by Noah Gordon
The evening meal was hard bread, bony smoked fish, and water that tasted of herring. Rob tried choking down a few bites but cast it up. To make matters worse, Aldus had a loose stomach and soon made the slop bucket an offense to the eyes and nostrils. It was nothing to faze one who had worked in a hospital, and Rob emptied the bucket and rinsed it in sea water until it was clean. Perhaps the accomplishment of the homely chore took the other two men by surprise, for after that they didn’t curse him.
That night, lying cold and desperate as the boat heaved and yawed in the darkness, Rob crawled again and again to the side, until he had nothing left in him to vomit. In the morning the routine began again, but on the sixth dragging of the net, something changed. When they tugged on it, it seemed anchored. Slowly, laboriously, they gathered it in, and finally it brought them a silvery, wriggling stream.
“Now we catch herring!” Nee exulted.
Three times the net came in full, and then with lesser amounts, and when there was no more room to store fish they steered before the wind for land.
Next morning the catch was taken by merchants who would sell it fresh and sun-dried and smoked, and as soon as Nee’s boat had been unloaded, they put out to sea again.
Rob’s hands blistered and smarted and toughened. The net tore and he learned how to tie the knots needed to make repairs. On the fourth day, without his notice, the queasy illness disappeared. It didn’t come back. I must tell Tam, he thought gratefully when he realized.
Each day they inched farther up the coast, always putting into a new harbor to sell the latest catch before it could spoil. Sometimes on moonlit nights Nee would see a spray of fish tiny as raindrops, breaking water to escape a feeding school, and they would drop the net and drag it along a path of moonshine, pulling in the gift of the sea.
Nee began to smile a lot and Rob heard him tell Aldus that Jonsson had brought good fortune. Now when they put into port of an evening, Nee bought his crew ale and a hot meal and the three of them sat up late and sang. Among the things Rob learned as a crewman was a number of filthy songs.
“You would make a fisherman,” Nee said. “We’ll be in Eyemouth five, six days, repairing nets. Then we go back toward Middlesbrough because that is what we do, drift for herring between Middlesbrough and Eyemouth, back and forth. You want to stay?”
Rob thanked him, pleased the offer was made, but said he would leave them in Eyemouth.
They arrived a few days later, sailing into a crowded, pretty harbor, and Nee paid him off with a few coins and a clap on the back. When Rob mentioned his need for a mount, Nee led him through the town to an honest dealer who said he could recommend two of his horses, either a mare or a gelding.
The mare was a prettier animal by far. “I once had good luck with a gelding,” Rob said, and chose to try a gelding again. This one was no Arabian horse but a scrubby-looking English native with short, hairy legs and a tangled mane. It was two years old and strong and alert.
He arranged his pack behind the saddle and swung up onto the animal, and he and Nee saluted one another.
“May you find good fishing.”
“Go with God, Jonsson,” Nee said.
The wiry gelding gave him pleasure. It was better than its appearance and he decided to call it Al Borak, after the horse Muslims believed carried Mohammed from earth to the seventh heaven.
During the warmest part of each afternoon he tried to pause at a lake or a stream to give Al Borak a bath, and he worked at the tangled mane with his fingers, wishing he had a strong wooden comb. The horse seemed tireless and the roads were drying, so he traveled faster. The herring boat had taken him beyond the land with which he was familiar and now everything was more interesting because it was new. He followed a bank of the River Tweed for five days, until it turned south and he turned north, entering the uplands and riding between ridges that were too low to be called mountains. The rolling moors were broken in places by rocky cliffs. This time of year snowmelt still rushed down the hillsides and each stream crossing was a feat.
Farms were few and widespread. Some were large holdings, others were modest crofts; he noted that most were well kept and had the beauty of order that could be achieved only through hard work. He sounded the Saxon horn often. The crofters were watchful and guarded but no one tried to harm him. Observing the country and its people, for the first time he comprehended certain things about Mary.
