The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (65 page)

When he collected his second arrow Mirdin again tried to give him an ointment to protect his skin from the sun but he refused it, though he knew with a private shame it was because the ointment was unsightly and he wanted her to see him without it. It would be available if needed since, by prearrangement, on this lap Jesse would begin to follow him on the brown horse. Karim knew himself; the first testing of his soul was coming, for he invariably felt distress after 25 Roman miles.

Problems came almost on schedule. Halfway up the hill on the Avenue of the Thousand Gardens he became aware of a raw place on the heel of his right foot. It was impossible to run such a long race without damaging his feet and he knew he must ignore the discomfort, but soon it was joined by a sticking pain in his right side that grew until he gasped whenever his right foot jarred against the road.

He signaled to Jesse, who was carrying a goatskin of water behind his saddle, but a warm drink tasting of goaty leather did little to ease his discomfort.

But when he drew close to the
madrassa,
at once he spotted on the hospital roof the woman for whom he’d been looking, and it was as if everything that had been troubling him fell away.

Rob, riding behind Karim like a squire trailing his knight, saw Mary as they approached the
maristan
and they smiled at each other. Dressed in her mourning black, she would have been inconspicuous were her face not
unadorned, but every other female in sight wore the heavy black street veil. The others on the roof stood slightly apart from his wife, as if afraid lest they be corrupted by her European ways.

There were slaves with the women and he recognized the eunuch Wasif standing behind a small figure disguised by a shapeless black dress. Her face was hidden behind the horsehair veil but he could note Despina’s eyes, and where they were turned.

Following her gaze to Karim, Rob saw something that made it difficult for him to breathe. Karim had found Despina too and held her with his glance. As he ran past her, his hand went up and touched the little bag suspended around his neck.

It seemed to Rob a naked declaration to all, but the sound of the cheering didn’t change. And although Rob tried to study the crowd for Ibn Sina’s presence, he didn’t see him among the spectators as they went past the
madrassa.

Karim ran away from the pain in his side until it dwindled, and he ignored the discomfort in his feet. Now the time of attrition had begun and all along the way men in donkey-drawn wagons were busy picking up runners who couldn’t go on.

When he claimed his third arrow he allowed Mirdin to smear him with the ointment, made of oil of roses, oil of nutmeg, and cinnamon. It turned his light-brown skin yellow but was good against the sun. Jesse kneaded his legs while Mirdin applied the salve, then held a cup to his cracked lips, giving him more water than he desired.

Karim tried to protest. “Don’t want to have to piss!”

“You’re sweating too hard to piss.”

He knew it was true, and he drank. In a moment he was away again and running, running.

This time when he passed the school he was aware that she saw an apparition, the melted yellow grease streaked by rivulets of sweat and muddied dust.

Now the sun was high and hot, baking the ground so the heat of the road penetrated the leather of his shoes and seared his soles. Along the route men stood and held out containers of water, and sometimes he paused to drench his head before darting off without thanks or a blessing.

After he had collected the fourth arrow, Jesse left him, to reappear in a short time on his wife’s black mount, doubtless leaving the brown horse to water and rest in cool shade. Mirdin waited by the post containing the arrows, studying the other runners, according to their plan.

Karim kept running past men who had collapsed. Someone stood bent
over at the waist in the middle of the road, weakly vomiting nothing. A muttering Indian stopped hobbling and kicked off his shoes. He ran half a dozen steps, leaving the red tracks of his bloody feet, and then stood quietly and waited for a wagon.

When Karim passed the
maristan
on the fifth lap Despina was no longer on the roof. Perhaps she had been frightened by his appearance. It didn’t matter, for he had seen her and now occasionally he reached up and grasped the little bag containing the thick locks of black hair he had cut from her head with his own hands.

In places the wagons and the feet of the runners and the hooves of the attendants’ animals raised a fearful dust that coated his nostrils and throat and made him cough. He began to close down his consciousness until it was small and remote somewhere deep inside, dwelling on nothing, allowing his body to continue to do what it had done so many times.

