by Noah Gordon
“And were you born hereabouts, dolly?”
“Dropped by my mother in Worcester, and here I have lived,” she said cheerfully.
He nodded and patted her hand.
Still, he thought in gloomy revulsion, given the situation it wasn’t impossible that someday he could bed his own sister all unknowingly. He resolved that in the future he must have nothing to do with young females who might be Anne Mary’s age.
The depressing thought ended his holiday mood, and he began to gather up his clothing.
“Ah, must we leave, then?” she said regretfully.
“Yes,” he said, “for I must go a long way to get to St. Ives.”
Arthur Giles of St. Ives turned out to be a crashing disappointment, although Rob had had no right to high expectation, for clearly Benjamin Merlin had made the recommendation only under duress. The physician was a fat and filthy old man who appeared to be at least slightly mad. He kept goats and must have maintained them within his house part of the time, for the place stank abominably.
“It’s the bleeding that cures, young stranger. You must remember that. When all else fails, a good purifying drainage of the blood, and then another and another. That’s what cures the bastards,” Giles cried. He answered questions willingly, but when they discussed any mode of treatment other than bleeding, it became clear that Rob might profitably have taught the old man. Giles possessed no medical lore, no store of knowledge that might be tapped by a disciple. The physician offered an apprenticeship, and appeared to become furious when it was politely declined. Rob was happy to ride away from St. Ives, for he was better off remaining a barber than becoming a medical creature such as this.
For several weeks he believed he had renounced the impractical dream of becoming a physician. He worked hard at his entertainments, he sold a good deal of the Universal Specific, and was gratified by the thickness of his purse. Mistress Buffington throve on his prosperity as he had benefited from Barber’s; the cat ate fine leavings and grew to full size as he watched, a large white feline with insolent green eyes. She thought she was a lioness and got into fights. When they were in the town of Rochester she disappeared during the entertainment and came back into Rob’s camp at dusk, badly bitten in the right fore and with most of her left ear gone, her white fur matted with crimson.
He bathed her wounds and tended her like a lover. “Ah, mistress. You must learn to avoid brawling, as I have done, for it avails you nothing.” He fed her milk and held her in his lap before the fire.
She rasped his hand with her tongue. It may be that there was a drop of milk on his fingers, or the smell of supper, but he chose to see it as a caress, and he stroked her soft fur in return, grateful for her company.
“If the way were open for me to attend the Muslim school,” he told the cat, “I would take you in the wagon and point Horse toward Persia, and nothing would prevent our eventual arrival in that pagan place.”
Abu Ali at-Husain ibn Abdullah ibn Sina, he thought wistfully. “To hell with you, you Arab,” he said aloud, and went to bed.
The syllables ran through his mind, a haunting and taunting litany. Abu Ali at-Husain ibn Abdullah ibn Sina, Abu Ali at-Husain ibn Abdullah ibn Sina … until the mysterious repetition overcame the restlessness in his blood and he sank into sleep.
That night he dreamed he was locked in combat with a loathsome old knight, struggling hand to hand with daggers.
The old knight farted and mocked him. He could see rust and lichens on the other’s black armor. Their heads were so close that he saw corruption and snot hanging from the bony nose, and looked into terrible eyes and smelled the sickening stench of the knight’s breath. They fought desperately. Despite Rob’s youth and strength he knew the dark specter’s knife to be merciless and his armor infallible. Beyond them could be seen the knight’s victims: Mam, Da, sweet Samuel, Barber, even Incitatus and Bartram the bear, and Rob’s rage lent him strength, though he could already feel the inexorable blade entering his body.
He awoke to find the outside of his clothing damp with dew and the inside wet from the fear-sweat of the dream. Lying in the morning sun, with a robin singing its exhilaration not five feet away, he knew that although the dream was done, he was not. He was unable to give up the struggle.
Those who were gone wouldn’t come back, and that was the way of it. But what better way to spend a lifetime than fighting the Black Knight? The study of medicine was, in its own way, something to love in place of a missing family. He determined, as the cat came and rubbed against him with her good ear, that he would make it come to pass.
