by Noah Gordon
They chose a place directly in front of a boulder so large elephants couldn’t move it, taking precise bearings and pacing off the distance from the rock to the edge of the nearby road. Karim used his privilege to obtain parchment, quill, and ink, and after they had dug the grave Rob carefully mapped it. He would redraw a good chart and send it to Masqat. Unless there was incontrovertible evidence that Mirdin had died, Fara would be considered an agunah, a deserted wife, and she would never be permitted to marry again. That was the law; Mirdin had taught it to him.
“Alā will want to be here,” he said.
He watched Karim approach the Shah. Alā was drinking with his officers, bathing in the warm glow of victory. Rob saw him listen to Karim for a moment and then wave him away impatiently.
Rob felt a surge of hatred, remembering the king’s voice in the cave, and what he had told Mirdin: We are four friends.
Karim returned and said shamefacedly that they must proceed; he muttered broken fragments of Islamic prayer as they filled in the hole, but Rob didn’t try to pray. Mirdin deserved sorrowing voices raised in Hashkavot, the burial chant, and the Kaddish. But the Kaddish had to be said by ten Jews and he was a Christian pretending to be a Jew, standing numb and silent as the earth closed over his friend.
* * *
That afternoon the Persians could find no more Indians in the forest to kill.
The way from Kausambi was open. Alā appointed a hard-eyed veteran named Farhad to be his new Captain of the Gates, and the officer began to bawl orders calculated to whip the force into readiness to leave.
Amid general jubilation, Alā made an accounting. He had gained his Indian swordmaker. He had lost two elephants at Mansura but had taken twenty-eight there. In addition, four young, healthy elephants had been found by the mahouts in a pen in Kausambi; they were work animals, untrained for battle but still valuable. The Indian horses were scrubby little animals ignored by the Persians, but they had discovered a small herd of fine fast camels in Mansura and dozens of pack camels in Kausambi.
Alā was aglow with the success of his raids.
One hundred and twenty of the six hundred who had followed the Shah out of Ispahan were dead, and Rob had the responsibility for forty-seven wounded. Many of these were grievously injured and would die during travel, but there was no question of leaving them behind in the ravaged village. Any Persian found there would be killed when fresh Indian forces came.
Rob sent soldiers through every house to collect rugs and blankets, which were fastened between poles to make litters. When they left at dawn the following morning, Indians carried the litters.
It was three and a half days of hard, tense travel to a place where the river could be forded without fighting. In the early stages of the crossing two men were swept away and drowned. In the middle of the Indus the current was shallow but swift and the mahouts placed the elephants upstream to break the force of the water like a living wall, yet another demonstration of the true value of these animals.
The terribly wounded died first, those with perforated chests or slashed bellies, and a man who had been stuck in the neck. In one day alone, half a dozen succumbed. Fifteen days of travel brought them into Baluchistan, where they camped in a field and Rob placed his wounded in an open-sided barn. Seeing Farhad, he sought an audience, but Farhad was all posturing and pompous delay. Fortunately Karim overheard and at once brought him to the tent to see the Shah.
“I have twenty-one left. But they must lie in one place for a time or they will die too, Majesty.”
“I cannot wait for wounded,” Alā said, eager for his triumphal march through Ispahan.
“I ask your permission to stay here with them.”
The Shah stared. “I will not spare Karim to remain with you as hakim. He must return with me.”
Rob nodded.
They gave him fifteen Indians and twenty-seven armed soldiers to bear litters, and two mahouts and all five of the injured elephants so the animals might continue to receive his care. Karim arranged for sacks of rice to be unloaded. Next morning the camp was filled with the usual frenzied bustle. Then the main body moved out onto the trail and, when finally the last of them had gone, Rob was left with his patients and his handful of men in a sudden lack of noise that was at the same time welcome and discomfiting.
