by Noah Gordon
58
INDIA
Below Shīrāz they found the Spice Road and followed it until, to avoid the mountainous inland terrain, they moved to the coast near Hormuz. It was winter but the gulf air was warm and perfumed. Sometimes after they had made camp late in the day the soldiers and their animals bathed in the warm saltiness from hot sandy beaches while sentries kept a nervous watch for sharks. The people they saw now were as likely to be blacks or Baluchis as Persians. They were fisher folk or, at the oases that sprang from the coastal sand, farmers who grew dates and pomegranates. They lived in tents or in mud-plastered stone houses with flat roofs; now and then the raiders moved through a wadi where families lived in caves. Rob thought it a poor land, but Mirdin grew exhilarated as they traveled, looking about with soft eyes.
When they reached the fishing villag of Tīz, Mirdin took Rob by the hand and led him to the water’s edge. “There, on the other side,” he said, pointing out at the azure gulf. “There is Masqat. From here, a boat could bring us to my father’s house in a few hours.”
It was tantalizingly close, but next morning they broke camp and went farther away from the Askari family with every step.
Almost a month after they had departed from Ispahan they moved beyond Persia. Changes were made. Alā ordered three rings of sentries around the camp at night, and each morning a new watchword was passed to every man; anyone who tried to get into their camp without knowing the word would be killed.
Once on the soil of the foreign land of Sind the soldiers gave way to their instinct for marauding, and one day the foragers drove women back to the camp the way they drove animals. Alā said he would allow them to have females in the camp for this night only and then no more. It would be difficult enough for six hundred men to approach Mansura undetected, and he wanted no rumors to go before them because of women taken along their way.
It would be a wild night. They saw Karim selecting four of the women with great care.
“Why does he need four?” Rob asked.
“He doesn’t select them for himself,” Mirdin said.
It was true. They observed Karim leading the women to the king’s tent.
“Is this why we struggled to help him pass the examination and become a physician?” Mirdin said bitterly. Rob didn’t answer.
The raiders passed the other females from man to man, choosing lots for turns. Groups stood and watched the rutting and cheered, the sentries being relieved so they could come and share in these first spoils.
Mirdin and Rob sat off to one side with a goatskin of bitter wine. For a time they attempted study, but it wasn’t the occasion to review the Lord’s laws.
“You’ve taught me more than four hundred commandments,” Rob said wonderingly. “Soon we’ll be finished with them.”
“I’ve merely listed them. There are sages who devote their lives to trying to understand the commentaries on just one of the laws.”
The night was filled with screams and drunken sounds.
For years Rob had governed himself well in avoiding strong drink, but now he was lonely and in sexual need undampened by the ugliness taking place about him, and he drank too eagerly.
In a little while he was truculent. Mirdin, amazed that this was his mild and reasoning friend, gave him no excuse. But a passing soldier jostled him and would have been the object of his anger if Mirdin hadn’t soothed and cozened, coddling Rob like a spoiled child and leading him to a sleeping place.
When he awoke in the morning the women were gone and he paid for his foolishness by having to ride the camel with a terrible head. Ever the medical student, Mirdin added to his pain by questioning him at length, at last coming away with a greater understanding that to some men wine must be treated as if it were a poison and a bewitchery.
Mirdin hadn’t thought to bring a weapon to battle but he had brought the Shah’s Game and it was a blessing, for they played each evening until darkness came. Now finally the contests became hard-fought and close, and on occasion when luck was with him, Rob won.
Over the game board he confided his concern for Mary.
“Doubtless she’s fine, for Fara says that having babes is something women have learned to do long since,” Mirdin said cheerfully.
Rob wondered aloud whether the child would be daughter or son.
“How long after her menses had stopped did the fucking take place?”
He shrugged.
“It is written by al-Habib that if intercourse takes place on the first to fifth day after the end of bleeding, it will be a boy. If from the fifth to the eighth day after her period, a girl.” He hesitated, and Rob knew it was because al-Habib also had written that if the mating occurred after the fifteenth day, there was a possibility the child would be a hermaphrodite.
“Al-Habib also writes that brown-eyed fathers make sons and blue-eyed fathers make daughters. Yet I come from a land where most men have blue eyes, and they have always had many sons,” Rob said crossly.
“Doubtless al-Habib wrote only of normal folk such as are found in the East,” Mirdin said.
Sometimes, instead of playing the Shah’s Game they reviewed Ibn Sina’s teachings on the treatment of battle wounds, or they inspected their supplies and made certain they were in readiness as surgeons. It was fortunate that they did, for one evening they were invited to Alā’s tent to share the king’s evening meal and answer his questions about their preparations. Karim was there, greeting his friends uncomfortably; it soon became apparent he had been ordered to question them and judge their efficiency.
Servants brought water and cloths that they might wash their hands before eating. Alā dipped his hands in a beautifully chased golden bowl and wiped them dry on pale blue linen towels worked with Qu’ranic phrases in gold thread.
“Tell us how you’ll treat slash wounds,” Karim said.
Rob told what Ibn Sina had taught: oil was to be boiled and poured into the wound as hot as possible, to ward off suppuration and evil humors.
