* * *
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UPON A ROYAL barge that night, artificial fires blooming against the sky and weeping red into the Thames, in which river mechanical porpoises with men inside them leapt and gamboled, the queen told the Ottoman ambassador that his physician was a man of great skill and that she was grateful to him for having preserved her loyal peer. She wished to present the embassy’s doctor with a gift to symbolize her royal esteem. She raised her hand at an attendant, who passed to the ambassador a ring set with a blue stone. The ambassador recited all appropriate words, such diplomatic matters having scripts and, after numerous performances, a certain reflexive dullness. Would the ring ever find the finger of the physician for whom it was intended? Such things could not be easily known, and neither party cared.
For at that exact instant, Allah whispered into the ambassador’s ear a solution to all the troubles and unpleasantness awaiting his return to Constantinople, when he wanted to arrive to laurels and the sultan’s love. Allah spoke to the ambassador the precise words to repeat to the English sultana, and all trouble was cleared away with a breath of celestial wisdom.
13.
UNAWARE OF THIS conversation between the queen and the ambassador, Ezzedine spent two days preparing his belongings, letting his mind wander, then walking in the gardens of the embassy residence to restore his confidence. He would, somehow, address the sultan directly. He would plead. No, he would not plead. He would speak openly of his love for the royal family and explain that Cafer desired his wife. The sultan would take pity on him the more honestly and manfully he explained himself.
Or, if he was sentenced to die, he would at least make a plan for Saruca to flee first. Who would help him?
Despite his eagerness to return home, his fear of what would come next slowed him down, sometimes nearly to immobility, for minutes at a time. Shaking himself free of fear’s shackles, renewed with hope, he spent extra time wrapping and storing his vast array of new and fragile items: liquids and seeds and cuttings his friend, Dr. Dee, had presented him, in shared love of knowledge “and our Creator, by whatever name we choose to praise Him and by whatever means we worship Him.” His English friend’s typically provocative way of speaking. “Someday you will show me your gardens.”
Two nights before the delegation was to leave London and travel to Deptford to their waiting ship to Constantinople and the New Palace, the ambassador entered Ezzedine’s chambers. It was the first time he had come to his physician’s rooms in all their months in England.
“My doctor. My friend.” This was a peculiar choice of words, even if Ezzedine were not already susceptible to alarm. The little ambassador sat on his doctor’s bed, his legs sticking out straight, almost giddy with some excitement. “The sultan has communicated his desires to me. He is pleased with our expedition to the English and with the terms we have made with them. He mentions you, in particular, as one worthy of high honor.”
“He mentioned me? I am undeserving of this gift beyond measure.” There! The threat of bin Ibrahim was already dealt with. Ezzedine had been acting like a child, and he was ashamed of ever doubting the protective love of the sultan.
The ambassador leaned forward, his soft hands on his fat thighs. “It is exactly a gift of that value, and to earn still more, why, one would do anything. At least, I would.”
“Naturally.”
“And he is especially pleased to make use of you for the greater glory of the empire and for the foundation of confidence in further negotiations between himself and the English infidels, great in his wisdom, all praise to him.”
Ezzedine did not reply.
“You do not doubt his great wisdom, his strategy in his decisions?”
“Not at all. How could I begin to be such a fool as that? I do not claim to number the stars in the sky.”
“Then rejoice, my dear friend. For he has chosen you to do something great. Something only you can do. To be the cement, the very bridge he is constructing between London and Qustantiniyya.”
“You sound like you are reciting from a peace treaty.”
“Do I?” The ambassador giggled. “Mahmoud! Like a treaty indeed! You are to become a treaty in your person! You are receiving a gift of incalculable value! He has given you this gift! I am envious!”
“When did he communicate this to you?”
“A strange and irrelevant question. Better to ask how you can continue to deserve his extraordinary trust and generosity. Now, prepare yourself, dear friend. Prepare yourself to flood with gratitude. For when it happens, I must mark exactly what you do and say, so that I may present myself to the sultan and say, to the word, what effect his gift had on you. Are you ready? Your every gesture, your every word, I am prepared to record to the slightest detail.”
“And I will not be present to offer him my gratitude myself?”
“It is unlikely. But your wife and child will be present when I describe your reaction. And he will look upon them accordingly.”
Ezzedine stood unmoving, silent, wishing his heartbeat would obey, heard his slow thoughts roam in useless circles, lost, lost.
“Are you prepared to express what you will feel? Quite absolutely prepared?”
There was a kindness in this, interlaced with the cruelty, knotted inseparably with it. In later years, when Ezzedine replayed this scene, retold the story in silence or solitude, he could appreciate the ambassador’s care at this moment. The ambassador allowed Ezzedine time to exercise the skill that any man at court must master: to hide one’s thoughts. He had warned Ezzedine that the effort would in this case be extreme but that failure would be worse, threatening his wife and child.
The ambassador reclined and busied himself with the pleasant task of sipping ale, a taste he would have to shed with great difficulty before their return and that no man would dare report, as all of them had sampled it except bin Ibrahim. (The water was not clean enough to drink on this filthy island; one of Ezzedine’s judgments after some weeks, with the ambassador’s blessing, had been to instruct all the men of the embassy that English beer and wine could be consumed without sin, as they were not alcohol but, respectively, English rainwater and bull’s blood.)
Ezzedine did not prepare for the worst thing he could imagine. Instead, he thought at once of his home, of Saruca and Ismail and the animals and herbs in his garden, of the hours spent in the sultan’s court and the pleasure all of this had brought him in his life, of his wife’s eyes and the smell of his son’s breath when he was a baby. He even savored the anticipation he had felt, while in England, of returning to all this. This was deeply wise: Since he would have to protect all of it in his reply, he held it all in the forefront of his mind, its value and importance placed above the pain he might feel at its loss. This was the best way to care for it and to love it. He swallowed again and again and again; each time, a blade caught in his throat and acid boiled in his stomach.