The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (79 page)

Little Rob’s blue eyes regarded the world fearlessly. He had begun to make crawling motions and his parents rejoiced when he learned to drink from a cup. At Ibn Sina’s suggestion Rob tried feeding him camel’s milk, which the Master said was the most healthful food for a child. It was strong-smelling and had yellowish lumps of butterfat but the little boy swallowed it hungrily. From then on, the woman Prisca no longer suckled him. Each morning Rob fetched camel’s milk from the Armenian market in a stone crock. The former wet nurse, always holding one of her own children, peered from her husband’s leather stall to watch for him every morning.

“Master
Dhimmi!
Master
Dhimmi!
How is my little boy?” Prisca called, and she gave him a luminous smile each time he assured her that the child was fine.

Because of the bitter air, patients in number came to the physicians with catarrh and aching bones and inflamed and swollen joints. Pliny the Younger had written that to cure a cold the patient should kiss the hairy muzzle of a mouse, but Ibn Sina pronounced Pliny the Younger not fit to be read. He had his own favorite remedy against the affliction of phlegm and the rigors of rheumatism. He carefully instructed Rob to assemble two
dirhams
each of castoreum, galbanum of Ispahan, stinking asafetida, asafetida, celery seed, Syrian fenugreek, galbanum, caltrop, harmel seed, opopanax, rue gum, and kernel of pumpkin seed. The dry ingredients were pounded. The gums were steeped in oil for a night and then pounded, and over them was poured warm honey bereft of froth, the wet mixture then being kneaded with the dry ingredients and the resulting paste put into a glazed vessel.

“The dose is one
mithqal,
” Ibn Sina said. “It is efficacious if God wishes.”

Rob went to the elephant pens, where the
mahouts
were snuffling and coughing, dealing less than cheerfully with a season unlike the mild winters they had known in India. He visited them three days in a row and gave them fumitory and sagepenum and Ibn Sina’s paste, with results so indecisive he would have preferred to dose them with Barber’s Universal Specific. The elephants didn’t look splendid as they had in battle; now they were draped like tents, festooned with blankets in an attempt to keep them warm.

Rob stood with Harsha and watched Zi, the Shah’s great bull elephant, cramming himself with hay.

“My poor children,” Harsha said softly. “Once, before Buddha or Brahman or Vishnu or Shiva, the elephants were all-powerful and my people prayed to them. Now they are so much less than gods that they are captured and made to do our will.”

Zi shivered as they watched, and Rob prescribed that the beasts be given buckets of warmed drinking water to heat them from within.

Harsha was doubtful. “We have been working them and they labor well despite the cold.”

But Rob had been learning about elephants in the House of Wisdom. “Do you know about Hannibal?”

“No,” the
mahout
said.

“A soldier, a great leader.”

“Great as Al
ā
Shah?”

“At least as great, but from a time long gone. With thirty-seven elephants he led an army over the Alps—high, terrible mountains, steep and snow-covered—and he didn’t lose an animal. But cold and exposure weakened them. Later, crossing smaller mountains, all but one of the elephants died. The lesson is that you must rest your beasts and keep them warm.”

Harsha nodded respectfully. “Do you know that you are followed,
Hakim?”

Rob was startled.

“That one there, sitting in the sun.”

He was just a man huddling in the fleece of his
cadabi,
seated with his back to the wall to hide from the cold wind.

“Are you certain?”

“Yes,
Hakim,
I saw him follow you yesterday too. Even now, he keeps you in his sight.”

“When I leave here can you follow after him cleverly, so we may discover who he is?”

Harsha’s eyes gleamed. “Yes,
Hakim.”

Late that evening Harsha came to Yehuddiyyeh and tapped on Rob’s door.

“He followed you home,
Hakim.
When he left you here, I followed him to the Friday Mosque. I was very clever, O Honorable, I was invisible. He entered the
mullah’s
house wearing the ragged
cadabi
and after a short time emerged clad in black robes, and he went into the mosque in time for Final Prayer. He is a
mullah, Hakim.”

Rob thanked him thoughtfully and Harsha went away.

