The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (58 page)

Both Rob and Mirdin were happy to work hard. Jalal-ul-Din was famous as a bone specialist and had developed a wide variety of padded splints and traction devices. He taught them to use fingertips as if they were eyes that could peer beneath bruised and crushed flesh, visualizing the injury until the best course of treatment was clear. Jalal was especially skillful in manipulating chips and fragments until they were back in their rightful places, where nature could make them part of bones once again.

“He appears to have a curious interest in crime,” Mirdin grumbled after their first few days as Jalal’s assistants. And it was true, for Rob had noted that the physician spoke inordinately long about a murderer who had shriven his guilt that week in Imam Qandrasseh’s court.

One Fakhr-i-Ayn, a shepherd, had confessed that two years earlier he had sodomized and then slain a fellow shepherd named Qifti al-Ullah, burying his victim in a shallow grave outside the city walls. The murderer was condemned by the court and promptly executed and quartered.

A few days later, when Rob and Mirdin reported to Jalal, he told them that the body of the murdered man was to be removed from its crude grave and reburied in a Muslim cemetery with benefit of Islamic prayer to insure his soul’s admission to Paradise.

“Come,” Jalal said. “It is a rare opportunity. Today we shall be grave-diggers.”

He didn’t disclose whom he had bribed, but soon the two clerks and the physician, leading a laden mule, accompanied a
mullah
and a
kelonter’s
soldier to the lonely hillside which the late Fakhr-i-Ayn had pointed out to authorities.

“Have a care,” Jalal said as they used their spades.

Presently they saw the bones of a hand, and soon after that removed the entire skeleton, laying the bones of Qifti-al-Ullah on a blanket.

“Time for food,” Jalal announced, and led the donkey to the shade of a tree a distance from the grave. The animal’s pack was opened to give forth roast fowl, sumptuous
pilah,
large desert dates, honey cakes, a jug of
sherbet.
The soldier and the
mullah
fell to eating eagerly, and Jalal and his clerks left them to the heavy meal and the nap that would surely follow.

The three of them hurried back to the skeleton. The earth had done its task and the bones were clean save for a rusty stain around the place where Fakhr’s dagger had punched through the sternum. They knelt over the bones, murmuring, scarcely aware that the remains once had been a man named Qifti.

“Note the femur,” Jalal said, “the largest and strongest bone in the body. Is it not apparent why it is difficult to set a break that occurs in the thigh?

“Count the twelve pairs of ribs. Do you note how the ribs form a cage? The cage protects the heart and the lungs, is that not marvelous?”

It was remarkably different to be studying human bones instead of a sheep’s, Rob thought; but it was only a small part of the story. “The human heart and lungs—have you seen them?” he asked Jalal.

“No. But Galen says they are very much like the pig’s. We have all seen the pig’s.”

“What if they are not the same?”

“They are the same,” Jalal said crankily. “Let us not waste this golden chance for study, for soon those two will return. Do you witness how the upper seven pair of ribs are attached to the breastplate by flexible connective stuff? The next three are united by a common tissue, and the last two pairs have no attachment to the front at all. Is Allah (great and mighty is He!) not the cleverest designer,
Dhimmis?
Is it not a wondrous framework on which He has built his people?”

They squatted in the hot sun over their scholarly feast, making an anatomy lesson of the murdered man.

Afterward, Rob and Mirdin spent time in the academy’s baths, washing away the funereal feeling and easing muscles unaccustomed to digging. It was here that Karim found them, and at once Rob saw from his friend’s face that something was wrong.

“I am to be reexamined.”

“But surely that is what you want!”

Karim glanced at two faculty members conversing at the other end of the room and lowered his voice. “I’m afraid. I’d almost given up hope for another examining. This will be my third—if I fail this time all will be over.” He looked at them bleakly. “At least now I’m able to be a clerk.”

“You will trot through the examination like a runner,” Mirdin said.

Karim waved off any attempt at lightheartedness. “I’m not concerned with the medical portion. It’s the portion on philosophy, and the portion on the law.”

“When?” Rob asked.

“In six weeks.”

“That gives us time, then.”

“Yes, I will study philosophy with you,” Mirdin said calmly. “Jesse and you will work on the law.”

Inside, Rob groaned, for he scarcely considered himself a jurist. But they had been through the plague together and were linked by similar boyhood catastrophes; he knew they must try. “We begin tonight,” he said, reaching for a cloth to dry his body.

“I have never heard of anyone staying apprentice for seven years and then being made a physician,” Karim said, and he made no attempt to hide his terror from them, a new level of intimacy.

“You will pass,” Mirdin said, and Rob nodded.

“I must,” Karim said.

46

THE RIDDLE

Two weeks in a row, Ibn Sina invited Rob to dine with him.

“Hoo, the Master has a favorite clerk,” Mirdin gibed, but there was pride and not jealousy in his smile.

“It’s good that he takes an interest,” Karim said seriously. “Al-Juzjani has had Ibn Sina’s sponsorship since they were young men, and al-Juzjani became a great physician.”

Rob scowled, unwilling to share the experience even with them. He couldn’t describe what it was like to have an entire evening as the sole beneficiary of Ibn Sina’s mind. One evening they had talked of the heavenly bodies—or, to be precise, Ibn Sina had talked and Rob had listened. Another evening, Ibn Sina had held forth for hours on the theories of the Greek philosophers. He knew so much and could teach it effortlessly!

In contrast, before Rob could teach Karim, he had to learn. He determined that for six weeks he would stop attending all lectures save for selected ones on the law, and he drew books on law and jurisprudence from the House of Wisdom. Tutoring Karim in law would not simply be a selfless act of friendship, for it was an area Rob had neglected. In helping Karim he would be preparing himself for the day when his own ordeal of testing would begin.

