The Year of Rice and Salt

In deference to Bahram's feelings, Khalid and Iwang organized the whole compound as an armoury, and all their tests and demonstrations were devoted to increasing the powers of the Khan's army. Stronger cannon, more explosive gunpowder, spinning shot, killer of myriads; also firing tables, logistical protocols, mirror alphabets to talk over great distances; all this and more they produced, while Bahram lived half in the Khanaka with Esmerine and the children, and half out at the compound, until the Bokhara Road became like the courtyard path to him, traversed at all hours of the day and night, sometimes asleep on horses that knew the way blind.

The increases they made in the Khan's war making powers were prodigious; or would have been, if the commanders of Sayyed Abdul's army could have been made to submit to Khalid's instruction, and if Khalid had had the patience to teach them. But both sides were too proud for accommodation, and though it seemed to Bahram a critical failure on Nadir's part not to force the issue and command the generals to obey Khalid, also not to spend more of the Khan's treasury on hiring more soldiers with more experience, nothing was done. Even the great Nadir Devanbegi had limits to his power, which came down in the end to the sway of his advice over the Khan. Other advisers had different advice, and it was possible Nadir's power was in fact waning just at the moment it was most needed, and despite Khalid and Iwang's innovations – or, who knew, perhaps even because of them. It was not as if the Khan had distinguished himself for good judgment. And possibly his pocket was not as bottomless as it had seemed back in the days when the bazaars and caravanserai and building sites were all bustling like beehives, and paying taxes.

So Esmerine seemed to suggest, though Bahram had mostly to deduce this from ber looks and silences. She seemed to believe they were spied upon at all times, even during their sleepless hours in the dead of night, which was a rather terrible thought. The children had taken to life in the palace as if falling into some dream out of the Arabian Nights, and Esmerine did nothing to disabuse them of this notion, although she of course knew that they were prisoners, and their lives forfeit if the Khan should happen to experience a fit of bad temper at the way things were going at Khalid's, or to the cast, or anywhere else. So naturally she avoided saying anything objectionable, and mentioned only how well fed and kindly treated they were, how much the children and she were thriving. Only the look in her eye when they were alone told Bahram how afraid she was, and how much she wished to encourage him to fulfil the Khan's desires.

Khalid of course knew all this without his daughter's glances to tell him. Bahram could see him putting more and more effort into improving the military capacity of the Khan, not only by exerting himself in the armoury, but by trying to ingratiate himself with the most amenable of the generals, and by making suggestions discreet or direct on all manner of subjects, from the renovation of the walls of the city, in keeping with his demonstrations of the strength of raw earthworks, to plans for welldigging and drainage of stale water in Bokhara and Samarqand. All purely theoretical demonstrations went by the board in this effort, with no time spent grumbling about it either. But progress was uneven.

Rumours began to fly about the city like bats, sucking the light out of the day. The Manchurian barbarians had conquered Yunnan, Mongolia, Cham, Tibet, Annam and the eastern extensions of the Mughal empire; every day it was somewhere different, somewhere closer. There was no way to confirm any of these assertions, and indeed they were often denied, either by direct contradiction, or simply by the fact that caravans kept coming from some of those regions, and the traders had seen nothing unusual, though they too had heard rumours. Nothing was certain but that there was turmoil to the east. The caravans certainly came less often, and included not only traders but whole families, Muslim or Jewish or Hindu, driven out by fear of the new dynasty, called the Qing. Centuries old foreign settlements dissipated like frost in the sun, and the exiles streamed west with the idea things would be better in Dar al Islam, under the Mughals or the Ottomans or in the taifa sultanates of Frengistan. No doubt true, as Islam was lawful; but Bahram saw the misery on their faces, the destitution and fear, the need for their men to angle and beg for provisions, their goods for trade already depleted, and all the wide western half of the world still before them to be traversed.

At least it would be the Muslim half of the world. But visits to the caravanserai, once one of Bahram's favourite parts of the day, now left him anxious and fearful, as intent as Nadir to see Khalid and Iwang come up with ways to defend the khanate from invasion.