Avatak was staring up at the ceiling, at a panel where Mongol warriors on horseback shot tiny arrows at a rampaging dragon. ‘What a room this is.’
‘That’s what plundering a continent earns you.’
They came now to the scholar’s facility, and Avatak saw that it was a series of glass-walled compartments — domes, square-walled boxes, some a good deal taller than he was. Tubes of some flexible material led from each box to a complex apparatus of brass and glass, fussed over by attendants.
And in each of the boxes there was something alive, he saw. Something growing. A tray of soil bearing grass shoots in this box; in the next, what looked like wheat; in the next, potatoes; in the next, rice. These boxes were bathed with sunlight from open windows in the walls above. In the very largest boxes there were animals, one to each compartment: a horse, a cow, a sheep — a man, Avatak saw with shock, a small, skinny, youngish man of Cathay, sitting naked on a mat, his eyes averted, bowls of piss and shit beside him. Beside each container was a similarly sized box, quite empty, but fitted with tubes and valves. The largest dome contained a tree, of a kind unfamiliar to Avatak, with wide branches and bright green leaves, growing from a big ceramic pot. A tree, taller than he was, in the middle of this vast room.
Uzzia stared, amazed. ‘By the Storm God’s left buttock, what under heaven is this?’ Then she remembered herself, and she bowed hastily to Bolghai. ‘My apologies, lord. I am a simple trader; I am overwhelmed by this evidence of your mighty learning.’
Bolghai looked amused. ‘Oh, get up, madam. Overwhelmed even though you understand not a jot of it, I suppose?’
Pyxeas snorted. ‘Uzzia, Bolghai is studying properties of the air. We are all at the mercy of the weather, yes? And though I, Pyxeas, and the generations who went before me, have shown that the great cycles of the weather are dominated by astronomy, by the dipping and nodding of the world as it orbits the central fire, it is nevertheless the air that delivers that weather to us. So we study it too.
‘After all, invisible though it may be the air is real; it has weight and substance. You can feel it dragging into your lungs, you can use pumps to evacuate it from a chamber — we all felt its lack up on the roof of the world. And the air is made up of several component parts, which can be separated with sufficient ingenuity. This was first achieved by Northlander scholars. We know there is vital air, an air full of energy, which we suspect is the agent that supports combustion — and indeed the slower fire that burns in our bodies to sustain life. And then there is fixed air. This was first identified by a scholar at Etxelur called Cleomedes, of Greek descent, who studied the burning of charcoal in a closed vessel.’
Bolghai said, ‘The scholars of Cathay have long shared their knowledge with Northland, a tradition I have sought, in my time, to maintain, or rather revive. I with my party was the first to travel to Northland after the conquests of the Great Khans. And, given the importance of the air to the weather which shapes all our destinies, as Pyxeas points out, we have continued its study here. Although Cathay scholars are perhaps of a more practical bent than those of Northland.’
Pyxeas sighed. ‘True, true, but the first Wall-builders would cringe to hear you say it. That’s the legacy of Pythagoras and his Greeks, who could be a bit contemplative.’
Bolghai gestured at his apparatus. ‘We have found ways to measure the presence and concentration of fixed air more precisely. For instance here, you see, the air from this chamber is fed through lime dissolved in water; it precipitates a kind of chalk whose weight we can determine. . The details are unimportant.’
‘Not to me, they’re not!’ thundered Pyxeas. ‘I want to examine every tube and valve, every seal and measuring gauge. Excellent experimental design,’ he said now, walking around the boxes. ‘Can you see it, Avatak? Why these empty boxes, for instance?’
That was easy; Avatak had seen similar set-ups in Pyxeas’ own studies. ‘They are for comparison. A horse in this box, not in that box that’s otherwise the same; you can subtract one from the other to see what difference the horse makes.’
‘Exactly!’
Bolghai said, ‘Of course the emissions and absorptions vary depending on the plant or beast enclosed, and indeed on its conditions — if the horse is agitated or not, resting or exercising, for instance. All these things we can study.’
Uzzia asked, ‘Who is the man in the box?’
Bolghai seemed puzzled by the question. 'Who? Why — he is the subject. I sent specifications to the slavers regarding size and weight and general health. I hope to extend the studies to compare different ethnicities, ages, health conditions — sex, of course. I am not concerned with who.
‘What is most important is the conclusion. Which is this.’ With the air of a showman he walked them past the compartments containing the grass, the grain. ‘Vegetables, plants, trees — as they grow these things absorb the fixed gas from the air. But if they are burned they release that gas again. Whereas animals, from sheep to pigs to men, they release the fixed gas as they breathe. All of this in the processes of their lives, you see — it seems accurate, as you say, Pyxeas, to think of life as a kind of slow burning, animal life at least. Plants and animals, absorption and release-’
‘Yes, yes. And together they shape the atmosphere — and it shapes them. But to what end, what end? And how does this relate to the longwinter? For somehow it must. .’
‘Quite so,’ Bolghai said. ‘To explore that I am also running studies of the physical properties of fixed air. Perhaps that will offer some clues. But the properties are subtle, the apparatus unwieldy and preliminary. Nevertheless I have some first results. We can proceed to that when we’re done here.’
‘Good, good,’ Pyxeas murmured. The two scholars wandered off, talking, debating.
Servants stood by Uzzia and Avatak, heads bent, waiting for instructions.
‘I want to get out of here,’ whispered Avatak.
‘Yes. And I’ve got deals to do. We’ve delivered Pyxeas to his scholar; we’ve done our jobs for now. Let’s go.’
42
Uzzia wandered through Daidu, reacquainting herself with a city she’d visited once before. Avatak followed her, gradually finding his bearings.
Within its double walls the city was laid out like a board game played by giants, the rectangle of walls enclosing a grid-pattern of streets, with tidy blocks of houses and inns and manufactories, temples and schools, all on a tremendous scale. Avatak, a boy from a chaotic land of ice and water, even having visited Northland’s mighty Wall, felt utterly out of place in this vision of stone and geometry.
But the vision could be pleasing. You would turn a corner and come upon a park gleaming green in the late autumn sunshine, with animals apparently roaming loose: squirrels, ermine, deer, even stags. A river ran right through the city, and people walked its banks and crossed delicate bridges. The people were both Cathay and Mongol, the latter in their colourful silk tunics and coats. People spoke Mongol, or one of the tongues of Cathay, or a rapid language that Uzzia identified as Persian, a common tongue for the traders who came here.
Some of the grander folk went on horseback. The cultured Cathay folk seemed to flinch at seeing horses inside a city, but the Mongols’ bond with their animals was indissoluble. Avatak saw one man ride along under a canopy of gold, carried by bearers who had to run alongside. Uzzia said this was probably a baron, one of the Khan’s top generals, who would command a hundred thousand men or more.
In one place by the river Avatak saw a tower, four or five times taller than a man, with a small waterwheel at its side. On the top was a brass construction, a ring showing the constellations, models of sun and moon. It was a representation of the sky, driven by the waterwheel, like a tremendously expanded version of Pyxeas’ oracle. Perhaps the links between Cathay and Northland really were deep and ancient, Avatak thought.