“You spent the night, then, my trusted doctor, drinking with men who reject the truth of any God?” Bin Ibrahim opened his eyes at last and smiled slightly with this question. Ezzedine only now heard a threat, like the first throbs of fever or infection. Had it been those, he would surely have seen the troubling symptoms much earlier. But he was, in streaks and moments, a child, and he was angry with himself for this. He stuttered: “If Allah…If Allah…If…” as if the idea he meant to eject from his body, bloated with anger, could not push past his tongue.
“Yes? If Allah what?” Cafer heard that anger and opened a space in front of Ezzedine where he could place it.
But calm returned: “Perhaps these men must stumble blindly first and then, when they fall often enough, learn to see after.”
9.
DR. DEE STOOD beside Dr. Ezzedine, a fair distance from the birds and hunters, and watched the falcons take their meat. “To listen to the earl,” the English doctor said, nodding toward the queen’s beloved Essex, “the birds are noble. They know respect, courage, loyalty.”
“But you believe they have learned simply to follow the food,” said the Turkish doctor.
“I believe they know habit as we do. Perhaps even preference for familiarity. That wrist. This hood. I do not think they love one gloved wrist above another. Although that story of your boy and the birds gives me pause. And the loyalty of some dogs and warhorses does make me wonder if they feel or comprehend something more.”
Across the park, beside the Earl of Essex, Cafer bin Ibrahim loosened the straps of his bird’s hood, releasing the blinking raptor’s head to the light. The animal peered at the sky, and bin Ibrahim threw it into the blue as the beaters and dogs flushed the songbirds and sparrows from the trees and bushes. Essex called for wine. As it was served, bin Ibrahim declined, then turned to nod and slightly bow to the two doctors from across the green expanse.
“Let us walk,” said Dee, and took his Turkish friend’s hand.
Ezzedine followed his favorite Englishman farther into the wood. Dee pointed with excitement. His pleasure at sharing was evident: “Poison…pain relief…reduces boils…urinary difficulty…other insufficiencies of the male organ…” Unlike English faces, these buds and leaves and sticks differentiated themselves graciously for Ezzedine, explained themselves plainly. Some he knew from Turkish soil; others he recognized as kin to those plants; most interesting, of course, were those unique to English earth. Dee broke a twig in two and held it to Ezzedine’s nose. “To slow a wound’s bleeding.”
Ezzedine took several cuttings for his bag. “It would be illustrative, I think, to cut, slightly, the flesh in two locations and to apply to one a paste made from this English root and to the other a paste made from the herbs I carried from Qustantiniyya. And then to see which stops the bleeding more rapidly.”
Dee laughed like a child. “We must! Let us you and I do it this very night. It is most clever of you, my friend. If only every question could be settled so brilliantly.”
“You are kind.”
“Your party returns to Constantinople soon. Are you ready to leave our island?”
Ezzedine told his one friend, “I will be sorry to come to the end of our walks and conversations, but I will see my wife and son, and I can feign no unhappiness about that, even to be diplomatic. They require me, and, if I am honest, I feel the loss of them while I am here.”
Dee laughed. “My friend, that has been quite evident, even for one as diplomatic as you.”
As they pushed farther into the wood, Dr. Dee spoke of the strife he had seen in his life caused by an inability to answer questions with solutions as elegant as Ezzedine’s proposed experiment. “The unquestionable greatness of our queen lies in her wisdom on one particular topic. I do not know how matters stand among the Mahometans, but, sadly, Christian kingdoms hate one another and are divided on how best to show their love for Jesus Christ. How mad, you think, to hate over how best to love. But there it is. One makes allowances for children and souls that quake like children’s souls. For many, it is the way things have always been.
“Every man as old as I knows of three different alterations of all they knew, and all our ways were upside down, and in despair at knowing the right way to believe, men did sometimes choose to believe nothing at all, yet that spared them not from the flame and the ax, wielded first by the Catholics, then by the Protestants, and then back again and then again. Until our queen, in her wisdom, has understood, with a divine spark of love, that we must not look inside other men’s souls. We must—and I believe she knows this, though sometimes she forgets when Catholics threaten the throne itself—learn to be indifferent to other men’s errors, even unto their damnation. For what we, in our frailty, take with certainty to be their errors…let us accept that just possibly they are not errors but we are in error? I believe she sees this. Let us all act the same on Sunday, as good English, and then discuss it no further. Perhaps men could accustom themselves to living with a small amount of doubt. I think doubt a necessary ingredient to live.”
Amazed by Dee’s words, Ezzedine remained silent and listened, until the philosopher came to an end and the silence became perhaps offensive. He finally allowed himself to speak but was nervous of what he would need to report to bin Ibrahim, and feared even what someone might say (although none was present) about Ezzedine himself, and so he was cautious, even to the point of dishonesty with his words: “Is there a limit to the permissible error of other men’s thoughts? Would you love your English neighbor were he a Mahometan?”
“I love my dear friend from the land of the Turks and feel no need to correct him.”
Ezzedine could not help himself: He admired this humility, this open heart. “And if your neighbor, like your poet-guest at your house the other evening, held his belief in no god at all, by any name, neither mine nor yours?”
At this, Dee laughed, and Ezzedine flinched that any might hear. “We mustn’t take a wicked child’s pulled faces too seriously. Do you know, in France, there are English Catholics who study violence and mean to infiltrate themselves into England to do mischief, and they know full well that they will be caught and tortured and killed, and they long for this! And they call themselves martyrs! It sickens the heart. And for this, in front of a Mahometan, I am ashamed of ourselves, Catholic and Protestant alike.”
All of this Ezzedine attempted to remember word for word. He wrote it down after he and Dee embraced in parting (and made plans to cut each other’s arms and apply pastes together), though first he wrote sketches and descriptions of the leaves and roots his friend had taught him.
He wrote Dee’s words to be sure that he forgot nothing. This was his duty.
He wrote Dee’s words to someday show his son how wisdom grew. This was his pleasure and his duty.