He breathed deeply, and when he was ready—the ambassador did not hurry him—Ezzedine murmured through tears, “I am eager to learn of how best I might please our sultan.”
At the end, when with curlicues of language the ambassador had made clear Ezzedine’s gift, Ezzedine asked if the ambassador would carry a letter back to his wife, to keep it private for her and read it aloud to her, of necessity. “I will gladly,” said the puffy man, lovingly grateful in turn to Ezzedine for having played his role so gently, without any strife. He was now so kind to his physician that Ezzedine in turn regretted having caused the ambassador all this trouble to begin with, and he hoped that the sultan would praise the ambassador for the solution he had discovered and the lies he had told, since of course it was not at all possible that this had been arranged in Constantinople at all. The letter to his wife was a large request, and in later years Ezzedine was sometimes even forgiving of the ambassador for having ignored it.
14.
AT THE CONCLUSION of the play—the comical story of a woman who was cruel and disobedient to her husband until he starved her into proper behavior—the ambassador stood before the queen, in the space the players had left. He summoned Dr. Ezzedine from out of the crowd to join him. Some of the players circled in the back of the chamber, jostling to find a space, the better to study how their betters spoke and stood, the better to play back to them, convincingly, the image of themselves and their ancestors.
“Tomorrow, great queen,” began the ambassador, “we sail from your shores, successful in the task our lord and sultan set for us, for we have found upon this island peace between peoples and love for your great kingdom. A people as contented and fatted as can be conceived. Councillors as wise as any we have ever known. And atop this commonweal, a queen who rules without a king but with all the strength and wisdom that any king, or even sultan, might be loudly jealous to possess.”
Elizabeth smiled upon the speech, and her councillors and attendant lords and ladies bowed and applauded lightly. “Think you could play a Turk eunuch?” a player whispered to one of his slim young colleagues, still in a gown from his performance as the shrewish wife. “If we put a cushion under your shirt? And tied your eggs back between your legs?”
“Murad the Great, third of that name, Sultan of the Ottomans, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, Caliph of Caliphs, knowing that Mahmoud Ezzedine has been of service to Her Majesty, Elizabeth, Queen of England, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, and greatly proud that Master Ezzedine’s knowledge of physic being among the most esteemed of all who reside in his lands, so most certainly does our sultan wish to present you with a gift that in every day of health will bring to your mind a thought of kindness between our kingdoms, the friendship bridging our empire and your own. For you to command and to take such benefit as might please you, that you may reign in health for so long as monarchs reign, Mahmoud Ezzedine, physician to the sultan of the Turks, will remain and wait upon Your Majesty’s desires for so long as he does bring you satisfaction.”
“Such friendship and comity between our nations will forever be one of the great prides of my reign,” said Elizabeth, “and it pleases me that you will tell your sultan that his friend in England does thank him for his kindness.” She noted carefully what she could see of Dr. Ezzedine’s expressions, such that were visible above his beard and mustache. “Doctor. Is this destiny what you yourself may desire? To live among us English?”
“Great queen, it is my desire to serve my sultan, and if he so desires that I might serve you, then I desire it, too, and with all warmth. To serve Your Majesty is to serve him. It is my duty and joy.”
“Prettily pronounced,” she said as the doctor bowed to her.
Essex laughed loudly. “But he will not live here among us forever? As a Mahometan?”
She eyed the insolence into silence, then turned her softer gaze to the kneeling, bowed Turk.
* * *
—
AND SO, IN late August of 1591, Mahmoud Ezzedine was for the first time made into a gift.
The boat left without him. They left him. Before he could even give them the letters to his son and wife.
He was stranded by chuckling fate or reeking devils on a tiny, wet, and blustery island, impossibly far from civilization, from home, from love, castaway and outcast in one. He stood, alone, on this island populated, as in a children’s story, only by savages and heretics and imbeciles and, most of all, by professional liars, speaking only and always in misdirection. The speed of events was bewildering, perhaps even to God, if He ever chose to cast His eyes over the circumstances: In just a few months—in just a few days—a respected and fortunate man was reduced to a slave; a man who knew his honored place became a token of others’ generosity or scorn. He was in almost no time at all sliced from his devoted family, from his country, severed even from his loving God, and dropped to wander alone in a wilderness far from all he loved.
And they congratulated him, behind false smiles, for his abandonment.
When men win prizes from life by their cleverness, they begin to believe that their cleverness is infinitely protective, that they have earned an unshakable and privileged place in Allah’s creation, that they are essentially and eternally unlike the world’s poor victims. But—having begun his long stumble into diplomacy and espionage, court politics, foreign intrigues, religious war—as a man ensnared by events beyond his understanding, Mahmoud Ezzedine was stupefied: He was made stupid or forced to accept that he had always been stupid. He was never aware of a symptom, and when made aware, he responded with useless instincts. And so it was that in a time when a man might be lucky to see fifty years, ten years were lifted from Mahmoud Ezzedine as easily as a purse is snipped free in a crowded theater.
Of arrogance and stupidity, he realized, ten years later, standing alone on a heath in Scotland, vomiting, he had never been cured.
Dr. Mahmoud Ezzedine was to be presented as a gift—was handed over as the personification of someone else’s generosity—four more times.
15.
My son,
God the all-knowing and merciful will place such obstacles in one’s path that He deems necessary, and it is not for us to demand an explanation or to bewail our fate but to love our travails as we love Him. Allah knows all, and Allah listens not to the whine of a man or a dog.
I will not return to you when I had expected, and when the embassy returns to the Sublime Porte, I will not be among them.
Whosoever brings this letter to you is my friend and yours. He may judge it wise that you and your mother should travel with him away from our home, possibly even away from Qustantiniyya, until such time as I am able to rejoin you and protect you.
Here is a difficult task for you, but one I ask you to perform as a young man: Please tell your mother that I will return when God arranges for it and that my return will never be delayed by any desire of my own. Her husband is alive and hurt only by our separation. Please read her these words as often as she desires. I am delayed, only delayed.