The King at the Edge of the World, page 3
8.
MONTHS BEFORE, SARUCA had sat in front of the house, pulling feathers from a chicken. She spread her legs wide and laid a cloth across her lap. The child picked feathers up and dropped them one at a time over the wall above the hillside. The breeze would occasionally capture a feather and set it in a long flight the full length of the hill, all the way to the sea. The woman wiped the back of her hand across her exposed forehead, and a little of the chicken’s blood marked her skin there.
His appetite for her was almost like the appetite for food. He stepped closer to her and made his presence known. She looked up, startled. “My husband is not at home, sir.”
Cafer bin Ibrahim feigned a mild disappointment. “A pity. I have some news for him about our departure for England. But may I sit and rest a moment before I return to my day?”
A man of middle size, middle intelligence, and middle talent, Cafer bin Ibrahim did have the supremely well-developed survival instincts of an old jackal. He had been dispatched to England as chief adviser to the ambassador for good reason. Not only could he speak English, but he had, far more than the gentle ambassador, a clear eye for weakness and strength, for softness and indecision, and for (an English trait, the sultan knew) incompetence and ignorance disguised as haughty indifference.
In the Palace of Felicity, bin Ibrahim was one of many the sultan trusted to sniff out plot and conspiracy without becoming attracted to its scent. The sultan recognized a man to whom the logic of life as it really was came as naturally as breath. The sultan knew that Cafer’s self-interest would identically match the interests of the sultan in his negotiations with the queen of the English. Cafer was the sort of man the sultan allowed to rise to a certain height of glory and then carefully and regularly examined for signs of toxic ambition, much as Dr. Ezzedine insisted on examining the sultan twice yearly for any small incursions of some subtle disease upon his skin, within his sputum, or in the bubbled currents of his passed water.
* * *
—
“DR. DEE SHOWED you herbs,” bin Ibrahim repeated Ezzedine’s last words back to him, then called for more drink for them both.
“And demonstrated their properties, in some cases.” Ezzedine was aware of using language that might dazzle bin Ibrahim a bit. “Their natural properties and inherent philosophical value.”
“Explain.”
Ezzedine attempted to explain, though bin Ibrahim’s eyes were closed, and, if Ezzedine were candid about the question, the man wasn’t intelligent enough to understand a fraction of what was involved in physic. “Nothing troubling. Merely the medical or magical properties of certain herbs and grasses that appear in this island and not in our country. Their ability to harm or heal. I rather thought”—and here Ezzedine congratulated himself for being clever, expecting to win Cafer’s praise—“that I was doing the task you set us. I am bringing secrets of this country back home for the good of the sultan and our people.”
“Excellent, Doctor. Now tell me of all those present, in order, around the table.” Ezzedine strained to recall, not having the skill some men had to create a picture in the mind of faces, and many of the English resembled one another so closely that he had, more than once, called one by another’s name. There had been a great deal of drink, which he had been assured was not liquor but which, he must admit, may have clouded his mind nevertheless. “Tell me of the talk, please, Doctor. Do they support their queen? Or conspire? Do they want a king upon the throne, as would be natural? One of themselves? Will they abide by their agreements with us? Which of them seems the poorest? Did you speak of the true religion? Would any of them consider, do you think, making private reports to you in exchange for gold?”
This was a task for which Ezzedine was ill-suited. To recall what every man at a long meal said? Some had likely spoken of France and Spain, this or that about King James of Scotland and Elizabeth. But most of the talk was of horses—whose was fastest, handsomest, boldest. They threatened to fight on these last questions, and peace was made with difficulty but always before actual combat.
Ezzedine had left the table at Dr. Dee’s invitation to examine his library. Dee had a book in Arabic and wanted Ezzedine to read a passage to him. It was Averroes. There was some conversation, as they returned to the table, of Ezzedine, in the time remaining of the embassy’s stay in England, teaching Dee how to read and write a bit of Arabic.
“You agreed to instruct him?” asked bin Ibrahim.
Ezzedine answered cautiously, fearing something in the man’s voice, fearing that he had stepped over a bound. “I said I would consider it.” This lie sounded implausible even as he spoke.
“I think it an excellent notion,” said Cafer, who seemed nearly asleep. “To be in regular close conference with the queen’s trusted wizard. Cleverly done. And when you returned to the company at the table?”
Ezzedine was doubly relieved: The Arabic lessons, which he had already begun out of enthusiastic delight, were permissible; and he had another clear recollection of table talk he could now deliver to bin Ibrahim. He felt almost gratified to be able to give the man what he wanted. “A young man—a poet, I believe—was boasting, trying to impress all the older men with his talk. Like a naughty child.”
“On what subject?”
It now returned clearly to Ezzedine. “He said the Christian holy book was false. That the Jewish books, too, are false. That they are mere stories with no truth, tales of tricksters and filthy men. He said these words: ‘filthy men.’ ”
Bin Ibrahim opened an eye with interest. “Was there agreement with him among the company?”
Some. Some heads shook in disapproval. Some of the conversation became too rapid for Ezzedine to follow. There were some—knights and lords—who laughed and urged the poet on in his flights of words. “ ‘Moses was a juggler,’ he said, and another man, a large man I have seen at court, laughed loudly at this.”
