The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (49 page)

“How of the urine?” Ibn Sina asked.

“Until the third day his urine was clear. Light yellow in color. On the morning of the third day his urine showed blood, and that afternoon he passed six urinary calculi, four like grains of sand and two of them stones the size of small peas. Since then he has had no further pain and his urine is clear, but he will take no food.”

Ibn Sina frowned. “What have you offered him?”

The student appeared puzzled. “The usual fare.
Pilah
of several sorts. Hens’ eggs. Mutton, onions, bread … He will touch nothing. His bowels have ceased to function, his pulse is fainter, and he grows progressively weak.”

Ibn Sina nodded and looked at them. “What ails him, then?”

Another of the medical clerks gathered his courage. “I think, Master, that his intestines have become twisted, blocking the passage of food through his body. Sensing this, he will allow no nourishment to enter his mouth.”

“Thank you, Fadil ibn Parviz,” Ibn Sina said with courtesy. “But in such an injury the patient will eat, only to cast up his food.” He waited. When no other observations were forthcoming, he approached the man on the pallet.

“Amahl,” he said, “I am Husayn the Physician, son of Abd-Ullah who was son of al-Hasan who was son of Ali who was son of Sina. These are my friends and would be thine. Where are you from?”

“The village of Shaini, Master,” the man whispered.

“Ah, a man of Fars! I have spent happy days in Fars. The dates of the oasis in Shaini are large and sweet, is it not so?”

Tears formed in Amahl’s eyes, and he nodded dumbly.

“Askari, go now and fetch our friend dates and a bowl of warm milk.”

In a short time the food was brought, and the physicians and the students watched as the man began to eat the fruit hungrily.

“Slowly, Amahl. Slowly, my friend,” Ibn Sina warned. “Askari, you shall see to the change in our friend’s diet.”

“Yes, Master,” the Jew said as they walked away.

“This must be remembered about the sick people in our care. They come to us but they do not become us, and very often they do not eat what we eat. Lions do not relish hay because they visit the kine.

“Dwellers in the desert subsist mainly on sour curds and similar preparations of milk. The inhabitants of the Dar-ul-Maraz eat rice and dry foods. The Khorasanis want only soup thickened with flour. The Indians eat peas, pulse, oil, and hot spices. The people of Transoxiania take wine and meat, especially horse flesh. The people of Fars and Arabistan eat mainly dates. The Bedouins are accustomed to meat, camel’s milk, and locusts. The people of Gurgan, the Georgians, the Armenians, and the Europeans are wont to take spirits with meals and to eat the flesh of cows and pigs.”

Ibn Sina looked flintily at the men gathered about him. “We terrify them, young masters. Ofttimes we cannot save them and sometimes our treatment kills them. Let us not starve them as well.”

The Chief of Princes walked away from them, his hands behind his back.

Next morning, in a small amphitheater with rising tiers of stone seats, Rob attended his first lecture at the
madrassa.
Out of nervousness he was early, and he was seated alone in the fourth row when half a dozen clerks entered together.

At first they paid him no attention. From their conversation it was evident that one of them, Fadil ibn Parviz, had been notified he would be examined for his fitness to become a physician, and his fellow clerks were reacting with envious gibes.

“Only one week before your examination, Fadil?” said a short, plump clerk. “You will piss green with fear, I think!”

“Shut your fat face, Abbas Sefi, you Jew’s nose, you Christian’s prick! You needn’t be afraid of the examination, for you’ll be a clerk even longer than Karim Harun,” Fadil said, and they all laughed.

“Salaam,
what have we here?” Fadil said, noticing Rob for the first time. “What’s your name,
Dhimmi?”

“Jesse ben Benjamin.”

“Ah, of jail fame! The Jew barber-surgeon of the Shah’s
calaat.
You’ll find it takes more than a royal decree to make a physician.”

The hall was filling. Mirdin Askari was picking his way up the stone tiers to a vacant place, and Fadil called to him.

“Askari! Here’s another Hebrew arrived to be made into a leech. You’ll soon quite outnumber us.”

