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

by Noah Gordon

  On the other side the raiders reassembled and began to move north again, toward Mansura, making a wide sweep around the guarded ford.

  Karim summoned Mirdin and Rob to the Shah, and for a time they rode with Alā on Zi’s back. Rob had to concentrate on the king’s words, for the world was different atop an elephant.

  Alā’s spies had reported to him in Ispahan that Mansura was but lightly guarded. The old Rajah of that place, who had been a fierce commander, had recently died and it was said his sons were poor soldiers who undermanned their garrisons.

  “Now I must send out scouts to confirm this,” Alā said. “You shall go, for it occurs to me that two Dhimmi merchants can approach Mansura without raising comment.”

  Rob resisted the impulse to glance at Mirdin.

  “You must keep your eyes open for elephant traps near the village. Sometimes these people build wooden frames through which project sharp iron spikes, and bury them in shallow trenches outside their walls. These devastate the elephants, and we must know that they are not in use here before we commit our beasts.”

  Rob nodded. When one rode an elephant all things appeared possible. “Yes, Majesty,” he told the Shah.

  The raiders made camp, where they would wait until the scouts returned. Rob and Mirdin left their camels, which were obviously military beasts bred for speed and not for burden, and led two asses away from the encampment.

  It was a fresh, sunny morning. In the overripe forest savage birds challenged and shrieked, and a company of monkeys scolded them from a tree.

  “I should like to dissect a monkey.”

  Mirdin was still angry with him, and was finding even less enjoyment in becoming a secret observer than in being a soldier. “Why?” he demanded.

  “Why, to discover what I may,” Rob said, “even as Galen dissected Barbary apes to learn.”

  “I thought you had determined to be a physician.”

  “That is being a physician.”

  “No, that is being a dissector. I’ll be a physician, spending all my days caring for the people of Masqat in time of sickness, which is what a physician does. You can’t fix your mind whether to be a surgeon or a dissector or a physician or a … a midwife with balls! You want it all!”

  Rob smiled at his friend but said nothing more. He had little defense, for to a great extent what Mirdin accused him of was true.

  They traveled for a time in silence. Twice they passed Indian men, a farmer up to his ankles in the muck of a roadside irrigation ditch, and two men in the road lugging a pole from which hung a basket filled with yellow plums. This pair hailed them in a language neither Rob nor Mirdin could comprehend and they could but answer with a smile; Rob hoped they wouldn’t walk as far as the encampment, for now anyone who came upon the raiders would at once become a slave or a corpse.

  Presently half a dozen men leading donkeys came toward them around a bend in the road and Mirdin grinned at Rob for the first time, for these travelers wore dusty leather Jew’s hats like their own, and black caftans that bore witness to hard journeying.

  “Shalom!” Rob called when they were close enough.

  “Shalom aleikhem! And well met.”

  Their spokesman and leader said he was Hillel Nafthali, spice merchant of Ahwaz. He was bluff and smiling, with a livid strawberry birthmark that covered the cheek under his left eye, and he appeared willing to spend the entire day in introductions and the recital of pedigrees. One of the men with him was his brother Ari, one was his son, and the other three were husbands of his daughters. He didn’t know Mirdin’s father but had heard of the pearl-buying Askari family of Masqat, and the exchange of names went on and on until finally they reached a distant Nafthali cousin with whom Mirdin had acquaintance, thus satisfying both sides that they were not strangers.

  “You’ve come from the north?” Mirdin said.

  “We’ve been to Multan. A small errand,” Nafthali said with a satisfaction that indicated the magnitude of the transaction. “Where do you travel?”

  “Mansura. Business, a bit of this, a bit of that,” Rob said, and the men nodded with respect. “Do you know Mansura well?”

  “Very well. In fact, we spent last night there with Ezra ben Husik, who deals in peppercorns. A most worthy man, always excellent hospitality.”

  “Then you have observed the garrison there?” Rob said.

  “The garrison?” Nafthali gazed at them, puzzled.

