The Galileans: A Novel of Mary Magdalene (16 page)

“A physician to treat your father,” Matthat said sharply. “Stand aside, buffoon!”

“We need no physicians,” the thief growled. “Today I sacrificed to Serapis. He will soon be well.”

“Achillas asked me to bring a physician. Enough of this! I want Joseph of Galilee to see him.”

“Bloodsucking Jews!” Manetho stepped aside but spat at the floor beside their feet in eloquent contempt. “We run the risk and you make the profit.”

“And where would you be if I did not sell what you steal?” Matthat demanded urbanely. “Other bands of thieves would be glad to have me turn their takings into gold.”

They entered a fairly large room, hollowed out of the earth and lit by oil lamps. Although the air was chilly it was not foul, so Joseph judged that there must be an opening on the surface above, perhaps hidden by another tomb. In one corner, a brazier glowed with a pot over it from which arose the savory odor of bubbling stew. Several men were gathered about the brazier, and in the corner of the room an old man with white hair lay on a couch. Beside him was a beautiful dark-skinned girl dressed in white.

“Shalom, Matthat,” the old man said courteously. “I welcome you in the manner of your people.”

“Shalom, Achillas,” Matthat replied. “I have brought with me a skilled physician, Joseph of Galilee.”

The girl’s face brightened. She was quite beautiful, Joseph saw, with finely chiseled features, dark hair that fell to her shoulders, and a lovely figure. “This is Albina, Joseph,” Matthat said. “She dances in the Alexandrian Theater.”

“Welcome, Joseph of Galilee,” the girl said in a low musical voice, bowing low. “Cure my father of this grave illness and you may call upon us for whatever you wish, even our lives.”

Behind them Manetho snorted, “Jews!” but Achillas spoke sharply to him and, still glowering, Manetho joined the men beside the brazier. “Forgive the rudeness of my son, I beg you,” the old man said quietly. “He is a boor and a disgrace to the Greek blood we bear in our bodies with that of Egypt. I have been grievously ill and the fever is still upon me. If you have a potent medicine . . .”

“Let me examine you first,” Joseph suggested courteously. “Perhaps I can do something to help you then.”

He had little difficulty in making the diagnosis; the condition had been graphically described by Hippocrates nearly five hundred years before. First came an inflammation of the lungs, easily understandable in an old man who lived amidst dampness and cold. Then followed the exudation of fluid inside the chest and its change into a purulent accumulation, slowly poisoning the victim. Most physicians advocated waiting for the empyema to rupture through the lung, an event that occurred in far less than half the cases. But Hippocrates and a few daring surgeons after him had advocated a more direct treatment, draining the poisonous exudate by making an opening between the ribs directly through the chest wall. Joseph wondered if he dare advocate this procedure here, upon the leader of a gang of thieves, with the scowling son waiting in the background for an excuse to intervene.

He hesitated only a moment, however, for, true to his profession, he could recommend only that treatment which seemed to promise some hope of a cure, regardless of the consequences to himself. Watching him anxiously from beside the couch, the daughter Albina said, “There is hope; I can see it in your face.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “I believe your father can be cured. But surgery is necessary.”

She caught her breath. “The knife!”

“The knife is for embalmers,” Manetho growled. “My father is not dead.”

“There is an accumulation inside his chest,” Joseph explained. “It must be drained away or he will be poisoned by it.”

“I have felt the heaviness in my side for many days,” Achillas agreed. “Do what you must, Joseph. But do it quickly. Already the poison is sapping my strength.”

Joseph had brought the small case in which he carried his instruments and medicines, so little preparation was required. True to the description by Hippocrates, the spaces between the ribs on the right side of Achillas’s chest were filled out, as if distended by the purulent accumulation deeper within the cavity. With the old man lying on his left side, Joseph tensed the skin between two of the lower ribs beneath the armpit and cut quickly through the skin and fatty tissue down to the muscle in one clean stroke, opening a wound about a hand’s breadth in length.

Blood spurted from tiny vessels, and Achillas gasped with the sudden stab of pain. Had Bana Jivaka been there he might have induced the strange trance and thus prevented the old man from feeling pain, but Joseph was not yet adept in bringing on the stupor. Besides, he thought it advisable not to do anything startling in the face of Manetho’s obvious suspicion.

