The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice

by Noah Gordon

  Their fellowship was tempting, but he escaped to the loneliness of his house. When he had tended the animals he read the Aristotle in the garden and found it difficult, for meaning eluded him and he was smitten by his ignorance.

  As darkness fell he moved indoors and lighted the lamp, and then he turned to the Qu’ran. The suras appeared to be arranged according to length, with the longest chapters first. But which were the important suras that must be memorized? He hadn’t an idea. And there were so many introductory passages; were they important?

  He was desperate and felt he must begin somewhere.

  Glory to God Most High, full of Grace and Mercy; He created All, including Man …

  He read the passages again and again, but before more than a few verses had been committed to memory, his heavy lids closed. Fully dressed, he sank into deep sleep on the lamplit floor, like a man seeking to escape a sore and vexatious wakefulness.

  40

  AN INVITATION

  Rob was awakened each morning by the rising sun glinting through his chamber’s narrow window, reflected golden off the tile roofs of Yehuddiyyeh’s crazily leaning houses. People appeared in the streets at daybreak, the men going to morning prayers in the synagogues, the women hurrying to tend stalls in the market or to shop early for the best produce of the day.

  In the house next door to the north lived a shoemaker named Yaakob ben Rashi, his wife Naoma, and their daughter Lea. The house to the south was occupied by a bread baker named Micah Halevi, his wife Yudit, and three small children, all females. Rob had lived in Yehuddiyyeh only a few days before Micah sent Yudit to Rob’s house to deliver a round, flat loaf for his breakfast, still warm and crisp from the oven. Everywhere he went in Yehuddiyyeh, people had a kind word for the foreign Jew who had won the calaat.

  He was less popular in the madrassa, where the Muslim students never called him by name and took open pleasure in addressing him as Dhimmi, and where even the Jewish students called him “European.”

  If his experience as a barber-surgeon wasn’t generally admired, it was still useful in the maristan, where within three days it was apparent that he could bandage, bleed, and set simple fractures with a skill equal to a graduate of the school. He was relieved of the chore of collecting slops and given duties that more directly involved the care of sick people, and that made his life a little more bearable.

  When he asked Abul Bakr which of the one hundred and fourteen suras of the Qu’ran were the important ones, he couldn’t get an answer. “All are important,” the fat mullah said. “Some are more important in the eyes of one scholar, others are more important to another scholar.”

  “But I can’t be graduated from this place unless I have memorized the important suras! If you don’t tell me which they are, how am I to know?”

  “Ah,” the theology lecturer said. “You must study Qu’ran, and Allah (exalted is He!) will reveal them.”

  He felt the weight of Mohammed on his back, the eyes of Allah on him always. Everywhere he turned in the school, there inescapably was Islam. A mullah sat in every class to make certain Allah (great and mighty is He!) was not profaned.

  Rob’s first class with Ibn Sina was an anatomy lesson at which they dissected a large pig, forbidden to Muslims as food but permitted for study.

  “The pig is a particularly good anatomy subject, because its internal organs are identical to man’s,” Ibn Sina said, deftly cutting away the skin.

  This one was full of tumors.

  “These smooth-surfaced growths are likely to cause no harm. But some have grown so fast … see, like these—” Ibn Sina said, tipping the heavy carcass so they could better observe, “—that clumps of flesh have crowded against one another like the sections in a head of cauliflower. The cauliflower tumors are deadly.”

  “Do they appear in humans?” Rob asked.

  “We do not know.”

  “Couldn’t we look for them?”

  Now the room was silent, the other students contemptuous of the stranger and infidel devil, the assisting instructors watchful. The mullah who had slaughtered the pig had lifted his head from his prayer book.

  “It is written,” Ibn Sina said carefully, “that the dead shall rise and be greeted by the Prophet (may God bless him and greet him!), to live again. Against that day, their bodies must be unmutilated.”

  After a moment, Rob nodded. The mullah returned to his prayers, and Ibn Sina resumed his anatomy lesson.

