Lord of Emperors Read Free Page B

his students practical experience and observations to go with the treatises they memorized and copied. It was of little use, he was fond of saying, to learn what al-Hizari said about amputation if you didn’t know how to use a saw.
    He himself had spent six weeks with his eastern teacher on a failed Ispahani campaign against the insurgents on their north-eastern reaches. He had learned how to use a saw.
    He had also seen enough of violent death and desperate, squalid pain that summer to decide to return home to his wife and the small child he had scarcely seen before leaving for the east. This house and garden at the edge of the village, and then another wife and a girl-child, had followed upon his return. The small boy he’d left behind was now seven years old and sitting on a mat outside the door of the medical chambers, listening to his father’s lectures.
    And Rustem the physician still dreamt in the blackness of some nights of a battlefield in the east, remembering himself cutting through the limbs of screaming men beneath the smoky, uncertain light of torches in wind as the sun went down on a massacre. He remembered black fountains of blood, being drenched, saturated in the hot gout and spray of it, clothing, face, hair, arms, chest . . . becoming a creature of dripping horror himself, hands so slippery he could scarcely grip his implements to saw and cut and cauterize, the wounded coming and coming to them endlessly, without surcease, even when night fell.
    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, ignoringthe 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