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There were worse things than a village practice in Bassania, he had decided the next morning, and he had not wavered since, though ambition would sometimes rise up within him and speak otherwise, seductive and dangerous as a Kabadh courtesan. Rustem had spent much of his adult life trying to appear older than he was. He wasn’t old, though. Not yet. Had wondered, more than once, in the twilight hours when such thoughts tended to arrive, what he would do if opportunity and risk came knocking.
Looking back, afterwards, he couldn’t remember if there was a knock that day. The whirlwind speed of what ensued had been very great, and he might have missed it. It seemed to him, however, that the outside door had simply banged open, without warning, nearly striking the patient waiting by the wall, as booted soldiers came striding in, filling the quiet room to bursting with the chaos of the world.
Rustem knew one of them, the leader: he had been stationed in Kerakek a long time. The man’s face was distorted now, eyes dilated, fevered-looking. His voice, when he spoke, rasped like a woodcutter’s saw. He said, ‘You are to come! Immediately! To the fortress!’
‘There has been an accident?’ Rustem asked from his mat, keeping his own voice modulated, ignoring the peremptory tone of the man, trying to reestablish calm with his own tranquillity. This was part of a physician’s training, and he wanted his students to see him doing it. Those coming to them were often agitated; a doctor could not be. He took note that the soldier had been facing east when he spoke his first words. A neutral omen. The man was of the warrior caste, of course, which would be either good or bad, depending on the caste of the afflicted person. The wind was north: not good, but no birds could be seen or heard through the window, which counterbalanced that, somewhat.
‘An accident! Yes!’ cried the soldier, no calm in him at all. ‘Come! It is the King of Kings! An arrow!’
Poise deserted Rustem like conscripted soldiers facing Sarantine cavalry. One of his students gasped in shock. The woman with the afflicted eye collapsed to the floor in an untidy, wailing heap. Rustem stood up quickly, trying to order his racing thoughts. Four men had entered. An unlucky number. The woman made five. Could she be counted, to adjust the omens?
Even as he swiftly calculated auspices, he strode to the large table by the door and snatched his small linen bag. He hurriedly placed several of his herbs and pots inside and took his leather case of surgical implements. Normally he would have sent a student or a servant ahead with the bag, to reassure those in the fortress and to avoid being seen rushing out-of-doors himself, but this was not a circumstance that allowed for ordinary conduct. It is the King of Kings!
Rustem became aware that his heart was pounding. He struggled to control his breathing. He felt giddy, light-headed. Afraid, in fact. For many reasons. It was important not to show this. Claiming his walking stick, he slowed deliberately and put a hat on his head. He turned to the soldier. Carefully facing north, he said, ‘I am ready. We can go.’
The four soldiers rushed through the doorway ahead of him. Pausing, Rustem made an effort to preserve some order in the room he was leaving. Bharai, his best student, was looking at him.
‘You may practise with the surgical tools on vegetables, and then on pieces of wood, using the probes,’ Rustem said. ‘Take turns evaluating each other. Send the patients home. Close the shutters if the wind rises. You have permission to build up the fire and use oil for sufficient light.’
‘Master,’ said Bharai, bowing.
Rustem followed the soldiers out the door.
He paused in the garden and, facing north again, feet together, he plucked three shoots of bamboo. He might need them for probes. The soldiers were waiting impatiently in the roadway, agitated and terrified. The air pulsed with anxiety. Rustem straightened, murmured his prayer to Perun and the Lady and turned to follow them. As he did, he observed Katyun and Jarita at the front door of the house. There was fear in their eyes: Jarita’s were enormous, even seen at a distance. She stared at him silently, leaning against Katyun for support, holding the baby. One of the soldiers must have told the women what was happening.
He gave them both a reassuring nod and saw Katyun nod calmly back as she put her arm around Jarita’s shoulders. They would be all right. If he came back.
