The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (89 page)

Rob watched Al
ā
ride straight for the enemy camp. When he was close, he reined up the horse and stood in the stirrups as he shouted his challenge. Rob couldn’t hear the words, only a thin, unintelligible shouting. But some of the king’s people could hear. They had been raised on the legend of Ardewan and Ardeshir and the first duel to choose a
Shahanshah,
and from the top of the wall rose the sound of cheering. In the Ghazna camp, a small group of horsemen rode down from the area of officers’ tents. The man in the lead wore a white turban but Rob couldn’t tell if it was Mas
ū
d. Wherever Mas
ū
d was, if he had heard of Ardewan and Ardeshir and the ancient battle for the right to be King of Kings, he cared nothing for legends.

A troop of archers on fast horses burst from the Afghan ranks.

The white stallion was the fastest horse Rob had ever seen, but Al
ā
didn’t try to outrun them. He stood in the stirrups again. This time, Rob was certain, he shouted taunts and insults at the young Sultan who would not fight.

When the soldiers were almost on him, Al
ā
readied his bow and began to flee on the white horse, but there was no place to run. Riding hard, he turned in the saddle and loosed a bolt that felled the leading Afghan, a perfect Parthian shot that drew cheers from those watching on the wall. But an answering hail of arrows found him.

Four arrows found his horse as well. A red gush appeared at the stallion’s mouth. The white beast slowed and then stopped and stood, swaying, before it crashed to the ground with its dead rider.

Rob was taken unawares by his sadness.

He watched them tie a rope to Al
ā
’s ankles and then pull him to the Ghazna camp, raising a trail of gray dust. For a reason Rob didn’t understand, he was especially bothered by the fact that they dragged the king over the ground face down.

He took the brown horse to the paddock behind the royal stables and removed the saddle. It was a task to open the massive gate alone but the place was as unattended as the rest of the House of Paradise, and he manhandled it himself.

“Goodbye, friend,” he said.

He slapped the horse on the rump and when it joined the herd he shut the gate carefully. Only God knew who would own the brown horse by morning.

At the camel paddock he collected a pair of halters from the impedimenta hanging in an open shed and chose the two young, strong females he wanted. They knelt in the dust chewing their cuds, watching his approach.

The first tried to bite off his arm when he drew near with the bridle; but Mirdin, that most gentle of men, had shown him how to reason with camels, and he punched the animal so hard in the ribs that the breath whistled from between the square yellow teeth. After that the camel was tractable and the other animal gave no trouble, as though it learned by observation. He rode the larger and led the second beast on a rope.

At the Gates of Paradise the young sentry was gone, and as Rob traveled into the city it appeared Ispahan had gone mad. People were rushing everywhere, bearing bundles and leading animals laden with their belongings. The Avenue of Ali and Fatima was in an uproar; a runaway horse
careered past Rob, causing the camels to shy. In the marketplaces, some of the merchants had abandoned their goods. He saw covetous glances directed at the camels, and he took his sword from its sheath and held it across his lap as he rode. He had to make a wide berth around the eastern part of the city in order to reach Yehuddiyyeh; people and animals already were backed up for a quarter of a mile as they tried to flee Ispahan through the eastern gate to evade the enemy camped beyond the western wall.

When he reached the house, Mary opened the door at his call, her face ashen and her father’s sword still in her hand.

“We are going home.”

She was terrified but he saw her lips moving in thanksgiving.

He took off the turban and Persian clothing and put on his black caftan and the leather Jew’s hat.

They assembled his copy of Ibn Sina’s
Canon of Medicine,
the anatomical drawings rolled and inserted into a length of bamboo, his casebook, his kit of medical tools, Mirdin’s game, foodstuffs and a few drugs, her father’s sword and a small box containing their money. All this was packed on the smaller camel.

From one side of the larger camel he hung a reed basket and from the other, a loosely woven sack. He had a tiny amount of
buing
in a small vial, just enough to allow him to wet the end of his little finger and let Rob J. suckle the fingertip, and then do the same for Tam. When they were sleeping he placed the older boy in the basket and the baby in the sack, and their mother mounted the camel to ride between them.

It wasn’t quite dark when they left the little house in Yehuddiyyeh for the last time, but they didn’t dare delay, since the Afghans could fall upon the city at any moment.

Darkness was complete by the time he led the two camels through the deserted western gate. The hunting trail they followed through the hills passed so close to the Ghazna campfires that they could hear singing and shouting, and the shrill cries of the Afghans working themselves into a frenzy for the pillaging.

Once a horseman seemed to be galloping straight at them, yipping as he rode, but the hoofbeats veered away.

The
buing
began to wear off and Rob J. started to whimper and then to cry. Rob thought the sound doomingly loud, but Mary took the boy from the basket and silenced him with her teat.

There was no pursuit. Soon they left the campfires behind, but when Rob looked back whence they had come a roseate nimbus had appeared low in the sky and he knew Ispahan was burning.

They traveled all night and when the first thin light of morning came, he saw he had led them out of the hills and no soldiers were in sight. His body was numb, and his feet … he knew that when he stopped walking pain would be another enemy. By this time both children were wailing and his gray-faced wife rode with closed eyes, but Rob didn’t stop. He forced his tired legs to continue to plod, leading the camels west, toward the first of the Jewish villages.

PART SEVEN
The Returned

75

LONDON

They crossed the great channel on March 24, Anno Domini 1043, and touched land late in the afternoon at Queen’s Hythe. Perhaps if they had come to the city of London on a warm summer’s day the rest of their lives might have been different, but Mary landed in a sleety spring rain carrying her younger son, who, like his father, had retched and vomited from France till journey’s end, and she disliked and mistrusted London from the damp bleakness of the first moment.

