The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice

by Noah Gordon

  “I’ve been taught to dose several ailments. I can snip off a mangled finger and leave a neat stump. But so many people come to me and pay over their coins, and I know nothing of how to help them. I’m ignorant. I tell myself that some might be saved if I knew more.”

  “And though you study medicine for a score of lifetimes, there will come to you people whose illnesses are mysteries, for the anguish of which you speak is part and parcel of the profession of healing and must be lived with. Still, it’s true that the better the training, the more good a doctor may do. You give the best possible reason for your ambition.” Merlin drained his cup reflectively. “If the Arab schools are not for you, you must sift the doctors of England until you find the best of the poor, and perhaps you may persuade someone to take you as prentice.”

  “Do you know of any such physician?”

  If Merlin recognized the hint, it went unacknowledged. He shook his head and got to his feet.

  “But each of us has earned his rest, and tomorrow we shall face the question refreshed. A good night to you, young barber.”

  “A good night, master physician.”

  In the morning there was hot pea gruel in the kitchen and more blessings in Hebrew. The family sat and broke their night’s fast together, scrutinizing him covertly while he examined them. Mistress Merlin appeared perpetually cross and in the cruel new light a faint line of dark hairs was visible on her upper lip. He could see fringes peeping out from under the kirtles of Benjamin Merlin and the boy named Ruel. The porridge was good quality.

  Merlin inquired politely whether he had had a good night. “I have given thought to our discussion. Unfortunately, I can think of no physician I’m able to recommend as a master and an example.” His wife brought to the table a basket of large blackberries, and Merlin beamed. “Ah, you must help yourself to these with your gruel, for they are flavorsome.”

  “I would like you to take me as your apprentice,” Rob said.

  To his great disappointment, Merlin shook his head.

  Rob said quickly that Barber had taught him a great deal. “I was helpful to you yesterday. Soon I could go alone to visit your patients during severe weather, making things easy for you.”

  “No.”

  “You’ve observed that I’ve a sense of healing,” he said doggedly. “I’m strong and could do heavy work as well, whatever is necessary. A seven-year apprenticeship. Or longer, as long as you like.” In his agitation he rose to his feet, jogging the table and sloshing the gruel.

  “It is impossible,” Merlin said.

  He felt baffled; he’d been certain Merlin liked him. “Do I lack the qualities necessary?”

  “You have excellent qualities. From what I have seen, you would make an excellent physician.”

  “What, then?”

  “In this most Christian of nations I would not be suffered as your master.”

  “Who would care?”

  “The priests here would care. They already resent me as one forged by the Jews of France and tempered at an Islamic academy, seeing this as cooperation between dangerous pagan elements. Their eyes are on me. I live in dread of the day when my words are interpreted as bewitchery or I forget to christen a newborn.”

  “If you won’t have me,” Rob said, “at least suggest a physician to whom I should apply.”

  “I’ve told you, I recommend no one. But England is large and there are many doctors I do not know.”

  Rob’s lips tightened and his hand settled on the hilt of his sword. “Last night you told me to sift the best of the poor. Who is the best of the physicians of your acquaintance?”

  Merlin sighed and acceded to the bullying. “Arthur Giles of St. Ives,” he said coldly, and resumed eating his breakfast.

  Rob had no intention of drawing, but the wife’s eyes were on his sword and she was unable to stifle a shuddering moan, certain her prophecy was being fulfilled. Ruel and Jonathan were looking at him somberly, but Zechariah began to cry.

  He was sick with the shame of how he had repaid their hospitality. He tried to fashion an apology but couldn’t, and finally he turned away from the Frenchy Hebrew spooning his gruel and left their house.