Karim nodded.
Alā had been listening palely. Now he gave firm instructions that if he himself were mortally struck, they were to dose him with soporifics to ease the pain the very moment after a mullah had led him in final prayer.
The meal was simple by royal standards, spit-roasted fowl and summer greens gathered along the way, but it was better prepared than the fare to which they were accustomed, and it was served on plates. Afterward, while three musicians played dulcimers, Mirdin tested Alā at the Shah’s Game but was easily bested.
It was a welcome change in their routine, but Rob was not unhappy to leave the presence of the king. He didn’t envy Karim, who nowadays often rode on the elephant named Zi, seated in the box with the Shah.
But Rob hadn’t lost his fascination with elephants and watched them closely at every opportunity. Some were laden with bundles of war mail similar to the armor worn by human warriors. Five of the elephants carried twenty extra mahouts brought along by Alā as excess baggage in the hopeful expectation that on the trip back to Ispahan they would be occupied in tending the elephants taken at Mansura. All the mahouts were Indians captured in previous raids, but they had been excellently treated and lavishly rewarded, as befit their value, and the Shah was certain of their loyalty.
The elephants took care of their own foraging. At the end of each day their small, dark keepers accompanied them to vegetation where they ate their fill of grass, leaves, small branches, and bark, often gaining their food by knocking down trees with startling ease.
One evening the feeding elephants frightened from the trees a chattering band of manlike, furry little creatures with tails, which Rob knew from his reading to be monkeys. After that they saw monkeys every day, and a variety of bright-plumaged birds and occasional serpents on the ground and in the trees. Harsha, the Shah’s mahout, told Rob that some of the snakes were deadly. “If someone is bitten, a knife must be used to open the site of the bite and all the poison must be sucked away and spat out. Then a small ani
mal should be killed and the liver tied to the wound to draw it.” The Indian warned that the person doing the sucking must not have a sore or a cut in his mouth. “If he does, the poison will enter and he will die in half an afternoon.”
They passed Buddhas, great sitting gods at which some of the men jeered uncomfortably but which nobody defiled, for though they told each other that Allah was the one true God, there was an amused, subtle menace in the ageless figures that made them realize they were a long way from their homes. Looking up at the looming stone gods, Rob fought them off with a silent recitation of the Paternoster from St. Matthew. That evening perhaps Mirdin fought them off as well, for, lying on the ground surrounded by the Persian army, he taught an especially enthusiastic lesson in the Law.
It was the night when they reached the five hundred and twenty-fourth commandment, on the face of it a puzzling edict: “If a man has committed a sin worthy of death, and he be put to death, and thou hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night upon the tree but thou shalt surely bury him the same day.”
Mirdin told him to mark the words well. “Because of them, we don’t study human dead as did the heathen Greeks.”
Rob’s skin prickled and he sat up.
“The sages and scholars draw three edicts from this commandment,” Mirdin said. “First, if a convicted criminal’s body is to be treated with such respect, then the body of a respected citizen certainly should also be swiftly interred without being subjected to shame or disgrace. Second, whoever keeps his dead unburied overnight transgresses a negative commandment. And third, the body must be interred whole and uncut, for if one leaves out even a small amount of tissue, it’s as if no burial took place at all.”
“This is what’s done the mischief,” Rob said wonderingly. “Because this law forbids leaving a murderer’s body unburied, Christians and Muslims and Jews have kept physicians from studying that which they seek to heal!”
“It’s God’s commandment,” Mirdin said sternly.
Rob lay back and studied the darkness. Nearby, a foot soldier snored loudly and beyond that unpleasant sound someone hawked and spat. For the hundredth time he asked himself what he was doing in their midst. “I think your way is disrespect for the dead. To throw them into the earth with such haste, as if you can’t wait to get them out of sight.”
“It’s true we don’t fuss over the corpse. After the funeral we honor the memory of the person through shiva, seven days in which the mourners stay inside their house in grief and prayer.”
Frustration welled, and Rob felt as savage as if he had wallowed in strong drink. “It makes little sense. It’s an ignorant commandment.”
“You shall not say that God’s word is ignorant!”
“I’m not speaking of God’s word. I’m talking of man’s interpretation of God’s word. That has kept the world in ignorance and darkness for a thousand years.”
For a moment Mirdin was silent. “Your approval isn’t required,” he said finally. “Nor is wisdom or decency. Our agreement was simply that you would study God’s laws.”
“Yes, I agreed to study. I didn’t agree to close off my mind or withhold my judgment.”
This time Mirdin didn’t reply.
Two days later, they came at last to the banks of a great river, the Indus. There was an easy ford a few miles north but the mahouts told them that sometimes it was guarded by soldiers, so they traveled south a few miles to another ford, deeper but still passable. Khuff set a party of men to building rafts. Those who were able swam to the far bank with the animals. Those who were not swimmers poled across on the rafts. Some of the elephants walked on the river bottom, submerged save for their trunks, which extended out of the water and gave them air! When the river became too deep even for them, the elephants swam as well as horses.
On the other side the raiders reassembled and began to move north again, toward Mansura, making a wide sweep around the guarded ford.
