The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (75 page)

The Shah agreed at once. Before they could depart that place, however, scouting parties came back with disturbing news. The Indian troops, far from fleeing, had set up positions in the forest and along the road and were waiting to fall upon anyone seeking to leave Kausambi.

Al
ā
knew the Indians couldn’t contain them indefinitely. As had been the case at Mansura, the hidden soldiers were poorly armed; further, they were forced to live off the wild fruits of the land. The Shah’s officers told
him that doubtless runners had been sent to bring Indian reinforcements, but the nearest known military force of any size was in Sehwan, six days away.

“You must go into the forest and clean them out,” Al
ā
ordered.

The five hundred Persians were divided into ten units of fifty fighters each, all foot soldiers. They left the village and beat the brush to find their enemy as though they were hunting wild pigs. When they came upon Indians, the fighting was fierce and bloody and prolonged.

Al
ā
ordered all casualties to be removed from the forest lest they be counted by the enemy and give him knowledge of dwindling strength. And so the Persian dead were laid in the gray dust of a street in Kausambi, to be buried in mass graves by the prisoners from Mansura. The first body to be brought in, at the very start of the forest fighting, was that of the Captain of the Gates. Khuff was dead from an Indian arrow in the back. He had been a strict, unsmiling man but a fixture and a legend. The scars on his body could be read like a history of hard campaigns for two Shahs. All that day, Persian soldiers came to look at him.

They were coldly angered by his death and this time they took no prisoners, killing even when an Indian wished to surrender. In turn, they faced the frenzy of hunted men who knew they would be shown no mercy. The warfare was unrelievedly ugly, either jagged arrows or men doing their worst with sharp metal, all slashing and stabbing and screaming.

Twice a day the wounded were assembled in a clearing and one of the surgeons went out under heavy guard and gave first treatment and brought the patients back to the village. The fighting lasted three days. Of the thirty-eight wounded at Mansura, eleven had died before the Persians had departed that village and sixteen more had perished in the three-day march to Kausambi. To the eleven wounded who survived in the care of Mirdin and Rob, thirty-six new maimed were added during the three days of the forest battle. Forty-seven more Persians were killed.

Mirdin performed one more amputation and Rob three, one of them involving only the fixing of a skin flap over a stub made perfectly below the elbow when an Indian sword took a soldier’s forearm. At first they treated wounds the way Ibn Sina had taught: they boiled oil and poured it as hot as possible into the wound to ward off suppuration. But on the morning of the last day Rob ran out of oil; remembering how Barber had tended lacerations with metheglin, he took a goatskin of wine and bathed each new wound with strong drink before dressing it.

That morning the last outburst of fighting had begun immediately after dawn. At midmorning a new group of wounded arrived and bearers carried
in someone wrapped from head to ankles in a purloined Indian blanket. ‘Only wounded here,’ Rob said sharply.

But they set him down and stood, waiting uncertainly, and he noticed suddenly that the dead man was wearing Mirdin’s shoes.

“Had he been an ordinary soldier we would have placed him in the street,” one of them said. “But he is
hakim,
so we have brought him to
hakim.”

They said they were on the way back when a man sprang from the brush with an ax. The Indian had struck only Mirdin and then was himself cut down.

Rob thanked them and they went away.

When he removed the blanket from the face he saw it was indeed Mirdin. The face was contorted and seemed puzzled and sweetly cranky.

Rob closed the tender eyes and bound the long, homely jaw shut. He didn’t think, moving as if drunk. From time to time he left to comfort the dying or care for the wounded, but always he came back and sat. Once he kissed the cold mouth but didn’t believe Mirdin knew. He felt the same way when he tried to hold Mirdin’s hand. Mirdin was no longer there.

He hoped Mirdin had crossed one of his bridges.

Eventually Rob left him and tried to stay away, working blindly. A man was brought in with a maimed right hand and he did the last amputation of the campaign, taking the hand just above the joint of the wrist. When he came back to Mirdin at midday, flies had gathered.

He removed the blanket and saw that the ax had cleaved Mirdin open at the chest. When Rob bent over the great wound, he was able to pry it wider with his hands.

He was bereft of awareness of either the odors of death within the tent or the scent of the hot crushed grass underfoot. The groans of the wounded, the buzzing of flies, and the far-off shouts and battle sounds faded from his ears. He lost the knowledge that his friend was dead and forgot the crushing burden of his grief.

For the first time he reached inside a man’s body and touched the human heart.

60

FOUR FRIENDS

Rob washed Mirdin and cut his nails, combed his hair and wrapped him in his prayer shawl, from which half of one of the fringes was cut away, according to custom.

He sought out Karim, who blinked as if slapped upon hearing the news.

“I don’t want him in the mass grave,” Rob said. “His family will certainly come here to get him and bring him home to Masqat for burial among his people in sacred ground.”

They chose a place directly in front of a boulder so large elephants couldn’t move it, taking precise bearings and pacing off the distance from the rock to the edge of the nearby road. Karim used his privilege to obtain parchment, quill, and ink, and after they had dug the grave Rob carefully mapped it. He would redraw a good chart and send it to Masqat. Unless there was incontrovertible evidence that Mirdin had died, Fara would be considered an
agunah,
a deserted wife, and she would never be permitted to marry again. That was the law; Mirdin had taught it to him.

“Al
ā
will want to be here,” he said.

He watched Karim approach the Shah. Al
ā
was drinking with his officers, bathing in the warm glow of victory. Rob saw him listen to Karim for a moment and then wave him away impatiently.

