by Albert Noyer
“Cat worship?” Getorius gagged on a piece of cooked pear. Alarmed, Miu arched its back.
Papnouthios said, “Surgeon, the goddess Bastet was sacred to ancient Egyptians and thus Bubastis has a vast necropolis of embalmed felines.”
Eusebios continued, “When the inhabitants of Bubastis also proved inhospitable, the Holy Child caused the temple to collapse. Its idols fell to the ground. As Ezekiel prophesied, ‘Bubastis will fall by the sword and the city shall go into captivity.’ The punishment was fulfilled.”
Arcadia felt skeptical of these overly pious legends. “Do we know the age of the Christ Child at this time?”
“Accounts differ, yet our tradition places the sojourn at somewhat over four years.”
“So Jesus was about five years old when they returned to Judea?”
“Indeed, Domina.” Eusebios fell silent as he was served a second portion of the warm fruit.
Dorothea turned toward her husband to emphasize, “Sergius, you must find the information that the Augusta sent to you for our guests.”
“Carita, Nepheros and I will search for Her Serenity’s instructions in the morning.”
“Thank you…” Dorothea abruptly stood up, clutching her kitten. “Sergius, I’m sure our guests are exhausted by their long day of travel. We should allow them to rest.”
“Of course…”He looked toward Pennuta, but she had slipped out of the room unnoticed. “Nepheros, show our guests to their quarters. Don’t want them getting lost.”
“At once, Excellency.”
After the others pushed their chairs back and stood up, Dorothea asked, “Holiness, please, a psalm of guidance for our Latin Romans.”
“Very well…” The bishop reflected a moment, then raised both arms in prayer.
“‘No one is put to shame who waits for You,
but only those who break faith without cause.
Make known to me Your ways, Lord,
teach me Your paths.
Guide me in Your truth and teach me,
for You are my Savior.
For You I stand all the long day,
awaiting the coming of Your goodness, Lord’.”
Following a communal ‘Amen’ in which Papnouthios did not join, the physician turned to leave, but Getorius, flushed from the corma, grasped his sleeve to hold him back. “I…I would like to witness that vivisection you mentioned.”
His request surprised Papnouthios. “Truly, Surgeon?”
“I…I have a professional interest.”
“Then I shall call for you here at the third hour.”
Arcadia shot her husband a glare of protest. “Getorius, you took an oath not to inflict pain on others.”
Instead of responding to her, he told Nepheros to lead them back to their quarters.
In a room only slightly warmer from the glowing charcoal, Getorius undressed for bed in strained silence, unwilling to argue or justify his decision with his wife. Arcadia slipped into her night tunic, then sat holding a mirror to arrange her hair for the night.
“Perhaps Dorothea could arrange for her personal slave to arrange your hair,” he suggested to ease tension.
“It’s cruel and inhumane,” she insisted without looking over at him.
“The subjects are criminals like those bandits at the oasis. They might well have murdered us.”
“You call them ‘subjects’?” She turned around to face him. “Getorius, we’re talking about humans created in God’s image.”
“Nevertheless, I am going with Papnouthios in the morning.” He slipped under the bed covers, muttering, “Furnace slaves must be asleep, this room is still colder than Boreas.”
Arcadia did not reply.
It would be an even chillier night.
CHAPTER II
In the morning, despite the glowing brazier a slave set near her in the triclinium, Arcadia shivered as she spread honey on a chunk of bread, then placed it back on her plate. “Husband, are you actually going with that Egyptian physician? You heard Dorothea say that she detests the man.”
He deflected her criticism with his own question, “Are you feeling better than last evening?”
“No, my head aches and I feel nauseous.”
“Probably that cabbage and fish you ate.”
“Getorius, I asked if you were going with Papnouthios.”
To avoid looking up, he concentrated on stirring his wheat-spelt porridge. “If I can learn anything from him, then, yes, I’m going. In September we both came to the East expecting to learn from medical texts. It’s now mid-November and I don’t know any more about surgery than I did two months ago.”