Karim summoned Mirdin and Rob to the Shah, and for a time they rode with Alā on Zi’s back. Rob had to concentrate on the king’s words, for the world was different atop an elephant.
Alā’s spies had reported to him in Ispahan that Mansura was but lightly guarded. The old Rajah of that place, who had been a fierce commander, had recently died and it was said his sons were poor soldiers who undermanned their garrisons.
“Now I must send out scouts to confirm this,” Alā said. “You shall go, for it occurs to me that two Dhimmi merchants can approach Mansura without raising comment.”
Rob resisted the impulse to glance at Mirdin.
“You must keep your eyes open for elephant traps near the village. Sometimes these people build wooden frames through which project sharp iron spikes, and bury them in shallow trenches outside their walls. These devastate the elephants, and we must know that they are not in use here before we commit our beasts.”
Rob nodded. When one rode an elephant all things appeared possible. “Yes, Majesty,” he told the Shah.
The raiders made camp, where they would wait until the scouts returned. Rob and Mirdin left their camels, which were obviously military beasts bred for speed and not for burden, and led two asses away from the encampment.
It was a fresh, sunny morning. In the overripe forest savage birds challenged and shrieked, and a company of monkeys scolded them from a tree.
“I should like to dissect a monkey.”
Mirdin was still angry with him, and was finding even less enjoyment in becoming a secret observer than in being a soldier. “Why?” he demanded.
“Why, to discover what I may,” Rob said, “even as Galen dissected Barbary apes to learn.”
“I thought you had determined to be a physician.”
“That is being a physician.”
“No, that is being a dissector. I’ll be a physician, spending all my days caring for the people of Masqat in time of sickness, which is what a physician does. You can’t fix your mind whether to be a surgeon or a dissector or a physician or a … a midwife with balls! You want it all!”
Rob smiled at his friend but said nothing more. He had little defense, for to a great extent what Mirdin accused him of was true.
They traveled for a time in silence. Twice they passed Indian men, a farmer up to his ankles in the muck of a roadside irrigation ditch, and two men in the road lugging a pole from which hung a basket filled with yellow plums. This pair hailed them in a language neither Rob nor Mirdin could comprehend and they could but answer with a smile; Rob hoped they wouldn’t walk as far as the encampment, for now anyone who came upon the raiders would at once become a slave or a corpse.
Presently half a dozen men leading donkeys came toward them around a bend in the road and Mirdin grinned at Rob for the first time, for these travelers wore dusty leather Jew’s hats like their own, and black caftans that bore witness to hard journeying.
“Shalom!” Rob called when they were close enough.
“Shalom aleikhem! And well met.”
Their spokesman and leader said he was Hillel Nafthali, spice merchant of Ahwaz. He was bluff and smiling, with a livid strawberry birthmark that covered the cheek under his left eye, and he appeared willing to spend the entire day in introductions and the recital of pedigrees. One of the men with him was his brother Ari, one was his son, and the other three were husbands of his daughters. He didn’t know Mirdin’s father but had heard of the pearl-buying Askari family of Masqat, and the exchange of names went on and on until finally they reached a distant Nafthali cousin with whom Mirdin had acquaintance, thus satisfying both sides that they were not strangers.
“You’ve come from the north?” Mirdin said.
“We’ve been to Multan. A small errand,” Nafthali said with a satisfaction that indicated the magnitude of the transaction. “Where do you travel?”
“Mansura. Business, a bit of this, a bit of that,” Rob said, and the men nodded with respect. “Do you know Mansura well?”
“Very well. In fact, we spent last nigh
t there with Ezra ben Husik, who deals in peppercorns. A most worthy man, always excellent hospitality.”
“Then you have observed the garrison there?” Rob said.
“The garrison?” Nafthali gazed at them, puzzled.
“How many soldiers are stationed in Mansura?” Mirdin asked quietly.
Understanding dawned, and Nafthali drew back, appalled. “We do not become involved in such things,” he said in a low voice, almost a whisper.
They began to turn away, in a moment they would be gone. Rob knew it was time for a show of faith. “You must not continue very far down this road on peril of your life. Nor must you turn back to Mansura.”
They gazed at him palely.
“Then where shall we go?” Nafthali said.
“Lead your animals off the road and hide in the woods. Stay hidden as long as necessary—until you have heard a great many men going by. When they have all passed, return to the road and go to Ahwaz as fast as you are able.”
“We thank you,” Nafthali said bleakly.
“Is it safe for us to approach Mansura?” Mirdin asked.
The spice merchant nodded. “They are accustomed to seeing Jewish traders.”
Rob was unsatisfied. Remembering the sign language that Loeb had taught him on the way east to Ispahan, the secret signals by which Jewish merchants in the East conducted their business without conversation, he held out his hand and turned it, the signal for How many?
Nafthali gazed at him. Finally he placed his right hand on his left elbow, the sign for hundreds. Then he spread all five fingers. Hiding the thumb of his left hand, he spread the other fingers and placed them on his right elbow.
Rob had to be certain he understood. “Nine hundred soldiers?”
Nafthali nodded. “Shalom,” he said with quiet irony.
“Peace be with you,” Rob said.
