The Physician

by Noah Gordon

  Rob stayed near the elephant until a flourish of drums and cymbals announced the arrival of the Shah, then he returned to the garden with the other guests.

  Alā Shah wore simple white clothing, in contrast to the guests, who might have been costumed for an affair of state. He acknowledged the ravi zemin with a nod and took his place on a sumptuous chair above the cushions near the pool.

  The entertainment began with a demonstration by swordsmen wielding scimitars with such strength and grace that the assemblage fell quiet and gave their attention to the clash of steel on steel, the stylized circling of a combat exercise as ritualized as a dance. Rob noted that the scimitar was lighter than the English sword and heavier than the French; it required both a duelist’s skill at the thrust and strong wrists and arms for hacking. He was sorry when the display came to an end.

  Acrobat-magicians made a great and busy show of planting a seed in the earth, watering it, and covering it with a cloth. Behind a screen of tumbling bodies, just at the climax of their acrobatics, one of them swept off the cloth, jabbed a leafy twig into the ground, and covered it again. Both the diversion and the deception were nakedly apparent to Rob, who had been watching for them, and he was amused when finally the cloth was removed and people applauded “the magical growing tree.”

  Alā Shah was visibly restless as wrestling began. “My longbow,” he called.

  When it arrived he strung and unstrung it, showing his courtiers how easily he bent the heavy weapon. Those nearest him murmured their admiration at his strength, while others took advantage of the relaxed mood to converse, and now Rob learned the reason for his invitation; as a European, he was as much a displayed oddity as any of the animals or the entertainers, and the Persians regaled him with questions.

  “Do you have a Shah in your country, that place …?”

  “England. Yes, a king. His name is Canute.”

  “Are the men of your country warriors and horsemen?” an old man with wise eyes asked curiously.

  “Yes, yes, great warriors, fine horsemen.”

  “What of the weather and climate?”

  Colder and wetter than here, he told them.

  “What of the food?”

  “It is different from yours, not so many spices. We do not have pilah.”

  It shocked them. “No pilah,” the old man said with contempt.

  They surrounded him, but out of inquisitiveness rather than friendship, and he felt an isolation in their midst.

  Alā Shah rose from his chair. “Let us to the horses!” he exclaimed impatiently, and the crowd streamed after him to a nearby field, leaving the wrestlers still grunting and tugging at one another.

  “Ball-and-stick, ball-and-stick!” someone called, and there was immediate applause.

  “So, let us play,” the Shah agreed, and chose three men to be his teammates and four men to oppose them.

  The horses that were led onto the field by grooms were tough little ponies at least a hand smaller than the pampered white stallions. When all were mounted, each player was given a long, limber stick that ended in a crook.

  At each end of the long field were two stone columns, about eight paces apart. Each team cantered its horses to these goals and lined up in front of them, the riders facing one another like opposing armies. An army officer who would serve as judge stood off to the side and rolled a wooden ball, about the size of an Exmouth apple, into the center of the field.

  The people began to shout. The horses hurtled toward one another at a dead gallop, the riders screaming and brandishing their sticks.

  God, Rob J. thought in terror. Look out, look out! Three of the horses came together with a sickening sound and one of them went down and rolled over, sending its rider flying. The Shah brought his stick around and stroked the wooden ball soundly, and the horses plunged after it with flying sward and a pounding of hooves.

  The fallen horse was neighing shrilly as it struggled to stand on a broken hock. A dozen grooms came and cut its throat and dragged it from the field before its rider had gained his feet. He was holding his left arm and grinning through clenched teeth.

  Rob thought the arm might be broken, and approached the injured man. “Shall I help you?”

  “You are a physician?”

  “A barber-surgeon and a student at the maristan.”

  The noble grimaced at him in amazed disgust. “No, no. We must summon al-Juzjani,” he said, and they led him away.