“But vivisection on a living human being?” When he failed to reply, Arcadia added in disgust, “Wherever it is that he operates must resemble the butcher shop we saw in Rhinocolura…bloody carcasses and live sheep waiting to be slaughtered.”
“That’s surely an exaggeration. Besides, I might experience what Galen never was able to do.” Getorius reached across the table to grasp his wife’s hand. “Arcadia, what you should be concerned about is that Abinnaeus can’t find the message from Aelia Pulcheria and her further instructions for sending us here.”
“Or says he can’t.”
“What?” He looked up at a skeptical comment that startled him. “What do you mean?”
“We won’t know until we see the instructions, will we? And in less than a week Abinnaeus will be gone for…for months.”
“He seems like a fairly competent official. I’m sure the packet has been misplaced in the process of moving. You saw the chaos in his office.”
“That’s exactly my point. He can blame that for ‘losing’ the Augusta’s message.”
Getorius finished his porridge in silence, a little concerned that Arcadia’s hot-cold humors were teetering out of balance and thinking that her suspicions were probably misplaced. But at least she was more or less speaking to him again.
* * *
Despite a dank, fog-shrouded morning that seemed as if the sun had fled to another part of the cosmos, Papnouthios arrived at the third hour with a driver and open carriage. The two men were driven through a western gate where the paved road turned in a southerly direction toward Bubastis and paralleled a northwest arm of the Nile’s Pelusiac branch. The ghostly shapes of sea birds hunted crustaceans along the marshy banks. A flat horizon melted into the mist to mimic an opaque morning scene not unlike that at Ravenna during this time of year.
Getorius, engrossed in thoughts of what experiments he might see, rode in silence until Papnouthios taunted, “Surgeon, you said your late mentor studied at Alexandria. Was he a Dogmatist or Empiricist?”
“I…I don’t understand your meaning.”
The physician sighed in condescension. “Did he practice dissection?”
“Nicias told me that he did so at the medical school.”
“Then he was a Dogmatist. Surely, surgeons in the west have read Cornelius Celsus. He was one of yours, from Gaul’s Narbonensis Province.”
Getorius admitted, “I…I haven’t heard of him.”
Papnouthios snorted in disbelief. “Celsus writes that Herophilos and Erasistratos dissected, even vivisected bodies to gain knowledge about internal human functions. The Empiricists opposed these practices and relied only on reading about the experiences of others for their treatments.” His voice took on a practiced sarcasm. “Does Abinnaeus’s cook merely read to him about meals or actually prepare the food?”
“You’re a Dogmatist, then.”
“Indeed, Surgeon.”
“I have dissected many animals…” Getorius regretted his feeble attempt at justification, yet added, “And I own Galen’s volume ‘On the Natural Faculties’.”
“Not his treatise on anatomical procedures?”
“N…no. I don’t have that.”
Papnouthios smirked, “Surgeon, when your vaunted Rome was yet a village of wattle-and-daub huts, Egypt was ruled by the kings of a Twenty-third dynasty. Twenty-two cent
uries before that, the great Sphinx at Giza already watched over our pyramids. A thousand years later, Moses of the Hebrews was schooled in our Egyptian mysteries. The Macedonian conqueror, Alexander, lies buried here in his namesake city, a center of Greek learning. What can you in the West hope to teach us?”
Since there was no answer to the physician’s taunting, Getorius hunched further down in his cloak to ask, “What…what kinds of experiments are you trying?”
“One is for a cure after the breath of a demon enters a wound and causes redness and fever.”
The reference to a demiurge surprised Getorius. “The breath of a demon?”
Papnouthios quoted an Egyptian medical text, “‘Its two lips are red and its mouth is open.’ An apt description of a wound, don’t you think? And I have proven that blood is not produced in proportion to food given, but that the body contains a set amount of the life force. I know that because I have measured it.”
Getorius realized that the totality of blood in a body could only be pumped out by a living heart, and then heard the physician relating his experiments with the digestion of food.
