The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (69 page)

“I think,” Rob said at length, almost idly, “that during all these long centuries of dark ignorance, there have been small, secret fires.”

Now Mirdin’s attention was drawn from the board.

“Men who have had the strength to dissect dead humans in stealth. Defying the priests in order to do the Lord’s work as physicians.”

Mirdin stared. “Dear God. They would be treated as witches.”

“They would not have been able to report their knowledge, but at least they would have gained it for themselves.”

Mirdin now looked alarmed.

Rob smiled at him. “No, I would not,” he said gently. “I have enough trouble pretending to be a Jew. I simply do not have the necessary variety of courage.”

“We must show gratitude for tiny blessings,” Mirdin said drily. He had been made sufficiently uneasy and diverted so that now he played poorly, giving up an elephant and two horses in swift succession, but Rob hadn’t yet learned enough about pressing through to victory. Quickly and coolly Mirdin rallied his forces and, within a dozen moves, to Rob’s chagrin he was once again forced to experience
shahtreng,
the anguish of the king.

54

MARY’S EXPECTATIONS

Mary had no female friend other than Fara, but the Jewess was enough. The two women learned to sit for hours and talk to one another, communications devoid of the questions and answers characterizing most social conversation. Sometimes Mary talked and Fara listened to an outpouring of Gaelic she didn’t understand, sometimes Fara spoke the Tongue to an uncomprehending Mary.

The words were curiously unimportant. What mattered was the play of emotions across the facial features, the expressions of the hands, what was in the voice, secrets conveyed by the eyes.

Thus they shared their feelings and for Mary it was an advantage, for she spoke of things she wouldn’t have mentioned to one she had known so short a time. She revealed her sorrow over the loss of her father; her loneliness for the Christian Mass; the power of her longing when she awoke from dreaming of the young and beautiful woman Jura Cullen once had been, and then had to lie in the little Yehuddiyyeh house as, like a cold and loathsome creature, the realization crept into her mind that her mother was long dead. And she spoke of things she wouldn’t have mentioned no matter how long she and Fara had been friends: of how she loved him so much that sometimes it caused a trembling she couldn’t control; of moments when desire flooded her with such warmth that for the first time she understood mares in heat; of how she would never again watch a ram mounting a ewe without thinking of her limbs around Rob, his taste in her mouth, the smell of his firm warm flesh in her nostrils, the hot magical extension of her husband making her one with him as they strove to get him into the core of her body.

She didn’t know if Fara spoke of such things but her eyes and ears told her that betimes what Mirdin’s wife talked about was intimate and important, and the two dissimilar women became linked by love and high regard, a bond of friendship.

One morning Mirdin laughed and clapped Rob’s shoulder in delight. “You’ve obeyed the commandment to multiply. She’s expecting a child, you European ram!”

“It isn’t so!”

“It is so,” Mirdin said firmly. “You’ll see. In this, Fara is never wrong.”

Two mornings later Mary paled after eating her breakfast and spewed up the food and drink, requiring Rob to clean and scrape the packed-earth floor and carry in fresh sand. That week she began regularly to be plagued by vomiting, and when her monthly flow was absent, no doubt remained. It should have been no surprise, for they’d been unflagging in their love-making; but she’d long since begun to think that perhaps God didn’t favor the union.

Her periods ordinarily were difficult and painful and she was pleased to be relieved of them, but the frequent nausea made the exchange no great bargain. Rob held her head and cleansed her when she was sick and thought of the coming child with both delight and foreboding, nervously wondering what sort of creature would grow from his seed. Now he unclothed his wife with more ardor than ever, for the scientist in him gloried in the chance to note the changes down to the slightest detail, the widening and purpling in the areolae of her nipples, the greater fullness of her breasts, the first gentle curving of belly, a rearrangement of expressions caused by the subtle swelling of her mouth and nose. He insisted that she lie on her stomach so he could judge the accumulation of fat in the hips and buttocks, the slight thickening of her legs. At first Mary enjoyed the attention but gradually she lost patience.

“The toes,” she grumbled. “What of the toes.”

He studied her feet gravely and reported that the toes were unchanged.

The attractions of surgery were spoiled for Rob by a spate of geldings.

The making of eunuchs was a commonplace procedure, and two types of castrations were performed. Handsome men, selected to guard the entrances of
harams,
where they would have little contact with the women of a house, suffered only the loss of their testicles. For general service inside the
harams,
ugly men were prized, with premiums paid for such disfigurements as a mashed or naturally repelling nose, a misshapen mouth, thick lips, and black or irregular teeth; in order to render such men completely functionless sexually, their genitalia were entirely removed and they were compelled to carry a quill for use whenever they wished to pass water.

Often young boys were castrated. Sometimes they were sent to a school for the training of eunuchs in Baghdad, where they were taught to be
singers and musicians or thoroughly grounded in the practices of business or in purchasing and administration, turning them into highly prized servants, valuable pieces of property like Ibn Sina’s eunuch slave, Wasif.

The technique for gelding was basic. In his left hand the surgeon grasped the object to be amputated. Holding a sharp razor in his right hand, he removed the parts with a single sweep of the blade, for speed was essential. At once a poultice of warm ashes was clapped to the bleeding area, and the male was permanently altered.

Al-Juzjani had explained to him that when castration was performed as a punishment, sometimes the poultice of ashes wasn’t administered and the patient was allowed to bleed to death.

Rob came home one evening and looked at his wife and tried not to consider that none of the men or boys he had operated on would ever make a woman swell with life. He put his hand on her warm abdomen, which had not really grown much larger yet.

“Soon it will be like a green melon,” she said.

“I want to see it when it is a watermelon.”

