by Noah Gordon
Through the thin fabric screens of the open windows, sounds had been invading the maristan in increasing volume, and when Rob went outside he saw that the city had turned out to bid its army farewell.
He followed the people to the maidans. This army was too large to be contained in the squares. It spilled over and filled the streets throughout the central portion of the city. Not hundreds, as in the raiding party that had gone to India, but thousands. Long ranks of heavy infantry, longer ranks of lightly armed men. Javelin hurlers. Lancers on horses, and sword cavalry on ponies and camels. The press of the crowd was tremendous, as was the hubbub: cries of farewell, weeping, the screams of women, obscene badinage, commands, words of farewell and encouragement.
He pushed his way forward like a man swimming against the human tide, through the stink, an amalgam of human odor and camel sweat and horseshit. The sun-glitter on the polished weapons was blinding. At the head of the line were the elephants. Rob counted thirty-four. Alā was committing all the war elephants he owned.
Rob didn’t see Ibn Sina. He had made his farewells to several of the departing physicians in the maristan, but Ibn Sina hadn’t come to say goodbye nor had he summoned Rob, and it was obvious he preferred no words of leavetaking.
Here came the royal musicians. Some blew long golden trumpets and others rang silver bells, heralding the swaying approach of the great elephant Zi, a ponderous force. The mahout Harsha was dressed in white and the Shah clad in the blue silks and red turban that was his costume for going to war.
The people roared in ecstasy at seeing their warrior king. As he raised his hand in royal greeting, they knew he was promising them Ghazna. Rob studied the Shah’s rigid back; at that moment, Alā was not Alā—he had become Xerxes, he had become Darius, he had become Cyrus the Great. He was all conquerors to all men.
We are four friends. We are four friends. Rob felt dizzy, thinking of the occasions when it would have been so easy to kill him.
He was far back in the crowd. Even if he had been up front, he would have been cut down the moment he hurled himself at the king.
He turned away. He didn’t wait with the others to see the departing parade of those bound to glory or to death. He struggled out of the crowd and walked unseeingly until he came to the banks of Zayendeh, the River of Life.
He took from his finger the ring of massy gold Alā had given him for his service in India and dropped it into the brown water. Then, while in the distance the crowd roared and roared, he walked back to the maristan.
Qasim had been dosed heavily with the infusion but he appeared to be very ill. His eyes were vacant, his countenance pale and sunken. Though the day was warm he was shivering, and Rob covered him with a blanket. Soon the blanket was soaked and when he felt Qasim’s face, it was hot.
By late afternoon the pain had become so powerful that when Rob touched his abdomen, the old man screamed.
Rob didn’t go home. He stayed in the maristan, returning often to Qasim’s pallet.
That evening, in the midst of Qasim’s agony, there was complete relief. For a time his breathing was quiet and even, and he slept. Rob dared hope, but within a few hours he was reclaimed by fever and his body became ever hotter, his pulse rapid and at times barely perceptible.
He tossed and thrashed in delirium. “Nuwas,” he called. “Ah, Nuwas.” Sometimes he spoke to his father or to his uncle Nili, and again and again to the unknown Nuwas.
Rob took his hands and his heart sank; he didn’t let go, for now he could offer only his presence and the meager comfort of a human touch. At length the labored breathing simply slowed and then stopped. He was still holding the callused hands when Qasim died.
He placed one arm beneath the knobby knees and the other under the bare bony shoulders and carried the body into the charnel house, then he went into the room next door. It stank; he would have to see that it was scrubbed. He sat among Qasim’s belongings, which were few: one extra garment, shabby; a prayer rug, tattered; some paper sheets and a tanned leather on which Qasim had paid a scribe to copy several prayers from the Qu’ran. Two flasks of forbidden wine. A loaf of stale Armenian bread and a bowl of rancid green olives. A cheap dagger with a nicked blade.