  “How many soldiers are stationed in Mansura?” Mirdin asked quietly.

  Understanding dawned, and Nafthali drew back, appalled. “We do not become involved in such things,” he said in a low voice, almost a whisper.

  They began to turn away, in a moment they would be gone. Rob knew it was time for a show of faith. “You must not continue very far down this road on peril of your life. Nor must you turn back to Mansura.”

  They gazed at him palely.

  “Then where shall we go?” Nafthali said.

  “Lead your animals off the road and hide in the woods. Stay hidden as long as necessary—until you have heard a great many men going by. When they have all passed, return to the road and go to Ahwaz as fast as you are able.”

  “We thank you,” Nafthali said bleakly.

  “Is it safe for us to approach Mansura?” Mirdin asked.

  The spice merchant nodded. “They are accustomed to seeing Jewish traders.”

  Rob was unsatisfied. Remembering the sign language that Loeb had taught him on the way east to Ispahan, the secret signals by which Jewish merchants in the East conducted their business without conversation, he held out his hand and turned it, the signal for How many?

  Nafthali gazed at him. Finally he placed his right hand on his left elbow, the sign for hundreds. Then he spread all five fingers. Hiding the thumb of his left hand, he spread the other fingers and placed them on his right elbow.

  Rob had to be certain he understood. “Nine hundred soldiers?”

  Nafthali nodded. “Shalom,” he said with quiet irony.

  “Peace be with you,” Rob said.

  The forest ended and they could see Mansura. The village lay in a small valley at the bottom of a stony slope. From the height they could see the garrison and its arrangement: barracks, training grounds, horse corrals, elephant pens. Rob and Mirdin took careful note of the locations and impressed them in their memories.

  Both the village and the garrison were enclosed in a single stockade made of logs set into the ground side by side, with sharpened tops to make the barricade difficult to climb.

  When they drew near the wall Rob jabbed one of the asses with a stick and then, followed by shouting and laughing children, he pursued the animal around the outside of the wall while Mirdin went the other way, ostensibly to cut off the creature’s escape.

  There was no sign of elephant traps.

  They didn’t tarry, but turned west again at once. It didn’t take long to return to the encampment.

  The watchword of the day was mahdi, which meant “savior”; after they had given it to three lines of sentries they were allowed to follow Khuff into the presence of the Shah.

  Alā scowled when hearing of nine hundred soldiers, for he had been led by his spies to expect far fewer defenders at Mansura. Yet he was undaunted. “If we are able to surprise, advantage will yet be on our side.”

  Drawing on the ground with sticks, Rob and Mirdin indicated the details of the fortifications and the location of the elephant pens, while the Shah listened attentively and made his plans.

  All morning the men had been tending equipment, oiling harness, whetting blades to edges of perfect sharpness.

  The elephants were given wine in their buckets. “Not much. Just enough to make them sullen and ready to fight,” Harsha told Rob, who nodded wonderingly. “It is given to them only before battle.”

  The beasts appeared to understand. They moved about restlessly and their mahouts had to be alert as the elephants’ mail was unpacked, draped, and fastened. Special long, heavy swords
with sockets instead of hilts were fitted onto the tusks, and now added to their aura of brute strength was a wicked new lethality.

  There was a burst of nervous activity when Alā ordered out the entire force.

  They moved down the Spice Road, slowly, slowly, for timing was all, and Alā wanted them to arrive at Mansura with day’s end. No one spoke. They met only a few unfortunates along the way, who were taken at once, bound, and guarded by foot soldiers so they could not give alarm. When they came to the place in the road where Rob last had seen the Jews of Ahwaz, he thought of the men hiding somewhere nearby and listening to the sounds of the animals’ hooves and the marching feet and the soft jangling of the elephants’ mail.

  They emerged from the forest as dusk began to claim the world, and under cover of the gloom Alā deployed his forces along the top of the hill. Behind each elephant, on which four archers sat back to back, were swordwielding men on camels and horses, and after the cavalry would come foot soldiers with lances and scimitars.

