by Noah Gordon
As they crossed the bridge over the River of Life, Mirdin glanced over at him and grinned. “You shall learn to love her!” he shouted to his friend.
Rob never learned to love his camel. When given a chance the beast spat ropy globs at him and snapped like a cur so that he had to tie its jaws, and aimed vicious backward kicks at him such as are employed by an uglytempered mule. He was wary of the animal at all times.
He enjoyed traveling with soldiers in front and behind; they might have been an ancient Roman cohort, and he was pleased to fancy himself part of a legion bringing its own kind of enlightenment where it went. The fantasy was dispelled late each afternoon, for they didn’t make a neat Roman camp. Alā had his tent and soft carpets and musicians, and cooks and hands aplenty to do his will. The others picked a spot on the ground and rolled up in their clothing. The stink of the excretions of animals and men was ever present, and if they came to a brook it was foul before they left it.
At night, lying in the dark on the hard ground, Mirdin continued to teach him the laws according to the Jewish God. The familiar exercise of teaching and learning helped them forget discomfort and apprehension. They went through commandments by the dozens, making excellent progress and causing Rob to observe that going to war could be an ideal environment for study. Mirdin’s calm, scholarly voice seemed a reassurance that they would see a better day.
For a week they used their own stores and then all provisions were gone, according to plan. One hundred of the foot soldiers were assigned as foragers and moved ahead of the main party. They scoured the countryside with skill and it was a daily sight to see the men leading goats or herding sheep, carrying squawking fowl or laden with produce. The finest was chosen for the Shah and the rest distributed, so that each night there was cooking over a hundred fires and the raiders ate well.
A daily medical call was held at each new encampment; it was within sight of the king’s tent to discourage malingerers, but still the line was long. One evening Karim came to them there.
“Do you want to work? We’re in need of help,” Rob said.
“It’s forbidden. I’m to stay close to the Shah.”
“Ah,” Mirdin said.
Karim gave them his crooked smile. “Do you want more food?”
“We have enough,” Mirdin said.
“I can get what you want. It will take several months to reach the elephant pens at Mansura. You may as well make your life on the march as comfortable as possible.”
Rob thought of the story Karim had told him during the plague in Shīrāz. Of how an army passing through the province of Hamadhān had brought a bitter end to Karim’s parents. He wondered how many babies would be brained against the rocks to save them from starvation, because of the passing of this army.
Then he felt ashamed of his animosity toward his friend, for the raid into India wasn’t Karim’s fault. “There is something I’d like to ask for. Ditches should be dug on the four perimeters of each new camp, to be used as latrines.”
Karim nodded.
The suggestion was implemented at once, along with an announcement that the new system was an order of the surgeons. It didn’t make them popular, for now each evening weary soldiers were assigned to ditchdigging, and anyone who awoke in the night with cramps gripping his bowels had to stumble about in the darkness seeking a trench. Violators who were caught received canings. But there was less of a stench and it was pleasant not having to worry about stepping in human shit as they broke camp every morning.
Most of the troops viewed them with bland contempt. It hadn’t escaped general notice that Mirdin had reported to the raiding party without a weapon, requiring Khuff to issue him a clumsy excuse for a guardsman’s sword, which usually he forgot to wear. Their leather caps also set them apart, as did their habit of rising early and walking from the camp to don prayer shawls and recite benedictions and wind leather thongs around their arms and hands.
Mirdin was bemused. “There are no other Jews here to scrutinize and suspect you, so why do you pray with me?” He grinned when Rob shrugged. “I think a small part of you has become a Jew.”
“No.” He told Mirdin how, on the day he had assumed a Jewish identity, he had gone to the Cathedral of St. Sofia in Constantinople and promised Jesus that he would never forsake Him.
Mirdin nodded, no longer grinning. They were wise enough not to pursue the subject. They were aware of things about which they could never agree because they had been raised in differing beliefs regarding God and the human soul, but they were content to avoid these pitfalls and share their friendship as reasoning men, as physicians, and now as bumbling soldiers.