The problem was discouraging. He presented entertainments in Northampton and Bedford and Hertford in turn, and in each place he sought out physicians and spoke with them and saw that their combined knowledge of healing was less than Barber’s had been. In the town of Maldon the physician’s reputation for butchery was so deadly that when Rob J. asked people to give directions to the leech’s home they paled and crossed themselves.
It wouldn’t do to apprentice to such as these.
It occurred to him that another Hebrew doctor might be more willing to take him on than Merlin had been. In Maldon’s square he stopped where workmen were raising a brick wall.
“Do you have knowledge of any Jews in this place?” he asked the master mason.
The man stared at him, spat, and turned away.
He asked several other men in the square without better results. Finally there was one who examined him curiously. “Why do you seek Jews?”
“I seek a Jew physician.”
The man nodded in sympathetic understanding. “May Christ be merciful to you. There are Jews in the town of Malmesbury, and they have a physician there named Adolescentoli,” he said.
It was a five-day trip from Maldon to Malmesbury, with stops in Oxford and Alveston to put on entertainments and sell physick. Rob seemed to remember that Barber had spoken of Adolescentoli as a famous physician, and he made his way into Malmesbury hopefully as evening shadows fell over the small and formless village. The inn gave him a plain but heartening supper. Barber would have found the mutton stew unseasoned but it contained plenty of meat, and afterward he was able to pay to have fresh straw spread in a corner of the sleeping room.
Next morning at breakfast he asked the publican to tell him about Malmesbury’s Jews.
The man shrugged as if to say, What is there to tell?
“I am curious, for until lately I knew no Jews.”
“That is because they are scarce in our land,” the publican said. “My sister’s husband, who is a ship’s captain and has traveled to all places, says they are plentiful in France. He says they are found in every country, and that the farther east one travels, the more thickly are they sprinkled.”
“Does Isaac Adolescentoli live among them here? The physician?”
The publican grinned. “No, indeed. It is they who live around Isaac Adolescentoli, basking in his eminence.”
“He’s celebrated, then?”
“He’s a great physician. People come from afar to consult him and stay at this inn,” the publican said proudly. “The priests speak against him, of course, but”—he put a finger to his nose and leaned forward—“I know at least two occasions when he was collected in dark of night and bundled off to Canterbury to tend to Archbishop Aethelnoth, who was thought to be dying last year.”
He gave directions to the Jewish settlement and soon Rob was riding past the gray stone walls of Malmesbury Abbey, through woods and fields and a steep vineyard in which monks picked grapes. A coppice separated the abbey land from the Jews’ homes, perhaps a dozen clustered houses. These must be Jews: men like crows, in loose black caftans and bell-shaped leather hats, were sawing and hammering, raising a shed. Rob drove to a building that was larger than the others, where a wide courtyard was filled with tethered horses and wagons.
“Isaac Adolescentoli?” Rob asked one of several boys attending the animals.
“He’s in the dispen
sary,” the boy said, and deftly caught the coin Rob threw to make certain Horse was well tended.
The front door opened into a large waiting room filled with wooden benches, all crammed with ailing humanity. It was like the lines that waited beyond his own treatment screen, but many more people. There were no empty seats, but he found a place against the wall.
Now and again a man came through the little door that led to the rest of the house and collected the patient who sat at the end of the first bench. Everyone would then move one space forward. There appeared to be five physicians. Four were young and the other was a small, quick-moving man of middle age, whom Rob supposed to be Adolescentoli.
It was a very long wait. The room remained crowded, for it seemed that each time someone was led through the waiting room door by a physician, new arrivals entered the front door from the outside. Rob passed the time trying to diagnose the patients.
By the time he was first on the front bench it was midafternoon. One of the young men came through the door. “You may come with me.” He had a French accent.
“I want to see Isaac Adolescentoli.”
“I am Moses ben Abraham, an apprentice of Master Adolescentoli. I’m able to take care of you.”
“I’m certain you would treat me skillfully were I sick. I must see your master on another matter.”
The apprentice nodded and turned to the next person on the bench.
