The Year of Rice and Salt

All well and good, but no matter how much air they blasted into the charcoal fire, causing the iron to run white as the sun and liquid as water, or even thinner, the cannons that resulted were just as prone to cracks as before. And Nadir would appear, unannounced, aware of even the latest results. Clearly he had his spies in the compound, and did not care if Bahram knew it. Or wanted him to know it. And so he would show up, not pleased. His look would say, More, and quickly! even as his words reassured them that he was confident they were doing the best they could, that the Khan was pleased with the flight tables. He would say, 'The Khan is impressed by the power of mathematics to stave off Chinese invaders,' and Bahram would nod unhappily, to indicate he had got the message even if Khalid had studiously avoided seeing it, and he would hold back from asking after the assurance of an amun for Iwang the following spring, thinking it might be best to trust to Nadir's good will at a better time, and go back to the shop to try something else.

A New Metal, a New Dynasty, a New Religion

Just as a practical matter, then, Bahram was getting interested in a dull grey metal that looked like lead on the outside and tin on its interior.

There was obviously very much sulphur in the mercury – if that whole description of metals could be credited – and it was, at first, so nondescript as to pass notice. But it was proving in various little demonstrations and trials to be less brittle than iron, more ductile than gold, and, in short, a different metal than those mentioned by Al Razi and Ibn Sina, strange though that was to contemplate. A new metal! And it mixed with iron to form a kind of steel that seemed as if it would work well as cannon barrel material.

'How could there be a new metal?' Bahram asked Khalid and Iwang. 'And what should it be called? I can't just keep calling it the grey stuff.'

'It's not new,' Iwang said. 'It was always there among the rest, but we're achieving heats never before reached, and so it expresses out.'

Khalid called it leadgold as a joke, but the stuck name stuck for lack of another. And the metal, found now every time they smelted certain bluish copper ores, became part of their armoury.

Days passed in a fever of work. Rumours of war to the east increased. In China, it was said, barbarians were again crashing over the Great Wall, bringing down the rotten Ming dynasty and setting that whole giant off in a ferment of violence that was now rippling outwards from it. This time the barbarians came not from Mongolia but Manchuria, northeast of China, and they were the most accomplished warriors ever yet seen in the world, it was said, and very likely to conquer and destroy everything in their path, including Islamic civilization, unless something was done to make a defence against them possible.

So people said in the bazaar, and Nadir too, in his more circuitous way, confirmed that something was happening; and the feeling of danger grew as the winter passed, and the time for military campaigns came around again. Spring, the time for war and for plague, the two biggest arms of six armed death, as Iwang put it.