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

by Noah Gordon

  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 save 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.

  One morning he was summoned, and rode the brown horse down the Avenue of the Thousand Gardens until he came to the dusty lane leading to Ibn Sina’s handsome house. The gateman took his horse, and by the time he had walked to the stone door Ibn Sina was there to greet him.

  “It is my wife. I would be grateful if you would examine her.”

  Rob bowed, confused; Ibn Sina had no lack of distinguished colleagues who would be pleased and honored to examine the woman. But he followed him to a door leading to a stone stairway like the inside of a snail shell, and they ascended the north tower of the house.

  The old woman lay on a pallet and stared through them with dull and unseeing eyes. Ibn Sina knelt by her.

  “Reza.”

  Her dry lips were cracked. He moistened a square of cloth in rose water and wiped her mouth and face tenderly. Ibn Sina had a lifetime of experience in how to make a sickroom comfortable, but not even clean surroundings and newly changed garments and the fragrant wisps of smoke rising from incense dishes could mask the stink of her illness.

  The bones seemed almost to violate her transparent skin. Her face was waxen, her hair thin and white. Perhaps her husband was the greatest physician in the world but she was an old woman in the final stages of bone sickness. Large buboes were visible on her skinny arms and lower legs. Her ankles and feet were swollen with gathered fluids. Her right hip was largely deteriorated and Rob knew that if he were to lift the bed gown he would find that more of the advanced growths had invaded other external parts of her body just as, from the odor, he was certain they had spread to her intestines.

  It wasn’t to confirm a terrible and obvious diagnosis that Ibn Sina had summoned him. Now he knew what was required of him and he took both her frail hands in his, talking to her softly. He took longer than necessary, gazing into her eyes, which for a moment seemed to clear. “Da’ud?
” she whispered, and her grip on his hands strengthened.

  Rob looked at Ibn Sina questioningly.

  “Her brother, dead these many years.”

  The vacancy returned to her eyes, the fingers clutching his grew slack. Rob returned her hands to the pallet and they withdrew from the tower.

  “How long?”

  “Not long, Hakim-bashi. I believe a matter of days.” Rob felt clumsy; the other man was far too senior to him for the standard condolences. “Is there nothing, then, that can be done for her?”

  Ibn Sina’s mouth twisted. “I am left to showing her my love with stronger and stronger infusions.” He took his apprentice to the front door and thanked him, then returned to his afflicted wife.

  “Master,” someone said to Rob.

  When he turned he saw the huge eunuch who guarded the second wife. “You will follow, please?”

  They passed through a doorway in the garden wall, the opening so small each of them had to stoop, into another garden outside the south tower.

  “What is it?” he asked the slave curtly.

  The eunuch made no reply. Something drew Rob’s glance and he looked to where a veiled face stared down at him through a small window.

  Their eyes held and then hers moved away in a swirl of veils and the window was empty.

  Rob turned to the slave and the eunuch smiled slightly and shrugged.

  “She bade me bring you here. She desired to look upon you, master,” he said.

  Perhaps Rob might have dreamed of her that night but there was no time. He studied the laws of ownership of property and, as the oil in his lamp was burning low, he heard the clopping sound of hooves that came down his street and appeared to stop outside his door.

  There was a tapping.

  He reached for his sword, thinking of thieves. It was far too late for callers. “Who is there?”

  “Wasif, master.”

  Rob knew no Wasif but thought he recognized the voice. Holding the weapon ready, he opened the door and saw he had been right. It was the eunuch, holding the reins of a donkey.

  “Were you sent by the hakim?”

  “No, master. I am sent by her, who wishes you to come.”

  He had no reply. The eunuch knew better than to smile, but there was a glint behind the grave eyes that took in the Dhimmi’s amazement.

  “Wait,” Rob said rudely, and shut the door.

  He came out after a hasty washing-up and, mounting the brown horse without a saddle, wended through the dark streets behind the huge slave, whose splayed feet dragged furrows in the dust as he rode astride the poor donkey. They plodded past silent houses in which people slept, turning into the lane whose deeper dust muffled the animals’ hooves, and then into a field that extended behind the wall of Ibn Sina’s estate.

  A gate in the wall took them close to the door of the south tower. The eunuch opened the tower gate and, bowing, motioned for Rob to go on alone.

  It was like the fantasies he had had on a hundred nights while lying alone and aroused. This dark stone passage was twin to the stairway in the north tower, circling like the whorls of a nautilus shell, and when he emerged at the top he found himself in a commodious haram.

  In the lamplight he saw that she waited on a large cushioned pallet, a Persian woman who had prepared herself to make love, her hands and feet and cunnus red with henna and slick with oil. Her breasts were a disappointment, scarcely larger than a boy’s.

  Rob removed her veil.

  She had black hair, also treated with oil and pulled back tight against her round skull. He had imagined the forbidden features of a Queen of Sheba or a Cleopatra and was startled to find instead a haunting young girl with a trembling mouth that she now licked nervously with a flick of pink tongue. It was a heart-shaped, lovely face with a pointed chin and a short, straight nose. From the thin right nostril dangled a small metal ring just large enough to admit his little finger.

  He had been in this country too long: her uncovered facial features were more exciting to him than her shaven body.

  “Why are you called Despina the Ugly?”

