Meanwhile, at the suggestion of Dr. Ezzedine, all the men of the embassy performed zakat by paying, as their wealth allowed them, for the release or well-being of Turkish prisoners held in England. Ezzedine went further and, under escort, searched in the darkest parts of London for a rumored community of Moors awaiting passports or funds to sail for happier places. Dr. Ezzedine would have given generously to these unfortunates, if he could have found them.
What would Saruca and Ismail think of this place? He sketched it for them, in pictures and words, the palaces and the creaking wooden buildings where mythological Moors could not be found. But it was impossible to properly capture with paper. Ismail often claimed he would explore the world, to see every corner of the sultan’s empire, but he still was shy around other boys and hid behind his father’s legs, and Ezzedine suspected that the sight of these houses painted with the sign of plague would ruin his sleep for days. “Sometimes, it’s much nicer to stay at home,” he had told his father almost every night for a few weeks when he was smaller.
Later, Ezzedine had brought Ismail to see the chamber of maps at the Sublime Porte, showed him the far-off corners of the empire, where Sarajevo and Buda and Athens and Jerusalem and Cairo sat, so many difficult months away from Constantinople and Ismail’s beloved caged birds. As a mark of respect to his father, Ismail was permitted to see the globes and even to set one of them to turning. Ezzedine watched as the question of scale began to trouble the child. “Are we all residing on this one tiny dot? But how can that be?” It seized the boy’s mind for a month to come, and at times Ezzedine despaired of getting Ismail to understand. “Even Mother? Even my birds? Even you? All of us live on a black dot? But it is not black on the ground outside….”
Finally, Saruca succeeded where Ezzedine had failed. Ismail explained to his father, “Look how small the boats are on the water when we stand on the top of the hill. But they are not small when we are near them. They don’t change, but they seem small. So if a bird flew very high, we would seem small enough to fit on a spot.”
Saruca teased her husband that night: “If you would like me to take over the boy’s education, I will make time in my day.”
4.
INTO THE INTOLERABLY wet and cold summer the ambassador and his men were entertained, feted by the queen, though they were often unable to eat much of what was served. They sat for plays and masques, dancers and musicians, even a Turkish acrobat long in service to Elizabeth. Ezzedine asked him how he had come to be in England, but the man was nervous to talk to his former countrymen and fled the doctor’s gentle approach.
The embassy watched the queen’s most beloved entertainment twice in the first month: A cat, dressed in the habit of the Catholic pope, was placed on the back of a horse and tethered to the saddle. The horse, draped in English banners, trotted in a ring until a bear, wearing the livery of Mr. Walsingham, the queen’s recently deceased principal secretary, swept the cat from the horse’s back, tearing it to pieces. “It’s an allegory,” a lady of the court explained to Ezzedine. The doctor looked away at the moment of the animal’s death.
The most senior Turks went out riding with the master of the horse, the queen’s favorite (and, to Turkish eyes, quite obviously the English sultana’s sexual consort), the Earl of Essex. The earl was pleased to hunt with the pair of falcons brought by the ambassador as gifts to the queen. He deemed the ambassador a good and companionable gentleman and found his chief adviser, Cafer bin Ibrahim, to be “an uncommon skilled hand at the noble falcons.” It was bin Ibrahim who taught Essex the spoken commands in Arabic that the predators understood best. Bin Ibrahim was then honored to be a guest at Essex’s table and to hunt with him alone. He conversed often with this chief of the English military, asking naïve questions that led the earl to talk and talk and talk, taking obvious and predictable pleasure in educating the childish foreigner.
Members of the embassy who spoke English, or some tongue in common with the Englishmen, were encouraged by bin Ibrahim to pass hours in conversation with the strange inhabitants of this strange place. Later, at the embassy’s residence, they would be called in, one at a time, to make private report to him of all they had discussed, every English word and intonation. Each then received further instruction as to whom they should speak with the following day and on what topics.
Cafer bin Ibrahim condensed all these reports into an oral summary for the ambassador, delivered in his master’s chamber every evening, removing and adding certain details so the ambassador would best comprehend. He would then return to his table to prepare a written statement for a particular vizier back in Constantinople. This report bin Ibrahim would dispatch whenever a vessel departed while the embassy remained in London. Though the vizier had told bin Ibrahim that no English person—not a single soul on the entire island—could read Arabic, still he enciphered the reports. Long after the soft and plump ambassador was snoring contentedly, bin Ibrahim would be twirling an engraved spiral of mahogany upon which rode delicate tiles, each with two letters inked on it, one upside down. After completing his work, he would invert this ciphering wand and reorder the tiles for the next day, according to a system prearranged with the vizier prior to the embassy’s departure. Still, bin Ibrahim woke at least once a night in fear that he had made some fatal error in code, rendering it illegible.
5.
CAFER BIN IBRAHIM dreamed of knowing all things at all times, and in his dreams his body enjoyed the sensation—in his cheeks and groin and kidneys—of what such a stuffed pregnancy of facts and secrets might feel like, how close total knowledge might feel to paradise. He dreamed of paradise not as it is written but as he might hope it to be: every answer to every question, a perfect knowledge, while his eternal and youthful form was caressed by so many perfect duplicates of women he admired in earthly life—the sultana, the ladies most recently retired from the sultan’s seraglio, the wives of other men at court, and most decidedly and deliciously the wife of Mahmoud Ezzedine, the daughter of a rich man, a prize absurdly wasted on the doctor from the provinces, a woman whose face had been nearly visible through her light veil and whose eyes unquestionably revealed her lascivious nature.
In waking hours, bin Ibrahim settled for less than total knowledge, though he watched with particular interest as Dr. Ezzedine—by nature shy—was befriended by John Dee, the queen’s wizard. It seemed unlikely that Ezzedine knew how valuable a source of intelligence this man could be, but that ignorance might serve bin Ibrahim as well as anything; at least the transparent doctor would not be asked to lie or perform. He would simply give reports of table talk.
Mahmoud Ezzedine, born in Beirut, was as fair in skin as men of that sun-bleached corner of the Turks’ empire could sometimes be. “You might be an Italian,” said one of the English courtiers. This man was styled “knight,” though he wore no armor, and the weapon at his side was as thin as a twig, not feasible for combat. The stories of Crusaders that Ezzedine had heard all his life, tales of Christian marauders told to frighten and control wicked children—this knight was not possibly such a devil as those men had been. Ezzedine was excited to tell his son that the Christians had become weak since those days, it seemed. He wished he could be home that very night, to wake the boy and tell him, “Ismail, I saw the Christians. They are not Crusaders at all. Rather, they are like stick men you make with your friends.”