  That afternoon Hakim Fadil ibn Parviz was in the maristan, wearing a physician’s red turban and receiving the congratulations of the medical clerks because he had passed the examination. Rob had no reason to like Fadil but he was excited and glad nevertheless, for any student’s success might one day be his own.

  Fadil and al-Juzjani were the physicians who made the rounds of patients that day, and Rob followed them along with four other clerks: Abbas Sefi, Omar Nivahend, Suleiman-al-Gamal, and Sabit bin Qurra. At the last moment al-Juzjani and Fadil were joined by Ibn Sina and Rob could feel the general heightening of nervousness, the small excitement that always occurred with the presence of the Chief Physician.

  Soon they came to the place for tumor patients. On the pallet closest to the entrance lay a still, hollow-eyed figure, and they paused well away from him. “Jesse ben Benjamin,” al-Juzjani said. “Tell us of this man.”

  “He is Ismail Ghazali. He doesn’t know his age but says he was born in Khur during the great spring floods there. I have been told that was thirty-four years ago.”

  Al-Juzjani nodded approvingly.

  “He has tumors in his neck, under his arms, and in his groin that cause him great pain. His father died of similar disease when Ismail Ghazali was a small boy. It agonizes him to urinate. When he does, his water is deep yellow with casts like small red threads. He cannot eat more than a few spoonfuls of gruel without vomiting, so he has been fed lightly and as often as he will accept nourishment.”

  “Have you bled him this day?” al-Juzjani asked.

  “No, Hakim.”

  “Why have you not?”

  “It is unnecessary to cause him further pain.” Perhaps if Rob hadn’t been thinking of the pig and wondering whether Ismail Ghazali’s body was consumed by cauliflower growths, he would not have trapped himself. “By nightfall he will be dead.”

  Al-Juzjani stared.

  “Why do you think this?” Ibn Sina asked.

  All eyes were on Rob, but he knew better than to attempt an explanation. “I know it,” he said finally, and Fadil forgot his new dignity and guffawed.

  Al-Juzjani’s face reddened with anger, but Ibn Sina raised his hand to the other physician and indicated that they should continue.

  The incident drained Rob’s optimistic excitement. That evening he found study to be impossible. The school was a mistake, he told himself. There was nothing that could make him what he was not, and perhaps it was time to acknowledge he wasn’t meant to be a physician.

  Yet next morning he went to the school and attended three lectures, and in the afternoon he forced himself to follow al-Juzjani on his inspection of patients. As they set off, to Rob’s anguish Ibn Sina joined them as he had on the previous day.

  When they arrived at the tumor section, a stripling youth lay on the pallet closest to the door.

  “Where is Ismail Ghazali?” al-Juzjani asked the nurse.

  “Taken during the night, Hakim.”

  Al-Juzjani made no comment. As they continued on their way, he treated Rob with the icy contempt due an alien Dhimmi who had made a fortunate guess.

  But when they had completed their visitations and had been dismissed, Rob felt a hand on his arm and turned to look into the old man’s unsettling eyes.

  “You will come to share my evening meal,” Ibn Sina said.

  Rob was nervous and expectant that evening as he followed the Chief Physician’s directions, riding the brown horse along the Avenue of the Thousand Gardens to the lane leading to Ibn Sina’s home. It proved to be an enormou
s twin-towered residence of stone set among the terraced orchards and vineyards. Ibn Sina, too, had been given a “royal garment” by the Shah, but his calaat had come when he was famous and venerated, and the gift had been princely.

  Rob was admitted to the walled estate by a gateman who expected him and took his horse. The path to the house was of stone crushed so fine that his footsteps sounded like whispering. As he approached the house, a side door opened and a woman emerged. Young and graceful, she wore a red velvet coat full at the waist and with tinsel edges, over a loose cotton gown of yellow-printed flowers, and although diminutive she walked like a queen. Beaded bracelets clutched her ankles where the scarlet trousers were fastened tightly and ended in woollen fringes over sweet bare heels. Ibn Sina’s daughter—if indeed that was who she was—scrutinized him with large dark eyes as curiously as he assessed her, before averting her veiled face from a male, according to Islam.