“…small, gold tubes inserted into the stomach. Food is dropped in on twine and retrieved to observe the gastric process. Ah…” Papnouthios pointed ahead to a low building of tan brick. “Here is the indigents’ hospital.”
Located at an oasis about a mile southwest of the port and a half mile from the Delta road to Alexandria, small alfalfa fields or sand wastes on the east and south surrounded the hospital and its patch of greenery. To the west, marshes almost choked a small waterway meandering toward the Mediterranean coastline.
Getorius commented, “A rather isolated place for a hospital.”
“This was a short-lived monastery inspired by the monk, Pachomios, after yet another insane vision of his.”
“We don’t know that monk in the west.”
“Pachomios was an Egyptian holy man of the last century who abjured a hermit’s life to found a cenobitic…communal…monastery at Tabennisi. Monks seeking to emulate him here left the monastery after his death. Most scattered into the desert to live alone, as had Antony.”
Getorius barely masked his own sarcasm. “So the poorest patients are isolated out here?”
“A few, yet Dorothea is most generous with funds that maintain another such hospital inside the city.”
Giving you unrestricted access to bodies here, Getorius speculated.
When the carriage jolted to a stop at a side entrance, Papnouthios stepped down, spoke to the driver in Greek, then went to rap on the entry portal. As if waiting for the physician, a pale, unsmiling man with shoulder-length hair immediately opened the door. Papnouthios did not introduce him, but when he spoke to the man in Greek, Getorius picked up the name ‘Skoros.’
“You perhaps understood?” the physician asked. “That is short for Dioskoros, my assistant’s name.”
“Nai, yes, I did.”
“Then, Surgeon, you do speak some Greek. Come inside.”
The two men followed Skoros as he led the way along a narrow corridor that separated fifteen small cells from a refectory and chapel beyond an opposite wall. Although all cell doors were closed, a low moaning sounded from behind a few of them.
Papnuthios explained, “These former monks’ cells are suitable for my experiments. After we parted last evening, I completed a procedure you will see.”
Skoros stopped at a cell near the far end, selected a key on his belt that fit the lock wards, and slid the door bolt aside.
Gloomy morning light filtered in from a high window, to give scant illumination to a pair of corpses lying on separate slanted tables. On a stand, a three-spouted lamp almost out of oil sputtered between them. Despite the cell’s chill air, an unpleasant odor of decaying flesh pervaded the room. An emaciated male body lay on one table, perhaps a beggar by the slovenly look of his beard and hair. The second man had been middle-aged and obese in life. The skin of both corpses was white far beyond any paleness usually evident in a dead body. Getorius noticed slits on the upper arms of each,
Papnouthios rubbed his hands together. “It is believed by physicians that nutrition…food…creates new blood in proportion to its quantity. My belief is that each human body contains approximately the same amount.”
“So you starved one subject and overfed the other. Then you opened the brachial artery and bled each man dry to determine if you were correct.”
The physician’s reaction was a cynical ‘compliment’.. “Surgeon, you are clever after all!” When he spoke to Skoros, the assistant took the clay tops off two small amphorae. “Each jar holds two congii of liquid, about forty cups of wine.”
“I know the measurement.”
“Of course. Surgeon, look inside.”
Getorius saw a dark, glistening liquid that came to approximately the same level in each container. “You…you were correct,” he agreed, turning away from a quantity of blood he had not seen before.
“And that tells you what, Surgeon?”
“That the same blood created by the liver is…is somehow reused.”
“Indeed, as water in a circular tube returns upon itself. Yet what mechanism in the body does this?”
“Galen taught that the heart is a pump. I concur.”
“Excellent!” Papnouthios went from a sneering superiority to studied praise for a perceived colleague. “Yet how is the blood circulated? Even Erasistratos believed arteries to contain air.”
“Galen disproved that with his experiment on a rabbit. He tied ligatures between two sections of an artery.”
