Dear and Glorious Physician

by Taylor Caldwell

  Asah was sitting on the low wall of the well, weeping and mourning. Sira stood at a distance, shrinking from the moonlight, and beseeching his wife, in a muted voice, to halt her tears. Neither of them was aware of the presence of Lucanus, who stood in the sharp black shadows near the closed door.

  “Ah, my dearest,” wept the young woman, “if only you, as a physician, had not attempted to cure the lepers! But you, so merciful, so tender, so kind, must attend them, and must sacrifice for them in the temples. You must hide them from the authorities in your hopeless compassion. ‘Are they not human, and blood of my blood, my brothers, the beat of my heart?’ That is what you said, my dearest one. But gods and men are cruel and without justice, and the frightful disease came to you from the afflicted. Did you consider your wife and your little children? No. You told me that the physician is dedicated to One greater than we, that he has sworn the holy oath to cherish mankind and alleviate its sufferings. And in revenge the gods afflicted you yourself with this monstrous horror and drove you from your wife’s arms and from the kisses of your children!”

  Sira groaned. “I did not betray my oath. If the gods have betrayed me, then that is their own crime.”

  The young woman lifted her pale smooth face to the moon, and her dark hair drifted in disorder on her shoulders, and her tears turned to quicksilver. “Ah, yes,” she murmured. “It is true that men are sometimes better than their gods. Would I have turned you from the afflicted? I do not believe so now. What else can a man do but his duty?”

  She rose and moved to her husband, her arms extended to him pitifully. But he cried out, “Unclean, unclean!”

  “Not to me, not to me, Sira. I am your wife. Where you go, there shall I go. Where you live, there shall I live. What are children and parents to a wife who loves her husband? They are as nothing; they are not even phantoms when she hears her husband’s voice. Will you dwell in a cave? There shall I dwell also. Will you eat the bread of charity? That shall I eat also. If you sleep with the foxes and the wild vultures, there also shall I sleep, and your bed shall be my bed. For there is nothing in the world for me but you, and no sea, no death, no bloody hand of man, no hatred of the gods shall divide us.”

  Sira held out his palms desperately to keep her away. “I implore you, my love, do not approach me! In the name of the gods, keep far from me. No, you shall not go with me to die as a leper, to ring a bell to warn off the warmness of others, to rot and bleed and become numb and blind and filled with sores. I have cherished your sweetness and your beauty. Shall I die remembering what I have done to you?”

  “Shall I die, Sira, remembering that I have deserted you, I who swore never to leave your side?” Her hands reached for him, but he cringed against the wall and, like a reptile, scuttled along it, making a rasping sound.

  “Shall you torture me, Asah, with the sight of your beloved and leprous face? Go, I beg you. Go and forget me. I am one with the dead. I have died. The rotting thing you see is not your husband. You are young. Marry again and bear other children, and weep for me, but do not remember me long.”

  “In my heart, forever, there will be remembrance. Do not drive me from you, Sira. Let me embrace you. Let me once again kiss your lips.” Asah wept, and the faint sound of her mourning filled the courtyard with the most heartbreaking of echoes. She followed him slowly, a pursuer quivering with love and devotion.

  “No!” cried Lucanus, and came from the shadows. “Your husband is right, and you must not touch him!”

  Sira and Asah started at the sound of his voice, and stood mutely looking at him. His head rose from his broad shoulders like the head of a god, beautiful and most terrible in its beauty. Asah put her hand to her lips and stood motionless, the night wind lifting her hair like a banner. Sira stared at him from the shadows, his eyes burning.

  Lucanus came to him, took him by the shoulder and pulled him into the moonlight and examined him closely and sharply.

  “I am a physician,” said Sira, in a broken voice. “I have leprosy.”

  There was no doubt of it. The leonine appearance of the disease had already thickened Sira’s features. Bluish-red and yellowish-brown erythematous patches scarred his face; here and there, on his brow and on his throat, were ulcerous lesions exuding serum and pus. His hoarse voice betrayed an invasion of his larynx. Even his hands revealed the loathsomeness of the disease, and two or three of his fingers were already gangrenous.

