by Noah Gordon
“I,” Fadil said hoarsely.
“Do not do this, Hakim,” Rob said.
“You are our leader and our only physician,” Karim said.
Fadil didn’t appear to hear them. “I shall come inside, merchant.”
“I shall come inside too,” Abbas Sefi said.
Both men slid from their horses. There was the sound of a heavy bar being eased slowly free. They glimpsed a pale, bearded face as the door opened only far enough to allow the two men to slip inside, then it was slammed again and barred.
Those outside stood like men adrift on the open sea. Karim looked at Rob. “Perhaps they are right,” he muttered. Mirdin said nothing, his face troubled and uncertain. The youth Ali was about to weep again.
“The Plague Book,” Rob said, remembering that Fadil carried it in a large purse he wore on a strap around his neck. He went to the door and hammered on it.
“Go away,” Fadil said. He sounded terrified; doubtless he feared to open the door lest they fall on him.
“Hear me, you shitepoke,” Rob said, seized by fury. “If we are not given Ibn Sina’s Plague Book, wood and brush will be gathered and piled high against the walls of this house. And I will delight in setting it afire, you false physician.”
In a moment the drawing of the bar was heard again. The door opened and the book was thrown out to fall in the dust at their feet.
Rob picked it up and mounted. His fury didn’t last as he rode away, for part of him yearned to be with Fadil and Abbas Sefi in the merchant’s safe place.
He traveled a long time before he could bring himself to turn in the saddle. Mirdin Askari and Karim Harun were far back, but coming after him. The youth, Ali Rashid, brought up the rear, leading Fadil’s packhorse and Abbas Sefi’s mule.
44
THE DEATH
The trail traversed a marshy plain almost in a straight line and then became tortuous in a rocky chain of bare mountains that they crossed for two days. Finally descending toward Shīrāz on the third morning, they saw smoke from afar. As they drew near, they came upon men burning bodies outside the wall. Beyond Shīrāz they could see the slopes of its famous gorge, Teng-i-Allahu Akbar, or Pass of God Is Most Great. Rob noticed dozens of large black birds soaring above the pass and knew that at last they had found the pestilence.
No sentry was at the gate when they passed into the city.
“Were the Seljuks inside the walls, then?” Karim said, for Shīrāz had a raped look. It was a pleasantly arranged city of pink stone, with many gardens, but everywhere raw stumps marked where once large trees had given shade and green majesty, and even the rosebushes of the gardens had been taken to feed the funeral pyres.
Dreamlike, they rode down empty streets.
At last they spied a man with a stumbling gait, but when they hailed him and moved to approach, he fled behind some houses.
Soon they found another pedestrian, and this time they boxed him in with their horses when he tried to run away, and Rob J. drew his sword.
“Answer and we do you no harm. Where are the physicians?”
The man was terrified. He held before his mouth and nose a small packet, probably of aromatic herbs. “The kelonter’s,” he gasped, pointing down the street.
On the way they passed a charnel wagon. Its two burly collectors, their faces more heavily veiled than if they’d been women, stopped to pick up the small body of a child from where it had been left at the side of the street. There were three adult cadavers, one male and two female, in the wagon.
At the municipal offices, they presented themselves as the medical party from Ispahan and were stared at with astonishment by a tough man with a military look and an old man, enfeebled; both had the slack faces and staring eyes of long sleeplessness.
“I am Dehbid Hafiz, the kelonter of Shīrāz,” the younger man told them. “And this is Hakim Isfari Sanjar, our last physician.”
“Why are your streets empty?” Karim said.
“We were fourteen thousand souls,” Hafiz said. “With the coming of the Seljuks, an additional four thousand scurried behind the protection of our wall. After the outbreak of the Death, one-third of all those in Shīrāz fled the city, including,” he said bitterly, “every rich man and the entire government, content to leave their kelonter and his soldiers to guard their property. Nearly six thousand have died. Those who are not yet stricken cower inside their homes and pray to Allah (merciful is He!) that they may remain so.”