He had gone to the House of Learning and read about the fetus. Ibn Sina had written that after the womb shuts over the semen, life is formed in three stages. According to the Master of Physicians, in the first stage, the clot is transformed into a small heart; in the second stage, another clot appears and develops into the liver; and in the third stage, all of the chief organs are formed.

“I’ve found a church,” Mary said.

“A Christian church?” he said, and was amazed when she nodded. He hadn’t known of a church in Ispahan.

The week before, she and Fara had gone to the Armenian market to buy wheat. They had made a wrong turn down an alley, narrow and smelling of piss, and she had come upon the Church of Archangel Michael.

“Eastern Catholics?”

She nodded again. “It’s a tiny, sad church, attended by a handful of the poorest Armenian laborers. Doubtless it is tolerated because it’s too weak to be a threat.” She’d returned twice, alone, to stand and envy the ragged Armenians who entered and left the church.

“Mass would be in their language. We couldn’t even offer the responses.”

“But they celebrate the Eucharist. Christ is present on their altar.”

“We would risk my life to attend. Go to the synagogue with Fara to pray, but offer your own silent prayers. When I’m in the synagogue I pray to Jesus and the saints.”

She lifted her head and for the first time he saw the smoldering behind her eyes.

“I need no Jews to allow me to pray,” she said hotly.

Mirdin agreed with him about rejecting surgery as a profession. “It’s not only the gelding, although that is terrible. But in places where there are no medical clerks to service the
mullahs
‘ courts, the surgeon is called upon to tend prisoners after punishments. Better to use our knowledge and skills against illness and hurt than to trim the stubs and stumps of what could have been healthy limbs and organs.”

Sitting in the early morning sun on the stone steps of the
madrassa,
Mirdin sighed when Rob told him about Mary and her yearnings for a church. “You must pray your own prayers with her when you’re alone. And you must take her to your own people as soon as you’re able.”

Rob nodded, studying the other man thoughtfully. Mirdin had been bitter and hateful when he had thought Rob a Jew who had rejected his own faith. But since gaining the knowledge that Rob was an Other, he had shown the essence of friendship.

“Have you considered,” Rob said slowly, “how each faith claims that it alone has God’s heart and ear? We, you, and Islam—each vows it is the true religion. Can it be that we’re all three wrong?”

“Perhaps we’re all three right,” Mirdin said.

Rob felt a welling of affection. Soon Mirdin would be a physician and return to his family in Masqat and when Rob was
hakim
he too would go home. Doubtless, they would never meet again.

When he met Mirdin’s eyes he was certain his friend shared his thoughts.

“Shall we see each other in Paradise?”

Mirdin stared at him gravely. “I shall meet you in Paradise. Solemn vow?”

Rob smiled. “Solemn vow.”

They clasped wrists.

“I think of the separation between life and Paradise as a river,” Mirdin said. “If there are many bridges that cross the river, should it be of great concern to God which bridge the traveler chooses?”

“I believe not,” Rob said.

The two friends parted warmly and hurried off, each to his own labor.

Rob sat in the surgery with two other clerks and listened to al-Juzjani warn them of the need for discretion regarding the operation that would follow. He wouldn’t give the patient’s identity in order to protect her
reputation, but he let it be known that she was the close relative of a powerful and famous man, and that she had cancer of the breast.

Because of the gravity of the disease, the theological prohibition known as
aurat
—which forbade any but a woman’s husband to look upon her body from neck to knee—would be disregarded to enable them to operate.

The woman had been plied with opiates and wine and was carried in to them unconscious. She was full-formed and heavy, with wisps of gray hair escaping from the cloth that bound her head. She was loosely veiled and fully draped save for her breasts, which were large, soft, and flaccid, indicating a patient no longer young.

Al-Juzjani ordered each of the clerks in turn to palpate both breasts gently in order to learn what a breast tumor feels like. It was detectable even without palpation, a visible growth in the side of the left breast, as long as Rob’s thumb and three times as thick.

He was very interested in watching; he had never seen a human breast opened before. Blood welled as al-Juzjani pressed the knife into the yielding flesh and cut well below the bottom of the lump, desiring to get it all. The woman moaned and the surgeon worked quickly, eager to finish before she awoke.

Rob saw that the inside of the breast contained muscle, cellular gray flesh, and clumps of yellow fat like that in a dressed chicken. He could clearly make out several pink lactiferous ducts running to join at the nipple like the branches of a river merging at a bay. Perhaps al-Juzjani had nicked one of the ducts; reddened liquid welled from the nipple like a drop of rosy milk.

Al-Juzjani had the tumor out and was sewing rapidly. If such a thing were possible, Rob would have said the surgeon was nervous.

She is related to the Shah, he told himself. Perhaps an aunt; maybe even the very woman of whom the Shah had told him in the cave, the aunt who had inducted Al
ā
into sexual life.

Groaning and almost fully awake, she was carried away as soon as the breast was closed.

Al-Juzjani sighed. “There is no cure. The cancer will kill her in the end, but we can attempt to slow its progress.” He saw Ibn Sina outside and went to report on the operation while the clerks tidied the surgery.

Soon Ibn Sina entered the surgery and spoke briefly to Rob, patting his shoulder before taking leave of him.

He was dazed by what the Chief Physician had told him. He left the surgery and walked toward the
khazanat-ul-sharaf,
where Mirdin was working. They met in the corridor leading from the pharmacy. Rob saw
in Mirdin’s face all the emotions that were churning within him. “You also?”

Mirdin nodded. “In two weeks?”

“Yes.” He tasted panic. “I’m not ready for testing, Mirdin. You’ve been here four years, but I’ve been here only three years and I’m not yet ready.”