They watched. There were perhaps ten people in the room. It was perfectly silent and still, as if all the world had stopped to witness the test.
Slowly, very slowly, the balance tray holding the dead man and his bed began to rise. Somebody gasped. The bed rose and hung in the air overhead. The old man had lightened.
'Take away the very smallest weight from the other tray,' the Sultan whispered. One of his bodyguards did so, removing a few flakes of gold leaf. Then some more. Finally the tray holding the dead man in the air began to descend, until it drifted below the height of the other one. The bodyguard put the smallest flake back on. Skilfully he rebalanced the scale. The man at dying had lost a quarter grain of weight.
'Interesting!' the Sultan declared in his normal voice. He returned to his repast, gesturing to Ismail. 'Come, cat. Then tell me what you think of these rabble from the cast, whom we hear are attacking us.'
The doctor indicated that he did not have an opinion.
'Surely you have heard things,' the Sultan encouraged him. 'Tell me what you have heard.'
'Like everyone else, 1 have heard they come from the south of India,' Ismail said obediently. 'The Mughals have been defeated by them. They have an effective army, and a navy that moves them around and shells coastal cities. Their leader styles himself the Kerala of Travancore. They have conquered the Safavids, and attacked Syria and Yemen ‑'
'This is all old news,' the Sultan interrupted. 'What I require of you,
Ismail, is explanation. How have they managed to accomplish these things?'
Ismail said, 'I do not know, Excellency. The few letters 1 have received from medical colleagues to the east do not discuss military matters. 1 gather their army moves quickly, 1 have heard a hundred leagues a day.'
'A hundred leagues! How is that possible?'
'I do not know. One of my colleagues wrote of treating burn wounds. I hear their armies spare those they capture, and set them to farm in areas they have conquered.'
'Curious. They are Hindu?'
'Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh ‑ 1 get the impression they practise some mix of these three faiths, or some kind of new religion, made up by this sultan of Travancore. Indian gurus often do this, and he is apparently that kind of leader.'
Sultan Selim shook his head. 'Eat,' he commanded, and Ismail took up a cup of sherbet. 'Do they attack with Greek fire, or the black alchemy of Samarqand?'
'I don't know. Samarqand itself has been abandoned, 1 understand, after years of plague, and then earthquakes. But its alchemy may have been developed further in India.'
'So we are being attacked by black magic,' reflected the Sultan, looking intrigued.
'I cannot say.'
'What about this navy of theirs?'
'You know more than 1, Excellency. 1 have heard they sail into the eye of the wind.'
'More black magic!'
'Machine power, Excellency. 1 have a Sikh correspondent who told me that they boil water in scaled pots, and force the steam through tubes, like bullets out of guns, and the steam pushes against paddles like a river pushing a waterwheel, and thus the ships are rowed forwards.'
'Surely that would only move them backwards in the water.'
'They could call that forwards, Excellency.'
The Sultan stared suspiciously at his doctor. 'Do any of these ships blow up?'
'It seems as if they might, if something goes wrong
Selim considered it. 'Well, this should be most interesting! If a
cannonball hits one of their boiler pots, it should blow up the whole ship!'
'Very possibly.'
The Sultan was pleased. 'It will make for good target practice. Come with me.'
He led his usual train of retainers out of the room: bodyguard of six, cook and waiters, astronomer, valet and the Chief Black Eunuch of the Seraglio, all trailing him and the doctor, whom the Sultan held by the shoulder. He brought Ismail through the Gate of Felicity into his harem without a word to its guards, leaving his retainers behind to figure out yet again who was intended to follow him into the seraglio. In the end only a waiter and the Chief Black Eunuch entered.
In the seraglio all was gold and marble, silk and velvet, the walls of the outer rooms covered with religious paintings and icons from the age of Byzantium. The Sultan gestured to the Black Eunuch, who nodded to a guard at the far door.
One of the harem concubines emerged, trailed by four maids: a whiteskinned redheaded young woman, her naked body glowing in the gaslight jets. She was not an albino, but rather a naturally pale‑skinned person, one of the famous white slaves of the seraglio, among the only known survivors of the vanished Firanjis. They had been bred for several generations by the Ottoman sultans, who kept the line pure. No one outside the seraglio ever saw the women, and no one outside the Sultan's palace ever saw the men used for breeding.
This young woman's hair was a gold‑burnished red, her nipples pink, ber skin a translucent white that revealed blue veins under it, especially in her breasts, which were slightly engorged. The doctor reckoned her three months pregnant. The Sultan did not appear to notice; she was his favourite, and he still had her every day.
The familiar routine unfolded. The odalisque walked to the draped area of her bed, and the Sultan followed, not bothering to pull the curtains. The ladies‑in‑waiting helped the woman to cushion herself properly, held her arms out, her legs spread and pulled up. Selim said 'Ah yes,' and went to the bed. He pulled his erect member from his pantaloons and covered her. They rocked together in the usual fashion, until with a shudder and a grunt the Sultan finished and sat beside her, stroking her belly and legs.
