The Physician

by Noah Gordon

  Al-Juzjani showed him how to run his hands over both the patient’s arms at the same time, then both legs, then each side of the body together, so that any defect, swelling, or other irregularity would be revealed because it felt different from the normal limb or side. And how to strike the patient’s body with sharp, short blows of the fingertips in an attempt to discover illness by hearing an abnormal sound. Much of this was new and strange to Rob, but he quickly became familiar with the routine and found it easy because he had worked with patients for years.

  His difficult time began early in the evening, after he had arrived back in his house in Yehuddiyyeh, for that is when the battle began between the need to study and the need to sleep. Aristotle proved to be a sapient old Greek and Rob learned that if a subject was captivating, studying changed from a chore to a pleasure. It was a momentous discovery, perhaps the single thing that allowed him to work as doggedly as necessary, for Sayyid Sa’di quickly assigned him readings from Plato and Heraclitus; and al-Juzjani, as casually as if he were requesting another log on the fire, asked him to read the twelve books dealing with medicine in Pliny’s Historia naturalis—“as preparation for reading all of Galen next year”!

  There was constantly Qu’ran to memorize. The more he consigned to his memory, the more resentful he became. Qu’ran was the official compilation of the preachings of the Prophet, and Muhammed’s message had been essentially the same for years on end. The book was repetition upon repetition, and filled with calumny against Jews and Christians.

  But he persevered. He sold the donkey and the mule so he wouldn’t have to spend time tending and feeding them. He ate his meals quickly and without pleasure, and frivolity had no place in his life. Each night he read until he could read no more, and he learned to put minuscule amounts of oil in his lamps, so they would burn themselves out after his head dropped into his arms and he slept over his books at the table. Now he knew why God had given him a great, strong body and good eyes, for he taxed himself to the limit of his endurance as he sought to make himself a scholar.

  * * *

  One evening, aware only that he could study no more and must escape, he fled the little house in Yehuddiyyeh and plunged into the night life of the maidans.

  He had grown accustomed to the great municipal squares as they were during the day, sunbaked open spaces with a few people strolling or curled asleep in a patch of shade. But he found that by night the squares became seamy and alive, riotous celebrations jam-packed with the males of common-class Persia.

  Everyone appeared to be talking and laughing at once, producing a clamor louder than several Glastonbury Fairs. A group of singing jugglers used five balls and were droll and adept, making him want to join them. Muscular wrestlers, their heavy bodies gleaming with animal grease to make it difficult for opponents to gain a hold, struggled while onlookers screamed advice at them and made wagers. Puppeteers performed a lewd play, acrobats leaped and somersaulted, hucksters of a variety of food and wares vied for the passing trade.

  Rob stopped in a torchlit bookstall, where the first volume he examined was a collection of drawings. Each sketch showed the same man and woman, cleverly depicted in a variety of lovemaking positions he had never met even in his imagination.

  “The entire sixty-four in pictures, master,” the bookseller said.

  Rob hadn’t the slightest idea what the sixty-four were. He knew it was against Islamic law to sell or own pictures of the human form because Qu’ran said Allah (exalted is He!) was the one and only creator of life. But he was captivated by the book and bought it.

  He went next to a refreshment place where the air was thick with babble and ordered wine.

  “No wine. This is chai-khana, a tea house,” the effeminate waiter said. “You may have chai or sherbet, or rose water boiled with cardamons.”

  “What is chai?”

  “Excellent drink. It comes from India, I think. Or perhaps it is carried to us down the Silk Road.”

  Rob ordered chai and a dish of sweetmeats.

  “We have a private place. You wish a boy?”

  “No.”

