The ambassador smiled upon the proceedings. The queen asked that the story of her address to her troops be retold. The Earl of Essex bowed and began to declaim, “No woman soft, but monarch stern, before the bristled men of Tilbury did raise martial voice and call down heaven’s—” before a lesser noble pushed to the front of the leg-sore lords and ladies. He seemed to demand attention, shoving aside several, including the queen’s favorite in the midst of his oration. “Ruffian, are you touched?” someone cried. A page laughed. A countess slapped at the stumbling noble’s hands as he reached for her, and then he fell to the floor and trembled in every limb and foamed at his lips and spoke in unknown tongues. A giant man in the back began to step toward the commotion, then was stopped by the lightest touch of a lady’s hand on his arm.
Essex thought to ignore the intrusion and continued his speech, his timing in political gesture never being perfect. But the cries soon outperformed him. “A demon is locked within him!” murmured one of the queen’s ladies, and another shouted the exact same words an instant later, though with a poor player’s lack of conviction or even of alarm.
Ezzedine watched: the lord palsying upon the floor, his eye rolling, his chin wet, the queen observing but unmoving, though she leaned slightly forward on her throne to have a clear view of the event. Ezzedine might have asked his ambassador’s permission, but he did not think of it. Had he done so, perhaps he would have been reunited with his soft wife and fat son, in his house upon the hill over the bluest water in creation. But perhaps, too, he would have been murdered on the French ship back to Constantinople (Cafer’s open hand), or executed for apostasy upon his return (Cafer’s closed hand), or…Those possibilities don’t signify, those other lives and deaths he didn’t live or die. Because he did not ask his ambassador’s leave to attend to the stricken Englishman.
Dr. Ezzedine was dressed in the clothing of a Mahometan, of course, and so when he bent over the thrashing body of an English lord, there was scarcely a man in the chamber who did not clench his whole body, fist and tail, at a collective national memory: a Saracen kneeling over his Crusader victim. And when the Mahometan doctor removed from within his robes a curved implement of polished wood, a hand’s span in length, the image of one of Suleiman’s turbaned assassins with his carved killing dagger was complete. And yet no Englishman stepped forward to rescue his fallen comrade, if that is what he was, and the queen herself only tilted her head to one side in fascination at the theatrical unfolding before and beneath her.
Ezzedine knelt beside the trembling man and wedged the shining crescent of wood fast between the man’s jaws. A man-at-arms felt enough was now finally well past enough and began to step forward, lowering his halberd, but none less than the queen told him to be still. Ezzedine seized the lord’s flailing arms and pressed them to his flanks, again pushing the slipping bar back between his teeth. The doctor only then recalled at last some shred of protocol: “Forgive me, please, great Majesty,” he said. He then pushed Henry Fairleigh, Third Baron Moresby, onto his side, facing away from the queen (turning both his and the lord’s back to the monarch, but what can one do), because, seeming to know exactly what would happen next, he collected Baron Moresby’s voluminous outflow of vomit in rags withdrawn from his own robes. The queen moved one bejeweled foot slightly forward and out from under her skirts, as if considering standing for a better view, but she remained seated at the farthest edge of the Presence Chamber’s throne.
At last, held tight by the Turk for another long minute or two, the baron ceased to flail. His shoulders drawn to his ears, his eyes closed, his head turned away, his fists brought close to his cheek, the baron became at once a sleeping child. His vileness was wiped away and hidden by the graceful doctor who, in the same motion, stored away the curved piece of wood by which he had prevented the Englishman from swallowing his own tongue.
The observant queen, with the speed and strategic brilliance for which she was renowned, noticed at once that Moresby was not possessed of a demon and that the Mussulman did no harm but rather healed the Christian, and that Moresby was now visibly incapable of living at court and so would have to return certain valuable royal patents to royal hands. She was not entirely unprepared for this, having previously instructed two of her ladies to squeal something about demons if they ever saw Baron Moresby shake, as many-tongued rumor sneered that he sometimes did in private or in the company of a single trusted groom.
12.
CAFER BIN IBRAHIM would have preferred to keep the arrogant and conniving physician locked in his room, then locked away on the ship home, not brought out until he faced accusations before a vizier. But this was a ceremonial moment, and the ambassador had insisted on the full company of men attending. Still, Cafer took the doctor aside before the queen entered the chamber, and he smiled alarmingly through a few words in Arabic: “I hope that you are able to explain your position to the sultan more convincingly than you could to me or the ambassador. I truly hope it. It would be a loss to us all otherwise.” Perhaps that might be enough to make the doctor flee before they reached Qustantiniyya. The man’s house was placed so delightfully on a hill. There was a well-water fountain in its courtyard, clean and drinkable water, cool year-round. The child would have to be dealt with in time, but the sultan would certainly not stand in the way of a marriage. The widow would be considered greatly fortunate to make a new match. Told of her husband’s crimes and disappearance, she would leap at the offer.
Not forty minutes later, while Ezzedine attended to the thrashing, vomiting English lord, and the ladies cried “Demon!” and the lazy lords stood idly by as a Mahometan tossed and turned the body of their peer, while the queen poked a single jeweled toe from under the farthest skirts of her gowns, Cafer bin Ibrahim reduced himself to nothing but freely floating eyes and ears, and in that potent state, he sped and flew through the chamber, collecting priceless knowledge. Such physical pleasure to leave the body like this, to drift at any speed, at any distance, to glide invisibly above the room and below the feet, into the mouths and thence to the minds, all possible with effort.
Cafer floated beside the ladies shouting “Demon!” and saw their glances to each other, and then heard the words kept within their hearts: They did not think there were any demons here but only mouthed this claim upon instruction. Bin Ibrahim’s body, far across the chamber, shivered with pleasure at this purloined knowledge. He felt less aroused when it was his actual body at work, when, as an example, he had placed himself alone in the library of the city home of the Earl of Essex, while he was that peer’s guest, and read, rapidly, such letters as could be seen upon a writing table. There, alone, his actual body in the perilous act of intrusion, he felt pleasure—even a deep pleasure—but nothing comparable to the rush of blood and the quivers of waist that rewarded this disembodiment. The spirit of Allah’s angels inflated him as his own soul freely flew up the skirts of these ladies and into the mind of the Earl of Essex and the Baron Moresby and even his own countryman, Dr. Ezzedine. What did bin Ibrahim learn? What was not revealed to him as his body felt such heavenly caresses, as if his eternal pleasure in paradise had begun ahead of all logical time?