“How do you treat them, Hakim?” Karim asked.
“Nothing avails against the Death,” the old doctor said. “A physician may hope only to bring some small comfort to the dying.”
“We are not yet physicians,” Rob said, “but medical apprentices sent to you by our master Ibn Sina, and we shall do your bidding.”
“I give you no bidding, you shall do as you may,” Hakim Isfari Sanjar said roughly. He waved his hand. “I give you only advice. If you would stay alive as I have, each morning with your breakfast you must eat a piece of toast soaked in vinegar of wine, and each time you speak with any person, you must first take a drink of wine,” he said, and Rob J. realized that what he had mistaken for the infirmity of old age was instead an advanced state of drunkenness.
Records of the Ispahan Medical Party.
If this compendium is found after our deaths, generous reward will be realized upon its delivery to Abu Ali at-Husain ibn Abdullah ibn Sina, Chief Physician of the maristan, Ispahan. Inscribed on the 19th Day of the Month of Rabia I, in the 413th Year After the Hegira.
We have been in Shīrāz four days during which 243 have died. The pestilence begins as a mild fever followed by headache, sometimes severe. The fever becomes extremely high just before the appearance of a lesion in the groin, in an armpit, or behind an ear, commonly called a bubo. There is mention in the Plague Book of such buboes, which Hakim Ibn al-Khatīb of Andalusia said were inspired by the Devil and always in the shape of a serpent. Those observed here are not serpent-shaped but round and full, like the lesion of a tumor. They may be as large as a plum, but most are the size of a lentil. Often there is vomiting of blood, which always means death is imminent. Most victims die within two days of the appearance of a bubo. Some few are fortunate in that the bubo suppurates. When this occurs it is as if an evil humor passes from the patient, who may then recover.
(signed)
Jesse ben Benjamin Clerk
They found an established pesthouse in the jail, the prisoners having been freed. It was packed with the dead, the dying, and the newly afflicted, so many it was impossible to comfort any. The air was filled with groans and cries, and heavy with the stench of bloody vomit, unwashed bodies, and human waste.
After conferring with the other three clerks, Rob went to the kelonter and requested the use of the Citadel, in which soldiers had been housed. This granted, he went from patient to patient in the jail, assessing them, holding their hands.
The message that flowed into his own hands was generally dreadful: the cup of life turned into a sieve.
Those close to death were moved to the Citadel. Since this was a large percentage of the victims, those not yet moribund could be nursed in a cleaner and less crowded place.
It was Persian winter, cold nights, warm afternoons. The peaks of the mountains were dazzling with snow and in the mornings the clerks needed their sheepskin coats. Above the gorge, black vultures soared in growing numbers.
“Your men are throwing bodies down the pass instead of burning them,” Rob J. told the kelonter.
Hafiz nodded. “I have forbidden it, but I believe you are right. Wood is scarce.”
“Every body must be burned. Without exception,” Rob told him firmly, for it was something about which Ibn Sina had been adamant. “You must do what is necessary to make certain.”
That afternoon three men were beheaded for dumping bodies in the pass, execution adding to the death all around them. It wasn’t what Rob had intended, but Hafiz was resentful.
�
�Where are my men to get wood? All our trees are gone.”
“Send soldiers into the mountains to cut trees,” Rob said.
“They would not come back.”
So Rob delegated young Ali to take soldiers into houses that had been deserted. Most of the houses were of stone but they had wooden doors, wooden shutters, stout roof beams. Ali drove the men to rip and tear, and the pyres roared outside the city wall.
They tried to follow Ibn Sina’s instructions about breathing through vinegar-soaked sponges, but the sponges hampered their work and were soon discarded. Heeding the example of Hakim Isfari Sanjar, each day they choked down vinegar-soaked toast and drank a good deal of wine. Sometimes by nightfall they were as drunk as the old hakim.
In his cups, Mirdin told them of his wife Fara and his small sons Dawwid and Issachar who awaited his safe return to Ispahan. He spoke with nostalgia of his father’s house by the Arabian Sea, where his family traveled the coast buying seed pearls. “I like you,” he said to Rob. “How can you be friend to my terrible cousin Aryeh?”
