The Healer's Daughters

by Jay Amberg

  The white pick-up truck coming fast down the track leaves a trail of red-brown dust. She goes on counting her breaths—three seconds in and three out. The pick-up slows and stops twenty meters from her Dacia. A young man, perhaps Serkan’s age, gets out slowly and deliberately, then quickly closes the door to the dust that is settling around him. He has on sunglasses but no hat. Unarmed, or at least carrying no unconcealed weapon, he walks calmly toward the Dacia. As he approaches, he waves his right hand at the guard and says, “Stand back. Cover me.”

  The young man is tall, but not Serkan’s height. His shoulders are square and the line of his jaw strong. He is lean, but in the way of a country village, not a gym. Although they have never met, she feels as though she knows him.

  He leans down, rests his wrist on the top of the window well, and says, very respectfully, “Good afternoon.”

  Boroğlu widens her eyes, looks into his face, and says, “Good afternoon, young man. What is going on here?” Her voice holds a mixture of equal parts confusion and irritation.

  “This is private property,” he answers, again respectfully. Smoke from her cigarette twirls toward him.

  “Oh,” she says as if she didn’t know. He must recognize the Dacia as well as she does the white pick-up that has, periodically, followed her around the valley.

  “It is…,” he pauses, looking for a gentle word, “restricted.”

  “Oh,” she repeats. “It is?” She looks out through the windshield at the hill, a washed-out green covered with wild grass and shrubs. Gray rock juts in irregular formations near the summit.

  “You are…trespassing.”

  She purses her lips. “Who is the owner?” She already knows, of course. She has checked the property deeds, and one of the Hamits’ holding companies is the owner of record.

  “He…” The young man leans back. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does to me!” She crushes her cigarette butt in the Dacia’s almost-filled ashtray.

  “And who are you?” Irritation is creeping into his voice.

  “A resident of Bergama.” Glancing back at the rifle still pointing at her, she adds, “I’m looking for an old friend who lived here.”

  “She… No one lives here.”

  Boroğlu holds up her pack of cigarettes. “Would you like one?”

  “No,” he says sharply, but then, momentarily disarmed, he drums his fingers on the window well and adds, “thank you.” His fingernails are dirty deep into the quick. “You can’t stay here.”

  “But what about my friend?”

  “No one lives here!”

  “She did. For a long time.”

  He drums his fingers more rapidly. “What is her…your friend’s name?”

  Smiling, she tosses the pack of cigarettes next to the thermos on the passenger seat and then gazes again at the hill. “Cybele Meter.”

  He doesn’t react. He may be in charge here, but he’s not an archeologist, not fully aware of what’s really going on.

  “No,” he says. “No one by that name. No women are working on the site at all.”

  Taking a deep breath, she shakes her head as though she is becoming exasperated. “Perhaps I’m just confused.” In fact, though, he has just given her the exact information for which she has come.

  He looks over at the guard. “Maybe you are.”

  “I won’t bother anyone. I promise.”

  He shakes his head as though she is already bothering him.

  “Still, I’d like to look for her. It’s important that I get in touch…”

  “You…” He pulls off his sunglasses. “You need to leave. Now!”

  His eyes are bright green, that sea-glass green of Mustafa Hamit’s eyes. She drops her gaze, as if in submission. “But—”

  “Now! Immediately!” He really could be Mustafa junior, except that, as she has learned, the Hamit scion lacks this man’s roughness, his ruggedness.

  She turns the Dacia’s ignition key. “I will…,” she begins but then hesitates. “May I speak to the owner?”

  “He…they’re not…” His eyes gleam as he leans in closer. “Leave. Please!” That last word is wholly a command.

  “Okay, okay.” She shifts the car into reverse.

  The moment he notices the dashcam is on, she pops the clutch, and the old Dacia doesn’t stall. He jerks his arm past her face to rip out the dashcam, but he’s too late. The back of his hand slaps her as she pulls away. Though the Georgian guard does not shoot through the dust, she doesn’t breathe until she is forty meters back down the track. And only when she has turned the car around and reached the Bergama–Dikili road does she smile. She has sent the Hamits a message they can’t and won’t ignore—and one that is absolutely false. With any luck, they will go on digging here for an eternity.

