Chapter 6: The Three Doctors (cont'd)
-Tale of Ten Princes, A.D. 1200
Abd al-Latif felt as if his sandals glided across the very idea of the floor, not the floor itself. He felt himself imbued with a purpose, a deep desire to help the people of his host city, as well as a yearning to seek God, whereas he had been content before to simply worship as one with the rest. Now he felt the subtle shadow of God’s mighty hand brushing the curtains of hope at the back of his mind.
Abd al-Latif walked away from she who had inspired him in her misery; walked on without any anxious thought for the first time in his fifteen years of medical practice; walked on to his destiny across the well appointed room, down the long marble corridor, across the ceramic tiled court, until finally, when he reached the audience chamber, he heard his sandals touch like thunderclaps on the ringing tiles.
He felt warm all over, radiant of body, suffused of mind. His robes felt just right, soft as night and white as the moon's face. He felt no need to address his fellow doctors, but rather stood in the utmost serenity, his writing trance having followed him from his study to cloak him in confidence. He felt…like a Sultan of the mind.
The three who awaited him in the spare chamber of stools where the Commandant and his men met, did have their comforts. There were cushions upon the stools. There was a small pedestal upon which a slave, now having gone, had placed cool drinks made of baby tea that was brewed with citrus rinds and then let chill in a cellar.
Abdul Matin had declined to visit him out of shame after the castration and loss of 99 out of 100 boys down at the livestock pens where he consulted for the veterinarians. Out of pity, Abd al-Latif recognized him first with a slight bow and the lively little Berber fairly sprang to his feet and began to ramble, “So My dear al-Latif is the Commandant’s Chief Medical Advisor on the matter of this famine. God be with you brother—you look different somehow.”
Abyan Ibn-Musa, who specialized in the care of the frail, and the elderly, and attended to the Imams on behalf of the pious Sultan, was anxious, beside himself, as he rose in his white robes and red fez and spoke in a jittery tone, “I trust al-Latif that you shall get to the bottom of this detestable barbarism that is sweeping the land. It appears to be a contagious affliction of the morality and I fear my elderly father has fallen victim to it. He is –was—a stubborn old fellow and insisted on taking his walks along the canal bank. He and his boy servant made off there a week past never to be seen. I fear the poor have long ago picked their bones clean.”
‘The canal?’
‘Poor old fellow!’
Abd al-Latif took a seat and was pleasantly surprised when his voice took on a sonorous quality and seemed to relax his colleagues, who just now seemed as harried as he felt before gazing upon the eyes of the serene baby—his messenger from God, the hand that guided his footfalls upon this fateful path.
“Doctors I am working on a theory and have made my preliminary opinions known to the Commandant and Sultan.”
‘Oh my, I have yet to send off the letter. So be it. Continue’.
“I would learn from you, my colleagues. Awn al-Muzan was also to attend and lend his services.”
He paused for the collective snort of disdain, politely muffled, of course, and continued, “Al-Muzan and I were only saved from vile flesh-eating rascals and ruffians by my man Ibis and our quick-acting donkey boys. In the bazaar and along the side ways there is an obvious mania for the eating of human flesh, primarily it seems, the flesh of the children and the corpulent. I have in my possession a girl of pleasingly plump proportions who was being sold as flesh on the hoof so to speak. If we are to advise the Commandant in this matter we must pool our accounts.”
Abdul Matin, being a Berber and therefore presumptuous, impatient, prone to impulsive actions, and loud besides, jumped to be the first to speak. “As I am known to take on all kind of work, and with travelling being in my blood, I found myself in a situation. I was alone without my Turk or my donkey boy as propriety dictates when attending the chattel at master Efran’s flesh house.”
Abyan Ibn-Musa, the most pious and judgmental of their fraternity, could not contain himself. “Merciful God Abdul, is it not enough to wax penis roots in the eunuch gelding pens, but you most prostitute yourself to that half-Greek dog Efran?”
Abdul Matin, generally argumentative as those of the upstart classes tend to be, sprang to his own defense. “With all due respect Ibn-Musa, I’m a goddamned Berber. There are no princesses’ babies for me to deliver, no old money ailments for me to banish. Besides, someone has to do the dirty jobs. Imagine if we let the vaginal rot spread among the whores? Why sooner or later a good woman would become afflicted through the ministrations of a careless husband.