  21

  THE OLD KNIGHT

  A few weeks earlier he would have sought to rid himself of shame and anger through studying the bottom of a cup, but he had learned to be wary of the drink. It seemed clear that the longer he did without drunkenness, the stronger were the emanations he received from people when he took their hands, and he was placing an increasing value on the gift. So instead of liquor he spent a day with a woman in a glade on the banks of the Severn, a few miles beyond Worcester. The sun had made the grass almost as warm as their blood. She was a seamstress’s helper with poor needle-pricked fingers and a hard little body that became slippery when they swam in the river.

  “Myra, you feel like an eel!” he shouted, and felt better.

  She was trout-quick but he was clumsy, like some great sea monster, when they went down together through the green water. Her hands parted his legs and as she swam through them he stroked the pale tight flanks. The water was chill but they made love twice in the warmth on the bank and he left his ire in her, while a few feet away Horse cropped the grass and Mistress Buffington sat and watched them calmly. Myra had tiny pointed breasts and a bush of the silkiest brown hair. More a plant than a bush, he thought wryly; she was more girl than woman, although it was certain she had been with men before.

  “How old are you, dolly?” he asked idly.

  “Fifteen year, I’m told.”

  She was exactly of an age with his sister Anne Mary, he realized, and was saddened to think that somewhere that girl was all grown but unfamiliar to him.

  He was struck suddenly by a thought so monstrous that it left him weak and seemed to dim the sunlight.

  “Has your name always been Myra?”

  The question produced an astonished smile. “Why, of course that is my name, Myra Felker. What else would it be?”

  “And were you born hereabouts, dolly?”

  “Dropped by my mother in Worcester, and here I have lived,” she said cheerfully.

  He nodded and patted her hand.

  Still, he thought in gloomy revulsion, given the situation it wasn’t impossible that someday he could bed his own sister all unknowingly. He resolved that in the future he must have nothing to do with young females who might be Anne Mary’s age.

  The depressing thought ended his holiday mood, and he began to gather up his clothing.

  “Ah, must we leave, then?” she said regretfully.

  “Yes,” he said, “for I must go a long way to get to St. Ives.”

  Arthur Giles of St. Ives turned out to be a crashing disappointment, although Rob had had no right to high expectation, for clearly Benjamin Merlin had made the recommendation only under duress. The physician was a fat and filthy old man who appeared to be at least slightly mad. He kept goats and must have maintained them within his house part of the time, for the place stank abominably.

  “It’s the bleeding that cures, young stranger. You must remember that. When all else fails, a good purifying drainage of the blood, and then another and another. That’s what cures the bastards,” Giles cried. He answered questions willingly, but when they discussed any mode of treatment other than bleeding, it became clear that Rob might profitably have taught the old man. Giles possessed no medical lore, no store of knowledge that might be tapped by a disciple. The physician offered an apprenticeship, and appeared to become furious when it was politely declined. Rob was happy to ride away from St. Ives, for he was better off remaining a barber than becoming a medical creature such as this.

  For several weeks he believed he had renounced the impractical dream of becoming a physician. He worked hard at his entertainments, he sold a good deal of the Universal Specific, and was gratified by the thickness of his purse. Mistress Buffington throve on his prosperity as he had benefited from Barber’s; the cat ate fine leavings and grew
to full size as he watched, a large white feline with insolent green eyes. She thought she was a lioness and got into fights. When they were in the town of Rochester she disappeared during the entertainment and came back into Rob’s camp at dusk, badly bitten in the right fore and with most of her left ear gone, her white fur matted with crimson.

  He bathed her wounds and tended her like a lover. “Ah, mistress. You must learn to avoid brawling, as I have done, for it avails you nothing.” He fed her milk and held her in his lap before the fire.

  She rasped his hand with her tongue. It may be that there was a drop of milk on his fingers, or the smell of supper, but he chose to see it as a caress, and he stroked her soft fur in return, grateful for her company.

  “If the way were open for me to attend the Muslim school,” he told the cat, “I would take you in the wagon and point Horse toward Persia, and nothing would prevent our eventual arrival in that pagan place.”

