More bombs had been rigged by the Sultan's bodyguards to blow up the cages in the palace zoo, and when Ismail climbed back up the stairs and re emerged into the air, he found the grounds in chaos, invaders and defenders alike running around chasing or fleeing from elephants, lions, cameleopards and giraffes. A pair of black rhinoceroses, looking like boars out of a nightmare, charged about bleeding through crowds of shouting, shooting men. Ismail raised his hands, fully expecting to be shot, and thinking escape with Selim might have been all right after all.
But no one was being shot except the animals. Some of the palace guard lay dead on the ground, or wounded, and the rest had surrendered and were under guard, and much less trouble than the animals. For now it looked as if massacre of the defeated was not part of the invaders' routine, just as rumour had had it. In fact they were hustling their captives out of the palace, as booms were shaking the ground, and plumes of smoke shooting out of windows and stairwells, walls and roofs collapsing: the rigged explosions and the maddened beasts made it prudent to vacate Topkapi for a while.
They were regathered to the west of the Sublime Porte, just inside the Theodosian Wall, on a parade ground where the Sultan had surveyed his troops and done some riding. The women of the seraglio, in full chador, were surrounded by their eunuchs and a wall of guards. Ismail sat with the household retinue that remained: the astronomer, the ministers of various administrative departments, cooks, servants and so on.
The day passed and they got hungry. Late in the afternoon a group of the Indian army came among them with bags of flatbread. They were small dark-skinned men.
'Your name, please?' one of them asked Ismail.
'Ismail ibn Mani al Dir.'
The man drew his finger down a sheet of paper, stopped, showed another of them what he had found.
The other one, now looking like an officer, inspected Ismail. 'Are you the doctor, Ismail of Konstantiniyye, who has written letters to Bhakta, the abbess of the hospital of Travancore?'
'Yes,' Ismail said.
'Come with me, please.'
Ismail stood and followed, devouring the bread he had been given as he went. Doomed or not, he was famished; and there was no sign that he was being taken out to be shot. Indeed the mention of Bhakta's name seemed to indicate otherwise.
In a plain but capacious tent a man at a desk was interviewing pris oners, none of whom Ismail recognized. He was led to the front, and the interviewing officer looked at him curiously, and said in Persian, 'You are high on the list of people required to report to the Kerala of Travancore.'
'I am surprised to hear it.'
'You are to be congratulated. This appears to be at the request of Bhakta, abbess of the Travancori hospital.'
'A correspondent of many years' standing, yes.'
'All is explained. Please allow the captain here to lead you to the ship departing for Travancore. But first, one question; you are reported to be an intimate of the Sultan's. Is this true?'
'It was true.'
'Can you tell us where the Sultan has gone?'
'He and his bodyguard have absconded,' Ismail said. 'I believe they are headed for the Balkans, with the intention of re establishing the Sultanate in the West.'
'Do you know how they escaped the palace?'
'No. I was left behind, as you see.'
Their machine ships ran by the heat of fires, as Ismail had heard, burning in furnaces that boiled water, the steam then forced by pipes to push paddlewheels, encased by big wooden housings on each side of the bull. Valves controlled the amount of steam going to each wheel, and the ship could turn on a single spot. Into the wind it thumped along, bouncing awkwardly over and through waves, throwing spray high over the ship. When the winds came from behind, the crew raised small sails, and the ship was pushed forwards in the usual way, but with an extra impulse provided by the two wheels. They burned coal in the furnaces, and spoke of coal deposits in the mountains of Iran that would supply their ships till the end of time.
'Who made the ships?' Ismail asked.
'The Kerala of Travancore ordered them built. Ironmongers in Anatolia were taught to make the furnaces, boilers and paddlewheels. Shipbuilders in the ports at the east end of the Black Sea did the rest.'
They landed at a tiny harbour near old Trebizond, and Ismail was included in a group that rode south and east through Iran, over range after range of dry hills and snowy mountains, into India. Everywhere there were short dark skinned troops wearing white, on horseback, with many wheeled cannon prominently placed in every town and at every crossroads. All the towns looked undamaged, busy, prosperous. They changed horses at big fortified changing stations run by the army, and slept at these places as well. Many stations were placed under hills where bonfires burned through the night; blocking the light from these fires transmitted messages over great distances, all over the new empire. The Kerala was in Delhi, he would be back in Travancore in a few weeks; the abbess Bhakta was in Benares, but due back in Travancore in days. It was conveyed to Ismail that she was looking forward to meeting him.
Ismail, meanwhile, was finding out just how big the world was. And yet it was not infinite. Ten days of steady riding brought them across the Indus. On the green west coast of India, another surprise: they boarded iron carts like their iron ships, with iron wheels, and rode them on causeways that held two parallel iron rails, over which the carts rolled as smoothly as if they were flying, right through the old cities so long ruled by the Mughals. The causeway of the iron rails crossed the broken edge of the Deccan, south into a region of endless groves of coconut palms, and they rolled by the power of steam as fast as the wind, to Travancore, on the southwesternmost shore of India.
Many people had moved to this city following the recent imperial successes. After rolling slowly through a zone of orchards and fields filled with crops Ismail did not recognize, they came to the edges of the city. The outskirts were crowded with new buildings, encampments, lumber yards, holding facilities: indeed for many leagues in all directions it seemed nothing but construction sites.
Meanwhile the inner core of the city was also being transformed. Their train of linked iron carts stopped in a big yard of paired rails, and they walked out of a gate into the city centre. A white marble palace, very small by the standards of the Sublime Porte, had been erected there in the middle of a park which must have replaced much of the old city centre. The harbour this park overlooked was filled with all manner of ships. To the south could be seen a shipyard building new vessels; a mole was being extended out into the shallow green seas, and the enclosed water, in the shelter of a long low island, was as crowded with ships as the inner harbour, with many small boats sailing or being rowed between them. Compared to the dusty torpor of Konstantiniyye's harbours, it was a tumultuous scene.
Ismail was taken on horseback through the bustling city and down the coast farther, to a grove of palm trees behind a broad yellow beach. Here walls surrounded an extensive Buddhist monastery, and new buildings could be seen a long way through the grove. A pier extended out from the seaside buildings, and several fire powered ships were docked there. This was apparently the home of the famous hospital of Travancore.