  Two elephants, naked of battle gear and bearing only their mahouts, moved away on signal. Those atop the hill watched them slowly descending through the peaceful gray light. Beyond them, cooking fires glowed throughout the village as the women prepared the evening meal.

  When the two elephants reached the stockade they lowered their heads against the timbers.

  The Shah raised his arm.

  The elephants moved forward. There was a cracking and a series of thuds as the wall fell. Now the Shah’s arm came down and the Persians began to move.

  The elephants ran down the hill eagerly. Behind them, the camels and horses began to lope and then to gallop. From the village there arose the first faint cries.

  Rob had drawn his sword and was using it to tap Bitch’s flanks, but she needed no urging. First there was just the swift thudding of hooves and the music of the mail, then six hundred voices began to scream their battle cry and the beasts joined, the camels moaning, the elephants trumpeting wild and shrill.

  The hairs rose on the back of Rob’s neck, and he was howling like an animal when Alā’s raiders fell upon Mansura.

  59

  THE INDIAN SMITH

  Rob had swift impressions, like glimpsing a series of drawings. The camel made its way through the splintered ruin of the wall at top speed. As he rode through the village the fear in the faces of the people frantically scurrying gave him a strange feeling of his own invulnerability, a carnal knowledge compounded of both power and shame, like the feeling he had experienced long ago in England when he had baited the old Jew.

  When he reached the garrison a fierce battle already was in progress. The Indians fought on the ground, but they knew elephants and how to attack them. Foot soldiers carrying long pikes tried to jab out the elephants’ eyes and Rob saw that they had been successful against one of the armorless elephants that had pushed down the wall. The mahout was gone, doubtless slain, and the beast had lost both eyes and stood blind and trembling, screaming piteously.

  Rob found himself staring into a grimacing brown face, seeing the drawn-back sword, watching the blade come forward. He didn’t remember deciding to use his broadsword like a thin French blade; he simply shoved and the point entered the Indian’s throat. The man fell away and Rob turned to a figure struggling at him from the other side of the camel and began hacking.

  Some of the Indians had axes and scimitars and tried to take the elephants out by chopping at their trunks or their treelike legs, but it was an unequal contest. The elephants attacked, their ears in their rage spread wide like sails. Bending their trunks inward and folded beneath their deadly sworded tusks, they surged like ramming ships, falling upon the Indians in charges that overturned many. The giant animals raised their feet high, as in a savage dance, and brought them down in stampings that shook the earth. Men caught beneath the driving hooves were pulped like trodden grapes.

  He was imprisoned in a hell of killing and fearful sounds, gruntings, trumpetings, screams, curses, shouts, the groans of the dying.

  Zi, being the largest elephant and royally caparisoned, attracted more attackers than any other, and Rob saw that Khuff stood and fought near his Shah. Khuff had lost his horse. He wielded his heavy sword, whirling it around his head and shouting great oaths and insults, and atop the elephant Alā sat and used his longbow.

  The battle roiled, the men laboring with a fury, all caught up in the serious work of butchery.

  Plunging the camel after a lancer who parried and ran, Rob came across Mirdin on foot, the sword at his side looking as if it had not been used. He held a wounded man under the arms and was dragging him out of the fighting, oblivious to all else.

  The sight was like a shock of icy water. Rob blinked and jerked the camel’s reins, sliding off before Bitch had truly knelt. He went to Mirdin and helped him bear the fallen man, who was already gray from a wound in the neck.

  From that time, Rob forgot about killing and strove as a physician.

  The two surgeons laid the wounded in a village house, bringing them in one by one while the slaughter went on. All they could do was collect those who were down, for their carefully prepared supplies were on the backs of half a dozen asses scattered who knew where, and now there was no opium or oil, no great bundles of clean rags. When cloths were needed to stanch the flow of blood, Rob or Mirdin cut them from the clothing of one of the dead.