There was scarcely room to disembark; of fearsome black naval ships alone, Rob counted more than a score riding the swells at anchor, and merchant craft were everywhere. They were, all four, exhausted by travel. They made their way to one of the market inns Rob remembered at Southwark but it proved a sorry haven, crawling with vermin that added to their misery.

At earliest light next morning he set out alone to find them a better place, walking down the causeway and over London Bridge, which was in good repair, the least changed detail of the city. London had grown; where there had been meadows and orchards he saw unfamiliar structures and streets that meandered as crazily as those in Yehuddiyyeh. The northern quarter of the town made a complete stranger of him, for when he was a boy it had been a neighborhood of manor houses set off by fields and gardens, the properties of old families. Now some of these had been sold and the land converted to use by the dirtier trades. There was an iron works, and the goldsmiths had their own cluster of houses and shops, as did the silversmiths and the copper workers. It was not a place he chose to live, with its pall of misty wood smoke, the stink of the tanneries, the constant clang of hammers on anvils, the roaring of the furnaces, and the tapping, beating, and banging of work and industry.

Every neighborhood came up lacking something in his eyes. Cripple
gate was hard by the undrained moor, Halborn and Fleet Street remote from the center of London, Cheapside too crowded with retail business. The lower part of the city was even more congested but it had been a heroic part of his childhood and he found himself drawn back to the waterfront.

Thames Street was the most important street in London. In the squalor of the narrow lanes that ran from Puddle Dock on one end of it and Tower Hill on the other lived porters, stevedores, servants, and other unprivileged folk, but the long stretch of Thames Street itself and its wharves were the prosperous center of the export, import, and wholesale trades. On the south side of the street, the river wall and the quays compelled a certain amount of alignment, but the north side ran crazily, sometimes narrow, sometimes broad. In places, great houses pushed gabled fronts out as pregnant overhangs. Sometimes a small fenced garden poked out or a warehouse stood back, and most of the time the street was filled with humanity and animals whose vital effluvia and sounds he remembered well.

In a tavern he inquired about empty housing and was told of a place not far from the Walbrook. It proved to be next to the small Church of St. Asaph, and he told himself Mary would like that. On the ground floor lived the landlord, Peter Lound. The second floor was to let, being one small room and one large room for general living, connected to the busy street below by the steep stairway.

There was no sign of bugs and the price seemed fair. And it was a good location, for along the better side streets on the rising land to the north, wealthy merchants lived and kept their shops.

Rob lost no time in going to Southwark to fetch his family.

“Not yet a fine home. But it will do, will it not?” he asked his wife.

Mary’s eyes were timid and her reply was lost in the sudden ringing of the bells of St. Asaph’s, which proved to be very loud.

As soon as they were settled he hurried to a sign-maker’s and ordered the man to carve an oak board and blacken the letters. When the sign was done, it was fastened next to the doorway of the house on Thames Street, so all might see it was the home of Robert Jeremy Cole, Physician.

At first it was pleasant for Mary to be among Britons and speak English, although she continued to address her sons in Erse, wanting them to have the language of the Scots. The chance to obtain things in London was heady fare. She found a seamstress and ordered a dress of decent brown stuff. She would have wished a blue such as the dye her father once had given her, a blue like summer sky, but of course that was impossible.
Nevertheless, this dress was comely—long, girdled, with a high round neck and sleeves so loose they fell away from her wrists in luxurious folds.

For Rob they ordered good gray trousers and a kirtle. Though he protested the extravagance, she bought him two black physician’s robes, one of light unlined stuff for summer and the other heavier and with a hood trimmed in fox. New garments were overdue him, since he still wore the clothing bought in Constantinople after they had completed the trail of Jewish safe places like following a chain, link by link. He had trimmed the bushy beard to a goatee and traded for Western dress, and by the time they joined a caravan, Jesse ben Benjamin had disappeared. In his place was Robert Jeremy Cole, an Englishman taking his family home.

Ever frugal, Mary had kept the caftan and used the material to make garments for her sons. She saved Rob J.’s clothing for Tam, though this was made difficult by the fact that Rob J. was large for his age and Tam slightly smaller than most boys because he had experienced grave illness on their journey west. In the Frankish town of Freising both children had been taken by quinsy throats and watery eyes, and then racked by hot fevers that terrified her with the thought of losing her sons. The children had been febrile for days; Rob J. was left with no visible defect but the illness had settled in Tam’s left leg, which became pallid and appeared to be lifeless.

The Cole family had come to Freising with a caravan that was soon scheduled to depart, and the caravan master said he wouldn’t wait for illness.

“Go and be damned,” Rob had told him, because the child required treatment and would receive it. He had kept hot moist bandages on Tam’s limb, going without sleep in order to change them constantly and to engulf the small leg in his large hands and bend the knee and work the muscles again and again, and to pinch and squeeze and knead the leg with bear fat.

Tam recovered, but slowly. He had been walking less than a year when stricken; he had had to learn again to creep and to crawl, and this time when he took his first steps he was off balance, the left leg being slightly shorter than the other.

They were in Freising not quite twelve months waiting for Tam’s recovery and then for a suitable caravan. Although he never learned to love the Franks, Rob came to mellow somewhat regarding Frankish ways. People had come to him there for doctoring despite his ignorance of their language, having seen the care and tenderness with which he treated his own child. He had never stopped working on Tam’s leg, and although the boy sometimes dragged his left foot a bit when he walked, he was among the most active children in London.