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

by Noah Gordon

  The ewer was empty and Rob took it into the next room to replenish it from the wineskin.

  “Are you a Christian?”

  “I am,” she said.

  “Then how have you become chattel to this Jew? Were you taken by pirates or Muslims and sold to him?”

  “I am his wife,” she said clearly.

  In the next room Rob paused in the task of filling the ewer with wine and listened, his lips drawn in a mirthless grin. So great was the Englishman’s contempt for him that Bostock didn’t bother to lower his voice.

  “I would accommodate my caravan for you and the child. You could have a litter and bearers until you’ve given birth and are able to sit a horse.”

  “It is not a possibility, Master Bostock. I am my husband’s, gladly and by agreement,” Mary said, but she thanked him coolly.

  He replied with grave courtesy that it was Christian duty, what he would want another man to offer his own daughter if, Jesus forbid, she might find herself in similar circumstances.

  Rob Cole returned wishing to do Bostock bodily harm, but Jesse ben Benjamin behaved with Eastern hospitality, pouring wine for his guest instead of throttling him. Conversation was resentful and sparse, however. The English merchant departed almost immediately after he was done eating, and Rob and Mary were left with one another.

  They were occupied with their own thoughts as they gathered up the ruins of the meal.

  Finally she said, “Shall we ever go home?”

  He was astonished. “Of course we shall.”

  “Bostock was not my only chance?”

  “I swear it.”

  Her eyes glistened. “He’s right to hire a protecting army. The journey is so dangerous … how shall two children travel so far and survive?”

  There was more of her than fit, but he took her carefully into his arms. “After we reach Constantinople we will be Christians, and we will join a strong caravan.”

  “And between here and Constantinople?”

  “I learned the secret as I traveled here.” He helped her to lower herself to the mat. It was difficult for her now, because no matter how she lay, soon some part of her ached. He held her and stroked her head, talking to her as though telling a comforting story to a child. “From Ispahan to Constantinople I shall remain Jesse ben Benjamin. And we shall be taken in by Jewish village after Jewish village, and fed and safeguarded and guided, like a man crossing a dangerous stream by stepping from one safe rock to another.” He touched her face. Placing his palm on the great warm stomach he felt the unborn child move and was filled with gratitude and pity. That is how it would happen, he assured himself. But he couldn’t tell her when it would come to pass.

  He had become accustomed to sleeping with his body curled around the huge hardness of her stomach but one night he was awakened to feel wetness as well as warmth, and when he had gathered his wits he struggled into his clothes and ran for Nitka the Midwife. Although she was accustomed to people hammering on her door while the world slept, she emerged cranky and snappish, ordering him to be quiet and patient.

  “She has cast out her water.”

  “All right, all right,” she grumbled.

  Soon they made a caravan through the black street, Rob lighting the way with a torch, Nitka following with a great bag of washed rags, trailed by her two burly sons grunting and gasping under the weight of the birthing chair.

  Chofni and Shemuel set the chair next to the fireplace like a throne and Nitka ordered Rob to kindle a fire, for in the middle of the night the air was cool. Mary climbed into the chair like a naked queen. When the sons left they carried away Rob J. for safekeeping during his mother’s labor. In Yehuddiyyeh neighbors did such things for one another, even when one of them was a goya.

  Mary lost her royal bearing with the first pain, and the grunting, grinding cry that issued from her throat filled Rob with dismay. The chair was of stout construction so it could withstand any amount of bucking and thrashing and Nitka went about the task of folding and stacking her rags, obviously undisturbed as Mary gripped the handles at the side of the chair and sobbed.

  Her legs trembled all the time but during the terrible cramping they shook and jerked. After the third pain Rob stood behind her and pulled her shoulders against the back of the chair. Mary showed her teeth and snarled like a wolf; he wouldn’t have been surprised if she had bitten him or howled.

  He had cut off men’s limbs and become inured to every foul disease, but he felt the blood rushing from his head. The midwife looked at him hard and, taking a fold of flesh on his arm between her wiry fingers, she squeezed. The painful pinch restored his senses and he did not disgrace himself.