Inside the monastery grounds it was windless and calm. Ismail was led to a dining room and given a meal, then invited to wash off the grime of his travel. The baths were tiled, the water either warm or cool, depending on which pool he preferred, and the last ones were under the sky.
Beyond the baths stood a small pavilion on a green lawn, surrounded by flowers. Ismail donned a clean brown robe he was offered, and padded barefoot across the cut grass to the pavilion, where an old woman was in conversation with a number of others.
She stopped when she saw them, and Ismail's guide introduced him.
'Ah. A great pleasure,' the woman said in Persian. 'I am Bhakta, the abbess here, and your humble correspondent.' She stood and bowed to Ismail, hands together. Her fingers were twisted, her walk stiff; it looked to Ismail like arthritis. 'Welcome to our home. Let me pour you some tea, or coffee if you prefer.'
'Tea will be fine,' Ismail said.
'Bodhisattva,' a messenger said to the abbess, 'we will be visited by the Kerala on the next new moon.'
'A great honour,' the abbess said. 'The moon will be in close conjunction with the morning star. Will we have time to complete the mandalas?'
'They think so.'
'Very good.'
The abbess continued to sip her tea.
'He called you bodhisattva?' Ismail ventured.
The abbess grinned like a girl. 'A sign of affection, with no basis in reality. I am simply a poor nun, given the honour of guiding this hospital for a time, by our Kerala.'
Ismail said, 'When we corresponded, you did not mention this. I thought you were simply a nun, in something like a madressa and hospital.'
'For a long time that was the case.'
'When did you become the abbess?'
'In your year, what would it be, 1194. The previous abbot was a Japanese lama. He practised a Japanese form of Buddhism, which was brought here by his predecessor, with many more monks and nuns, after the Chinese conquered Japan. The Chinese persecute even the Buddhists of their own country, and in Japan it was worse. So they came here, or first to Lanka, then here.'
'And they made studies in medicine, I take it.'
'Yes. My predecessor in particular had very clear sight, and a great curiosity. Generally we see as if it were night, but he stood in the light of morning, because he tested the truth of what we say we know, in regularized trials. He could sense the strengths of things, the force of movement, and devise tests of them in trials of various kinds. We are still walking through the doors he opened for us.'
'Yet I think you have been following him into new places.'
'Yes, more is always revealed, and we have been working hard since he left that body. The great increase in shipping has brought us many useful and remarkable documents, including some from Firanja. It's becoming clear to me that the island England was a sort of Japan about to happen, on the other side of the world. Now they have a forest uncut for centuries, regrown over the ruins, and so they have wood to trade, and they build ships themselves. They bring us books and manuscripts found in the ruins, and scholars here and all around Travancore have learned the languages and translated the books, and they are very interesting. People like the Master of Henley were more advanced than you might think. They advocated efficient organization, good accounting, auditing, the use of trial and record to determine yields – in general, to run their farms on a rational basis, as we do here. They had waterpowered bellows, and could get their furnaces white hot, or high yellow at least. They were even concerned with the loss of forest in their time. Henley calculated that one furnace could burn all the tress within a yoganda's radius, in only forty days.'
'Presumably that will be happening again,' Ismail said.
'No doubt even faster. But meanwhile, it's making them rich.'
'And here?'
'Here we are rich in a different fashion. We help the Kerala, and he extends the reach of the kingdom every month, and within its bounds, all tends to improvement. More food is grown, more cloth made. Less war and brigandage.'
After tea Bhakta showed him around the grounds. A lively river ran through the centre of the monastery, and its water ran through four big wooden mills and their wheels, and a big sluice gate at the bottom end of a catchment pond. All around this rushing stream was green lawn and palm trees, but the big wooden halls built next to the mills on both banks hummed and clanked and roared, and smoke billowed out of tall brick chimneys rising out of them.
'The foundry, ironworks, sawmill and manufactory.'
'You wrote of an armoury,' Ismail said, 'and a gunpowder facility.'
'Yes. But the Kerala did not want to impose that burden on us, as Buddhism is generally against violence. We taught his army some things about guns, because they protect Travancore. We asked the Kerala about this – we told him it was important to Buddhists to work for good, and he promised that in all the lands that came under his control, he would impose a rule of laws that would keep the people from violence or evil dealing. In effect, we help him to protect people. Of course one is, suspicious of that, seeing what rulers do, but this one is very interested in law. In the end he does what he likes, of course. But he likes laws.'
Ismail thought of the nearly bloodless aftermath of the conquest of Konstantiniyye. 'There must be some truth in it, or I would not be alive.'
'Yes, tell me about that. It sounded as if the Ottoman capital was not so vigorously defended.'
'No. But that is partly because of the vigour of the assault. People were unnerved by the fireships, and the flying bags overhead.'
Bhakta looked interested. 'Those were our doing, I must admit. And yet the ships do not seem that formidable.'
'Consider each ship to be a mobile artillery battery.'
The abbess nodded. 'Mobility is one of the Kerala's watchwords.'
'As well it might be. In the end mobility prevails, and all within shot of the sea can be destroyed. And Konstantiniyye is all within shot of the sea.'
' I see what you mean.'
After tea the abbess took Ismail through the monastery and workshops, down to the docks and shipworks, which were loud. Late in the day they walked over to the hospital, and Bhakta led Ismail to the rooms used for teaching monks to become doctors. The teachers gathered to greet him, and they showed him the shelf on one wall of books and papers that they had devoted to the letters and drawings he had sent to Bhakta over the years, all catalogued according to a system he did not understand. 'Every page has been copied many times,' one of the men said.
'Your work seems very different to Chinese medicine,' one of the others said. 'We were hoping you might speak to us about the differences between their theory and yours.'
Ismail shook his head, fingering through these vestiges of his former existence. He would not have said he had written so much. Perhaps there were multiple copies even on this shelf.
'I have no theories,' he said. 'I have only noted what I have seen.' His face tightened. 'I will be happy to speak with you about whatever you like, of course.'
The abbess said, 'It would be very good if you would speak to a gathering about these things, there are many who would like to hear you, and to ask questions.'
'My pleasure, of course.'
'Thank you. We will convene tomorrow for that, then.'
A clock somewhere struck the bells that marked every hour and watch.
'What kind of clock do you employ?'
'A version of Bhaskara's mercury wheel,' Bhakta said, and led Ismail by the tall building that housed it. 'It does very well for the astronomical calculations, and the Kerala has decreed a new year using it, more accurate than any before. But to tell the truth, we are now trying horologues with weight driven mechanical escapements. We are also trying clocks with spring drives, which would be useful at sea, where accurate timekeeping is essential for determining longitude.'
