The Years of Rice and Salt (53 page)

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 were done 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 disks as big as millstones, each held level by two men, with the vibrantly colored 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 center 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 colored 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 her 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 disk in front of him, and very slowly tilted it up on its side. The sand slid off all at once, the colors pouring into the water and blurring together, staining the Kerala's silken leggings. He dipped the disk into the water and washed the rest of the sand away in a multicolored 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 disk 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 color, 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 Afzul 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 alliegance 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 one-fifth 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 afterward the Afghan soldiers tired of Delhi, and forced their khan to return to Kabul.

“The Marathas, however, were likewise broken. The Nazim's successors 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 east and by heading west.”

“Around the world?”

“Around. And they taught our shipbuilders much, and the Buddhist monasteries here were already centers 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 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 harbor, 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 shipbuilding, 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 jewelry. Especially prized in this society, it seemed to Ismail, were semiprecious 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 arbors 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, and 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 Kerala'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 progress 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 traveling 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 reexamined 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.”