by Noah Gordon
“Father Domhnall! It is Father Domhnall!” Mary cried, and hastened to bid him welcome.
They clustered about him and greeted him warmly. He spent a moment with each, asking a question with a smile, patting an arm, dropping a word of encouragement—like a good earl walking among his churls, Rob thought sourly.
He came to Rob and looked him over. “So. You are Mary Cullen’s man.”
“Yes.”
“Are you a fisher?”
The question disconcerted him. “I fish for trouts.”
“I’d have wagered so. I would take you after salmon tomorrow in the morning,” he said, and Rob said he would go.
Next day they walked in gray light to a small, rushing river. Domhnall had brought two massive poles that were surely too heavy, and stout line and long-shanked feathered lures with barbs hidden treacherously in their handsome centers. “Like men I know,” Rob observed to the priest, and Domhnall nodded, regarding him curiously.
Domhnall showed him how to fling the lure and bring it back through the water in little surges that resembled the darting of a small fish. They did it again and again with no result, but Rob didn’t care, for he was lost in the rush of the water. Now the sun was up. High overhead he watched an eagle floating on nothing, and somewhere nearby he heard the cry of a grouse.
The big fish took his lure at the surface with a slash that sent a spout of water into the air.
It began to run upstream at once.
“You must go toward him or he’ll break the line or tear out the hook!” Domhnall shouted.
Rob was already splashing into the river, clattering after the salmon. Expending its first surge of strength the fish almost did him in, for he fell several times in the frigid water, following over the stony bottom and floundering in and out of deep pools.
The fish ran again and again, taking him up and down the river. Domhnall had been shouting instructions, but once Rob looked up at the sound of a splash and saw that Domhnall now had troubles of his own. He had hooked a fish and was in the river too.
Rob fought to keep the fish in the middle of the stream. Eventually the salmon seemed under his control, though it felt dangerously heavy at the end of his line.
Soon he was able to skid the feebly struggling fish—so big!—into shingled shallows. As he grasped the shank of the lure, the salmon gave one last convulsive leap and the hook tore free, bringing with it a strip of bloody tissue from within the fish’s throat. For a moment the salmon lay motionless on its side and then, as Rob saw a thick haze of blood rise darkly from its gills, it flipped into deep water and was gone.
He stood trembling and disgusted, for the blood cloud told him he had killed the fish, and now it had been wasted.
Moving more by instinct than out of hope, he walked downstream, but before he had taken half a dozen steps he saw a silvery patch in the water ahead and splashed toward it. He lost the pale reflection twice as the fish swam or was moved by the river. Then he saw he was right on top of it. The salmon was dying but not quite dead, pressed against the upstream side of a boulder by the strong current.
He had to immerse himself in the numbing water to take it in both arms and carry it to the bank, where he ended its pain with a rock. It weighed at least two stone.
Domhnall was just landing his fish, which wasn’t nearly as large.
“Yours is enough flesh for us all, eh?” he said. When Rob nodded, Domhnall returned his salmon to the river. He held it carefully to let the water do its work. The fins moved and waved as languorously as if the fish were not struggling to maintain its existence, and the gills began to pump. Rob saw the quiver of life run through the fish, and as he watched it move away from them and disappear into the current, he knew that this priest would be his friend.
* * *
They took off their sodden garments and spread them to dry, then lay near them on a huge sun-warmed rock.
Domhnall sighed. “Not like catching trouts,” he said.
“The difference between picking a flower and felling a tree.” Rob had half a dozen bleeding cuts on his legs from falling in the river, and innumerable bruises.
They grinned at one another.
Domhnall scratched his round little belly, white as any fish’s, and lapsed into silence. Rob had expected questions, but he perceived it was this priest’s style to listen intently and wait, a valuable patience that would make him a deadly opponent if Rob should teach him the Shah’s Game.
“Mary and I are not married in the Church. Do you know that?”
“I had heard something.”