“And your host? The master Dee?”
“A man interested in all things, prepared to listen to all things, whether he agrees or not. He acknowledges our own physicians as his masters, as in mathematics and astronomy.” Ezzedine paused to recall what had pleased him in the evening, and he described it with unthinking candor. “They are men who, I suspect, wonder at the blindness of their fellow Christians. They are, perhaps, men who would see the superiority of our ways. But in the meantime, they dance, it seems to me, near other ideas. They are accused by some of atheism, though I do not think they truly—”
“You spent the night, then, my trusted doctor, drinking with men who reject the truth of any God?” Bin Ibrahim opened his eyes at last and smiled slightly with this question. Ezzedine only now heard a threat, like the first throbs of fever or infection. Had it been those, he would surely have seen the troubling symptoms much earlier. But he was, in streaks and moments, a child, and he was angry with himself for this. He stuttered: “If Allah…If Allah…If…” as if the idea he meant to eject from his body, bloated with anger, could not push past his tongue.
“Yes? If Allah what?” Cafer heard that anger and opened a space in front of Ezzedine where he could place it.
But calm returned: “Perhaps these men must stumble blindly first and then, when they fall often enough, learn to see after.”
9.
DR. DEE STOOD beside Dr. Ezzedine, a fair distance from the birds and hunters, and watched the falcons take their meat. “To listen to the earl,” the English doctor said, nodding toward the queen’s beloved Essex, “the birds are noble. They know respect, courage, loyalty.”
“But you believe they have learned simply to follow the food,” said the Turkish doctor.
“I believe they know habit as we do. Perhaps even preference for familiarity. That wrist. This hood. I do not think they love one gloved wrist above another. Although that story of your boy and the birds gives me pause. And the loyalty of some dogs and warhorses does make me wonder if they feel or comprehend something more.”
Across the park, beside the Earl of Essex, Cafer bin Ibrahim loosened the straps of his bird’s hood, releasing the blinking raptor’s head to the light. The animal peered at the sky, and bin Ibrahim threw it into the blue as the beaters and dogs flushed the songbirds and sparrows from the trees and bushes. Essex called for wine. As it was served, bin Ibrahim declined, then turned to nod and slightly bow to the two doctors from across the green expanse.
“Let us walk,” said Dee, and took his Turkish friend’s hand.
Ezzedine followed his favorite Englishman farther into the wood. Dee pointed with excitement. His pleasure at sharing was evident: “Poison…pain relief…reduces boils…urinary difficulty…other insufficiencies of the male organ…” Unlike English faces, these buds and leaves and sticks differentiated themselves graciously for Ezzedine, explained themselves plainly. Some he knew from Turkish soil; others he recognized as kin to those plants; most interesting, of course, were those unique to English earth. Dee broke a twig in two and held it to Ezzedine’s nose. “To slow a wound’s bleeding.”
Ezzedine took several cuttings for his bag. “It would be illustrative, I think, to cut, slightly, the flesh in two locations and to apply to one a paste made from this English root and to the other a paste made from the herbs I carried from Qustantiniyya. And then to see which stops the bleeding more rapidly.”
Dee laughed like a child. “We must! Let us you and I do it this very night. It is most clever of you, my friend. If only every question could be settled so brilliantly.”
“You are kind.”
“Your party returns to Constantinople soon. Are you ready to leave our island?”
Ezzedine told his one friend, “I will be sorry to come to the end of our walks and conversations, but I will see my wife and son, and I can feign no unhappiness about that, even to be diplomatic. They require me, and, if I am honest, I feel the loss of them while I am here.”
Dee laughed. “My friend, that has been quite evident, even for one as diplomatic as you.”
As they pushed farther into the wood, Dr. Dee spoke of the strife he had seen in his life caused by an inability to answer questions with solutions as elegant as Ezzedine’s proposed experiment. “The unquestionable greatness of our queen lies in her wisdom on one particular topic. I do not know how matters stand among the Mahometans, but, sadly, Christian kingdoms hate one another and are divided on how best to show their love for Jesus Christ. How mad, you think, to hate over how best to love. But there it is. One makes allowances for children and souls that quake like children’s souls. For many, it is the way things have always been.
“Every man as old as I knows of three different alterations of all they knew, and all our ways were upside down, and in despair at knowing the right way to believe, men did sometimes choose to believe nothing at all, yet that spared them not from the flame and the ax, wielded first by the Catholics, then by the Protestants, and then back again and then again. Until our queen, in her wisdom, has understood, with a divine spark of love, that we must not look inside other men’s souls. We must—and I believe she knows this, though sometimes she forgets when Catholics threaten the throne itself—learn to be indifferent to other men’s errors, even unto their damnation. For what we, in our frailty, take with certainty to be their errors…let us accept that just possibly they are not errors but we are in error? I believe she sees this. Let us all act the same on Sunday, as good English, and then discuss it no further. Perhaps men could accustom themselves to living with a small amount of doubt. I think doubt a necessary ingredient to live.”