In Islam there were two branches of law:
Fiqh,
or legal science, and
Shar
ī
’a,
the law as divinely revealed by Allah. When there was added to these
Sunna,
truth and justice as revealed by the exemplary life and sayings of Mohammed, the result was a complex and complicated body of learning that might make scholars quail.

Karim was trying, but it was obvious he was sorely tried. “It’s too much,” he said. The strain was apparent. For the first time in seven years, except for the period in which they had fought the plague in Sh
ī
r
ā
z, he wasn’t going to the
maristan
daily, and he confessed to Rob that he felt
strange and ripped out of his element without his daily routine of caring for patients.

Each morning, before he met with Rob to study the law and then with Mirdin to study the philosophers and their teachings, Karim ran in the first gray light. Once Rob tried to run with him but he was soon left behind; Karim ran as if trying to outdistance his fears. Several times, Rob rode the brown horse and paced the runner. Karim sped through the stirring city, past the grinning sentries at the main gate of the wall, across the River of Life and into the countryside. Rob didn’t think he knew or cared where he was running. His feet rose and fell and his legs moved with a steady, mindless rhythm that appeared to lull and comfort him as if it were an infusion of
buing,
the strong hempseed they gave to people with hopeless pain. The daily expenditure of effort bothered Rob.

“It takes Karim’s strength,” he complained to Mirdin. “He should save all his energy for studying.”

But wise Mirdin pulled his nose and stroked his long equine jaw and shook his head. “No, without the running I think he would not be able to get past this hard time,” he said, and Rob was wise enough to defer, for he had great faith that Mirdin’s everyday wisdom was as formidable as his scholarship.

One morning he was summoned, and rode the brown horse down the Avenue of the Thousand Gardens until he came to the dusty lane leading to Ibn Sina’s handsome house. The gateman took his horse, and by the time he had walked to the stone door Ibn Sina was there to greet him.

“It is my wife. I would be grateful if you would examine her.”

Rob bowed, confused; Ibn Sina had no lack of distinguished colleagues who would be pleased and honored to examine the woman. But he followed him to a door leading to a stone stairway like the inside of a snail shell, and they ascended the north tower of the house.

The old woman lay on a pallet and stared through them with dull and unseeing eyes. Ibn Sina knelt by her.

“Reza.”

Her dry lips were cracked. He moistened a square of cloth in rose water and wiped her mouth and face tenderly. Ibn Sina had a lifetime of experience in how to make a sickroom comfortable, but not even clean surroundings and newly changed garments and the fragrant wisps of smoke rising from incense dishes could mask the stink of her illness.

The bones seemed almost to violate her transparent skin. Her face was waxen, her hair thin and white. Perhaps her husband was the greatest
physician in the world but she was an old woman in the final stages of bone sickness. Large buboes were visible on her skinny arms and lower legs. Her ankles and feet were swollen with gathered fluids. Her right hip was largely deteriorated and Rob knew that if he were to lift the bed gown he would find that more of the advanced growths had invaded other external parts of her body just as, from the odor, he was certain they had spread to her intestines.

It wasn’t to confirm a terrible and obvious diagnosis that Ibn Sina had summoned him. Now he knew what was required of him and he took both her frail hands in his, talking to her softly. He took longer than necessary, gazing into her eyes, which for a moment seemed to clear. “Da’ud?” she whispered, and her grip on his hands strengthened.

Rob looked at Ibn Sina questioningly.

“Her brother, dead these many years.”

The vacancy returned to her eyes, the fingers clutching his grew slack. Rob returned her hands to the pallet and they withdrew from the tower.

“How long?”

“Not long,
Hakim-bashi.
I believe a matter of days.” Rob felt clumsy; the other man was far too senior to him for the standard condolences. “Is there nothing, then, that can be done for her?”

Ibn Sina’s mouth twisted. “I am left to showing her my love with stronger and stronger infusions.” He took his apprentice to the front door and thanked him, then returned to his afflicted wife.

“Master,” someone said to Rob.

When he turned he saw the huge eunuch who guarded the second wife. “You will follow, please?”

They passed through a doorway in the garden wall, the opening so small each of them had to stoop, into another garden outside the south tower.

“What is it?” he asked the slave curtly.

The eunuch made no reply. Something drew Rob’s glance and he looked to where a veiled face stared down at him through a small window.

Their eyes held and then hers moved away in a swirl of veils and the window was empty.

Rob turned to the slave and the eunuch smiled slightly and shrugged.

“She bade me bring you here. She desired to look upon you, master,” he said.

Perhaps Rob might have dreamed of her that night but there was no time. He studied the laws of ownership of property and, as the oil in his
lamp was burning low, he heard the clopping sound of hooves that came down his street and appeared to stop outside his door.

There was a tapping.

He reached for his sword, thinking of thieves. It was far too late for callers. “Who is there?”

“Wasif, master.”

Rob knew no Wasif but thought he recognized the voice. Holding the weapon ready, he opened the door and saw he had been right. It was the eunuch, holding the reins of a donkey.

“Were you sent by the
hakim?”

“No, master. I am sent by her, who wishes you to come.”

He had no reply. The eunuch knew better than to smile, but there was a glint behind the grave eyes that took in the
Dhimmi’s
amazement.

“Wait,” Rob said rudely, and shut the door.

He came out after a hasty washing-up and, mounting the brown horse without a saddle, wended through the dark streets behind the huge slave, whose splayed feet dragged furrows in the dust as he rode astride the poor donkey. They plodded past silent houses in which people slept, turning into the lane whose deeper dust muffled the animals’ hooves, and then into a field that extended behind the wall of Ibn Sina’s estate.

A gate in the wall took them close to the door of the south tower. The eunuch opened the tower gate and, bowing, motioned for Rob to go on alone.