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

by Noah Gordon

  Oh, you damned Ibn Sina. “You bloody old man,” he whispered. “You’re wrong!”

  Despite what Celsus had written, despite what had been taught for a thousand years, men and women were unique. And if this was so, who knew how many magnificent mysteries might be uncovered and answered simply by looking for them within the bodies of human beings.

  All his life Rob had been alone and lonely until he had met her, and now he was lonely again and could not bear it. One night when he came into the house he lay down next to her between the two sleeping children.

  He made no move to touch her but she turned like a wild creature. Her hand found his face with a stinging blow. She was a large female and strong enough to do hurt. He took her hands and pinned them to her sides.

  “Madwoman.”

  “Do not come to me from Persian harlots!”

  It was the aromatic, he realized. “I use it because I’ve been dissecting animals in the maristan.”

  She said nothing for a moment but then she tried to move free. He could feel the familiar body against him as she struggled and the scent of her red hair was in his nostrils.

  “Mary.”

  She became calmer; perhaps it was what was in his voice. Still, when he moved to kiss her it wouldn’t have surprised him to be bitten on the mouth or the throat, but he was not. It took him a moment to realize she was kissing him back. He stopped holding her hands and was infinitely grateful to touch breasts that were rigid but not with death.

  He couldn’t tell if she was weeping or merely aroused because she was making little moaning sounds. He tasted her milky nipples and nuzzled her navel. Beneath this warm belly shiny pink and gray viscera were coiled and twined like sea creatures in congress, but her limbs were not stiff and cold and in the mound first one of his fingers and then two found heat and slipperiness, the stuff of life.

  When he thrust inside her they came together like clapping hands, pounding and slamming as if trying to destroy something they couldn’t face. Exorcising the djinn. Her nails punished his back as she banged straight at him. There was only a quiet grunting and the slap-slap-slap of their mating until finally she cried out and then he cried out, and Tam bawled and Rob J. awoke with a scream, and together the four of them laughed or wept, the adults doing both.

  Eventually things were sorted out. Little Rob J. returned to sleep and the infant was brought to the breast, and as she fed him, in a quiet voice she told Rob of how Ibn Sina had come to her and instructed her about what she must do. And so he heard how the woman and the old man had saved his life.

  He was surprised and shocked to hear of Ibn Sina’s involvement.

  As for the rest, her experience was close to what he had already guessed, and after Tam fell asleep he held her in his arms and told her she was his own chosen woman for always, and smoothed the red hair and kissed the nape of her white neck where freckles didn’t dare appear. When she slept too he lay and stared at the dark ceiling.

  In the days that followed she smiled a lot and it saddened and angered him to see the trace of fear in the smiles, though by his actions he tried to show his love and gratitude.

  One morning, caring for a sick child in the house of a member of the court, he saw next to the sleeping pallet the small blue carpet of Samanid royalty. When he looked at the boy he observed swarthy skin, a nose already hooked, a certain quality in the eyes. It was a familiar face, made even more familiar whenever he looked at his own younger son.

  He broke with his schedule and went home and picked up little Tam and held him to the light. The face was brother to that of the sick child’s.

  And yet Tam did also sometimes look remarkably like Rob’s lost brother Willum.

  Before and after the time he had spent in Idhaj on Ibn Sina’s errand, he and Mary had made love. Who was to say this was not fruit of his own seed?

  And he changed the child’s wet cloth and touched the small hand and kissed the so-soft cheek, and returned him to his cradle.

  That night he and Mary made tender and considerate love that brought them release but wasn’t the same as once it was. Afterward he went out and sat in the moon-washed garden next to the autumnal ruins of the flowers on which she had lavished her care.

  Nothing ever remains the same, he realized. She wasn’t the young woman who had followed him so trustingly into a field of wheat, and he wasn’t the youth who had led her there.

  And that was not the least of the debts for which he yearned to repay Alā Shah.