The call to Second Prayer was a shock.

All along the route, runners and spectators alike prostrated themselves toward Mecca. He lay and trembled, his body unable to believe that the demands on it had halted, however briefly. He wanted to remove his shoes but knew he wouldn’t get them back on his swollen feet. When the prayers were finished, for a moment he didn’t move.

“How many?”

“Eighteen. Now it is the race,” Jesse told him.

Karim started up again, forcing himself to run through the heat shimmer. But he knew it was not yet the race.

It was harder to climb the hills than it had been all morning but he kept to the steady rhythm of his running. This was the worst, with the sun directly overhead and the real testing before him. He thought of Zaki and knew that unless he died he would keep going until at least he had won second place.

Until now he hadn’t had the experience, and in another year perhaps his body would be too old for such punishment. It would have to be today.

The thought allowed him to reach within himself and find strength when some of the others were searching and finding nothing, and when he slid the sixth arrow into his quiver, he turned at once to Mirdin. “How many?”

“Six runners are left,” Mirdin said wonderingly, and Karim nodded and began to run again.

Now it was the race.

He saw three runners ahead and knew two of them. He was overtaking a small, finely made Indian. Perhaps eighty paces in front of the Indian
was a youth whose name Karim didn’t know but whom he recognized as a soldier in the palace guard. And far ahead but close enough for him to identify was a runner of note, a man from Hamadh
ā
n named al-Har
ā
t.

The Indian had slowed but picked up the pace when Karim drew even, and they went on together, matching stride for stride. He had very dark skin, almost ebony, under which long, flat muscles gleamed in the sun as he moved.

Zaki’s skin had been dark, an advantage under a hot sun. Karim’s skin needed the yellow salve; it was the color of light leather, the result, Zaki always said, of a female ancestor being fucked by one of Alexander’s fair Greeks. Karim thought something like that probably was true. There had been a number of Greek invasions and he knew light-skinned Persian men, and women with snowy breasts.

A little spotted dog had come from nowhere and was pacing them, barking.

When they passed the estates on the Avenue of the Thousand Gardens people held out melon slices and cups of
sherbet
but Karim didn’t take any, being fearful of cramps. He accepted water, which he put into his cap before setting it back on his head and reaping momentary relief until the hat dried in the sun with remarkable swiftness.

The Indian grabbed green melon and gobbled as he ran, discarding the rind over his shoulder.

Together they passed the young soldier. He was already out of contention, a full lap behind, for there were only five arrows in his quiver. Two dark red lines ran down the front of his shirt from nipples rubbed raw. Every time he took a step his legs buckled slightly at the knees and it was clear he wouldn’t be running much longer.

The Indian looked at Karim and gave a white-toothed grin.

Karim was dismayed to see that the Indian was running easily and his face was alert but relatively unstrained. Runner’s intuition said that the man was stronger than Karim and less tired. Perhaps faster, too, if it should come to that.

The spotted dog that had run with them for miles suddenly swerved and cut across their path. Karim jumped to avoid him and felt the brush of the warm fur, but the dog smashed solidly into the other runner’s legs and the Indian fell to the ground.

He started up as Karim turned to him, then he sat back in the road. His right foot was twisted crazily and he gazed at his ankle in disbelief, unable to comprehend that his race was done.

“Go!” Jesse shouted to Karim. “I will take care of him. You go!” And
Karim turned and ran as if the Indian’s strength were transferred to his own limbs, as if Allah had spoken with the
Dhimm
ī
s
voice, because he was beginning truly to believe that now might be the time.

He trailed al-Har
ā
t most of the lap. Once, on the Street of the Apostles, he came up close behind and the other runner glanced back. They had known one another in Hamadh
ā
n and he saw recognition in al-Har
ā
t’s eyes, and an old familiar contempt: Ah, it is Zaki-Omar’s bum boy.

Al-Har
ā
t increased his pace and soon led him again by 200 paces.

Karim took the seventh arrow and Mirdin told him of the other runners as he gave water and smeared the yellow ointment.