“Well. We have been truly wed, these years. But it was a hand-held union.”
Domhnall grunted.
He told the cleric their story. He didn’t omit or make light of his troubles in London. “I would like you to marry us, but I must warn that perhaps I’ve been excommunicated.”
They dried lazily in the sun, considering the problem.
“If this auxiliary bishop of Worcester could have done, he would gloss it over,” Domhnall said. “Such an ambitious man would rather have a missing and forgotten brother than close kin scandalously driven from the Church.”
Rob nodded. “Suppose he could not cover it over?”
The priest frowned. “You have no sure proof of excommunication?”
Rob shook his head. “But it is possible.”
“Possible? I cannot run my ministry according to your fears. Man, man, what do your fears have to do with Christ? I was born in Prestwick. Since ordination I have never left this mountain parish and I expect I will be pastor here when I die. Other than yourself, never in all my life have I encountered anyone from London or from Worcester. I have never received a message from an archbishop or from His Holiness, but only from Jesus. Can you believe it is the will of the Lord that I not make a Christian family of the four of you?”
Rob smiled at him and shook his head.
All their lives the two sons would remember the wedding of their parents, and describe it to their own grandchildren. The Nuptial Mass in the Cullen hall was small and quiet. Mary had a dress of light gray stuff and wore a silver brooch and a roeskin belt studded with silver. She was a composed bride, but her eyes shone as Father Domhnall declared that ever more and in sanctified protection she and her children were irreversibly joined to Robert Jeremy Cole.
Thereafter Mary sent invitations for all her kinfolk to meet her husband. On the appointed day the MacPhees came west through the low hills and the Tedders crossed the big river and came through the clough to Kilmarnock. They came bearing wedding gifts and fruit cakes and game pies and casks of strong drink and the great meat-and-oats puddings they loved. At the holding, an ox and a bull were slowly turning on spits over open fires, and eight sheep and a dozen lambs, and numerous fowl. There was the music of harp, pipe, viol, and trump, and Mary joined in when the women sang.
All afternoon, during the athletic contests, Rob met Cullens and Tedders and MacPhees. Some he admired at once and others he did not. He tried not to study the male cousins, who were legion. Everywhere, men began to become drunk, and some tried to force the groom to join them. But he toasted his bride and his sons and their clan, and for the rest he put them off with an easy word and a smile.
That evening, while the roistering was still in high progress, he walked from the buildings, past the pens and away. It was a good night, starry but still not warm. He could smell the spice of the gorse, and as the sounds of the celebration faded behind him he heard the sheep and the nickering of a horse and the wind in the hills and the rushing of streams, and he fancied he could feel taproots emerging from the soles of his feet and pushing deep into the thin, flinty soil.
81
THE CIRCLE COMPLETED
Why a woman should quicken with new life, or not, was the perfect mystery. After bearing two sons and then passing five years in barrenness, Mary ripened with child following their wedding. She was careful at her work, quicker now to ask one of the men to help her with a
task. The two sons trailed after her and did light chores. It was easy to see which child would be the sheepman; at times Rob J. seemed to enjoy the work, but Tam was always eager to feed the lambs and begged for a chance to shear. There was something else about him, seen first in the crude outlines he scraped into the earth with a stick, until his father gave him charcoal and a pine board and showed him how things and people might be pictured. Rob didn’t have to tell the boy not to leave out the flaws.
On the wall above Tam’s bed hung the rug of the Samanid kings, and it was understood by everyone that it was his, the gift of a family friend in Persia. Only once did Mary and Rob face the thing they had compressed and pushed into the recesses of their minds. Watching him run after a straying ewe, Rob knew it would be no blessing for the boy to learn he had an army of foreign stranger-brothers he would never see. “We will never tell him.”
“He is yours,” she said. She turned and held him in her arms, and between them was the thickening bulge that was to be Jura Agnes, the only daughter.
