The Physician

by Noah Gordon

  Karim fell silent a moment, the stillness broken only by the soft moaning of a patient across the room.

  “When he died, I was fifteen. His family threw me out, but he had made arrangements for my entrance to the madrassa and I came to Ispahan, free for the first time. I made up my mind that when I have sons they will be safe, and that kind of safety comes from wealth.”

  As children they had met similar catastrophes half a world apart, Rob thought. Had he been slightly less fortunate, or had Barber been a different sort of a man …

  The conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Mirdin, who sat on the floor on the other side of the pallet from Karim. “Nobody died in Shīrāz yesterday.”

  “Allah,” Karim said.

  “No one died!”

  Rob took each of them by the hand.

  Presently Karim and Mirdin clasped hands too. They were beyond laughter, beyond tears, like old men who had shared a lifetime. Linked, they sat and looked at one another, savoring survival.

  It was ten more days before they pronounced Rob strong enough to travel. Word of the plague’s end had spread. It would be years before there were trees in Shīrāz again but people were beginning to come back, and some brought lumber. They passed a house on whose windows carpenters were hanging shutters, several more where men were putting up doors.

  It was good to leave the city behind and head north.

  They traveled without haste. When they came to the house of Ishmael the Merchant, they dismounted and knocked, but no one answered.

  Mirdin wrinkled his nose. “There are dead nearby,” he said quietly.

  Entering the house, they found the decomposed bodies of the merchant and Hakim Fadil. There was no sign of Abbas Sefi, who doubtless had fled the “safe refuge” when he saw that the other two were stricken.

  So they had one last responsibility before they left the land of the plague, and they spoke prayers and burned the two bodies, building a hot fire with the merchant’s expensive furniture.

  Where eight had left Ispahan with the medical party, three rode back from Shīrāz.

  45

  A MURDERED MAN’S BONES

  When he got back there seemed an unreality about Ispahan, full of healthy people laughing or squabbling. For a time it was strange for Rob to walk among them, as if the world were tipped on end.

  Ibn Sina was saddened but not surprised to learn of the desertions and deaths when they got home. He received the record book from Rob eagerly. During the month in which the three clerks had waited in the house at Ibrahim’s Rock, to make certain they didn’t bring home the plague, Rob had written at length, resulting in a detailed account of their work in Shīrāz.

  He made it plain in his reports that the other two clerks had saved his life, and he had written of them with warm praise.

  “Karim too?” Ibn Sina asked him bluntly when they were alone.

  Rob hesitated, for it seemed presumptuous of him to evaluate a fellow student. But he drew a breath and answered the question. “He may have trouble with the examinations but he is already a wonderful physician, calm and resolute during disaster and tender with those in torment.”

  Ibn Sina seemed satisfied. “And now you must go to the House of Paradise and report to Alā Shah, for the king is eager to discuss the presence of a Seljuk army in Shīrāz,” he said.

  Winter was dying but not dead, and the palace was cold. Khuff’s hard boots rang on the stone floors as Rob followed him down dark corridors.

  Alā Shah sat alone at a great table.

  “Jesse ben Benjamin, Majesty.” The Captain of the Gates withdrew as Rob performed the ravi zemin.

  “You may sit with me, Dhimmi. You must pull the tablecloth over your lap,” the king instructed. When Rob did so, it was a pleasant shock. The table was set over a grill in the floor, through which heat drifted pleasantly from ovens below.

  He knew he mustn’t look at the monarch too long or too directly, but he had already noted evidence that confirmed the marketplace gossip of the Shah’s continuing dissipation. Alā’s eyes burned like a wolf’s and the flat planes of the lean, hawkish face looked slack, doubtless the result of consuming too much wine too steadily.

  Before the Shah was a board divided into alternately light and dark squares, set with elaborately carved bone figures. Next to it were cups and a pitcher of wine. Alā poured for them both and downed his wine quickly.

  “Drink it, drink it, I would make you a merry Jew.” The red eyes were commanding.

