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?’
Rustem had feared this question. He was a good dissembler—most physicians were—but this was his king, mortal kin to the sun and moons.
‘I have encountered it before,’ he said. ‘I was trained in Ispahani, my lord, where the plant grows.’
‘I know where it grows,’ said the King of Kings. ‘What else do you have to tell me, physician?’
Nowhere to hide, it seemed. Rustem took a deep breath.
‘I also smelled it elsewhere in this room, great lord. Before I put the herbal scent to the fire.’
There was a silence.
‘I thought that might be so.’ Shirvan the Great looked coldly up at him. ‘Where?’ One word only, hard as a smith’s hammer.
Rustem swallowed again. Tasted something bitter: the awareness of his own mortality. But what choice did he now have? He said, ‘On the hands of the prince, great king. When he bade me save your life, at risk of my own.’
Shirvan of Bassania closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, Rustem saw a black rage in their depths again, despite the drug he had been given. ‘This . . . distresses