herbs of wider origin than usual. Avram Shachar's name was given me."
The boy opened the door wider and called out for his father.
A man appeared from the back of the shop. He was perhaps fifty, his hair streaked with gray, his face dominated by dark, heavy-lidded eyes and a powerful nose. "I am Avram Shachar. How can I help you?"
Anna mentioned the herbs she was short of, adding also ambergris and myrrh.
Shachar's eyes lit with interest. "Unusual needs for a Christian doctor," he observed with humor. He did not say that Christians were not allowed to seek treatment from Jewish physicians, except with the special dispensation that was frequently granted to the rich and the princes of the Church, but his eyes said that he knew it.
She smiled back. She liked his face. And the sharp yet delicate odors of the herbs brought back memories of her father's rooms. Suddenly she was achingly lonely for the past.
"Come in," Shachar invited, mistaking her silence as reluctance.
She followed him as he led the way to the back of the house and into a small room opening onto a garden. Cupboards and chests of carved wood lined three walls, and a worn wooden table stood in the center with brass scales and weights and a mortar and pestle. There were pieces of Egyptian paper and oiled silk in piles, and long-handled spoons of silver, bone, and ceramic set neatly beside glass vials.
"From Nicea?" Shachar repeated curiously. "And you come to practice in Constantinople? Be careful, my friend. The rules are different here."
"I know," she answered. "I use them"-she indicated the cupboards and drawers-"only when necessary to heal. I've learned all my saints' days appropriate to every illness, and every season or day of the week." She looked at him, searching his face for disbelief. She knew too much anatomy and far too much of Arabic and Jewish medicine to believe, as Christian doctors did, that disease was due solely to sin, or that penitence would cure it, but it was not something the wise said aloud.
There was a flicker of understanding in Shachar's eyes, but the dark, subtle amusement did not reach his lips. "I can sell you most of what you need," he said. "What I do not have, perhaps Abd al-Qadir can supply."
"That would be excellent. Do you have Theban opium?"
He pursed his lips. "That is one for Abd al-Qadir. Do you need it urgently?"
"Yes. I have a patient I am treating and I have little left. Do you know a good surgeon if the stone does not pass naturally?"
"I do," he replied. "But give it time. It is not good to use the knife if it can be avoided." He worked as he spoke, weighing, measuring, packing things up for her to take, everything carefully labeled.
When he was finished, she took the parcel and paid him what he asked.
He studied her face for a few moments before making his decision. "Now let us see if Abd al-Qadir can help you with the Theban opium. If not, I have some that is less good, but still perfectly adequate. Come."
Obediently she followed, looking forward to meeting the Arab physician and wondering if perhaps he was the surgeon Shachar would recommend for Basil. How would her very Greek patient accept that? Perhaps it would not be necessary.
Chapter 5-6
Five
ZOE CHRYSAPHES STOOD AT THE WINDOW OF HER FAVORITE room and stared across the rooftops of the city to where the sunlight streamed onto the Golden Horn till the water was like molten metal. Her hands caressed the stones in front of her, still warm in the last glow of the day. Constantinople was spread out below her like a jeweled mosaic. The ancient magnificence of the Aqueduct of Valens was behind her, its arches sweeping in from the north like a Titan from the Roman past, an age when Constantinople was the eastern pillar of an empire that ruled the world. The Acropolis, far to the right, was far more Greek and therefore more comfortable to her, her language, her culture. Although its great days had been before she was born, the elderly woman still felt a pride in the thought of it.
She could see the tops of the trees that hid the ruins of the Bukoleon Palace, where her father had taken her as a child. She tried to bring back those bright memories, but they were too far away and slipped out of her grasp.
The radiance of the setting sun momentarily hid