The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman And Matters Of Choice Part 43

When the last patient had been visited, Rob went to the House of Wisdom and asked Yussuf-ul-Gamal, the librarian, to help him find what the Roman had written of the side sickness. He was fascinated to learn that Celsus had opened the bodies of the dead to advance his knowledge. Still, there wasn't much knowledge of this particular complaint, which Celsus described as distemper in the large intestine near the cec.u.m, accompanied by violent inflammation and pain on the right side of the abdomen.

When he was through reading, he went again to where Bill lay. The father was gone. A stern mullah perched over the boy like a great raven, intoning from the Qu'ran while the child stared at his black robes, his eyes stark.

Rob pulled the pallet so the little one was looking away from the mullah. On a low table the nurse had left three Persian pomegranates round as b.a.l.l.s, to be eaten with the evening meal, and he took them now and popped them one at a time until he had them flowing over his head from hand to hand. Just like olden days, Bill. He was a very unpracticed juggler now but with only three objects there was no trouble and he made the fruits play tricks.

The boy's eyes were as round as the flying objects.

"What we need is melody!"

He didn't know any Persian songs and he required something lively. There emerged from his mouth Barber's raucous old dolly song.

"Your eyes caressed me once, Your arms embrace me now ...

We'll roll together by and by So make no fruitless vow!"

Not a suitable song for a child to die by, but the mullah, glaring at his antics in disbelief, was supplying solemnity and prayer while Rob supplied some of the joyousness of life. They didn't understand the words at any rate, so there was no disrespect. He gave Bill several choruses and then saw the child leap into a final convulsion that arched his small body into a bow. Still singing, Rob felt the final pulse flutter into nothingness in Bill's throat.

He shut the eyes, cleaned the snot from the nose, straightened and bathed the body. He combed Bill's hair and tied the jaw closed with a cloth.

The mullah still sat cross-legged, chanting from the Qu'ran. His eyes glared: he was able to pray and hate at the same time. Doubtless he would make complaint that the Dhimmi had committed sacrilege, but Rob told himself that the report would not show that just before he died, Bill had smiled.

Four nights out of seven the eunuch Wasif came for him and he stayed in the tower haram until the early hours of morning.

They gave language lessons.

"A p.r.i.c.k."

She laughed. "No, your lingam. And this, my yoni."

She said they were adequately matched. "A man is either as a hare, a bull, or a horse. You are as a bull. A woman is either as a deer, a mare, or an elephant, and I am as a deer. That is good. It would be difficult for a hare to bring joy to an elephant," she said seriously.

She was the teacher, he the student, as if he were a boy again and had never made love. She did things he recognized from the pictures in the book he had bought in the maidan and a number that weren't depicted in the book. She showed him kshiraniraka, the milk-and-water embrace. The position of the wife of Indra. The auparishtaka mouth congress.

In the beginning he was intrigued and delighted as they progressed through the Turnabout, the Knocking at the Door, the Coition of the Blacksmith. He became cranky when she tried to teach him the proper sounds to make when coming, the choice of sut or plat as subst.i.tution for the groan.

"Do you never simply relax and f.u.c.k? It is worse than memorizing Fiqh."

"It is more pleasurable after it is learned," she said, offended.

He was unaffected by the reproach in her voice. Also, he had decided that he liked women to keep their hair.

"Isn't the old man sufficient?"

"He was more than enough, once. His potency was famous. He loved drink and women, and when the mood was on him he would do a snake. A female snake," she said, and her eyes glittered with tears as she smiled. "But he hasn't lain with me for two years. When she became very sick, he stopped."

Despina said she had belonged to Ibn Sina all her life. She had been born to two of his slaves, an Indian woman and a Persian who had been his trusted servant. Her mother died when she was six. The old man had married her at her father's death, when she was twelve, and had never freed her.

Rob fingered her nose ring, symbol of her slavery. "Why has he not?"

"As his property as well as his second wife, I am doubly protected."

"What if he were to come here now?" He thought of the single stairway.

"Wasif stands below and would divert him. Besides, my husband sits next to Reza's pallet and doesn't let go of her hand."

