"No physician at all, my great lord?" said the small, plump vizier, dry-voiced, dry-eyed.
"In Kerakek?" said the King of Kings, his voice bitter, enraged. "In this desert? Think where we are." There was blood welling as he spoke, from where the arrow lay in him, the shaft smeared black, fletched with black feathers. The king's beard was stained with his own dark blood.
The vizier bowed his head. Men moved to usher the three condemned physicians from the room. They offered no protest, no resistance. The sun was past its highest point by then, beginning to set, on a winter's day in Bassania in a remote fortress near the sands. Time was moving; what was to be had long ago been written.
Men find courage sometimes, unexpectedly, surprising themselves, changing the course of their own lives and times. The man who sank to his knees by the bed, pressing his head to the carpeted floor, was the military commander of the fortress of Kerakek. Wisdom, discretion, self-preservation all demanded he keep silent among the sleek, dangerous men of the court that day. Afterwards he could not have said why he did speak. He would tremble as with a fever, remembering, and drink an excess of wine, even on a day of abstinence.
"My king," he said in the firelit chamber, "we have a much-travelled physician here, in the village below the fortress. We might summon him?"
The Great King's gaze seemed already to be in another place, with Perun and the Lady, beyond the confines and small concerns of mortal life. He said, "Why kill another man?"
It was told of Shirvan, written on parchment and engraved on tablets of stone, that no man more merciful and compassionate, more imbued with the spirit of the goddess Anahita, had ever sat the throne in Kabadh holding the sceptre and the flower. But Anahita the Lady was also called the Gatherer, who summoned men to their ending.
Softly, the vizier murmured, "Why not do so? How can it matter, lord? May I send?"
The King of Kings lay still another moment, then he motioned assent, the gesture brief, indifferent. His rage seemed spent. His gaze, heavy-lidded, went to the fire and lingered there. Someone went out, at a sign from the vizier.
Time passed. In the desert beyond the fortress and the village below it a north wind rose. It swept across the sands, blowing and shifting them, erasing dunes, shaping others, and the lions, unhunted, took refuge in their caves among the rocks, waiting for night.
The blue moon, Anahita's, rose in the late afternoon, balancing the low sun. Within the fortress of Kerakek, men went forth into that dry wind to kill three physicians, to kill a son of the king, to summon a son of the king, to bear messages to Kabadh, to summon a priest with Holy Fire to the King of Kings in his room.
And to find and bring one other man.
Rustem of Kerakek, son of Zorah, sat cross-legged on the woven Ispahani mat he used for teaching. He was reading, occasionally glancing up to observe his four students as they carefully copied from one of his precious texts. Merovius on cataracts was the current matter; each student had a different page to transcribe. They would exchange them day by day until all of them had a copy of the treatise. Rustem was of the view that the ancient Trakesian's western approach was to be preferred in treatment of most-though not all-issues relating to the eye.
Through the window that overlooked the dusty roadway a breeze entered the room. It was mild as yet, not unpleasant, but Rustem could feel a storm in it. The sands would be blowing. In the village of Kerakek, below the fortress, the sand got into everything when the wind came from the desert. They were used to it, the taste in their food, the gritty feel in their clothing and bed sheets, in their own intimate places.
From behind the students, in the arched interior doorway that led to the family quarters, Rustem heard a slight rustling sound; he glimpsed a shadow on the floor. Shaski had arrived at his usual post beyond the beaded curtain, and would be waiting for the more interesting part of the afternoon lessons to begin. His son, at seven years of age, showed both patience and a fierce determination. A little less than a year ago he'd begun dragging a small mat of his own from his bedroom to a position just outside the teaching room. He would sit cross-legged upon it, spending as much of the afternoon as he was allowed listening through the curtain as his father gave instruction. If taken away by his mothers or the household servants he would find his way back to the corridor as soon as he could escape.
Rustem's two wives were both of the view that it was inappropriate for a small child to listen to explicit details of bloody wounds and bodily fluxes, but the physician found the boy's interest amusing and had negotiated with his wives to allow Shaski to linger outside the door if his own lessons and duties had been fulfilled. The students seemed to enjoy the boy's unseen presence in the hallway as well, and once or twice they'd invited him to voice an answer to his father's questions.
There was something endearing, even to a careful, reserved man, in a seven-year-old proclaiming, as was required, "With this affliction I will contend," and then detailing his proposed treatment of an inflamed, painful toe or a cough with blood and loose matter in it. The interesting thing, Rustem thought, idly stroking his neat, pointed beard, was that Shaski's answers were very often to the point. He'd even had the boy answer a question once to embarrass a student caught unprepared after a night's drinking, though later that evening he'd regretted doing so. Young men were entitled to visit taverns now and again. It taught them about the lives and pleasures of common men, kept them from aging too soon. A physician needed to be aware of the nature of people and their weaknesses and not be harsh in his judgement of ordinary folly. Judgement was for Perun and Anahita.
The feel of his own beard reminded him of a thought he'd had the night before: it was time to dye it again. He wondered if it was still necessary to be streaking the light brown with grey. When he'd returned from ispahani and the Ajbar Islands four years ago, settling in his home town and opening a physician's practice and a school, he'd considered it prudent to gain a measure of credibility by making himself look older. In the east, the Ispahani physician-priests would lean on walking sticks they
didn't need, gain weight deliberately, dole out words in measured cadences or with eyes focused on inward visions, all to present the desired image of dignity and success.
There had been some real presumption in a man of twenty-seven putting himself forward as a teacher of medicine at an age when many were just beginning their studies. Indeed, two of his pupils that first year had been older than he was. He wondered if they'd known it.
After a certain point, though, didn't your practice and your teaching speak for themselves? In Kerakek, here on the edge of the southern deserts, Rustem was respected and even revered by the villagers, and he had been summoned often to the fortress to deal with injuries and ailments among the soldiers, to the anger and chagrin of a succession of military doctors. Students who wrote to him and then came this far for his teaching-some of them even Sarantine Jad-worshippers, crossing the border from Amoria-were unlikely to turn around and go away when they discovered that Rustem of Kerakek was no ancient sage but a young husband and father who happened to have a gift for medicine and to have read and travelled more widely than most.