He looked over at Ismail as a thought occurred to him. 'What is it like now where she came from?' he asked.
The doctor cleared his throat. 'I don't know, Excellency.'
'Tell me what you have heard.'
'I have heard that Firanja west of Vienna is mainly divided between Andalusis and the Golden Horde. The Andalusis occupy the old Frankish lands and the islands north of it. They are Sunni, with the usual sufi and Wahhabi elements fighting for the patronage of the emirs. The east is a mix of Golden Horde and Safavid client princes, many of them Shiites Many sufi orders. They also have occupied the offshore islands, and the Roman peninsula, though it is mostly Berber and Maltese.'
The Sultan nodded. 'So they prosper.'
'I don't know. It rains there more than on the steppes, but there are mountains everywhere, or hills. There is a plain on the north coast where they grow grapes and the like. AI‑Andalus and the Roman peninsula do well, 1 gather. North of the mountains it is harder. It's said the lowlands are still pestilential.'
'Why is that? What happened there?'
'It's damp and cold all the time. So it is said.' The doctor shrugged. 'No one knows. It could be that the pale skin of the people there made them more susceptible to plague. That's what AI‑Ferghana said.'
'But now good Muslims live there, with no ill effects.'
'Yes. Balkan Ottomans, Andalusis, Safavids, the Golden Horde. All Muslim, except perhaps for some Jews and Zotts.'
'But Islam is fractured.' The Sultan thought it over, brushing the odalisque's red pubic hair with his palm. 'Tell me again, where did this girl's ancestors come from?'
'The islands off the north coast of Frankland,' the doctor ventured. 'England. They were very pale there, and some of the outermost islands escaped the plague, and their people were discovered and enslaved a century or two later. It is said they didn't even know anything had changed.'
'Good land?'
'Not at all. Forest or rock. They lived on sheep or fish. Very primitive, almost like the New World.'
'Where they have found much gold.'
'England was known more for tin than gold, as I understand it.'
'How many of these survivors were taken?'
'I have read a few thousand. Most died, or were bred into the general populace. You may have the only purebreds left.'
'Yes. And this on
e is pregnant by one of their men, I'll have you know. We care for the men as carefully as we do the women, to keep the line going.'
'Very wise.'
The Sultan looked at his Black Eunuch. 'I'm ready for Jasmina now.'
In came another girl, very black, her body almost twin to that of the white girl, though this one was not pregnant. Together they looked like chess pieces. The black girl replaced the white one on the bed. The Sultan stood and went to her.
'Well, the Balkans are a sorry place,' he mused, 'but farther west may be better. We could move the capital of the empire to Rome, just as they moved theirs here.'
'Yes. But the Roman peninsula is fully repopulated.'
'Venice too?'
'No. Still abandoned, Excellency. It is often flooded, and the plague was particularly bad there.'
Sultan Selim pursed his lips. 'I don't ‑ ah ‑ 1 don't like the damp.'
'No, Excellency.'
'well, we will have to fight them here. 1 will tell the troops that their souls, the most precious quarter grain of them, will rise up to the Paradise of Ten Thousand Years if they die in defence of the Sublime Porte. There they will live like 1 do here. We will meet these invaders down at the straits.'
'Yes, Excellency.'
'Leave me now.'
But when the Indian navy appeared it was not in the Aegean, but in the Black Sea, the Ottoman Sea. Little black ships crowding the Black Sea, ships with waterwheels on their sides, and no sails, only white plumes of smoke pouring out of chimneys topping black deckhouses. They looked like the furnaces of an ironworks, and it seemed they should sink like stones. But they didn't. They puffed down the relatively unguarded Bosporus, blasting shore batteries to pieces, and anchored offshore the Sublime Porte. From there they fired explosive shells into
Topkapi Palace, also into the mostly ceremonial batteries defending that side of the city, long‑neglected as there had been no one to attack Konstantiniyye for centuries. To have appeared in the Black Sea ‑ no one could explain it.
in any case there they were, shelling the defences until they were pounded into silence, then firing shot after shot into the walls of the palace, and the remaining batteries across the Golden Horn, in Pera. The populace of the city huddled indoors, or took refuge in the mosques, or left the city for the countryside outside the Theodosian walls; soon the city seemed deserted, except for some young men out to watch the assault. More of these appeared in the streets as it began to seem that the iron ships were not going to bombard the city, but only Topkapi, which was taking a terrific beating despite its enormous impregnable walls.
Ismail was called into this great artillery target by the Sultan. He boxed up the mass of papers that had accumulated in the last few years, all the notes and records, sketches and samples and specimens. He wished he could make arrangements to send it all out to the medical madressa in Nsara, where many of his most faithful correspondents lived and worked; or even to the hospital in Travancore, home of their assailants, but also of his other most faithful group of medical correspondents.
There was no way now to arrange such a transfer, so he left them in his rooms with a note on top describing the contents, and walked through the deserted streets to the Sublime Porte. It was a sunny day; voices came from the big blue mosque, but other than that only dogs were to be seen, as if Judgment Day had come and Ismail been left behind.