  “Ibn Sina decreed it. It is to fool the Evil Eye,” she said as he sank to the pallet beside her.

  Next morning he and Karim studied Fiqh again, the laws of marriage and divorce.

  “Who makes the marriage settlement?”

  “The husband makes the marriage contract and presents it to the wife, and he writes the mabr, the amount of the dowry, into the agreement.”

  “How many witnesses are needed?”

  “I don’t know. Two?”

  “Yes, two. Who has the greater rights in the haram, the second wife or the fourth wife?”

  “All wives have equal rights.”

  They turned to the laws of divorce, and the grounds: barrenness, shrewish behavior, adultery.

  Under Sharī’a, the penalty for adultery was stoning, but this had given way, two centuries before. An adulterous woman of a rich and powerful man might still be executed in the kelonter’s jail by beheading, but the adulterous wives of the poor often were given a severe striping with a cane and then divorced or not, depending upon the husband’s wishes.

  Karim had little trouble with Sharī’a, for he had been raised in a devout household and knew the laws of piety. It was Fiqh that haunted him. There were so many laws, about so many things, that he knew he couldn’t remember them all.

  Rob thought about it. “If you can’t recall the exact wording of the Fiqh, then you should turn to Sharī’a or Sunna. All the law is based on the sermons and writings of Mohammed. Therefore, if you can’t remember the law, give them an answer from religion or from the life of the Prophet and perhaps they will be satisfied.” He sighed. “It is worth trying. And in the meantime we’ll pray, and memorize as many of the laws of the Fiqh as we are able.”

  Next afternoon at the hospital he followed al-Juzjani through the halls and paused with the others at the pallet of a skinny little rat of a boy, Bilāl. Close by sat a peasant with dumb, accepting eyes.

  “Distemper,” al-Juzjani said. “An example of how colic can suck the soul. What is his age?”

  Cowed but flattered to be addressed, the father ducked his head. “He is in the ninth season, lord.”

  “How long ill?”

  “Two weeks. It is the side sickness and has killed two of his uncles and my father. Terrible pain. Come and gone, come and gone. But three days ago it came and did not leave.”

  The nurse, who addressed al-Juzjani fawningly and doubtless wished they would finish with the child and move on, said he had been fed only sherbets of sweetened juices. “Everything he swallows, he spews or shits.”

  Al-Juzjani nodded. “Examine him, Jesse.”

  Rob pulled down the blanket. The boy had a scar under the chin but it was fully healed and not part of his illness. He placed a palm on the thin cheek and Bilāl tried to move but didn’t have the strength. Rob patted his shoulder.

  “Hot.”

  He ran his fingertips slowly down the body. When he reached the stomach, the boy screamed.

  “The belly is soft on the left and hard on the right side.”

  “Allah tried to protect the site of the distemper,” al-Juzjani said.

  As gently as possible Rob used his fingertips to outline the area of pain from the navel across the right half of the abdomen, regretting the torture he produced each time he pressed the belly. He turned Bilāl and they saw that the rectum was red and tender.

  When he had replaced the blanket he took the small hands and heard the old Black Knight laughing at him again.

  “Will he die, lord?” the father asked matter-of-factly.

  “Yes,” Rob said, and the man nodded.

  Nobody smiled at the opinion. Since they had returned from Shīrāz, Mirdin and Karim had told certain stories that had been repeated. Rob had noticed that now no one hooted when he dared to say somebody would die.

  “Aelus Cornelius Celsus has described the side sickness in his writing
s and should be read,” Hakim al-Juzjani said, and turned to the next pallet.

  When the last patient had been visited, Rob went to the House of Wisdom and asked Yussuf-ul-Gamal, the librarian, to help him find what the Roman had written of the side sickness. He was fascinated to learn that Celsus had opened the bodies of the dead to advance his knowledge. Still, there wasn’t much knowledge of this particular complaint, which Celsus described as distemper in the large intestine near the cecum, accompanied by violent inflammation and pain on the right side of the abdomen.

  When he was through reading, he went again to where Bilāl lay. The father was gone. A stern mullah perched over the boy like a great raven, intoning from the Qu’ran while the child stared at his black robes, his eyes stark.

  Rob pulled the pallet so the little one was looking away from the mullah. On a low table the nurse had left three Persian pomegranates round as balls, to be eaten with the evening meal, and he took them now and popped them one at a time until he had them flowing over his head from hand to hand. Just like olden days, Bilāl. He was a very unpracticed juggler now but with only three objects there was no trouble and he made the fruits play tricks.

  The boy’s eyes were as round as the flying objects.

  “What we need is melody!”

  He didn’t know any Persian songs and he required something lively. There emerged from his mouth Barber’s raucous old dolly song.

  “Your eyes caressed me once,

  Your arms embrace me now …

  We’ll roll together by and by

  So make no fruitless vow!”

  Not a suitable song for a child to die by, but the mullah, glaring at his antics in disbelief, was supplying solemnity and prayer while Rob supplied some of the joyousness of life. They didn’t understand the words at any rate, so there was no disrespect. He gave Bilāl several choruses and then saw the child leap into a final convulsion that arched his small body into a bow. Still singing, Rob felt the final pulse flutter into nothingness in Bilāl’s throat.

  He shut the eyes, cleaned the snot from the nose, straightened and bathed the body. He combed Bilāl’s hair and tied the jaw closed with a cloth.