An adaptation of Noah Gordon's bestseller, about young Englishman Rob Cole (Payne) is both blessed and cursed with the ability to sense when someone is about to die. He tries to study medicine, but medieval England is a backwater of religious quacks and superstition. Hearing of a gifted physician and teacher in faraway Persia, he sets off, traveling from his English purgatory to the promised land and to the tutelage of the Persian philosopher and scientist Ibn Sina (Kingsley).