The Horse Healer

by Gonzalo Giner

  The man brought his hand to his face. He screamed in pain from the cut and began to blaspheme. Gómez Garceiz took this opportunity to grab the dagger before Diego used it again. As soon as he got it, he ordered Marcos to take hold of his friend and he turned to Don Pedro.

  “Tomorrow I will inform the king about you and will do everything possible to have you stripped of your ambassadorship. But for now, get out of my house. I don’t want to see you here again.”

  Pedro de Mora looked at Diego, covering the wound with his hand.

  “What happened to my sisters?”

  “Answer him,” Garceiz added.

  “I know nothing. …” He could barely be understood.

  “I know he’s lying,” Diego assured.

  “I’m not lying.” His eyes expressed deep rage.

  “Get out of this house now!” Garceiz commanded him.

  Pedro de Mora left the room, trailing behind him a stream of blood and an infinite hatred for Diego.

  His name, that face … He swore by the most sacred he would not rest until he saw Diego dead.

  XII.

  On that night, in her note, Mencía had invited Diego to visit the church of Santa María de Albarracín.

  After what had happened with Pedro de Mora, Diego and Marcos left Olite and headed toward Fitero, eight days later than they had previously imagined.

  His heart told him to go after Mencía, but above his desires, he knew he had to go back to the monastery and take advantage of the opportunity, maybe his only one, to have in his hands the treatise of Celsus, which he hadn’t read, or Cato, whose praises Galib had sung. Later on, once he had exhausted the medical resources available there, he would go to his destiny. Marcos didn’t object, since his conquest lived in proximity to the monastery.

  Before he left Olite, Diego thanked Gómez Garceiz for his attentions without imagining the surprise he had in store for him.

  “It’s the surgical instruments you used during the joust. You will get better use out of them.”

  He offered Diego a leather bag inside which chimed the excellent instruments, made of steel by expert hands. When he took it, Diego was overwhelmed by the kindness and promised to put them to the best possible use.

  Nevertheless, their reception in the monastery couldn’t have been worse.

  Friar Servando had received word of Diego’s brilliant performance with that wounded horse, but he threw it in his face as soon as he saw him enter the stables.

  “Fortunately, I’m not the only victim of your disloyalties.” He spit out a piece of chewed leather without looking in his face.

  “I don’t understand,” Diego answered.

  “I’ve heard it said that in Olite you provoked the wrath of a colleague from Naples, making him look ridiculous in front of everyone. I see you enjoy treading on others’ authority, yes …” He forked a bundle of hay and spread it over the floor of the stable. “It reminded me very much of what happened with that fig you cured behind my back … or when you ignored my diagnosis in front of that baker. … And why not mention the many occasions when you have taken the chance to talk ill of me, show me up, almost always in front of the other stable boys. …”

  “The fact is that I cannot bear injustice,” Diego replied sternly. “Even less so when it affects someone weaker, and now I’m not talking about horses.”

  “You must know as well that the farrier stabbed him in the back and tried to kill him,” Marcos added, indignant over the friar’s ill humor.

  “It must not have been so bad.” Servando took up another bundle of straw and split it open without paying much mind. He looked at Diego, complained of seeing him standing there idly, and ordered him to clean the water troughs and then to go for grain.

  “Before dinner I want it spread out in all the feeding troughs.”

  Diego sighed. Again he was faced with the hardest reality, with reading the only nourishment to make up for such misfortune.

  While he brought in the first barrow full of oats, he remembered Mencía nostalgically. The wound in his neck still hadn’t healed, but now he felt a much deeper pain, that of being far from the most beautiful woman he had ever known.

  Luckily, within a few days Marcos was able to reestablish his contact with the friar responsible for the library, and in accordance with his desires, he brought a large copy of the book De Medicina, written by the Roman Celsus.

  That important treatise fed Diego’s nights, thanks to an oil lamp that his friend also provided the fuel for.

  From Celsus, he learned another kind of anatomy, that of the interior. His work explored the organization of the tissues and the functions of the different organs. Though all the references were to humans, it worked just as well for Diego, since he understood that the differences from the animals couldn’t be so extreme as to make what he was learning irrelevant.

  He delved into the descriptions, especially those that studied the inflammation that Celsus analyzed according to four symptoms: inflammation, color, pain, and tumor.

  As grand and wise as his science was, the wise Roman spoiled it when he began to explain inflammation itself as an effect of divine punishment, as Friar Servando did. He even read that Celsus defined medicine as the art of speculation.

  That provoked his resistance, and how. What would make the gods of the Greeks and Romans, or his God, decide to impose an inflammation on a creature lacking in soul and sin, like a horse? What were they punishing? The more he thought about it, the less charming he found those absurd theories.

  For a long time, almost since his first books in Arabic, Diego had been obsessed with finding the true causes of each illness. The classic theory of imbalances in humors had never convinced him. Nor the others that accused malign spirits, as his current master did. And even less the ones that mixed the effects of the seasons and age to justify various pathological processes.