  Another horse and man had joined the game at once. The eight riders apparently had forgotten they were playing and not fighting a battle. They battered their mounts against one another, and in their attempts to flail at the ball and drive it between the goalposts, they struck dangerously close to their opponents and the horses. Even their own mounts weren’t safe from their sticks, for the Shah often stroked at the ball close behind his horse’s flying hooves and beneath the beast’s belly.

  The Shah was given no quarter. Men who undoubtedly would have been slain if they had directed a cross look at their sovereign lord now apparently were doing their best to maim him, and from the grunts and whispers of the spectators, Rob J. judged that they wouldn’t have been displeased if Alā Shah were struck or thrown.

  He was not. Like the others, the Shah rode recklessly, but with a skill numbing to watch, directing his pony without using his hands, which held the stick, and with little apparent gripping of his legs. Instead, Alā maintained a strong, confident seat and rode as if he were an extension of his horse. It was a standard of horseback riding Rob had never met, and he thought with hot embarrassment of the old man who had asked about English horsemanship and had been assured of its excellence.

  The horses were a wonder, for they followed after the ball without slackening speed but could wheel instantly and gallop in the opposite direction, and time and again only this fine control prevented horses and riders from careening into the stone goalposts.

  The air became choked with dust and the spectators screamed themselves hoarse. Drums were pounded and cymbals jangled ecstatically when someone scored, and presently the Shah’s team had driven the ball between the posts five times to their opponents’ three, and the game was over. Alā’s eyes glistened with satisfaction as he dismounted, for he had scored twice himself. In celebration, as the ponies were led away two young bulls were staked in the center of the field and two lions were turned loose upon them. The contest was puzzlingly unfair, for no sooner had the great cats been released than the bulls were pulled down by their handlers and brained with axes, the felines then being allowed to tear the still-quivering flesh.

  Realization came to Rob that this human assistance was given because Alā Shah was the Lion of Persia. It would have been unseemly and the most evil of portents if, by mischance during his own entertainment, a mere bull had gained victory over the symbol of the stalwart might of the King of Kings.

  In the garden, four veiled females swayed and danced to the music of pipers while a poet sang of the houri, the fresh and sensuous virgin women of Paradise.

  The Imam Qandrasseh could have had no objection; though occasionally the curve of a buttock or a thrusting of breast could be seen in the loose stuff of their voluminous black dresses, only the gesturing hands were uncovered, and the feet, rubbed red with henna at which the assembled nobles stared hungrily, reminded of other hennaed places hidden by the black cloth.

  Alā Shah rose from his chair and walked away from those around the pool, past the eunuch holding his naked sword, and into the haram.

  Rob seemed to be the only one staring after the king as Khuff, the Captain of the Gates, came up and began to guard the Third Gate with the eunuch. The level of bright conversation rose; nearby, General Rotun bin Nasr, the host of the king’s entertainment and the master of the house, laughed too loudly at his own joke, as if Alā had not just gone in to his wives in full view of half the court.

  Is this, then, what may be expected of the Most Powerful Master of the Universe? Rob asked himself.


  In an hour the Shah was back, looking benign. Khuff slipped away from the Third Gate and gave an imperceptible sign, and the feasting began.

  The finest white plate was set on cloths of Qum brocade. Bread of four sorts was brought, and eleven kinds of pilah in silver basins so large a single dish would have served the assemblage. The rice in each basin was of a different color and flavor, having respectively been prepared with saffron, or sugar, or peppers, or cinnamon, or cloves, or rhubarb, or pomegranate juice, or the juice of citrons. Four of the enormous trenchers each contained twelve fowl, two contained braised haunches of antelope, one was heaped high with broiled mutton, and four contained whole lambs that had been cooked on a spit to a tender, juicy crackliness.

  Barber, Barber, a pity you are not here!

  For one who had been taught the appreciation of savory food by such a master, in recent months Rob had had more than his share of hurried, spartan meals in order to devote himself to the scholar’s life. Now he sighed and tasted everything with a will.

