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

by Noah Gordon

  “Great as Alā Shah?”

  “At least as great, but from a time long gone. With thirty-seven elephants he led an army over the Alps—high, terrible mountains, steep and snow-covered—and he didn’t lose an animal. But cold and exposure weakened them. Later, crossing smaller mountains, all but one of the elephants died. The lesson is that you must rest your beasts and keep them warm.”

  Harsha nodded respectfully. “Do you know that you are followed, Hakim?”

  Rob was startled.

  “That one there, sitting in the sun.”

  He was just a man huddling in the fleece of his cadabi, seated with his back to the wall to hide from the cold wind.

  “Are you certain?”

  “Yes, Hakim, I saw him follow you yesterday too. Even now, he keeps you in his sight.”

  “When I leave here can you follow after him cleverly, so we may discover who he is?”

  Harsha’s eyes gleamed. “Yes, Hakim.”

  Late that evening Harsha came to Yehuddiyyeh and tapped on Rob’s door.

  “He followed you home, Hakim. When he left you here, I followed him to the Friday Mosque. I was very clever, O Honorable, I was invisible. He entered the mullah’s house wearing the ragged cadabi and after a short time emerged clad in black robes, and he went into the mosque in time for Final Prayer. He is a mullah, Hakim.”

  Rob thanked him thoughtfully and Harsha went away.

  The mullah had been sent by Qandrasseh’s friends, he was certain. Doubtless they had followed Karim to his meeting with Ibn Sina and Rob and then had watched to determine the extent of Rob’s involvement with the prospective Vizier.

  Perhaps they concluded he was harmless, for next day he watched carefully but could see no one who might have been trailing after him and, so far as he could tell, in the days that followed he wasn’t spied on again.

  It remained chill, but spring was coming. Only the tips of the purplegray mountains were white with snow, and in the garden the stark branches of the apricot trees were covered with tiny black buds, perfectly round.

  Two soldiers came one morning and fetched Rob to the House of Paradise. In the cold stone throne room small knots of blue-lipped members of the court stood about and suffered. Karim was not among them. The Shah sat at the table over the floor grille through which oven heat drifted. After the ravi zemin was out of the way he motioned for Rob to join him, and the warmth trapped by the heavy felt tablecloth proved to be pleasant.

  The Shah’s Game was already set up, and without conversation Alā made his first move.

  “Ah, Dhimmi, you have become a hungry cat,” he said presently.

  It was true; Rob had learned to attack.

  The Shah played with a scowl on his face, eyes intent on the board. Rob used his two elephants to do damage and quickly gained a camel, a horse and rider, three foot soldiers.

  The onlookers followed the game in rapt, expressionless silence. Doubtless some were horrified and some delighted by the fact that a European nonbeliever appeared to be besting the Shah.

  But the king had vast experience as a sneaking general. Just as Rob began to think himself a fine fellow and a master of strategy, Alā offered sacrifices and drew his enemy in. He employed his own two elephants more adroitly than Hannibal had used his thirty-seven, until Rob’s elephants were gone, and his horsemen. Still Rob fought doggedly, calling upon all Mirdin had taught him. It was a respectable time before he was shahtreng. When it was over, the courtiers applauded the king’s victory and Alā allowed himself to look pleased.

  The Shah slipped a heavy ring of massy gold from his finger and placed it in Rob’s right hand. “About the calaat. We now give it. You shall have a house large enough for a royal entertainment.”

  With a haram. And Mary in the haram.

  The nobles watched and listened.

  “I shall wear this ring with pride and gratitude. As for the calaat, I am quite happy with your Majesty’s past generosity and I shall remain in my house.”

  His voice was respectful but it was too firm and he did not turn his eyes away quite fast enough to prove humility. And all who were present heard the Dhimmi say these things.

  By the following morning, it had reached Ibn Sina.

  Not for nothing had the Chief Physician twice been a vizier. He had informants in the court and among the servants at the House of Paradise, and from several sources he heard about the rash stupidity of his Dhimmi assistant.