  Behind her came a turbaned figure, enormous as a bad dream. The eunuch’s hand was on the jeweled hilt of the dagger in his belt, and he didn’t avert his eyes but watched Rob balefully until he saw his charge safely through a door in a garden wall.

  Rob was still gazing after them when the front door, a single great stone slab, opened on oiled hinges and a manservant admitted him into spacious coolness.

  “Ah, young friend. You are welcome to my house.”

  Ibn Sina led the way through a series of large rooms whose tiled walls were adorned with rich woven hangings the colors of the earth and the sky. The carpets on the stone floors were thick as turf. In an atrium garden in the heart of the house, a table had been set close to a splashing fountain.

  Rob felt awkward, for a servant had never before helped him to be seated. Another brought an earthen tray of flat bread and Ibn Sina sang his Islamic prayer with unmusical ease. “Do you wish your own blessing?” he asked with grace.

  Rob broke one of the flat loaves and it was easily done, for he had become accustomed to the Hebrew thanksgiving: “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.”

  “Amen,” Ibn Sina said.

  The meal was simple and excellent, sliced cucumbers with mint and heavy soured milk, a light pilah prepared with bits of lean lamb and chicken, stewed cherries and apricots, and a refreshing sherbet of fruit juices.

  When they had eaten, a man whose ringed nose marked him a slave brought wet cloths for their hands and faces, while other slaves cleared the table and lighted smoky torches to drive away insects.

  A bowl of plump pistachios was brought and they sat and cracked the nuts with their teeth and chewed companionably.

  “Now.” Ibn Sina leaned forward and his remarkable eyes, that could convey so many things, shone bright and attentive in the torchlight. “Let us speak of the reason you knew Ismail Ghazali would die.”

  Rob told him how, when he was nine years old, by taking his mother’s hand he had become aware that she would die. And of how, in the same way, he had learned of his father’s impending death.

  And he described the others since, the occasional person whose hand in his had brought the piercing dread and awful revelation.

  Ibn Sina questioned him patiently as he reported each case, plumbing his memory and making certain that no detail was overlooked. Slowly, the reserve in the old man’s face disappeared.

  “Show me what you do.”

  Rob took Ibn Sina’s hands and looked into his eyes, and in a little while he smiled. “For now, you need have no fear of death.”

  “Nor do you,” the physician said quietly.

  A moment passed and then, Good Christ! Rob thought. “Is it truly something you can feel as well, Chief Physician?”

  Ibn Sina shook his head. “Not as you feel it. In me, it manifests itself as a certainty somewhere deep inside—strong instinct that a patient will or will not die. Down through the years I have talked with other physicians who share this intuition, and we are a larger brotherhood than you may imagine. But never have I met one in whom this gift is stronger than in you. It is a responsibility, and to be equal to it you must make an excellent physician of yourself.”

  It brought unpleasant reality, and Rob sighed ruefully. “I may end up no physician, for I am not a scholar. Your Muslim students have been force-fed on classical learning all their lives, and the … other Jewish clerks were weaned on the fierce scholarship of their study houses. Here in the university they build on these foundations, while I build on two paltry years of schooling, and vast ignorance.”

  “Then you must build harder and faster than the others,” Ibn Sina said without sympathy.

  Despair made Rob bold. “Too much is demanded in the school. And some of it I neither want nor need. Philosophy, Qu’ran—”

  The old man broke in scornfully. “You make a common error. If you have not studied philosophy, how can you reject it? Science and medicine teach of the body, while philosophy teaches of the mind and the soul, and a physician requires all these as he needs food and air. As for theology, I had memorized the Qu’ran by the age of ten. It is of my faith and not of your own but it will not harm you, and memorizing ten Qu’rans would be small price if it would gain you medical knowledge.

  “You have the mind, for we see you grasp a new language, and we detect your promise in a dozen other ways. But you must not fear to allow learning to become a part of you, so that it is as natural as breathing. You must stretch your mind, wide enough to take in all we can give you.”

  Rob was silent and watchful.

