Ismail was called into this great artillery target by the Sultan. He boxed up the mass of papers that had accumulated in the last few years, all the notes and records, sketches and samples and specimens. He wished he could make arrangements to send it all out to the medical madressa in Nsara, where many of his most faithful correspondents lived and worked; or even to the hospital in Travancore, home of their assailants, but also of his other most faithful group of medical correspondents.
There was no way now to arrange such a transfer, so he left them in his rooms with a note on top describing the contents, and walked through the deserted streets to the Sublime Porte. It was a sunny day; voices came from the big blue mosque, but other than that only dogs were to be seen, as if Judgment Day had come and Ismail been left behind.
Judgment Day had certainly come for the palace; shells struck it every few minutes. Ismail ducked inside the outer gate and was taken to the Sultan, whom he found seemingly exhilarated by events, as if at a fair: Selim the Third stood on Topkapi’s highest bartizan, in full view of the fleet bombarding them, watching the action through a long silver telescope.
“Why doesn’t the iron sink the ships?” he asked Ismail. “They must be as heavy as treasure chests.”
“There must be enough air in the hulls to make them float,” the doctor said, apologetic at the inadequacy of this explanation. “If their hulls were punctured, they would surely sink faster than wooden ships.”
One of the ships fired, erupting smoke and seemingly sliding backwards in the water. Their guns shot forwards, one per ship. Fairly little things, like big bay dhows, or giant water bugs.
The shot exploded down the palace wall to their left. Ismail felt the jolt in his feet. He sighed.
The Sultan glanced at him. “Frightened?”
“Somewhat, Excellency.”
The Sultan grinned. “Come, I want you to help me decide what to take. I need the most valuable of the jewels.” But then he spotted something in the sky. “What’s that?” He clapped the telescope to his eye. Ismail looked up; there was a dot of red in the sky. It drifted on the breeze over the city, looking like a red egg. “There’s a basket hanging under it!” the Sultan exclaimed, “and people in the basket!” He laughed. “They know how to make things fly in the sky!”
Ismail shaded his eyes. “May I use the spyglass, Excellency?”
Under white, puffy clouds, the red dot floated towards them. “Hot air rises,” Ismail said, shocked as it became clear to him. “They must have a brazier in the basket with them, and the hot air from its fire rises up into the bag and is caught there, and so the whole thing rises up and flies.”
The Sultan laughed again. “Wonderful!” He took the glass back from Ismail. “I don’t see any flames, though.”
“It must be a small fire, or they would burn the bag. A brazier using charcoal, you wouldn’t see that. Then when they want to come down, they damp the fire.”
“I want to do that,” the Sultan declared. “Why didn’t you make one of these for me?”
“I didn’t think of it.”
Now the Sultan was in especially high spirits. The red floating bag was floating their way.
“We can hope the winds carry it elsewhere,” Ismail remarked as he watched it.
“No!” the Sultan cried. “I want to see what it can do.”
He got his wish. The floating bag drifted over the palace, just under the clouds, or between them, or even disappearing inside one, which gave Ismail the strongest sense yet that it was flying in the air like a bird. People in the air like birds!
“Shoot them down!” the Sultan was shouting enthusiastically. “Shoot the bag!”
The palace guards tried, but the cannon that were left standing on the broken walls could not be elevated high enough to fire at it. The musketeers shot at it, the flat cracks of their muskets followed by shouts from the Sultan. The acrid smoke of gunpowder filled the grounds, mixing with the smells of citrus and jasmine and pulverized dust. But as far as any of them could tell, no one hit bag or basket. Judging by the minute faces looking down from the basket’s edge, wrapped in heavy woollen scarves it appeared, Ismail thought they were perhaps out of range, too high to be hit. “The bullets probably won’t go that far up,” he said.
And yet they would never be too high to drop things on whatever lay below. The people in the basket appeared to wave at them, and then a black dot dropped like a stooping hawk, a hawk of incredible compaction and speed, crashing right into the roof of one of the inner buildings, exploding and sending shards of tile clattering all over the courtyard and garden.
The Sultan was shouting ecstatically. Three more gunpowder bombs dropped onto the palace, one on a wall where soldiers surrounded one of the big guns, killing them with much damage.
Ismail’s ears hurt more from the Sultan’s roars than from the explosions. He pointed to the iron ships. “They’re coming in.”
The ships were close onshore, launching boats filled with men. The bombardment from other ships continued during the disembarking, more intense than ever; their boats were going to land uncontested at a section of the city walls they had blasted down. “They’ll be here soon,” Ismail ventured. Meanwhile the floating bag and basket had drifted west, past the palace and over the open fields beyond the city wall.
“Come on,” Selim said suddenly, grabbing Ismail by the arm. “I need to hurry.”
Down broken marble stairs they ran, followed by the Sultan’s immediate retinue. The Sultan led the way into the warren of rooms and passageways deep beneath the palace.
Down here oil lamps barely illuminated chambers filled with the loot of four Ottoman centuries, and perhaps Byzantine treasure as well, if not Roman or Greek, or Hittite or Sumerian; all the riches of the world, stacked in room after room. One was filled entirely with gold, mostly in the form of coins and bars; another with Byzantine devotional art; another with old weapons; another with furniture of rare woods and furs, another with chunks of coloured rock, worthless as far as Ismail could tell. “There won’t be time to go through all this,” he pointed out, trotting behind the Sultan.
Selim just laughed. He swept through a long gallery or warehouse of paintings and statues to a small side room, empty except for a line of bags on a bench. “Bring these,” he ordered his servants as they caught up; then he was off again, sure of his course.
They came to staircases descending through the rock underlying the palace: a strange sight, smooth marble stairs dropping through a craggy rock hole into the bowels of the Earth. The city’s great cistern-cavern lay some way to the south and east, as far as Ismail knew; but when they came down into a low natural cave, floored by water, they found a stone dock, and moored to it, a long narrow barge manned by imperial guards. Torches on the dock and lanterns on the barge illuminated the scene. Apparently they were in a side-passage of the cistern cavern, and could row into it.
Selim indicated to Ismail the roof around the stairwell, and Ismail saw that explosives were packed into crevices and drilled holes; when they were off and some distance away, this entrance would presumably be demolished, and some part of the palace grounds might fall onto it; in any case their escape route would be obscured, and pursuit made impossible.
Men busied themselves with loading the barge, while the Sultan inspected the charges. When they were ready to leave he himself lit their fuses, grinning happily. Ismail stared at the sight, which had the lamplit quality of some of the Byzantine icons they had passed in the treasure hoards. “We’ll join the Balkan army, and cross the Adriatic into Rome,” the Sultan announced. “We’ll conquer the West, then come back to smite these infidels for their impudence!”
The bargemen cheered on cue from their officers, sounding like thousands in the echoing confinement of the underground lake and its sky of rock. The Sultan took the acclaim with open arms, then stepped onto the barge, balanced by three or four of his men. No one saw Ismail turn and dash up the doomed stairs to a different destiny.
&
nbsp; Chapter Two
Travancore
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, camels, leopards 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 prisoners, 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.”