The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (39 page)

He explained the Church’s ban against attending Islamic academies, and he told her what he intended to do.

She had paled as she gained understanding. “You are risking eternal damnation.”

“I cannot believe my soul will be forfeit.”

“A Jew!” She wiped the razor clean on the cloth with preoccupied movements and returned it to its little leather bag.

“Yes. So you see, it’s something I must do alone.”

“What I see is a man who is mad. I have closed my eyes to the fact that I know nothing about you. I think you have said farewells to many women. It is true, is it not?”

“This is not the same.” He wanted to explain the difference but she wouldn’t allow it. She had listened well and now he saw the depth of the wound he had made.

“Do you not fear I’ll tell my father you’ve used me, so he may pay to see your death? Or that I’ll hasten to the first priest I meet and whisper the destination of a Christian who makes mockery of Holy Mother Church?”

“I’ve given you truth. I could neither cause your death nor betray you, and I’m certain you must treat me the same way.”

“I’ll not be waiting for any physician,” she said.

He nodded, loathing himself for the bitter veil over her eyes as she turned away.

All day he watched her riding very erect in the saddle. She didn’t turn around to look at him. That evening he observed Mary and Master Cullen talking seriously and at length. Evidently she told her father only that she had decided not to marry, for a while later Cullen shot a grin at Rob that was both relieved and triumphant. Cullen conferred with Seredy, and just before dark the servant brought two men into the camp, whom Rob took to be Turks from their clothing and appearance.

Later he guessed they had been guides, for when he awoke the next morning, the Cullens were gone.

As was customary in the caravan, everyone who had traveled behind them moved up one place. That day, instead of following her black gelding, he now drove behind the two fat French brothers.

He felt guilt and sorrow but also experienced a sense of relief, for he had never considered marriage and had been ill prepared. He pondered whether his decision had been made out of true commitment to medicine or if he had merely fled matrimony in weak panic, as Barber would have done.

Perhaps it was both, he decided. Poor stupid dreamer, he told himself in disgust. You’ll grow tired one day, older and needier of love, and doubtless you will settle for some slovenly sow with a terrible tongue.

Conscious of a great loneliness, he yearned for Mistress Buffington to be alive again. He tried not to think of what he had destroyed, hunching over the reins and staring in distaste at the obscene arses of the French brothers.

Thus for a week he felt as he had after a death had occurred. When the caravan reached Babaeski he experienced a deepening of guilty grief, realizing that here they would have turned off together to accompany her father and start a new life. But when he thought of James Cullen he felt better about being alone, for he knew the Scot would have been a troublesome father-in-law.

Still, he didn’t stop thinking of Mary.

He began to come out of his moodiness two days later. Traveling through a countryside of grassy hills, he heard a distinctive noise coming toward the caravan from far away. It was a sound such as angels might make and eventually it drew near and he saw his first camel train.

Each camel was hung with bells that chimed with every strange, lurching step the beasts took.

Camels were larger than he had expected, taller than a man and longer than a horse. Their comic faces seemed both serene and sinister, with great open nostrils, floppy lips, and heavily lidded liquid eyes half hidden behind long lashes that gave them an oddly feminine appearance. They were tied to one another and laden with enormous bundles of barley straw piled between their twin humps.

Perched atop the straw bundle of every seventh or eighth camel was a skinny, dark-skinned drover wearing only a turban and a ragged breech-cloth. Occasionally one of these men urged the beasts forward with a “Hut! Hut! Hut!” that his ambling charges seemed to ignore.

The camels took possession of the rolling landscape. Rob counted almost three hundred animals before the last of them diminished into specks in the distance and the wonderful tinkling whisper of their bells faded away.

The undeniable sign of the East hurried the travelers along their way as they began to follow a narrow isthmus. Although Rob couldn’t see water, Simon told him that to their south lay the Sea of Marmara and to their north the great Black Sea, and the air had taken on an invigorating salt tang that reminded him of home and filled him with a new sense of urgency.

The following afternoon, the caravan crested a rise and Constantinople lay before him like a city of his dreams.

33

THE LAST CHRISTIAN CITY

The moat was wide and as they clattered across the drawbridge Rob could see carp large as pigs in the green depths. On the inside bank was an earthen breastwork and twenty-five feet beyond, a massive wall of dark stone, perhaps a hundred feet high. Sentries walked the top from battlement to battlement.

Fifty feet farther and there was a second wall, identical to the first! This Constantinople was a fortress with four lines of defense.

They passed through two sets of great portals. The huge gate of the inside wall was triple-arched and adorned with the noble statue of a man, doubtless an early ruler, and some strange animals in bronze. The beasts were massive and bulky, with big floppy ears raised in anger, short tails to the rear, and what appeared to be longer tails growing rampantly out of their faces.

Rob pulled at Horse’s reins so he could study them, and behind him Gershom hooted and Tuveh groaned. “You must move your arse,
Inghiliz,”
Meir shouted.

“What are these?”

“Elephants. You have never seen elephants, you poor foreigner?”

He shook his head, twisting on the wagon seat as he drove away so he could study the creatures. So it was that the first elephants he saw were the size of dogs and frozen in metal that bore the patina of five centuries.

Kerl Fritta led them to the caravanserai, an enormous transportation yard through which travelers and freight entered and left the city. It was a vast level space containing warehouses for the storage of the varied goods, and pens for animals and rest houses for humans. Fritta was a veteran guide and, bypassing the noisy horde in the caravanserai yard, he directed his charges into a series of khans, man-made caverns dug into adjoining hillsides to provide coolness and shelter for caravans. Most of the travelers
would spend only a day or two at the caravanserai, recuperating, making wagon repairs or swapping horses for camels, then they would follow a Roman road south to Jerusalem.