  16

  PERGAMON; 159 CE

  Galen pulls the silk thread taut, loops it, and ties off the final stitch. He wipes blood and sweat from his hands and forearms; his tunic is splattered, but there’s nothing to be done about that. He reaches for the beaker of ointment, both analgesic and antiseptic, he has made to protect the wound. The gladiator, a stout, thickly muscled Syrian, breathes heavily and stares at the low stone ceiling of the colosseum’s spoliarium. He gives no other sign of the pain caused by the deep sword wound in his thigh.

  As Galen spreads the ointment, he says, “Rest now. You will be back in the arena for the next festival.” The Syrian closes his eyes but doesn’t otherwise move.

  The ointment’s aroma mixes with the stench of the spoliarium, which doubles as the colosseum’s morgue. Galen wraps linen bandages around the wound, takes a deep breath, and stares at the candle he used to heat the ingredients with which he cauterized the wound. The stone walls thunder as the forty-eight thousand people above him cheer the beginning of the afternoon’s final bout.

  Galen is, at twenty-nine, the youngest man ever to be appointed Pergamon’s physician to the High Priest of Asia’s gladiators. He is certainly well-educated, having studied here under Satyrus and in Smyrna, Corinth, and, for eight years, Alexandria, the world’s center of medical training. But none of his teachers’ knowledge, their often contentious philosophies, their ineffectual treatments, their rudimentary understanding of anatomy, and their senseless appeals to the gods for mercy have prepared him for attending to the gladiators. Working on their gaping wounds has revealed to Galen an empirical world that his elders seldom considered—and never understood. He has discovered an anatomical universe of human veins and arteries, tendons and muscles, organs and intestines, hot and pulsing blood, and, when a treatment is erroneous, decay and putrescence. He has, unlike his predecessors, never lost a gladiator because of maltreatment.

  Now, well into his second term, Galen is finally experiencing death. He has seen death often, of course, from afar and up close, in his work. When he attended the gladiatoral games as a boy, death was on display in the slaughtered animals and in the noxii, the Empire’s condemned criminals and traitors who suffered spectacularly and then were dragged deceased from the arena. In his studies, he has dissected pigs and monkeys. The dying and the dead have been woven into the fabric of his life, but the only death that Galen has ever felt deeply was his father’s.

  When Galen was nineteen and beginning his study of medicine, Aelius Nicon wasted slowly from a disease that ran its devastating and irrevocable course with nothing of the arena’s drama and fanfare. In Nicon’s last months, Galen spent a great deal of time with him, but by degrees Nicon lost the ability to walk and stand, and then to write and speak, and ultimately to eat and drink. In the final week, all that was left to them was the fond, suffering gaze in Nicon’s eyes and the sorrowful devotion in Galen’s. During the interminable two days after his father became unresponsive, the man’s soul departed so gradually that, despite Galen’s co
nstant vigilance, the process, enshrouded by grief, was imperceptable.

  As the crowd above roars repeatedly, Galen peers at the second gladiator lying on a stretcher near the spoliarium’s tunnel into the arena. Like the Syrian, he is clean-shaven, but he is taller and not as thick. His face is long like Galen’s, and his nose Roman. Stripped of his helmet and armor, he wears only a loin cloth. His breathing is shallow, his skin gray. A bloodstained bandage covers the left side of his chest from his armpit to his nipple.

  Wiping his hands again on a clean linen, Galen crosses to the stretcher, drops to one knee, and leans close to the dying man to check the wound. The sword’s blade, entering at an angle in the narrow space between the shoulder and the armor, went deep. The thrust must have been perfectly timed and brilliantly placed. The wound is fatal, as any wound to the heart is, but the blade tore only the endocardium and not the ventricle. Galen has not closed the wound because if he did, the bleeding would become even more painful. The man is slowly bleeding out; his soul will depart his body soon, sometime in the next half hour.

