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

by Noah Gordon

  The deputy governor was a small, thin man, not yet old, who wore an air of self-importance, a tunic of good gray stuff, and the white turban of one who has made his way to Mecca. He had little dark eyes and on his forehead a very distinct zabiba bore witness to the fervor of his piety.

  After they had exchanged salaams he listened to Rob’s request and studied him narrowly. “You’ve come from England, you say? In Europe? … Ah, what part of Europe is that?”

  “The north.”

  “The north of Europe. How long did it take you to reach us?” “Not quite two years, Hadji.”

  “Two years! Extraordinary. Your father is a physician, a graduate of our school?”

  “My father? No, Hadji.”

  “Hmmm. An uncle, perhaps?”

  “No. I shall be the first physician in my line.”

  Hosein frowned. “Here we have scholars descended from long lines of physicians. You have letters of introduction, Dhimmi?”

  “No, Master Hosein.” He felt rising panic. “I am a barber-surgeon, I already have had some training …”

  “No references from some of our distinguished graduates?” Hosein asked, astounded.

  “No.”

  “We don’t accept for education any person who appears.”

  “This isn’t a passing fancy. I have traveled a terrible distance because of my determination to be trained in medicine. I have learned your language.”

  “Poorly, I may say.” The hadji sniffed. “We do not simply train in medicine. We do not produce tradesmen, we fashion educated men. Our students learn theology, philosophy, mathematics, physics, astrology, and jurisprudence as well as medicine, and upon being graduated as well-rounded scientists and intellectuals they may take their choice of careers in teaching, medicine, or the law.”

  Rob waited with a sinking feeling.

  “Surely you must comprehend? It is impossible.”

  He comprehended almost two years.

  Turning his back on Mary Cullen.

  Sweating under the burning sun, shivering in glacial snows, beaten by storm and rain. Through salt desert and treacherous forest. Laboring like a bloody ant over mountain after mountain.

  “I will not leave without speaking with Ibn Sina,” he said firmly.

  Hadji Davout Hosein opened his mouth but saw something in Rob’s eyes that made him close it. He paled and nodded quickly. “Please to wait here,” he said, and left the room.

  Rob sat there alone.

  After a time, four soldiers came. None was as large as he but they were muscular. They carried short, heavy wooden batons. One of them had a pocked face and kept smacking his baton into the meaty palm of his left hand.

  “What is your name, Jew?” the man with the pocked face asked, not impolitely.

  “I am Jesse ben Benjamin.”

  “A foreigner, a European, Hadji said?”

  “Yes, from England. A place a great distance from here.”

  The soldier nodded. “Did you not refuse to leave at Hadji’s request?”

  “That is true, but—”

  “It is time to leave now, Jew. With us.”

  “I will not leave without speaking with Ibn Sina.”

  The spokesman swung his baton.

  Not my nose, he thought in anguish.

  But blood began to pour at once, and all four of them knew where and how to use the clubs with economic efficiency. They hemmed him in so he couldn’t swing his arms.

  “To hell!” he said in English. They couldn’t have understood but the tone was unmistakable, and they hit harder. One of the blows cracked him above the temple and he was suddenly dizzy and nauseated. He tried at the very least to succeed in being sick in Hadji’s office chamber but the pain was too great.

  They knew their job very well. When he was no longer a threat, they stopped using the batons in order to beat him very skillfully with their fists.

  They made him walk out of the school, one of them supporting him under each arm. They had four large brown horses tethered outside and they rode while he staggered between two of the beasts. Whenever he fell, which happened three times, one of them dismounted and kicked him hard in the ribs until he got to his feet. It seemed a long walk but they went just beyond the madrassa grounds to a small brick building, shabby and unprepossessing, part of the lowest branch of the Islamic court system, as he would learn. Inside there was only a wooden table, behind which sat a cross-looking man, bushy-haired, full-bearded, and wearing black clerical robes not unlike Rob’s caftan. He was in the process of opening a melon.