  Abu Ali at-Husain ibn Abdullah ibn Sina, he thought wistfully. “To hell with you, you Arab,” he said aloud, and went to bed.

  The syllables ran through his mind, a haunting and taunting litany. Abu Ali at-Husain ibn Abdullah ibn Sina, Abu Ali at-Husain ibn Abdullah ibn Sina … until the mysterious repetition overcame the restlessness in his blood and he sank into sleep.

  That night he dreamed he was locked in combat with a loathsome old knight, struggling hand to hand with daggers.

  The old knight farted and mocked him. He could see rust and lichens on the other’s black armor. Their heads were so close that he saw corruption and snot hanging from the bony nose, and looked into terrible eyes and smelled the sickening stench of the knight’s breath. They fought desperately. Despite Rob’s youth and strength he knew the dark specter’s knife to be merciless and his armor infallible. Beyond them could be seen the knight’s victims: Mam, Da, sweet Samuel, Barber, even Incitatus and Bartram the bear, and Rob’s rage lent him strength, though he could already feel the inexorable blade entering his body.

  He awoke to find the outside of his clothing damp with dew and the inside wet from the fear-sweat of the dream. Lying in the morning sun, with a robin singing its exhilaration not five feet away, he knew that although the dream was done, he was not. He was unable to give up the struggle.

  Those who were gone wouldn’t come back, and that was the way of it. But what better way to spend a lifetime than fighting the Black Knight? The study of medicine was, in its own way, something to love in place of a missing family. He determined, as the cat came and rubbed against him with her good ear, that he would make it come to pass.

  The problem was discouraging. He presented entertainments in Northampton and Bedford and Hertford in turn, and in each place he sought out physicians and spoke with them and saw that their combined knowledge of healing was less than Barber’s had been. In the town of Maldon the physician’s reputation for butchery was so deadly that when Rob J. asked people to give directions to the leech’s home they paled and crossed themselves.

  It wouldn’t do to apprentice to such as these.

  It occurred to him that another Hebrew doctor might be more willing to take him on than Merlin had been. In Maldon’s square he stopped where workmen were raising a brick wall.

  “Do you have knowledge of any Jews in this place?” he asked the master mason.

  The man stared at him, spat, and turned away.

  He asked several other men in the square without better results. Finally there was one who examined him curiously. “Why do you seek Jews?”

  “I seek a Jew physician.”

  The man nodded in sympathetic understanding. “May Christ be merciful to you. There are Jews in the town of Malmesbury, and they have a physician there named Adolescentoli,” he said.

  It was a five-day trip from Maldon to Malmesbury, with stops in Oxford and Alveston to put on entertainments and sell physick. Rob seemed to remember that Barber had spoken of Adolescentoli as a famous physician, and he made his way into Malmesbury hopefully as evening shadows fell over the small and formless village. The inn gave him a plain but heartening supper. Barber would have found the mutton stew unseasoned but it contained plenty of meat, and afterward he was able to pay to have fresh straw spread in a corner of the sleeping room.

  Next morning at breakfast he asked the publican to tell him about Malmesbury’s Jews.

  The man shrugged as if to say, What is there to tell?

  “I am curious, for until lately I knew no Jews.”

  “That is because they are scarce in our land,” the publican said. “My sister’s husband, who is a ship’s captain and has traveled to all places, says they are plentiful in France. He says they are found in every country, and that the farther east one travels, the more thickly are they sprinkled.”

  “Does Isaac Adolescentoli live among them here? The physician?”

  The publican grinned. “No, indeed. It is they who live around Isaac Adolescentoli, basking in his eminence.”

  “He’s celebrated, then?”

  “He’s a great physician. People come from afar to consult him and stay at this inn,” the publican said proudly. “The priests speak against him, of course, but”—he put a finger to his nose and leaned forward—“I know at least two occasions when he was collected in dark of night and bundled off to Canterbury to tend to Archbishop Aethelnoth, who was thought to be dying last year.”

