“I have a boy. Ismail is his name.”
“Ismail,” Dee repeated slowly, trying out the sounds in his mouth. “Is he a child to make you proud?”
“Very much. A wise boy. He is eight years old. He has an affinity, I believe you would say, an understanding of the animal kingdom, with animals individually. I do not recall the same attitude in myself at his age. I came upon him recently lying on the stones in the courtyard of my home. At first I was frightened. I saw only his small fat legs stretched out on the ground, but as I came around the corner, I saw a little dog sitting on Ismail’s chest. I did not know the dog or where it came from. I watched. They had not noticed me yet. The boy was scratching the dog’s ears. The dog seemed obviously, I think, to feel affection for the child. I watched them until the dog wandered off to smell something in the corner.”
“I have seen such things. But he sounds a kind and gentle lad.”
“But wait: The dog left, but the child remained supine there. He did not rise or move. I think he knew I was watching, but I am not certain. And then, to my amazement, two birds flew down and landed upon him, one on his chest where the dog had been, one on his arm, near his hand. I tell you the truth. And he seemed in no way surprised by this. He thought it entirely proper that birds should trust him like this. They stayed upon him, walking a bit and making birdsong, for several minutes! I began to sketch them there.
“That evening at supper, my wife had prepared us a chicken. She prepared it in the way she always does, with pomegranates in a sauce of yogurt. It is a favorite of both mine and Ismail’s. But that night—”
“He refused it?” said Dr. Dee.
“He did. I asked him if he felt ill. He is a plump fellow. It is unlike him to turn away from any food. ‘I am not ill, Father,’ he said. His mother said, ‘If you want to be strong and wise like your father, you must eat.’ And do you know what he did?”
Dr. Dee considered, then guessed: “Did he mourn?”
“Exactly. He wept. At the table. And could not be consoled.”
“Of course,” said Ezzedine’s English friend. “Of course.”
7.
EVERY NIGHT, AFTER the Maghrib prayers the men performed together, Ezzedine wrote to his son, a long journal he would carry to Constantinople himself at the completion of the embassy rather than risk individual letters to messengers on merchant ships, which might well be taken by Algerian (or English) pirates before they saw Constantinople and his boy.
The doctor wrote his unguarded impressions of the foreigners and their practices, their rare flashes of common intelligence (Dee’s praised as a separate matter worthy of its own category), their prevalent uncleanliness. He wrote of their queen, whom he had seen at table and in her court, and who, on a few occasions, had spoken to Ezzedine directly. She had looked with interest at the Turkish men, even looking long into their eyes.
The English court is not so richly built as ours and would not suit even a pasha. Their finest buildings are handsome, with walls and ceilings carved in wood and painted with scenes of their stories, but it is a small kingdom, unimportant in the world, and poor. One might easily speculate that their refusal to recognize God has made them weak. Once, they asked our sultan for assistance against their enemy the Spanish. I was present when the sultan read this queen’s pleading letter to the court, and his laughter, and the laughter of all the court, was loud.
The sultana of England is not beautiful, as our sultana is reputed to be, nor as wise as our sultan, though she speaks Latin well. She is an old woman, and her face is painted with strange colors. Her hair is the color of a persimmon because her people come from the land of Wales, where everyone is so strangely colored, though I have not traveled there to confirm this with my eyes. But the Wales men are fiercer warriors than the other tribes of the island and so have seized almost all of it. The men of Wales conquered the island under this queen’s grandfather, though I do not know if he was as strong as a Turkish soldier, since the king he defeated was a hunchback. The queen’s principal vizier is also a hunchback. It seems common to these unfortunate people. Their bodies break easily, or they are born incomplete. It is a strange place.
The most northern piece of the island is still held by the weaker (yet weaker!) Scots people and their king, who is cousin to the queen. He is sometimes the queen’s friend and other times her enemy, if I understand correctly. The mother of this little king attempted to take Elizabeth’s throne, through sorcery and wiles, but the English queen discovered her plots and took her head. It is no wonder that Yakub, the King of Scotland, should hate Elizabeth and the English, and no wonder, too, that when he claims not to hate them, and claims to love her as his cousin and woman-lord, that many men should think he lies. I do not know if he lies or how one might ever know such a thing, for he wants, I am told by our ambassador’s adviser, to be king of all this cold island when Elizabeth dies. And so men struggle in blindness, like rats in darkness, a crust of bread all the world to them because they know not what light shines just outside their cellar door.
This queen of theirs—I return to her, despite myself. She never wed and everyone too loudly says she is still a virgin, though she is old. She is old, yet still she behaves as if she were a young woman with flashing eyes. It is embarrassing when she looks upon you, but the ambassador seems able to compliment her beauty without blushing. His is a difficult job. Perhaps he is best equipped for it of all of us. The sultan may be very wise indeed for having selected him for this task. The women here walk quite nearly nude within the court and in the city. They all show their faces. All of them. Do not tell your mother!
One is not amazed to discover that one Christian nation dislikes another and would make war upon a neighboring kingdom of Christians. Such things occur among men of the true religion as well. But one is shocked to learn that the Christians would kill one another not for land or power or money, but more often than not rush to slaughter one another from a shared inability to comprehend the nature of God. What is obvious to all of us—even if we should fight for power or land or wealth—so confounds the half-sighted Christians that they slash and burn their neighbor, their own countrymen, their holy men.
They have their book, certainly. And yet they cannot agree even among themselves what it says! They cannot agree to understand it. Like children (like children much stupider than you, my child), they are frustrated at a problem whose solution eludes them, and so they vomit up wrath. They do not look at the true source of their frustration: their own blindness. Instead, they rage against those who stand beside them in quite identical frustration. And such rage! In Paris, I am told, in the kingdom of the Franks, the Cross-worshippers tore to pieces men, women, even children, who understood Christian stories differently.
Before this queen, England had another queen, this Elizabeth’s sister, but she was a Cross-worshipper, so she burned her religious enemies by the hundreds. Not for a moment did it occur to them (or to Elizabeth’s Luther-men, who in turn have been hunting Cross-worshippers in England, chopping them to bits when they find them cowering in a cellar) that they are both wrong!