The Physician

by Noah Gordon

  “What can Masūd want with the mullahs?” he asked al-Juzjani.

  “Doubtless his spies have told him of Alā’s troubles with them. I think he intends to rule here some day soon and bargains with the mosques for blessings and obedience.”

  It may have been so, for soon Masūd and his aides returned to their troops and there was no pillaging. The Sultan was young, hardly more than a boy, but he and Alā could have been kinsmen: they had the same proud, cruel predator’s face. They watched him unwind the clean white turban, which was then carefully stowed away, and put on a filthy black turban before he resumed the march.

  The Afghans rode to the north, following the route taken by Alā’s army.

  “The Shah was wrong in thinking they would come by way of Hamadhān.”

  “I think the main Ghazna force is in Hamadhān already,” al-Juzjani said slowly.

  Rob realized he was right. The departing Afghans were far fewer in number than the Persian army and there were no war elephants among them; they had to have another force. “Then Masūd is springing a trap?”

  Al-Juzjani nodded.

  “We can ride to warn the Persians!”

  “It is too late, or Masūd wouldn’t have left us alive. At any rate,” al-Juzjani said with irony, “it little matters whether Alā defeats Masūd or Masūd defeats Alā. If the Imam Qandrasseh truly has gone to lead the Seljuks to Ispahan, ultimately neither Masūd nor Alā will prevail. The Seljuks are fearsome, and they are as numerous as the sands of the sea.”

  “If the Seljuks come, or if Masūd returns to take this city, what will become of the maristan?”

  Al-Juzjani shrugged. “The hospital will close for a while and we’ll all scurry to hide from disaster. Then we’ll come out of our holes and life will be same as before. With our Master I have served half a dozen kings. Monarchs come and go, but the world continues to need physicians,” he said.

  Rob asked Mary for the money for the book, and the Qanūn became his. It filled him with awe to hold it in his hand. Never had he owned a book before, but so great was his delight in proprietorship of this book that he vowed there would be others.

  Yet he didn’t spend overly long reading it, for Qasim’s room drew him.

  He dissected several nights a week and began to use his drawing materials, hungry to do more but unable because he required a minimum of sleep in order to function in the maristan during the day.

  In one of the corpses he studied, that of a young man who had been knifed in a wineshop brawl, he found the little cecum appendage enlarged and with its surface reddened and rough, and he surmised he was looking at the earliest stage of the side sickness, when the patient would begin to get the first intermittent pangs. He now had a picture of the progress of the illness from onset to death, and he wrote in his casebook:

  Perforating abdominal distemper has been witnessed in six patients, each of whom died.

  The first decided symptom of the disease is sudden abdominal pain.

  The pain is usually intense and rarely slight.

  Occasionally it is accompanied by an ague and more often by nausea and vomiting.

  The abdominal pain is followed by fever as the next constant symptom.

  A circumscribed resistance is felt on palpation of the right lower belly, with the area often agonized by pressure and the abdominal muscles tense and rigid.

  The condition comes to an appendage of the cecum which in appearance is not unlike a fat, pink earthworm of common variety. Should this organ become angry or infected it turns red and then black, fills with pus and finally bursts, its contents escaping into the general abdominal cavity.

  In that event death follows rapidly, as a rule within half an hour to thirty-six hours of the onset of high fever.

  He cut and studied only those parts of the body that would be covered by the burial shroud. This excluded the feet and the head, a frustration because he was no longer content with examining a pig’s brain. His respect for Ibn Sina remained unbounded, but he had become aware that in certain areas his mentor had himself been taught incorrectly about the skeleton and the musculature and had passed on the misinformation.

  Rob worked patiently, uncovering and sketching muscles like wire and like strands of rope, some beginning in a cord and ending in a cord, some with flat attachment, some with round attachment, some with cord only at one end, and some that were compound muscles with two heads, their special value apparently being that if one head is injured the other will take over its function. He began in ignorance and gradually, in a constant state of fevered and dreamlike excitement, he learned. He made sketches of bone and joint structure, shape, and position, realizing that such drawings would be invaluable in teaching young doctors how to deal with sprains and fractures.