He hadn’t seen her in many long months. Was he on a fool’s errand? Maybe by now she had another man, perhaps the damn cousin.
It was terrain pleasing to men but designed for sheep and cows. The tops of the hills were largely barren but most of the lower slopes consisted of rich pastureland. All the shepherds used dogs and he learned to fear them.
Half a day beyond Cumnock he stopped at a farm to ask permission to sleep that night on their hay, and he found that the day before, the woman of the place had had a breast ripped off by one of the dogs.
“Praise Jesus!” her husband whispered when Rob said he was a physician.
She was a stout female with grown children, and now she was out of her mind with pain. It had been a savage attack, as if she had been bitten by a lion. “Where is the dog?”
“The dog is no more,” the man said grimly.
They forced grain liquor into her. It made her choke, but it helped her while Rob trimmed ragged flesh and sewed. He thought she’d have lived anyway, but there was no doubt she was better off because of him. He should have watched over her a day or two, but he stayed a week, until one morning he realized he was still there because he wasn’t far from Kilmarnock and he was afraid to finish his journey.
He told her husband where he wanted to go and the man showed him the best way.
Her wounds were still on his mind two days later when he was accosted by a great growling cur that blocked the horse’s way. His sword was half drawn when the animal was called off. The shepherd said something crisp to Rob in the Erse.
“I haven’t your language.”
“Ye be on Cullen land.”
“That’s where I want to be.”
“Eh? Why is that?”
“I’ll tell that to Mary Cullen.” Rob appraised him and saw a man who was still young, but weathered and grizzled and as watchful as the dog. “Who are you?”
The Scot stared back at him, seeming undecided about whether he wanted to answer. “Craig Cullen,” he said finally.
“My name is Cole. Robert Cole.”
The shepherd nodded, appearing neither surprised nor welcoming. “Best follow,” he said, and started off afoot. Rob hadn’t seen him signal the dog but the beast held back and trailed close behind the horse, so that he came in between the man and the dog, delivered like a stray thing they had found in the hills.
The house and barn were of stone, well-laid long ago. Children stared and whispered as he rode in, and it took him a moment to realize his sons were among them. Tam spoke quietly to his brother in the Erse.
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘Is that our Da?’ I said you was.”
Rob smiled and wanted to gather them up, but they shrieked and scattered with the rest of the children when he swung from the saddle. Tam still hobbled but was able to run with ease, Rob noted gladly.
“They’re just shy. They’ll be back,” she said from the doorway. She kept her face averted and wouldn’t meet his eyes; he thought she wasn’t glad to see him. Then she was in his arms, where she felt so fine! If she had another man, right there in the barnyard they gave him something to think about.
Kissing her, he discovered she was missing a tooth, to the right of the middle of her upper jaw.
“I was struggling to get a cow into the pen and fell against her horns.” She was crying. “I am old and ugly.”
“I didn’t take a damned tooth to wife.” His tone was rough but he touched the gap with a gentle fingertip, feeling the wet, warm springiness of her mouth as she sucked his finger. “It wasn’t a damned tooth I took to
my bed,” he said, and though her eyes still glittered, she smiled.
“To your wheat field,” she said. “Right down in the dirt next to mice and crawling things, like a ram doing a ewe.” She wiped her eyes. “You’ll be worn and hungry,” she said, and took his hand and led him into a kitchen house. It was strange for him to see her so at home here. She gave him oat cakes and milk and he told her of the brother he had found and lost, and about fleeing London.
“How strange and sad for you… If it hadn’t happened, would you have come to me?”
“Sooner or later.” They kept smiling at one another. “This is a beautiful country,” he said. “But hard.”
“Easier with warmer weather. Before we know, it will be plowing time.”
He could no longer swallow the oat cakes. “It is plowing time now.”
