4.

INTO THE INTOLERABLY wet and cold summer the ambassador and his men were entertained, feted by the queen, though they were often unable to eat much of what was served. They sat for plays and masques, dancers and musicians, even a Turkish acrobat long in service to Elizabeth. Ezzedine asked him how he had come to be in England, but the man was nervous to talk to his former countrymen and fled the doctor’s gentle approach.

The embassy watched the queen’s most beloved entertainment twice in the first month: A cat, dressed in the habit of the Catholic pope, was placed on the back of a horse and tethered to the saddle. The horse, draped in English banners, trotted in a ring until a bear, wearing the livery of Mr. Walsingham, the queen’s recently deceased principal secretary, swept the cat from the horse’s back, tearing it to pieces. “It’s an allegory,” a lady of the court explained to Ezzedine. The doctor looked away at the moment of the animal’s death.

The most senior Turks went out riding with the master of the horse, the queen’s favorite (and, to Turkish eyes, quite obviously the English sultana’s sexual consort), the Earl of Essex. The earl was pleased to hunt with the pair of falcons brought by the ambassador as gifts to the queen. He deemed the ambassador a good and companionable gentleman and found his chief adviser, Cafer bin Ibrahim, to be “an uncommon skilled hand at the noble falcons.” It was bin Ibrahim who taught Essex the spoken commands in Arabic that the predators understood best. Bin Ibrahim was then honored to be a guest at Essex’s table and to hunt with him alone. He conversed often with this chief of the English military, asking naïve questions that led the earl to talk and talk and talk, taking obvious and predictable pleasure in educating the childish foreigner.

Members of the embassy who spoke English, or some tongue in common with the Englishmen, were encouraged by bin Ibrahim to pass hours in conversation with the strange inhabitants of this strange place. Later, at the embassy’s residence, they would be called in, one at a time, to make private report to him of all they had discussed, every English word and intonation. Each then received further instruction as to whom they should speak with the following day and on what topics.

Cafer bin Ibrahim condensed all these reports into an oral summary for the ambassador, delivered in his master’s chamber every evening, removing and adding certain details so the ambassador would best comprehend. He would then return to his table to prepare a written statement for a particular vizier back in Constantinople. This report bin Ibrahim would dispatch whenever a vessel departed while the embassy remained in London. Though the vizier had told bin Ibrahim that no English person—not a single soul on the entire island—could read Arabic, still he enciphered the reports. Long after the soft and plump ambassador was snoring contentedly, bin Ibrahim would be twirling an engraved spiral of mahogany upon which rode delicate tiles, each with two letters inked on it, one upside down. After completing his work, he would invert this ciphering wand and reorder the tiles for the next day, according to a system prearranged with the vizier prior to the embassy’s departure. Still, bin Ibrahim woke at least once a night in fear that he had made some fatal error in code, rendering it illegible.