  Diego believed in the existence of other types of agents directly responsible for the illnesses, even if he still wasn’t able to give them a name. To know them and then fight them was becoming an important and attractive challenge for him.

  On one of those long late nights, while he read that manuscript, he enjoyed a bit of counsel from Celsus that seemed almost magical. A thousand years had passed since he’d written it, and yet it still had the same relevance.

  It went thus:

  “The surgeon should be young, or at least little advanced in age, with a hand nimble, firm, and never trembling; equally dexterous with both hands; vision, sharp and distinct; bold, unmerciful, so that, as he wishes to cure his patient, he may not be moved by his cries to hasten too much, or to cut less than is necessary. In the same way, let him do everything as if he were not affected by the cries of the patient.”

  As an albéitar Diego disregarded the last part of that reflection, since it was so far from the reality of his patients, but he accepted the logic of it.

  He was also interested in the surgical technique Celsus proposed, as well as the remedies employed to cure wounds that were already badly infected, such as alum, cantharides, egg white, or salamander ash. He never imagined that the ashes of lizards, pigeons, and swallows could work for a similar end. He decided to try them as soon as he could.

  The following winter in Fitero was much harsher than the ones before. It snowed with such intensity throughout the month of January that no one could leave the monastery.

  After being closed in for so long, many of the horses became ill because of the poor ventilation in the stables, and some were even close to death. But as always, no one asked for Diego’s advice.

  One day, Friar Servando decided to bleed all of them, even Sabba, despite Diego’s protests. He said this would lower their interior moisture and stop the constant flow of mucus.

  Diego had no faith in bleeding, since he thought that this liquid carried not only diseases, but also th
e defenses against them. He therefore thought it better to leave things as they were.

  Once he knew what Friar Servando’s plans were, he decided to treat Sabba secretly every night, making use of his own remedies. He gave her dried lovage as he had read in the book of the nun Hildegard. He also made Sabba inhale an infusion of mint and oak. With a fistful of straw he rubbed her breast to warm it and then covered it with a blanket. Some nights he even was able to sleep leaning against her breast to give her warmth.

  After a few days, those remedies did Sabba good and she improved notably, unlike the rest of the horses.

  In just a week, four animals had died, two of them very young, and for that reason the worry among the friars grew serious. Diego began to treat a few more animals, in secret, but someone told Friar Servando about his initiative and once again he was sent to the latrines where he was shut up two full weeks.

  With that, he began to get fed up.

  When that time had passed, he returned to the stables, where he was assigned the usual task, but he was no longer the same and didn’t behave as he had before. He had made a number of important decisions.

  One of them he set in play three days later, when he decided to sneak into the library one morning and look for the last two books that interested him. If he got them, he could read them and consider his education finished and leave that inhumane prison once and for all.

  “Marcos, I’m doing it today!” He looked at him decisively.

  “Just like you asked, I got hold of the key to the library. You don’t know how hard it was for me to get it, since Friar Tomás sleeps holding on to it, as if it were his mission in life. Please remember I have to give it back before morning prayers.”

  Diego waited until midnight to enter the cloister and look for the stairway that led to the third floor, where the library was located, just above the chapter house.

  While he walked along the archways, he squeezed his fist, feeling the key inside it. Marcos had explained to him that he should look for a long passageway to his right, at the end of which he would find his objective. He also warned him of a danger; along that hallway were the twenty-four cells where the monks slept. If he made the least noise or someone saw him there, the situation for both Diego and Marcos could get very dire.

  Diego didn’t meet anyone on his way.

  Luckily, it was too late for anyone to still be awake. He leaned against the stone banister of the winding staircase. It was cold. Before stepping out onto the floor, he pricked up his ears. Everything seemed quiet.

  He headed down the passageway and left the first doors behind him. He didn’t hear any strange noises, nothing alarming, just an intense chorus of snores and deep darkness. He continued slowly to the middle of the hallway without problems, but then he heard one of the doors open. He threw himself to the floor and prayed that the person wouldn’t bump against him. Diego listened closely to calculate the distance of the footsteps and confirmed with panic that a monk was coming toward him. The hallway was narrow but he pressed himself as close to the wall as possible and therefore the man passed beside him without being aware of his presence. He listened to the monk’s steps going dim around the corner and decided to move rapidly so he wouldn’t catch him on the way back.

  He reached the two thick doors that opened into the scriptorium and the library and opened them with the key. They creaked too loudly.

  Once inside, he could smell the intense aroma of oil and calves’ leather. It was the material the monks used to make the vellum, a type of soft parchment well suited to copying.

  Diego tried to adapt to the scant light that entered from the windows to his right. On a table of large proportions he saw laid out in perfect order the inks and mixes of oil and minerals used to produce the different colors. On a smaller one there was a great well of black ink ready to be used. He counted a dozen desks with half-copied books atop them. He looked at them tenderly, marveling at their delicate drawings and their excellent form, at the perfection of the handwriting.