It was past midnight and most of the hospital slept. Now and again a patient cried out or wept. Nobody saw him remove Qasim’s meager belongings from the little room. While he was carrying in the wooden table he met a nurse, but the shortage of help had given the man courage to look the other way and hurry past the hakim before he could be given more work than he already had.
In the room, under two of the legs at one end Rob placed a board so the table tilted, and on the floor under the lower end he set a basin. He needed ample light and he prowled the hospital, stealing four lamps and a dozen candles, which he set around the table as though it were an altar. Then he brought Qasim from the charnel house and laid him on the table.
Even as Qasim lay dying, Rob had known he would break the commandment.
Yet now the moment was at hand and he found it difficult to breathe. He wasn’t an ancient Egyptian embalmer who could call in a despised paraschiste to open the body and absorb the sin. The act and the sin, if any, must be his own.
He picked up a curved, probe-tipped surgical knife called a bistoury and made the incision, slicing open the abdomen from the groin to the sternum. The flesh parted crisply and began to ooze blood.
He didn’t know how to proceed and he flayed the skin away from the sternum, then he lost his nerve. In all his life he had had but two peer friends and each had died by having his body cavity cruelly violated. If he were caught he would die the same way but in addition there would be flaying, the ultimate agony. He left the little room and nervously prowled the hospital, but those who were awake paid him no heed. He still felt as though the ground had opened up and he walked on air, but now he believed he was peering deep into the abyss.
He fetched a small-toothed bone saw to the makeshift little laboratory and sawed through the sternum in imitation of the wound that had killed Mirdin in India. At the bottom of the incision he cut from the groin to the inside of the thigh, making a large, clumsy flap that he was able to fold back, exposing the abdominal cavity. Beneath the pink belly the stomach wall was red meat and whitish strands of muscle, and even in skinny Qasim there were yellow globules of fat.
The thin inner lining of the abdominal wall was inflamed and covered with a coagulable substance. The organs appeared healthy to his dazzled eyes except for the small intestine, which was reddened and angry in many places. Even the smallest vessels were so filled with blood they looked as if they had been injected with red wax. A little pouchy part of the gut was unusually black and adhered to the abdominal lining; when he attempted to separate them gently by pulling, the membranes broke and exposed two or three spoonfuls of pus, the infection that had caused Qasim so much pain. He suspected that Qasim’s agony had stopped when the diseased tissue had ruptured. A thin, dark-colored, fetid fluid had escaped from the inflammation into the cavity of the abdomen. He dipped a fingertip into it and sniffed it with interest, for this might be the poison that had produced fever and death.
He wanted to examine the other organs but he was afraid.
He sewed up the opening carefully, so that if the holy men were right and Qasim ibn Sahdi should be resurrected from the grave, he would be whole. Then he crossed the wrists and tied them and used a large cloth to bind the old man’s loins. He carefully wrapped the body in a shroud and returned it to the charnel house to await burial in the morning.
“Thank you, Qasim,” he said somberly. “May you rest.”
Taking a single candle to the maristan baths, he scrubbed himself clean and changed his garments. But still he fancied the odor of death remained on him and he rinsed his hands and arms in perfume.
Outside, in the darkness, he was still afraid. He could not believe what he had done.
It was almost dawn when he settled himself onto his pallet. In the morning he slept de
eply and Mary’s face turned to stone as she breathed another woman’s flowery scent that seemed to foul their house.
71
IBN SINA’S ERROR
Yussuf-ul-Gamal beckoned Rob into the scholarly shade of the library. “I want to show you a treasure.”
It was a thick book, an obviously new copy of Ibn Sina’s masterwork, Canon of Medicine.
“This Qanūn isn’t owned by the House of Wisdom. It is a copy made by a scribe of my acquaintance. It is for sale.”
Ah. Rob picked it up. It was lovingly done, the letters black and crisp on each ivory-colored page. It was a codex, a book with many gatherings—large sheets of vellum folded and then cut so each page could be freely turned. The gatherings had been finely stitched between covers of soft tanned lambskin.
“It is costly?”
Yussuf nodded.