Rob looked at Despina and nodded and felt the guilt that had been growing without his knowledge. He liked the small and beautiful olive-skinned girl with tiny b.r.e.a.s.t.s and a plump little belly and a hot mouth. He was sorry about the life she led, a prisoner in this comfortable jail. He knew Islamic tradition kept her shut up most of the time within the house and the gardens and he didn't blame her for anything, but he had come to love the shabby old man with the magnificent mind and the big nose.

He got up and began to put on his clothing. "I would be your friend."

She wasn't stupid. She watched him with interest. "You've been here almost every night and have had your fill of me. If I send Wasif in two weeks' time, you will come."

He kissed her on the nose just above the ring.

Riding the brown horse slowly home in the moonlight, he wondered whether he was a great fool.

Eleven nights later, Wasif knocked at his door.

Despina was almost right, he was powerfully tempted and wanted to nod in agreement. The old Rob J. would have hurried to reinforce a story that for the rest of his life could have been pulled forth whenever men tippled and bragged-of how he had gone to the young wife again and again while the old husband sat in another part of the house.

Rob shook his head. "Tell her I can't come to her any more."

Wasif's eyes glittered beneath great, black-dyed lids, and he smiled scornfully at the timid Jew and rode his donkey away.

Reza the Pious died three mornings later as the muezzins of the city chanted First Prayer, a suitable time for the ending of a religious life.

In the madra.s.sa and the maristan people spoke of how Ibn Sina prepared the woman's body with his own hands, and of the simple burial, which he had allowed only a few praying mullahs to attend.

Ibn Sina didn't come to the school or the hospital. No one knew where he was.

A week after Reza's death, one evening Rob saw al-Juzjani drinking in the central maidan.

"Sit, Dhimmi," al-Juzjani said, and signaled for more wine.

"Hakim, how is the Chief Physician?"

It was as if the question was unasked. "He thinks you are something different. A special clerk," al-Juzjani said resentfully.

If he were not a medical clerk, and if al-Juzjani were not the great al-Juzjani, Rob would have thought the other man jealous of him.

"If you are not a special clerk, Dhimmi, you will reckon with me." Al-Juzjani fixed him with a shining stare, and Rob realized the surgeon was quite drunk. They fell silent as the wine was served.

"I was seventeen years old when we met in Jurjn. Ibn Sina was only a few years older, but Allah! It was like looking straight into the sun. My father struck the bargain. Ibn Sina was to apprentice me in medicine, I would be his factotum."

Al-Juzjani drank reflectively. "I attended him. He taught me mathematics, using the Almagest as text. And he dictated several books to me, including the first part of The Canon of Medicine, fifty pages every golden day.

"When he left Jurjn I followed, to half a dozen places. In Hamadhn, the Amr made him vizier but the army rebelled and Ibn Sina was thrown into prison. At first they said they'd kill him, but he was released-the lucky son of a mare! Soon the Amr was tormented by colic and Ibn Sina cured him, and the vizierate was given to him a second time!

"I stayed with him whether he was a physician or a prisoner or a vizier. He had become as much my friend as my master. Every night pupils would gather in his house, while by turns I read aloud from his book called Healing and someone else read from the Canon. Reza made sure we always had good food. When we were finished we drank lots of wine and went out and found women. He was the merriest of companions and played the way he worked. He had dozens of beautiful c.u.n.ts-perhaps he f.u.c.ked remarkably, as he did everything else better than most men. Reza always knew but she loved him anyway."

He looked away. "Now she is buried and he is consumed. So that he sends old friends from him, and every day he walks the city alone, bestowing gifts to the poor."

"Hakim," Rob said gently.

Al-Juzjani stared.

"Hakim, shall I see you to your home?"

"Foreigner. I would like you to leave me now."

So Rob nodded and thanked him for the wine, and then he went away.

Rob waited a week and then rode to the house in full daylight and left his horse with the man at the gate.

Ibn Sina was alone. His eyes were at peace. He and Rob sat together comfortably, talking sometimes, and sometimes not.

"Were you already a physician when you wed her, Master?"

"I became hakim at sixteen. We were wed when I was ten, the year I memorized the Qu'ran, the year I began the study of healing herbs."

Rob was awed. "At that age I was struggling to become a faker and a barber-surgeon." He told Ibn Sina how Barber had apprenticed him as an orphaned boy.

