The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (86 page)

71

IBN SINA’S ERROR

Yussuf-ul-Gamal beckoned Rob into the scholarly shade of the library. “I want to show you a treasure.”

It was a thick book, an obviously new copy of Ibn Sina’s masterwork,
Canon of Medicine.

“This
Qan
ū
n
isn’t owned by the House of Wisdom. It is a copy made by a scribe of my acquaintance. It is for sale.”

Ah. Rob picked it up. It was lovingly done, the letters black and crisp on each ivory-colored page. It was a codex, a book with many gatherings—large sheets of vellum folded and then cut so each page could be freely turned. The gatherings had been finely stitched between covers of soft tanned lambskin.

“It is costly?”

Yussuf nodded.

“How much?”

“He will sell for eighty silver
bestis.
Because he needs money.” He pursed his lips, aware he didn’t have that much. Mary had a large sum, her father’s money, but he and Mary no longer …

Rob shook his head.

Yussuf sighed. “I felt
you
should own it.”

“When must it be sold?”

Yussuf shrugged. “I can keep it for two weeks.”

“All right, then. Keep it.”

The librarian looked at him doubtfully. “Will you have the money then,
Hakim?”

“If it is God’s will.”

Yussuf smiled. “Yes.
Imshallah.”

He placed a stout hasp and a heavy lock on the door of the chamber next to the charnel house. He brought in a second table, a steel, a fork, a small
knife, several sharp scalpels, and the kind of chisel stonecutters call a quarrel; a drawing board, paper and charcoals and leads; thongs, clay and wax, quills, and an inkstand.

One day he took several strong students to the market and brought back the fresh carcass of a hog, with no little effort. No one appeared to think it odd when he said he would do some dissecting in the little room.

That night, alone, he carried in the corpse of a young woman who had died a few hours before and placed her on the empty table. Her name had been Melia.

This time he was more eager and less afraid. He had thought about his fear and didn’t think he was driven to his actions by witchery or the work of a
djinn.
He believed he had been allowed to become a physician to work toward the protection of God’s finest creation, and that the Almighty wouldn’t frown at his learning more about so complex and interesting a creature.

Opening both the pig and the woman, he prepared to make a careful comparison of the two anatomies.

Because he began his double inspection in the area where abdominal distemper takes place, he was brought up short at once. The pig’s cecum, the pouchlike gut from which the large intestine began, was substantial, almost eighteen inches long. But the woman’s cecum was tiny in comparison, only two or three inches long and as wide as Rob’s little finger. And halloo! … attached to this tiny cecum was … something. It looked like nothing so much as a pink worm, uncovered in the garden, picked up and placed within the woman’s belly.

The pig on the other table did not have a wormlike attachment, and Rob had never observed a similar appendage on a pig’s bowel.

He drew no swift conclusions. He thought at first that the small size of the woman’s cecum might be an anomaly, and that the wormlike thing was a rare tumor or some other growth.

He prepared the corpse of Melia for burial as carefully as he had done with Qasim, and returned her to the charnel house.

But in the nights that followed he opened the bodies of a stripling youth, a middle-aged woman, and a six-week-old male infant. In each case, with rising excitement, he found that the same tiny appendage was there. The “worm” was a part of every person—one tiny proof that the organs of a human being were not the same as the organs of a swine.

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 Al
ā
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. Al
ā
’s army having followed him to Hamadh
ā
n, the gates were guarded by a handful of aged troopers, old men who melted away at the foreign army’s approach, so that Sultan Mas
ū
d—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 Mas
ū
d, 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 Mas
ū
d want with the
mullahs?”
he asked al-Juzjani.

“Doubtless his spies have told him of Al
ā
’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 Mas
ū
d and his aides returned to their troops and there was no pillaging. The Sultan was young, hardly more than a boy, but he and Al
ā
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 Al
ā
’s army.

“The Shah was wrong in thinking they would come by way of Hamadh
ā
n.”

“I think the main Ghazna force is in Hamadh
ā
n 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 Mas
ū
d is springing a trap?”

Al-Juzjani nodded.

“We can ride to warn the Persians!”

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

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