  As always in time of crisis, Ibn Sina sat and thought. He was aware that his presence in Alā’s capital city was a source of royal pride, enabling the Shah to compare himself to the Baghdad caliphs as a monarch of culture and a patron of learning. But Ibn Sina was also aware that his influence had limits; a direct appeal would not save Jesse ben Benjamin.

  All his life Alā had dreamed of being one of the greatest Shahs, a king with an undying name. Now he was preparing for a war that could take him either to immortality or to oblivion, and it was impossible at this moment for him to allow anyone to obstruct his will.

  Ibn Sina knew that the king would have Jesse ben Benjamin killed.

  Perhaps orders already had been given for unidentified assailants to fall upon the young hakim in the streets, or he might be arrested by soldiers and tried and sentenced by an Islamic court. Alā was capable of political craft and would use the execution of this Dhimmi in a manner that would serve him best.

  For years Ibn Sina had studied Alā Shah and he understood the workings of the king’s mind. He knew what must be done.

  That morning in the maristan he summoned his staff. “Word has reached us that in the town of Idhaj are a number of patients too sick to travel here to the hospital,” he said, which was true. “Therefore,” he told Jesse ben Benjamin, “you must ride to Idhaj and hold a clinic for the treatment of these people.”

  After they discussed herbs and drugs that must be taken with him on a pack ass, and medicines that could be found in that town, and the histories of certain patients they knew to be ill there, Jesse said goodbye and left without delay.

  Idhaj was a slow, uncomfortable three-day ride to the south, and the clinic would take at least three days. It would give Ibn Sina more than enough time.

  Next afternoon, he went alone into Yehuddiyyeh and rode directly to his assistant’s house.

  The woman answered the door holding her child. Surprise and brief confusion showed in her face when she saw the Prince of Physicians standing on her threshold, but she recovered quickly and showed him inside with proper courtesy. It was a plain home but kept well, and it had been made comfortable, with wall hangings and rugs on the earthen floors. With commendable dispatch she placed an earthen plate of sweet seed cakes before him, and a sherbet of rose water flavored with cardamon.

  He hadn’t counted on her ignorance of the language. When he tried to talk with her it was quickly obvious that she had only a few words of Persian.

  He wanted to converse at length and with persuasion, wanted to tell her that when first he had recognized the quality of her husband’s mind and instincts, he had hungered after the large young foreigner the way a miser lusts for a treasure or a man desires a woman. He had wanted the European for medicine because it was clear to him that God had fashioned Jesse ben Benjamin to be a healer.

  “He will be a shining light. He is almost realized, but it is too soon, he is not yet there.

  “All kings are mad. To one with absolute power, it is no more difficult to take a life than to bestow a calaat. Yet if you flee now, it will be a resentment for the rest of your lives, for he has come so far, dared so much. I know he is no Jew.”

  The woman sat and held the child, watching Ibn Sina with growing tension. He tried speaking Hebrew with no success, then Turkish and Arabic in quick succession. He was a philologist and a linguist but knew few European languages, for he learned a tongue only in pursuit of scholarship. He spoke to her in Greek without response.

  Then he turned to Latin and saw her head move slightly and
her eyes blink.

  “Rex te venire ad se vult. Si non, maritus necabitur.” He repeated it: The king wishes you to come to him. If you do not, your husband will be slain.

  “Quid dicas?” What do you say? she said.

  He repeated it very slowly.

  The child was beginning to fuss in her arms, but the woman paid her baby no heed. She stared at Ibn Sina, her face drained of color. It was a face like stone but he saw it contained an element he hadn’t noted before. The old man understood people and for the first time his anxiety abated, for he recognized the woman’s strength. He would make the arrangements and she would do what was necessary.

  Slaves bearing a sedan chair came for her. She didn’t know what to do with Rob J., so she brought him along; it was a happy solution, for in the haram of the House of Paradise the child was received by a number of delighted women.