  Always when he finished working he shrouded and returned the bodies and took his drawings away with him. He no longer felt that he peered into the pit of his own damnation, but he never lost the awareness of the terrible end that awaited him if he were discovered. Dissecting in the uneven, flickering lamplight of the airless little room, he started at every noise and froze in terror on the rare occasion when someone walked past the door.

  He had good reason for his fear.

  Early one morning he removed from the charnel house the body of an elderly woman who had died only a short time before. Outside the door he looked up to see a nurse coming toward him, carrying the body of a man. The woman’s head lolled and one arm swung as Rob stopped wordlessly and gazed at the nurse, who bent his head politely.

  “Shall I help you with that one, Hakim?”

  “She’s not heavy.”

  Preceding the nurse, he went back inside and they laid the two bodies side by side and left the charnel house together.

  The pig he had dissected had lasted only four days, rapidly reaching a state of ripeness that made disposal a necessity. Yet opening the human stomach and gut released odors far worse than the sickly-sweet stench of porcine rot. Despite soap and water, the smell permeated the place.

  One morning he bought a new hog. That afternoon he walked past Qasim’s room to discover the hadji Davout Hosein rattling the locked door.

  “Why is it locked? What is inside?”

  “It’s a room in which I am dissecting a pig,” Rob said calmly.

  The deputy governor of the school gazed at him in disgust. These days, Davout Hosein looked at everything with stern suspicion, for he had been delegated by the mullahs to police the maristan and the madrassa for infractions of Islamic law.

  Several times that day, Rob observed him hovering watchfully.

  That evening Rob went home early. Next morning when he came to the hospital he saw that the lock on the door of the little room had been forced and broken. Inside, things were as he had left them—but not quite. The pig lay covered on the table. His instruments had been disarranged but none was missing. They had found nothing to incriminate him, and he was safe for the moment. But the intrusion had chilling implications.

  He knew sooner or later he would be discovered, but he was learning precious facts and seeing marvelous things and was not ready to stop.

  He waited two days, in which the hadji left him alone. An old man died in the hospital while holding a quiet conversation with him. That night he opened the body to see what had accomplished so peaceful a death and found that the artery which had fed the heart and the lower members was parched and shrunken, a withered leaf.

  In a child’s body he saw why cancer had received its name, noting how the hungry crablike growth had extended its claws in every direction. In another man’s body he found that the liver, instead of being soft and of a rich red-brown, had turned into a yellowish object of woody hardness.

  The following week he dissected a woman several months pregnant and sketched the womb in the swollen belly like an inverted drinking glass cradling the life that had been forming in it. In the drawing he gave her the face of Despina, who would never give life to a child. He labeled it the Pregnant Wom
an.

  And one night he sat by the dissection table and created a young man to whom he gave the features of Karim, an imperfect likeness but a recognizable one to anybody who had loved him. Rob drew the figure as if the skin were made of glass. What he couldn’t see for himself in the body on the table he drew as Galen had claimed it existed. He knew some of this unsubstantiated detail would be inaccurate, but still the drawing was remarkable even to him, showing organs and blood vessels as if the eye of God were peering through man’s solid flesh.

  When it was completed he exultantly signed his name and the date and labeled the drawing the Transparent Man.

  73

  THE HOUSE IN HAMADHĀN

  All this time there had been no news of the war. By prearrangement four caravans laden with supplies had gone out in search of the army, but they were never seen again and it was supposed they had found Alā and had been absorbed into the fighting. And then one afternoon just before Fourth Prayer a rider came, bearing the worst possible intelligence.