'I know nothing of that.'
'No. You have been attending to medicine.'
'Yes.'
The next day they returned to the hospital, and in a large room where surgeries were performed, a great number of monks and nuns in brown and maroon and yellow robes sat on the floor to hear him. Bhakta had assistants bring several thick wide books to the table where Ismail was to speak, all of them filled with anatomical drawings, most Chinese.
They seemed to be waiting for him to speak, so he said, 'I am pleased to tell you what I have observed. Perhaps it will help you, I don't know. I know little of any formal medical system. I studied some of the ancient Greek knowledge as it was translated by Ibn Sina and others, but I never could profit much from it. Very little from Aristotle, somewhat more from Galen. Ottoman medicine itself was no very impressive thing. In truth, nowhere have I found a general explanation that fits what I have seen with my own eyes, and so long ago I gave up on all hypothesis, and decided to try to draw and to write down only what I saw. So you must tell me about these Chinese ideas, if you can express them in Persian, and I will see if I can tell you how my observations match with them.' He shrugged. 'That's all I can do.'
They stared at him, and he continued nervously: 'So useful, Persian. The language that bridges Islam and India.' He waggled a hand. 'Any questions?'
Bhakta herself broke the silence. 'What about the meridian lines that the Chinese speak of, running through the body from the skin inward and back again?'
Ismail looked at the drawings of the body she turned to in one of the books. 'Could they be nerves?' he said. 'Some of these lines follow the paths of major nerves. But then they diverge. I have not seen nerves crisscrossing like this, cheek to neck, down spine to thigh, up into back. Nerves generally branch like an almond tree's branches, while the blood vessels branch like a birch tree. Neither tangle like these are shown to.'
'We don't think meridian lines refer to the nerves.'
'To what, then? Do you see anything there when you do autopsies?'
'We do not do autopsies. When opportunity has allowed us to inspect torn bodies, their parts look as you have described them in your letters to us. But the Chinese understanding is of great antiquity and elaboration, and they get good results by sticking pins in the right meridian points, among other methods. They very often get good results.'
'How do you know?'
'Well – some of us have seen it. Mostly we understand it from what they have said. We wonder if they are finding systems too small to be seen. Can we be sure that the nerves are the only messengers of motion to the musculature?'
'I think so, ' Ismail said. 'Cut the right nerve and the muscles beyond it will not move. Prick a nerve and the appropriate muscle will jump.'
His audience stared at him. One of the older men said, 'Perhaps some other kind of energy transference is happening, not necessarily through the nerves, but through the lines, and this is needed as much as the nerves.'
'Perhaps. But look here,' pointing at one diagram, 'they show no pancreas. No adrenal glands either. These both perform necessary functions.'
Bhakta said, 'For them there are eleven crucial organs – five yin and six yang. Heart, lungs, spleen, liver and kidneys, they are yin.'
'A spleen is not essential.'
'Then the six yang organs are gall bladder, stomach, small intestine, large intestine, bladder and triple burner.'
'Triple burner? What is that?'
She read from the Chinese notations by the drawing: 'They say, "It has a name but no shape. It combines the effects of the organs that regulate water, as a fire must control water. The upper burner is a mist, the middle burner a foam, the lower burner a swamp. Thus top to bottom, corresponding to head and upper body, middle from nipples to navel, lower the abdomen below the navel. – Ismail shook his head. 'Do they find it in dissections?'
'Like us, they rarely do dissections. There are similar religious barriers. Once in their Sung dynasty, about year 390 in Islam, they dissected forty six rebels.'
'I doubt that would have helped. You have to see a lot of dissections, and vivisections, with no preconceptions in mind, before it begins to come clear.'
Now the monks and nuns were staring at him with an odd expression, but he forged on as he examined the drawings. 'This flow through the body and all its parts, do they not mean blood?'
'A harmonious balance of fluids, some material, like blood, some spiritual, like jing and shen and qi, the so called three treasures 'What are they, please?'
'ling is the source of change,' one nun said hesitantly, 'supportive and nutritive, like a fluid. Essence is another Persian word we could use to translate it. In Sanskrit, semen, or the generative possibility.'
'And shen?'
'Shen is awareness, consciousness. Like our spirit, but a part of the body, too.'
Ismail was interested in this. 'Have they weighed it?'
Bhakta led the laughter. 'Their doctors do not weigh things. With them it is not things, but forces and relationships.'
'Well, I am just an anatomist. What animates the parts is beyond me. Three treasures, one, a myriad – I cannot tell. It does seem there is some animating vitality, that comes and goes, waxes and wanes. Dissection cannot find it. Our souls, perhaps. You believe that the soul returns, do you not?'
'We do.'
'The Chinese also?'
'Yes, for the most part. For their Daoists there is no'pure spirit, it is always mixed with material things. So their immortality requires movement from one body to another. And all Chinese medicine is strongly influenced by Daoism. Their Buddhism is mostly like ours, although again, more materialist. It is chiefly what the women do in their older years, to help the community, and prepare for their next life. The official Confucian culture does not speak much of the soul, even though they acknowledge its existence. In most Chinese writing the line drawn between spirit and matter is vague, sometimes nonexistent.'
'Evidently,' Ismail said, looking at the meridian line drawing again. He sighed. 'Well. They have studied long, and helped living people, while I have only drawn dissections.'
They continued. The questions came from more and more of them, with comments and observations. Ismail answered every question as best he could. The movement of the blood in the chambers of the heart; the function of the spleen, if there was one; location of the ovaries; shock reactions to amputation of the legs; flooding of punctured lungs; movement of the various limbs when parts of the exposed brain were prodded with needles: he described what he had seen in each case, and as the day wore on, the crowd sitting on the floor looked up at him with expressions more and more guarded, or odd. A pair of nuns left quietly. As Ismail was describing the coagulation of the blood after extraction of teeth, the room went completely silent. Few of them met his eye, and noticing that, he faltered. 'As I said, I am a mere anatomist… We will have to see if we can reconcile what I have seen with your theoretical texts…' He looked hot, as if he had a fever, but only in his face.