Now Rob understood Mirdin’s initial coolness. “A friend of Aryeh? I am not a friend of Aryeh. Aryeh is a shit!”
“He is, he is a shit, exactly!” Mirdin cried, and they rocked with laughter.
Handsome Karim drawled stories of sexual conquest and promised he would find young Ali the most beautiful pair of teats in the Eastern Caliphate when they returned to Ispahan. Karim ran every day, through the city of death. Sometimes he jeered at them until they ran with him, hurling themselves through the empty streets past vacant houses, past houses in which the nervous undiseased huddled, past houses before which bodies had been placed to await the charnel wagon—running from the dreadful sight of reality. For they were touched by more than wine. Surrounded by death, they were young and alive, and they tried to bury their terror by pretending they were immortal and inviolate.
Records of the Ispahan Medical Party.
Inscribed on the 28th Day of the Month of Rabia I, in the 413th Year After the Hegira.
Blood-letting, cupping, and purging appear to have little effect. The relationship of the buboes to dying of this plague is interesting, for it continues to hold true that in the event the bubo bursts or steadily evacuates its green smelly discharge, the patient is likely to survive.
It may be that many are killed by the terribly high fever that eats the fat from their bodies. But when the buboes suppurate, the fever drops precipitously and recuperation begins.
Having observed this, we have labored to ripen the buboes that they might open, applying poultices of mustard and lily bulbs; poultices of figs and boiled onions, pounded and mixed with butter; and a variety of drawing plasters. Sometimes we have cut open the buboes and treated them like ulcers, with but little success. Often these swellings, affected partly by the distemper and partly by their being too violently drawn, become so hard no instrument can cut them. These we have attempted to burn with caustics, with poor results. Many died raving mad with the torment and some during the very operation, so that we may be said to have tortured these poor creatures even to death. Yet some are saved. These might have lived without our presence in this place, but it is our comfort to believe we have been of assistance to a few.
(signed) Jesse ben Benjamin Clerk
“You bone-pickers!” the man screamed. His two servants dumped him unceremoniously on the pesthouse floor and fled, doubtless to steal his belongings, a commonplace thievery in a plague that appeared to corrupt souls as fast as bodies. Children with buboes were being abandoned without hesitation by their terror-crazed parents. Three men and a woman had been beheaded that morning for looting, and a soldier was flayed for fucking a dying female. Karim, who had led soldiers armed with buckets of limewater to cleanse houses in which there had been pestilence, said every vice was for sale and reported witnessing so much rutting that it was clear many were grasping at life through a wildness of the flesh.
Just before midday the kelonter, who never entered the pesthouse himself, sent a white and trembling soldier to bring Rob and Mirdin to the street, where they found Kafiz sniffing a spice-studded apple to ward off disease. “Be advised that the count of those who died yesterday was down to thirty-seven,” he told them triumphantly. It was a dramatic improvement, for on the most virulent day, in the third week after the outbreak, 268 had perished.
Kafiz told them that by his reckoning Shīrāz had lost 801 men, 502 women, 3,193 children, 566 male slaves, 1,417 female slaves, 2 Syrian Christians, and 32 Jews.
Rob and Mirdin exchanged a knowing glance, neither of them having missed the kelonter’s listing of the victims in their order of importance.
Young Ali came walking down the street. Something odd, for the boy would have passed them without a sign had not Rob called his name.
Rob went to him and saw that his eyes were strange. When he touched Ali’s head, the familiar terrible burning chilled his heart.
Ah, God.
“Ali,” he said gently. “You must come inside with me now.”
They had already seen many die, but witnessing the swiftness with which the disease possessed Ali Rashid, it was as if Rob and Karim and Mirdin suffered in the youth’s pain.
