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

by Noah Gordon

  Adolescentoli inclined his head. “I guessed that is why you’re here. But I won’t take you.”

  “Can I not persuade you, then?”

  “No. You must find yourself a Christian physician as master, or stay a barber,” Adolescentoli said, not cruelly but with firmness.

  Perhaps his reasons were the same as Merlin’s but Rob wasn’t to know, for the physician would speak no more. He rose and led the way to the door, and nodded without interest as Rob left his dispensary.

  Two towns away, in Devizes, he put on an entertainment and dropped a juggled ball for the first time since he had mastered the knack. People laughed at his banter and bought the physick but there came behind his screen a young fisherman from Bristol, roughly his own age, who was pissing blood and had lost most of his flesh. He told Rob he knew he was dying.

  “Is there naught you can do for me?”

  “What is your name?” Rob asked him quietly.

  “Hamer.”

  “I think perhaps you have bubo in your insides, Hamer. But I’m not at all certain. I don’t know how to cure you or ease your pain.” Barber would have sold him more than a few bottles. “This stuff is mostly spirits, bought cheaper elsewhere,” he said without knowing why. He had never told that to a patient before.

  The fisherman thanked him and went away.

  Adolescentoli or Merlin would have known how to do more for him, Rob told himself bitterly. Timorous bastards, he thought, refusing to teach him while the bloody Black Knight grinned.

  That evening he was caught out by a sudden wild storm with fierce winds and drenching rain. It was the second day of September and early for fall rains, but that didn’t make it less wet or chill. He made his way to the only shelter, the inn at Devizes, fastening Horse’s reins to the limb of a great oak in the yard. When he pushed inside he found that too many others had preceded him. Every piece of floor space was taken.

  In a dark corner huddled an exhausted man who sat with his arms around a swollen pack such as merchants used for their goods. If Rob had not gone to Malmesbury he wouldn’t have given the fellow a second glance, but now he saw from the black caftan and pointed leather cap that this was a Jew.

  “It was on such a night that our Lord was slain,” Rob said loudly.

  Conversation in the inn dwindled as he went on to speak of the Passion story, for travelers love a tale and a diversion. Someone brought him a stoup. When he told of how the populace had denied that Jesus was King of the Jews, the weary man in the corner appeared to shrink.

  By the time Rob had reached the part about Calvary, the Jew had taken his pack and slipped out into the night and the storm. Rob broke off the tale and took his place in the warm corner.

  But he found no more pleasure in driving away the merchant than he had gained from giving the Special Batch to Barber. The common room of the inn was full of the reek of damp wool clothing and unwashed bodies, and he was soon nauseated. Even before the rain had ceased, he left the inn and went out to his wagon and his animals.

  He drove Horse to a nearby clearing and unhitched her. There was dry kindling in the wagon and he managed to light a fire. Mistress Buffington was too young to breed but perhaps she already exuded female scent, for beyond the shadows cast by the fire a tomcat yowled. Rob threw a stick to drive it away and the white cat rubbed against him.

  “We are a fine lonely pair,” he said.

  If it took his lifetime, he would search until he found a worthy physician to whom he might apprentice, he decided.

  As for the Jews, he had spoken to only two of their doctors. No doubt there were others. “Perhaps one would apprentice me if I pretended to him that I were a Jew,” he told the cat.

  Thus it began, as less than a dream—a fantasy in idle chatter; he knew he couldn’t be a Jew convincingly enough to undergo the daily scrutiny of a Jewish master.

  But he sat before the fire and stared into the flames, and it took form.

  The cat offered up her silken belly. “Could I not be a Jew well enough to satisfy Muslims?” Rob asked her, and himself, and God.

  Well enough to study with the greatest physician in the world?

  Stunned by the enormity of the thought, he dropped the cat and she sprang away into the wagon. In a moment she was back, dragging what appeared to be a furry animal. It proved to be the false beard he’d worn during the Old Man nonsense. Rob picked it up. If he could be an old man for Barber, he asked himself, why could he not be a Hebrew? The merchant at the inn in Devizes, and others, could be imitated …

  “I shall become a counterfeit Jew!” he cried.