Finally the Abbess Bhakta rose to her feet, stepped stiffly to him, and held his shaking hands in hers. 'No more,' she said gently. All the monks and nuns rose to their feet, their hands placed together before them, as in prayer, and bowed towards him. 'You have made good from bad,' Bhakta said. 'Rest now, and let us take care of you.'
So Ismail settled into a small room in the monastery provided for him, and studied Chinese texts freshly translated into the Persian by the monks and nuns, and taught anatomy.
One afternoon he and Bhakta walked from the hospital to the dining hall, through hot and muggy air, the pre monsoon air, like a warm wet blanket. The abbess pointed to a little girl running through the rows of melons in the big garden. 'There is the new incarnation of the previous lama. She just came to us last year, but she was born the very hour the old lama died, which is very unusual. It took a while for us to find her, of course. We did not start the search until last year, and immediately she turned up.'
'His soul moved from man to woman?'
'Apparently. The search certainly looked among the little boys, as is traditional. That was one of the things that made identifying her so easy. She insisted on being tested, despite her sex. At four years of age. And she identified all of Peng Roshi's things, many more than the new incarnation usually can do, and told me the contents of my final conversation with Peng, almost word for word.'
'Really!' Ismail stared at Bhakta.
Bhakta met his gaze. 'It was like looking into his eyes again. So, we say that Peng has come back to us as a Tara bodhisattva, and we started paying more attention to the girls and the nuns, something of course that I have always encouraged. We have emulated the Chinese habit of inviting the old women of Travancore to come to the monastery and give their lives over to studying the sutras, but also to studying medicine, and going back out to care for those in their villages, and to teach their grandchildren and great grandchildren.'
The little girl disappeared into the palm trees at the end of the garden. The new moon sickled the sky, pendant under a bright evening star. The sound of drumming came on a breeze. 'He has been delayed,' Bhakta said as she listened to the drums. 'He will be here tomorrow.'
The drumming became audible again at dawn, just after the clock bells had clonged the coming of day. Distant drums, like thunder or gunfire, but more rhythmic than either, announced his arrival. As the sun rose it seemed the ground shook. Monks and nuns and their families living in the monastery poured out of the dormitories to witness the arrival, and the great yard inside the gate was hastily cleared.
The first soldiers danced in a rapid walk, all stepping together, taking a skip forwards at every fifth step, and shouting as they reversed their rifles from one shoulder to the other. The drummers followed, skipping in step as their hands beat their tablas. A few snapped hand cymbals. They wore uniform shirts, with red patches sewn to the shoulders, and came circling in a column around the great yard, until perhaps five hundred men stood in curved ranks facing the gate. When the Kerala and his officers rode in on horseback, the soldiers presented their arms and shouted three times. The Kerala raised a hand, and his detachment commander shouted orders: the tabla players rolled out the surging beat, and the soldiers danced into the dining hall.
'They are fast, just as everyone said,' Ismail said to Bhakta. 'And everything is so together.'
'Yes, they live in unison. In battle they are the same. The reloading of their rifles has been broken down into ten movements, and there are ten command drumbeats, and different groups of them are coordinated to different points of the cycle, so they fire in rotating mass, to very devastating effect I am told. No army can stand up to them. Or at least, that was true for many years. Now it seems the Golden Horde are beginning to train their armies in similar ways. But even with that, and with modern weapons, they won't be able to withstand the Kerala.'
Now the man himself dismounted, and Bhakta approached him, bringing Ismail along. The Kerala waved aside their bows, and Bhakta said without preamble, 'This is Ismail of Konstantiniyye, the famous Ottoman doctor.'
The Kerala stared at him intently, and Ismail gulped, feeling the heat of that impatient eye. The Kerala was short and compact, black haired, narrow faced, quick of movement. His torso seemed just a touch too long for his legs. His face was very handsome, chiselled like a Greek statue.
'I hope you are impressed by the hospital here,' he said in clear Persian.
'It is the best I have ever seen.'
'What was the state of Ottoman medicine when you left it?'
Ismail said, 'We were making progress in understanding a little of the parts of the body. But much remained mysterious.'
Bhakta added, 'Ismail has examined the medical theories of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, and brought what was useful in them to us, as well as making very many new discoveries of his own, correcting the ancients or adding to their knowledge. His letters to us have formed one of the main bases of our work in the hospital.'
'Indeed.' Now the Kerala's gaze was even more piercing. His eyes were protuberant, their irises a jumble of colours, like circles of jasper. 'Interesting! We must speak more of these things. But first I want to discuss recent developments with you alone, Mother Bodhisattva.'
The abbess nodded, and walked hand in hand with the Kerala to a pavilion overlooking the dwarf orchard. No bodyguard accompanied them, but only settled back and watched from the yard, rifles at the ready, with guards posted on the monastery wall.
Ismail went with some monks to the streamside, where they were arranging a ceremony of sand mandalas. Monks and nuns in maroon and saffron robes flowed everywhere about the bankside, setting out rugs and flower baskets, happily chattering and in no great hurry, as the Kerala often conferred with their abbess for half the day, or longer. They were famous friends.
Today, however, they finished earlier, and the pace quickened considerably as word came back that the two were leaving the pavilion. Flower baskets were cast on the stream, and the soldiers reappeared to the sound of the pulse quickening tablas. They skipped to the banksides without their rifles and sat, cleaving an aisle for their leader's approach. He came among them, stopping to put a hand to one shoulder or another, greeting men by name, asking after their wounds, and so on. The monks who had led the mandala effort came out of their studio, chanting to a gong and the blast of bass trumpets, carrying two mandalas – wooden discs as big as millstones, each held level by two men, with the vibrantly coloured mandalas laid in unfixed sand on their tops. One was a complex geometrical figure in bold red, green, yellow, blue, white and black. The other was a map of the world, with Travancore a red dot like a bindi, and India occupying the centre of the circle, and the rest of the mandala depicting almost the whole width of the world, from Firanja to Korea and Japan, with Africa and the Indies curved around the bottom. All was coloured naturally, the oceans dark blue, inland seas lighter blue, land green or brown, as the case might be, with the mountain ranges marked by dark green and snowy white. Rivers ran in blue threads, and a vivid red line enclosed what Ismail took to be the border of the Kerala's conquests, now including the Ottoman empire up through Anatolia and Konstantiniyye, though not the Balkans or the Crimea. A most beautiful object, like looking down on the world from the vantage of the sun.