From time to time Ali lurched in sudden spasm, as if something had bitten him in the stomach. Agony made him shudder with convulsion and arch his body into queer, contorted positions. They bathed him with vinegar and in the early afternoon they had hope, for he was almost cool to the touch. But it was as if the fever had gathered itself and when the fresh assault came he was hotter than before, his lips cracked, his eyes rolling up into his head.
Among all the cries and groans his were almost lost, but the other three clerks heard the terrible sounds clearly because circumstances had made them his family.
When night came, they took turns sitting by his bed.
The boy was lying racked on the tumbled pallet when Rob came to relieve Mirdin before dawn. His eyes were dull and unknowing and fever had wasted his body and transformed the round adolescent face, from which high cheekbones and a hawkish beak had emerged to give a glimpse of the Bedouin man he might have become.
Rob took Ali’s hands and experienced the dwindling.
Now and again, as an escape from the helplessness of doing nothing, he moved his fingers to Ali’s wrists and felt the pulse beats, weak and blurred like the wing strokes of a struggling bird.
By the time Karim came to relieve Rob, Ali was gone. They could no longer make a pretense of immortality. It was obvious that one of them soon would be next and they began to know the true meaning of fear.
They accompanied Ali’s body to the pyre and each prayed in his own way as it burned.
That morning they began to witness the turning; it was obvious that fewer were brought to the pesthouse with the illness. Three days later the kelonter, barely able to suppress the wishfulness in his voice, reported that on the preceding day only eleven persons had died.
Walking near the pesthouse, Rob noted a large group of dead and dying rats and saw a singular thing when he inspected them: the rodents had the plague, for almost all of them displayed a small but indisputable bubo. Locating one that had died so recently that the warm furry body still crawled with fleas, he laid it on a large flat rock and opened it with his knife as neatly as though al-Juzjani or some other anatomy teacher were peering over his shoulder.
Records of the Ispahan Medical Party.
Inscribed on the Fifth Day of the Month of Rabia II, 413th Year After the Hegira.
Various animals have died as well as men, word having reached us that horses, cows, sheep, camels, dogs, cats, and birds have perished of the pestilence in Anshan.
Dissections of six plague-killed rats were of interest. External signs were similar to those found in human victims, with staring eyes, contorted muscles, gaping lips, protruding tongue of blackish color, bubo in the groin area or behind an ear.
Upon dissection of these rats it becomes clear why surgical removal of th
e bubo is most often unsuccessful. The lesion is likely to have deep, carrot-like roots which, after the main body of the bubo has been removed, remain imbedded in the victim to wreak their havoc.
On opening the abdomens of the rats I found the lower orifices of all six stomachs and the upper bowels to be quite discolored by green gall. The lower intestines were speckled. The livers of all six rodents were shriveled and in four of the rats the hearts were shrunken.
In one of the rats the stomach was, so to say, internally peeled.
Do these effects occur to the organs of human victims of this plague?
Clerk Karim Harun says Galen wrote that man’s internal anatomy is precisely identical to the pig’s and the ape’s, but dissimilar to the rat’s.
Thus, while we do not know the causal events of plague death in humans, we may be bitterly certain they are occurring internally and thus are barred from our inspection.
(signed) Jesse ben Benjamin Clerk
Working in the pesthouse two days later, Rob felt an uneasiness, a heaviness, a weakness in the knees, a difficulty in breathing, a burning within as though he had eaten heavily of spices, although he hadn’t.
These sensations stayed with him and grew as he worked all through the afternoon. He fought to ignore them until, looking into a victim’s face
—inflamed and distorted, the brilliant eyes starting out of the man’s head
—Rob felt he was seeing himself.
He went to Mirdin and Karim.
The answer was in their eyes.
Before he would allow them to lead him to a pallet he insisted on fetching the Plague Book and his notes and giving them to Mirdin. “If neither of you should survive, these must be left by the last man where they can be found and sent to Ibn Sina.”
“Yes, Jesse,” Karim said.
Rob felt calm. A mountain had been moved from his shoulders; the worst had happened and therefore he had been freed from the terrible prison of dread.
“One of us will stay with you,” good, grieving Mirdin said.
“No, there are many here who need you.”