  “I ask your kind permission to leave it. It doesn’t make me merry, Majesty. It makes me surly and wild, so I can’t enjoy wine like more fortunate men.”

  The Shah’s attention had been gained. “It causes me to awake each morning with a powerful pain behind the eyes and a trembling of the hands. You are the physician. What is the remedy?”

  Rob smiled. “Less wine, Highness, and more riding out in the pure Persian air.”

  The sharp eyes searched his face for insolence and found none. “Then you must ride out with me, Dhimmi.”

  “I am at your service, Majesty.”

  Alā waved his hand to show it was understood. “Now, let us speak of the Seljuks in Shīrāz. You must tell all.”

  He listened attentively while Rob recounted at length what he knew about the force that had invaded Anshan.

  Finally he nodded. “Our enemy to the northwest encircled us and sought to establish themselves to our southeast. Had they conquered and occupied all of Anshan, Ispahan would have been a morsel between grinding Seljuk jaws.” He slapped the table. “Allah be blessed for bringing them the plague. When they come again, we will be ready.”

  He pulled the large checkered board so that it sat between them. “You know this pastime?”

  “No, Sire.”

  “Our ancient pursuit. When you lose it is called shahtreng, the ‘anguish of the king.’ But mostly it is known as the Shah’s Game, for it is about war.” He smiled, amused. “I shall teach you the Shah’s Game, Dhimmi.”

  He handed one of the elephant figures to Rob and let him feel the creamy smoothness. “Carved from an elephant’s tusk. You see, we both have an equal array. The king stands in the center, his faithful companion, the general, in attendance. On each side of them is an elephant, casting comfortable shadows as dark as indigo about the throne. Two camels are next to the elephants, with men of fast intent mounted on them. Then come two horses with their riders, ready to fight on the day of combat. At each end of the battle lines a rukh, or warrior, raises his cupped hands to his lips, drinking his enemies’ blood. In front move the foot soldiers, whose duty is to come to the assistance of the others in the fighting. If a foot soldier presses through to the other end of the field of battle, that hero is placed beside the king, like the general.

  “The brave general never moves in the battle more than one square from his king. The mighty elephants run through three squares and observe the whole battlefield two miles wide. The camel runs snorting and stamping through three squares, thus and so. The horses also move over three squares, and in jumping them one of the squares remains untouched. To all sides rage the vindictive rukhs, crossing the whole field of battle.

  “Each piece moves in its own area, and makes neither less nor more than its appointed move. If anyone approaches the king in battle he cries aloud, ‘Remove, O Shah!’ and the king must retreat from his square. Should the opposing king, horse, rukh, general, elephant, and army close the road before him, he must look about him on all four sides with knit brows. If he see that his army has been overthrown, his road barred by water and the ditch, the enemy to left and right, before and behind, he shall die of weariness and thirst, the fate ordained by the revolving firmament for a loser in war.” He poured himself more wine, drank it down, and glowered at Rob. “Do you comprehend?”

  “I believe so, Sire,” Rob said cautiously.

  “Then let us begin.”

  Rob made mistakes, moving some of the pieces incorrectly, and each time
Alā Shah corrected him with a growl. The game didn’t last long, for very quickly his forces were slain and his king taken.

  “Another,” Alā said with satisfaction.

  The second contest was concluded almost as swiftly as the first, but Rob began to see that the Shah anticipated his moves because he had set ambushes and lured him into traps, just as though they were fighting a real war.

  When the second game was finished, Alā waved his hand in dismissal.

  “A proficient player can ward off defeat for days,” he said. “Who wins at the Shah’s Game is fit to govern the world. But you have done well, your first time. It is no disgrace for you to suffer shahtreng, for after all you are but a Jew.”

  * * *

  How satisfying to be in the little house in Yehuddiyyeh again, and to slip back into the hard routines of the maristan and the lecture halls!

  To Rob’s great pleasure he wasn’t sent back to serve as jail surgeon, but instead was apprenticed in fractures for a time, to serve with Mirdin as clerks under Hakim Jalal-ul-Din. Slim and saturnine, Jalal appeared to be a typical leader of Ispahan’s medical society, respected and prosperous. But he differed from most of the Ispahan doctors in several important aspects.