"What had been your father's work?"

"A carpenter."

"I know of European guilds. I had heard," Ibn Sina said slowly, "that in Europe there are very few Jews and they are not allowed in the guilds."

He knows, Rob thought in anguish. "A few are allowed," he muttered.

Ibn Sina's eyes seemed to pierce him gently. Rob couldn't rid himself of the certainty that he was undone.

"You yearn so desperately to learn the healing art and science."

"Yes, Master."

Ibn Sina sighed, nodded, looked away.

No doubt, Rob noted with relief, his fear had been mistaken; for soon they talked of other things.

Ibn Sina recalled the first time he had seen Reza as a boy. "She was from Bukhara, a girl four years older than I. Our fathers were tax collectors both, and the marriage was amicably arranged save for brief difficulty because her grandfather objected that my father was an Ismaili and used hashish during holy worship. But presently we were wed. She was steadfast all my life."

The old man turned his eyes on Rob. "You still have the fire in you. What do you want?"

"To be a good physician." The kind only you make, he added silently. But he believed Ibn Sina understood.

"You are already a healer. As for worthiness ..." Ibn Sina shrugged. "To be a good physician, you must be able to answer an unanswerable riddle."

"What is the question?" Rob J. asked, intrigued.

But the old man smiled in his sorrow. "Perhaps one day you may discover it. That is part of the riddle," he said.

47.

THE EXAMINATION.

On the afternoon of Karim's examination, Rob went through his customary activities with special energy and attention, attempting to divert his mind from the scene he knew would soon take place in the meeting room just off the House of Wisdom.

He and Mirdin had recruited Yussuf-ul-Gamal, the kindly librarian, as their accomplice and spy. While going about his duties in the library Yussuf was able to witness the ident.i.ties of the examiners. Mirdin waited outside for the news, which he promptly brought to Rob.

"It is Sayyid Sa'di for philosophy," Yussuf had told Mirdin before hurrying back inside for more. That wasn't bad; the philosopher was difficult but would not go out of his way to fail a candidate.

But from then on, the news was terrifying.

Nadir Bukh, the autocratic, spade-bearded legalist who had failed Karim on his first examination, would test for the law! The mullah Abul Bakr would question on matters of theology, and the Prince of Physicians himself would examine on medicine.

Rob had hoped that Jalal would sit on the board for surgery, but Rob could see Jalal at his usual duties, tending to patients; and presently Mirdin came rushing in and whispered that the last member had arrived and it was Ibn al-Natheli, whom none of them knew well.

Rob concentrated on his work, helping Jalal put traction on a dislocated shoulder, using a clever device of ropes of Jalal's own design. The patient, a palace guard who had been thrown from his pony during a game of ball-and-stick, finally lay like a wild animal in rope restraints, pop-eyed with the sudden release from pain.

"Now you will lie for several weeks, at ease while others struggle with the onerous duties of soldiering," Jalal said cheerfully. He directed Rob to administer astringent drugs and to order an acid diet until they could be certain the guardsman had not developed inflammation or a hematoma.

The binding of the shoulder with cloths, not too tight but sufficient to restrain movement, was Rob's last ch.o.r.e. When he was finished he went to the House of Wisdom and sat and read Celsus, trying to hear what was being said in the examining room and gaining only the unintelligible murmur of voices. Finally he abandoned the effort and went to wait on the steps of the medical school, where presently he was joined by Mirdin.

"They are still inside."

"I hope it is not drawn out," Mirdin said. "Karim isn't the sort who can deal with too long a testing."

"I am not certain he can deal with any testing. He puked for an hour this morning."

Mirdin sat beside Rob on the steps. They spoke about several patients and then lapsed into silence, Rob scowling, Mirdin sighing.

After a longer time than they would have thought possible, Rob stood. "Here he is," he said.

Karim threaded his way toward them through the cl.u.s.ters of students.

"Can you tell from his face?" Mirdin said.

Rob couldn't, but well before Karim reached them, he shouted the news. "You must call me hakim, clerks!"

They charged down the steps.

The three of them embraced, danced, and shouted, pummeling one another and making such a row that Hadji Davout Hosein, pa.s.sing, showed them a face pale with indignation that students of his academy should behave in such a fashion.