  Then he heard a noise outside the room and stayed still until he was sure he was safe. Afterward, he opened all the doors looking for the one that opened to the library, and at last he found it. When he entered, he was stunned.

  The room was as high as ten men and all the walls were lined with books, from the floor to the ceiling. Some were enormous, so much so that one person would be incapable of moving them. They were arranged inside niches carved into the walls over wooden shelves.

  In the center were two long reading tables with various mechanical supports where the heaviest books were placed.

  He looked toward the ceiling and counted five skylights that let in the light of the moon. Its bluish color, mixed with the fine dust that floated in the air, made the place into a magical, almost ghostly stage.

  Diego sat down in ecstasy and regretted not having come before. He stood then and walked down the narrow wooden passage that ran alongside the shelves, only a few feet from the floor, and read a few of the spines.

  The wood creaked under his feet.

  He identified some of the books, though the majority were unknown to him. At first, he didn’t understand how they were arranged, but after he had traced the perimeter, he concluded it was by theme. In the first two rows to the left were the enormous books of canticles. Until the end of that wall, the rest of the space was taken up by religious books, including two enormous bibles with covers embossed with gold.

  Farther on, he found some Latin treatises, many of which he already knew, and some Greek ones. They were followed by books of science, mostly of medicine. He touched their spines with a desire to read them all.

  At the end of the room he found two old cabinets with their doors locked. Through a grating he managed to see what they held. One of them was The Curse of Love, and he also saw a Torah and a strange tome called Opticorum. There were many others, almost all with dark spines and an ominous air. He decided they must be books considered impious. He explored them one by one, since it must be there where what he wanted was located, the reason that had brought him there.

  He tried to force the lock but there was nothing nearby to help him. He remembered having seen a gauge in the scriptorium, and he went for it. When he returned, he slid it between the two leaves of the cabinet and levered. After a strong crack, the doors gave without further problems and he immediately set to examining the spines of the books until he found what he’d come for.

  “Who are you?” he heard behind him.

  Diego thought he would die from fright. When he turned, he saw a monk with small, threatening eyes. He was holding an oil lamp. Diego immediately tried to flee but the man was faster and grasped him by the tunic.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” He saw the jimmied cabinet and then the book Diego had in his hands. It was a copy of Mekhor Chaim, an old philosophical treatise on the principles of the kabbalah, written two centuries back by a famous Jewish poet from Malaga, Solomon ibn Gabirol.

  The monk took it from Diego’s hands and looked him straight in the eyes.

  “Aren’t you the albéitar?”

  Diego nodded his head.

  “And you are Friar Tomás. …”

  “The very same.”

  Though that man had become his supplier of books, that was the first time they had spoken. The religious scholar never left the library except to go to the rectory to eat, to the temple to pray, or to his cell to sleep, and he was never seen speaking to anyone. That is what Marcos had told him a number of times.

  “I hope you have a good reason to justify yourself. I didn’t expect this of you.”

  “Before I explain myself, I have to thank you for your help with all the magnificent books—”

  “Yes, fine.” The monk cut him off. “But skip the formalities and get to the point.”

  “Don’t worry, I will. … Up to now, everything I have asked
you for through Marcos I’ve gotten without any problem. Now then, with this one, I didn’t dare.” He pointed to the one he was trying to take. “I imagined it in the list of prohibited readings and so I decided to take it without your mediation. I want to read it without compromising you. Do you understand? That is the truth.”

  “Your sincerity makes me trust you. But tell me: What are you looking for in that book? If it’s the truth you want, you won’t find it there.”

  Diego turned to look at the book and then at the friar.

  “I only want to know how the great wise men of the past thought. I want to draw conclusions from them that will help me further my profession,” he answered, convinced.

  “And what do you plan on doing by studying philosophy and the kabbalah?”

  “In Toledo I met a wise translator, Gerardo de Cremona, who let me read a small fragment of this same book. He said that through reading it, it was possible to deepen your awareness of being, but not just that; it would also help to understand illness and, in an indirect way, to recommend remedies, though not from the classical point of view. He himself admitted that he had learned a great deal from the Mekhor Chaim, some of the great truths of human existence.”

  “I see you met a man with an open mind, ready to learn from any discipline. I must admit this attitude pleases me, and you can’t imagine how much.”

  Friar Tomás set the lamp on the table and drew three small lines in the dust with his finger.

  “What do you see here? Three marks or something more?”

  “I don’t understand.” Diego looked first at the drawing and then at him, rather disconcerted.

  “Numbers rule more things than we think. Here you have three, the most perfect number of all. The number of days our Lord Jesus Christ was dead. The basic periods of any life: youth, maturity, and death. The three parts of the Trinity. Do you know anything about that?”