“In any case, my practice among the low is well known. Just two days ago a woman came to me outside of Efran’s. She seemed to have been once among the whores, but was now past her prime. I suppose she was going on fifty—a dry riverbed that surely is. So she claimed to have been in the employ of a guardsman who paid her to look after his invalid mother. She gave me two pieces of silver and bid me follow her. I expected to be making a call in the tax quarter as this was the quarter where Efran’s house is—as I know you fine doctors have never visited it or any like establishment—which would be a reasonable quarter for a guardsman with a fair income to settle his dependents.”
“Then, after some twists and turns I find myself following this old girl down increasingly narrow alleys that connect the tax quarter with the slums. I seized her be the shoulder and spoke as one does to such types.”
Abyan Ibn-Musa snorted, “I suppose you acquitted yourself quite fluently in the gutter speak of her ungodly kind.”
Abdul Matin grinned a false teeth-flashing grin at his social better and went along with the fun. “I do believe ‘vile gash of sin’ passed my lips. In any case I refused to follow any farther, convinced that I was being led into some ambush. I then remonstrated with her with more vehemence—ire even—and she took to her dirty heels without even a thought for her two pieces of silver. I will not forget the needlepoint look in her eyes, that look that the defiant guilty give when caught in the act and are yet unwilling to beg off.”
Abyan Ibn-Musa morosely completed the younger foreign doctor’s tale, “And so perhaps my aged father, a doctor who no longer took payment for his services among the poor, apparently fell into their clutches. I say perhaps the horsemen should just eradicate the lower orders if this is how they repay us for the walls we raise between them and the desert wind.”
Abdul Matin stood and clicked two silver-pieces together. “These are my good luck charms now. I know such sentiments are not pious. But my work rarely takes me among the pious likes of you fine men. I will keep my ear to the wall and keep you informed. Al-Latif, I have sent away to Alexandria, for a good friend, a doughty fellow that has been past the Rocks of Gibraltar to the Dog Isles, who has sailed the Black Coasts as far south as Zanzibar. He owes me, for I once saved his head from a Tuareg stake. After that old whore in the alley I have suffered from ominous portents and thought to partner with a man untroubled in such circumstances. Now I see clear that my debt to you—for the tall boy lived—can best be paid by transferring his debt to me to your cause.”
His cheek warmed and he felt his mouth widen. He was about to thank Abdul formally when Abyan Ibn-Musa congratulated the Berber in a less edifying manner. “On behalf of my old father—kind soul that he was—I forgive you your base heritage, your mean application of our art, and your overall crude ways. Abdul Matin, you I no longer look upon you as a Jew among the faithful, or a Frank among swine, but as a lesser brother of the medical arts—help avenge my father my upstart Fellow!”
The men hugged, the thick swarthy skin of Abdul Matin having easily absorbed the backhanded elements of Ibn-Musa’s snobbish address, permitting his mind to savor the acceptance among doctors that he so craves.
He looked to Nadar Siwa, his only real equal in skill and knowledge among the local doctors. Nadar Siwa came from a long line of scholars and physicians, and it was Abd al-Latif’s thought that perhaps he had recommended him for this honor, to lead the foremost doctors of Cairo against the famine. Nadar Siwa habitually went bare-headed and enveloped himself within a deep yellow robe, which obscured the slippers he had invented to cure his own foot ailment. Nadar wore his slippers everywhere, having used camel hide for the soles.
Nadar Siwa rose and expressed himself in his deep soothing tones that so endeared him to good people and poor alike. “Just yesterday I was approached at the shop of the Jew apothecary, Solomon—amiable fellow he is for one of his kind—by a man of means. This fellow I have known as a silk merchant, although the market for his goods are surely sparse these days. He asked me to accompany him to his house on The Way of Martyrs to attend his invalid father. I have been suspicious of making house calls after the disappearance of Ibn-Musa’s father. I have completely neglected the poor since they began eating their children. But this fellow, a certain Hurouni Ali down from Susa for decades now, well, he is the very example of good people I thought. I had seen him about, and knew of him by name but not acquaintance, and was glad to have a chance to make some money, as I have spent all of my previous year’s earnings on feeding my family—which you know to be vast—and on my good daughters’ dowries.
“As we made our way by the side route I began to become worried over his constant quoting of the Koran, ‘Today is the day of retribution, and a recompense double the good that has been done; let those who act, act with a view to such a reckoning.’ His repetition of this passage smacked of fanaticism. Yet, he gave out small coin willingly to many a downtrodden person. This made me feel guilty for my neglect of the poor as well as assured that I would be well-compensated. I was led by a leash of hope and tempted by a lure made of silver toward my doom.”
Nadar Siwa’s well-formed body quaked under his robes with emotion, much as little Ibrahm had twitched in his sleep after the ordeal among the tents.