  “How unmerciful are the gods,” said Asah, her arms trembling for her husband. “My Sira is the most gentle of men, the most dedicated. Yet now he must die if he cannot escape from the city unseen. But if he must die, then shall I die with him, good Master.”

  “Master, take her from me,” implored Sira. “Conduct her to our home. For surely she is lost if she remains longer.”

  Lucanus was seized with a very ecstasy of rage and despair and pity. He grasped Sira’s shoulders in his strong hands and closed his eyes and addressed God silently but with fury.

  “O You who have so tormented this man who wished only to save Your victims from Your hatred! Must You forever strike down those who help the afflicted, who are innocent, who are without malice and evil? Must always Your smile be reserved for the vile and their children, and Your blessings be poured out on the unrighteous? Why do You not destroy us and let us have our peace forever in a dayless grave, covered by the merciful night, far from Your vengeful eyes? What have we done to merit Your hate, You who have not the eyes and the limbs and the blood of men, and not their flesh? Do You bleed as a man bleeds? Does Your heart tremble as the heart of a man trembles? Have You suffered pain, O You who afflict pain? Have You loved as a man loves? Have You begotten a son, so that You might mourn for him?”

  Sira and his wife stood like motionless stone, their ears straining. They heard no voice, but dimly they were aware that something most awesome was sounding in this moon-struck place, this silent and fetid place. They saw Lucanus’ contorted face, his closed eyes, his parted lips, between which the teeth gleamed like marble.

  Again he addressed God in the wild bitterness and anguish of his heart.

  “Oh, if You were merciful, in Your illimitable might, You would cure this wretched man and return him to his wife and his children! If You possessed only one quiver of human pity You would take from him his disease and make him whole. Am I greater than You, more merciful than You? I swear to You by all that I hold dear that if I could I would take upon me the lesions of this horror instead and flee forever to the desert, remembering that I have saved a man, his wife, and his children.”

  Sira felt the hands of Lucanus on his thin shoulders, and it seemed to him that a strange and awful force emanated from Lucanus’ fingers, like a cold and surging fire. The force pervaded him, shattered along his bones, rippled over his flesh, made his back arch and his hair rise on his head. It was as if lightning had struck him. He could not breathe or move; he leaned against Lucanus’ hands, and his heart crashed into sound against his ears like the sound of unearthly drums. He thought, I am dying! And the moonlight faded from his sight and became a blackness before his eyes.

  “I am not God!” Lucanus cried from his heart. “I am only a man. Therefore I pity. Oh, be You merciful! Be You merciful!”

  He caught Sira to his breast and held him tightly, and his tears dropped over his cheeks and fell on the other man’s forehead. And Asah, understanding vaguely that something had happened beyond human comprehension, sank to Lucanus’ feet and rested her head against them.

  Then Lucanus felt some tremendous virtue leave him like flowing blood, and a mysterious weakness made his body shake. Gently, with trembling hands, he put Sira from him, sighing.

  “Take my mantle with its hood,” he said. “Hide your face in it. Here are my sandals,” and he bent and removed his sandals and placed them near the leper’s feet. “Here is my purse, and my dagger. No one will recognize or find you. Go from the city and do not return. And if there is a God, go in His peace.”

  He threw
the mantle over Sira’s shoulders, and pressed the purse and the dagger in his hands, and he stood before husband and wife in his bare feet and clad only in his yellow tunic. And they looked at him and could not speak for bewilderment and gratitude, and it seemed to them that this young man was the son of Isis herself.

  He turned and opened the door and stepped out into the stinking street, and the stone cut into his feet, and he did not feel the pain. Blinded with tears, he staggered away, sunk in grief and sorrow.

  For a long time Sira and Asah did not move or speak. They stood in the moonlight like carved statues of themselves, stricken dumb. Then Asah approached her husband again with outstretched arms, and he held her off. “Unclean,” he murmured, and let her see his face and arms clearly in the light.