  “Out,” Nitka said. “Out, out!”

  So he went into the garden and stood in the dark, listening to the sounds that followed him out of the house. It was cool and quiet; he thought briefly about vipers coming out of the stone wall and decided he didn’t care. He lost track of time, but eventually knew that the fire would be in need of tending, so he went back inside to replenish it.

  When he looked at Mary, her knees were spread wide.

  “Now you will bear down,” Nitka commanded sternly. “Work, my friend. Work!”

  Transfixed, he saw the crown of the baby’s head appear between his wife’s thighs, like the pate of a monk with a wet red tonsure, and he fled for the garden again. He was there a long time until he heard the thin wail, then he went back in and saw the infant.

  “Another boy,” Nitka said briskly, clearing mucus from the tiny mouth with the tip of her little finger.

  The thick, ropy umbilicus looked blue in the thin light of dawn.

  “It was much easier than the first time,” Mary told him.

  Nitka cleaned and comforted, and gave Rob the afterbirth to bury in the garden. The midwife accepted generous payment with a satisfied nod and went home.

  When they were alone in their bedchamber they embraced, then Mary asked for water and christened the child Thomas Scott Cole.

  Rob held and examined him: slightly smaller than his older brother had been, but not a runt. A lusty, ruddy man-child with round brown eyes and a patch of dark hair that already contained glints of his mother’s redness. He decided that in the eyes and the shape of the head, the wide mouth and the long, narrow little fingers, the new child bore close resemblance to his brothers William Stewart and Jonathan Carter when they were newly born. It was always easy to tell a Cole baby, he told Mary.

  68

  THE DIAGNOSIS

  Qasim had been keeper of the dead for two months when the pain returned to his abdomen.

  “What is it like?” Rob asked him.

  “It is bad, Hakim.”

  But obviously it wasn’t as bad as it had been before. “Is it a dull pain, or sharp?”

  “It is as if a djinn lives within me and claws at my insides, twisting and tearing.” The former drover succeeded in terrifying himself; he gazed beseechingly at Rob for reassurance that this was not indeed the case.

  He wasn’t feverish as he had been during the attack that had brought him to the maristan, nor was his abdomen rigid. Rob prescribed frequent dosing with a honey-and-wine infusion, which Qasim took to eagerly since he was a drinker and had been sorely tried by the enforced religious abstinence.

  Qasim spent several pleasant weeks, slightly inebriated as he lazed about the hospital exchanging views and opinions. There was much to gossip about. The latest news was that Imam Qandrasseh had deserted the city, despite his obvious political and tactical victory over the Shah.

  It was rumored Qandrasseh had fled to the Seljuk Turks, and that when he returned it would be with an attacking Seljuk army to depose Alā and place a strict Islamic religionist—perhaps himself?—on the throne of Persia. In the meantime, life was unchanged and pairs of somber mullahs continued to patrol the streets, for the wily old Imam had left his disciple, Musa Ibn Abbas, as keeper of the faith in Ispahan.

  The Shah remained in the House of Paradise as if in hidin
g. He didn’t hold audiences. Rob hadn’t heard from Alā since Karim had been put to death. There was no summoning to entertainment, no hunting or games or invitations to the court. When a physician was required at the House of Paradise in place of the indisposed Ibn Sina, al-Juzjani or someone else was demanded, but never Rob.

  But a gift for the new son had come from the Shah.

  It arrived following the Hebrew naming of the baby. This time Rob knew enough to invite the neighbors himself. Reb Asher Jacobi the mohel asked that the child might grow in vigor to a life of good works, and cut off the foreskin. The babe was given suck on a wine sop to quiet his yowl of pain and in the Tongue was declared to be Tam, son of Jesse.

  Alā had bestowed no gift when little Rob J. was born, but now he sent a handsome small rug, light blue wool interwoven with lustrous silk threads of the same shade and embossed in darker blue with the crest of the royal Samanid family.

