The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (87 page)

Al-Juzjani shrugged. “The hospital will close for a while and we’ll all scurry to hide from disaster. Then we’ll come out of our holes and life will be same as before. With our Master I have served half a dozen kings. Monarchs come and go, but the world continues to need physicians,” he said.

Rob asked Mary for the money for the book, and the
Qan
ū
n
became his. It filled him with awe to hold it in his hand. Never had he owned a book before, but so great was his delight in proprietorship of this book that he vowed there would be others.

Yet he didn’t spend overly long reading it, for Qasim’s room drew him.

He dissected several nights a week and began to use his drawing materials, hungry to do more but unable because he required a minimum of sleep in order to function in the
maristan
during the day.

In one of the corpses he studied, that of a young man who had been knifed in a wineshop brawl, he found the little cecum appendage enlarged and with its surface reddened and rough, and he surmised he was looking at the earliest stage of the side sickness, when the patient would begin to get the first intermittent pangs. He now had a picture of the progress of the illness from onset to death, and he wrote in his casebook:

Perforating abdominal distemper has been witnessed in six patients, each of whom died.

The first decided symptom of the disease is sudden abdominal pain.

The pain is usually intense and rarely slight.

Occasionally it is accompanied by an ague and more often by nausea and vomiting.

The abdominal pain is followed by fever as the next constant symptom.

A circumscribed resistance is felt on palpation of the right lower belly, with the area often agonized by pressure and the abdominal muscles tense and rigid.

The condition comes to an appendage of the cecum which in appearance is not unlike a fat, pink earthworm of common variety. Should this organ become angry or infected it turns red and then black, fills with pus and finally bursts, its contents escaping into the general abdominal cavity.

In that event death follows rapidly, as a rule within half an hour to thirty-six hours of the onset of high fever.

He cut and studied only those parts of the body that would be covered by the burial shroud. This excluded the feet and the head, a frustration because he was no longer content with examining a pig’s brain. His respect for Ibn Sina remained unbounded, but he had become aware that in certain areas his mentor had himself been taught incorrectly about the skeleton and the musculature and had passed on the misinformation.

Rob worked patiently, uncovering and sketching muscles like wire and like strands of rope, some beginning in a cord and ending in a cord, some with flat attachment, some with round attachment, some with cord only at one end, and some that were compound muscles with two heads, their special value apparently being that if one head is injured the other will take over its function. He began in ignorance and gradually, in a constant state of fevered and dreamlike excitement, he learned. He made sketches of bone and joint structure, shape, and position, realizing that such drawings would
be invaluable in teaching young doctors how to deal with sprains and fractures.

Always when he finished working he shrouded and returned the bodies and took his drawings away with him. He no longer felt that he peered into the pit of his own damnation, but he never lost the awareness of the terrible end that awaited him if he were discovered. Dissecting in the uneven, flickering lamplight of the airless little room, he started at every noise and froze in terror on the rare occasion when someone walked past the door.

He had good reason for his fear.

Early one morning he removed from the charnel house the body of an elderly woman who had died only a short time before. Outside the door he looked up to see a nurse coming toward him, carrying the body of a man. The woman’s head lolled and one arm swung as Rob stopped wordlessly and gazed at the nurse, who bent his head politely.

“Shall I help you with that one,
Hakim?”

“She’s not heavy.”

Preceding the nurse, he went back inside and they laid the two bodies side by side and left the charnel house together.

The pig he had dissected had lasted only four days, rapidly reaching a state of ripeness that made disposal a necessity. Yet opening the human stomach and gut released odors far worse than the sickly-sweet stench of porcine rot. Despite soap and water, the smell permeated the place.

One morning he bought a new hog. That afternoon he walked past Qasim’s room to discover the
hadji
Davout Hosein rattling the locked door.

“Why is it locked? What is inside?”

“It’s a room in which I am dissecting a pig,” Rob said calmly.

The deputy governor of the school gazed at him in disgust. These days, Davout Hosein looked at everything with stern suspicion, for he had been delegated by the
mullahs
to police the
maristan
and the
madrassa
for infractions of Islamic law.

Several times that day, Rob observed him hovering watchfully.

That evening Rob went home early. Next morning when he came to the hospital he saw that the lock on the door of the little room had been forced and broken. Inside, things were as he had left them—but not quite. The pig lay covered on the table. His instruments had been disarranged but none was missing. They had found nothing to incriminate him, and he was safe for the moment. But the intrusion had chilling implications.

He knew sooner or later he would be discovered, but he was learning precious facts and seeing marvelous things and was not ready to stop.

He waited two days, in which the
hadji
left him alone. An old man died
in the hospital while holding a quiet conversation with him. That night he opened the body to see what had accomplished so peaceful a death and found that the artery which had fed the heart and the lower members was parched and shrunken, a withered leaf.

In a child’s body he saw why cancer had received its name, noting how the hungry crablike growth had extended its claws in every direction. In another man’s body he found that the liver, instead of being soft and of a rich red-brown, had turned into a yellowish object of woody hardness.

The following week he dissected a woman several months pregnant and sketched the womb in the swollen belly like an inverted drinking glass cradling the life that had been forming in it. In the drawing he gave her the face of Despina, who would never give life to a child. He labeled it the Pregnant Woman.