  When the refreshment came the drink was very hot, an amber-colored liquid with a flat, mouth-puckering taste; Rob couldn’t decide whether he liked it, but the sweetmeats were very good. From the upper galleries of the arcades near the maidan came plangent melody, and when he looked across the square he saw that the music was being played on polished copper trumpets eight feet long. He sat in the dimly lighted chai-khana, gazing out at the crowd and drinking chai after chai, until a storyteller began to regale the patrons with a tale of Jamshid, the fourth of the hero kings. Mythology attracted Rob not much more than pederasty, and he paid the waiter and wove his way through the crowd until he was at the edge of the maidan. For a while he stood and watched the mule-drawn carriages that were driven slowly around and around the square, for he had heard of them from other students.

  Finally he hailed a well-kept coach with a lily painted on its door.

  Inside, it was dark. The woman waited until the mules had begun to draw the carriage before she moved.

  Soon he could see her well enough to know that the plump body was old enough to have mothered him. During the act he liked her, for she was an honest whore; she made no simulations of passion or pretense of enjoyment, but cared for him gently and with skill.

  Afterward, the woman pulled a cord, signifying completion, and the pimp on the box drew the mules to a halt.

  “Take me to Yehuddiyyeh,” Rob called. “I’ll pay for her time.”

  They lay companionably in the swaying coach. “What are you called?” he asked.

  “Lorna.” Well trained, she didn’t ask his name.

  “I am Jesse ben Benjamin.”

  “Well met, Dhimmi,” she said shyly, and touched the tightened muscles in his shoulders. “Why are these like knots of rope? What do you dread, a great young man like you?”

  “I fear I’m an ox when I must be a fox,” he said, smiling in the dark.

  “You are no ox, as I have learned,” she said drily. “What is your trade?”

  “I study in the maristan, to be a physician.”

  “Ah. Like the Chief of Princes. My own cousin has been his first wife’s cook as long as Ibn Sina has been in Ispahan.”

  “You know his daughter’s name?” he said after a moment.

  “There is no daughter, Ibn Sina has no children. He has two wives, Reza the Pious, who is old and sickly, and Despina the Ugly, who is young and beautiful, but Allah (exalted is He!) has blessed neither woman with issue.”

  “I see,” Rob said.

  He used her once more in comfortable fashion before the carriage reached Yehuddiyyeh. Then he directed the driver to his door and paid them well for making it possible for him to go inside and light his lamps and face his best friends and worst enemies, the books.

  42

  THE SHAH’S ENTERTAINMENT

  He was in a city and surrounded by people but it was a solitary existence. Each morning he came into contact with the other clerks, and each evening he left them. He knew that Karim and Abbas and some of the others lived in cells at the madrassa and he assumed that Mirdin and the other Jewish students lived somewhere in Yehuddiyyeh, but he had no idea what any of their lives were like away from the school and the hospital. Much like his own, he supposed, filled with reading and study. He was too busy to be lonely.

  He spent only twelve weeks admitting new patients to the hospital, then he was assigned to something he loathed, for apprentice physicians took turns servicing the Islamic court on days when sentences were carried out by the kelonter.

  His stomach roiled the first time he returned to the jail and walked past the carcans.

  A guard led him to a dungeon where a man lay tossing and moaning. Where the prisoner’s right hand should have been, a hempen cord bound a coarse blue rag to a stump, above which the forearm was dreadfully swollen.

  “Can you hear me? I am Jesse.”

 
“Yes, lord,” the man muttered.

  “What is your name?”

  “I am Djahel.”

  “Djahel, how long since they took your hand?”

  The man shook his head in bewilderment.

  “Two weeks,” the guard said.

  Removing the rag, Rob found a packing of horse dung. As a barber-surgeon he had often seen dung used in this way and he knew it was seldom beneficial and perhaps was harmful. He shook it off.

  The top of the forearm next to the amputation was ligated with another piece of hemp. Owing to the swelling, the cord had sunk into the tissue and the arm was beginning to turn black. Rob cut the cord and washed the stump slowly and carefully. He anointed it with a mixture of sandalwood and rose water and packed it in camphor in place of the dung, leaving Djahel groaning but relieved.

  That was the best part of his day, for he was led from the dungeons to the prison courtyard for the beginning of the punishments.

