by Noah Gordon
But he could sense them hovering and watching him.
He determined to note each separate stage of the disease, marking it well in his mind, but got only as far as the onset of high fever and a headache so formidable it made the skin of his entire body sensitive. The covers became heavy and irritating and he threw them off. Sleep overcame him.
He dreamed he sat and conversed with tall, spare Dick Bukerel, the long-dead Chief Carpenter of his father’s guild. When he awoke he could feel the heat becoming more oppressive, the frenzy within him increasing.
During a fitful night he was troubled by dreams more violent, in which he wrestled a bear that gradually grew thinner and taller until he was the Black Knight, while everyone who had been taken by the plague stood by and witnessed the thrashing struggle in which neither could pin the other.
In the morning he was awakened by soldiers dragging their miserable load from the pesthouse out to the charnel wagon. It was a familiar sight to him as medical clerk, but seeing it as one of the afflicted was different. His heart beat throbbingly, there was a far-off buzzing in his ears. The heaviness in all his limbs was worse than before he had gone to bed, and a fire raged within him.
“Water.”
Mirdin hastened to fetch some, but as Rob shifted himself to drink, he caught his breath in anguish. He hesitated before looking at the place where he felt the pain. Finally he uncovered it and he and Mirdin exchanged a fearful look. Under his left arm there was a hideous bubo of a livid purple hue.
He grasped Mirdin’s wrist. “You shan’t cut it! And you mustn’t burn it with caustics. Do you promise?”
Mirdin ripped his hand free and pushed Rob J. back down onto the pallet. “I promise, Jesse,” he said gently, and hurried away to fetch Karim.
Mirdin and Karim pulled his hand behind his head and tied it to a post, leaving the bubo exposed. They heated rose water and soaked rags to make compresses, changing the poultices faithfully when they cooled.
He grew hotter with fever than he had ever been, man or child, and all the pain in his body concentrated in the bubo, until his mind turned away from the unremitting agony and wandered.
He sought coolness in the shade of a wheat field and kissed her, touched her mouth, kissed her face, the red hair falling over him like a dark mist.
He heard Karim praying in Persian and Mirdin in Hebrew. When Mirdin came to the Shema, Rob followed along. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart …
He feared to die with Jewish scripture on his lips and strove for a Christian prayer. The one that came to mind was a chant of his boyhood priests.
Jesus Christus natus est.
Jesus Christus crucifixus est.
Jesus Christus sepultus est.
Amen.
His brother Samuel sat on the floor close by the pallet, doubtless a guide come to fetch him. Samuel appeared the same, down to the wry and quizzical expression on his face. He scarcely knew what to say to Samuel; Rob had grown to manhood but Samuel was still the boy he had been when he died.
The pain was even more intense. The pain was terrible.
“Come, Samuel,” he cried. “Let us be gone!”
But Samuel only sat and stared at him.
Presently there was such a sweet and sudden easing of the pain in his arm that the relief was as sharp as a fresh hurt. He could not allow himself false hope, and he forced himself to wait patiently for someone to come.
After what seemed an inordinately long time, he was aware of Karim leaning over him.
“Mirdin! Mirdin! All praise to Allah, the bubo has opened!”
Two grinning faces hovered above him, the one darkly handsome, the other homely with the goodness of saints.
“I’ll put in a wick so it will drain,” Mirdin said, and for a while they became too busy for thanksgiving.
It was as if he had come through the stormiest of seas and now drifted in the calmest and most peaceable of backwaters.
The recovery was as swift and uneventful as he had seen in other survivors. There was a weakness and shakiness, natural following the high fevers; but clarity returned to his mind and there was no further mixing of past and present events.
He fretted, wishing to make some small use of himself, but his caretakers would have none of it and kept him supine upon his pallet.
“It means all to you, this practice of medicine,” Karim observed keenly one morning. “I knew it, and therefore made no objection when you seized leadership of our little party.”
Rob opened his mouth to protest but closed it quickly, for it was true.