The Kerala of Travancore walked with the abbess, helping her with her footing down the path. At the riverside they stopped, and the Kerala inspected the mandalas closely, slowly, pointing and asking the abbess and ber monks questions about one feature or another. Other monks chanted in low voices, and the soldiers helped to sing a song. Bhakta faced them and sang over their sound in a high thin voice. The Kerala took the mandala in his hands and lifted it up carefully; it was almost too large for one man to hold. He stepped down into the river with it, and bouquets of hydrangea and azalea floated into his legs. He held the geometrical mandala over his head, offering it to the sky, and then, at a shift in the song, and the growling entry of trumpets, he lowered the disc in front of him, and very slowly tilted it up on its side. The sand slid off all at once, the colours pouring into the water and blurring together, staining the Kerala's silken leggings. He dipped the disc into the water and washed the rest of the sand away in a multi coloured cloud that dissipated in the flow. He cleared the surface with his bare hand, then strode out of the water. His shoes were muddy, his wet leggings stained green and red and blue and yellow. He took the other mandala from its makers, bowed over it to them, turned and took it into the river. This time the soldiers shifted and bowed forehead to ground, chanting a prayer together. The Kerala lowered the disc slowly, and like a god offering a world to a higher god, rested it on the water and let it float, spinning slowly round and round under his fingers, a floating world that at the height of the song he plunged down into the stream as far as it would go, releasing all the sand into the water to float up over his arms and legs. As he walked to shore, spangled with colour, his soldiers stood and shouted three times, then three again.
Later, over tea scented with delicate perfumes, the Kerala sat in repose and spoke with Ismail. He heard all Ismail could tell him of Sultan Selim the Third, and then he told Ismail the history of Travancore, his eyes never leaving Ismail's face.
'Our struggle to throw off the yoke of the Mughals began long ago with Shivaji, who called himself Lord of the Universe, and invented modern warfare. Shivaji used every method possible to free India. Once he called the aid of a giant Deccan lizard to help him climb the cliffs guarding the Fortress of the Lion. Another time he was surrounded by the Bijapuri army, commanded by the great Mughal general Afzal Khan, and after a siege Shivaji offered to surrender to Afzal Khan in person, and appeared before that man clad only in a cloth shirt, that nevertheless concealed a scorpion tail dagger; and the fingers of his hidden left hand were sheathed in razor edged tiger claws. When he embraced Afzal Khan he slashed him to death before all, and on that signal his army set on the Mughals and defeated them.
'After that Alamgir attacked in earnest, and spent the last quarter century of his life reconquering the Deccan, at a cost of a hundred thousand lives per year. By the time he subdued the Deccan his empire was hollowed. Meanwhile there were other revolts against the Mughals to the northwest, among Sikhs, Afghans and the Safavid empire's eastern subjects, as well as Rajputs, Bengalis, Tamils and so forth, all over India. They all had some success, and the Mughals, who had overtaxed for years, suffered a revolt of their own zamindars, and a general breakdown of their finances. Once Marathas and Rajputs and Sikhs were successfully established, they all instituted tax systems of their own, you see, and the Mughals got no more money from them, even if they still swore allegiance to Delhi.
'So things went poorly for the Mughals, especially here in the south. But even though the Marathas and Rajputs were both Hindu, they spoke different languages, and hardly knew each other, so they developed as rivals, and this lengthened the Mughals' hold on mother India. In these end days the Nazim became premier to a khan completely lost to his harem and hookah, and this Nazim went south to form the principality that inspired our development of Travancore on a similar system.
'Then Nadir Shah crossed the Indus at the same ford used by Alexander the Great, and sacked Delhi, slaughtering thirty thousand and taking home a billion rupees of gold and jewels, and the Peacock Throne. With that the Mughals were finished.
'Marathas have been expanding their territory ever since, all the way into Bengal. But the Afghans freed themselves from the Safavids, and surged east all the way to Delhi, which they sacked also. When they withdrew the Sikhs were given control of the Punjab, for a tax of onefifth of the harvests. After that the Pathans sacked Delhi yet once more, rampaging for an entire month in a city become nightmare. The last emperor with a Mughal title was blinded by a minor Afghan chieftain.
'After that a Marathan cavalry of thirty thousand marched on Delhi, picking up two hundred thousand Rajput volunteers as they moved north, and on the fateful field of Panipat, where India's fate has so often been decided, they met an army of Afghan and ex Mughal troops, in full jihad against the Hindus. The Muslims had the support of the local populace, and the great general Shah Abdali at their head, and in the battle a hundred thousand Marathas died, and thirty thousand were captured for ransom. But afterwards the Afghan soldiers tired of Delhi, and forced their khan to return to Kabul.
'The Marathas, however, were likewise broken. The Nazim's succes sors secured the south, and the Sikhs took the Punjab, and the Bengalese Bengal and Assam. Down here we found the Sikhs to be our best allies. Their final guru declared their sacred writings to be the embodiment of the guru from that point on, and after that they prospered greatly, creating in effect a mighty wall between us and Islam. And the Sikhs taught us as well. They are a kind of mix of Hindu and Muslim, unusual in Indian history, and instructive. So they prospered, and learning from them, coordinating our efforts with them, we have prospered too.
'Then in my grandfather's time a number of refugees from the Chinese conquest of Japan arrived in this region, Buddhists drawn to Lanka, the heart of Buddhism. Samurai, monks and sailors, very good sailors they had sailed the great eastern ocean that they call the Dahai, in fact they sailed to us both by heading cast and by heading west.'
'Around the world?'
'Around. And they taught our shipbuilders much, and the Buddhist monasteries here were already centres of metalworking and mechanics, and ceramics. The local mathematicians brought calculation to full flower for use in navigation, gunnery and mechanics. All came together here in the great shipyards, and in our merchant and naval fleets were soon greater even than China's. Which is a good thing, as the Chinese empire subdues more and more of the world – Korea, Japan, Mongolia, Turkestan, Annam and Siam, the islands in the Malay chain – the region we used to called Greater India, in fact. So we need our ships to protect us from that power. By sea we are safe, and down here, below the gnarled wildlands of the Deccan, we are not easily conquered by land. And Islam seems to have had its day in India, if not the whole of the west.'
'You have conquered its most powerful city,' Ismail observed.