“We’ll be gone from here within hours,” Meir told Rob, “for we are within ten days’ travel of our home in Angora and eager to be freed of our responsibility.”

“I’ll stay a while, I think.”

“When you decide to leave, go to see the
kervanbashi,
the Chief of Caravans here. His name is Zevi. When he was a young man he was a drover and then a caravan master who took camel trains over all the routes. He knows the travelers and,” Simon said proudly, “he is a Jew and a good man. He’ll see that you journey in safety.”

Rob grasped wrists with each of them in turn.

Farewell, chunky Gershom, whose tough arse I lanced.

Farewell, sharp-nosed, black-bearded Judah.

Goodbye, friendly young Tuveh.

Thank you, Meir.

Thank you, thank you, Simon!

He said goodbye to them with regret, for they had shown him kindness. The parting was more difficult because it took him from the book that had led him into the Persian language.

Presently he drove alone through Constantinople, an enormous city, perhaps larger than London. When seen from afar it had appeared to float in the warm clear air, framed between the dark blue stone of the walls and the different blues of the sky above and the Sea of Marmara to the south. Seen from within, Constantinople was a city full of stone churches that loomed over narrow streets crowded with riders on donkeys, horses, and camels, as well as sedan chairs and carts and wagons of every description. Burly porters dressed in a loose uniform of rough brown stuff carried incredible burdens on their backs or on platforms that they wore on their heads like hats.

In a public square Rob paused to study a lone figure that stood atop a tall column of porphyry, overlooking the city. From the Latin inscription he was able to learn that this was Constantine the Great. The teaching brothers and priests of St. Botolph’s school in London had given him a thorough grounding in the subject of this statue; priests were greatly taken with Constantine, for he was the first Roman emperor to become a Christian. Indeed, his conversion had been the making of the Christian Church, and when he had captured the metropolis called Byzantium from the Greeks by force of arms and made it his own—Constantinople, city of
Constantine—it became the jewel of Christianity in the East, a place of cathedrals.

Rob left the area of commerce and churches and entered the neighborhoods of narrow wooden houses built cheek by jowl, with overhanging second stories that might have been transported from any number of English towns. It was a city rich in nationalities, as befit a place that marked the end of one continent and the beginning of another. He drove through a Greek quarter, an Armenian market, a Jewish sector, and suddenly, instead of listening to one impenetrable babble after another, he heard words in Parsi.

Straightaway he asked for and found a stable, run by a man named Ghiz. It was a good stable and Rob saw to Horse’s comfort before leaving her, for she had served him well and deserved a lazy rest and lots of grain. Ghiz pointed Rob toward his own home at the top of the Path of the Three Hundred and Twenty-nine Steps, where a room was for rent.

The room proved worth the climb, for it was light and clean and a salt breeze blew through the window.

From it he looked down over the hyacinth Bosporus, on which sails were like moving blossoms. Past the far shore, perhaps half a mile away, he could see looming domes and minarets keen as lances and realized they were the reason for the earthworks, the moat, and the two walls surrounding Constantinople. A few feet from his window the influence of the Cross ended and the lines were manned to defend Christendom from Islam. Across the strait, the influence of the Crescent began.

He stayed at the window and stared over at Asia, into which he would delve deep and soon.

That night Rob dreamed of Mary. He awoke to melancholy and fled the room. Off a square called August’s Forum he found public baths, where he took the chill waters briefly and then sat lolling in the
tepidarium
’s hot water like Caesar, soaping himself and breathing steam.

When he emerged, toweled dry and glowing from the last cold plunge, he was enormously hungry and more optimistic. In the Jewish market he bought little fishes fried brown and a bunch of black grapes that he ate while he searched for what he needed.

In many of the booths he saw the short linen undergarments every Jew had worn at Tryavna. The little vests bore the braided embellishments called
tsitsith
which, Simon had explained, allowed Jews to carry out the biblical admonition that all their lives they must wear fringes on the corners of garments.

He found a Jewish merchant who spoke Persian. He was a doddering man with a down-turned mouth and there were food stains on his caftan, but in Rob’s eyes he was the first threat of exposure.

“It’s a gift for a friend, he is my size,” Rob muttered. The old man paid him small attention, intent on the sale. Finally he came up with a fringed undergarment that was large enough.

Rob didn’t dare buy everything at once. Instead, he went to the stables and saw that Horse was fine.

“Yours is a decent wagon,” Ghiz said.

“Yes.”

“I might be willing to buy.” “Not for sale.”

Ghiz shrugged. “An adequate wagon, though I would have to paint it. But a poor beast, alas. Without spirit. Without the proud look in her eyes. You would be fortunate to have that animal off your hands.”

He saw at once that Ghiz’s interest in the wagon was a diversion to direct attention from the fact that he had taken a fancy to Horse.

“Neither is for sale.”

Still, he had to fight a smile at the idea that so clumsy a diversion had been attempted on one for whom diversion had been a stock in trade. The wagon was close at hand and it amused him, while the stableman was busy in a stall, to make certain unobtrusive preparations.

Presently he drew a silver coin from Ghiz’s left eye.

“O Allah!”

He convinced a wooden ball to vanish when covered by a kerchief, then he caused the kerchief to change color, and change color again, green to blue to brown.

“In the Prophet’s name …”

Rob drew a red ribbon from between his teeth and presented it with as pretty a flourish as if the stableman were a blushing girl. Caught between wonderment and fear of this infidel
djinni,
Ghiz gave in to delight. And thus part of the day was spent pleasantly in magic and juggling, and before he was through, he could have sold Ghiz anything.