He wrote Dee’s words because Dee’s mind brought Ezzedine pleasure. He would enjoy, when home in Constantinople, recalling his friend’s words at his leisure. Perhaps they would continue a scholarly and warm correspondence. Perhaps he might send medicaments back to England for him.
But first, his duty to report to bin Ibrahim: He would do so, of course. Or he could report only that the conversation pertained to natural philosophy, medicine, botany. He did not wish to imply that Dr. Dee’s clarity about Christian weakness made him a potential secret servant of bin Ibrahim.
Dee and Ezzedine passed three ladies as they exited the wood into the open park, where in the distance Essex and bin Ibrahim still hunted. Ezzedine followed Dee’s example, bowing while turning, walking backward as the ladies turned their heads and prettily smiled with only their lips. “That one is a lady of the chamber. She dresses the queen, attends her in her bath, cleans her in all manner of things. Do your sultan and sultana have such a one as this?”
Ezzedine felt it would be unkind to state the truth: that for any one English page, serving girl, or beauty such as this woman, for every man-at-arms, musician, or cook, the sultan had a dozen in the Sublime Porte, some paid, some slaves, some loyal for love. The sultan lived amid a clamor of those who wished to touch the royal hair or paint the face or clean a tooth or wipe away filth. The English court was richer in nothing except green grass, which Ezzedine did enjoy kneeling down to caress.
“Because,” Dee continued, “I happen to know that this one has asked about you. You have caught the eye of a great beauty, my friend, with your exotic ways and Mahometan wisdom. And the red beard, I suspect.”
Ezzedine did not at first understand the implication. “I am honored,” he said simply, though he was not a complete innocent. In Constantinople a court woman might well desire a man who was not her husband. The result might be heads cut off, or merely poison drizzled into goblets, and so illicit desires were kept at bay without much difficulty. Of course, the nearer a man sat to the sultan’s favor, the more freedom he was able to exert, and, as one of the sultan’s physicians, Ezzedine could, he supposed, have been nearly as free with himself in the Sublime Porte as any man might wish. He knew some men who acted according to their desires and the license of their rank. And yet he felt no desire whatever beyond what he felt for his wife. It never occurred to him that this was unusual. Nor did he notice the appetites she whetted in other men.
The two physicians strolled around a curve of wood and into an enclosure of green lawn, a bay nestled on three sides by forest, shadowed paintings of tree branches cast onto the grass. Three acrobats—a skinny man of surprising height, a boy, and some person whose sex Ezzedine could not have guessed—were awaiting passing audiences and now hurried into their performance at the arrival of the two chatting doctors. “Hop, hop…Hey!” The mysterious third climbed upon the man’s shoulders and set to juggling three balls. The boy ran in circles, pretended to fall, then leapt and scrambled up, not stopping until he was on the shoulders of the second figure, and from this perch, high above the doctors, he pulled four balls from a pocket and set to juggling, a ring of orbs set above the smaller ring below. “I can throw these balls to heaven!” shouted the boy, hurling the balls higher and higher in their crossing arcs and orbits, these harmonic circles. The two doctors leaned backward, like reeds blown by wind, to watch the balls fly and form a little universe of their own above the tower of people.
A voice behind them replied, “That is what I meant to say at your house the other evening.” Ezzedine had not heard anyone approach on the thick grass, and the voice was nearly in his ear.
It was the young man from Dee’s home, the friend of one of the lords, the poet who took such giggling, vicious pleasure in playing with hot ideas and trying out sour words upon his tongue. “That, my doctors: The juggler, like a priest, tells us he can see right up God’s nostrils and we, just a few yards below, beg him to report to us how long those celestial hairs grow.”
Ezzedine could not remember the man’s name. Dee just shook his head, calmly disapproving but ready to forgive, as at an infant smeared in filth. “Kit’s a difficult boy,” Dee said to Ezzedine, smiling but apologetic. “Exactly the sort of talk I was saying we need less of.” But today there was something about the young man that Ezzedine liked instantly, before any voice of censure arose in him. The poet blasphemed as if he expected to be praised rather than punished, praised for wisdom and for naughty daring. In normal circumstances (blasphemy against Mohammed), Ezzedine would have been glad to see him punished, but there was something in this arrangement (blasphemy against Christians, among Christians) that freed Ezzedine to weigh the boy’s worth on some other scale than doctrine. And then he liked him. He liked the boy’s desire to be loved, to make Dr. Dee laugh, and Dee did laugh, shaking his head in unconvincing disapproval, the boy going on and on with his jests and provocations and claims to historical evidence. He had said over dinner (words Ezzedine had forgotten to report to bin Ibrahim), “Do you know, there are people in the New World whose nations have been upon the earth well beyond six thousand years. Beyond the span of all human history laid out in our misshapen book.”
The boy juggler atop the tower shouted down, “Can you catch what heaven throws you, lords?” The child let fall from the top of its arc one of his balls, kept the other three converging into a blur, a halo. The released orb fell from the sky, shooting past three bodies and six other balls. Ezzedine tried to catch it, but he had no skill at such things. It fell between them, and the poet leapt at it. Kit chided him, “Can you not catch, sir Turk? Why, even the papists I’ve known can now and again catch and tickle the odd hairy ball.”
Ezzedine attempted to play with Kit’s words and wit: “Does God think the earth but a child’s ball?”
Quoth the poet: “He thinketh it but a turd.” Ezzedine caught his breath, but no one from his embassy was in range to hear such talk. “And I do return his low opinion.”
“Do you not risk chastisement for this…speech?” asked the doctor.
“Of course he does,” clucked Dee. “He thinks his friends make him immortal.”
“Oh, the men without wit are not so foolish as to think me menacing. But if they should grow tired of me, I would flee with you to Constantinople and take up residence in the seraglio.”
“I doubt the sultan would welcome your intrusion. Or that he would enjoy your wit.”
“Good Turk, I have higher hopes in your people than that. I will give you a gold coin of your own realm if you invite me to the Sublime Porte so that I might inform the sultan that, just like the god of the Hebrews, the god of Rome, and the god of the English, so, too, the god of Mussulmen is born of the same muck: the conceit of man. I shall convince every man there in the sultan’s court, and all the harem, too, that I speak the truth. When I leave, they will not one of them spend another day on anything but tobacco, wine, and lust.”