The rest benefited his patients, out of the sun and the dust, and spared the constant jolting and shaking of travel. Two men died on their first day in the barn and another on the fourth day, but those who hung on were the tough ones who clutched at survival, and Rob’s decision to pause in Baluchistan allowed them to live.
At first the soldiers resented the duty. The other raiders soon would be back in Ispahan to safety and triumphant acclaim, while they had been given prolonged risk and a dirty job. Two members of the armed guard slipped away during the second night and were not seen again. The weaponless Indians did not attempt to flee, nor did the other members of the guard. Soldiers by profession, they soon realized that next time any of them might be struck down, and they were grateful that the hakim would risk himself to help their kind.
He sent out hunting parties every morning and small game was brought back and dressed and stewed with some of the rice Karim had left them, and his patients gained in strength even as he watched.
He treated the elephants as he did the men, changing their dressings regularly and bathing their wounds in wine. The great beasts stood and allowed him to hurt them, as if they understood he was their benefactor. The men were as stolid as the animals, even when wounds mortified and he was forced to cut stitches and rip open mending flesh so he could clean away the pus and bathe the wound in wine before closing it again.
He witnessed a strange fact: in virtually every case he had treated with the boiling oil, the wounds had become angry, swollen, and full of suppuration. Many of these patients had died, while most of the men whose wounds were treated after the oil had run out were without pus, and these men lived. He began to keep records, suspecting that this single observation perhaps had made his presence in India worth something. He was almost out of wine, but he had not manufactured the Universal Specific without having learned that where there were farmers, kegs of strong drink could be obtained. They would buy more along the way.
When finally they left the barn at the end of three weeks, four of his patients were well enough to ride. Twelve of the soldiers were burdenless and thus could trade off with those who carried litters, allowing some to rest at all times. Rob led them off the Spice Road at first opportunity and took a circuitous route. The longer way would add almost a week to their travel, which made the soldiers sullen. But he wouldn’t risk his tiny caravan by following the Shah’s larger force through a countryside in which hatred as well as starvation had been sown by the ravaging Persian foragers.
Three of the elephants still limped and were not given loads, but Rob rode on the back of the elephant whose trunk had received minor slashes. He was happy to leave Bitch and would be content never to ride a camel again. In contrast, the elephant’s broad back offered comfort and stability and a king’s view of the world.
But the easy travel allowed unlimited opportunity for him to think, and the memory of Mirdin was with him every step of the way, so that the ordinary wonders of a journey—a sudden flight of thousands of birds, a sunset that set the sky to flaming, the way one of the elephants stepped on the lip of a steep ditch to crumble it and then sat like a child to slide down the resulting earth ramp—these things were noticed but brought little joy.
Jesus, he thought. Or Shaddai, or Allah, whoever You may be. How can You allow such waste?
Kings led ordinary men into battle and some who survived were poor stuff and some were purely evil, he thought bitterly. Yet God had permitted one to be cut down who had had the qualities of saintliness and a mind scholars envied and coveted. Mirdin would have spent his life seeking only to heal and serve mankind.
Not since the burial of Barber had Rob been so moved and shaken
by a death, and he was still brooding and in despair when they reached Ispahan.
They approached in late afternoon, so that the city was as he first had seen it, white buildings, blue-shadowed, with roofs of reflected pink from the sand hills. They rode directly to the maristan, where the eighteen wounded men were handed over to others for care.
Then they went to the stables of the House of Paradise, where he rid himself of responsibility for the animals, the troops, and the slaves.
When that was done, he asked for his brown gelding. Farhad, the new Captain of the Gates, was nearby and overheard, and he ordered the groom not to waste time trying to locate one horse in the milling herd. “Issue the hakim another mount.”
“Khuff said I would get back the same horse.” Not everything had to change, he told himself.
“Khuff is dead.”
“Nevertheless.” To his own great surprise, Rob’s voice and stare became hard. He had come from carnage that had sickened him but now he yearned for something to strike, violence as a release. “I wish the same horse.”