  The four soldiers led Rob to the table and stood respectfully while the justice used a dirty fingernail to scrape the seeds from the melon into an earthen bowl. Then he sliced the melon and ate it slowly. When it was gone he wiped first his hands and then the knife on his robe and turned toward Mecca and thanked Allah for the food.

  Having finished praying, he sighed and looked at the soldiers.

  “A crazy European Jew who has disturbed the public tranquility, mufti,” the soldier with the pocked face said. “Taken on complaint of Hadji Davout Hosein, against whom he threatened violent deeds.”

  The mufti nodded and dug a bit of melon from between his teeth with a fingernail. He looked at Rob. “You are not a Muslim, and you are accused by a Muslim. The word of an unbeliever may not be accepted against one of the faithful. Do you have a Muslim who will speak in your defense?”

  Rob tried thickly to talk but no sound came, though his legs buckled with the effort. The soldiers yanked him erect.

  “Why do you behave like a dog? Ah, well. An infidel, after all, unused to our ways. Therefore, it requires mercy. You shall hand him over to be kept in the carcan at the discretion of the kelonter,” the mufti told the soldiers.

  It added two words to Rob’s Persian vocabulary, which he pondered as the soldiers half dragged him from the court and again herded him between their mounts. He guessed correctly on one of the definitions; though he didn’t know it then, the kelonter, whom he supposed to be some kind of jailkeeper, was the provost of the city.

  When they arrived at a great and grim jail, Rob thought that carcan surely meant prison. Inside, the pockfaced soldier turned him over to two guards who hustled him past forbidding dungeons of foul dankness, but they emerged finally from the windowless dark into the open brilliance of an inner court where two long lines of stocks were occupied by groaning or unconscious human misery. The guards marched him along the line until they came to an empty device, which one of them unlocked.

  “Thrust your head and right arm into the carcan,” he ordered.

  It was instinct and fear that made Rob pull back, but they were technically correct in interpreting it as resistance.

  They struck him until he fell and then began to kick him, as the soldiers had done. Rob could do nothing but curl himself into a ball to hide his groin and throw up his arms to protect his head.

  When they were finished savaging him, they shoved and maneuvered him like a sack of meal until his neck and right arm were positioned, then they slammed down the heavy upper half of the carcan and nailed it closed before abandoning him, more unconscious than not, to hang hopeless and helpless under the unshaded sun.

  38

  THE CALAAT

  They were peculiar stocks indeed, made of a rectangle and two squares of wood fastened in a triangle, the center of which gripped Rob’s head so that his crouching body was half suspended. His right hand, the eating hand, had been placed over the end of the longest piece and a wooden cuff nailed over his wrist, for while in the carcan a prisoner wasn’t fed. The left hand, the wiping hand, was unfettered, for the kelonter was civilized.

  At intervals he drifted into consciousness to stare at the long double row of stocks, each containing a wretch. In his line of sight at the other end of the courtyard was a large wooden block.

  Once he dreamed of people and demons in black robes. A man knelt and placed his right hand on the block; one of the demons swung a sword that
was larger and heavier than an English cutlass and the hand was taken off at the wrist while the other robed figures prayed.

  The same dream again and again in the hot sun. And then a difference. A man knelt so the back of his neck was on the block and his eyes bulged at the sky. Rob was afraid they would decapitate him but they took his tongue.

  When next Rob opened his eyes he saw neither people nor demons but on the ground and on the block were fresh stains such as are not left by dreams.

  It hurt him to breathe. He had been given the most thorough beating of his life and he couldn’t tell if there were broken bones.

  He hung in the carcan and wept weakly, trying to be silent and hoping no one was watching.

  Eventually he tried to relieve his ordeal by speaking to his neighbors, whom he could just manage to see by turning his head. It was an effort he learned not to make casually, for the skin of his neck quickly rubbed raw against the wood that held him fast. To his left was a man who had been beaten unconscious and didn’t move; the youth on his right studied him curiously but was either a deaf mute, incredibly stupid, or unable to make sense of his broken Persian. After several hours a guard noticed that the man on his left was dead. He was taken away and another put in his place.