Adolescentoli came out in a while and led Rob through the door and down a short corridor; through a door left ajar he glimpsed a surgery with an operating couch, buckets, and instruments. They ended in a tiny room bare of furniture save for a small table and two chairs. “What is your trouble?” Adolescentoli said. He listened in some surprise as, instead of describing symptoms, Rob spoke nervously of his desire to study medicine.
The physician had a dark, handsome face that didn’t smile. Doubtless the interview wouldn’t have ended differently if Rob had been wiser but he was unable to resist a question: “Have you lived in England long, master physician?”
“Why do you ask?”
“You speak our language so well.”
“I was born in this house,” Adolescentoli said quietly. “In 70 A.D., five young Jewish prisoners of war were transported from Jerusalem to Rome by Titus following the destruction of the great Temple. They were called adolescentoli, Latin for ‘the youths.’ I am descended from one of these, Joseph Adolescentoli. He won his freedom by enlisting in the Second Roman Legion, with which he came to this island when its inhabitants were little dark coracle men, the black Silures who were the first to call themselves Britons. Has your own family been English that long?”
“I don’t know.”
“You yourself speak the language adequately,” Adolescentoli said silkily.
Rob told him of meeting with Merlin, mentioning only that they had spoken together of medical education. “Did you, too, study with the great Persian physician in Ispahan?”
Adolescentoli shook his head. “I attended the university in Baghdad, a larger medical school with a greater library and faculty. Except, of course, we didn’t have Avicenna, whom they call Ibn Sina.”
They chatted of his apprentices. Three were Jews from France and the other a Jew from Salerno.
“My apprentices have chosen me over Avicenna or some other Arab,” Adolescentoli said proudly. “They don’t have a library such as students have in Baghdad, of course, but I own the Leech Book of Bald, which lists remedies after the method of Alexander of Tralles and tells how to make salves, poultices, and plasters. They’re required to study it with great attention, as well as some Latin writings of Paul of Aegina and certain works of Pliny. And before I’m done with them, each shall know how to perform phlebotomy, cautery, incision of arteries, and the couching of cataracts.”
Rob felt an overpowering yearning, not unlike the emotion of a man who gazes upon a woman for whom, instantly, he longs. “I’ve come to ask you to take me as prentice.”
Adolescentoli inclined his head. “I guessed that is why you’re here. But I won’t take you.”
“Can I not persuade you, then?”
“No. You must find yourself a Christian physician as master, or stay a barber,” Adolescentoli said, not cruelly but with firmness.
Perhaps his reasons were the same as Merlin’s but Rob wasn’t to know, for the physician would speak no more. He rose and led the way to the door, and nodded without interest as Rob left his dispensary.
Two towns away, in Devizes, he put on an entertainment and dropped a juggled ball for the first time since he had mastered the knack. People laughed at his banter and bought the physick but there came behind his screen a young fisherman from Bristol, roughly his own age, who was pissing blood and had lost most of his flesh. He told Rob he knew he was dying.
“Is there naught you can do for me?”
“What is your name?” Rob asked him quietly.
“Hamer.”
“I think perhaps you have bubo in your insides, Hamer. But I’m not at all certain. I don’t know how to cure you or ease your pain.” Barber would have sold him more than a few bottles. “This stuff is mostly spirits, bought cheaper elsewhere,” he said without knowing why. He had never told that to a patient before.
The fisherman thanked him and went away.
Adolescentoli or Merlin would have known how to do more for him, Rob told himself bitterly. Timorous bastards, he thought, refusing to teach him while the bloody Black Knight grinned.
That evening he was caught out by a sudden wild storm with fierce winds and drenching rain. It was the second day of September and early for fall rains, but that didn’t make it less wet or chill. He made his way to the only shelter, the inn at Devizes, fastening Horse’s reins to the limb of a great oak in the yard. When he pushed inside he found that too many others had preceded him. Every piece of floor space was taken.
In a dark corner huddled an exhausted man who sat with his arms around a swollen pack such as merchants used for their goods. If Rob had not gone to Malmesbury he wouldn’t have given the fellow a second glance, but now he saw from the black caftan and pointed leather cap that this was a Jew.
