, that it floats down on the air.'
Khalid tried it again.
Iwang said, 'So much for Aristotle.'
'Well,' said Khalid, looking at the balls, then lofting them in his left hand. 'He could be wrong about this and right about other things.'
'No doubt. But everything he says has to be tested, if you ask me, and also compared with what Hsing Ho and Al Razi say, and the Hindus. Demonstrated to be true or false, in the full light of day.'
Khalid was nodding. 'I would have some questions, I admit.'
Iwang gestured at the alchemical equipment in the yard. 'It's the same for all this – you could test them, see what's useful and what's not.'
Khalid frowned. Iwang returned his attention to the falling balls. The two men dropped a number of different items from the device, chattering away all the while.
'Look, something has to be bringing them down,' Khalid said at one point. 'Bringing them, forcing them, drawing them, what have you.'
'Of course,' said Iwang. 'Things happen by causes. An attraction must be caused by an agent, acting according to certain laws. What the agent might be, however…'
'But this is true of everything,' Khalid said, muttering. 'We know nothing, that's what it comes down to. We live in darkness.'
'Too many conjoined factors,' Iwang said.
Khalid nodded, hefting a carved block of ironwood in his hand. 'I'm tired of it, though.'
'So we try things. You do something, you get something else. It looks like a causal chain. Describable as a logical sequence, even as a mathematical operation. So that you might say, reality manifests itself thus. Without worrying too much about defining what force it is.'
'Perhaps love is the force,' Bahram offered. 'The same attraction as of persons to persons, extended between things in a general way.'
'It would explain how one's member rises away from the Earth,' Iwang said with a smile.
Bahram laughed, but Khalid said only, 'A joke. What I am speaking of could not be less like love. It is as constant as the stars in their places, a physical force.'
'The sufis say that love is a force, filling everything, impelling everything.'
'The sufis,' Khalid said scornfully. 'Those are the last people on Earth I would consult if I wanted to know how the world works. They moon about love and drink lots of wine and spin themselves. Bah! Islam was an intellectual discipline before the sufis came along, studying the world as it is, we had Ibn Sina and Ibn Rashd and Ibn Khaldun and all the rest, and then the sufis appeared and there hasn't been a single Muslim philosopher or scholar since then who has advanced our understanding of things by a single whit.'
'They have too,' Bahram said. 'They've made it clear how important love is in the world.'
'Love, oh yes, all is love, God is love, but if everything is love and all is one with Allah, then why do they have to get so drunk every day?'
Iwang laughed. Bahram said, 'They don't really, you know.'
'They do! And the good fellowship halls fill up with good fellows looking for a good time, and the madressas grow emptier, and the khans give them less, and here we are in the year 1020 arguing over the ideas of the ancient Frengis, without a single idea why things act the way they do. We know nothing! Nothing!'
'We have to start small,' Iwang said.
'We can't start small! Everything is all tied together!'
'Well, then we need to isolate one set of actions that we can see and control, and then study that, and see if we can understand it. Then work onwards from there. Something like this falling, just the simplest movement. If we understood movement, we could study its manifestations in other things.'
Khalid thought about that. He had finally stopped dropping things through the device.
'Come here with me,' Iwang said. 'Let me show you something that makes me curious.'
They followed him towards the shop containing the big furnaces. 'See how you obtain such hot fires now. Your waterworks drive the bellows faster than any number of puffers ever could, and the heat of the fire is accordingly higher. Now, Aristotle says fire is trapped in wood, and released by heat. Fair enough, but why does more air inake the fire burn hotter? Why does wind drive a wildfire so? Does it mean air is essential to fire? Could we find out? If we built a chamber in which the air was pulled out by the bellows rather than pushed in, would the fire burn less?'
The Year of Rice and Salt Page 24