Askari looked over at them coolly, disregarding Fadil as he might have ignored a bothersome insect.

Further comment was cut off by the arrival of the lecturer, a worried-looking teacher of philosophy named Sayyid Sa’di.

Rob received an inkling of what he had assumed by fighting to become a medical clerk, for Sayyid looked about the room and noted a face that was strange to him.

“You,
Dhimmi,
what is your name?”

“I am Jesse ben Benjamin, master.”

“Jesse ben Benjamin, tell us how Aristotle described the relationship between the body and the spirit.” Rob shook his head.

“It is in his work,
On the Soul,
” the lecturer said impatiently.

“I don’t know
On the Soul.
I’ve never read Aristotle.”

Sayyid Sa’di stared at him with concern. “You must begin to do so at once,” he said.

Rob understood little that Sayyid Sa’di spoke about in his lecture.

When the class was over and the amphitheater was emptying, he made his way to Mirdin Askari. “I bring you the best wishes of three men of Masqat, Reb Lonzano ben Ezra, Reb Loeb ben Kohen, and your cousin, Reb Aryeh Askari.”

“Ah. Was their trip successful?”

“I believe it was.”

Mirdin nodded. “Good. You are a Jew from Europe, I hear. Well, Ispahan will seem strange to you, but most of us are from other places.” Their fellow medical clerks, he said, included fourteen Muslims from countries of the Eastern Caliphate, seven Muslims from the Western Caliphate, and five Eastern Jews.

“I’m only the sixth Jewish clerk, then? I would have thought us more numerous, from what Fadil ibn Pardiz said.”

“Oh, Fadil! Even one Jewish medical clerk would be too many to please Fadil. He’s an Ispahani. Ispahanis consider Persia the only civilized nation and Islam the only religion. When Muslims exchange insults, they call each other ‘Jew’ or ‘Christian.’ When they’re in a good mood, they consider it the soul of wit to call another Mohammedan
‘Dhimmi.’”

Rob nodded, remembering that when the Shah had called him “Hebrew” people had laughed. “It makes you angry?”

“It makes me work my mind and arse hard. So I can smile when I leave
the Muslim clerks far behind me in the
madrassa.
” He looked at Rob curiously. “They say you’re a barber-surgeon. Is it true?”

“Yes.”

“I wouldn’t talk about it,” Mirdin said cautiously. “Persian physicians believe barber-surgeons to be …”

“Less than admirable?”

“They are not in favor.”

“I don’t care what’s in favor. I make no apology for what I am.”

He thought he saw a flicker of approval in Mirdin’s eyes, but if so it was gone in a moment.

“Nor should you,” Mirdin said. He nodded coolly and made his way out of the amphitheater.

A lesson in Islamic theology taught by a fat
mullah
named Abul Bakr was only slightly better than the philosophy class. The Qu’ran was divided into one hundred and fourteen chapters called
suras.
The
suras
varied in length from a few lines to several hundred verses, and to Rob’s dismay he learned he could not be graduated from the
madrassa
until he had memorized the important
suras.

During the next lecture, by a master surgeon named Abu Ubayd al-Juzjani, he was ordered to read
Ten Treatises on the Eye
by Hunayn. Al-Juzjani was small and swarthy and fearsome, with an unblinking stare and the disposition of a newly awakened bear. The rapid accumulation of assigned scholarly work chilled Rob, but he was interested in al-Juzjani’s lecture about the opacity that covered the eyes of so many people and robbed them of vision. “It is believed such blindness is caused by a pouring-out of corrupt humor into the eye,” al-Juzjani said. “For this reason early Persian physicians called the ailment
nazul-i-ab,
or ‘descent of water,’ which has been vulgarized into waterfall disease or cataract.”

The surgeon said most cataracts began as a small spot in the lens that scarcely interfered with vision but gradually spread until the entire lens became milky white, causing blindness.