‘Poor Siwa is still shaken from this ordeal and should be sedated I think.’
“Would you like some poppy paste Nadar Siwa, to calm your body?”
“Thank you al-Latif, I have already partaken today. Like I said the desire for profit urged me on, and my good opinion of this fellow—no matter how queer his holy admonishments—outweighed the alarms in my mind. Then, as a purported shortcut to the main thoroughfare I allowed myself to be taken into the entry of a half-ruined apartment block built over some stables, warehouses and shops. The alarms in my mind returned, but my desire for profit and the spell-like notion of good-company and piety cast by this man eased my seduction.
Nadar Siwa stopped, stepped to the pedestal and took a drink. He emptied the cup and then stepped back away from the other cups as if they were tempter’s in an alley. Then he continued. “Al-Latif, I felt such the fool when I looked at the dilapidated state of the stairs I was on and knew it to be no byway to The Way of Martyrs, but some pit into hell! As my companion stepped ahead to open the door I stopped on the stairs—midway up, but a good twenty steps up from the alley. Then the man’s crony came to him at the door and said, ‘After taking so long about it, have you at least brought some good game?’”
“Imagine my horror!” Siwa said with a shaking jaw. “I did spy a window to the side and up a few steps. I would surely have been run down on the stairs by the crony had I turned, for he was a wiry looking sort with a knife in his belt, the kind of man a doctor in fallen-arch slippers does not long outpace. I took three steps up and leaped out over the wood shingle roof through the window lattice and fell. A broken neck I thought would be better than being gutted and hung. Then the smell of horse manure came gloriously to me and a dunking into a hay pile saved my bones. I rolled to my feet and was confronted by a man who seemed displeased to have me in his stables. He was a bruiser, the sort you don’t tussle with. He was the master of the stable and wished to know my business there. I was afraid to tell him for fear that he was in league with the alms-giver Ali and his wicked crony. When my hesitation to speak was apparent—and I suppose the light of terror in my eyes as well—the stable master said, ‘I know what has happened to you. The men who lodge there entrap men and kill them.’”
“The stable master mounted me on a donkey and sent a boy with me by circuitous ways back to the apothecary shop, where I immediately prescribed poppy paste for my anxiety. I have pledged to look after the man’s health and that of his wife and children free of consideration.”
Nadar Siwa stopped his account abruptly and sat back down in a dark mood.
Abd al-Latif had a sinking feeling that the two most competent doctors here would be largely useless in the service of the Commandant, as they seemed already broken by their personal experiences. They had looked to him as a man of action, even though he was a coward, because of his experience as a traveler, his proven ability to cross the boundaries of humanity. But those boundaries were but divisions within the Realm-of-submission-to-God. He now contemplated a journey across an internal boundary that crossed the line between God’s Realm and that of The Deceiver. For companions in such an undertaking he must have men like Abdul Matin, base though he may be, who can be trusted not to retreat into their fetal mind under such alien stress.
‘I shall spare them my assessment that the Imam is correct, that The Deceiver has clawed his way up from the abyss to set man to feast upon man.
‘How is it that I feel so calm; that I know no such fear as Nadar Siwa, having experienced nigh the same terror?’
‘I must seek out the lily pedals of death. In the mean time, perhaps there is a use to be made of these broken-spirited healers who twiddle away with their fingers as their charges die in droves and turn to evil in packs.’
“Doctors as yet we have no evidence that good people have fallen upon the flesh of their fellows. It seems that you recount happenings in which the cunning of the poor has driven them to impersonate the good and lure good people to their doom. You must spread the word among your families, patients, and associated shopkeepers, as well as any horseman, warrior, donkey boy, or bully boy, to be on the lookout for such cunning characters. Deceit is the watchword.”
They nodded in vague agreement, likely to be as useless as a penis on a mule.
“You good doctors exchange the word, and be on the lookout that this flesh-eating habit does not spread to the good classes. If it does we may be lost. I fear that it may, so shall continue my search into the origin of this. After all, there has been famine before in this land, but never before this ravening curse. Abdul Matin, I will be calling upon you, so please, do not let yourself be eaten for two pieces of silver. And do bring your trustworthy man from Alexandria to me as soon as he arrives.”
He paced a turn for emphasis and made the rude eye with them all just to let them feel the gravity of his words more fully. “None of us, must venture out alone without a guard. It seems no accident that doctors are being targeted for death and consumption; as if some preternatural mind wishes no doctor to stand between some vile design and the good people as yet to be afflicted.