  72

  THE TRANSPARENT MAN

  Out of the east there arose a dust cloud of such proportion that the lookouts confidently expected an enormous caravan, or perhaps even several great caravans merged into a single train.

  Instead, an army approached the city.

  When it reached the gates it was possible to identify the soldiers as Afghans from Ghazna. They stopped outside the walls and their commander, a young man wearing a dark blue robe and snowy turban, entered Ispahan accompanied by four officers. No one was there to stop him. Alā’s army having followed him to Hamadhān, the gates were guarded by a handful of aged troopers, old men who melted away at the foreign army’s approach, so that Sultan Masūd—for it was he—rode into the city unchallenged. At the Friday Mosque the Afghans dismounted and went inside, where reportedly they joined the congregation at Third Prayer and then sequestered themselves for several hours with the Imam Musa Ibn Abbas and his coterie of mullahs.

  Most of the inhabitants of Ispahan didn’t see Masūd, but as the Sultan’s presence was made known, Rob and al-Juzjani were among those who went to the top of the wall and looked down upon the soldiers of Ghazna. They were tough-looking men in ragged trousers and long loose shirts. Some of them wore the ends of their turbans wrapped about their mouths and noses to keep out the dust and sand of travel, and quilted bed mats were rolled behind the small saddles of their shaggy ponies. They were in high spirits, fingering arrows and shifting their longbows as they looked upon the rich city with its unprotected women, the way wolves would look at a warren of hares, but they were disciplined and waited without violence while their leader was in the mosque. Rob wondered if among them was the Afghan who had run so well against Karim in the chatir.

  “What can Masūd want with the mullahs?” he asked al-Juzjani.

  “Doubtless his spies have told him of Alā’s troubles with them. I think he intends to rule here some day soon and bargains with the mosques for blessings and obedience.”

  It may have been so, for soon Masūd and his aides returned to their troops and there was no pillaging. The Sultan was young, hardly more than a boy, but he and Alā could have been kinsmen: they had the same proud, cruel predator’s face. They watched him unwind the clean white turban, which was then carefully stowed away, and put on a filthy black turban before he resumed the march.

  The Afghans rode to the north, following the route taken by Alā’s army.

  “The Shah was wrong in thinking they would come by way of Hamadhān.”

  “I think the main Ghazna force is in Hamadhān already,” al-Juzjani said slowly.

  Rob realized he was right. The departing Afghans were far fewer in number than the Persian army and there were no war elephants among them; they had to have another force. “Then Masūd is springing a trap?”

  Al-Juzjani nodded.

  “We can ride to warn the Persians!”

  “It is too late, or Masūd wouldn’t have left us alive. At any rate,” al-Juzjani said with irony, “it little matters whether Alā defeats Masūd or Masūd defeats Alā. If the Imam Qandrasseh truly has gone to lead the Seljuks to Ispahan, ultimately neither Masūd nor Alā will prevail. The Seljuks are fearsome, and they are as numerous as the sands of the sea.”

  “If the Seljuks come, or if Masūd returns to take this city, what will become of the maristan?”

  Al-Juzjani shrugged. “The hospital will close for a while and we’ll all scurry to hide from disaster. Then we’ll come out of our holes and life will
be same as before. With our Master I have served half a dozen kings. Monarchs come and go, but the world continues to need physicians,” he said.

  Rob asked Mary for the money for the book, and the Qanūn became his. It filled him with awe to hold it in his hand. Never had he owned a book before, but so great was his delight in proprietorship of this book that he vowed there would be others.

  Yet he didn’t spend overly long reading it, for Qasim’s room drew him.

  He dissected several nights a week and began to use his drawing materials, hungry to do more but unable because he required a minimum of sleep in order to function in the maristan during the day.

  In one of the corpses he studied, that of a young man who had been knifed in a wineshop brawl, he found the little cecum appendage enlarged and with its surface reddened and rough, and he surmised he was looking at the earliest stage of the side sickness, when the patient would begin to get the first intermittent pangs. He now had a picture of the progress of the illness from onset to death, and he wrote in his casebook:

  Perforating abdominal distemper has been witnessed in six patients, each of whom died.