Rob learned the new language, for it was spoken all about him and he applied himself. Father Domhnall loaned him a Bible written in the Erse by monks in Ireland, and as he had mastered Persian from the Qu’ran, he learned the Gaelic from Holy Scripture.
In his study he hung the Transparent Man and the Pregnant Woman and began to teach his sons the anatomical charts and answer their questions. Often when he was summoned to tend a sick person or an animal, one or both of them went with him. On such a day Rob J. rode behind his father on Al Borak’s back, to a hill-croft house that stank of the dying of Ostric’s wife, Ardis.
The boy watched as he measured out and gave her an infusion, and Rob poured water on a cloth and handed it to his son.
“You may bathe her face.”
Rob J. did it gently, taking great care with her cracked lips. When he was finished Ardis fumbled, taking the young hands in hers.
Rob saw the tender smile change into something else. He witnessed the confusion of first awareness, the pallor. The starkness with which the boy thrust away her hands.
“It’s all right,” he said. He put his arms around the thin shoulders and held Rob J. tight. “It is all right.” Only seven years old. Two years younger than he had been himself. He knew, wonderingly, that his life had completed a great circle.
He comforted and tended Ardis. When they were outside the house, he took his son’s hands so Rob J. could feel his father’s living strength and be reassured. He looked into Rob J.’s eyes.
“What you felt in Ardis, and the life you detect in me now … to sense these things is a gift from the Almighty. A good gift. It isn’t evil, don’t fear it. Don’t try to understand it now. There will be time for you to understand it. Don’t be afraid.”
The color was returning to his son’s face. “Yes, Da.”
He mounted and swung the boy up behind his saddle, and took him home.
Ardis died eight days later. For months after that, Rob J. didn’t come to the dispensary or ask to accompany his father when he went to tend the sick. Rob didn’t urge him. Even for a child, he felt, involving oneself with the world’s suffering had to be a voluntary act.
Rob J. tried to interest himself in herding the sheep with Tam. When that palled, he went off alone and picked herbs, hour after long hour. He was a puzzled boy.
But he had complete trust in his father, and the day came when Rob J. ran after Rob as he was riding out of the farmyard. “Da! May I go with you? To tend the horse and such?”
Rob nodded and pulled him up behind the saddle.
Soon Rob J. began coming to the dispensary sporadically and his instruction resumed; and when he was nine years old, at his own request he began to assist his father every day as apprentice.
The year after Jura Agnes was born, Mary gave birth to a third male child, Nathanael Robertsson. A year later there was the stillbirth of a boy who was christened Carrik Lyon Cole before burial, and then two difficult miscarriages in succession. Though she was still of childbearing age, Mary didn’t become pregnant again. It grieved her, he knew, for she had wanted to give him many children, but Rob was content to see her gradually regain her strength and spirit.
One day when his youngest child was in his fifth year, a man in a dusty black caftan and bell-shaped leather cap rode into Kilmarnock, leading a laden ass.
“Peace unto you,” Rob said in the Tongue, and the Jew gaped at the language and answered, “Unto you, peace.”
A muscular man with a great, unkempt brown beard, skin burnt by travel, and exhaustion pulling at his mouth and making lines in the corners of his eyes. He was Dan ben Gamliel of Rouen, and a long way from home.
Rob saw to his beasts and gave him water in which to wash and then set before him unforbidden foods. He found his own grasp of the Tongue was poor, for a surprising amount had slipped away from him, but he made the blessings over the bread and the wine.
“Are you then Jews?” Dan ben Gamliel said, staring.
“No, we are Christians.”
“Why do you do this?”
“We owe a great debt,” Rob said.
His children sat at the table and stared at a man who looked like no one they had ever seen, listening in wonder as their father joined him in uttering strange blessings before they ate their food.
“After we have eaten, you may care to study with me.” Rob felt the rise of an almost-forgotten excitement. “Perhaps we may sit together and study the commandments,” he said.