  Asah uttered a loud and piercing shriek, then dropped senseless to the stones like one felled by a blow. And Sira stared at his arms and saw that they were whole and clean and without blemish. Dazed, he turned them about and examined them, and there was no spot upon them. He put his hands to his cheeks and his brow, and they were as smooth as an infant’s flesh, and warm and full of sensation.

  He looked at the closed door through which Lucanus had vanished. He dropped to his knees beside his fainting wife and lifted his hands in prayer.

  “Oh, most blessed,” he murmured. “Oh, that you visited us!”

  Chapter Twenty

  Cusa looked with consternation at Lucanus. “It is not possible, Master!” he exclaimed, holding his head in his hands. His impish satyr’s face with its plump cheeks and thin little beard, humorous eyes, and impudent nose had blanched with horror.

  “I am sorry,” said Lucanus, patiently. “I have tried to explain it. There is no need of another public medical officer in Rome, which is filled with modern sanitoria. Yes, I understand that the Public Assembly has graciously appointed me, at the behest of Diodorus, and at a considerable stipend. But shall a physician not go where he is most needed? Hippocrates has said this, and I have taken his oath. My work will be among the poor and oppressed and the abandoned, the dying and the desperately ill for whom there is no provision in the cities along the Great Sea. I shall minister to slaves and to those hopeless in poverty, and I shall ask no fee except from a rich master of slaves. I shall go among the prisons and in the galleys, in the mines and in the slums, in the ports and in the infirmaries for the indigent. There is my work, and I cannot turn away from it.”

  “But why?” cried Cusa, incredulously.

  Lucanus sat on his bed in the stark white bedroom where he slept and studied and looked at his long pale hands. “I have told you,” he said. “I must go where I am needed.”

  Cusa rocked his head in his hands. Was Lucanus mad? Had the red Furies disordered his mind? Had Hecate secretly visited him in the night? By all the gods, this was not to be understood or to be endured! Cusa spoke reasonably, and quietly, as one speaks to a man afflicted with insanity.

  “Master, your family needs you. Your adopted father is proud of you, and he the proudest of Romans. Your mother has not seen you for years; your brother and your sister have never looked upon you. What will it be said of Diodorus that his adopted son is a wanderer, ministering to the scum of the earth in hot barbarian cities and highways and byways? That is good enough for a slave physician, but not for the son of Diodorus Cyrinus. What will you say to Diodorus, and your mother? They will be shamed before the face of Rome.”

  Lucanus shook his head. “I have no words to reach you, Cusa, or blow away the fog of your bewilderment. Enough. You and your family will leave with me tomorrow for Rome and my father’s estates. There you will be happy.” He smiled affectionately at his old teacher.

  “My lack of understanding is mild to the lack of understanding Diodorus will display, Master.”

  “I know.” Lucanus frowned, then smiled, remembering the bellicose Roman. “But I must do as I must.”

  “You do not know what poverty is, Master! When you are a beggarly physician drifting from port to port — for certainly Diodorus will not sustain you with his careful money under the circumstances — you will discover what it is to be hungry and filthy and homeless and in rags. You will not delight in it, Lucanus, you whose flesh has been carefully nurtured and tended and clothed in fine linen and wool. Lucanus, enlighten me. What is this madness? What is a slave or a poor man or a criminal? They are less than human. It were better for you to treat the dogs and other animals of the rich and patrician in Rome! It would bring less shame and grief to Diodorus.”

  Lucanus reflected. How could he say to Cusa, “I must deliver the tormented from their Enemy?” Cusa would then be completely assured that he was mad.

