Rob shrugged. “I never seek the Shah’s company, nor have I any desire to stew in politics.”
Ibn Sina nodded in approval. “There is this about monarchs in the East: they like to choose physicians as their viziers, feeling that healers somehow already have Allah’s attention. I know how easy it is to answer the lure of such an appointment and I have drunk the intoxicating wine of power. Twice when I was younger I accepted the title of Vizier in Hamadhān. It was more dangerous than the practice of medicine. After the first time, I narrowly escaped execution. I was thrown into the castle-prison called Fardajān, where I languished for months. After I was released from Fardajān, Vizier or not, I knew I couldn’t stay in Hamadhān in safety. With al-Juzjani and my household I made my way to Ispahan, where I have been under Alā’s protection ever since.”
They turned back, retracing their steps toward the gardens in which the entertainment was being held.
“Fortunate for Persia that Alā allows great physicians to pursue their profession,” Rob said.
Ibn Sina smiled. “It fits his plans to be known as a great king who fosters the arts and the sciences,” he said drily. “Even when he was a young man, he hungered after an empire of influence. Now he must seek to make it wider, trying to eat up his enemies before they devour him.”
“The Seljuks.”
“Oh, I should fear the Seljuks most if I were Vizier in Ispahan,” Ibn Sina said. “But it is Mahmud of Ghazna whom Alā watches most intently, for the two are cut from the same fabric. Alā has made four raids into India, capturing twenty-eight war elephants. Mahmud is closer to the source, he has raided India more often and has more than fifty war elephants. Alā envies and fears him. It is Mahmud who must be eliminated next if Alā is to proceed with his dream.”
Ibn Sina stopped and placed a hand on Rob’s arm. “You must take great care. It is said by thoughtful men that Qandrasseh’s days are numbered as Vizier. And that a young physician will take his place.”
Rob said nothing, but he remembered suddenly that Alā had spoken of having “lofty and noble plans” for Karim.
“If it is true, Qandrasseh will strike without mercy at anyone he may see as the friend or supporter of his rival. It isn’t enough to have no political ambitions for yourself. When a physician deals with those in power he must learn to bend and sway or he will not survive.”
Rob wasn’t certain he would be skilled at bending and swaying.
“Don’t be overconcerned,” Ibn Sina said. “Alā changes his mind often and swiftly, and one cannot plan on what he will do in the future.”
They resumed walking and reached the gardens shortly before the subject of their discussion returned from Fath Ali’s haram, looking relaxed and in a good mood.
Halfway through the afternoon, Rob began to wonder whether Ibn Sina ever had been host to an entertainment for his Shah and protector. He went up to Khuff and casually asked the question.
The grizzled Captain of the Gates slitted his eyes in concentration, then he nodded. “A few years since,” he said.
Clearly, Alā would have had no interest in the first wife, old Pious Reza, so it was virtually certain that he had claimed sovereign right to Despina. Rob pictured the Shah climbing the circular staircase in the stone tower while Khuff guarded the approach.
Mounting the girl’s small, voluptuous body.
Fascinated now, Rob studied the three men, each surrounded by idolizing and deferring nobles. The Shah was ringed by his usual attendance of arse kissers. Ibn Sina, grave and composed, quietly answered questions of scholarly looking men. Karim, as always nowadays, was virtually hidden by the admirers who sought to speak to him, to touch his clothing, to bathe in the excitement and glow of his sought-after presence.
This Persia seemed to seek to make every man a cuckold in turn.
He felt natural and right with surgical instruments in his hand, as if they were interchangeable parts of his own body. Al-Juzjani gave him more and more of his own precious time, showing him with painstaking patience how to do every procedure. The Persians had ways of immobilizing and desensitizing patients. When hemp was soaked in barley water for days and the infusion was swallowed, it allowed someone to remain conscious but deadened the pain. Rob spent two weeks with the master pharmacists of the khazanat-ul-sharaf learning to mix concoctions that put patients to sleep. The substances were unpredictable and hard to control, but sometimes they allowed surgeons to operate without the convulsive shudderings and moans and screams of pain.
The recipes seemed to him more like magic than medicine.
Take the flesh of a sheep. Free it from fat and cut it into lumps, piling the pieces of meat over and around a goodly amount of braised henbane seeds. Set this in an earthenware jar beneath a heap of horse dung until worms are generated. Then place the worms in a glass vessel until they shrivel up. When required for use, take two parts of these and one part of powdered opium, and instill this into the nose of the patient.
Opium was derived from the juice of an Eastern flower, the poppy. It was grown in Ispahan fields but the demand outpaced the supply, for it was used in the mosque rites of Ismaili Muslims as well as in medicines, so some of it was imported from Turkey and from Ghazna. It was the base of all pain-killing formulae.
Take pure opium and nutmeg. Grind and cook them together and allow them to soak in old wine for forty days. Keep on putting the bottle in the sun. Soon it will be a paste. When a pill is made from this and administered to anyone, he will at once fall unconscious and be without sensation.
They used another prescription most of the time, because it was the one that was preferred by Ibn Sina:
Take equal parts of henbane, opium, euphorbia and licorice seeds. Grind each of them separately and mix the whole together in a mortar. Place some of the mixture upon any kind of food and whosoever eats thereof will fall asleep immediately.
Despite Rob’s suspicion that al-Juzjani resented his relationship with Ibn Sina, he was soon busily using all the instruments of surgery. Al-Juzjani’s other clerks thought the new apprentice had more than his share of choice work and grew surly, taking out their jealousy on Rob by mutterings and mean insults. Rob didn’t care, for he was learning more than he had dared dream was possible. One afternoon, having for the first time performed alone the procedure that dazzled him above all others in surgery—the couching of eyes blinded by cataracts—he at tempted to thank al-Juzjani, but the surgeon interrupted him brusquely.
“You’ve the knack for cutting flesh. It’s not something many clerks have, and my special instruction is selfish, for I’ll get a great amount of work from you.”
It was true. Day after day he did amputations, repaired every kind of wound, tapped into abdomens to relieve the pressure of accumulated fluids in the peritoneal cavity, removed piles, stripped varicose veins …
“I think you begin to like cutting too much,” Mirdin said shrewdly as they sat together in Mirdin’s house one evening over the Shah’s Game. In the next room, Fara listened while Mary put her sons to sleep with a lullaby in the Erse, the language of the Scots.
“I am drawn to it,” Rob admitted. Lately he had given thought to becoming a surgeon after winning the designation of hakim. In England surgeons were considered below physicians in status, but in Persia they were addressed by the special title of ustad and enjoyed equal respect and prosperity.
But he had reservations. “Surgery is satisfying so far as it goes. But we’re limited to operating on the outside of the bag of skin. The inside of the body is a mystery handed down in books more than a thousand years old. We know almost nothing about the internal body.”
“That’s the way it must be,” Mirdin said placidly, and took a rukh with one of his own foot soldiers. “Christians, Jews, and Muslims agree it is sin to desecrate the human form.”
“I don’t speak of desecration. I speak of surgery, I speak of dissection. The ancients didn’t cripple their science with admonitions of sin, and what little we now know came from
the early Greeks, who had the freedom to open the body and study it. They dissected the dead and observed how man is fashioned within. For a brief moment in those long-ago days their brilliance illuminated all of medicine, and then the world fell into darkness.” He brooded and the game suffered, so that Mirdin quickly captured the other rukh and one of his camels.
“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.