He went through the small gate into the road, taking his first step with his right foot, glancing up for any signs among the birds. None to be seen: they had all taken shelter from the rising wind. No omens there. He wished there hadn’t been four soldiers sent. Someone ought to have known better. Little to be done about that now, however. He would burn incense at the fortress, in propitiation. Rustem gripped his stick and struggled to present an appearance of equanimity. He didn’t think he was succeeding. The King of Kings. An arrow.
He stopped abruptly in the dusty road.
And in the moment he did so, cursing himself for a fool, preparing to go back to the treatment rooms, knowing how very bad an omen that would be, he heard someone speak from behind him.
‘Papa,’ said a small voice.
Rustem turned, and saw what his son was holding in both hands. His heart stopped for a moment then, or it felt as though it did. He swallowed, with sudden difficulty. Forced himself to take another deep breath, standing very still now just outside the gate.
‘Yes, Shaski,’ he said quietly. He looked at the small boy in the garden and a strange calm descended upon him. His students and the patients watched in a knotted cluster from the portico, the soldiers from the roadway, the women from the other doorway. The wind blew.
‘The man said . . . he said an arrow, Papa.’
And Shaski extended his two small hands, offering his father the implement he’d carried out into the yard.
‘He did say that, didn’t he?’ said Rustem, gravely. ‘I should take that with me then, shouldn’t I?’
Shaski nodded his head. His small form straight, dark brown eyes serious as a priest’s with an offering. He is seven years old, Rustem thought. Anahita guard him.
He went back through the wooden gate, and he bent and took the slender instrument in its leather sheath from the boy. He had brought it back from Ispahani, a parting gift from his teacher there.
The soldier had indeed said there was an arrow. Rustem felt a sudden, quite unexpected desire to lay a hand upon the head of his son, on the dark brown, curling hair, to feel the warmth, and the smallness. It had to do, of course, with the fact that he might not come back from the fortress. This might be a farewell. One could not decline to treat the King of Kings, and depending on where the arrow had lodged . . .
Shaski’s expression was so intense, it was as if he actually had some preternatural apprehension of this. He couldn’t, of course, but the boy had just saved him from the terrible auspice of having to re-enter the treatment room after walking out and taking his bamboo reeds, or sending someone back in for him.
Rustem found that he was unable to speak. He looked down at Shaski for another moment, then glanced over at his wives. There was no time to say anything to them, either. The world had entered through his doorway, after all. What was to be had long ago been written.
Rustem turned and went quickly back out through the gate and then with the soldiers up the steep road in the north wind that was blowing. He didn’t look back, knowing the omen attached to that, but he was certain that Shaski was still standing there and watching him, alone in the garden now, straight as a spear, small as a reed by a riverbank.
Vinaszh, son of Vinaszh, the military commander of the southern fortress of Kerakek, had been born even farther to the south, in a tiny oasis of palms east of Qandir, a sparse, spring-fed island of greenery with desert all around. It was a market village, of course. Goods and services exchanged with the dark, grim peoples of the sands as they came riding in on their camels and went back out again, receding and then disappearing on the shimmering horizon.
Growing up as a merchant’s son, Vinaszh came to know the nomadic tribes quite well, both in times of trade and peace and during those seasons when the Great King sent armies south in yet another fruitless attempt to force access to the western sea beyond the sands. The desert, at least as much as the wild tribesmen who shifted across its face, had made this impossible, again and again. Neither the sands nor those who dwelled there were inclined to be subdued.
But his childhood in the south had made Vinaszh— who had chosen the army over a merchant’s life—an excellent, obvious choice to take control of one of the desert fortresses. It represented a rare measure of clear thinking on the part of officials in Kabadh that he was, in fact, appointed to govern Kerakek when he attained sufficient rank, rather than being given command of, say, soldiers guarding a fishing port in the north, dealing with fur-clad traders and raiders from Moskav. Sometimes the military succeeded in doing things properly, almost in spite of itself. Vinaszh knew the desert, was properly respectful of it and those who dwelled there. He could manage some of the dialects of the nomads, spoke a little of the Kindath tongue, and was unruffled by sand in his bed or clothing or folds of skin.