  As had been surmised, by the time Masūd had paused in Ispahan his main force already had found the Persians and was engaging them. Masūd had sent two of his senior generals, Abū Sahl al-Hamdûnī and Tāsh Farrāsh, to lead his army along the expected route. They planned and executed the frontal attack perfectly. Splitting their force in two, they hid behind the village of al-Karaj and sent forth their scouts. When the Persians drew close enough, Abū Sahl al-Hamdūnī’s host streamed from around one side of al-Karaj and Tāsh Farrāsh’s Afghans came around the other side. They fell upon Alā Shah’s men on two flanks, which rapidly drew together until the Ghazna army was reunited across a giant semicircular line of combat, like a net.

  After their initial surprise the Persians fought bravely but they were outnumbered and outmaneuvered, and they lost ground steadily for days. Finally they discovered that at their back was another Ghazna force led by Sultan Masūd. Then the fighting grew ever more desperate and savage, but the end was inevitable. In front of the Persians was the superior force of the two Ghazna generals. Behind them, the cavalry of the Sultan, small in number and vicious, waged a conflict similar to the historic battle between the Romans and the ancient Persians, but this time Persia’s enemy was the ephemeral harrying force. The Afghans struck again and again and always melted away to reappear in another rear sector.

  Finally, when the bloodied Persians had been sufficiently weakened and confused, under cover of a sandstorm Masūd launched the full power of all three of his armies in all-out attack.

  Next morning, the sun disclosed sand swirling over the bodies of men and beasts, the better part of the Persian army. Some had escaped and it was rumored Alā Shah was among them, the messenger said, but this wasn’t certain.

  “What has befallen Ibn Sina?” al-Juzjani asked the man.

  “Ibn Sina left the army well before it reached al-Karaj, Hakim. He had been afflicted by a terrible colic that rendered him helpless, and so with the Shah’s permission the youngest physician among the surgeons, one Bibi al-Ghurī, took him to the city of Hamadhān, where Ibn Sina still owns the house that had been his father’s.”

  “I know the place,” al-Juzjani said.

  Rob knew al-Juzjani would go there. “Let me come too,” he said.

  For a moment jealous resentment flickered in the older physician’s eyes, but reason quickly won and he nodded.

  “We shall leave at once,” he said.

  It was a hard and gloomy trip. They pushed their horses hard, not knowing if they would find him alive when they arrived. Al-Juzjani was made dumb by despair and this wasn’t to be wondered at; Rob had loved Ibn Sina for relatively few years, while al-Juzjani had worshiped the Prince of Physicians all his life.

  It was necessary for them to circle to the east to avoid the war, which for all they knew, was still being fought in the territory of Hamadhān. But when they reached the capital city that gave the territory its name, Hamadhān appeared sleepy and peaceable, with no hint of the great slaughter that had taken place only a few miles away.

  When Rob saw the house it seemed to him that it suited Ibn Sina better than the grand estate in Ispahan. This mud-and-stone house was like the clothing Ibn Sina always wore, unprepossessing, shabby and comfortable.

  But within was the stench of illness.

  Al-Juzjani jealously asked Rob to wait outside the chamber in which Ibn Sina lay. Moments later Rob heard a low murmur of voices and then, to his surprise and alarm, the unmistakable sound of a blow.

  The young physician named Bibi al-Ghurī emerged from the chamber. His face was white and he was weeping. He pushed past Rob without greeting and rushed from the house.

  Al-Juzjani came out a short while later, followed by an elderly mullah.

  “The young charlatan has doomed Ibn Sina. When they arrived here, al-Ghurī gave the Master celery seed to break the wind of the colic. But instead of two danaqs of seed he gave five dirhams, and ever since then Ibn Sina has passed great amounts of blood.”

  There were six dānaqs to a dirham; that meant that fifteen times the recommended dosage of the brutal cathartic had been given.

  Al-Juzjani looked at him. “I myself served on the examining board that passed al-Ghurī,” he said bitterly.

  “You weren’t able to look into the future and see this mistake,” Rob said gently.