  She was taken to the baths, an embarrassment. Rob had told her it was a religious obligation for Muslim women to remove their pubic hair every ten days by means of a lime-and-arsenic depilatory. Similarly, the hair of the armpits was plucked or shaved, once a week by a married woman, every two weeks by a widow, and once a month by a virgin. The women attending her stared in undisguised disgust.

  After she had been washed, three trays of scents and dyes were offered but she used only a bit of perfume.

  She was led to a room and instructed to wait. It was furnished only with a large pallet, pillows, and blankets, and a closed cabinet on which stood a basin of water. Somewhere nearby, musicians played. She was cold. When she had waited what seemed a long time, she picked up a blanket and wrapped herself.

  Presently Alā came. She was terrified but he smiled at seeing her standing cowled in the blanket.

  He waggled his finger for her to remove it, and then motioned impatiently that she was to take off the robe too. She knew she was thin compared to most Eastern females, and Persian women had gone out of their way to inform her that freckles were Allah’s just punishment on someone so shameless she did not wear the veil.

  He touched the heavy red hair on her head, lifted a handful to his nostrils. She hadn’t perfumed her hair and its lack of scent made him grimace.

  For a moment Mary was able to escape by worrying about her child. When Rob J. was older, would he remember having been brought to this place? The glad cries and soft cooing of the women? Their tender faces beaming down at him? Their hands caressing him?

  The king’s hands were still at her head. He was speaking in Persian, whether to himself or to her she couldn’t tell. She dared not even shake her head to signify she didn’t understand, lest he interpret the gesture as disagreement.

  He went straight to an examination of her body patch. He was most curious about her hair.

  “Henna?”

  She understood the single word and assured him the color wasn’t henna, in language which of course he didn’t comprehend. He pulled a strand gently through his fingertips and tried to wash out the red.

  In a moment he took off his single loose cotton garment. His arms were muscular and he was thick in the waist, with a protruding, hairy belly. His entire body was hairy. His pizzle seemed smaller than Rob’s and darker.

  In the sedan chair on the way to the palace she had had fantasies. In one, she had wept and explained that Christian women were forbidden by Jesus to perform this act outside of marriage; and as though it were a story about one of the saints, he had taken pity on her tears and, out of kindness, had sent her home. In another vision, having been forced into this to save her husband, she had been freed to enjoy the most lascivious physical release of her lifetime, a ravishment by a supernatural lover who, although able to command the most beautiful women in Persia, had selected her.

  Reality resembled neither imagining. He examined her breasts, touching the nipples; perhaps the coloring differed from those he was accustomed to. The chill air had made her breasts hard but they didn’t maintain his interest. When he pushed her to the mat she silently begged the help of the blessed Mother of God whose namesake she was. She was an unwilling receptacle, kept dry by fear and anger at this man who had come close to ordering the death of her husband. There were none of the sweet caresses with which Rob warmed her and turned her bones to water. Instead of being a vertical stick Alā’s organ was drooping and he had difficulty in pushing into her, resorting to olive oil that he splashed irritably on her instead of himself. Finally he squeezed greasily inside and she lay with her eyes closed.

  She had been bathed but discovered he had not. He wasn’t vigorous. He seemed almost bored, grunting softly as he worked. In a very few moments he gave an unroyal little shudder for so large a man and a disgusted moan. Then the King of Kings pulled out with a small sucking of oil and strode from the room without a word or a glance.

  She lay in sticky humiliation where he had left her, not knowing what to do next. She would not allow herself to weep.

  Eventually she was called for by the same women and taken to her son. She dressed hurriedly and scooped up Rob J. Sending her home, the women placed a rope bag of green melons in the sedan chair. When she and Rob J. reached Yehuddiyyeh she thought of leaving the melons in the road, but it seemed easier to carry them into the house and let the sedan chair go on its way.

  The melons in the marketplaces were poor, because they were stored in caverns throughout the Persian winter and many spoiled. These were in excellent condition and perfectly ripe when Rob returned from his mission to Idhaj, and they proved to have an uncommonly fine flavor.