  They were much as he had witnessed them during his own confinement, save that while in the carcan he had been able to retreat into unconsciousness. Now he stood stonily among mullahs who chanted prayers while a muscular guard lifted an oversized curved sword. The prisoner, a gray-faced man who had been convicted of fomenting treason and sedition, was forced to kneel and lay his cheek against the block.

  “I love the Shah! I kiss his sacred feet!” the kneeling man screamed in a vain attempt to avert the sentence, but no one answered him and the sword was already whistling. The blow was clean and the head rolled to come to rest against a carcan, the eyes still protruding in anguished fear.

  The remains were removed and then a young man who had been caught with another’s wife had his belly opened. This time the same executioner wielded a long, slim dagger, a ripping from left to right that efficiently spilled the adulterer’s bowels.

  Fortunately, there were no murderers, who would have been drawn and quartered, then set out to be consumed by dogs and carrion birds.

  Rob’s services began to be required after the minor punishments.

  A thief who was not yet a man soiled himself in his fright and pain as his hand was taken. There was a jar of hot pitch but Rob didn’t need it, for the force of the amputation sealed the stump, which he had only to wash and dress.

  He had a messier time with a fat, weeping woman who had been convicted of mocking the Qu’ran for the second time and thus was deprived of her tongue. The red poured through her hoarse, wordless screaming until he succeeded in pinching off a blood vessel.

  Within him there was a lush blossoming of hatred for Muslim justice and Qandrasseh’s court.

  “This is one of your most important tools,” Ibn Sina told the medical students solemnly. He held up the urine glass, which he had told them was properly called a matula. It was bell-shaped, with a wide, curved lip designed to catch urine. Ibn Sina had trained a glass-blower to make the matulae for his doctors and students.

  Rob had known that if urine contained blood or pus, something was wrong. But Ibn Sina already had lectured for two weeks on urine alone!

  Was it thin or viscous? The subtleties of odor were weighed and discussed. Was there the treacly hint of sugar? The chalky smell that suggested the presence of stones? The sourness of a wasting sickness? Or merely the rank grassiness of someone who has eaten asparagus?

  Was the flow copious, which meant the body was flushing out the disease, or sparing, which could signify that internal fevers were drying up the system’s fluids?

  As to color, Ibn Sina taught them to look at urine with an artist’s eye for the palette, twenty-one nuances of color, from clear through yellow, dark ocher, red and brown, to black, showing the various combinations of contenta, or undissolved components.

  Why all this fuss about piss? Rob asked himself wearily. “Why is the urine so important?” he asked.

  Ibn Sina smiled. “It comes from within, where important things happen.” The master physician read them a selection from Galen which indicated that the kidneys were the organs for separating out the urine:

  Any butcher knows this from the fact that he sees every day the position of the kidneys and the duct (called the ureter) which runs from each kidney into the bladder and by studying this anatomy he reasons what their use is and the nature of their functions.

  The lecture left Rob enraged. Physicians shouldn’t need to consult with butchers, or learn from dead sheep and pigs how humans were constructed. If it was so bloody important to know what was happening within men and women, why didn’t they look within men and women? If Qandrasseh’s mullahs could be blithely evaded for coupling or a drunken binge, why didn’t physicians dare to ignore the holy men to gain knowledge? No one spoke of eternal mutilation or the quickening of the dead when a religious court cut off a prisoner’s head or hand or tongue or slit his belly.

  Early next morning two of Khuff’s palace guardsmen, driving a mule cart laden with food supplies, stopped in Yehuddiyyeh to fetch Rob.

  “His Majesty will go visiting today, master, and commands your company,” one of the soldiers said.

  What now? Rob asked himself.

  “The Captain of the Gates urges you to hurry.” The soldier cleared his throat discreetly. “Perhaps it would be best if the master were to change into his best clothing.”

  “I am wearing my best clothing,” Rob said, and they sat him in the back of the cart atop some sacks of rice and hurried him away.