Rob watched as al-Juzjani couched the eyes of a dead cat. Soon thereafter, his assistants passed among the clerks and distributed animal corpses so they might try the procedure on dogs and cats and even hens. Rob was given a brindle cur with a fixed stare, a permanent snarl, and no front paws. His hands were unsteady and he had no real idea of what to do. But he took courage from recalling how Merlin had rid Edgar Thorpe of his blindness because he had been taught this operation at this school, perhaps even in this very room.

Suddenly al-Juzjani was leaning over him and peering at the eye of his dead dog. “Place your needle upon the spot at which you intend to couch and make a mark there,” he said sharply. “Then move the tip of the needle toward the outer angle of the eye, level with and slightly above the pupil. This would make the cataract sink below it. If you are operating on the right eye, you hold the needle in your left hand, and vice versa.”

Rob followed the instructions, thinking of the men and women who had come behind his barber-surgeon’s screen through the years with opaque eyes, and for whom he had been able to do nothing.

To hell with Aristotle and the Qu’ran! This was why he had made his way to Persia, he told himself exultantly.

That afternoon he was among a group of clerks following al-Juzjani through the
maristan
like acolytes trailing a bishop. Al-Juzjani visited patients and taught and commented and questioned the students as he changed dressings and removed stitches. Rob saw that he was a surgeon of skill and diversity; his patients in the hospital that day were recovering from cataract surgery, a crushed and amputated arm, the excision of buboes, circumcisions, and the closing of a wound in the face of a boy whose cheek had been perforated by a sharp stick.

When al-Juzjani was through, Rob made the trip through the hospital again, this time behind
Hakim
Jalal-ul-Din, a bonesetter whose patients were rigged with complex systems of retractors, couplers, ropes, and pulleys that Rob regarded with awe.

He had waited nervously to be called upon or questioned, but neither physician had acknowledged his existence. When Jalal was done, Rob aided the porters in feeding patients and cleaning up slops.

He went in search of books when he was finished at the hospital. Copies of the Qu’ran could be found in ample number in the
madrassa
library, and he discovered
On the Soul.
But he learned that the single copy of Hunayn’s
Ten Treatises on the Eye
had been taken by someone else, and half a dozen students had applied before him to study the book.

The keeper of the House of Wisdom was a kindly man named Yussuful-Gamal, a calligrapher who spent his spare time with quill and ink, making extra copies of books bought from Baghdad. “You have waited too long. Now it will be many weeks before
Ten Treatises on the Eye
will be available to you,” he said. “When a book is advised by a lecturer you must hurry to me at once or others will get here first.”

Rob nodded wearily. He carried the two books home, stopping along the way at the Jewish market to buy a lamp and oil from a spare woman with a strong jaw and gray eyes.

“You’re the European?”

“Yes.”

She beamed. “We are neighbors. I am Hinda, wife of Tall Isak, three houses north of you. You must visit.”

He thanked her and smiled, warmed.

“For you, the lowest price. My finest price for a Jew who wormed a
calaat
out of that king!”

At the inn of Salman the Lesser he stopped for a meal of
pilah,
but was dismayed when Salman brought two more neighbors to meet the Jew who had won the
calaat.
They were burly young men, stonecutters by trade—Chofni and Shemuel b’nai Chivi, sons of the widowed Nitka the Midwife, who lived at the end of his street. The brothers patted his back, bade him welcome, tried to buy him wine. “Tell us of the
calaat,
tell us of Europe!” Chofni cried.

Their fellowship was tempting, but he escaped to the loneliness of his house. When he had tended the animals he read the Aristotle in the garden and found it difficult, for meaning eluded him and he was smitten by his ignorance.

As darkness fell he moved indoors and lighted the lamp, and then he turned to the Qu’ran. The
suras
appeared to be arranged according to length, with the longest chapters first. But which were the important
suras
that must be memorized? He hadn’t an idea. And there were so many introductory passages; were
they
important?

He was desperate and felt he must begin somewhere.

Glory to God Most High, full of Grace and Mercy; He created All, including Man …

He read the passages again and again, but before more than a few verses had been committed to memory, his heavy lids closed. Fully dressed, he sank into deep sleep on the lamplit floor, like a man seeking to escape a sore and vexatious wakefulness.

40

AN INVITATION