She still colored easily. It was a thing that would never change, he noted with satisfaction. As she led him to the main house they tried to keep hold of one another but it led to tangled legs and bumped hips, so that soon they were laughing so hard he feared it would interfere with the lovemaking, but that didn’t prove to be a problem.
79
LAMBING
Next morning, both with a child before them in the saddle, she led him through the enormous, hilly holding. Sheep were everywhere, lifting black faces, white faces, and brown faces from the new grass when the horses passed. She took him a distance, showing everything proudly. There were twenty-seven small crofts on the outskirts of the large farm. “All the crofts-men are my kin.”
“How many men are there?”
“Forty-one.”
“Your entire family is gathered here?”
“The Cullens are here. The Tedders and the MacPhees are our kinsmen too. The MacPhees live a morning’s ride away, through the low hills to the east. The Tedders live a day’s ride to the north, through the clough and across the big river.”
“With the three families, how many men do you have?”
“Perhaps a hundred and a half.”
He pursed his lips. “Your own army.”
“Yes. It is a comfort.”
There seemed to him to be unending rivers of sheep.
“Fleeces and hides are why we keep the flocks. The meat spoils quickly, so we all eat it. You will grow weary of mutton.”
He was pulled into the family business that morning. “Spring birthings already have begun,” Mary said, “and night and day everyone must help the ewes. Some of the lambs have to be killed in the third to tenth day of life, when the pelts are finest.” She turned him over to Craig and left him. By midmorning the shepherds had accepted him, observing that he was cool during problem births and knew how to whet and use knives.
He was dismayed by their method of altering newborn male lambs. They bit off the tender gonads and spat them into a bucket.
“Why do you do that?” he asked.
Craig grinned at him with a bloody mouth. “Gotta take the balls. Can’t have too many rams, can ye?”
“Why not use a knife?”
“This is the way ‘twas always done. Fastest way, and causes the lambs t’least pain.”
Rob went to his pack and took out the scalpel of patterned steel, and soon Craig and the other shepherds grudgingly acknowledged that his way also was efficient. He didn’t tell them he had learned to be fast and skillful in order to spare pain to men in the process of turning them into eunuchs.
He saw that the shepherds were independent men, and with indispensable skills.
“No wonder you wanted me,” he told her, later. “Everyone else in this bloody country is kin.”
She flashed a tired smile, for they had been skinning all day. The room stank of sheep but also of blood and flesh, not uncomfortable smells for him because they were reminders of the maristan and the hospital tents in India.
“Now that I’m here, you’ll need one less shepherd,” he said to her, and her smile faded.
“Whisht,” she said sharply. “Are you crazy?”
She took his hand and led him out of the skinning room to another stone outbuilding. Inside were three whitewashed rooms. One was a study. One clearly had been set up as an examining room, with tables and cabinets duplicating the room he had used in Ispahan. In the third room there were wooden benches on which patients would sit while waiting to see the physician.
He began to learn about the people as individuals. A man named Ostric was the musician. A skinning knife slipped and sliced into an artery in Ostric’s forearm, and Rob halted the bleeding and closed the wound.
“Shall I be able to play?” Ostric said anxiously. “It’s the arm that bears the weight of the pipes.”
“A few days will make all the difference,” Rob assured him.
Several days later, walking through the tanning shed where the pelts were cured, he saw Craig Cullen’s old father Malcolm, cousin to Mary. He stopped and studied the man’s clubbed and swollen fingertips and saw how his fingernails had curved strangely as they grew.
“For a long time you’ve had a bad cough. And frequent fevers,” he told the old man quietly.
“Who has been telling you?” Malcolm Cullen said.
It was a condition Ibn Sina had called “Hippocratic fingers,” and it always meant lung disease. “I can see it in your hands. Your toes are the same way, are they not?”
The old man nodded. “Can you do ought for me?”
“I don’t know.” He placed his ear against the chest and heard a crackling sound such as made by boiling vinegar.