“How much?”
“He will sell for eighty silver bestis. Because he needs money.” He pursed his lips, aware he didn’t have that much. Mary had a large sum, her father’s money, but he and Mary no longer …
Rob shook his head.
Yussuf sighed. “I felt you should own it.”
“When must it be sold?”
Yussuf shrugged. “I can keep it for two weeks.”
“All right, then. Keep it.”
The librarian looked at him doubtfully. “Will you have the money then, Hakim?”
“If it is God’s will.”
Yussuf smiled. “Yes. Imshallah.”
He placed a stout hasp and a heavy lock on the door of the chamber next to the charnel house. He brought in a second table, a steel, a fork, a small knife, several sharp scalpels, and the kind of chisel stonecutters call a quarrel; a drawing board, paper and charcoals and leads; thongs, clay and wax, quills, and an inkstand.
One day he took several strong students to the market and brought back the fresh carcass of a hog, with no little effort. No one appeared to think it odd when he said he would do some dissecting in the little room.
That night, alone, he carried in the corpse of a young woman who had died a few hours before and placed her on the empty table. Her name had been Melia.
This time he was more eager and less afraid. He had thought about his fear and didn’t think he was driven to his actions by witchery or the work of a djinn. He believed he had been allowed to become a physician to work toward the protection of God’s finest creation, and that the Almighty wouldn’t frown at his learning more about so complex and interesting a creature.
Opening both the pig and the woman, he prepared to make a careful comparison of the two anatomies.
Because he began his double inspection in the area where abdominal distemper takes place, he was brought up short at once. The pig’s cecum, the pouchlike gut from which the large intestine began, was substantial, almost eighteen inches long. But the woman’s cecum was tiny in comparison, only two or three inches long and as wide as Rob’s little finger. And halloo! … attached to this tiny cecum was … something. It looked like nothing so much as a pink worm, uncovered in the garden, picked up and placed within the woman’s belly.
The pig on the other table did not have a wormlike attachment, and Rob had never observed a similar appendage on a pig’s bowel.
He drew no swift conclusions. He thought at first that the small size of the woman’s cecum might be an anomaly, and that the wormlike thing was a rare tumor or some other growth.
He prepared the corpse of Melia for burial as carefully as he had done with Qasim, and returned her to the charnel house.
But in the nights that followed he opened the bodies of a stripling youth, a middle-aged woman, and a six-week-old male infant. In each case, with rising excitement, he found that the same tiny appendage was there. The “worm” was a part of every person—one tiny proof that the organs of a human being were not the same as the organs of a swine.
Oh, you damned Ibn Sina. “You bloody old man,” he whispered. “You’re wrong!”
Despite what Celsus had written, despite what had been taught for a thousand years, men and women were unique. And if this was so, who knew how many magnificent mysteries might be uncovered and answered simply by looking for them within the bodies of human beings.
All his life Rob had been alone and lonely until he had met her, and now he was lonely again and could not bear it. One night when he came into the house he lay down next to her between the two sleeping children.
He made no move to touch her but she turned like a wild creature. Her hand found his face with a stinging blow. She was a large female and strong enough to do hurt. He took her hands and pinned them to her sides.
“Madwoman.”
“Do not come to me from Persian harlots!”
It was the aromatic, he realized. “I use it because I’ve been dissecting animals in the maristan.”
She said nothing for a moment but then she tried to move free. He could feel the familiar body against him as she struggled and the scent of her red hair was in his nostrils.
“Mary.”
She became calmer; perhaps it was what was in his voice. Still, when he moved to kiss her it wouldn’t have surprised him to be bitten on the mouth or the throat, but he was not. It took him a moment to realize she was kissing him back. He stopped holding her hands and was infinitely grateful to touch breasts that were rigid but not with death.
He couldn’t tell if she was weeping or merely aroused because she was making little moaning sounds. He tasted her milky nipples and nuzzled her navel. Beneath this warm belly shiny pink and gray viscera were coiled and twined like sea creatures in congress, but her limbs were not stiff and cold and in the mound first one of his fingers and then two found heat and slipperiness, the stuff of life.