  As the long shadows turned to dusk, slaves fixed great tapers to the horny carapaces of living tortoises and lighted them. Four oversized kettles were carried in, each hauled from the kitchen on poles; one was full of hens’ eggs made into a cream pudding, one held a rich clear soup with herbs, another was filled with hashed meat made pungent with spices, and the last with slabs of fried fish of a type unfamiliar to Rob, the meat white and flaky like plaice but with the delicacy of trout.

  Shadows turned to darkness. Night birds cried; otherwise the only sounds were soft murmurings, belches, the tearing and crunching of food. Once in a while a tortoise sighed and moved, and the light cast by its candle shifted and flickered, like the moon’s glow shivering on water.

  And still they ate.

  There was a plate of winter salad, root herbs preserved in brine. And a bowl of summer salad, including Roman lettuce and bitter, peppery greens he had never tasted before.

  A deep porringer was set before each person and filled with a sweet-and-sour sherbet. And now servants bore in goatskins of wine, and cups, and dishes of pastries and honeyed nuts and salted seeds.

  Rob sat alone and sipped the good wine, neither speaking nor addressed, watching and listening to everything with the same curiosity with which he had tasted the food.

  The goatskins were emptied of wine and full ones were brought, an inexhaustible supply from the Shah’s own storehouse. People rose and went off to relieve themselves or to vomit. Some were sodden and inert from drink.

  The tortoises moved together, perhaps out of nervousness, pooling the light in a corner and leaving the rest of the garden in darkness. Accompanied by a lyre, a boy eunuch with a high, sweet voice sang of warriors and love, ignoring the fact that near him two men were fighting.

  “Slit of a whore,” one of them snarled drunkenly.

  “Face of a Jew!” the other spat.

  They grappled and rolled, till they were separated and dragged off.

  Eventually the Shah became nauseated and then unconscious, and was carried to his carriage.

  After that Rob slipped away. There was no moon and the way from Rotun bin Nasr’s estate was hard to follow. Out of a deep and bitter urge, he walked on the Shah’s side of the road and once stopped to piss long and satisfyingly on the strewn flowers.

  Horsemen and driven conveyances passed him but no one offered a ride, and it took him hours to return to Ispahan. The sentry had grown accustomed to stragglers returning from the Shah’s entertainment, and the soldier waved him wearily through the gate.

  Halfway across Ispahan Rob stopped and sat on a low wall and contemplated this strangest of cities, where everything was forbidden by the Qu’ran and committed by the people. A man was allowed four wives but most men seemed willing to risk death to sleep with other women, while Alā Shah openly fucked whomever he pleased. Taking wine was proscribed by the Prophet as a sin, yet there was a national craving for wine and a large percentage of the populace drank to excess, and the Shah owned a vast storehouse of fine vintages.

  Musing on the puzzle that was Persia, he went home on unsteady legs under pearling skies and to the lovely sound of the muezzin from the minaret of the Friday Mosque.

  43

  THE MEDICAL PARTY

  Ibn Sina was accustomed to the pious doomsaying of Imam Qandrasseh, who could not control the Shah but who had been warning his advisers with increasing stridency that wine-drinking and licentiousness would bring retribution from a force higher than the throne. To this end the Vizier had been collecting intelligence from abroad and presenting a pattern of evidence that Allah (all-powerful is He!) was furious with sinners all over the earth.

  Travelers along the Silk Road had brought word of disastrous earthquakes and pestilential fogs in the part of China watered by the Kiang and Hoai rivers. In India, a year of drought had been followed by plentiful spring rain, but the burgeoning crops were devoured by a plague of locusts. Great storms had battered the coast of the Arabian Sea, causing flooding that drowned many, while in Egypt there was famine due to the failure of the Nile to rise to the requisite level. In Maluchistan, a smoking mountain opened and spewed forth a river of molten rock. Two mullahs in Nain reported that demons appeared to them in their sleep. Exactly one month before the fast of Ramadan there was a partial eclipse of the sun, and then the heavens appeared to burn; strange celestial fires were observed.

