The Year of Rice and Salt

'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.