  “So you are Jesse the Barber-Surgeon, of whom I have heard?” he said when Rob reported to him.

  “Yes, Master Physician.”

  “I can’t share the general scorn for barber-surgeons. Many are thieves and fools, true enough, but also among their number are men who are honest and clever. Before I became a physician I was of another profession despised by Persian doctors, a traveling bonesetter, and after I became hakim I am the same man I was before. But though I don’t damn you as a barber, still you must work hard for my respect. If you don’t earn it, I shall kick your arse from my service, European.”

  Both Rob and Mirdin were happy to work hard. Jalal-ul-Din was famous as a bone specialist and had developed a wide variety of padded splints and traction devices. He taught them to use fingertips as if they were eyes that could peer beneath bruised and crushed flesh, visualizing the injury until the best course of treatment was clear. Jalal was especially skillful in manipulating chips and fragments until they were back in their rightful places, where nature could make them part of bones once again.

  “He appears to have a curious interest in crime,” Mirdin grumbled after their first few days as Jalal’s assistants. And it was true, for Rob had noted that the physician spoke inordinately long about a murderer who had shriven his guilt that week in Imam Qandrasseh’s court.

  One Fakhr-i-Ayn, a shepherd, had confessed that two years earlier he had sodomized and then slain a fellow shepherd named Qifti al-Ullah, burying his victim in a shallow grave outside the city walls. The murderer was condemned by the court and promptly executed and quartered.

  A few days later, when Rob and Mirdin reported to Jalal, he told them that the body of the murdered man was to be removed from its crude grave and reburied in a Muslim cemetery with benefit of Islamic prayer to insure his soul’s admission to Paradise.

  “Come,” Jalal said. “It is a rare opportunity. Today we shall be grave-diggers.”

  He didn’t disclose whom he had bribed, but soon the two clerks and the physician, leading a laden mule, accompanied a mullah and a kelonter’s soldier to the lonely hillside which the late Fakhr-i-Ayn had pointed out to authorities.

  “Have a care,” Jalal said as they used their spades.

  Presently they saw the bones of a hand, and soon after that removed the entire skeleton, laying the bones of Qifti-al-Ullah on a blanket.

  “Time for food,” Jalal announced, and led the donkey to the shade of a tree a distance from the grave. The animal’s pack was opened to give forth roast fowl, sumptuous pilah, large desert dates, honey cakes, a jug of sherbet. The soldier and the mullah fell to eating eagerly, and Jalal and his clerks left them to the heavy meal and the nap that would surely follow.

  The three of them hurried back to the skeleton. The earth had done its task and the bones were clean save for a rusty stain around the place where Fakhr’s dagger had punched through the sternum. They knelt over the bones, murmuring, scarcely aware that the remains once had been a man named Qifti.

  “Note the femur,” Jalal said, “the largest and strongest bone in the body. Is it not apparent why it is difficult to set a break that occurs in the thigh?

  “Count the twelve pairs of ribs. Do you note how the ribs form a cage? The cage protects the heart and the lungs, is that not marvelous?”

  It was remarkably different to be studying human bones instead of a sheep’s, Rob thought; but it was only a small part of the story. “The human heart and lungs—have you seen them?” he asked Jalal.

  “No. But Galen says they are very much like the pig’s. We have all seen the pig’s.”

  “What if they are not the same?”

  “They are the same,” Jalal said crankily. “Let us not waste this golden chance for study, for soon those two will return. Do you witness how the upper seven pair of ribs are attached to the breastplate by flexible connective stuff? The next three are united by a common tissue, and the last two pairs have no attachment to the front at all. Is Allah (great and mighty is He!) not the cleverest designer, Dhimmis? Is it not a wondrous framework on which He has built his people?”

  They squatted in the hot sun over their scholarly feast, making an anatomy lesson of the murdered man.