'Yes. I will always smite Muslims, so that they will never be able to attack India again. There have been enough rapes of Delhi. So I had a small navy built on the Black Sea to attack Konstantiniyye, breaking the Ottomans like the Nazim broke the Mughals. We will establish small states across Anatolia, taking their land under our influence, as we have done in Iran and Afghanistan. Meanwhile we continue to work with the Sikhs, treating them as chief allies and partners in what is becoming a larger Indian confederation of principalities and states. The unification of India on that basis is not something many people resist, because when it succeeds, it means peace. Peace for the first time since the Mughals invaded more than four centuries ago. So India has emerged from its long night. And now 'we will spread the day everywhere.'
The following day Bhakta took Ismail to a garden party at the Kerala's palace in Travancore. The big park containing the little marble building overlooked the northern end of the harbour, away from the great noise and smoke of the shipworks, visible at the south side of the shallow bay, but innocuous at that distance. Outside the park more elaborate white palaces belonged not to the Kerala, but to the local merchant leaders, who had become rich in ship building, trade expeditions and most of all, the financing of other such expeditions. Among the Kerala's guests were many men of this sort, all richly dressed in silks and jewellery. Especially prized in this society, it seemed to Ismail, were semi precious stones – turquoise, jade, lapis, malachite, onyx, jasper and the like – polished into big round buttons and necklace beads. The wives and daughters of the men wore brilliant saris, and some walked with tamed cheetahs on leashes.
People circulated in the shade of the garden's arbours and palm trees, eating at long tables of delicacies, or sipping from glass goblets. Buddhist monks stood out in their maroon or saffron, and Bhakta was approached by quite a few of these. The abbess introduced some of them to Ismail. She pointed out to him the Sikhs in attendance, men who wore turbans and were bearded; and Marathas; and Bengalis; also Africans, Malaysians, Burmese, Sumatrans, Japanese or Hodenosaunee from the New World. The abbess either knew all these people personally, or could identify them by some characteristic of dress or figure.
'So very many different peoples here,' Ismail observed.
'Shipping brings them.'
Many of them seemed to crave a word with Bhakta, and she introduced Ismail to one of the Nazim's 'most trusted assistants', in the person of one Pyidaungsu, a short dark man who, he said, had grown up in Burma and on the eastern side of India's tip. His Persian was excellent, which was no doubt why the abbess had introduced Ismail to him, as she dealt with her own press of conversants.
'The Kerala was most pleased to meet you,' Pyidaungsu said immediately, drawing Ismail off to one side. 'He is very desirous of making progre ss in certain medical matters, especially infectious diseases. We lose more soldiers to disease or infection than to our enemies in battle, and this grieves him.'
'I know only a little of that,' Ismail said. 'I am an anatomist, attempting to learn the structures of the body.'
'But all advances in understanding of the body help us in what the Kerala wants to know.'
'In theory, anyway. Over time.'
'But could you not examine the army's procedures, in search of some aspects of them that contribute perhaps to diseases spreading?'
'Perhaps,' Ismail said. 'Although some aspects cannot be changed, like travelling together, sleeping together.'
'Yes, but the way those things are done.
'Possibly. There seems to be a likelihood that some diseases are transmitted by creatures smaller than the eye can see 'The creatures in microscopes?'
'Yes, or smaller. Exposure to a very small amount of these, or to some that are killed beforehand, seems to give people a resistance to later exposures, as happens with survivors of pox.'
'Yes, variolation. The troops are already scabbed for pox.'
Ismail was surprised to hear this, and the officer saw it.
'We are trying everything,' he said with a laugh. 'The Kerala believes all habits must be re examined with an eye to changing them, improving them as much as possible. Eating habits, bathing, evacuation – he began as an artillery officer when he was very young, and he learned the value of regular procedure. He proposed that the barrels of cannons be bored out rather than cast, as the casting could never be done with any true smoothness. With uniform bores cannons become more powerful and lighter at once, and ever so much more accurate. He tested all these things, and reduced gunnery to a set of settled motions, like a dance, much the same for cannon of all sizes, making them capable of deployment as quickly as infantry, almost as quick as cavalry. And easily carried on ships. Results have been prodigious, as you see.' Waving around complacently at the party.
'You have been an artillery officer, I suppose.'
The man laughed. 'Yes, I was.'
'So now you enjoy a celebration here.'
'Yes, and there are other reasons for this gathering. The bankers, the shippers. But they all ride on the back of the artillery, if you will.'
'And not the doctors.'
'No. But I wish it were so! Tell me again if you see any part of military life that might be made more healthy.'
'No contact with prostitutes?'
The man laughed again. 'Well, it is a religious duty for many of them, you must understand. The temple dancers are important for many ceremonies.'
'Ah. Well. Cleanliness, then. The animalcules move from body to body in dirt, by touch, in food or water, and breath. Boiled surgical instruments reduce infections. Masks on doctors and nurses and patients, to reduce spread of infection.'
The officer looked pleased. 'Cleanliness is a virtue of caste purity. The Kerala does not approve of caste, but it should be possible to make cleanliness more of a priority.'
'Boiling kills the animalcules, it seems. Cooking implements, pots and pans, drinking water – all might be boiled to advantage. Not very practical, I suppose.'
'No, but possible. What other methods could be applied?'
'Certain herbs, perhaps, and things poisonous to the animalcules but not to people. But no one knows whether such things exist.'
'But trials could be made.'
'Possibly.'
'On poisoners, for instance.'
'It's been done.'
'Oh, the Kerala will be pleased. How he loves trials, records, numbers laid out by his mathematicians to show whether the impressions of one doctor are true when applied to the army as a whole body. He will want to speak to you again.'
'I will tell him all I can,' Ismail said.
The officer shook his hand, holding it in both of his. 'I will bring you back to the Kerala presently. For now, the musicians are here, I see. I like to listen to them from up on the terraces.'
Ismail followed him for a while, as if in an eddy, and then one of the abbess's assistants snagged him and brought him back to the party gathered by the Kerala to watch the concert.
The singers were dressed in beautiful saris, the musicians in silk jackets cut from bolts of different colour and weave, mostly of brilliant sky blue and blood orange red. The musicians began to play; the drummers set a pattern on tablas, and others played tall stringed instruments, like long necked ouds, making Ismail recall Konstantiniyye, the whole city called up by these twangy things so like an oud.
A singer stepped forward and sang in some foreign tongue, the notes gliding through tones without a stop anywhere, always curving through tonalities unfamiliar to Ismail, no tones or quartertones that did not bend up or down rapidly, like certain bird calls. The singer's companions danced slowly behind her, coming as close to still positions as she came close to steady tones, but always moving, hands extended palm outwards, speaking in dance languages.