“I have done that,” the physician snapped, once again irritable. “My question is how blood passes from the brain to the feet, then back to the brain. Galen held the ridiculous belief that food was converted into pneuma physikon, a kind of ‘natural spirit.’ Blood encountered this pneuma in the heart. Through a quite implausible exchange between that organ and the brain, the blood was distributed through a network of hollow nerves.”
“That isn’t true, is it?”
“Of course not,” Papnouthios scoffed. “Had Galen dissected human corpses rather than those of Barbary apes, he might have discovered what Egyptian physicians long have known.”
“Even so…” Getorius fell silent. Two living humans had been sacrificed―the term was not too strong―to satisfy the Egyptian’s curiosity about a matter of little practical value.
“Surgeon, I offer you either corpse for dissection.” The physician’s voice was pleasant again. “An opportunity you would not have in the West.”
“But isn’t dissection also prohibited here?”
Papnouthios replied with a cryptic half-smile, “The bishop and I have come to an agreement. But first let me show you my experiments on digestion, which further refute Galen.” He spoke to Skoros, who selected a different key.
When the silent assistant opened another door in mid-hall, the moaning that Getorius had heard sounded louder. Three convicts dressed in tunics, two men and a woman, lay stretched out on cots, gagged and restrained at the hands and feet by leather straps. Circular holes cut in their clothing exposed an area of abdomen. Dishes marked Αlpha, Βeta, and Gamma, containing lumps of food and a roll of flaxen twine, lay on a side table. Here, too, a carrion smell persisted in the air.
Papnuthios said, “This is my dual project to determine the nature of digestion and also control inflammation caused by corrupt air entering the lips of a wound.” As he approached the nearest convict, the man’s eyes widened in fear. He uttered frantic grunts through the gag as he struggled to loosen straps binding him. The physician reprimanded him in angry Greek and beckoned Getorius closer. “The fool will dislodge a golden tube I inserted directly into his stomach, a window, as it were on the gastric contents.” He pulled on the end of a string protruding from the tube, removing a half-digested piece of grayish meat. “Let me see…” He consulted a scrap of papyrus on the table. “This pork was inserted some eight hours ago.”
Geto
rius saw a vicious area of inflammation circling skin around the tube. “This redness is from air corruption that your wound caused. Are you controlling it with achillea or arctium? Trifolium?”
“Is that what you apply in the West?” Papnuthios sneered. “Even old women here know of those. For ‘Alpha’ here, I use inhemen.”
“I’m not familiar with that medication.”
“An Egyptian name. The second man has linum, which, unfortunately, also acts as a purgative. But these are condemned criminals and useless to society.”
“Useless?” Getorius looked toward the last cot. “What was the woman’s crime?”
“Adultery, although she also killed her lover…” The physician snickered as he moved toward the cot. “‘Gamma’ is my most interesting experiment. Come.”
The woman lay quietly, eyes closed as in sleep. Three small, folded lead cylinders lay embedded in a black area round the golden tube in her abdomen.
Getorius asked, “What are those cylinders?”
“Incantation charms for warding off evil.”
“Charms? Surely you cannot believe magic is of any medical use.”
“The woman was told they were of both physical and metaphysical value. The cure can be in the suggestion.”
“A placere, then. A placebo.”
“If you wish, Surgeon.”
“What is that black substance?”
“Bitumen to hold the lead cylinders in place.”
Getorius bent down to examine the tube and wound: the area beyond the sticky black circle around the tube was barely inflamed. “Incredible. What do the incantations say?”
“One reads, ‘Drive off from the wound of Rhodopis any spirit that is wicked, evildoing and destructive.’ Another is, ‘Restrain and render ineffectual any demon that might attack Rhodopis’.”
“I see.” I can’t believe the amulets were of help. Could the bitumen be responsible for reducing the corruption? When Getorius felt for a pulse at Rhodopis’s throat, her flesh was cold and with no discernible beat. The skin at her wrists had chafed raw in attempts to free herself from the straps. He looked up. “Physician, your ‘experiment’ has been dead for several hours.”