The Year of Rice and Salt

Iwang would nod, thinking things over. But Bahram wondered if he could ever come to the right view. The fount of Bahram's own love, like a powerful artesian spring in the hills, was his feeling for his wife and children, then for Allah, who had allowed him the privilege of living his life among such beautiful souls – not only the three of them, but Khalid and Fedwa and all their relatives, and the community of the compound, the mosque, the ribat, Sher Dor, and indeed all of Samarqand and the wide world, when he was feeling it. Iwang had no such starting point, being single and childless, as far as Bahram knew, and an infidel to boot. How was he to begin to feel the more generalized and diffuse loves, if the specific ones were not there for him?

'The heart which is greater than the intellect is not that which beats in the chest.' So Ali would say. It was a matter of opening his heart to God, and letting the love appear from there first. Iwang was already good at calming himself, at paying attention to the world in its quiet moments, sitting out at the compound some dawns after he had spent the night on a couch in the shops. Bahram once or twice joined him in these sittings, and once he was inspired by a windless pure gold sky to recite from Rumi 'How silent it has become in the house of the heart!

The heart as hearth and home Has encompassed the world.'

When Iwang finally responded, after the sun had broken over the eastern ridges and flooded the valley with buttered light, it was only to say, 'I wonder if the world is as big as Brahmagupta said it was.'

'He said it was a sphere, right?'

'Yes, of course. You can see that out on the steppes, when a caravan comes over the horizon heads first. We are on the surface of a great ball.'

'The heart of God.'

No reply but the swaying head, which meant that Iwang did not agree but did not want to disagree. Bahram desisted, and asked about the Hindu's estimate of the size of the Earth, which was clearly what interested Iwang now.

'Brahmagupta noticed that the sun shone straight down a well in the Deccan on a certain day, and the next year he arranged to be a thousand yoganda north of there, and he measured the angle of the shadows, and used spherical geometry to calculate what percentage of the circle that arc of a thousand yoganda was. Very simple, very interesting.'

Bahram nodded; no doubt true; but they would only ever see a small fraction of those yoganda, and here, now, Iwang was in need of spiritual illumination. Or – in need of love. Bahram invited him to eat with his family, to observe Esmerine serve the meals, and instruct the children in their manners. The children were a pleasure all their own, their liquid eyes huge in their faces as they stopped in their racing about to listen impatiently to Esmerine's lectures. Their racing about the compound was a pleasure as well. Iwang nodded at all this. 'You're a lucky man,' he told Bahram.

'We are all lucky men,' Bahram replied. And Iwang agreed.

The Goddess and the Law

Parallel to his new religious studies, Iwang continued his investigations and demonstrations with Khalid. They devoted the greater portion of these efforts to their projects for Nadir and the Khan. They worked out a long range signalling system for the army that used mirrors and small telescopes; they also cast bigger and bigger cannons, with giant waggons to haul them by horse or camel train from one battlefield to the next.

'We will need cart roads for these, if we are ever to move them,' Iwang noted. Even the great Silk Road itself was nothing but a camel track for most of its length.

Their latest private investigation into causes concerned a little telescope which magnified objects too small to be seen by the eye alone. The astronomers from the Ulug Bek Madressa had devised the thing, which could only be focused on a very narrow slice of air, so that translucent items caught between two plates of glass were best, lit by mirrored sunlight from below. Then new little worlds appeared, right under their fingers.

The three men spent hours looking through this telescope at pond water, which proved to be full of strangely articulated creatures, all swimming about. They looked at translucently thin slabs of stone, wood and bone; and at their own blood, which was filled with blobs that were frighteningly like the animals in the pond water.

'The world just keeps getting smaller,' Khalid marvelled. 'If we could draw the blood of those little creatures in our blood, and put it under a lens even more powerful than this one, I have no doubt that their blood would contain animalcules just like ours does; and so on for those animals as well, and down to…'He trailed off, awe giving him a dazed look. Bahram had never seen him so happy.

'There is probably some smallest possible size of things,' Iwang said practically. 'So the ancient Greeks postulated. The ultimate particulates, out of which all else is constructed. No doubt smaller than we will ever see.'