“I was infuriated when Fadil ibn Parviz was made the leader,” Karim said. “He does well in examinations and is highly regarded by faculty, but as a working physician he is a calamity. Further, he began his apprenticeship two years after I started my own and he is a hakim while I am still a clerk.”
“Then how could you accept me as leader, who hasn’t yet apprenticed a full year?”
“You are different, taken out of the competition by your enslavement to healing.”
Rob smiled. “I’ve seen you, these hard weeks. Aren’t you owned by the same master?”
“No,” Karim said calmly. “Oh, don’t misunderstand, I desire to be the best of doctors. But at least as strongly, I need to become rich. Wealth isn’t your strongest ambition, is it, Jesse?”
Rob shook his head.
“When I was a child in the village of Carsh, which is in the province of Hamadhān, Abdallah Shah, the father of Alā Shah, led a great army across our countryside to move against bands of Seljuk Turks. Wherever Abdallah’s army stopped, misery came, a plague of soldiers. They took crops and animals, food that meant survival or disaster to their own people. When the army moved on, we starved.
“I was five years old. My mother held her newborn daughter by the feet and dashed her head against the rocks. They say many resorted to cannibalism, and I believe it.
“First my father died, and then my mother. For a year I lived in the streets with beggars and was a beggar boy. Finally I was taken in by Zaki-Omar, a man who had been my father’s friend. He was a noted athlete. He educated me and taught me to run. And for nine years he fucked my arse.”
Karim fell silent a moment, the stillness broken only by the soft moaning of a patient across the room.
“When he died, I was fifteen. His family threw me out, but he had made arrangements for my entrance to the madrassa and I came to Ispahan, free for the first time. I made up my mind that when I have sons they will be safe, and that kind of safety comes from wealth.”
As children they had met similar catastrophes half a world apart, Rob thought. Had he been slightly less fortunate, or had Barber been a different sort of a man …
The conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Mirdin, who sat on the floor on the other side of the pallet from Karim. “Nobody died in Shīrāz yesterday.”
“Allah,” Karim said.
“No one died!”
Rob took each of them by the hand.
Presently Karim and Mirdin clasped hands too. They were beyond laughter, beyond tears, like old men who had shared a lifetime. Linked, they sat and looked at one another, savoring survival.
It was ten more days before they pronounced Rob strong enough to travel. Word of the plague’s end had spread. It would be years before there were trees in Shīrāz again but people were beginning to come back, and some brought lumber. They passed a house on whose windows carpenters were hanging shutters, several more where men were putting up doors.
It was good to leave the city behind and head north.
They traveled without haste. When they came to the house of Ishmael the Merchant, they dismounted and knocked, but no one answered.
Mirdin wrinkled his nose. “There are dead nearby,” he said quietly.
Entering the house, they found the decomposed bodies of the merchant and Hakim Fadil. There was no sign of Abbas Sefi, who doubtless h
ad fled the “safe refuge” when he saw that the other two were stricken.
So they had one last responsibility before they left the land of the plague, and they spoke prayers and burned the two bodies, building a hot fire with the merchant’s expensive furniture.
Where eight had left Ispahan with the medical party, three rode back from Shīrāz.
45
A MURDERED MAN’S BONES
When he got back there seemed an unreality about Ispahan, full of healthy people laughing or squabbling. For a time it was strange for Rob to walk among them, as if the world were tipped on end.
Ibn Sina was saddened but not surprised to learn of the desertions and deaths when they got home. He received the record book from Rob eagerly. During the month in which the three clerks had waited in the house at Ibrahim’s Rock, to make certain they didn’t bring home the plague, Rob had written at length, resulting in a detailed account of their work in Shīrāz.
He made it plain in his reports that the other two clerks had saved his life, and he had written of them with warm praise.
“Karim too?” Ibn Sina asked him bluntly when they were alone.
Rob hesitated, for it seemed presumptuous of him to evaluate a fellow student. But he drew a breath and answered the question. “He may have trouble with the examinations but he is already a wonderful physician, calm and resolute during disaster and tender with those in torment.”
