“The Khan is very wise.” Guo offered a cryptic smile and gestured to the tables. “The treasures in this place are greater than anything in the Caliph’s vaults.”
Al-Tusi chose his reply carefully. “Unfortunately, ink and parchment is not so durable as gold. I fear much has already been lost.”
The general seemed not to have heard. “With enough gold, one man can buy an army of ten thousand, but with knowledge…ah, with knowledge, one man can destroy an army. You are a man of learning, Persian. Tell me, what do you see here?”
“These are scientific instruments for taking the measure of the heavens.” Though his answer had been immediate, reflexive, al-Tusi now scrutinized the machines and devices arrayed on the tables. Some were quite familiar — astrolabes, clocks and planetary models — but many of the others had nothing at all to do with astronomy.
“Are they indeed?” Guo watched him carefully for some hint of duplicity. “There is a scroll here that purports to hold the secret of Greek Fire. Over there—”
He gestured across to a table, upon which lay several enormous dome-shaped objects that looked like the lids of cooking pots. “Polished mirrors that can focus the rays of the sun and start fires, even at a great distance. I think these scientists—” Guo spat the word like a curse, “were trying to give the Caliph the victory of which he boasted.”
Then he smiled again. “But, I am no scholar. I might be mistaken. Some of these machines do, indeed, appear harmless. Take this one, for example.”
Al-Tusi’s breath caught in his throat as he saw the apparatus Guo was inspecting. It looked at first glance, like a large basket or a pot — al-Tusi reckoned he could not have encircled its circumference with his arms. Instead of clay or woven straw, it was constructed of lacquered wood, a flawless joining of curved panels that resembled the shape of a gourd, resting on a rectangular base from which sprouted a number of metal levers, each engraved with a distinctive symbol — symbols al-Tusi himself had created, and which only a handful of other men had ever seen.
By all that is holy, they actually built it.
Now he understood why the Caliph had been so defiant.
Six years earlier, al-Tusi had been part of an unparalleled scholarly experiment. A group of intellectuals, scientists and visionaries from every part of the civilized world had set out on a quest to discover the source of life. They had originally thought to name the object of their search after the paradise described in the holy writings of the Jews and Christians, but their goal did not lie in Mesopotamia, where Eden was thought to have existed. Besides, even if the sacred writings were to be taken literally — something that none of the scholars truly believed — scripture explicitly stated that God planted his garden after the Creation was complete. Life could have begun anywhere. Instead, they named the thing they sought prima materia, the name Aristotle had used in antiquity, and the place where they eventually found it, they had called ‘the Prime.’
For more than two years, they studied the Prime, unlocking its secrets and recording their discoveries in a book—The Book—written in a language of al-Tusi’s devising. They knew the world was not ready for what they had learned. The Christian kingdoms lived in perpetual fear of scientific learning; the possession of knowledge was a dangerous thing, an affront to God, and anyone possessing such a book would be labeled a heretic and summarily executed. Even in the enlightened Islamic world, possession of such information was dangerous, but the men had agreed that the House of Wisdom, which had endured for nearly five hundred years, would be the best place to safeguard the Book. Al-Tusi himself had borne the manuscript, along with a second document, a parchment roll that contained instructions on how to unlock the secrets of the Book, to Baghdad, en route to his home in Persia. When he had entrusted it to the keeper of the House, he had given the man explicit instructions to keep the Book secret until the world was ready for such profound knowledge.
The fools, al-Tusi thought. These discoveries were never meant to be used as a weapon; they cannot be used that way. It is an impossibility.
He felt the general’s eyes upon him, and he knew that he’d already given too much away by his reaction. He did his best to affect an expression of indifference, as he pretended to study the device. “It is an urghan. A musical instrument.”
Guo pressed one of the levers experimentally, and a low note resonated from the wooden body of the urghan. The sound continued to echo in the room for a moment after he released the lever. “How does it work?”
Al-Tusi laid a hand on the wooden body of the instrument. He saw that several bowls also occupied the tabletop, each of them containing lumps of powder — ash, sulfur, salt and other substances that he did not immediately recognize. All of them were arranged in a circle around the urghan, just as he and his fellow scientists had done years before, along with leaves of vellum and paper, the latter inscribed with diagrams and notations in Arabic. Then he saw something else on the table. It was the parchment he himself had written, which explained, among other things, how to construct and use the machine. It lay unrolled and open for all to see.
But where is the Book? Surely they would be together.
Through a supreme effort of will, he maintained his neutral demeanor. “There is a bladder of air inside. It is filled with a bellows.” He indicated another lever, which he began pumping with the heel of his hand. “There is a ney inside — a hollow reed with many different holes — and when you press one of these levers, it releases the air and covers one of the holes.”
He demonstrated its operation with a few random notes, finishing with a discordant combination that, he noted with some satisfaction, caused the general to wince. “Not very useful as a weapon,” al-Tusi continued. “I suppose with several of these you could make the enemy drop their swords and cover their ears.”
“A musical instrument? It is nothing more than that?” Guo continued to watch him, as if he could read in al-Tusi’s eyes the truth about the device. “I shall take it with me then. Perhaps I will learn its mysteries.”
Al-Tusi shrugged, but this time he wasn’t trying to hide anxiety. Guo had overestimated the urghan’s importance.
Now if he will just get out of the way, I can find the real prize.
“Yes,” the general went on. “Perhaps you will teach me how to play it.”
“I am no musician,” al-Tusi replied, staring at the urghan, surreptitiously searching the surrounding tabletop for the Book. “And I have the Khan’s business to attend to here. I must try to preserve what little of the library you have not already destroyed.”
With what he hoped was an air of casual disdain, al-Tusi turned away and started gathering scrolls and codices from the tables. He purposely ignored the parchment on the table with the urghan, hoping that Guo would lose interest, or more accurately, that he would be deceived by al-Tusi’s apparent disinterest.
“I leave you to your task,” Guo said, after a long silence. He strode toward the exit, pausing at the threshold. “I think I would like that instrument, though. I’ll send some men to collect it. Please make sure nothing…untoward…happens to it.”