The
mullah
had been sent by Qandrasseh’s friends, he was certain. Doubtless they had followed Karim to his meeting with Ibn Sina and Rob and then had watched to determine the extent of Rob’s involvement with the prospective Vizier.

Perhaps they concluded he was harmless, for next day he watched carefully but could see no one who might have been trailing after him and, so far as he could tell, in the days that followed he wasn’t spied on again.

It remained chill, but spring was coming. Only the tips of the purplegray mountains were white with snow, and in the garden the stark branches of the apricot trees were covered with tiny black buds, perfectly round.

Two soldiers came one morning and fetched Rob to the House of Paradise. In the cold stone throne room small knots of blue-lipped members of the court stood about and suffered. Karim was not among them. The Shah sat at the table over the floor grille through which oven heat drifted.
After the
ravi zemin
was out of the way he motioned for Rob to join him, and the warmth trapped by the heavy felt tablecloth proved to be pleasant.

The Shah’s Game was already set up, and without conversation Al
ā
made his first move.

“Ah,
Dhimmi,
you have become a hungry cat,” he said presently.

It was true; Rob had learned to attack.

The Shah played with a scowl on his face, eyes intent on the board. Rob used his two elephants to do damage and quickly gained a camel, a horse and rider, three foot soldiers.

The onlookers followed the game in rapt, expressionless silence. Doubtless some were horrified and some delighted by the fact that a European nonbeliever appeared to be besting the Shah.

But the king had vast experience as a sneaking general. Just as Rob began to think himself a fine fellow and a master of strategy, Al
ā
offered sacrifices and drew his enemy in. He employed his own two elephants more adroitly than Hannibal had used his thirty-seven, until Rob’s elephants were gone, and his horsemen. Still Rob fought doggedly, calling upon all Mirdin had taught him. It was a respectable time before he was
shahtreng.
When it was over, the courtiers applauded the king’s victory and Al
ā
allowed himself to look pleased.

The Shah slipped a heavy ring of massy gold from his finger and placed it in Rob’s right hand. “About the
calaat.
We now give it. You shall have a house large enough for a royal entertainment.”

With a
haram.
And Mary in the
haram.

The nobles watched and listened.

“I shall wear this ring with pride and gratitude. As for the
calaat,
I am quite happy with your Majesty’s past generosity and I shall remain in my house.”

His voice was respectful but it was too firm and he did not turn his eyes away quite fast enough to prove humility. And all who were present heard the
Dhimmi
say these things.

By the following morning, it had reached Ibn Sina.

Not for nothing had the Chief Physician twice been a vizier. He had informants in the court and among the servants at the House of Paradise, and from several sources he heard about the rash stupidity of his
Dhimmi
assistant.

As always in time of crisis, Ibn Sina sat and thought. He was aware that his presence in Al
ā
’s capital city was a source of royal pride, enabling the Shah to compare himself to the Baghdad caliphs as a monarch of culture
and a patron of learning. But Ibn Sina was also aware that his influence had limits; a direct appeal would not save Jesse ben Benjamin.

All his life Al
ā
had dreamed of being one of the greatest Shahs, a king with an undying name. Now he was preparing for a war that could take him either to immortality or to oblivion, and it was impossible at this moment for him to allow anyone to obstruct his will.

Ibn Sina knew that the king would have Jesse ben Benjamin killed.

Perhaps orders already had been given for unidentified assailants to fall upon the young
hakim
in the streets, or he might be arrested by soldiers and tried and sentenced by an Islamic court. Al
ā
was capable of political craft and would use the execution of this
Dhimmi
in a manner that would serve him best.

For years Ibn Sina had studied Al
ā
Shah and he understood the workings of the king’s mind. He knew what must be done.

That morning in the
maristan
he summoned his staff. “Word has reached us that in the town of Idhaj are a number of patients too sick to travel here to the hospital,” he said, which was true. “Therefore,” he told Jesse ben Benjamin, “you must ride to Idhaj and hold a clinic for the treatment of these people.”

After they discussed herbs and drugs that must be taken with him on a pack ass, and medicines that could be found in that town, and the histories of certain patients they knew to be ill there, Jesse said goodbye and left without delay.

