“Yes, no question, you might be an Italian.” His tone implied that this condition might be only slightly more palatable than if Ezzedine were a Moor. The English knight was, as many of the Englishmen were, so languid and thin in arm and leg, so peculiar and effeminate in affect, that Ezzedine wondered how many of them were eunuchs. Later assured by a laughing page boy that this was not the practice among the Christians, the doctor then diagnosed that most of them suffered from blood too thin to carry much warmth or vigor. The island’s damp simply could not in most cases produce men of physical beauty or virility. The nation was doomed by its weather (all praise be to Allah) to weakness, in the individual and the aggregate. Perhaps as Englishmen sailed south, they grew stronger, so that when they had arrived in Africa or Jerusalem they had grown powerful.
The willowy knight spoke to the doctor in French. “I have been to the south of the Italian lands. The people are like you, dark from the sun but not like Africans, you know, or even your other Turks there. Have you seen portraits of the savages of America? Two were brought here to court. They did astonish some of us, it must be said. There are, perhaps, some millions of them, do you know? They know nothing of God. Nothing of the world. And nothing of your empire, either, Doctor. It is…” The knight poured himself more wine, then looked at the carved and painted ceiling of the chamber in Greenwich. “You people really won’t take wine? Well. It is a troubling thing to contemplate. How could there be quite so many of the red devils? How many centuries have they existed? And we knew nothing of them? Might there, do you suppose, be other such lands full of other such nations of whom we have no knowledge? The counting of…how many millions might reside to east or west—I have never thought of it at all, for why would one? But if the total number of Christendom—I’m not a scholar—but if it were not the bulk of human—I don’t quite have it straight in my mind, what it is I am trying to say.”
It was difficult for Ezzedine to know how much of this strange and anxious talk he should report back to bin Ibrahim.
6.
DR. EZZEDINE FELT his own form softening and fading, as if it would soon resemble the English bodies. His vigor and heat drained out of him in the diseased air and gruesome streets. He shivered, even in daytime, even when dry. He coughed with no material result. He slept poorly at night and fell asleep eagerly at noon. He was far from his family and the family of his beloved sultan. He told himself he was still trusted, that home did not alter in his absence, but some days the distance felt unpassable and permanent, infinitely far from the palace and the body he was most responsible for. He sometimes childishly feared the future, and he suffered from three dreams of himself as a vastly old, gray, and withered man, entirely alone amid the offal and human waste that ran through the useless roads of primitive London. He awoke angry with his own cowardice.
Ezzedine’s duties during the embassy’s months in London were, after all, usually light. He was here to protect the health of the ambassador, but somehow that eunuch was, without effort, in good health, unaffected by the English air. Perhaps this was because he had been born a Christian, which might have protected him, as some who are born to plague victims cannot themselves fall prey to plague. The ambassador was ceremonially protected from the English food, too, and mechanically untempted by the grotesque Englishwomen and their humid, steaming pox, smelling now of roses, now of onions.
Ezzedine prayed, expressed gratitude to Allah. He was there, he reminded himself, to be a figure of strength and confidence in the face of endless strangeness, of threats to health and mental stamina. He must fortify the bodies of the embassy’s men (himself included) and fortify their minds against all that was wrong here: the half-naked women, the food, the fog, the filth, the intoxicating drink, the intellectual softness, the islanders’ several varieties of devoted and violent false faith. On days when he was able to work and breathe properly, to feel gratitude and anticipation rather than bitterness and fear, he fell asleep recalling anew that the prize of return would be well earned. Saruca’s touch would be the reward for walking bravely among these strange creatures; Ismail’s laughter for listening to their conversation; Saruca’s cooking for the sour fruit offered in flimsy palaces; Ismail’s company, his small hand in his father’s, for the Christians’ whispered mockery.
And he woke ready to face his duties again. Beyond conversing with the English and reporting their words to the insatiably curious Cafer bin Ibrahim, Ezzedine prepared astrological charts for the ambassador and attended to the physical complaints of the other men as well, distributing powders and ointments for stomach ailments and skin bumps, preparing a useful balm for those who had foolishly entertained an Englishwoman. In the time remaining to him, he studied the island’s herbs and plants and became cordial with the queen’s alchemist-astronomer and philosopher of nature, Dr. Dee. This Christian was kind and sought out Ezzedine’s conversation. He revealed himself, astonishingly, to have considerable knowledge of mathematics and medicine and had even read translations of Averroes, Avicenna, and al-Khwarizmi. The two men were seated together at a feast at the embassy because bin Ibrahim arranged it, saying, “You both like to inspect grass and dirt, I’m told. Perhaps he knows secrets he will share with you.”
Dee invited Ezzedine to his home after that feast, and bin Ibrahim approved of the visit, asserting a power—increasingly over the length of the embassy—to control the movements of the men in the retinue. “Tell me what you learn there. And if he should know of medicine new to you, the sultan will be pleased at your enterprise. If he should be willing to speak of the queen’s use of magic for her foreign wars or our negotiations, even better. And any horoscopes he has cast for members of the court, these you should memorize and report to me at once.”
But there was no conversation of intrigue or palace secrets. Instead, the learned Dee shyly displayed for his new friend his philosophical instruments for reading the stars, his library, his own glass house of medicinal herbs. It was far better than Ezzedine had expected to see outside Turkish or Moorish lands, and he complimented his host, expressed the hope that he might someday return the favor by showing him the expansive facilities at his disposal in the New Palace. Dee eagerly accepted the invitation, sincere in his desire to make that voyage, and Ezzedine was pleased to have inspired some envy for Ottoman knowledge in the Englishman. Dee even confessed ruefully that what the sultan had subsidized would likely dwarf what could be built here in England, where “men were too often nervous to learn of things that contradicted their dearest falsehoods.”
Dr. Ezzedine liked Dr. Dee, would have liked him in any circumstances, admired the wisdom of a Christian who could take steps toward light, could perceive glimpses of truth in darkness. When Dee led him one day outside London to a forest, explaining to him in Latin the English soil’s bounty, Ezzedine was deeply moved by the other man’s enthusiasm and knowledge and by the plentiful wonders of these foreign trees. It was a vanishingly rare moment in which Ezzedine did not wish to be launched immediately from the sickening island.