When they reached Shīrāz, by prearrangement the kelonter came to them outside the city with a pack train laden with provender, a sacrifice that saved the Shīrāz district from being indiscriminately stripped by the foragers. After he had paid his homage to the Shah the kelonter embraced Rob and Mirdin and Karim and they sat with him and drank wine and remembered the days of the plague.
Rob and Karim rode back with him as far as the city gates. Turning back, they succumbed to a flat, smooth stretch of road and the wine in their veins and began to race their camels. It was a revelation to Rob, for what had been a rolling, cumbersome walking gait turned into something else when the camel ran. The beast’s stride lengthened so that each step was a pushing leap that carried her and her rider through the air in a level, hurtling rush. Rob sat her easily and enjoyed various sensations; he floated, he soared, he became the wind.
Now he understood why the Persian Jews had coined a Hebrew name for the variety which the general populace had adopted—gemala sarka, the flying camels.
The gray female strove desperately, and for the first time Rob felt affection for her. “Come, my dolly! Come, my girl!” he shouted as they sped toward the camp.
Mirdin’s brown male won but the contest left Rob in high spirits. He begged extra forage from the elephant keepers and gave it to her and she bit him on the forearm. The bite didn’t break the skin but it was nasty, a purpled bruise that gave him pain for days, and that was when he gave the camel her name, Bitch.
58
INDIA
Below Shīrāz they found the Spice Road and followed it until, to avoid the mountainous inland terrain, they moved to the coast near Hormuz. It was winter but the gulf air was warm and perfumed. Sometimes after they had made camp late in the day the soldiers and their animals bathed in the warm saltiness from hot sandy beaches while sentries kept a nervous watch for sharks. The people they saw now were as likely to be blacks or Baluchis as Persians. They were fisher folk or, at the oases that sprang from the coastal sand, farmers who grew dates and pomegranates. They lived in tents or in mud-plastered stone houses with flat roofs; now and then the raiders moved through a wadi where families lived in caves. Rob thought it a poor land, but Mirdin grew exhilarated as they traveled, looking about with soft eyes.
When they reached the fishing villag of Tīz, Mirdin took Rob by the hand and led him to the water’s edge. “There, on the other side,” he said, pointing out at the azure gulf. “There is Masqat. From here, a boat could bring us to my father’s house in a few hours.”
It was tantalizingly close, but next morning they broke camp and went farther away from the Askari family with every step.
Almost a month after they had departed from Ispahan they moved beyond Persia. Changes were made. Alā ordered three rings of sentries around the camp at night, and each morning a new watchword was passed to every man; anyone who tried to get into their camp without knowing the word would be killed.
Once on the soil of the foreign land of Sind the soldiers gave way to their instinct for marauding, and one day the foragers drove women back to the camp the way they drove animals. Alā said he would allow them to have females in the camp for this night only and then no more. It would be difficult enough for six hundred men to approach Mansura undetected, and he wanted no rumors to go before them because of women taken along their way.
It would be a wild night. They saw Karim selecting four of the women with great care.
“Why does he need four?” Rob asked.
“He doesn’t select them for himself,” Mirdin said.
It was true. They observed Karim leading the women to the king’s tent.
“Is this why we struggled to help him pass the examination and become a physician?” Mirdin said bitterly. Rob didn’t answer.
The raiders passed the other females from man to man, choosing lots for turns. Groups stood and watched the rutting and cheered, the sentries being relieved so they could come and share in these first spoils.
Mirdin and Rob sat off to one side with a goatskin of bitter wine. For a time they attempted study, but it wasn’t the occasion to review the Lord’s laws.
“You’ve taught me more than four hundred commandments,” Rob said wonderingly. “Soon we’ll be finished with them.”