  But al-Juzjani wasn’t to be consoled. “What a cruel irony,” he said, “that the great physician should be undone by an inept hakim!”

  “Is the Master aware?”

  The mullah nodded. “He has freed his slaves and given his wealth to the poor.”

  “May I go in?”

  Al-Juzjani waved his hand.

  Inside the chamber, Rob was shocked. In the four months since he had last seen him, Ibn Sina’s flesh had melted. His closed eyes were sunken, his face looked caved in, and his skin was waxen.

  Al-Ghurī had done him harm, but mistreatment had only served to hasten the inevitable result of the stomach cancer.

  Rob took his hands and felt so little life that he found it hard to speak. Ibn Sina’s eyes opened. They bore into his; he felt they could see his thoughts, and there was no need for dissembling. “Why is it, Master,” he asked bitterly, “that despite all a physician is able to do, he is as a leaf before the wind, and the real power lies only with Allah?”

  To his mystification, a brilliance illuminated the wasted features. And suddenly he knew why Ibn Sina was attempting to smile.

  “That is the riddle?” he asked faintly.

  “It is the riddle … my European. You must spend the rest of your life … seeking … to answer it.”

  “Master?”

  Ibn Sina had closed his eyes again and didn’t answer. For a time Rob sat next to him in silence.

  “I could have gone elsewhere without dissembling,” he said in English. “To the Western Caliphate—Toledo, Cordova. But I’d heard of a man. Avicenna, whose Arab name seized me like a spell and shook me like an ague. Abu Ali at-Husain ibn Abdullah ibn Sina.”

  He couldn’t have understood more than his name, yet he opened his eyes again and his hands put a slight pressure on Rob’s.

  “To touch the hem of your garment. The greatest physician in the world,” Rob whispered.

  He scarcely remembered the tired, world-whipped carpenter who had been his natural father. Barber had treated him well but had stopped short of affection. This was the only father his soul had known. He forgot about the things he had scorned and was conscious only of a need.

  “I ask your blessing.”

  The halting words Ibn Sina spoke were pure Arabic but it was unnecessary to understand them. He knew Ibn Sina had blessed him long before.

  He kissed the old man goodbye. When he left, the mullah had settled by the bed again and was reading aloud from the Qu’ran.

  74

  THE KING OF KINGS

  He rode back to Ispahan by himself. Al-Juzjani had remained in Hamadhān, making it plain that he wished to be
alone with his dying Master in the final days.

  “We shall never see Ibn Sina again,” Rob told Mary gently when he returned home, and she averted her face and wept like a child.

  As soon as he had rested he hurried to the maristan. Without either Ibn Sina or al-Juzjani the hospital was disorganized and full of loose ends, and he spent a long day examining and treating patients, lecturing on wounds and—a distasteful chore—meeting with the hadji Davout Hosein regarding the general administration of the school.

  Because of the uncertain times, many of the students had left their apprenticeships and returned to their homes outside the city. “This leaves few medical clerks to do the work of the hospital,” the hadji grumbled. Fortunately, the patient population was correspondingly low, people instinctively feeling more concern about impending military violence than about illness.

  That night Mary’s eyes were red and swollen and she and Rob clung to one another with a tenderness that had almost been forgotten.

  In the morning when he left the little house in Yehuddiyyeh he could feel change in the air like dampness before an English storm.

  In the Jewish market most of the shops were uncharacteristically empty, and Hinda was frantically packing up the goods in her stall.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “The Afghans.”

  He rode to the wall. When he climbed the stairs he found the top lined with strangely silent people and at once saw the reason for their fear, for the host of Ghazna lay assembled in great strength. Masūd’s foot warriors filled half the small plain outside the western wall of the city. The horsemen and camel soldiers were encamped across the foothills, and war elephants were tethered on the higher slopes near the tents and booths of the nobles and commanders, whose standards snapped in the dry wind. In the midst of the camp, floating above all, was the serpentine banner of the Ghaznavids, a black leopard’s head on an orange field.