  It was fortunate no one was passing, to hear him speak aloud and at length to a cat, for it would have been declared that he was a wizard addressing his succubus.

  He had no fear of the Church. “I piss on child-stealing priests,” he told the cat.

  He could grow a full Jew’s beard, and he already had the prick for it.

  He’d tell folk that, like Merlin’s sons, he had been raised isolated from his people, ignorant of their tongue and customs.

  He would make his way to Persia!

  He would touch the hem of Ibn Sina’s garment!

  He was excited and terrified, shamed to be a grown man and trembling so. It was like the moment when he’d known he would pass beyond Southwark for the first time.

  It was said they were everywhere, damn their souls. On the journey he would cultivate them and study their ways. By the time he reached Ispahan he would be ready to play the Jew, and Ibn Sina would have to take him in and share the precious secrets of the Arab school.

  PART TWO

  The Long Journey

  22

  THE FIRST LEG

  More shipping left London for France than from any other port in England, so he made for the city of his birth. All along the way he stopped to work, wanting to set out on such an adventure with as much gold as possible. By the time he reached London he had missed the shipping season. The Thames bristled with the masts of anchored vessels. King Canute had drawn upon his Danish origins and built a great fleet of Viking ships that rode the water like tethered monsters. The fearsome war craft were surrounded by an assorted assemblage: fat knorrs converted to deep-sea fishing boats; the private trireme galleys of the wealthy; squat, slow-sailing grain ships; two-masted merchant packets with triangular lateen-rigged sails; two-masted carracks from Italy; and long, single-masted vessels, the workhorses of the merchant fleets of the northern countries. None of the ships held cargo or passengers, for frigid windstorms already had begun. During the next terrible six months on many mornings salt spray would freeze in the Channel, and sailors knew that to venture out where the North Sea met and merged with the Atlantic Ocean was to ask for drowning in the churning waters.

  In the Herring, a mariners’ hole on the waterfront, Rob stood and thumped his mug of mulled cider against the tabletop. “I’m searching for snug, clean lodging until spring sailing,” he said. “Is anyone here who knows of such?”

  A short, wide man, built like a bull dog, studied him as he drained his cup and then nodded. “Aye,” he said. “My brother Tom died last voyage. His widow, name of Binnie Ross, is left with two small ones to feed. If you’re willing to pay fair I know she would welcome you.”

  Rob bought him a drink and then followed him a short way to a tiny house near the marketplace at East Chepe. Binnie Ross turned out to be a thin mouse of a girl, all worried blue eyes in a thin, pale little face. The place was clean enough but very small.

  “I have a cat and a horse,” Rob said.

  “Oh, I would welcome the cat,” she said anxiously. It was clear she was desperate for the money.

  “You might put up the horse for the winter,” her brother-in-law said. “There is Egglestan’s stables on Thames Street.”

  Rob nodded. “I know the place,” he said.

  “She is with young,” Binnie Ross said, picking up the cat and stroking her.

  Rob could see no extra roundness in the sleek
stomach. “How do you know?” he asked, thinking her mistaken. “She’s still a young one herself, just born this past summer.”

  The girl shrugged.

  She was right, for within a few weeks Mistress Buffington bloomed. He fed the cat tidbits and provided good food for Binnie and her son. The little daughter was an infant who still took milk at her mother’s breast. It pleasured Rob to walk to the marketplace and buy for them, remembering the miracle of eating well after a long time with a rumbling-empty belly.

  The infant was named Aldyth and the little boy, less than two years old, was Edwin. Every night Rob could hear Binnie crying. He had been in the house less than a fortnight when she came to his bed in the dark. She said not a word but lay down and put her slender arms around him, silent all through the act. Curious, he tasted her milk and found it sweet.

  When they were finished she slipped back to her own bed and next day made no reference to what had happened.