Rob felt a surge of hatred, remembering the king’s voice in the cave, and what he had told Mirdin:
We are four friends.

Karim returned and said shamefacedly that they must proceed; he muttered broken fragments of Islamic prayer as they filled in the hole, but Rob didn’t try to pray. Mirdin deserved sorrowing voices raised in
Hashkavot,
the burial chant, and the
Kaddish.
But the
Kaddish
had to be said by ten Jews and he was a Christian pretending to be a Jew, standing numb and silent as the earth closed over his friend.

* * *

That afternoon the Persians could find no more Indians in the forest to kill.

The way from Kausambi was open. Al
ā
appointed a hard-eyed veteran named Farhad to be his new Captain of the Gates, and the officer began to bawl orders calculated to whip the force into readiness to leave.

Amid general jubilation, Al
ā
made an accounting. He had gained his Indian swordmaker. He had lost two elephants at Mansura but had taken twenty-eight there. In addition, four young, healthy elephants had been found by the
mahouts
in a pen in Kausambi; they were work animals, untrained for battle but still valuable. The Indian horses were scrubby little animals ignored by the Persians, but they had discovered a small herd of fine fast camels in Mansura and dozens of pack camels in Kausambi.

Al
ā
was aglow with the success of his raids.

One hundred and twenty of the six hundred who had followed the Shah out of Ispahan were dead, and Rob had the responsibility for forty-seven wounded. Many of these were grievously injured and would die during travel, but there was no question of leaving them behind in the ravaged village. Any Persian found there would be killed when fresh Indian forces came.

Rob sent soldiers through every house to collect rugs and blankets, which were fastened between poles to make litters. When they left at dawn the following morning, Indians carried the litters.

It was three and a half days of hard, tense travel to a place where the river could be forded without fighting. In the early stages of the crossing two men were swept away and drowned. In the middle of the Indus the current was shallow but swift and the
mahouts
placed the elephants upstream to break the force of the water like a living wall, yet another demonstration of the true value of these animals.

The terribly wounded died first, those with perforated chests or slashed bellies, and a man who had been stuck in the neck. In one day alone, half a dozen succumbed. Fifteen days of travel brought them into Baluchistan, where they camped in a field and Rob placed his wounded in an open-sided barn. Seeing Farhad, he sought an audience, but Farhad was all posturing and pompous delay. Fortunately Karim overheard and at once brought him to the tent to see the Shah.

“I have twenty-one left. But they must lie in one place for a time or they will die too, Majesty.”

“I cannot wait for wounded,” Al
ā
said, eager for his triumphal march through Ispahan.

“I ask your permission to stay here with them.”

The Shah stared. “I will not spare Karim to remain with you as
hakim.
He must return with me.”

Rob nodded.

They gave him fifteen Indians and twenty-seven armed soldiers to bear litters, and two
mahouts
and all five of the injured elephants so the animals might continue to receive his care. Karim arranged for sacks of rice to be unloaded. Next morning the camp was filled with the usual frenzied bustle. Then the main body moved out onto the trail and, when finally the last of them had gone, Rob was left with his patients and his handful of men in a sudden lack of noise that was at the same time welcome and discomfiting.

The rest benefited his patients, out of the sun and the dust, and spared the constant jolting and shaking of travel. Two men died on their first day in the barn and another on the fourth day, but those who hung on were the tough ones who clutched at survival, and Rob’s decision to pause in Baluchistan allowed them to live.

At first the soldiers resented the duty. The other raiders soon would be back in Ispahan to safety and triumphant acclaim, while they had been given prolonged risk and a dirty job. Two members of the armed guard slipped away during the second night and were not seen again. The weaponless Indians did not attempt to flee, nor did the other members of the guard. Soldiers by profession, they soon realized that next time any of them might be struck down, and they were grateful that the
hakim
would risk himself to help their kind.

He sent out hunting parties every morning and small game was brought back and dressed and stewed with some of the rice Karim had left them, and his patients gained in strength even as he watched.

He treated the elephants as he did the men, changing their dressings regularly and bathing their wounds in wine. The great beasts stood and allowed him to hurt them, as if they understood he was their benefactor. The men were as stolid as the animals, even when wounds mortified and he was forced to cut stitches and rip open mending flesh so he could clean away the pus and bathe the wound in wine before closing it again.

He witnessed a strange fact: in virtually every case he had treated with the boiling oil, the wounds had become angry, swollen, and full of suppuration. Many of these patients had died, while most of the men whose wounds were treated after the oil had run out were without pus, and these men lived. He began to keep records, suspecting that this single observation perhaps had made his presence in India worth something. He was almost out of wine, but he had not manufactured the Universal Specific without
having learned that where there were farmers, kegs of strong drink could be obtained. They would buy more along the way.

When finally they left the barn at the end of three weeks, four of his patients were well enough to ride. Twelve of the soldiers were burdenless and thus could trade off with those who carried litters, allowing some to rest at all times. Rob led them off the Spice Road at first opportunity and took a circuitous route. The longer way would add almost a week to their travel, which made the soldiers sullen. But he wouldn’t risk his tiny caravan by following the Shah’s larger force through a countryside in which hatred as well as starvation had been sown by the ravaging Persian foragers.

Three of the elephants still limped and were not given loads, but Rob rode on the back of the elephant whose trunk had received minor slashes. He was happy to leave Bitch and would be content never to ride a camel again. In contrast, the elephant’s broad back offered comfort and stability and a king’s view of the world.