Still, there was nothing at all in the background of the man to suggest that the soldier son of Vinaszh the trader might have had the rashness to speak up among the mightiest figures of Bassania and offer the uninvited suggestion that a small-town physician—one not even of the priestly caste—be summoned to the King of Kings where he was dying.
Among other things, the words put the commander’s own life at risk. He was a dead man if someone afterwards were to decide that the country doctor’s treatment had hastened or caused the death of the king—even though Great Shirvan had already turned his face to the fire as if looking in the flames for Perun of the Thunder, or the dark figure of the Lady.
The arrow was in him, very deep. Blood continued to seep slowly from it, darkening the sheets of the bed and the linens that had been bunched around the wound. It seemed a wonder, in fact, that the king still breathed, still remained among them, fixedly watching the dance of the flames while a wind from the desert rose outside. The sky had darkened.
Shirvan seemed disinclined to offer his courtiers any last words of guidance or to formally name an heir, though he’d made a gesture that implied his choice. Kneeling beside the bed, the king’s third son, Murash, who had covered his own head and shoulders with hot ashes from the hearth, was rocking back and forth, praying. None of the other royal sons was present. Murash’s voice, rising and falling in rapid incantation, was the only human sound in the room other than the laboured rhythm of the Great King’s breathing.
In that stillness, and even with the keening of the wind, the sound of booted feet was clearly heard when it finally came from the corridor. Vinaszh drew a breath and briefly closed his eyes, invoking Perun, ritually cursing Azal the Eternal Enemy. Then he turned and saw the door open to admit the physician who had cured him of an embarrassing rash he’d contracted during an autumn reconnaissance towards the Sarantine border towns and forts.
The doctor, trailed by Vinaszh’s obviously terrified captain of the guard, entered a few steps and then paused, leaning on his staff, surveying the room, before looking over at the figure on the bed. He had no servant with him—he would have left in great haste, the captain’s instructions from Vinaszh had been unambiguous—and so carried his own bag. Without looking back, he extended the linen bag and his walking stick and some sheathed implement, and Vinaszh’s captain moved with alacrity to take them. The doctor—his name was Rustem—had a reserved, humourless manner that Vinaszh didn’t really like, but the man had studied in Ispahani and he didn’t seem to kill people and he had cured the rash.
The physician smoothed his greying beard with one hand and then knelt and abased himself, showing unexpectedly adroit manners. At a word from the vizier he rose. The king hadn’t turned his gaze from the fire; the young prince had not ceased his praying. The doctor bowed to the vizier, then turned carefully—facing due west, Vinaszh noted—and said briskly, ‘With this affliction I will contend.’
He hadn’t even approached—let alone examined—the patient, but he had no real choice here. He had to do what he could. Why kill another man? the king had asked. Vinaszh had almost certainly done just that by suggesting the physician be brought here.
The doctor turned to look at Vinaszh. ‘If the commander of the garrison will remain to assist me I would be grateful. I might have need of a soldier’s experience. It is necessary for all the rest of you, my revered and gracious lords, to leave the room now, please.’
Without rising from his knees, the prince said fiercely, ‘I will not leave my father’s side.’
This man was almost certainly about to become the King of Kings, the Sword of Perun, when the breathing of the man on the bed stopped.
‘An understandable desire, my lord prince,’ said the doctor calmly. ‘But if you care for your beloved father, as I can see you do, and wish to aid him now, you will honour me by waiting outside. Surgical treatment cannot take place in a crowd of men.’
‘There will be no . . . crowd,’ said the vizier. Mazendar’s lip curled at the word. ‘Prince Murash will remain, and I myself. You are not of the priestly caste, of course, and neither is the commander. We must stay here, accordingly. All others will depart, as requested.’
The physician simply shook his head. ‘No, my lord. Kill me now, if you wish. But I was taught, and believe, that members of the family and dear friends must not be present when a doctor treats an afflicted man. One must be of the priestly caste to be a royal physician, I know. But I have no such position . . . I am merely attending upon the Great King, at request. If I am to contend with this affliction, I must do so in the manner of my training. Otherwise I can avail the King of Kings not at all, and my own life becomes a burden to me if that is so.’