The stranger peered at him. “I regret—No, I cannot!” Dan ben Gamliel’s face was pallid. “I am not a scholar,” he muttered.
Masking his disappointment, Rob took the traveler to a good place to sleep, as it would have been done in a Jewish village.
Next day he rose early. Among the things he had taken from Persia he found the Jew’s cap and prayer shawl and phylacteries and went to join Dan ben Gamliel at morning devotions.
Dan ben Gamliel stared as he bound the little black box to his forehead and wound the leather around his arm to form the letters in the name of the Unutterable. The Jew watched him sway and listened to his prayers.
“I know what you are,” he said thickly. “You were a Jew and you became an apostate. A man who has turned his back on our people and our God and given his soul to the other nation.”
“No, it isn’t so,” Rob said, and saw with regret that he had disrupted the other’s praying. “I will explain when you have finished,” he said, and withdrew.
But when he returned to summon the man to the morning meal, Dan ben Gamliel wasn’t there. The horse was gone. The ass was gone. The heavy load had been picked up and carried away, and his guest had fled rather than expose himself to the dread contagion of apostasy.
It was Rob’s last Jew; he never saw another nor spoke the Tongue again.
He felt his memory of Persian slipping from him too, and one day determined that before it abandoned him, he must translate the Qānîin into English so he might continue to consult the Master Physician. It took him a dreadfully long time. Again and again he told himself that Ibn Sina had written The Canon of Medicine in less time than it took Robert Cole to translate it!
Sometimes he regretted wistfully that he hadn’t studied all the commandments at least once. Often he thought of Jesse ben Benjamin but increasingly made peace with his passing—it was hard to be a Jew!—and he came almost never to speak of other times and places. Once when Tam and Rob J. were entered in the running contest that each year celebrated the feast day of St. Kolumb in the hills, he told them of a runner named Karim who had won a long and wonderful race called the chatir. And rarely—usually when engaged in one of the mundane tasks that marked the even rhythm of a Scot’s days, mucking the pens or moving drifted snow or hewing firewood—he would smell the cooling heat of the desert at night, or remember the sight of Fara Askari kindling Sabbath tapers, or the enraged trumpet call of an elephant charging into battle, or the breathless sensation of flying perched atop the lo
ng-legged stagger of a racing camel. But it came to seem that Kilmarnock had always been his life, and that what had happened before was a tale he had heard told around the fire when the wind blew cold.
His children throve and changed, his wife turned finer with age. As the seasons slipped by, only one thing was constant. The extra sense, the healer’s sensitivity, never abandoned him. Whether he was called lonely in the night to a bedside or hurried of a morning into the crowded dispensary, he could always feel their pain. Hastening to struggle with it, he never failed to know—as he had known from the first day in the maristan—a rush of wondering gratitude that he was chosen, that it was he whom God’s hand had reached out and touched, and that such an opportunity to minister and serve should have been given to Barber’s boy.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Twenty-six years have passed since The Physician was first published. I am grateful to the many millions of people who have kept the book in print during that time by reading it in 32 languages. It is now being developed as a motion picture.
I am happy that this newest edition of The Physician is offered to readers of the English language, internationally and in America, by my publisher, Blanca Rosa Roca of Barcelona eBooks.
The Physician is a story in which only two characters, Ibn Sina and al-Juzjani, are taken from life. There was a shah named Ala-al-Dawla, but so little information survives that the character of that name is based on an amalgam of shahs.
The maristan was depicted from descriptions of the medieval Azudi hospital of Baghdad.
Much of the flavor and fact of the eleventh century is forever lost. Where the record was nonexistent or obscured, I did not hesitate to fictionalize; thus, it should be understood that this is a work of the imagination and not a slice of history. Any errors, large or small, made in my striving to faithfully recreate a sense of time and place, are my own. Yet this novel could not have been written without the help of a number of libraries and individuals.