  64

  THE BEDOUI GIRL

  Strange. To enter the maristan, that cool, sacred place with its stinks of illness and its rough medicinal smells and groanings and cries and bustling sounds, the song of the hospital. It still made Rob catch his breath, still made his heart pound to enter the maristan and find trailing behind him, like baby geese following their mother, a gaggle of students.

  Following him, who not long before had trailed others!

  To stop and allow a clerk to recite a history of affliction. Then to approach a pallet and speak with the patient, watching, examining, touching, smelling out disease like a fox snuffling to find an egg. Trying to outwit the fucking Black Knight. At length, to discuss the sick or injured person with the group, receiving opinions often worthless and absurd but sometimes wonderful. For the clerks, a learning; for Rob, an opportunity to mold these minds into a critical instrument that analyzed and proposed treatment and rejected and proposed again, so that sometimes as a result of teaching them he reached conclusions that otherwise would have eluded him.

  Ibn Sina urged him to lecture, and when he did, others came to hear him but he never was truly at ease before them, standing and sweating earnestly while discoursing on a subject he had carefully reviewed in the books. He was aware of how he must look to them, bigger than most and with his broken English nose, and aware of how he sounded, for now he was fluent enough with the language to be conscious of his accent.

  Similarly, because Ibn Sina demanded he be a writer, he fashioned a short article on the wine treatment of wounds. He labored over the essay but took no joy from it even when it was finished and transcribed and placed in the House of Learning.

  He knew he must pass on learning and skills, as these things had been passed to him, but Mirdin had been wrong: Rob did not want to do everything. He would not fashion himself after Ibn Sina. He had no ambition to be philosopher and educator and theologian, no need to write or preach. He was forced to learn and seek so he could know what to do when he must act. For him, the challenge came each time he held a patient’s hands, the same magic he had first felt when he was nine years old.

  One morning a girl named Sitara was brought into the maristan by her father, a bedoui tentmaker. She was very sick, nauseous and vomiting and racked by terrible pain in the lower right part of her rigid belly. Rob knew what was wrong but had no idea how to treat the side sickness. The girl groaned and could barely answer but he questioned her at length,
seeking to learn something that might show him the way.

  He purged her, tried hot packs and cold compresses, and that night he told his wife about the bedoui girl and asked Mary to pray for her.

  Mary was saddened by the thought of a young girl stricken as James Geikie Cullen had been stricken. It brought to mind the fact that her father lay in an unvisited grave in Ahmad’s wadi in Hamadhān.

  Next morning Rob let blood from the bedoui girl and gave drugs and herbs, but all he did was to no avail. He saw her turn febrile and glassy-eyed and begin to fade like a leaf after frost. She died on the third day.

  He went over the details of her short life painstakingly.

  She had been healthy prior to the series of painful attacks that had killed her. A twelve-year-old virgin who had reached her womanly bleeding but recently … what had she in common with a small male child and his middle-aged father-in-law? Rob could see nothing.

  Yet all three had been killed in precisely the same way.

  The breach between Alā and his Vizier, the Imam Qandrasseh, became more public at the Shah’s audience. The Imam was seated on the smaller throne below Alā’s right hand, as was customary, but he addressed the Shah with such cold courtesy that his message was clear to all who attended.

  That night Rob sat in Ibn Sina’s home and they played at the Shah’s Game. It was more a lesson than a contest, like a grown man playing with a child. Ibn Sina seemed to have thought out the entire game in advance. He moved the pieces without hesitation. Rob could not contain him but perceived the need for planning ahead, and this foresight quickly became a part of his own strategy.

  “Small groups of people are gathered in the streets and in the maidans, speaking softly,” Rob said.

  “They become worried and confused when the priests of Allah are in conflict with the lord of the House of Paradise, for they fear the quarrel will destroy the world.” Ibn Sina took a rukh with his horseman. “It will pass. It always passes, and those who are blessed will survive.”

  They played for a time in silence and then he told Ibn Sina of the death of the bedoui girl, recounting the symptoms and describing the two other cases of abdominal distemper that haunted him.