“You are fourth. In first place is an Afghan whose name I don’t know. A man from al-Rayy is second, name of Mahdavi. Then al-Har
ā
t and you.”

For a lap and one-half he trailed al-Har
ā
t like one who knew his place, sometimes wondering about the two who were so far ahead they weren’t in his sight. In Ghazna, a place of towering mountains, Afghan men ran trails so high the air was thin, and it was said that when they ran at lower altitudes they didn’t tire. And he had heard that Mahdavi of al-Rayy also was a good runner.

But while descending the short, steep hill on the Avenue of the Thousand Gardens he saw a dazed runner at the edge of the road, holding his right side and weeping. They passed him by, but soon Jesse brought the news that it had been Mahdavi.

Karim’s own side had begun to hurt again and both his feet gave him pain. Call to Third Prayer caught him just beginning the ninth lap. Third Prayer was a time that had worried him, for the sun was no longer high and he feared his muscles would stiffen. But the heat was unrelenting and pressed down like a heavy blanket as he lay and prayed, and he was still sweating when he rose and began to run again.

This time, though he kept his pace, he seemed to overtake al-Har
ā
t as if the Hamadh
ā
n man were walking. When he drew abreast, al-Har
ā
t tried to make a race of it but soon his breathing was loud and desperate and he was lurching. The heat had him; as a physician, Karim knew that the man could die if it was the kind of heat sickness that brought on a red face and dry skin, but al-Har
ā
t’s face was pale and wet.

Nevertheless he stopped when the other staggered to a halt.

Al-Har
ā
t still had enough contempt in him to glare, but he wanted a Persian to win. “Run, bastard.”

Karim left him gladly.

From the high slope of the first descent, gazing down the straight stretch
of white road, he caught sight of a small figure moving up the long hill in the distance.

As he watched, the Afghan fell and then got to his feet and began to run again, finally turning out of sight onto the Street of the Apostles. It was hard for Karim to hold himself in rein but he kept to his pace and didn’t see the other runner again until he had achieved the Avenue of Ali and Fatima.

They were much closer. The Afghan fell again and got up to run raggedly; he may have been accustomed to thin air but the mountains of Ghazna were cool and the Ispahan heat served Karim, who kept closing the distance.

When they ran past the
maristan
he didn’t see or hear the people he knew because he was concentrating on the other runner.

Karim reached him after the fourth and final fall. They had brought the Afghan water and were applying wet cloths as he lay gasping like a landed fish, a squat man with broad shoulders and dark skin. He had slightly slanted brown eyes that were calm as they watched Karim pass him.

Victory brought more anguish than triumph, for now there had to be a decision. He had won the day; did he have it in him to try for the Shah’s
calaat?
The “royal garment,” five hundred gold pieces, and the honorary but well-paid appointment as Chief of the
Chatirs
would go to any man who completed the entire course of 126 miles in less than twelve hours.

Rounding the
maidan,
Karim faced the sun and studied it. He had run all through the day, almost 95 miles. It should be enough and he ached to turn in his nine arrows and collect the prize of coins, then to join other runners now splashing in the River of Life. He needed to soak in their envy and admiration and in the river itself, a sinking into green waters that was more than earned.

The sun hovered above the horizon. Was there time? Was there strength in his body still? Was it Allah’s wish? It would be very close, and perhaps he could not complete another 31 miles before the call to Fourth Prayer signaled the setting of the sun.

Yet he knew that total victory might banish Zaki-Omar from his bad dreams more completely than lying with all the women of the world.

And thus when he had collected another arrow, instead of turning toward the officials’ tent he started around for the tenth time. The white dust road before him was vacant, and now he was running against the dark
djinn
of the man to whom he had yearned to be a son and who had made him, instead, a whore.

* * *

When the race had dwindled to the last man and the
chatir
was won, the spectators had begun to disperse; but now all along the way, people saw Karim coming alone and they flocked to regather as they realized he was trying to gain the Shah’s
calaat.