Ibn Sina seemed satisfied. “And now you must go to the House of Paradise and report to Alā Shah, for the king is eager to discuss the presence of a Seljuk army in Shīrāz,” he said.
Winter was dying but not dead, and the palace was cold. Khuff’s hard boots rang on the stone floors as Rob followed him down dark corridors.
Alā Shah sat alone at a great table.
“Jesse ben Benjamin, Majesty.” The Captain of the Gates withdrew as Rob performed the ravi zemin.
“You may sit with me, Dhimmi. You must pull the tablecloth over your lap,” the king instructed. When Rob did so, it was a pleasant shock. The table was set over a grill in the floor, through which heat drifted pleasantly from ovens below.
He knew he mustn’t look at the monarch too long or too directly, but he had already noted evidence that confirmed the marketplace gossip of the Shah’s continuing dissipation. Alā’s eyes burned like a wolf’s and the flat planes of the lean, hawkish face looked slack, doubtless the result of consuming too much wine too steadily.
Before the Shah was a board divided into alternately light and dark squares, set with elaborately carved bone figures. Next to it were cups and a pitcher of wine. Alā poured for them both and downed his wine quickly.
“Drink it, drink it, I would make you a merry Jew.” The red eyes were commanding.
“I ask your kind permission to leave it. It doesn’t make me merry, Majesty. It makes me surly and wild, so I can’t enjoy wine like more fortunate men.”
The Shah’s attention had been gained. “It causes me to awake each morning with a powerful pain behind the eyes and a trembling of the hands. You are the physician. What is the remedy?”
Rob smiled. “Less wine, Highness, and more riding out in the pure Persian air.”
The sharp eyes searched his face for insolence and found none. “Then you must ride out with me, Dhimmi.”
“I am at your service, Majesty.”
Alā waved his hand to show it was understood. “Now, let us speak of the Seljuks in Shīrāz. You must tell all.”
He listened attentively while Rob recounted at length what he knew about the force that had invaded Anshan.
Finally he nodded. “Our enemy to the northwest encircled us and sought to establish themselves to our southeast. Had they conquered and occupied all of Anshan, Ispahan would have been a morsel between grinding Seljuk jaws.” He slapped the table. “Allah be blessed for bringing them the plague. When they come again, we will be ready.”
He pulled the large checkered board so that it sat between them. “You know this pastime?”
“No, Sire.”
“Our ancient pursuit. When you lose it is called shahtreng, the ‘anguish of the king.’ But mostly it is known as the Shah’s Game, for it is about war.” He smiled, amused. “I shall teach you the Shah’s Game, Dhimmi.”
He handed one of the elephant figures to Rob and let him feel the creamy smoothness. “Carved from an elephant’s tusk. You see, we both have an equal array. The king stands in the center, his faithful companion, the general, in attendance. On each side of them is an elephant, casting comfortable shadows as dark as indigo about the throne. Two camels are next to the elephants, with men of fast intent mounted on them. Then come two horses with their riders, ready to fight on the day of combat. At each end of the battle lines a rukh, or warrior, raises his cupped hands to his lips, drinking his enemies’ blood. In front move the foot soldiers, whose duty is to come to the assistance of the others in the fighting. If a foot soldier presses through to the other end of the field of battle, that hero is placed beside the king, like the general.
“The brave general never moves in the battle more than one square from his king. The mighty elephants run through three squares and observe the whole battlefield two miles wide. The camel runs snorting and stamping through three squares, thus and so. The horses also move over three squares, and in jumping them one of the squares remains untouched. To all sides rage the vindictive rukhs, crossing the whole field of battle.
“Each piece moves in its own area, and makes neither less nor more than its appointed move. If anyone approaches the king in battle he cries aloud, ‘Remove, O Shah!’ and the king must retreat from his square. Should the opposing king, horse, rukh, general, elephant, and army close the road before him, he must look about him on all four sides with knit brows. If he see that his army has been overthrown, his road barred by water and the ditch, the enemy to left and right, before and behind, he shall die of weariness and thirst, the fate ordained by the revolving firmament for a loser in war.” He poured himself more wine, drank it down, and glowered at Rob. “Do you comprehend?”