  He gave directions to the Jewish settlement and soon Rob was riding past the gray stone walls of Malmesbury Abbey, through woods and fields and a steep vineyard in which monks picked grapes. A coppice separated the abbey land from the Jews’ homes, perhaps a dozen clustered houses. These must be Jews: men like crows, in loose black caftans and bell-shaped leather hats, were sawing and hammering, raising a shed. Rob drove to a building that was larger than the others, where a wide courtyard was filled with tethered horses and wagons.

  “Isaac Adolescentoli?” Rob asked one of several boys attending the animals.

  “He’s in the dispensary,” the boy said, and deftly caught the coin Rob threw to make certain Horse was well tended.

  The front door opened into a large waiting room filled with wooden benches, all crammed with ailing humanity. It was like the lines that waited beyond his own treatment screen, but many more people. There were no empty seats, but he found a place against the wall.

  Now and again a man came through the little door that led to the rest of the house and collected the patient who sat at the end of the first bench. Everyone would then move one space forward. There appeared to be five physicians. Four were young and the other was a small, quick-moving man of middle age, whom Rob supposed to be Adolescentoli.

  It was a very long wait. The room remained crowded, for it seemed that each time someone was led through the waiting room door by a physician, new arrivals entered the front door from the outside. Rob passed the time trying to diagnose the patients.

  By the time he was first on the front bench it was midafternoon. One of the young men came through the door. “You may come with me.” He had a French accent.

  “I want to see Isaac Adolescentoli.”

  “I am Moses ben Abraham, an apprentice of Master Adolescentoli. I’m able to take care of you.”

  “I’m certain you would treat me skillfully were I sick. I must see your master on another matter.”

  The apprentice nodded and turned to the next person on the bench.

  Adolescentoli came out in a while and led Rob through the door and down a short corridor; through a door left ajar he glimpsed a surgery with an operating couch, buckets, and instruments. They ended in a tiny room bare of furniture save for a small table and two chairs. “What is your trouble?” Adolescentoli said. He listened in some surprise as, instead of describing symptoms, Rob spoke nervously of his desire to study medicine.

  The physician had a dark, handsome face that didn’t smile. Doubtless the interview wouldn’t have ended differently if Rob had been wiser but he was unable to resist a question: “Have you
lived in England long, master physician?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “You speak our language so well.”

  “I was born in this house,” Adolescentoli said quietly. “In 70 A.D., five young Jewish prisoners of war were transported from Jerusalem to Rome by Titus following the destruction of the great Temple. They were called adolescentoli, Latin for ‘the youths.’ I am descended from one of these, Joseph Adolescentoli. He won his freedom by enlisting in the Second Roman Legion, with which he came to this island when its inhabitants were little dark coracle men, the black Silures who were the first to call themselves Britons. Has your own family been English that long?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You yourself speak the language adequately,” Adolescentoli said silkily.

  Rob told him of meeting with Merlin, mentioning only that they had spoken together of medical education. “Did you, too, study with the great Persian physician in Ispahan?”

  Adolescentoli shook his head. “I attended the university in Baghdad, a larger medical school with a greater library and faculty. Except, of course, we didn’t have Avicenna, whom they call Ibn Sina.”

  They chatted of his apprentices. Three were Jews from France and the other a Jew from Salerno.

  “My apprentices have chosen me over Avicenna or some other Arab,” Adolescentoli said proudly. “They don’t have a library such as students have in Baghdad, of course, but I own the Leech Book of Bald, which lists remedies after the method of Alexander of Tralles and tells how to make salves, poultices, and plasters. They’re required to study it with great attention, as well as some Latin writings of Paul of Aegina and certain works of Pliny. And before I’m done with them, each shall know how to perform phlebotomy, cautery, incision of arteries, and the couching of cataracts.”

  Rob felt an overpowering yearning, not unlike the emotion of a man who gazes upon a woman for whom, instantly, he longs. “I’ve come to ask you to take me as prentice.”