When he thrust inside her they came together like clapping hands, pounding and slamming as if trying to destroy something they couldn’t face. Exorcising the djinn. Her nails punished his back as she banged straight at him. There was only a quiet grunting and the slap-slap-slap of their mating until finally she cried out and then he cried out, and Tam bawled and Rob J. awoke with a scream, and together the four of them laughed or wept, the adults doing both.
Eventually things were sorted out. Little Rob J. returned to sleep and the infant was brought to the breast, and as she fed him, in a quiet voice she told Rob of how Ibn Sina had come to her and instructed her about what she must do. And so he heard how the woman and the old man had saved his life.
He was surprised and shocked to hear of Ibn Sina’s involvement.
As for the rest, her experience was close to what he had already guessed, and after Tam fell asleep he held her in his arms and told her she was his own chosen woman for always, and smoothed the red hair and kissed the nape of her white neck where freckles didn’t dare appear. When she slept too he lay and stared at the dark ceiling.
In the days that followed she smiled a lot and it saddened and angered him to see the trace of fear in the smiles, though by his actions he tried to show his love and gratitude.
One morning, caring for a sick child in the house of a member of the court, he saw next to the sleeping pallet the small blue carpet of Samanid royalty. When he looked at the boy he observed swarthy skin, a nose already hooked, a certain quality in the eyes. It was a familiar face, made even more familiar whenever he looked at his own younger son.
He broke with his schedule and went home and picked up little Tam and held him to the light. The face was brother to that of the sick child’s.
And yet Tam did also sometimes look remarkably like Rob’s lost brother Willum.
Before and after the time he had spent in Idhaj on Ibn Sina’s errand, he and Mary had made love. Who was to say this was not fruit of his own seed?
And he changed the child’s wet cloth and touched the small hand and kissed the so-soft cheek, and returned him to his cradle.
That night he and Mary made tender and considerate love that brought them release but wasn’t the same as once it was. Afterward
he went out and sat in the moon-washed garden next to the autumnal ruins of the flowers on which she had lavished her care.
Nothing ever remains the same, he realized. She wasn’t the young woman who had followed him so trustingly into a field of wheat, and he wasn’t the youth who had led her there.
And that was not the least of the debts for which he yearned to repay Alā Shah.
72
THE TRANSPARENT MAN
Out of the east there arose a dust cloud of such proportion that the lookouts confidently expected an enormous caravan, or perhaps even several great caravans merged into a single train.
Instead, an army approached the city.
When it reached the gates it was possible to identify the soldiers as Afghans from Ghazna. They stopped outside the walls and their commander, a young man wearing a dark blue robe and snowy turban, entered Ispahan accompanied by four officers. No one was there to stop him. Alā’s army having followed him to Hamadhān, the gates were guarded by a handful of aged troopers, old men who melted away at the foreign army’s approach, so that Sultan Masūd—for it was he—rode into the city unchallenged. At the Friday Mosque the Afghans dismounted and went inside, where reportedly they joined the congregation at Third Prayer and then sequestered themselves for several hours with the Imam Musa Ibn Abbas and his coterie of mullahs.
Most of the inhabitants of Ispahan didn’t see Masūd, but as the Sultan’s presence was made known, Rob and al-Juzjani were among those who went to the top of the wall and looked down upon the soldiers of Ghazna. They were tough-looking men in ragged trousers and long loose shirts. Some of them wore the ends of their turbans wrapped about their mouths and noses to keep out the dust and sand of travel, and quilted bed mats were rolled behind the small saddles of their shaggy ponies. They were in high spirits, fingering arrows and shifting their longbows as they looked upon the rich city with its unprotected women, the way wolves would look at a warren of hares, but they were disciplined and waited without violence while their leader was in the mosque. Rob wondered if among them was the Afghan who had run so well against Karim in the chatir.