“I’ve merely listed them. There are sages who devote their lives to trying to understand the commentaries on just one of the laws.”
The night was filled with screams and drunken sounds.
For years Rob had governed himself well in avoiding strong drink, but now he was lonely and in sexual need undampened by the ugliness taking place about him, and he drank too eagerly.
In a little while he was truculent. Mirdin, amazed that this was his mild and reasoning friend, gave him no excuse. But a passing soldier jostled him and would have been the object of his anger if Mirdin hadn’t soothed and cozened, coddling Rob like a spoiled child and leading him to a sleeping place.
When he awoke in the morning the women were gone and he paid for his foolishness by having to ride the camel with a terrible head. Ever the medical student, Mirdin added to his pain by questioning him at length, at last coming away with a greater understanding that to some men wine must be treated as if it were a poison and a bewitchery.
Mirdin hadn’t thought to bring a weapon to battle but he had brought the Shah’s Game and it was a blessing, for they played each evening until darkness came. Now finally the contests became hard-fought and close, and on occasion when luck was with him, Rob won.
Over the game board he confided his concern for Mary.
“Doubtless she’s fine, for Fara says that having babes is something women have learned to do long since,” Mirdin said cheerfully.
Rob wondered aloud whether the child would be daughter or son.
“How long after her menses had stopped did the fucking take place?”
He shrugged.
“It is written by al-Habib that if intercourse takes place on the first to fifth day after the end of bleeding, it will be a boy. If from the fifth to the eighth day after her period, a girl.” He hesitated, and Rob knew it was because al-Habib also had written that if the mating occurred after the fifteenth day, there was a possibility the child would be a hermaphrodite.
“Al-Habib also writes that brown-eyed fathers make sons and blue-eyed fathers make daughters. Yet I come from a land where most men have blue eyes, and they have always had many sons,” Rob said crossly.
“Doubtless al-Habib wrote only of normal folk such as are found in the East,” Mirdin said.
Sometimes, instead of playing the Shah’s Game they reviewed Ibn Sina’s teachings on the treatment of battle wounds, or they inspected their supplies and made certain they were in readiness as surgeons. It was fortunate that they did, for one evening they were invited to Alā’s tent to share the king’s evening meal and answer his questions about their preparations. Karim was there, greeting his friends uncomfortably; it soon became apparent he had been ordered to question them and judge their efficiency.
Servants brought water and cloths that they might wash their hands before eating. Alā dipped his hands in a beautifully chased golden bowl and wiped them dry on pale blue linen towels worked with Qu’ranic phrases in gold thread.
“Tell us how you’ll treat slash wounds,” Karim said.
Rob told what Ibn Sina had taught: oil was to be boiled and poured into the wound as hot as possible, to ward off suppuration and evil humors.
Karim nodded.
Alā had been listening palely. Now he gave firm instructions that if he himself were mortally struck, they were to dose him with soporifics to ease the pain the very moment after a mullah had led him in final prayer.
The meal was simple by royal standards, spit-roasted fowl and summer greens gathered along the way, but it was better prepared than the fare to which they were accustomed, and it was served on plates. Afterward, while three musicians played dulcimers, Mirdin tested Alā at the Shah’s Game but was easily bested.
It was a welcome change in their routine, but Rob was not unhappy to leave the presence of the king. He didn’t envy Karim, who nowadays often rode on the elephant named Zi, seated in the box with the Shah.
But Rob hadn’t lost his fascination with elephants and watched them closely at every opportunity. Some were laden with bundles of war mail similar to the armor worn by human warriors. Five of the elephants carried twenty extra mahouts brought along by Alā as excess baggage in the hopeful expectation that on the trip back to Ispahan they would be occupied in tending the elephants taken at Mansura. All the mahouts were Indians captured in previous raids, but they had been excellently treated and lavishly rewarded, as befit their value, and the Shah was certain of their loyalty.