  “How did your husband die?” he asked her as she was dishing out the breakfast gruel.

  “A storm. Wulf—that is his brother, who brought you here—said my Paul was washed away. He could not swim,” she said.

  She used him one more night, grinding to him desperately. Then her dead husband’s brother, who doubtless had been marshaling his courage to speak to her, came to the house one afternoon. After that Wulf came every day with small gifts; he played with his niece and nephew but it became clear he was paying court to their mother, and one day Binnie told Rob that she and Wulf would be married. It made the house an easier place in which Rob could do his waiting.

  During a blizzard he delivered Mistress Buffington of a fine litter: a white female miniature of herself, a white male, and a pair of black and white toms that presumably resembled their sire. Binnie offered to drown the four kittens as a service, but as soon as they were weaned Rob lined a basket with rags and took them to public houses, buying a number of drinks in order to give each of them away.

  In March, the slaves who did the brute work of the port were moved back to the waterfront, and long lines of men and drays again began to crowd Thames Street, loading the warehouses and the ships with exports.

  Rob asked innumerable questions of traveling men and determined his journey was best started by way of Calais. “That is where my ship is bound,” Wulf told him, and took him down to the slip to see the Queen Emma. She was not as grand as her name, a great old wooden tub with one towering mast. The stevedores were loading her with slabs of tin mined in Cornwall. Wulf brought Rob to the master, an unsmiling Welshman who nodded when asked if he would take a passenger, and named a price that seemed to be fair.

  “I have a horse and a wagon,” Rob said.

  The captain frowned. “It will cost you dear to move them by sea. Some travelers sell their beasts and carts on this side of the Channel and buy new ones on the other side.”

  Rob did some pondering, but at length he decided to pay the freight charges, high as they were. It was his plan to work as a barber-surgeon during his travels. Horse and the red wagon were a good rig and he had no faith that he would find another that pleased him as much.

  April brought softer weather and finally the first ships began to depart. The Queen Emma raised her anchor from the Thames mud on the eleventh day of the month, sent off by Binnie with much weeping. There was a fresh but gentle wind. Rob watched Wulf and seven other sailors haul on the lines, raising an enormous square sail that filled with a crack when it was barely up, and they floated into the outgoing tide. Laden low with its metal cargo, the big boat moved out of the Thames, slipped heavily through the narrows between the Isle of Thanet and the mainland, crept along the coast of Kent, and then doggedly crossed the Channel before the wind.

  The green coast became darker as it receded, until England was a blue haze and then a purple smudge that was swallowed by the sea. Rob had no chance to think noble thoughts, for he was pukingly ill.

  Wulf, passing him on deck, stopped and spat contemptuously over the side. “God’s blood! We are too low in the water to pitch or roll, it is the kindest of weather and the sea is calm. So what ails you?”

  But Rob couldn’t answer, for he was leaning over in order not to sully the deck. Part of his problem was terror, for he had never been to sea and now was haunted by a lifetime of tales of drowned men, from the husband and sons of Editha Lipton to the unfortunate Tom Ross who had left Binnie a widow. The oily water onto which he was sick appeared inscrutable and bottomless, the likely home of every evil monster, and he rued the recklessness with which he had ventured into this strange environment. To make matters worse the wind quickened and the sea developed deep billows. Soon he confidently expected to die and would have welcomed the release. Wulf sought him out and offered dinner of bread and cold fried salt pork. He decided that Binnie must have confessed her visits to Rob’s bed and this was her future husband’s revenge, to which he hadn’t the strength to reply.

  The voyage had lasted seven endless hours when another haze lifted itself out of the heaving horizon and slowly became Calais.

  Wulf said a hasty goodbye, for he was busy with the sail. Rob led the horse and cart down the gangway and onto firm land that appeared to rise and fall like the sea. He reasoned that the ground in France could not go up and down or he would surely have heard of this oddity; indeed, after he had walked for a few minutes, the earth seemed firmer. But where was he bound? He had no idea as to destination or what his next action should be. The language was a blow. People around him spoke in a rattle of sound, and he could make no sense of it. Finally he stopped and climbed onto his cart and clapped his hands.