  Afterward, Rob and Mirdin spent time in the academy’s baths, washing away the funereal feeling and easing muscles unaccustomed to digging. It was here that Karim found them, and at once Rob saw from his friend’s face that something was wrong.

  “I am to be reexamined.”

  “But surely that is what you want!”

  Karim glanced at two faculty members conversing at the other end of the room and lowered his voice. “I’m afraid. I’d almost given up hope for another examining. This will be my third—if I fail this time all will be over.” He looked at them bleakly. “At least now I’m able to be a clerk.”

  “You will trot through the examination like a runner,” Mirdin said.

  Karim waved off any attempt at lightheartedness. “I’m not concerned with the medical portion. It’s the portion on philosophy, and the portion on the law.”

  “When?” Rob asked.

  “In six weeks.”

  “That gives us time, then.”

  “Yes, I will study philosophy with you,” Mirdin said calmly. “Jesse and you will work on the law.”

  Inside, Rob groaned, for he scarcely considered himself a jurist. But they had been through the plague together and were linked by similar boyhood catastrophes; he knew they must try. “We begin tonight,” he said, reaching for a cloth to dry his body.

  “I have never heard of anyone staying apprentice for seven years and then being made a physician,” Karim said, and he made no attempt to hide his terror from them, a new level of intimacy.

  “You will pass,” Mirdin said, and Rob nodded.

  “I must,” Karim said.

  46

  THE RIDDLE

  Two weeks in a row, Ibn Sina invited Rob to dine with him.

  “Hoo, the Master has a favorite clerk,” Mirdin gibed, but there was pride and not jealousy in his smile.

  “It’s good that he takes an interest,” Karim said seriously. “Al-Juzjani has had Ibn Sina’s sponsorship since they were young men, and al-Juzjani became a great physician.”

  Rob scowled, unwilling to share the experience even with them. He couldn’t describe what it was like to have an entire evening as the sole beneficiary of Ibn Sina’s mind. One evening they had talked of the heavenly bodies—or, to be precise, Ibn Sina had talked and Rob had listened. Another evening, Ibn Sina had held forth for hours on the theories of the Greek philosophers. He knew so much and could teach it effortlessly!

  In contrast, before Rob could teach Karim, he had to learn. He determined that for six weeks he would stop attending all lectures sav
e for selected ones on the law, and he drew books on law and jurisprudence from the House of Wisdom. Tutoring Karim in law would not simply be a selfless act of friendship, for it was an area Rob had neglected. In helping Karim he would be preparing himself for the day when his own ordeal of testing would begin.

  In Islam there were two branches of law: Fiqh, or legal science, and Sharī’a, the law as divinely revealed by Allah. When there was added to these Sunna, truth and justice as revealed by the exemplary life and sayings of Mohammed, the result was a complex and complicated body of learning that might make scholars quail.

  Karim was trying, but it was obvious he was sorely tried. “It’s too much,” he said. The strain was apparent. For the first time in seven years, except for the period in which they had fought the plague in Shīrāz, he wasn’t going to the maristan daily, and he confessed to Rob that he felt strange and ripped out of his element without his daily routine of caring for patients.

  Each morning, before he met with Rob to study the law and then with Mirdin to study the philosophers and their teachings, Karim ran in the first gray light. Once Rob tried to run with him but he was soon left behind; Karim ran as if trying to outdistance his fears. Several times, Rob rode the brown horse and paced the runner. Karim sped through the stirring city, past the grinning sentries at the main gate of the wall, across the River of Life and into the countryside. Rob didn’t think he knew or cared where he was running. His feet rose and fell and his legs moved with a steady, mindless rhythm that appeared to lull and comfort him as if it were an infusion of buing, the strong hempseed they gave to people with hopeless pain. The daily expenditure of effort bothered Rob.

  “It takes Karim’s strength,” he complained to Mirdin. “He should save all his energy for studying.”

  But wise Mirdin pulled his nose and stroked his long equine jaw and shook his head. “No, without the running I think he would not be able to get past this hard time,” he said, and Rob was wise enough to defer, for he had great faith that Mirdin’s everyday wisdom was as formidable as his scholarship.