  The first decided symptom of the disease is sudden abdominal pain.

  The pain is usually intense and rarely slight.

  Occasionally it is accompanied by an ague and more often by nausea and vomiting.

  The abdominal pain is followed by fever as the next constant symptom.

  A circumscribed resistance is felt on palpation of the right lower belly, with the area often agonized by pressure and the abdominal muscles tense and rigid.

  The condition comes to an appendage of the cecum which in appearance is not unlike a fat, pink earthworm of common variety. Should this organ become angry or infected it turns red and then black, fills with pus and finally bursts, its contents escaping into the general abdominal cavity.

  In that event death follows rapidly, as a rule within half an hour to thirty-six hours of the onset of high fever.

  He cut and studied only those parts of the body that would be covered by the burial shroud. This excluded the feet and the head, a frustration because he was no longer content with examining a pig’s brain. His respect for Ibn Sina remained unbounded, but he had become aware that in certain areas his mentor had himself been taught incorrectly about the skeleton and the musculature and had passed on the misinformation.

  Rob worked patiently, uncovering and sketching muscles like wire and like strands of rope, some beginning in a cord and ending in a cord, some with flat attachment, some with round attachment, some with cord only at one end, and some that were compound muscles with two heads, their special value apparently being that if one head is injured the other will take over its function. He began in ignorance and gradually, in a constant state of fevered and dreamlike excitement, he learned. He made sketches of bone and joint structure, shape, and position, realizing that such drawings would be invaluable in teaching young doctors how to deal with sprains and fractures.

  Always when he finished working he shrouded and returned the bodies and took his drawings away with him. He no longer felt that he peered into the pit of his own damnation, but he never lost the awareness of the terrible end that awaited him if he were discovered. Dissecting in the uneven, flickering lamplight of the airless little room, he started at every noise and froze in terror on the rare occasion when someone walked past the door.

  He had good reason for his fear.

  Early one morning he removed from the charnel house the body of an elderly woman who had died only a short time before. Outside the door he looked up to see a nurse coming toward him, carrying the body of a man. The woman’s head lolled and one arm swung as Rob stopped wordlessly and gazed at the nurse, who bent his head politely.

  “Shall I help you with that one, Hakim?”

  “She’s not heavy.”

  Preceding the nurse, he went back inside and they laid the two bodies side by side and left the charnel house together.

  The pig he had dissected had lasted only four days, rapidly reaching a state of ripeness that made disposal a necessity. Yet opening the human stomach and gut released odors far worse than the sickly-sweet stench of porcine rot. Despite soap and water, the smell permeated the place.

  One morning he bought a new hog. That afternoon he walked past Qasim’s room to discover the hadji Davout Hosein rattling the locked door.

  “Why is it locked? What is inside?”

  “It’s a room in which I am dissecting a pig,” Rob said calmly.

  The deputy governor of the school gazed at him in disgust. These days, Davout Hosein looked at everything with stern suspicion, for he had been delegated by the mullahs to police the maristan and the madrassa for infractions of Islamic law.

  Several times that day, Rob observed him hovering watchfully.

  That evening Rob went home early. Next morning when he came to the hospital he saw that the lock on the door of the little room had been forced and broken. Inside, things were as he had left them—but not quite. The pig lay covered on the table. His instruments had been disarranged but none was missing. They had found nothing to incriminate him, and he was safe for the moment. But the intrusion had chilling implications.

  He knew sooner or later he would be discovered, but he was learning precious facts and seeing marvelous things and was not ready to stop.

  He waited two days, in which the hadji left him alone. An old man died in the hospital while holding a quiet conversation with him. That night he opened the body to see what had accomplished so peaceful a death and found that the artery which had fed the heart and the lower members was parched and shrunken, a withered leaf.