The elephants took care of their own foraging. At the end of each day their small, dark keepers accompanied them to vegetation where they ate their fill of grass, leaves, small branches, and bark, often gaining their food by knocking down trees with startling ease.
One evening the feeding elephants frightened from the trees a chattering band of manlike, furry little creatures with tails, which Rob knew from his reading to be monkeys. After that they saw monkeys every day, and a variety of bright-plumaged birds and occasional serpents on the ground and in the trees. Harsha, the Shah’s mahout, told Rob that some of the snakes were deadly. “If someone is bitten, a knife must be used to open the site of the bite and all the poison must be sucked away and spat out. Then a small animal should be killed and the liver tied to the wound to draw it.” The Indian warned that the person doing the sucking must not have a sore or a cut in his mouth. “If he does, the poison will enter and he will die in half an afternoon.”
They passed Buddhas, great sitting gods at which some of the men jeered uncomfortably but which nobody defiled, for though they told each other that Allah was the one true God, there was an amused, subtle menace in the ageless figures that made them realize they were a long way from their homes. Looking up at the looming stone gods, Rob fought them off with a silent recitation of the Paternoster from St. Matthew. That evening perhaps Mirdin fought them off as well, for, lying on the ground surrounded by the Persian army, he taught an especially enthusiastic lesson in the Law.
It was the night when they reached the five hundred and twenty-fourth commandment, on the face of it a puzzling edict: “If a man has committed a sin worthy of death, and he be put to death, and thou hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night upon the tree but thou shalt surely bury him the same day.”
Mirdin told him to mark the words well. “Because of them, we don’t study human dead as did the heathen Greeks.”
Rob’s skin prickled and he sat up.
“The sages and scholars draw three edicts from this commandment,” Mirdin said. “First, if a convicted criminal’s body is to be treated with such respect, then the body of a respected citizen certainly should also be swiftly interred without being subjected to shame or disgrace. Second, whoever keeps his dead unburied overnight transgresses a negative commandment. And third, the body must be interred whole and uncut, for if one leaves out even a small amount of tissue, it’s as if no burial took place at all.”
“This is what’s done the mischief,” Rob said wonderingly. “Because this law forbids leaving a murderer’s body unburied, Christians and Muslims and Jews have k
ept physicians from studying that which they seek to heal!”
“It’s God’s commandment,” Mirdin said sternly.
Rob lay back and studied the darkness. Nearby, a foot soldier snored loudly and beyond that unpleasant sound someone hawked and spat. For the hundredth time he asked himself what he was doing in their midst. “I think your way is disrespect for the dead. To throw them into the earth with such haste, as if you can’t wait to get them out of sight.”
“It’s true we don’t fuss over the corpse. After the funeral we honor the memory of the person through shiva, seven days in which the mourners stay inside their house in grief and prayer.”
Frustration welled, and Rob felt as savage as if he had wallowed in strong drink. “It makes little sense. It’s an ignorant commandment.”
“You shall not say that God’s word is ignorant!”
“I’m not speaking of God’s word. I’m talking of man’s interpretation of God’s word. That has kept the world in ignorance and darkness for a thousand years.”
For a moment Mirdin was silent. “Your approval isn’t required,” he said finally. “Nor is wisdom or decency. Our agreement was simply that you would study God’s laws.”
“Yes, I agreed to study. I didn’t agree to close off my mind or withhold my judgment.”
This time Mirdin didn’t reply.
Two days later, they came at last to the banks of a great river, the Indus. There was an easy ford a few miles north but the mahouts told them that sometimes it was guarded by soldiers, so they traveled south a few miles to another ford, deeper but still passable. Khuff set a party of men to building rafts. Those who were able swam to the far bank with the animals. Those who were not swimmers poled across on the rafts. Some of the elephants walked on the river bottom, submerged save for their trunks, which extended out of the water and gave them air! When the river became too deep even for them, the elephants swam as well as horses.