Now the two drummers shifted into a complex but steady rhythm, woven together in a braid with the singing. Ismail closed his eyes; he had never heard such music. Melodies overlapped and went on without end. The audience swayed in time with them, the soldiers dancing in place, all moving around the still centre of the Kerala, and even he shimmied in place, moved by sound. When the drummers went into a final mad flurry to mark the end of the piece, the soldiers cheered and shouted and leapt in the air. The singers and musicians bowed deeply, smiling, and came forward to receive the Kerala's congratulations. He conferred for a time with the lead singer, talking to her as to an old friend. Ismail found himself in something like a reception line gathered by the abbess, and he nodded to the sweaty performers one by one as they passed. They were young. Many different perfumes filled Ismail's nostrils, jasmine, orange, sea spray, and his breathing swelled his chest. The sea smell came in stronger on a breeze, from the sea itself this time, though there had been a perfume like it. The sea lay green and blue out there, like the road to everywhere.
The party began to swirl about the garden again, in patterns determined by the Kerala's slow progress. Ismail was introduced to a quartet of bankers, two Sikh and two Travancori, and he listened to them discuss, in Persian to be polite to him, the complicated situation in India and around the Indian Ocean and the world more generally. Towns and harbours fought over, new towns built in hitherto empty river mouths, loyalties of local populations shifting, Muslim slavers in west Africa, gold in south Africa, gold in Inka, the island west of Africa all these things had been going on for years, but somehow it was different now. Collapse of the old Muslim empires, the mushrooming of new machines, new states, new religions, new continents, and all emanating from here, as if the violent struggle within India was vibrating change outwards in waves all the way around the world, meeting again coming the other way.
Bhakta introduced another man to Ismail, and the two men nodded to each other, bowing slightly. The man's name was Wasco, and he was from the new world, the big island west of Firanja, which the Chinese called Yingzhou. Wasco identified it as Hodenosauneega, 'Meaning territories of the peoples of the Long House,' he said in passable Persian. He represented the Hodenosaunee League, Bhakta explained. He looked like a Siberian or Mongolian, or a Manchu who did not shave his forehead. Tall, hawk nosed, striking to the eye, even there in the intense sunlight of the Kerala himself; he looked as if those isolated islands on the other side of the world might have produced a more healthy and vigorous race. No doubt sent by his people for that very reason.
Bhakta left them, and Ismail said politely, 'I come from Konstantiniyye. Do your people have music like what we heard?'
Wasco thought about it. 'We do sing and dance, but they are done by all together, informally and by chance, if you see what I am driving at. The drumming here was much more fluid and complicated. Thick sound. I found it fascinating. I would like to hear more of it, to see if I heard what I heard.' He waggled a hand in a way Ismail didn't understand – amazement, perhaps, at the drummers' virtuosity.
'They play beautifully,' Ismail said. 'We have drummers too, but these have taken drumming to a higher level.'
'Truly.'
'What about cities, ships, all that? Does your land have a harbour like this one?' Ismail asked.
Wasco's expression of surprise looked just like anyone else's, which, Ismail thought, made perfect sense, as one saw the same look on the faces of babies just birthed. In fact, with his fluent Persian, it was impressive to Ismail how immediately comprehensible he was, despite his exotic home.
'No. Where I come from we do not gather in such numbers. More people live around this bay than in all my country, I think.'
Now Ismail was the surprised one. 'So few as that?'
'Yes. Although there are a lot of people here, I think. But we live in a great forest, extremely thick and dense. The rivers make the best ways. Until you people arrived, we hunted and grew some crops, we made only what we needed, with no metal or ships. The Muslims brought those to our cast coast, and set up forts in a few harbours, in particular at the mouth of the East River, and on Long Island. There were not so many of them, at first, and we learned a lot from them that we put to use for ourselves. But we have been stricken by sicknesses we never knew before, and many have died, at the same time that many more Muslims have come, bringing slaves from Africa to help them. But our land is very big, and the coast itself, where the Muslims cluster, is not very good land. So we trade with them, and even better, with ships from here, when the Travancoris arrived. We were very happy to see these ships, truly, because we were worried about the Firanjis. We still are. They have lots of cannons, and they go where they want, and tell us we do not know Allah, and that we should pray to him, and so on. So we liked to see the coming of other people, in good ships. People who were not Muslim.'
'Did the Travancoris attack the Muslims already there?'
'Not yet. They landed at the mouth of the Mississippi, a big river. It may be they will come to blows eventually. They both are very well armed, and we are not, not yet.' He looked Ismail in the eye and smiled cheerfully. 'I must remember you are Muslim yourself, no doubt.'
Ismail said, 'I do not insist on it for others. Islam allows you to choose.'
'Yes, they said that. But here in Travancore you see it really happening. Sikh, Hindu, Africans, Japanese, you see them all here. The Kerala does not seem to care. Or he likes it.'
'Hindus absorb all that touch them, they say.'
'That sounds all right to me,' said Wasco. 'Or in any case, preferable to Allah at gunpoint. We're making our own ships now in our great lakes, and soon we can come around Africa to you. Or, now the Kerala is proposing to dig a canal through the desert of Sinai, connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, and giving us more direct access to you. He proposes to conquer all Egypt to make this possible. No, there is much talk to be made, many decisions to be made. My league is very fond of leagues.'
Then Bhakta came by and took Ismail off again. 'You have been honoured with an invitation to join the Kerala in one of the sky chariots.'
'The floating bags?'
Bhakta smiled. 'Yes.'
'Oh joy.'