The fellow was a stuffy prig, greying before his time, Vinaszh thought, but he had courage. He saw Prince Murash look up, black eyes blazing. Before the prince could speak, however, a faint, cold voice from the bed murmured, ‘You heard the physician. He is brought here for his skills. Why is there wrangling in my presence? Get out. All of you.’
There was silence.
‘Of course, my gracious lord,’ said Mazendar the vizier, as the prince, mouth opening and closing, stood up uncertainly. The king had still not taken his eyes from the flames. His voice sounded to Vinaszh as if it already came from somewhere beyond the realms of living men. He would die, the doctor would die, Vinaszh, very probably, would die. He was a fool and a fool, near the end of his days.
Men began moving nervously out into the corridor, where torches had now been lit in the wall brackets. The wind whistled, an otherworldly, lonely sound. Vinaszh saw his captain of the guard set down the doctor’s things before quickly walking out. The young prince stopped directly in front of the slim physician, who stood very still, waiting for them to leave. Murash lifted his hands and murmured, fierce and low, ‘Save him, or these fingers end your life. I swear it by Perun’s thunder.’
The physician said nothing, merely nodded, calmly eyeing the hands of the overwrought prince as they opened and closed and then twisted before his face in a sudden gesture of strangulation. Murash hesitated another moment, then looked back at his father—it might be for the last time, Vinaszh thought, and had a swift, sharp memory of his own father’s deathbed in the south. Then the prince strode from the room as others made way for him. They heard his voice rising in prayer again, from the hallway.
Mazendar was last to leave. He paused near the bed, glanced at Vinaszh and the physician, looking uncertain for the first time, and then murmured, ‘Have you instructions for me, dear my lord?’
‘I gave them,’ said the man on the bed quietly. ‘You saw who was here. Serve him loyally if he allows. He might not. The Lord of Thunder and the Lady guard your soul if that is so.’
The vizier swallowed. ‘And yours, my great lord, if we meet not again.’
The king made no reply. Mazendar went out. Someone closed the door from out in the corridor.
Immediately, moving briskly, the physician opened his linen bag and extracted a small sachet. He strode to the fire and tossed the contents onto it.
The flames turned blue, and a scent of wildflowers suddenly filled the room like an eastern springtime. Vinaszh blinked. The figure on the bed stirred.
‘Ispahani?’ said the King of Kings.
The physician looked surprised. ‘Yes, my gracious lord. I would not have imagined you—’
‘I had a physician from the Ajbar Islands once. He was very skilled. Unfortunately he courted a woman he would have done better not to have touched. He used this scent, I recall.’
Rustem crossed to the bedside. ‘It is taught that the nature of the treatment room can affect the nature of the treatment. We are influenced by such things, my lord.’
‘Arrows are not,’ said the king. But he had shifted a little to look at the physician, Vinaszh saw.
‘Perhaps that is so,’ said the doctor, noncommittally. He came to the bedside and, for the first time, bent to examine the shaft and the wound. Vinaszh saw him suddenly check his motion. A strange expression crossed the bearded features. He lowered his hands.
Then he looked over at Vinaszh. ‘Commander, it is necessary for you to find gloves for me. The best leather ones in the fortress, as quickly as possible.’
Vinaszh asked no questions. He was likely to die if the king died. He went, closing the door behind him, and hurried along the corridor, past those waiting there, and down the stairwell to find his own riding gloves.
RUSTEM HAD BEEN TERRIFIED when he entered, overwhelmed, summoning all his reserves of composure so as not to show it. He’d almost dropped his implements, feared someone would see his trembling hands, but the captain of the guard had moved quickly to take them. He’d used the formal movements of genuflection to speak a calming invocation in his mind.