  Very soon the fighting became a massacre. The Indians had been surprised, and while half of them had been able to find arms and use them, the others had resisted with sticks and rocks. They were easily slain, yet most fought desperately in the sure knowledge that if they surrendered they faced shameful execution or lives as slaves or eunuchs in Persia.

  The bloodletting carried into the darkness. Rob drew his sword and, carrying a torch, went to a nearby house. Inside was a small, slim man, his wife, and two small children. The four dark faces turned toward him, their eyes fixed on his sword. “You must go unseen,” Rob told the man, “while there is still time.”

  But they didn’t know Persian and the man said something in their strange tongue.

  Rob went to the door and pointed out into the night at the distant forest, and then returned and made urgent shooing movements with his hands.

  The man nodded. He looked terrified; perhaps there were beasts in the forest. But he gathered his family and soon they had slipped through the door.

  In that house Rob found lamps, and in others he discovered oil and rags and brought them back to the wounded.

  Late in the night, as the last of the fighting ended, Persian swordsmen killed all enemy wounded and the looting and raping began. He and Mirdin and a handful of soldiers walked the field of battle with torches. They didn’t bring in the dead or anyone clearly dying, but sought Persians who might be saved. Soon Mirdin found two of the precious pack asses and, working by lamplight, the surgeons began to treat wounds with hot oil and sew and dress them. They cut off four ruined limbs, but all but one of those patients died. Thus they worked through the terrible night.

  They had thirty-one patients and when dawn brought light to the grisly village they found seven more who were wounded but alive.

  After First Prayer, Khuff brought orders that the surgeons were to tend to the wounds of five elephants before resuming work on the soldiers. Three of the animals had been cut in the legs, one had an arrow through the ear, and the trunk of another had been severed, so that at Rob’s recommendation she and the elephant that had been blinded were put down by lancers.

  After the morning meal of pilah, the mahouts moved into the elephant pens of Mansura and began to sort the animals there, talking to them softly and moving them about by tugging their ears with the hooked goads called ankushas.

  “Here, my father.”

  “Move, my daughter. Steady, my son! Show me what you can do, my children.”

  “Kneel, mother, and let me ride on your beautiful head.”

  With tender cries the mahouts separated the trained beasts
from those which still were half wild. They could take only docile animals that would obey them on the march back to Ispahan. The wilder ones would be released and allowed to return to the forest.

  The voices of the mahouts were joined by a competing sound, a buzzing, for blowflies already had found the corpses. Soon, with the rising heat of day, the smell would be intolerable. Seventy-three Persians had perished. Only one hundred and three Indians had surrendered and lived, and when Alā offered them opportunity to become military bearers they accepted with eager relief; in a few years they might earn trust and be allowed to carry arms for Persia, and they preferred being soldiers to becoming eunuchs. Now they were at work digging a mass grave for the Persian dead.

  Mirdin looked at Rob. Worse than I had feared, his eyes said. Rob agreed but was comforted that it was over and now they would go home.

  But Karim came to see them. Khuff had killed an Indian officer, Karim said, but not before the Indian’s sword had sliced almost halfway through the softer steel of Khuff’s oversized blade. Karim brought Khuff’s sword to show them how deeply it had been cut. The captured Indian sword was fashioned out of the precious swirl-patterned steel and now Alā wore it. The Shah personally had overseen the interrogation of prisoners until he learned that the sword had been made by a craftsman named Dhan Vangalil in Kausambi, a village three days to the north of Mansura.

  “Alā has decided to march on Kausambi,” Karim said.

  They would capture the Indian smith and take him to Ispahan, where he would make weapons of rippled steel to help the Shah conquer his neighbors and restore the great and far-flung Persia of ancient days.

  It was said easily but proved more difficult.

  Kausambi was another small village on the west bank of the Indus, a place of a few dozen rickety wooden houses leaning into four dusty streets, each of which led to the military garrison. Again they succeeded in keeping their attack a surprise, creeping up through the forest that kept the village pinned against the riverbank. When the Indian soldiers recognized the assault they exploded from the place like a pack of startled monkeys, streaming away into the wilderness.