'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?'