After rising, he’d been more blunt than he ought to have been, asking the courtiers—and the vizier and a prince!—to leave the room. But he always used a manner of crisp efficiency to suggest authority beyond his years, and this was no time or place to deviate from his customary methods. If he was to die, it hardly mattered what they thought of him, did it? He asked the commander to stay. A soldier would be unfazed by bloodshed and screaming, and someone might have to hold the afflicted person down.
The afflicted person. The King of Kings. Sword of Perun. Brother to the Sun and Moons.
Rustem forced himself to stop thinking in that way. This was a patient. An injured man. That was what mattered. The courtiers left. The prince—Rustem didn’t know which of the king’s sons this was—paused in front of him and made vivid with twisting hands the threat of death that had been with Rustem from the moment he’d left his garden.
It could not be allowed to matter. All would be as had been written.
He’d cast the Ajbar powder into the fire to bring the room in tune with more harmonious presences and spirits, then crossed to the bed to examine the arrow and the wound.
And he had smelled kaaba there.
His mind reeling with shock, he’d realized that the smell had jogged a hovering awareness, and then a second one had emerged and left him very much afraid. He’d sent the commander hurrying for gloves. He needed them.
If he touched that arrow shaft he would die.
Alone in the room with the King of Kings, Rustem discovered that his fears were those of a physician and not a lowly subject now. He wondered how to say what was in his mind.
The king’s eyes were on his face now, dark and cold. Rustem saw rage in them. ‘There is a poison on the shaft,’ Shirvan said.
Rustem bowed his head. ‘Yes, my lord. Kaaba. From the fijana plant.’ He took a breath and asked, ‘Did your own physicians touch the arrow?’
The king nodded his head very slightly. No hint of anger diminishing. He would be in very great pain but wasn’t showing it. ‘All three of them. Amusing. I ordered them to be executed for their incompetence, but they would each have died soon, wouldn’t they? None of them noted the poison.’
‘It is rare here,’ said Rustem, struggling to order his thoughts.
‘Not so rare. I have been taking small amounts for twenty-five years,’ said the king. ‘Kaaba, other evil substances. Anahita will summon us to herself when she wills, but men may still be prudent in their lives, and kings must be.’
Rustem swallowed. He now had the explanation for his patient’s survival to this point. Twenty-five years? An image came into his mind: a young king touching— fearfully, surely—a trace amount of the deadly powder: the sickness that would have ensued . . . doing the same thing again later, and then again, and then beginning to taste it, in larger and larger amounts. He shook his head.
‘The king has endured much for his people,’ he said. He was thinking of the court physicians. Kaaba closed the throat before it reached the heart. One died in agony, of self-strangulation. He had seen it in the east. A method of formal execution. Amusing, the king had said.
He was thinking of something else now, as well. He pushed that away for the moment, as best he could.
‘It makes no difference,’ said the king. His voice was much as Rustem had imagined it might be: cold, uninflected, grave. ‘This is a lion arrow. Protection from poison doesn’t help if the arrow cannot come out.’
There was a tapping at the door. It opened and Vinaszh the garrison commander returned, breathing as if he’d been running, carrying dark brown leather riding gloves. They were too thick for easy use, Rustem saw, but he had no choice. He put them on. Unlaced the thong of the case that held a long thin metal implement. The one his son had brought out to the garden for him. He said an arrow, Papa.
‘There are sometimes ways of removing even these,’ Rustem said, trying not to think about Shaski. He turned to the west, closed his eyes and began to pray, mentally tabulating the afternoon’s omens, good and bad, as he did so, and counting the days since the last lunar eclipse. When he had done the calculations he set out the indicated talismans and wardings. He proposed a sense-dulling herb for the pain of what was to come. The king refused it. Rustem called the garrison commander to the bedside and told him what he had to do to keep the patient steady. He didn’t say ‘the king’ now. This was an afflicted man. Rustem was a doctor with an assistant and an arrow to remove, if he could. He was at war now, with Azal the Enemy, who could blot out the moons and sun and end a life.
