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.
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.”
“I should need the gold coin paid first, because I do not think you will be able to pay it after your lecture.”