  Rob thought it a handsome rug and would have laid it on the floor next to the cradle, but Mary, who was pettish following the birth, said she didn’t want it there. Instead, she bought a sandalwood chest that would protect it from moths and put it away.

  Rob participated in an examining board. He knew he was there in Ibn Sina’s absence and it shamed him that someone might think him presumptuous enough to assume he could take the place of the Prince of Physicians.

  But there was no help for it, so he did his best. He prepared for the board as though he were a candidate himself and not an examiner. He asked thoughtful questions designed not to undo a candidate but to bring out knowledge, and he listened attentively to the answers. The board examined four candidates and made three physicians. There was embarrassment over the fourth man. Gabri Beidhawi had been a medical clerk for five years. He had failed the testing twice before, but his father was a rich and powerful man who had flattered and cozened the hadji Davout Hosein, the administrator of the madrassa, and Hosein had requested that Beidhawi be tested again.

  Rob had been a student with Beidhawi and knew him for a lazy wastrel, careless and callous in treating patients. During the third examining he showed himself to be ill prepared.

  Rob knew what Ibn Sina would have done. “I reject the candidate,” he said firmly and with little regret. The other examiners hastened to concur, and the board was adjourned.

  Several days after the examinations, Ibn Sina came to the maristan.

  “Welcome back, Master!” Rob said, gladdened.

  Ibn Sina shook his head. “I haven’t returned.” He appeared tired and worn, and he told Rob he had come for an evaluation which he wished performed by al-Juzjani and Jesse ben Benjamin.

  They sat with him in an examining room and talked with him, gathering the history of his complaint as he had taught them to do.

  He had waited at home, hoping soon to resume his duties, he told them. But he had never recovered from the twin shocks of losing first Reza and then Despina, and he had begun to look and feel poorly.

  He had felt lassitude and weakness, an inability to make the effort required for the simplest of tasks. At first he had attributed his symptoms to acute melancholia. “For we all know well that the spirit can do terrible and strange things to the body.”

  But lately his bowel movements had become explosive and his stools had been besmeared with mucus, pus, and blood; and so he had requested this medical examination.

  They performed the search as though they would never have another chance to inspect a human being. They overlooked nothing. Ibn Sina sat with sweet patience and allowed them to prod and press and thump and listen and question.

  When they were through, al-Juzjani was pale but put on an optimistic face. “It is the bloody flux, Master, brought on by the aggravation of your emotions.”

  But Rob’s intuition had told him something else. He looked at his beloved teacher. “I believe it is schirri, the early stages.”

  Ibn Sina blinked once. “Cancer of the intestine?” he said, as calmly as if talking to a patient he had never met.

  Rob nodded, trying not to think of the slow torture of the disease.

  Al-Juzjani was ruddy with rage at being overruled, but Ibn Sina soothed him. That is why he had asked for the two of them, Rob realized—he had known al-Juzjani would be so blinded with love he would be unable to find a loathsome truth.

  Rob’s legs felt weak. He took Ibn Sina’s hands in his own, and their eyes met and held. “You are still strong, Master. You must keep your bowels open, to guard against the accumulation of black bile that would cause the cancer to grow.”

  The Chief Physician nodded.

  “I pray I’ve made an error in diagnosis,” Rob said.

  Ibn Sina favored him with a small smile. “Prayer can do no hurt.”

  He told Ibn Sina he would like to visit him soon and pass an evening with the Shah’s Game, and the old man said Jesse ben Benjamin would always be welcome in his house.

  69

  GREEN MELONS

  On a dry and dusty day near the end of the summer, out of the haze to the northeast came a caravan of one hundred and sixteen belled camels. The beasts, all in a line and spewing ropy saliva under the exertion of carrying heavy loads of iron ore, wound into Ispahan late in the afternoon. Alā had hoped Dhan Vangalil would use the ore to make many weapons of blue patterned steel. Tests by the swordsmith, alas, subsequently would prove the iron in the ore to be too soft for that purpose, but by nightfall news brought by the caravan had created a stir of excitement among some in the city.