“I believe so, Sire,” Rob said cautiously.
“Then let us begin.”
Rob made mistakes, moving some of the pieces incorrectly, and each time Alā Shah corrected him with a growl. The game didn’t last long, for very quickly his forces were slain and his king taken.
“Another,” Alā said with satisfaction.
The second contest was concluded almost as swiftly as the first, but Rob began to see that the Shah anticipated his moves because he had set ambushes and lured him into traps, just as though they were fighting a real war.
When the second game was finished, Alā waved his hand in dismissal.
“A proficient player can ward off defeat for days,” he said. “Who wins at the Shah’s Game is fit to govern the world. But you have done well, your first time. It is no disgrace for you to suffer shahtreng, for after all you are but a Jew.”
* * *
How satisfying to be in the little house in Yehuddiyyeh again, and to slip back into the hard routines of the maristan and the lecture halls!
To Rob’s great pleasure he wasn’t sent back to serve as jail surgeon, but instead was apprenticed in fractures for a time, to serve with Mirdin as clerks under Hakim Jalal-ul-Din. Slim and saturnine, Jalal appeared to be a typical leader of Ispahan’s medical society, respected and prosperous. But he differed from most of the Ispahan doctors in several important aspects.
“So you are Jesse the Barber-Surgeon, of whom I have heard?” he said when Rob reported to him.
“Yes, Master Physician.”
“I can’t share the general scorn for barber-surgeons. Many are thieves and fools, true enough, but also among their number are men who are honest and clever. Before I became a physician I was of another profession despised by Persian doctors, a traveling bonesetter, and after I became hakim I am the same man I was before. But though I don’t damn you as a barber, still you must work hard for my respect.
If you don’t earn it, I shall kick your arse from my service, European.”
Both Rob and Mirdin were happy to work hard. Jalal-ul-Din was famous as a bone specialist and had developed a wide variety of padded splints and traction devices. He taught them to use fingertips as if they were eyes that could peer beneath bruised and crushed flesh, visualizing the injury until the best course of treatment was clear. Jalal was especially skillful in manipulating chips and fragments until they were back in their rightful places, where nature could make them part of bones once again.
“He appears to have a curious interest in crime,” Mirdin grumbled after their first few days as Jalal’s assistants. And it was true, for Rob had noted that the physician spoke inordinately long about a murderer who had shriven his guilt that week in Imam Qandrasseh’s court.
One Fakhr-i-Ayn, a shepherd, had confessed that two years earlier he had sodomized and then slain a fellow shepherd named Qifti al-Ullah, burying his victim in a shallow grave outside the city walls. The murderer was condemned by the court and promptly executed and quartered.
A few days later, when Rob and Mirdin reported to Jalal, he told them that the body of the murdered man was to be removed from its crude grave and reburied in a Muslim cemetery with benefit of Islamic prayer to insure his soul’s admission to Paradise.
“Come,” Jalal said. “It is a rare opportunity. Today we shall be grave-diggers.”
He didn’t disclose whom he had bribed, but soon the two clerks and the physician, leading a laden mule, accompanied a mullah and a kelonter’s soldier to the lonely hillside which the late Fakhr-i-Ayn had pointed out to authorities.
“Have a care,” Jalal said as they used their spades.
Presently they saw the bones of a hand, and soon after that removed the entire skeleton, laying the bones of Qifti-al-Ullah on a blanket.
“Time for food,” Jalal announced, and led the donkey to the shade of a tree a distance from the grave. The animal’s pack was opened to give forth roast fowl, sumptuous pilah, large desert dates, honey cakes, a jug of sherbet. The soldier and the mullah fell to eating eagerly, and Jalal and his clerks left them to the heavy meal and the nap that would surely follow.