  As Galen takes the man’s pulse, which has weakened, the gladiator opens his eyes and turns his head slightly so that their eyes meet, but he is stoic, giving no indication of the severe pain he suffers. After the crowd goes silent for a moment and then cheers even louder, the executor enters the spoliarium from the arena’s tunnel. A large man dressed as Charon, the Etruscan god of death, carries the heavy mallet used to finish off dying gladiators. Earlier in the day, he was busy with the noxii and the damnati, but his business now is only the man on the stretcher.

  “Go away!” Galen says. Neither he nor the gladiator looks away from the mallet’s bloody, diamond-shaped head.

  “The High Priest commands it.” The executor’s deep voice is devoid of emotion.

  Galen stands so that he faces the Charon. “I said, leave this man be!” His voice is imperious. “He is dying. Beyond help.”

  As Galen’s dark eyes bore into him, the executor takes a step back. He raises the mallet so that the iron diamond gleams darkly. “That is why it is ordered.”

  “Yes. But in his own time.”

  “I will report—”

  “Do that,” Galen shouts. “Tell the High Priest that I take full reponsibility for this man’s death.”

  The Charon backs into the mouth of the tunnel, turns abruptly, and stomps toward the thundering arena where the crowd is chanting the names of both gladiators. The final bout has obviously been a success.

  Galen pulls his stool close to the stretcher and sits. The man’s face is ashen, but he never flinched during the altercation. Galen knows him both from Pergamon’s gladiator training encampment and from the parchment posters plastered about the city. He is not as infamous as those fighting in the day’s final bouts, but he has a following. He is an auctori, a free man who originally chose the enslavement of the arena in order to pay off his debts. Noted for his fierce bravery in more than a dozen bouts, he was again granted freedom—but enslaved himself once more so that he could keep fighting in the arena.

  “What is your name?” Galen asks, even though he knows it.

  “Pectoris of Smyrna.” The man’s voice is hoarse.

  Galen nods. The man is still rational. His lips are cracked and dry, so Galen offers him water from a clay cup. “I studied in Smyrna.”

  The man swallows water until the cup is empty.

  “The light there is good,” Galen adds.

  The man looks more carefully at Galen. “Yes, it is.” His eyes close for a moment, as though memory has taken him. When he looks again at Galen, he says, “I accept the mallet.”

  “I know. But I want you to die naturally. With dignity.” He does not add, So that I may experience it. Galen takes a sponge and wipes the gladiator’s forehead and neck. He remembers doing this for his father, but his father was withering and this man is not. His father’s soul slipped away. This man’s is not. As his heart weakens, his soul neither wavers nor shrinks. Most doctors believe that a man’s soul resides in his heart, but it is clearly not so. This man retains an internal dignity that goes far beyond the gladiators’ oath. Although Galen has forsaken the Olympian gods, he still believes deeply in the human soul. Every man carries within him a divine spark, and Pectoris of Smyrna’s soul remains present, fully evident, even in his final moments.

  The noise above and through the tunnel becomes cacophonous. A melee between factions must have erupted in the stands, as it sometimes does, but the plebians trampled, beaten, or otherwise injured are not Galen’s concern. Pectoris of Smyrna’s heartbeat is fading, but his soul remains firm. Could the soul and the mind, the spirit, reside most deeply not in the heart or liver, as Aristotle had said long before, but in the brain?

  17

  ISTANBUL

  At six minutes to 10:00, Serkan Boroğlu takes a seat on the stone bench that runs along the outer wall in the garden of the Suleyman Mosque. A breeze rising from the Golden Horn stirs the heat. No one else is in the garden except for an old man with a cane tottering along the path toward Suleyman’s tomb and a young couple, he in a white shirt and she in a red headscarf, sitting under a tree off to Serkan’s right. He takes out his smartphone and waits for the next message, the third he will have had since 9:15. The first instructed him to move from the steps of the New Mosque to a café near the main entrance to the grand bazaar, and the second from there to this garden. This last move was uphill all the way, and, though he’s not winded, he’s sticky here in the sun—and not at all happy. He didn’t really sleep last night, and the climb has made his headache worse. He has met with the Hamits’ rep four times before, but there has never been this senseless faux-spy security where he has had to trudge from point to point.