Farhad knew men and recognized the challenge in the hakim’s voice. He had nothing to gain from brawling with this Dhimmi and a great deal to lose. He shrugged and turned away.
Rob rode beside the groom, back and forth through the herd. By the time he saw the gelding he was ashamed of his ugly conduct. They separated the horse from the others and put a saddle on it while Farhad hovered and didn’t hide his contempt that this flawed beast was what the Dhimmi had been prepared to fight for.
But the brown horse trotted eagerly through the dusk to Yehuddiyyeh.
Hearing noises among the animals, Mary took her father’s sword and the lamp and opened the door between house and stable.
He had come home.
The saddle was already off the brown horse and he was in the act of backing the gelding into the stall. He turned, and in the poor light she saw he had lost considerable weight; he looked almost like the thin, half-wild boy she had met in Kerl Fritta’s caravan.
He reached her in three steps and held her without speaking, then his hand touched her flat belly.
“Did it go well?”
She gave a shaky laugh, for she was weary and torn. Only by five days had he missed hearing her frantic screams. “Your son was two days in coming.”
“A son.”
He placed his large palm against her cheek. At his touch the flooding relief made her tremble, so that she came close to spilling oil from the lamp and the flame flickered. When he was away she had made herself hard and strong, a leather woman, but it was deepest luxury to trust again that someone else was shielding and capable. Like turning from leather back into silk.
She set down the sword and took his hand, leading him inside to where the infant lay asleep in a blanket-lined basket.
Suddenly she saw the round-faced bit of humanity through Rob’s eyes, tiny red features swollen from birthing travail, fuzz of darkish hair atop his head. She felt annoyance at the kind of man this was, for she couldn’t tell if he was disappointed or overjoyed. When he looked up, mixed with pleasure there was agony in his face.
“How is Fara?”
“Karim came and told her. I observed shiva with her, seven days. Then she took Dawwid and Issachar and joined a caravan bound for Masqat. With God’s aid, by now they are among kinsmen.”
“It will be hard for you without her.”
“Harder for her,” she said bitterly.
The child began a thin wailing and Rob picked him from the basket and gave his little finger, which was taken hungrily.
Mary wore a loose dress with a drawstring at the neck, sewn for her by Fara. She opened the garment and lowered it beneath her full breasts, then took the babe from him. Rob lay down alongside them on the mat as she began to nurse. He moved his head onto her free breast and soon she felt his cheek’s wetness.
She had never known her father to weep, or any man, and Rob’s convulsive shaking frightened her. “My dear. My Rob,” she murmured.
Instinctively, her free hand gently directed him until his mouth was on the nipple. He was a more tentative suckler than his son and when he drew on her and swallowed, she was vastly moved but tenderly amused: for once, part of her body was entering him. She thought fleetingly of Fara and, with no little guilt, thanked the Virgin that it had not been her husband who had been taken. The two pairs of lips on her, one tiny and the other large and so familiar, filled her with a tingling warmth. Perhaps it was the Blessed Mother or the saints working their magic, but for a time the three of them became one.
Finally Rob sat up, and when he leaned over and kissed her, she tasted her own warm richness.
“I am not a Roman,” he said.
PART SIX
Hakim
61
THE APPOINTMENT
The morning after his return Rob studied his man-child in the light of day and saw that the babe was beautiful, with deep blue English eyes and large hands and feet. He counted and gently flexed each tiny finger and toe and rejoiced in the slightly bowed little legs. A strong infant.
The child smelled like an olive press, having been oiled by his mother. Then he smelled less pleasing and Rob changed a baby’s cloth for the first time since tending his brothers and sister. Deep within him he still yearned to find William Stewart, Anne Mary, and Jonathan Carter one day. Wouldn’t it be joy to show this nephew to the long-lost Coles?
He and Mary quarreled about circumcision.
“It will do him no harm. Here every man is circumcised, Muslim and Jew, and it’s an easy way for him to be more easily accepted.”