  By midday Rob’s tongue rasped and seemed to fill his mouth. He felt no urge to urinate or void, for any wastes had long ago been sucked from him by the sun. At times he believed himself back in the desert and in lucid moments remembered too vividly Lonzano’s description of how a man dies of thirst, the swollen tongue, the blackened gums, the belief that he was in another place.

  Presently Rob turned his head and met the new prisoner’s eyes. They studied one another and he saw a swollen face and ruined mouth.

  “Is there no one of whom we can ask mercy?” he whispered.

  The other waited, perhaps puzzled by Rob’s accent. “There is Allah,” he said finally. He was not himself easily understood because of his split lip.

  “But no one here?”

  “You are a foreigner, Dhimmi?”

  “Yes.”

  The man directed his hatred at Rob. “You have seen a mullah, foreigner. A holy man has sentenced you.” He appeared to lose interest and turned his face away.

  The waning of the sun was a blessing. Evening brought such a coolness as to be almost joyful. His body was numb and he no longer felt muscular pain; perhaps he was dying.

  During the night the man next to him spoke again. “There is the Shah, foreign Jew,” the man said.

  Rob waited.

  “Yesterday, the day of our torture, was Wednesday, Chahan Shanbah. Today is Panj Shanbah. And each week on the morn of Panj Shanbah, in order to attempt a perfect soul-cleansing before Jom’a, the Sabbath, Alā-al-Dawla Shah holds audience during which anyone may approach his throne in the Hall of Pillars to complain of injustice.”

  Rob couldn’t stifle the reluctant stir of hope. “Anyone?”

  “Anyone. Even a prisoner may demand to be brought to place his case before the Shah.”

  “No, you must not!” a voice bawled from the darkness. Rob couldn’t tell from which carcan the sound came.

  “You must put it out of your mind,” the unknown voice said. “For the Shah almost never reverses a mufti’s judgment or a sentence. And the mullahs eagerly await the return of those who waste the Shah’s time with a wagging tongue. It is then that tongues are taken and bellies are ripped, as this devil surely knows, this evil son of a bitch who gives you false advice. You must place your faith in Allah and not in Alā Shah.”

  The man on his right was laughing slyly, laughing as if caught out in a practical joke.

  “There is no hope,” the voice said from the darkness.

  His neighbor’s mirth had turned into a paroxysm of coughing and wheezing. When he caught his breath the man said viciously, “Yes, we may look for hope in Paradise.” No one spoke again.

  Twenty-four hours after Rob was placed in the carcan he was released. He tried to stand but fell, and lay in agony as blood reentered his muscles.

  “Go,” a guard said finally, and kicked at him.

  He struggled to his feet and limped out of the jail, hurrying from that place. He walked to a great square with plane trees and a splashing fountain from which he drank and drank, surrendering to a thirst without end. Then he plunged his head into the water until his ears rang and he felt that some of the prison stink had been washed away.

  Ispahan’s streets were crowded and people glanced at him as they passed.

  A fat little vendor in a tattered tunic was fanning flies from a pot cooking on a brazier in his donkey cart. The aroma from the pot brought such a weakness it gave Rob a fright. But when he opened his purse-pocket, instead of sufficient funds to keep him for months, it contained one small bronze coin.

  He had been robbed while unconscious. He cursed bleakly, not knowing whether the thief had been the pockfaced soldier or a jail guard. The bronze coin was a mockery, a wry joke on the thief’s part, or perhaps it had been left through some twisted religious sense of charity. He gave it to the vendor, who ladled out a small portion of a greasy rice pilah. It was spicy and contained bits of bean and he swallowed it too quickly, or perhaps his body had been overtaxed by deprivation and sun and the carcan. Almost at once he cast up the contents of his stomach into the dusty street. His neck was bleeding where it had been tormented by the stocks and there was a pounding behind his eyes. He moved into the shade under a plane tree and stood there thinking of green England, his own Horse and cart with money beneath the floorboards and Mistress Buffington sitting next to him for company.