  “I’ve a gift of my own, as strong as yours, Jesse ben Benjamin. I can detect a man in whom there may be a physician, and in you I feel a need to heal, so strong that it burns. But it is not enough to have such a need. A physician is not declared by calaat, which is fortunate since there are already too many ignorant physicians. That is why we have the school, to winnow the chaff from the wheat. And when we see a clerk who is worthy, we make his testing especially severe. If our trials are too much for you, then you must forget us and go back to being a barber-surgeon and selling your spurious ointments—”

  “Physick,” Rob said, glaring.

  “Your spurious physick, then. For to be hakim must be earned. If you desire it, you must punish yourself for the sake of learning, seek every advantage in keeping up with the other clerks and in excelling them. You must study with the fervor of the blessed or the cursed.”

  Rob drew a breath, his eyes still locked hotly with Ibn Sina’s, and told himself he hadn’t struggled across the world to fail.

  He rose to take his leave and was struck by a thought. “Do you own Hunayn’s Ten Treatises of the Eye, Chief Physician?”

  Now Ibn Sina smiled. “I do,” he said, and hurried to fetch the book and give it to his student.

  41

  THE MAIDAN

  Early on a hurried morning three soldiers called upon him. He tensed and readied himself for anything, but this time they were all politeness and respect and their batons remained sheathed. Their leader, whose breath revealed he had breakfasted on green onions, bowed deeply.

  “We are sent to inform you, master, that there will be a formal session of the court tomorrow after Second Prayer. Recipients of a calaat are expected.”

  Thus, on the following morning Rob found himself once again under the arched and gilded roofs of the Hall of Pillars.

  This time the masses of people were absent, which Rob thought a pity, for the Shahanshah was resplendent. Alā wore a turban, a flowing tunic, and pointed shoes of purple, trousers and leg wrappings of crimson, and a heavy crown of worked gold. The Vizier, the Imam Mirza-aboul Qandrasseh, sat a smaller throne nearby, dressed as always in mullah black.

  The calaat beneficiaries stood away from the thrones as observers. Rob couldn’t see Ibn Sina and recognized no one nearby save for Khuff, Captain of the Gates.

  The floor surrounding Alā was spread with carpets lustrous with threads of silk and gold. Seated on cushions on both sides of the throne and f
acing it was a host of richly caparisoned men.

  Rob went to Khuff and touched his arm. “Who are they?” he whispered.

  Khuff looked at the foreign Hebrew with scorn but answered patiently, as he was trained to do. “The empire is divided into fourteen provinces, in which there are five hundred and forty-four Considerable Places—cities, walled towns, and castles. These are the mirzes, chawns, sultans, and beglerbegs who govern the principalities over which Alā-al-Dawla Shah holds sway.”

  Perhaps the ceremonies would soon begin, for Khuff hurried away and stationed himself inside the door.

  The ambassador from Armenia was the first of the envoys to ride into the hall. He was a man still young, with black hair and beard but otherwise a gray eminence, riding a gray mare and wearing silver foxes’ tails on a gray silk tunic. One hundred and fifty paces from the throne he was stopped by Khuff, who helped him dismount and conducted him to the throne for the kissing of Alā’s feet.

  That accomplished, the ambassador presented the Shah with lavish gifts from his own sovereign, including a large crystal lantern, nine small crystal looking-glasses set into gold frames, one hundred and twenty yards of purple cloth, twenty bottles of fine scent, and fifty sables.

  Barely interested, Alā welcomed the Armenian to the court and bade him thank his most gracious lord for the gifts.

  Next, in rode the ambassador from the Khazars, to be met by Khuff, and the whole performance was played again, save that the gift of the Khazar king was three fine Arabian horses and a chained baby lion that was not tamed, so that in its fright the beast shat upon the gold and silk carpet.

  The hall was still, awaiting the Shah’s reaction. Alā did not frown or smile, but waited as slaves and servants hastened to remove the offending matter, the gifts, and the Khazar. The courtiers at the Shah’s feet sat on their cushions like inanimate statues, their eyes on the King of Kings. They were shadows, ready to move with Alā’s body. At last there was an imperceptible signal and a general relaxing as the next envoy, from the Amīr of Qarmatia, was announced and rode a reddish-brown horse into the hall.