“I don’t wish him to be more easily accepted in Persia,” she said wearily. “I wish him to be accepted at home, where men aren’t bobbed and knobbed but are left to nature.”
He laughed and she began to cry. He comforted her and then, when he could, escaped to confer with Ibn Sina.
The Prince of Physicians greeted him warmly, thanking Allah for his survival and speaking sadly of Mirdin. Ibn Sina listened with close attention to Rob’s report of treatments and amputations performed at the two battles, being especially interested in his comparisons between the efficacy of hot oil versus wine baths for cleansing open wounds. Ibn Sina showed himself more interested in scientific truth than in his own infallibility. Even though Rob’s observations contradicted what he himself had said and written, he insisted that Rob write his findings. “Also, this thing concerning wine in wounds should be your first lecture as a hakim,” he said, and Rob found himself agreeing with his mentor.
Then the old man looked at him. “I would like you to work with me, Jesse ben Benjamin. As assistant.”
He had never dreamed of this. He wanted to tell the Chief Physician that he had come to Ispahan—from so great a distance, through other worlds, surmounting so many problems—only to touch the hem of Ibn Sina’s garment.
Instead, he nodded. “Hakim-bashi, I would like that.”
Mary made no difficulty when he told her. She had been in Ispahan long enough so it didn’t occur to her that her husband could refuse such an honor, for in addition to a comfortable salary there would be the immediate prestige and respect of association with a man who was venerated like a demigod, loved above royalty. When Rob saw her joy for him, he took her into his arms. “I will take you home, I promise you, Mary. But not for a time yet. Please trust me.”
She did. Yet she recognized that if they were to remain for a longer time, she must change. She determined to make an effort to bend to the country. Reluctantly, she gave in concerning the matter of the child’s circumcision.
Rob went to Nitka the Midwife for advice. “Come,” she said, and led him two streets away to Reb Asher Jacobi the mohel.
“So, a circumcision,” the mohel said. “The mother …” Musing, he looked at Nitka through narrowed eyes, his fingers scrabbling in his beard. “An Other!”
“It doesn’t have to be a brit, with all the prayers,” Nitka said impatiently. Having taken th
e serious step of delivering the Other’s man-child, she slipped easily into the role of defender. “If the father asks for the seal of Abraham on the child, it is a blessing to circumcise him, isn’t it so?”
“Yes,” Reb Asher admitted. “Your father. Will he hold the child?” he asked Rob.
“My father is dead.”
Reb Asher sighed. “Will other family members be present?”
“Only my wife. There are no other family members here. I’ll hold the child myself.”
“A time of celebration,” Nitka said gently. “Would you mind? My sons Shemuel and Chofni, a few neighbors …”
Rob nodded.
“I’ll attend to it,” Nitka said.
Next morning she and her two burly stonecutter sons were the first to arrive at Rob’s house. Hinda, the disapproving merchant from the Jewish market, came with her Tall Isak, a gray-bearded scholar with bemused eyes. Hinda was still unsmiling but she brought a gift, a swaddling garment. Yaakob the Shoemaker and Naoma, his wife, gave a flagon of wine. Micah Halevi the Baker came, his wife Yudit carrying two large loaves of sugared bread.
Holding the sweet little body supine in his lap, Rob had doubts when Reb Asher cut the foreskin from the tiny penis. “May the lad grow in vigor—of mind and body—to a life of good works,” the mohel declared, as the baby shrieked. The neighbors lifted bowls of wine and cheered, and Rob gave the boy the Jewish name Mirdin ben Jesse.
Mary hated every moment. An hour later when everyone had gone home and she and Rob were alone with their child, she wet her fingers in barley water and touched her screaming son lightly on the forehead, the chin, and one earlobe and then the other.
“In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, I christen you Robert James Cole,” she said clearly, naming him for his father and his grandfather.
After that, when they were alone she called her husband Rob, and it was the child to whom she referred as Rob J.