Matthat had sickened at the first sight of blood, and it was the girl Albina who helped Joseph, handing him the pad of washed wool that he packed into the wound to stop the bleeding and holding an oil lamp where he could see. While he waited for the tiny vessels to be closed by clot, he could not help admiring the graceful way Albina moved.

She reminded him of Mary, and then he remembered that she, too, was a dancer and made a mental note to ask if Albina knew anything about her.

Holding the wound open with the fingers of his left hand, Joseph now slit the whitish tough tissue over the muscles for the length of the incision, separating the pinkish muscle fibers with the handle of the knife. He could see a second layer of muscle running in the other direction, and this he cut through carefully lest the crossing effect of the strands close the opening through which he hoped to drain the poisonous material.

Deep in the wound Joseph could now feel a tense layer that was like a drumhead. Slowly he slid the scalpel down along his index finger until it pressed upon the drumlike tissue. The point engaged the tough layer, and as he slowly increased the pressure upon the scalpel handle, he felt the blade cut through the almost gristly wall of the accumulated empyema. Then a sudden nauseating stench told him he had found his goal.

“Sacred Mother of Horus!” Albina breathed. “How could he live with that in his body?”

Joseph worked rapidly, letting the thick, foul accumulation pour from the cavity where it had been dammed up. When it was empty, he rolled a square of wool into a tube and slipped it through the opening, where it would act as a wick and keep the wound edges from closing together too soon. The whole thing had taken less than half an hour.

Achillas took a deep breath in spite of the pain. “Ahh!” he exclaimed. “Already a great load has been lifted from me. You have performed a miracle, Joseph.”

“Not a miracle,” Joseph corrected him. “An ordinary surgical operation.”

“But not one many physicians would attempt, even in Alexandria,” Albina said warmly. “We owe you our lives for saving my father.”

“I ask no fee,” Joseph told them. “You are friends of Matthat, who is also my friend. That is enough.”

“No,” Achillas said firmly. “I know it is written in the ancient writings of the Jews that in all labor there is profit. Bring me the small pouch from the chest there in the corner, Albina.”

Joseph was washing his hands when the girl returned. While he dried them, Achillas fumbled with the strings of the pouch and tumbled something out into his palm. “Take this,” he said, handing it to Joseph. “It was to be Albina’s wedding portion.

“You need not hesitate,” he added. “It was bought, not stolen.”

Joseph had no choice but to accept the gift if he was to avoid offending the old man. It was a large pearl, almost as big as a small egg. “Won’t you take this back as a gift from me?” he asked the girl. “I wish no pay for helping your father.”

But the beautiful dark-skinned dancer shook her head. “My father’s life is worth more to me than jewels. Take it, please, from both of us. You have earned it ten times over.”

Joseph put the pearl into his purse. “I will sell it, then,” he told them, “and give the money to the poor.”

As he gathered up his instruments and supplies, he saw that the young thief Manetho’s face was dark with anger. And when they were leaving the Necropolis, Matthat warned, “I may have underestimated Manetho, Joseph. He would gladly stick a knife between your ribs to get that pearl. Give it to me to sell, and I will see that he knows you no longer have it. The money will be safe with a moneylender and will earn interest for you until you return to Jerusalem.”

Joseph gladly gave Matthat the jewel since he had no wish for his body to be found floating in the Agathadaemon Canal the next morning.

At the canal, Matthat hailed one of the boats for hire that plied back and forth between Lake Mareotis, the Harbor of the Happy Return, and the main part of the city itself. Joseph left him there and went on through the Rhakotis alone. It was said of the Alexandrians that they slept by day and roistered the whole night long and, looking about him tonight, Joseph could well believe it. The weather was still warm, although winter was approaching, and the babbling of voices in every tongue of the world filled the air. Brawny sailors and fishermen from the waterfront ranged the narrow streets arm in arm. Those they met were forced to scurry into doorways for protection or be knocked sprawling into the stone-paved street. On almost every corner was a drinking house from which came shouts and coarse laughter mingled with the happy squeals of the women who thronged there with the men.

