The Year of Rice and Salt

'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.