  A man named Khendi, the caravan’s captain of drovers, was summoned to the palace to repeat details of the intelligence for the Shah’s own ears, and then he was taken to the maristan to tell his tale to the doctors there.

  Over a period of months Mahmud, the Sultan of Ghazna, had become gravely ill, with fever and so much pus in his chest that it caused a broad, soft bulge in his back, and his physicians had decided that if Mahmud was to live, this lump would have to be drained.

  One of the details Khendi brought was that the Sultan’s back had been smeared with a thin wash of potter’s clay.

  “Why was that?” one of the newest physicians asked.

  Khendi shrugged, but al-Juzjani, who served as their leader in Ibn Sina’s absence, knew the answer. “The clay must be watched attentively, for the first patch to dry indicates the hottest part of the skin and is therefore the best place for cutting.”

  When the surgeons opened the Sultan corruption sprang forth, Khendi said, and to rid Mahmud of the remaining pus, they inserted drains.

  “Did the cutting scalpel have a round blade or a pointed one?” al-Juzjani asked.

  “Did they dose him for the pain?”

  “Were the drains fashioned of tin or of linen wicks?”

  “Was the pus dark or white?”

  “Were there traces of blood in it?”

  “Lords! My lords, I am a drovers’ captain and not a hakim!” Khendi exclaimed in anguish. “I have the answers to none of these questions. I know only one thing more, masters.”

  “And what is that?” al-Juzjani asked.

  “Three days after they cut him, lords, the Sultan of Ghazna was dead.”

  They had been two young lions, Alā and Mahmud. Each had come early to his throne to follow a strong father, and each had kept the other in sight while their kingdoms watched, aware that one day they would clash, that Ghazna would eat Persia or Persia would eat Ghazna.

  It had never come to pass. They had circled each other warily and at times their forces had skirmished, but each had waited, sensing the time was not right for total war. Yet Mahmud never was out of Alā’s thoughts. Often the Shah dreamed of him. It was always the same dream, with their armies massed and eager and Alā riding out alone toward Mahmud’s fierce Afghan tribesmen, hurling down the single combat call to the Sultan as Ardashir had roared challenge to Ardewan, the survivor to claim his destiny as the true and proven King of Kings.

  Now Allah had intervened and Alā would never meet Mahmu
d in combat. In the four days after the arrival of the camel caravan, three experienced and trusted spies rode separately into Ispahan and spent time in the House of Paradise, and from their reports the Shah began to perceive a clear picture of what had occurred in the capital city of Ghazni.

  Immediately following the Sultan’s death, Mahmud’s son Muhammad had attempted to mount the throne but was thwarted by his brother Abu Said Masūd, a young warrior with the firm support of the army. Within hours, Muhammad was a shackled prisoner and Masūd had been declared Sultan. Mahmud’s funeral was a wild affair, part grim leavetaking and part frenzied celebration, and when it was through Masūd had called his chieftains together and declared his intention to do what his father never had done: the army was put on notice that it would march against Ispahan within days.

  It was intelligence that would finally bring Alā out of the House of Paradise.

  The planned invasion was not unwelcome to him, for two reasons. Masūd was impetuous and untried, and Alā was pleased by the chance to pit his generalship against the stripling’s. And because there was something in the Persian soul that loved war, he was shrewd enough to realize that the conflict would be embraced by his people as a foil to the pious restrictions under which the mullahs had forced them to live.

  He held military meetings that were small celebrations, with wine and women making their appearances at the proper times, as in days gone by. Alā and his commanders pored over their charts and saw that from Ghazna there was only one route that was feasible for a large force. Masūd must cross the clay ridges and foothills to the north of the Dasht-i-Kavir, skirting the great desert until his army was deep into Hamadhān. Thence they would turn south.

  But Alā decided that a Persian army would march to Hamadhān and meet them before they could fall upon Ispahan.

  The preparations of Alā’s army was the sole topic of conversation, not to be escaped even in the maristan, though Rob tried. He didn’t think of the impending war because he wished no part of it. His debt to Alā, while it had been considerable, was paid. The raids in India had convinced him he never wanted to go soldiering again.