  The crowd was denser now, a flood of people flowing through the street, all headed in the same direction.

  “Where are they going?” he asked the food vendor.

  “To the Shah’s audience,” the man said, staring askance at the battered Jew until Rob moved away.

  Why not? he asked himself. Did he have another choice?

  He joined in the tide that swept down the Avenue of Ali and Fatima, crossed the four-laned Avenue of the Thousand Gardens, turned into the immaculate boulevard marked Gates of Paradise. They were young and old and in-between, hadjis in white turbans, students in green turbans, mullahs, beggars whole and maimed and wearing rags and cast-off turbans of all colors, young fathers holding babies, porters bearing sedan chairs, men on horseback and on donkeys. Rob found himself trailing a dark-caftaned gaggle of Jews and hobbled just behind them, an errant gosling.

  They passed through the small coolness of an artificial woods, for trees were not plentiful in Ispahan, and then, although they were still well within the town walls, past numerous fields on which sheep and goats grazed, separating royalty from its city. Now they approached a great green lawn with two stone pillars at either end like portals. When the first house of the royal court came into view Rob thought it the palace, for it was larger than King’s House in London. But there was house after house of the same size, mostly built of brick and stone, many with towers and porches and each with terraces and extensive gardens. They passed vineyards, stables, and two racing tracks, orchards and gardened pavilions of such beauty he wanted to leave the crowd and wander in the perfumed splendor, but knew it was doubtless forbidden.

  And then a structure so formidable, and at the same time so sweepingly graceful that he didn’t credit it, all breast-shaped roofs and girded battlements on which sentries with glittering helms and shields paced beneath long colored pennants that fluttered in the breeze.

  He plucked at the sleeve of the man in front of him, a stocky Jew whose fringed undergarment peeped from his shirt. “What is the fortress?”

  “Why, the House of Paradise, home of the Shah!” The man peered at him worriedly. “You are bloodied, friend.”

  “Nothing, a small accident.”

  They poured down the long approach road, and as they drew near he saw that the main section of the palace was protected by a wide moat. The drawbridge was raised, but on the near sid
e of the moat, next to a plaza that served as the palace’s great portal, was a hall through whose doors the crowd entered.

  Inside was a space half as large as the Cathedral of St. Sofia in Constantinople. The floor was marble; the walls and the lofty ceilings were stone, cleverly chinked so daylight softly illuminated the interior. It was the Hall of Pillars, for next to all four walls were stone columns, elegantly wrought and fluted. Where each column joined the floor, its base had been carved into the legs and paws of a variety of animals.

  The hall was half filled when Rob arrived, and immediately people entered behind him, pressing him in among the party of Jews. Roped-off sections left open aisles down the length of the hall. Rob stood and watched, noting everything with a new intensity, for his time in the carcan had impressed upon him that he was a foreigner; actions that he would think of as natural the Persians might consider bizarre and threatening, and he was aware his life might depend on correctly sensing how they behaved and thought.

  He observed that men of the upper class, wearing embroidered trousers and tunics and silk turbans and brocaded shoes, rode into the hall on horseback through a separate entrance. Each was halted approximately one hundred and fifty paces from the throne by attendants who took his horse in return for a coin, and from that privileged point they proceeded on foot among the poor.

  Petty officials in gray clothing and turbans now passed among the people and called out requests for the identities of those with petitions, and Rob made his way to the aisle and laboriously spelled out his name to one of these aides, who recorded it on a curiously thin and unsubstantial-looking parchment.

  A tall man had entered the raised portion at the front of the hall, on which sat a large throne. Rob was too far away to see detail, but the man wasn’t the Shah, for he seated himself at a smaller throne below and to the right of the royal place.

  “Who is that?” Rob asked the Jew to whom he had spoken previously.

  “It is the Grand Vizier, the holy Imam Mirza-aboul Qandrasseh.” The Jew looked at Rob uneasily, for it had not gone unnoticed that he was a petitioner.