  “I will hire somebody who has my language,” he shouted.

  A pinch-faced old man came forward. He had thin shanks and a skeletal frame that warned he wouldn’t be of much use in lifting or carrying. But he noted Rob’s pale complexion and his eyes twinkled. “May we talk over a soothing glass? Apple spirits do wonders to settle the stomach,” he said, and the familiar English was benison to Rob’s ears.

  They stopped at the first public house and sat at a rough pine table outside the front door.

  “I am Charbonneau,” the Frenchman said above the waterfront din. “Louis Charbonneau.”

  “Rob J. Cole.”

  When the apple brandy came they drank to one another’s health and Charbonneau was proven right, for the spirits warmed Rob’s stomach and made him one of the living again. “I believe I can eat,” he said wonderingly.

  Pleased, Charbonneau spoke an order and presently a serving girl brought to their table a crusty bread, a platter of small green olives, and a goat’s cheese of which even Barber would have approved.

  “You can see why I’m in need of someone’s help,” Rob said ruefully, “for I can’t even ask for food.”

  Charbonneau smiled. “All my life I’ve been a sailor. I was a boy when my first ship put into London, and I well remember my longing to hear my native tongue.” Half of his time ashore had been spent on the other side of the Channel, he said, where the language was English.

  “I’m a barber-surgeon, traveling to Persia to buy rare medicines and healing herbs that will be sent to England.” It was what he had decided to tell people, to avoid discussing the fact that his real reason for going to Ispahan was considered a crime by the Church.

  Charbonneau lifted his eyebrows. “A long way.”

  Rob nodded. “I need a guide, someone who can also translate for me, so that I may present entertainments and sell physick and treat the ill as we travel. I’ll pay a generous wage.”

  Charbonneau took an olive from the plate and set it on the sun-warmed table. “France,” he said. He took another. “The Saxon-ruled five duchies of Germany.” Then another and another, until there were seven olives in a line. “Bohemia,” he said, indicating the third olive, “where live the Slavs and the Czechs. Next is the territory of the Magyars, a Christian country but full of wild barbarian horsemen. Then the Balkans, a place of tall, fierce mountains and t
all, fierce people. Then Thrace, about which I know little save that it marks the final limit of Europe and contains Constantinople. And finally Persia, where you want to go.”

  He regarded Rob contemplatively. “My native city is on the border between France and the land of the Germans, whose Teutonic languages I have spoken since childhood. Therefore, if you will hire me, I’ll accompany you past—” He picked up the first two olives and popped them into his mouth. “I must leave you in time to return to Metz by next winter.”

  “Done,” Rob said in relief.

  Then, while Charbonneau grinned at him and ordered another brandy, Rob solemnly consumed the other olives in the line, eating his way through the remaining five countries, one by one.

  23

  STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND

  France was not as determinedly green as England but there was more sun. The sky seemed higher, the color of France was deep blue. Much of the land was woods, as at home. It was a country of fiercely neat farms, with here and there a somber stone castle similar to the ones Rob was accustomed to seeing in the countryside; but some of the lords lived in great wooden manor houses such as were uncommon in England. There were cattle in the pastures and peasants sowing wheat.

  Already Rob saw some wonders. “Many of your farm buildings are roofless,” he observed.

  “There is less rain here than in England,” Charbonneau said. “Some of our farmers thresh the grain in the open barns.”

  Charbonneau rode a big, placid horse, light gray, almost white. His arms were used-looking and well kept. Each night he tended the mount carefully and cleaned and polished the sword and the dagger. He was good company at the campfire and on the road.

  Every farm had orchards, glorious with blossom. Rob stopped at several, seeking to buy spirits; he could find no metheglin but bought a barrel of apple brandy similar to the tipple he had enjoyed in Calais, and found that it made superior Universal Specific.