Judgment Day had certainly come for the palace; shells struck it every few minutes. Ismail ducked inside the outer gate and was taken to the Sultan, whom he found seemingly exhilarated by events, as if at a fair: Selim the Third stood on Topkapi's highest bartizan, in full view of the fleet bombarding them, watching the action through a long silver telescope.
'Why doesn't the iron sink the ships?' he asked Ismail. 'They must be as heavy as treasure chests.'
'There must be enough air in the hulls to make them float,' the doctor said, apologetic at the inadequacy of this explanation. 'If their hulls were punctured, they would surely sink faster than wooden ships.'
One of the ships fired, erupting smoke and seemingly sliding back~ wards in the water. Their guns shot forwards, one per ship. Fairly little things, like big bay dhows, or giant water bugs.
The shot exploded down the palace wall to their left. Ismail felt the jolt in his feet. He sighed.
The Sultan glanced at him. 'Frightened?'
'Somewhat, Excellency.'
The Sultan grinned. 'Come, 1 want you to help me decide what to take. I need the most valuable of the jewels.' But then he spotted something in the sky. 'What's that?' He clapped the telescope to his eye. Ismail looked up; there was a dot of red in the sky. It drifted on the breeze over the city, looking like a red egg. 'There's a basket hanging under it!' the Sultan exclaimed, 'and people in the basket!' He laughed. 'They know how to make things fly in the sky!'
Ismail shaded his eyes. 'May 1 use the spyglass, Excellency?'
Under white, puffy clouds, the red dot floated towards them. 'Hot air rises,' Ismail said, shocked as it became clear to him. 'They must have a brazier in the basket with them, and the hot air from its fire rises up into the bag and is caught there, and so the whole thing rises up and flies.'
The Sultan laughed again. 'Wonderful!' He took the glass back from Ismail. 'I don't see any flames, though.'
'It must be a small fire, or they would burn the bag. A brazier using charcoal, you wouldn't see that. Then when they want to come down, they damp the fire.'
'I want to do that,' the Sultan declared. 'Why didn't you make one of these for me?'
'I didn't think of it.'
Now the Sultan was in especially high spirits. The red floating bag was floating their way.
'We can hope the winds carry it elsewhere,' Ismail remarked as he watched it.
'No!' the Sultan cried. 'I want to see what it can do.'
He got his wish. The floating bag drifted over the palace, just under the clouds, or between them, or even disappearing inside one, which gave Ismail the strongest sense yet that it was flying in the air like a bird. People in the air like birds!
'Shoot them down!' the Sultan was shouting enthusiastically. 'Shoot the bag!'
The palace guards tried, but the cannon that were left standing on the broken walls could not be elevated high enough to fire at it. The musketeers shot at it, the flat cracks of their muskets followed by shouts from the Sultan. The acrid smoke of gunpowder filled the grounds, mixing with the smells of citrus and jasmine and pulverized dust. But as far as any of them could tell, no one hit bag or basket. judging by the minute faces looking down from the basket's edge, wrapped in heavy woollen scarves it appeared, Ismail thought they were perhaps out of range, too high to be hit. 'The bullets probably won't go that far up,' he said.
And yet they would never be too high to drop things on whatever lay below. The people in the basket appeared to wave at them, and then a black dot dropped like a stooping hawk, a hawk of incredible compaction and speed, crashing right into the roof of one of the inner buildings, exploding and sending shards of tile clattering all over the courtyard and garden.
The Sultan was shouting ecstatically. Three more gunpowder bombs dropped onto the palace, one on a wall where soldiers surrounded one of the big guns, killing them with much damage.
Ismail's ears hurt more from the Sultan's roars than from the explo‑ sions. He pointed to the iron ships. 'They're coming in.'
The ships were close onshore, launching boats filled with men. The bombardment from other ships continued during the disembarking, more intense than ever; their boats were going to land uncontested at a section of the city walls they had blasted down. 'They'll be here soon,' Ismail ventured. Meanwhile the floating bag and basket had drifted west, past the palace and over the open fields beyond the city wall.
'Come on,' Selim said suddenly, grabbing Ismail by the arm. 'I need to hurry.'
Down broken marble stairs they ran, followed by the Sultan's immediate retinue. The Sultan led the way into the warren
of rooms and passageways deep beneath the palace.
Down here oil lamps barely illuminated chambers filled with the loot of four Ottoman centuries, and perhaps Byzantine treasure as well, if not Roman or Greek, or Hittite or Sumerian; all the riches of the world, stacked in room after room. One was filled entirely with gold, mostly in
the form of coins and bars; another with Byzantine devotional art; another with old weapons; another with furniture of rare woods and furs, another with chunks of coloured rock, worthless as far as Ismail could tell. 'There won't be time to go through all this,' he pointed out, trotting behind the Sultan.
Selim just laughed. He swept through a long gallery or warehouse of paintings and statues to a small side room, empty except for a line of bags on a bench. 'Bring these,' he ordered his servants as they caught up; then he was off again, sure of his course.
The Years of Rice and Salt Page 47