  Cusa watched him narrowly. Then he burst out, “It is that accursed Joseph ben Gamliel! I have overheard him speaking with you in the gardens. Master, the Jews are incomprehensible, with their merciful God and His Commandments and His ridiculous laws for the temperate dealing of man with man. It is all superstition, and deplorable, and adds gloom to life. Have you seen a Jew with a happy face? Have you heard the laughter of Roman feasts and Roman abandonment and dancing in a Jew’s house? No, that is only for a barbarian Roman! Not,” added Cusa, “that I consider a Roman much more than a barbarian. But at least he is a man of sinew and blood and has a proper respect for the arts of Greece, though he is a wolf cub. The Roman is a realist. The Jews deal with transcendent superstitions. They speak of freedom, which is absurd. They expect the impossible from their God, and one of sense understands that the gods never deal in the impossible and expects no great virtue from them.”

  Lucanus said with anger, “I do not believe that God is merciful and good! I do not believe what Joseph ben Gamliel tells me of Him! Spare your breath, Cusa. I must leave you for a last farewell to my teachers.”

  Cusa, smarting, wounded, and quite confounded, understood that he had been dismissed, and he went to find his wife. Calliope listened as she nursed her child, and she puckered her lips thoughtfully. Then she shrugged. “I have always believed that Lucanus was extraordinary,” she said.

  Lucanus had no regret for leaving Alexandria. Since Rubria had died he had felt no attachment for any single spot in the world, no desire to visit it, or to travel as a rich young man. The world to him was a carnal house, full of groaning, and no beauty of architecture, no music had power to lighten his endless sorrow. But last night he had dreamed of Sara bas Elazar, Sara whose father had been buried yesterday. It had been a most confused dream. She had come running to him through a field of flowers, laughing sweetly, and when she reached him her face was the face of Rubria, sparkling as if under spring sunshine. Her dark hair had fallen back from her white brow, and Lucanus had experienced the rapture of complete bliss and joy. And then he had seen the violet of her eyes, and pain had come to him. In his dream, he did not know why, he had said to her questioningly, “Rubria?” And she had answered in her dulcet voice, “Love.” He had shaken his head. “There is no room in my life for love. I shall not take love again, for love is a serpent in the heart, filled with poison and agony.” She had retreated from him then, looking mournfully to the last at his face, as if searching and sad, and the flowers had risen up and hidden her from him. Then he had known his old grief again and had cried out, and had awakened.

  He remembered his dream as he packed his large leather physician’s pouch with his precious surgical instruments: forceps, scalpels, amputation saws, probes, syringes, trephines. Each instrument, of the most carefully wrought iron, and perfect, had to be wrapped in a woolen cloth impregnated with olive oil to guard against rust. There were older instruments, too, of copper and bronze, clumsier. These were also gently laid in the pouch in their own wrappings. To these he added his precious medical books, a number of ligatures in a silken case, and some special vials of Eastern medicines. Cusa would care for his personal effects, of which he had few. Lucanus examined them to see what he could give away to the poor and penniless in the infirmary at the medical school. A small bag dropped to the floor
from some garment, with a heavy sound, and he picked it up and opened it. The golden cross Keptah had given Rubria lay in his hand, its golden chain twinkling.

  Lucanus felt a sudden boiling and despair in him, and he wanted to hurl the cross from his sight. But Rubria had pressed it in his hand at the moment of dying. He could not remember bringing it here. He had forgotten it. Now he breathed on the gold and rubbed it with his sleeve until it brightened, and, remembering Rubria with a fresh access of pain, he kissed the symbol of infamy and replaced it in its bag and dropped it in his medical pouch. And he thought of Sara again, the beautiful young Sara with her graceful figure just burgeoning into womanhood, and her white neck and lovely, artless eyes. He left the room hurriedly, as if fleeing, and went to the university.

  His teachers greeted him with affection, and all gave him amulets, even the cynical Greek physicians, and all expressed their regret at his departure, and all blessed him. “Remember, my dear Lucanus,” said one of the Greeks, “that medicine has always been associated with the priesthood, for there is more to medicine than the body, and a physician must also treat the souls of his patients, and, at the last, he must depend for a cure on the Divine Physician.” Lucanus was surprised at this statement from this most lucid-minded Greek, but the man regarded him seriously, then kissed him on both cheeks. “I do not fear for you,” he added.