It was on just such a warm night as this, Joseph remembered, that he had walked across the city of Magdala to Demetrius’s house with Mary and she had kissed him before going inside. He wondered if he would ever find her here in this teeming city. The quest seemed hopeless now, for she had apparently failed in her ambition to become an important figure in the theater of Alexandria, and he did not know where else to look for her. She might even have left the city in her disappointment, going perhaps to Ephesus, Antioch, or even Rome, all of which had large theaters.

Obeying an impulse to see if he could learn anything about Mary at the waterfront, Joseph turned along a street leading to the Great Harbor. The spars of hundreds of vessels were always visible where the streets opened upon the harbor, and if Mary had sailed for Rome or another city, it would have been from the great quay.

When he came out upon the jetty near the Heptastadium, Joseph stopped in astonishment. It was the first time he had come here at night, and he was not prepared for what he saw. A mirror reflected seaward the light of the great fires built nightly on the platform atop the Pharos, but the flames themselves were bright enough to light up the harbor and the great broad causeway leading across it to the island upon which the lighthouse stood. Along the waterfront streets and the causeway itself a great crowd of people—the largest Joseph had ever seen—was moving in the nightly promenade of the Alexandrians, a sight to be seen nowhere else in the world.

In Judea women did not go out at night, except when accompanied by their menfolk. This crowd, however, teemed with unattached women of every nationality, every color, every social level, for the Heptastadium was in truth the meeting place of all Alexandrians. A haughty Roman wife walked idly along in her finery, perhaps to meet a lover, attended by a coal-black slave girl naked above the snow-white cloth wrapped about her body as a skirt. Almost touching the respectable matron, a courtesan ambled with the peculiar undulating gait of her tribe, cheeks painted with antimony, eyelids dripping with kohl, lips vivid with carmine, gazing boldly at the men she met and smiling an invitation to any who looked prosperous. Dark-skinned Egyptian girls walked with blond descendants of the soldiers brought here by Alexander and much more recently by the legions of Caesar. Actually, it seemed to Joseph that there were more courtesans in Alexandria than respectable women, which was not far from the truth.

In a Jewish community, these painted women would have been stoned by an outraged populace. Lest he find temptation stronger than his will, Joseph turned toward the quays themselves where the work of loading and unloading ships went on both night and day. If Mary had left Alexandria, someone among the mariners who sailed regularly to all the seaport cities of the empire might remember her and Demetrius, or at least the height and the hawklike profile of the Nabatean, Hadja.

He stopped to speak to Phoenician traders, tall men with long hair and jutting beaks of noses guarding piled-up bales of the rich purple fabric used for Roman uniforms, but learned nothing. Then he went on to question sailors who had traveled beyond the Pillars of Hercules to the land called Britannia, returning with vast stores of amber and crude tin, but to no avail.

All the produce in which men traded the world over lay on the massive wharves of this great free port where no customs fees were charged on goods transshipped to other destinations. Silken cloth and cheaper cotton fabric from the far-distant domain of the Han emperors; apes, peacocks, and precious jewels from the ports of Malabar; spices and precious incense from the cities of Arabia; ivory and gold from the land of the blacks called Nubia—these and hundreds of other goods filled the quays and the great warehouses. Long lines of slaves marched up and down the gangplanks under the whips of the overseers, handling cargo even at night. For the sea lanes of the world radiated from this teeming port, and from the bottomless granary of the Nile Valley flowed an endless stream of grain for Rome and its soldiers. But none of the ships’ captains remembered taking as passengers a girl whose hair was as red as the sunset over Lake Mareotis, a fat Greek musician, and a man of the deserts.

Although Joseph was disappointed in his search for Mary, he was not unhappy concerning his other purpose in coming to Alexandria, that of learning more about his profession. Under the tutelage of Bana Jivaka he was able to go directly to the source of this rich fountain of learning: the great Museum that stood between the Street of Canopus and the waterfront. Actually the Museum was part of a larger building or palace that formed in its entirety a university for the study of science and other subjects. The teachers took their meals in a large hall from which opened a series of arcades where students walked and conversed with the professors between lectures. Nearby were rooms where the lecturers gave their discourses.