And one night he sat by the dissection table and created a young man to whom he gave the features of Karim, an imperfect likeness but a recognizable one to anybody who had loved him. Rob drew the figure as if the skin were made of glass. What he couldn’t see for himself in the body on the table he drew as Galen had claimed it existed. He knew some of this unsubstantiated detail would be inaccurate, but still the drawing was remarkable even to him, showing organs and blood vessels as if the eye of God were peering through man’s solid flesh.

When it was completed he exultantly signed his name and the date and labeled the drawing the Transparent Man.

73

THE HOUSE IN HAMADH
Ā
N

All this time there had been no news of the war. By prearrangement four caravans laden with supplies had gone out in search of the army, but they were never seen again and it was supposed they had found Al
ā
and had been absorbed into the fighting. And then one afternoon just before Fourth Prayer a rider came, bearing the worst possible intelligence.

As had been surmised, by the time Mas
ū
d had paused in Ispahan his main force already had found the Persians and was engaging them. Mas
ū
d had sent two of his senior generals, Ab
ū
Sahl al-Hamdûn
ī
and T
ā
sh Farr
ā
sh, to lead his army along the expected route. They planned and executed the frontal attack perfectly. Splitting their force in two, they hid behind the village of al-Karaj and sent forth their scouts. When the Persians drew close enough, Ab
ū
Sahl al-Hamd
ū
n
ī
’s host streamed from around one side of al-Karaj and T
ā
sh Farr
ā
sh’s Afghans came around the other side. They fell upon Al
ā
Shah’s men on two flanks, which rapidly drew together until the Ghazna army was reunited across a giant semicircular line of combat, like a net.

After their initial surprise the Persians fought bravely but they were outnumbered and outmaneuvered, and they lost ground steadily for days. Finally they discovered that at their back was another Ghazna force led by Sultan Mas
ū
d. Then the fighting grew ever more desperate and savage, but the end was inevitable. In front of the Persians was the superior force of the two Ghazna generals. Behind them, the cavalry of the Sultan, small in number and vicious, waged a conflict similar to the historic battle between the Romans and the ancient Persians, but this time Persia’s enemy was the ephemeral harrying force. The Afghans struck again and again and always melted away to reappear in another rear sector.

Finally, when the bloodied Persians had been sufficiently weakened and confused, under cover of a sandstorm Mas
ū
d launched the full power of all three of his armies in all-out attack.

Next morning, the sun disclosed sand swirling over the bodies of men and beasts, the better part of the Persian army. Some had escaped and it was rumored Al
ā
Shah was among them, the messenger said, but this wasn’t certain.

“What has befallen Ibn Sina?” al-Juzjani asked the man.

“Ibn Sina left the army well before it reached al-Karaj,
Hakim.
He had been afflicted by a terrible colic that rendered him helpless, and so with the Shah’s permission the youngest physician among the surgeons, one Bibi al-Ghur
ī
, took him to the city of Hamadh
ā
n, where Ibn Sina still owns the house that had been his father’s.”

“I know the place,” al-Juzjani said.

Rob knew al-Juzjani would go there. “Let me come too,” he said.

For a moment jealous resentment flickered in the older physician’s eyes, but reason quickly won and he nodded.

“We shall leave at once,” he said.

It was a hard and gloomy trip. They pushed their horses hard, not knowing if they would find him alive when they arrived. Al-Juzjani was made dumb by despair and this wasn’t to be wondered at; Rob had loved Ibn Sina for relatively few years, while al-Juzjani had worshiped the Prince of Physicians all his life.

It was necessary for them to circle to the east to avoid the war, which for all they knew, was still being fought in the territory of Hamadh
ā
n. But when they reached the capital city that gave the territory its name, Hamadh
ā
n appeared sleepy and peaceable, with no hint of the great slaughter that had taken place only a few miles away.

When Rob saw the house it seemed to him that it suited Ibn Sina better than the grand estate in Ispahan. This mud-and-stone house was like the clothing Ibn Sina always wore, unprepossessing, shabby and comfortable.

But within was the stench of illness.

Al-Juzjani jealously asked Rob to wait outside the chamber in which Ibn Sina lay. Moments later Rob heard a low murmur of voices and then, to his surprise and alarm, the unmistakable sound of a blow.

The young physician named Bibi al-Ghur
ī
emerged from the chamber. His face was white and he was weeping. He pushed past Rob without greeting and rushed from the house.

Al-Juzjani came out a short while later, followed by an elderly
mullah.

“The young charlatan has doomed Ibn Sina. When they arrived here, al-Ghur
ī
gave the Master celery seed to break the wind of the colic. But instead of two
danaqs
of seed he gave five
dirhams,
and ever since then Ibn Sina has passed great amounts of blood.”

There were six
d
ā
naqs
to a
dirham;
that meant that fifteen times the recommended dosage of the brutal cathartic had been given.

Al-Juzjani looked at him. “I myself served on the examining board that passed al-Ghur
ī
,” he said bitterly.

“You weren’t able to look into the future and see this mistake,” Rob said gently.

But al-Juzjani wasn’t to be consoled. “What a cruel irony,” he said, “that the great physician should be undone by an inept
hakim!”

“Is the Master aware?”

The
mullah
nodded. “He has freed his slaves and given his wealth to the poor.”

“May I go in?”

Al-Juzjani waved his hand.

Inside the chamber, Rob was shocked. In the four months since he had last seen him, Ibn Sina’s flesh had melted. His closed eyes were sunken, his face looked caved in, and his skin was waxen.