“You’re full of fluid. Come to the dispensary some morning. I’ll drill a small hole between two ribs and tap that water, a little at a time. Meanwhile, I’ll study your urine and watch the progress of the disease, and I’ll give you fumigations and a diet to dry up your body.”
That night Mary smiled at him. “How have you bewitched old Malcolm? He is telling everyone you have magical powers of healing.”
“I’ve done nothing for him yet.”
Next morning he was the only one in the dispensary; there was no Malcolm or any other living soul. Nor the morning after that.
When he complained, Mary shook her head. “They won’t come until after lambing is done, it’s their way.”
It was true. No one came to him for ten days more. Then it was the quieter time between the lambing and the labor of shearing, and one morning he opened the dispensary door and the benches were filled with people and old Malcolm wished him a fine day.
After that they came readily each morning, for word spread in the cloughs and vales among the hills that Mary Cullen’s man was a true healer. There never had been a physician in Kilmarnock and he recognized that he would spend years trying to undo some of the self-doctoring. In addition, they led their ailing animals or, if they could not, they weren’t bashful about summoning him to their barns. He became well acquainted with foot rot and sore mouth. When opportunity arose, he dissected a cow and some sheep so he could know what he was doing. He found them nothing like a pig or a man.
In the darkness of their bedchamber, where these nights they were willingly employed in the task of starting another child, he tried to thank her for the dispensary, which, he’d been told, was the first thing she had done on returning to Kilmarnock.
She leaned over him. “How long would you stay with me without your work, Hakim?”
There was no sting in the words, and she kissed him as soon as she said them.
80
A KEPT PROMISE
Rob took his boys into the forest and the hills and searched out the plants and herbs he wanted, and the three of them gathered the medicinals and brought them back, drying some and powdering others. He sat with his sons and taught them carefully, showing them each leaf and each flower. He told them about the herbs—which was used to cure the headache and which for cramp, which for fever and which for catarrh, which for bleeding nose and which for chilblains, which for quinsy and which for aching bones.
Craig Cullen was a spoonmake
r and turned his craft toward the fashioning of covered wooden boxes in which the pharmacy herbs could be kept safe and dry. The boxes, like Craig’s spoons, were decorated with carved nymphs and sprites and wild creatures of every sort. Seeing them, Rob was inspired to draw some of the pieces that made up the Shah’s Game.
“Could you make something like these?”
Craig looked at him quizzically. “Why not?”
Rob drew likenesses of each piece and the checkered board. With very little guidance Craig carved everything, so that presently Rob and Mary once again spent some of their hours at a pastime taught him by a dead king.
Rob was determined to learn Gaelic. Mary owned no books but set out to teach him, beginning with the eighteen-letter alphabet. By now he knew what must be done to learn a strange language and all through the summer and autumn he labored, so that by early winter he was writing short sentences in the Erse and trying to speak it, to the amusement of the shepherds and his sons.
As he had supposed, winter there proved hard. The bitterest cold came just before Candlemas. After that was the time of the huntsmen, for snowy ground helped them track venison and fowl and hunt down catamounts and wolves that harried the flocks. In the evenings there were always people gathered in the hall in front of a great fire. Craig might be there whittling, others would sit and repair harness or accomplish whatever homely tasks could be done in warmth and company. Sometimes Ostric played his pipes. They made a famous woollen cloth at Kilmarnock, dying their best fleeces the colors of heather by steeping them with lichens picked from the rocks. They wove in privacy but congregated in the hall for waulking, the shrinking of the fabric. The wet cloth, which had been soaked in soapy water, was passed around the table while each woman pounded and rubbed it. All the while they sang waulking songs, and Rob thought that their voices and Ostric’s pipes made a singular sound.
The nearest chapel was a three-hour ride and Rob had believed it wouldn’t be difficult to avoid priests, but one day in his second spring in Kilmarnock there appeared a small, plump man with a tired smile.