Following the hobbling abbess Ismail passed through terraces each with its own perfume scenting it, through nutmeg, lime, cinnamon, mint, rose, rising level by level in short stone staircases, feeling as he went something like a step into some higher realm, where both senses and emotions were keener: a faint terror of the body, as the odours cast him farther and farther into a higher state. His head whirled. He did not fear death, but his body did not like the idea of what would happen to take him to that final moment. He caught up to the abbess and walked by her, to stabilize himself by her calm. By the way she went up the stairs he saw that she was always in pain. And yet she never spoke of it. Now she looked back down at the ocean, catching her breath, and put one gnarled hand to Ismail's arm, and told him how glad she was that he was there among then. How much they might accomplish together working under the guidance of the Kerala, who was creating the space for greatness to occur. They were going to change the world. As she spoke Ismail reeled again on the scents in the air, he seemed to catch sight of things to come, of the Kerala sending back people and things from all over the world as he conquered one place after another, sending back to the monastery books, maps, instruments, medicines, tools, people with unusual diseases or new skills, from west of the Urals and east of the Pamirs, from Burma and Siam and the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra and Java, from the east coast of Africa, Ismail saw a witch docter from Madagascar showing him the nearly transparent wings of a kind of bat, which allowed for a full examination of living veins and arteries, at which point he would give the Kerala a complete description of the circulation of the blood, and the Kerala would be very pleased at this, and then Ismail saw a Chinese Sumatran doctor showing him what the Chinese meant by qi and shen, which turned out to be what Ismail had always called lymph, produced by small glands under the arms, which might be affected by poultices of steamed herbs and drugs, as the Chinese had always claimed, and then he saw a group of Buddhist monks arranging charts of different elements in different families, depending on chemical and physical properties, all laid out in a very beautiful mandala, the subject of endless discussions in reading rooms, workshops, foundries and hospitals, everyone exploring even if they did not sail around the world, even if they never left Travancore, all of them anxious to have something interesting to tell the Kerala the next time he came by – not so the Kerala would reward them, though he would, but because he would be so happy at the new information. There was a look on his face everyone craved to see, and that was the whole story of Travancore, right there.
They came to a broad terrace where the flying basket was tethered. Already its huge silken bag was full of heated air, and straining up in jerks against its anchor ropes. The bamboo wicker basket was as big as a large carriage or a small pavilion; the rigging connecting it to the bottom of the silk bag was a network of lines, each slender, but clearly strong in the aggregate. The silk of the bag was diaphanous. A coalfired enclosed brazier, with a hand bellows affixed to its side, was bolted to a bamboo frame affixed beneath the bag, just over head level when they stepped through a carriage door up into the basket.
The Kerala, the singer, Bhakta and Ismail crowded in and stood at the corners. Pyidaungsu looked in and said, 'Alas, it does not look as if there is room for me, I will crowd you uncomfortably; I will go up next time, regretful though I am to have lost the opportunity.'
The ropes were cast off by the pilot and his passengers, except for a single line, it was a nearly windless day, and this, Ismail was told, was to be a controlled flight. They were to ascend like a kite, the pilot explained, and then when they were near the full extension of the line, they would shut the stove down, and stabilize in that one spot like any other kite, hanging some thousand hands over the landscape. The usual slight onshore afternoon breeze would ensure that they would float inland, if the line happened to part.
Up they rose. 'It is like Arjuna's chariot,' the Kerala said to them, and they all nodded, eyes shining with excitement. The singer was beautiful, the memory of her singing like a song in the air around them; and the Kerala more beautiful still; and Bhakta the most beautiful of all. The pilot pumped the bellows once or twice. The wind whistled in the rigging.
From the air the world proved to be flat looking. It extended a tremendous distance to the horizon – green hills to the northeast and south, and to the west the flat blue plate of the sea, the sunlight on it gleaming like gold on blue ceramic. Things down there were small but distinct. The trees were like green tufts of wool. It looked like the landscapes painted in Persian miniatures, spread out and laid in space below them, gorgeously articulated. Fields of rice were banked and bordered by sinuous lines of palm trees, and beyond them were orchards of small trees, planted in rows and lines, looking like a tight weave of cloth, all the way out to the dark green hills in the east. 'What kind of trees are those?' Ismail asked.
The Kerala answered, for as became clear, he had directed the establishment of most of the orchards they could see. 'They are part of the city lands, and used to grow the sources of essential oils that we trade for the goods that come in. You smelled some of them on our walk to the basket. Root trees like vetiver, costus, valerian and angelica, shrubs like keruda, lotes, kadam, parijat and night queen. Grasses like cintronella, lemon grass and ginger grass and palmarosa. Flowers, as you see, including tuberose, champaca, roses, jasmine, frangipani. Herbs including peppermint, spearmint, patchouli, artemesia. Then there, back in the woods there, those are orchards of sandalwood and agarwood. All these are bred, planted, grown, harvested, processed and bottled or bagged for trade with Africa and Firanja and China and the new world, where formerly they had no scents and no healing substances anything like as powerful, and so are much amazed, and desire them very much. And now I have people out scouring the world to find more stock of various kind, to see what will grow here. Those that prosper are cultivated, and their oils sold round the world. Demand for them is so high it is hard to match it, and gold comes flowing into Travancore as its wondrous scents perfume the whole Earth.'
The basket turned as it came to the top of its anchor rope, and below them the heart of the kingdom was revealed, the city of Travancore as seen by the birds, or God. The land beside the bay was covered with roofs, trees, roads, docks, all as small as the toys of a princess, extending not as far as Konstantiniyye would have, but big enough, and sprinkled by a veritable arboretum of green trees, hardly displaced by the buildings and roads. Only the docks area was more roof than tree.
Just above them floated a tapestry of crosshatched cloud, moving inland on the wind. Off to sea a great line of tall white marbled clouds sailed towards them. 'We'll have to get down before too long,' the Kerala said to the pilot, who nodded and checked his stove.
A flock of vultures pinioned about them curiously, and the pilot shouted once at them, pulling a fowling gun out of a bag on the inside of the basket. He had never seen it happen, he said, but he had heard of a flock of birds pecking a bag right out of the sky. Hawks, jealous of their territory, apparently; probably vultures would not be so bold; but it would be a bad thing by which to be surprised.
The Kerala laughed, looked at Ismail and gestured at the colourful and fragrant fields. 'This is the world we want you to help us make,' he said. 'We will go out into the world and plant gardens and orchards to the horizons, we will build roads through the mountains and across the deserts, and terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be garden everywhere, and plenty for all, and there will be no more empires or kingdoms, no more caliphs, sultans, emirs, khans or zamin dars, no more kings or queens or princes, no more qadis or mullas or ulema, no more slavery and no more usury, no more property and no more taxes, no more rich and no more poor, no killing or maiming or torture or execution, no more jailers and no more prisoners, no more generals, soldiers, armies or navies, no more patriarchy, no more clans, no more caste, no more hunger, no more suffering than what life brings us for being born and having to die, and then we will see for the first time what kind of creatures we really are.'