“It was on such a night that our Lord was slain,” Rob said loudly.
Conversation in the inn dwindled as he went on to speak of the Passion story, for travelers love a tale and a diversion. Someone brought him a stoup. When he told of how the populace had denied that Jesus was King of the Jews, the weary man in the corner appeared to shrink.
By the time Rob had reached the part about Calvary, the Jew had taken his pack and slipped out into the night and the storm. Rob broke off the tale and took his place in the warm corner.
But he found no more pleasure in driving away the merchant than he had gained from giving the Special Batch to Barber. The common room of the inn was full of the reek of damp wool clothing and unwashed bodies, and he was soon nauseated. Even before the rain had ceased, he left the inn and went out to his wagon and his animals.
He drove Horse to a nearby clearing and unhitched her. There was dry kindling in the wagon and he managed to light a fire. Mistress Buffington was too young to breed but perhaps she already exuded female scent, for beyond the shadows cast by the fire a tomcat yowled. Rob threw a stick to drive it away and the white cat rubbed against him.
“We are a fine lonely pair,” he said.
If it took his lifetime, he would search until he found a worthy physician to whom he might apprentice, he decided.
As for the Jews, he had spoken to only two of their doctors. No doubt there were others. “Perhaps one would apprentice me if I pretended to him that I were a Jew,” he told the cat.
Thus it began, as less than a dream—a fantasy in idle chatter; he knew he couldn’t be a Jew convincingly enough to undergo the daily scrutiny of a Jewish master.
But he sat before the fire and stared into the flames, and it took form.
The cat offered up her silken belly. “Could I not be a Jew well enough
to satisfy Muslims?” Rob asked her, and himself, and God.
Well enough to study with the greatest physician in the world?
Stunned by the enormity of the thought, he dropped the cat and she sprang away into the wagon. In a moment she was back, dragging what appeared to be a furry animal. It proved to be the false beard he’d worn during the Old Man nonsense. Rob picked it up. If he could be an old man for Barber, he asked himself, why could he not be a Hebrew? The merchant at the inn in Devizes, and others, could be imitated …
“I shall become a counterfeit Jew!” he cried.
It was fortunate no one was passing, to hear him speak aloud and at length to a cat, for it would have been declared that he was a wizard addressing his succubus.
He had no fear of the Church. “I piss on child-stealing priests,” he told the cat.
He could grow a full Jew’s beard, and he already had the prick for it.
He’d tell folk that, like Merlin’s sons, he had been raised isolated from his people, ignorant of their tongue and customs.
He would make his way to Persia!
He would touch the hem of Ibn Sina’s garment!
He was excited and terrified, shamed to be a grown man and trembling so. It was like the moment when he’d known he would pass beyond Southwark for the first time.
It was said they were everywhere, damn their souls. On the journey he would cultivate them and study their ways. By the time he reached Ispahan he would be ready to play the Jew, and Ibn Sina would have to take him in and share the precious secrets of the Arab school.
PART TWO
The Long Journey
22
THE FIRST LEG
More shipping left London for France than from any other port in England, so he made for the city of his birth. All along the way he stopped to work, wanting to set out on such an adventure with as much gold as possible. By the time he reached London he had missed the shipping season. The Thames bristled with the masts of anchored vessels. King Canute had drawn upon his Danish origins and built a great fleet of Viking ships that rode the water like tethered monsters. The fearsome war craft were surrounded by an assorted assemblage: fat knorrs converted to deep-sea fishing boats; the private trireme galleys of the wealthy; squat, slow-sailing grain ships; two-masted merchant packets with triangular lateen-rigged sails; two-masted carracks from Italy; and long, single-masted vessels, the workhorses of the merchant fleets of the northern countries. None of the ships held cargo or passengers, for frigid windstorms already had begun. During the next terrible six months on many mornings salt spray would freeze in the Channel, and sailors knew that to venture out where the North Sea met and merged with the Atlantic Ocean was to ask for drowning in the churning waters.