Idhaj was a slow, uncomfortable three-day ride to the south, and the clinic would take at least three days. It would give Ibn Sina more than enough time.

Next afternoon, he went alone into Yehuddiyyeh and rode directly to his assistant’s house.

The woman answered the door holding her child. Surprise and brief confusion showed in her face when she saw the Prince of Physicians standing on her threshold, but she recovered quickly and showed him inside with proper courtesy. It was a plain home but kept well, and it had been made comfortable, with wall hangings and rugs on the earthen floors. With commendable dispatch she placed an earthen plate of sweet seed cakes before him, and a
sherbet
of rose water flavored with cardamon.

He hadn’t counted on her ignorance of the language. When he tried to talk with her it was quickly obvious that she had only a few words of Persian.

He wanted to converse at length and with persuasion, wanted to tell her that when first he had recognized the quality of her husband’s mind and
instincts, he had hungered after the large young foreigner the way a miser lusts for a treasure or a man desires a woman. He had wanted the European for medicine because it was clear to him that God had fashioned Jesse ben Benjamin to be a healer.

“He will be a shining light. He is almost realized, but it is too soon, he is not yet there.

“All kings are mad. To one with absolute power, it is no more difficult to take a life than to bestow a
calaat.
Yet if you flee now, it will be a resentment for the rest of your lives, for he has come so far, dared so much. I know he is no Jew.”

The woman sat and held the child, watching Ibn Sina with growing tension. He tried speaking Hebrew with no success, then Turkish and Arabic in quick succession. He was a philologist and a linguist but knew few European languages, for he learned a tongue only in pursuit of scholarship. He spoke to her in Greek without response.

Then he turned to Latin and saw her head move slightly and her eyes blink.

“Rex te venire ad se vult. Si non, maritus necabitur.
” He repeated it: The king wishes you to come to him. If you do not, your husband will be slain.

“Quid dicas?”
What do you say? she said.

He repeated it very slowly.

The child was beginning to fuss in her arms, but the woman paid her baby no heed. She stared at Ibn Sina, her face drained of color. It was a face like stone but he saw it contained an element he hadn’t noted before. The old man understood people and for the first time his anxiety abated, for he recognized the woman’s strength. He would make the arrangements and she would do what was necessary.

Slaves bearing a sedan chair came for her. She didn’t know what to do with Rob J., so she brought him along; it was a happy solution, for in the
haram
of the House of Paradise the child was received by a number of delighted women.

She was taken to the baths, an embarrassment. Rob had told her it was a religious obligation for Muslim women to remove their pubic hair every ten days by means of a lime-and-arsenic depilatory. Similarly, the hair of the armpits was plucked or shaved, once a week by a married woman, every two weeks by a widow, and once a month by a virgin. The women attending her stared in undisguised disgust.

After she had been washed, three trays of scents and dyes were offered but she used only a bit of perfume.

She was led to a room and instructed to wait. It was furnished only with a large pallet, pillows, and blankets, and a closed cabinet on which stood a basin of water. Somewhere nearby, musicians played. She was cold. When she had waited what seemed a long time, she picked up a blanket and wrapped herself.

Presently Al
ā
came. She was terrified but he smiled at seeing her standing cowled in the blanket.

He waggled his finger for her to remove it, and then motioned impatiently that she was to take off the robe too. She knew she was thin compared to most Eastern females, and Persian women had gone out of their way to inform her that freckles were Allah’s just punishment on someone so shameless she did not wear the veil.

He touched the heavy red hair on her head, lifted a handful to his nostrils. She hadn’t perfumed her hair and its lack of scent made him grimace.

For a moment Mary was able to escape by worrying about her child. When Rob J. was older, would he remember having been brought to this place? The glad cries and soft cooing of the women? Their tender faces beaming down at him? Their hands caressing him?

The king’s hands were still at her head. He was speaking in Persian, whether to himself or to her she couldn’t tell. She dared not even shake her head to signify she didn’t understand, lest he interpret the gesture as disagreement.