Amazed by Dee’s words, Ezzedine remained silent and listened, until the philosopher came to an end and the silence became perhaps offensive. He finally allowed himself to speak but was nervous of what he would need to report to bin Ibrahim, and feared even what someone might say (although none was present) about Ezzedine himself, and so he was cautious, even to the point of dishonesty with his words: “Is there a limit to the permissible error of other men’s thoughts? Would you love your English neighbor were he a Mahometan?”
“I love my dear friend from the land of the Turks and feel no need to correct him.”
Ezzedine could not help himself: He admired this humility, this open heart. “And if your neighbor, like your poet-guest at your house the other evening, held his belief in no god at all, by any name, neither mine nor yours?”
At this, Dee laughed, and Ezzedine flinched that any might hear. “We mustn’t take a wicked child’s pulled faces too seriously. Do you know, in France, there are English Catholics who study violence and mean to infiltrate themselves into England to do mischief, and they know full well that they will be caught and tortured and killed, and they long for this! And they call themselves martyrs! It sickens the heart. And for this, in front of a Mahometan, I am ashamed of ourselves, Catholic and Protestant alike.”
All of this Ezzedine attempted to remember word for word. He wrote it down after he and Dee embraced in parting (and made plans to cut each other’s arms and apply pastes together), though first he wrote sketches and descriptions of the leaves and roots his friend had taught him.
He wrote Dee’s words to be sure that he forgot nothing. This was his duty.
He wrote Dee’s words to someday show his son how wisdom grew. This was his pleasure and his duty.
He wrote Dee’s words because Dee’s mind brought Ezzedine pleasure. He would enjoy, when home in Constantinople, recalling his friend’s words at his leisure. Perhaps they would continue a scholarly and warm correspondence. Perhaps he might send medicaments back to England for him.
But first, his duty to report to bin Ibrahim: He would do so, of course. Or he could report only that the conversation pertained to natural philosophy, medicine, botany. He did not wish to imply that Dr. Dee’s clarity about Christian weakness made him a potential secret servant of bin Ibrahim.
Dee and Ezzedine passed three ladies as they exited the wood into the open park, where in the distance Essex and bin Ibrahim still hunted. Ezzedine followed Dee’s example, bowing while turning, walking backward as the ladies turned their heads and prettily smiled with only their lips. “That one is a lady of the chamber. She dresses the queen, attends her in her bath, cleans her in all manner of things. Do your sultan and sultana have such a one as this?”
Ezzedine felt it would be unkind to state the truth: that for any one English page, serving girl, or beauty such as this woman, for every man-at-arms, musician, or cook, the sultan had a dozen in the Sublime Porte, some paid, some slaves, some loyal for love. The sultan lived amid a clamor of those who wished to touch the royal hair or paint the face or clean a tooth or wipe away filth. The English court was richer in nothing except green grass, which Ezzedine did enjoy kneeling down to caress.
“Because,” Dee continued, “I happen to know that this one has asked about you. You have caught the eye of a great beauty, my friend, with your exotic ways and Mahometan wisdom. And the red beard, I suspect.”
Ezzedine did not at first understand the implication. “I am honored,” he said simply, though he was not a complete innocent. In Constantinople a court woman might well desire a man who was not her husband. The result might be heads cut off, or merely poison drizzled into goblets, and so illicit desires were kept at bay without much difficulty. Of course, the nearer a man sat to the sultan’s favor, the more freedom he was able to exert, and, as one of the sultan’s physicians, Ezzedine could, he supposed, have been nearly as free with himself in the Sublime Porte as any man might wish. He knew some men who acted according to their desires and the license of their rank. And yet he felt no desire whatever beyond what he felt for his wife. It never occurred to him that this was unusual. Nor did he notice the appetites she whetted in other men.
The two physicians strolled around a curve of wood and into an enclosure of green lawn, a bay nestled on three sides by forest, shadowed paintings of tree branches cast onto the grass. Three acrobats—a skinny man of surprising height, a boy, and some person whose sex Ezzedine could not have guessed—were awaiting passing audiences and now hurried into their performance at the arrival of the two chatting doctors. “Hop, hop…Hey!” The mysterious third climbed upon the man’s shoulders and set to juggling three balls. The boy ran in circles, pretended to fall, then leapt and scrambled up, not stopping until he was on the shoulders of the second figure, and from this perch, high above the doctors, he pulled four balls from a pocket and set to juggling, a ring of orbs set above the smaller ring below. “I can throw these balls to heaven!” shouted the boy, hurling the balls higher and higher in their crossing arcs and orbits, these harmonic circles. The two doctors leaned backward, like reeds blown by wind, to watch the balls fly and form a little universe of their own above the tower of people.
A voice behind them replied, “That is what I meant to say at your house the other evening.” Ezzedine had not heard anyone approach on the thick grass, and the voice was nearly in his ear.
It was the young man from Dee’s home, the friend of one of the lords, the poet who took such giggling, vicious pleasure in playing with hot ideas and trying out sour words upon his tongue. “That, my doctors: The juggler, like a priest, tells us he can see right up God’s nostrils and we, just a few yards below, beg him to report to us how long those celestial hairs grow.”