  The worst portent of Allah’s displeasure came from the royal astrologers, who reported with great trepidation that within two months there would be a grand conjunction of the three superior planets, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, in the sign of Aquarius. There were disputes about the exact date when this would occur, but no disagreement about its gravity. Even Ibn Sina heard the news gravely, for he knew that Aristotle had written of the menace inherent in the conjunction of Mars and Jupiter.

  So it seemed preordained when Qandrasseh summoned Ibn Sina one bright, terrible morning and told him pestilence had broken out in Shīrāz, the largest city in the territory of Anshan.

  “What pestilence?”

  “The Death,” the Imam said.

  Ibn Sina blanched and hoped the Imam was wrong, for the Death had been absent from Persia for three hundred years. But his mind went directly to the problem. “Soldiers must be ordered down the Spice Road at once, to turn back all caravans and travelers coming from the south. And we must send a medical party to Anshan.”

  “We do not gain very much from Anshan in taxes,” the Imam said, but Ibn Sina shook his head.

  “It is in our self-interest to contain the disease, for the Death moves readily from place to place.”

  By the time he had returned to his own home, Ibn Sina had decided he couldn’t send a group of his own colleagues, for if the plague should reach Ispahan the physicians would be needed in their own territory. Instead, he would select one physician and a party of apprentices.

  The emergency should be used to temper the best and the strongest, he decided. After some consideration, Ibn Sina took quill, ink, and paper and wrote:

  Hakim Fadil ibn Parviz, leader

  Suleiman-al-Gamal, third-year clerk

  Jesse ben Benjamin, first-year clerk

  Mirdin Askari, second-year clerk

  The party should also contain some of the school’s weakest candidates, in order to give them a single, Allah-sent opportunity to redeem their unfavorable records and go on to become physicians. To this end he added to the list the names:

  Omar Nivahend, third-year clerk

  Abbas Sefi, third-year clerk

  Ali Rashid, first-year clerk

  Karim Harun, seventh-year clerk.

  When the eight young men were assembled and the Chief Physician told them he was sending them to Anshan to fight the Death, they couldn’t look at him or at one another; it was a form of embarrassment.

  “You must each wear arms,” Ibn Sina said, “for it is impossible to determine how people will act when there is a plague.”

 
There was a long, shuddering sigh from Ali Rashid. He was sixteen years old, a round-cheeked boy with soft eyes, so homesick for his family in Hamadhān that he wept day and night and couldn’t apply himself to his studies.

  Rob forced himself to concentrate on what Ibn Sina was saying.

  “… We cannot tell you how to fight it, for it hasn’t appeared in our lifetimes. But we have a book compiled three centuries ago by physicians who survived plagues in different places. We shall give this book to you. Doubtless it contains many theories and remedies of little value, but among them might be information that will be effective.” Ibn Sina stroked his beard. “Against the possibility that the Death is caused by atmospheric contamination from putrid effluvia, I think you must kindle huge fires of aromatic woods in the vicinity of both the sick and the healthy. The healthy should wash in wine or vinegar and sprinkle their houses with vinegar, and they should sniff camphor and other volatile substances.

  “You who will care for the sick should do these things also. You would do well to hold vinegar-soaked sponges to your noses when you approach the afflicted, and to boil all water before drinking, to clarify it and separate off the impurities. And you must manicure your hands daily, for the Qu’ran says the Devil hides beneath the fingernails.”

  Ibn Sina cleared his throat. “Those who survive this plague must not return immediately to Ispahan, lest you bring it here. You will go to a house which stands at Ibrahim’s Rock, one day’s distance to the east of the town of Nain, and three days’ east of here. There you will rest for a month before coming home. Is it understood?”

  They nodded. “Yes, Master,” Hakim Fadil ibn Parviz said tremulously, speaking for all in his new position. Young Ali was weeping silently. Karim Harun’s handsome face was dark with foreboding.

  Finally Mirdin Askari spoke up. “My wife and children … I must make arrangements. To be certain they’ll be all right if …”

  Ibn Sina nodded. “Those of you with responsibilities have only brief hours to make these arrangements.”