The Year of Rice and Salt

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.

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, 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.'