In the event, the commander was not needed, nor was the herb. Rustem first broke off the blackened shaft as close to the entry wound as he could, then used a sequence of probes and a knife to widen the wound itself, a procedure he knew to be excruciatingly painful. Some men could not endure it, even dulled by medication. They would thrash and scream, or lose consciousness. Shirvan of Bassania never closed his eyes and never moved, though his breathing became shallow and rapid. There were beads of sweat on his brow and the muscles of his jaw were clenched beneath the plaited beard. When he judged the opening wide enough, Rustem oiled the long, slender, metal Spoon of Enyati and slid it in towards the embedded arrowhead.
It was difficult to be precise with the thick gloves, already blood-soaked, but he had a view of the alignment of the flange now and knew which way to angle the cupping part of Enyati’s device. The shallow cup slid up to the flange through the flesh of the king—who had caught his breath now, but moved not at all where he lay. Rustem twisted a little and felt the spoon slip around the widest part of the head, pressing against it. He pushed a little further, not breathing himself in this most delicate moment of all, invoking the Lady in her guise as Healer, and then he twisted it again and pulled gently back a very little.
The king gasped then and half lifted one arm as if in protest, but Rustem felt the catch as the arrowhead was gathered and shielded in the cup. He had done it in one pass. He knew a man, a teacher in the far east, who would have been gravely, judiciously pleased. Now only the smooth, oiled sides of the spoon itself would be exposed to the wounded flesh, the barbed flange safely nestled within.
Rustem blinked. He went to brush the sweat from his forehead with the back of one bloody glove and remembered—barely in time—that he would die if he did so. His heart thudded.
‘We are almost home, almost done,’ he murmured. ‘Are you ready, dear my lord?’ The vizier had used that phrase. In this moment, watching the man on the bed deal silently with appalling pain, Rustem meant it too. Vinaszh, the commander, surprised him by coming forward a little at the head of the bed and leaning sideways to place his hand on the king’s forehead above the wound and the blood: more a caress than a restraining hold.
‘Who is ever ready for this?’ grunted Shirvan the Great, and in the words Rustem caught—astonishingly— the ghost of a sardonic amusement. Hearing it, he set his feet to the west, spoke the Ispahani word engraved on the implement and, gripping with both gloved hands, pulled it straight back out from the mortal flesh of the King of Kings.
‘I AM TO LIVE, I take it?’
They were alone in the room. Time had run; it was full dark now outside. The wind was still blowing. On the king’s instructions, Vinaszh had stepped out to report only that treatment was continuing and Shirvan yet lived. No more than that. The soldier had asked no questions, neither had Rustem.
The first danger was always excessive bleeding. He had packed the expanded wound opening with lint and a clean sponge. He left the wound unclosed. Closing wounds too soon was the most common error doctors made, and patients died of it. Later, if all went well, he would draw the wound together with his smallest skewers as sutures, taking care to leave space for drainage. But not yet. For now he bandaged the packed wound with clean linen going under the armpit and across the chest, then up and around both sides of the neck in the triangle pattern prescribed. He finished the bandage at the top and arranged the knot to point downwards, as was proper, towards the heart. He wanted fresh bedding and linen now, clean gloves for himself, hot water. He threw the commander’s bloodied gloves on the fire. They could not be touched.
The king’s voice, asking the question, was faint but clear. A good sign. He’d accepted a sedating herb this time from Rustem’s bag. The dark eyes were calm and focused, not unduly dilated. Rustem was guardedly pleased. The second danger now, as always, was the green pus, though arrow wounds tended to heal better than those made by a sword. He would change the packing later, wash the wound, and change the salve and dressing before the end of the night: a variant of his own devising. Most physicians left the first bandage for two or three days.
‘My king, I believe you are. The arrow is gone, and the wound will heal if Perun wills and I am careful with it to avoid the noxious exudations.’ He hesitated. ‘And you have your own . . . protection against the poison that was in it.’
‘I wish to speak with you about that.’
Rustem swallowed hard. ‘My lord?’
‘You detected the fijana’s poison by the smell of it? Even with your own scented herbs on the fire?’