  The man who approaches him at exactly 10:00 is about his age, shorter but more lean. He is clean-shaven, and his dark hair is freshly trimmed. Both his pale-green sport shirt and his khaki pants are pressed. He is altogether handsome in a stylish, male model sort of way. “Hello, Serkan,” he says when he comes close. “May I sit down?”

  “Of course,” Serkan says. He sees himself as a man of the world, but this guy is clearly more cosmopolitan, right down to his Italian slip-ons.

  “Another perfect day in paradise,” the guy says as he brushes off the bench. He doesn’t give his name, but Serkan is sure he has seen him before in one of the after-hours clubs or, perhaps, on one of the online gossip sites.

  Serkan doesn’t quite know what to answer so he simply nods. Small pleasantries were never a part of the four earlier deals with the disheveled and disgruntled bald man who was his contact. When he glances to his left, he notices a stout, middle-aged man standing at attention fifty meters away on the path along the wall. He wears a dark, shiny suit jacket despite the heat.

  “May I have your cell phone?” The guy’s eyes are bright green, and his tone is so polite that it’s menacing.

  Serkan stares at his phone for a moment before handing it over. Without looking at the phone, the guy turns it off and sets it on the mottled stone between them. “You have some business for us?” he says, his voice oily. His fingernails are manicured. The breeze off the Golden Horn riffles his hair, and so he smooths it out.

  Serkan takes a breath. He’s not going to let this guy’s superiority get to him. “I have customers,” he says. “An American and his wife.”

  “His wife?” The skepticism drips.

  “Yes. Definitely his wife.” Off to Serkan’s right, a younger, even more muscular man has appeared on the path. His arms are folded across his chest as he scans the mosque’s grounds.

  “And they have an interest in antiquities?”

  “They do. Specifically, a golden amulet. Roman or older. The mother goddess.”

  “Demeter? Or Cybele? Or…?”

  “I’m not… It doesn’t matter.” Deliberately not lo
oking left or right, Serkan glances across the path at the light post next to three cypresses braced with wooden rails. “Authenticity matters.”

  “I…we will provide something that suits him and pleases the wife.”

  “They’re pretty clear on what they want.”

  “And the price range?”

  Serkan takes another breath and says, “They will pay for quality.”

  Crossing his legs, the guy gazes over at the nearest of the mosque’s four minarets. “My family will provide something beyond their expectations.” He picks absently at the crease in his khakis. “How shall we get in touch with him?”

  “Them. Her. She, the wife, will make the choice.”

  “Ah, so they are a modern couple?” The guy’s voice suggests irony and a touch of scorn.

  “They are.”

  “And what is his name?”

  “They are my customers.” He knows he is repeating himself, but it’s necessary. He can’t let the moment slip away.

  “They were. Now they are my family’s.”

  “They will work only with me.”

  The guy starts to say something, but then stops and smiles. “Serkan, you misunderstand me. We will pay you a generous finder’s fee. My family is always fair.”

  Across the lawn near one of the the mosque’s exits, four budding saplings are bent to the left as though some gale prevails. “Fair” doesn’t seem like the right word. “I have previously worked on commission.”

  The guy takes a breath and shakes his head once, as though he needs to explain something obvious to a child. “Yes, Serkan,” he says, ”but now you are working for me. And I’m prepared to offer you ten thousand lira for simply introducing the Americans to me.”

  Serkan picks up his phone but does not turn it on. He made four thousand Turkish lira on the last sale, and that icon was worth less than a tenth of an ancient gold amulet. Gold! Ten thousand lira would pay off half of his credit card debt, but it’s probably less than one percent of what they’ll charge. Anybody can do the math—if they paid the same to some poor farmer who dug it up, they’d be making 98 percent, and Serkan and the farmer would split two percent. Jack and Clare know him, trust him. That’s got value. He slips his phone into his pants pocket and then looks into the guy’s eyes. “As I mentioned,” he says, “the customers intend to work with me.”