He explained what he had witnessed at Iwang's.

'And so you think Nadir is in trouble at the court?'

'Yes.'

'And you think Iwang might convert to Islam?'

'He seemed to be asking about it.'

Khalid laughed, then coughed painfully. 'That would be odd.'

'People don't like to be laughed at.'

'Somehow I don't think Iwang would mind.'

'Did you know that's the name of his town, Iwang?,

'No. Is it?'

'Yes. So he seemed to say.'

Khalid shrugged.

'It means we don't know his real name.'

Another shrug. 'None of us know our real names.'

Love the Size of the World

The autumn harvests came and passed, and the caravanserai emptied for the winter, when the passes to the east would close. Bahram's days were enriched by Iwang's presence at the sufi ribat, where Iwang sat at the back and listened closely to all that the old master Ali said, very seldom speaking, and then only to ask the simplest questions, usually the meaning of one word or another. There were lots of Arabic and Persian words in the sufi terminology, and though Iwang's Sogdi Turkic was good, the religious language was opaque to him. Eventually the master gave Iwang a lexicon of sufi technical terms, or istilahat, by Ansari, titled 'One Hundred Fields and Resting Places', which had an introduction that ended with the sentence, 'The real essence of the spiritual states of the sufis is such that expressions are not adequate to describe it: nevertheless, these expressions are fully understood by those who have experienced these states.'

This, Bahram felt, was the main source of Iwang's problem: he had not experienced the states being described.

'Very possibly,' Iwang would agree when Bahram said this to him. 'But how am I to reach them?'

'With love,' Bahram would say. 'You must love everything that is, especially people. You will see, it is love that moves everything.'

Iwang would purse his lips. 'With love comes hate,' he would say. 'They are two sides of an excess of feeling. Compassion rather than love, that seems to me the best way. There is no bad obverse side to compassion.'

'Indifference,' Bahram suggested.

Iwang would nod, thinking things over. But Bahram wondered if he could ever come to the right view. The fount of Bahram's own love, like a powerful artesian spring in the hills, was his feeling for his wife and children, then for Allah, who had allowed him the privilege of living his life among such beautiful souls – not only the three of them, but Khalid and Fedwa and all their relatives, and the community of the compound, the mosque, the ribat, Sher Dor, and indeed all of Samarqand and the wide world, when he was feeling it. Iwang had no such starting point, being single and childless, as far as Bahram knew, and an infidel to boot. How was he to begin to feel the more generalized and diffuse loves, if the specific ones were not there for him?

'The heart which is greater than the intellect is not that which beats in the chest.' So Ali would say. It was a matter of opening his heart to God, and letting the love appear from there first. Iwang was already good at calming himself, at paying attention to the world in its quiet moments, sitting out at the compound some dawns after he had spent the night on a couch in the shops. Bahram once or twice joined him in these sittings, and once he was inspired by a windless pure gold sky to recite from Rumi 'How silent it has become in the house of the heart!

The heart as hearth and home Has encompassed the world.'

When Iwang finally responded, after the sun had broken over the eastern ridges and flooded the valley with buttered light, it was only to say, 'I wonder if the world is as big as Brahmagupta said it was.'

'He said it was a sphere, right?'

'Yes, of course. You can see that out on the steppes, when a caravan comes over the horizon heads first. We are on the surface of a great ball.'

'The heart of God.'

No reply but the swaying head, which meant that Iwang did not agree but did not want to disagree. Bahram desisted, and asked about the Hindu's estimate of the size of the Earth, which was clearly what interested Iwang now.

'Brahmagupta noticed that the sun shone straight down a well in the Deccan on a certain day, and the next year he arranged to be a thousand yoganda north of there, and he measured the angle of the shadows, and used spherical geometry to calculate what percentage of the circle that arc of a thousand yoganda was. Very simple, very interesting.'

Bahram nodded; no doubt true; but they would only ever see a small fraction of those yoganda, and here, now, Iwang was in need of spiritual illumination. Or – in need of love. Bahram invited him to eat with his family, to observe Esmerine serve the meals, and instruct the children in their manners. The children were a pleasure all their own, their liquid eyes huge in their faces as they stopped in their racing about to listen impatiently to Esmerine's lectures. Their racing about the compound was a pleasure as well. Iwang nodded at all this. 'You're a lucky man,' he told Bahram.

'We are all lucky men,' Bahram replied. And Iwang agreed.

The Goddess and the Law

Parallel to his new religious studies, Iwang continued his investigations and demonstrations with Khalid. They devoted the greater portion of these efforts to their projects for Nadir and the Khan. They worked out a long range signalling system for the army that used mirrors and small telescopes; they also cast bigger and bigger cannons, with giant waggons to haul them by horse or camel train from one battlefield to the next.

'We will need cart roads for these, if we are ever to move them,' Iwang noted. Even the great Silk Road itself was nothing but a camel track for most of its length.

Their latest private investigation into causes concerned a little telescope which magnified objects too small to be seen by the eye alone. The astronomers from the Ulug Bek Madressa had devised the thing, which could only be focused on a very narrow slice of air, so that translucent items caught between two plates of glass were best, lit by mirrored sunlight from below. Then new little worlds appeared, right under their fingers.

The three men spent hours looking through this telescope at pond water, which proved to be full of strangely articulated creatures, all swimming about. They looked at translucently thin slabs of stone, wood and bone; and at their own blood, which was filled with blobs that were frighteningly like the animals in the pond water.

'The world just keeps getting smaller,' Khalid marvelled. 'If we could draw the blood of those little creatures in our blood, and put it under a lens even more powerful than this one, I have no doubt that their blood would contain animalcules just like ours does; and so on for those animals as well, and down to…'He trailed off, awe giving him a dazed look. Bahram had never seen him so happy.

'There is probably some smallest possible size of things,' Iwang said practically. 'So the ancient Greeks postulated. The ultimate particulates, out of which all else is constructed. No doubt smaller than we will ever see.'

Khalid frowned. 'This is just a start. Surely stronger lenses will be made. And then who knows what will be seen? Maybe it will allow us to understand the composition of metals at last, and work the transmutations.'

'Maybe,' Iwang allowed. He stared into the eye of the lens, humming to himself. 'Certainly the little crystals in granite are made clear.'

Khalid nodded, wrote notes in one of his notebooks. He returned to the glass, then drew the shapes he saw on the page. 'The very small and the very large,' he said.

'These lenses are a great gift from God,' Bahram said, 'reminding us that it is all one world. One substance, all interpenetrated with structure, but still one, big to small.'