  In a child’s body he saw why cancer had received its name, noting how the hungry crablike growth had extended its claws in every direction. In another man’s body he found that the liver, instead of being soft and of a rich red-brown, had turned into a yellowish object of woody hardness.

  The following week he dissected a woman several months pregnant and sketched the womb in the swollen belly like an inverted drinking glass cradling the life that had been forming in it. In the drawing he gave her the face of Despina, who would never give life to a child. He labeled it the Pregnant Woman.

  And one night he sat by the dissection table and created a young man to whom he gave the features of Karim, an imperfect likeness but a recognizable one to anybody who had loved him. Rob drew the figure as if the skin were made of glass. What he couldn’t see for himself in the body on the table he drew as Galen had claimed it existed. He knew some of this unsubstantiated detail would be inaccurate, but still the drawing was remarkable even to him, showing organs and blood vessels as if the eye of God were peering through man’s solid flesh.

  When it was completed he exultantly signed his name and the date and labeled the drawing the Transparent Man.

  73

  THE HOUSE IN HAMADHĀN

  All this time there had been no news of the war. By prearrangement four caravans laden with supplies had gone out in search of the army, but they were never seen again and it was supposed they had found Alā and had been absorbed into the fighting. And then one afternoon just before Fourth Prayer a rider came, bearing the worst possible intelligence.

  As had been surmised, by the time Masūd had paused in Ispahan his main force already had found the Persians and was engaging them. Masūd had sent two of his senior generals, Abū Sahl al-Hamdûnī and Tāsh Farrāsh, to lead his army along the expected route. They planned and executed the frontal attack perfectly. Splitting their force in two, they hid behind the village of al-Karaj and sent forth their scouts. When the Persians drew close enough, Abū Sahl al-Hamdūnī’s host streamed from around one side of al-Karaj and Tāsh Farrāsh’s Afghans came around the other side. They fell upon Alā Shah’s men on two flanks, which rapidly drew together until the Ghazna army was reunited across a giant semicircular line of combat, like a net.

  After their initial surprise the Persians fought bravely but they
were outnumbered and outmaneuvered, and they lost ground steadily for days. Finally they discovered that at their back was another Ghazna force led by Sultan Masūd. Then the fighting grew ever more desperate and savage, but the end was inevitable. In front of the Persians was the superior force of the two Ghazna generals. Behind them, the cavalry of the Sultan, small in number and vicious, waged a conflict similar to the historic battle between the Romans and the ancient Persians, but this time Persia’s enemy was the ephemeral harrying force. The Afghans struck again and again and always melted away to reappear in another rear sector.

  Finally, when the bloodied Persians had been sufficiently weakened and confused, under cover of a sandstorm Masūd launched the full power of all three of his armies in all-out attack.

  Next morning, the sun disclosed sand swirling over the bodies of men and beasts, the better part of the Persian army. Some had escaped and it was rumored Alā Shah was among them, the messenger said, but this wasn’t certain.

  “What has befallen Ibn Sina?” al-Juzjani asked the man.

  “Ibn Sina left the army well before it reached al-Karaj, Hakim. He had been afflicted by a terrible colic that rendered him helpless, and so with the Shah’s permission the youngest physician among the surgeons, one Bibi al-Ghurī, took him to the city of Hamadhān, where Ibn Sina still owns the house that had been his father’s.”

  “I know the place,” al-Juzjani said.

  Rob knew al-Juzjani would go there. “Let me come too,” he said.

  For a moment jealous resentment flickered in the older physician’s eyes, but reason quickly won and he nodded.

  “We shall leave at once,” he said.

  It was a hard and gloomy trip. They pushed their horses hard, not knowing if they would find him alive when they arrived. Al-Juzjani was made dumb by despair and this wasn’t to be wondered at; Rob had loved Ibn Sina for relatively few years, while al-Juzjani had worshiped the Prince of Physicians all his life.