  They traveled out of the city in a line of traffic consisting of courtiers on horseback and in sedan chairs, mingled with all manner of wagons transporting equipment and supplies. Despite his homely perch Rob felt regal, for he had never before been conveyed over roads newly graveled and freshly watered. One side of the road, where the soldiers said only the Shah would travel, was strewn with flowers.

  The journey ended at the home of Rotun bin Nasr, general of the army, distant cousin to Alā Shah and honorary governor of the madrassa. “That is he,” one of the soldiers told Rob, pointing out a beaming fat man, voluble and posturing.

  The handsome estate had extensive grounds. The party would begin in a commodious groomed garden, in the center of which a great marble fountain splashed. All around the pool tapestries of silk and gold had been spread, strewn with cushions of rich embroidery. Servants hurried everywhere, carrying trays of sweetmeats, pastries, perfumed wines, and scented waters. Outside a gate at one side of the garden, a eunuch bearing an unsheathed sword guarded the Third Gate, leading to the haram. Under Muslim law only the master of a house was allowed in the women’s apartment and any male transgressor could have his belly ripped, so Rob was happy to move away from the Third Gate. The soldiers had made it clear that he wasn’t expected to unload the cart or otherwise work, and he meandered outside the garden into an adjacent open area crowded with beasts, noblemen, slaves, servants, and an army of entertainers who appeared all to be rehearsing at the same time.

  A nobility of four-legged creatures had been assembled. Tethered twenty paces apart were a dozen of the finest white Arabian stallions he had ever seen, nervous and proud, with brave dark eyes. Their trappings were worthy of close inspection, for four of the bridles were adorned with emeralds, two with rubies, three with diamonds, and three with a mixture of colored stones he couldn’t identify. The horses were clad in low-hanging, blanketlike garments of gold brocade set with pearls, and tethered with tresses of silk and gold to rings atop thick gold nails that had been driven into the ground.

  Thirty paces from the horses were wild beasts: two lions, a tiger, and a leopard, all magnificent specimens, each on its own large piece of scarlet tapestry, tethered in the same manner as the horses and with a golden water bowl.

  In a pen beyond, half a dozen white antelopes with long horns straight as arrows—unlike any deer in England!—stood together and nervously eyed the cats, which blinked at them sleepily.

  But Rob spent little time with these animals and disregarded gladiators, wrestlers, bowmen, and the like, pushing past them towar
d a huge object that immediately captured his attention, until finally he stood within touching distance of his first live elephant.

  It was even more massive than he had expected, far larger than the brazen elephant statues he had seen in Constantinople. The beast stood half again higher than a tall man. Each of its four legs was a stout column ending in a perfectly round foot. Its wrinkled hide seemed too large for its body and was gray, with large pink splotches like patches of lichen on a rock. Its arched back was higher than the shoulder or the rump, from which dangled a thick rope of tail with a frazzled end. The enormous head caused its pink eyes to seem tiny in comparison, although they weren’t smaller than a horse’s eyes. On the sloping forehead were two little humps, as if horns were unsuccessfully striving to break through. Each gently waving ear was almost as large as a warrior’s shield, but the most extraordinary feature of this extraordinary creature was its nose, which was longer and thicker by far than its tail.

  The elephant was cared for by a small-boned Indian in a gray tunic and white turban, sash, and trousers, who told Rob upon questioning that he was Harsha, a mahout or elephant tender. The elephant was Alā Shah’s personal combat mount and was named Zi, short for Zi-ul-Quarnayn or “Two-Horned One,” in honor of the wicked bone protuberances, curved and as long as Rob was tall, that extended from the monster’s upper jaw.

  “When we go into battle,” the Indian said proudly, “Zi wears his own mail and long, sharp swords are fixed on his tusks. He is trained to the onslaught, so that the charge of His Excellency on his trumpeting war elephant is sight and sound to chill any enemy’s blood.”

  The mahout kept servants busy carrying buckets of water. These were emptied into a large gold vessel from which the animal sucked water into its nose and then sprayed it into its mouth!