The King at the Edge of the World
REVIEWS | SYNOPSIS | EXCERPT | 1591 WITH 2020 VISION | LINKS
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In the Palace of Felicity, in Constantinople, in the land of the Turks, early in the Christian year 1591, viziers to Murad the Great, third of that name, Sultan of the Ottomans, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, Caliph of Caliphs, dispatched an embassy to a far- off, sunless, primitive, sodden, heathen kingdom at the far cliffside edge of the civilized earth. The sultan chose as his ambassador a loyal and trusted man, but nobody of great importance, to negotiate with the people of that patch of damp turf.
Still, one must send someone to discuss trade and passports and the repatriation of unlucky Turkish sailors captured by the pirate crews who cowered in the harbors of that barbarian island. Those pirates thrived under the protection of the island’s capricious sultana, cruel in her poverty, weakness, fearful isolation, and unnatural state of unmarried womanly rule. She also begged for the Ottoman sultan’s support against her enemies, locked as she was in a bloody and endless sectarian combat with others of her kind about some incomprehensible quarrel over their false religion. The sultan felt it was time to send someone competent to the island of the English to wring concessions from her queen.
And so the ambassador and his entourage traveled to the end of the world. The ambassador, a eunuch who had been born a Christian in Portugal and recognized the truth of Mohammed when he was captured at the age of eleven, led a small retinue, only fourteen men: his chief adviser, a doctor of medicine, servants, scribes, guards. He carried for the island’s sultana, among many other gifts, a pair of lions, a scimitar, a unicorn’s horn, and ten English pirates captured by Turkish sailors.
This last gift assured that the ambassador and his men were welcomed to London by a torchlight parade through the gawping crowds near St. Lawrence Jewry church, winding to the large house where they would live for five months before returning to Constantinople.
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Mahmoud Ezzedine, the doctor responsible for the health of the ambassador first and then of every man of the embassy after, had tried to avoid this journey, but his presence was specifically requested.
He had enriched himself and gained a reputation, won favor and honor, wife and child, home and security, all from his carefully amassed medical knowledge. He had risen to become one of the physicians entrusted with the very bodies of the sultan and his family, and his life in Constantinople lacked for nothing. There was no pleasure in losing a year of his wife’s company, of his son’s growth, of attempting a second child. Despite a lack of success so far, he had enjoyed the process. And, nearly as important, there was no plea- sure in being away from the royal family, whose health he protected and cherished even beyond his own.
He had dared to ask an influential courtier if there were any possibility of another physician being sent in his place. The man said he would inquire, but he must have done so clumsily, for a few days later, Ezzedine was visited at home by Cafer bin Ibrahim, who would be the ambassador’s chief adviser for the expedition. “Dr. Ezzedine,” said Cafer, over coffee and figs brought by the doctor’s translucently veiled wife, Saruca, to the courtyard of the house and served under the shade and pink flowers of the Judas trees. “It was I who suggested to the sultan that he send you to England. And he was enthusiastic that you should protect us all. And you would now refuse?”
“Of course I would not dream of refusing.”
“I’m glad to hear you say it. I misunderstood some idiot at court who misrepresented your words and heart to me. You should be careful whom you entrust with them. May I take another fig?”
The doctor’s son, Ismail, cried for two nights after he learned of his father’s approaching departure for Christian England. “I won’t be gone so long as all that,” he told Saruca as the boy sobbed himself to sleep. “I will bring him something English as a gift. It is gratify- ing to think I will be so missed.” He reached for his wife’s hand across the bed.
“He is afraid you will not return,” she said. “He told me he was afraid you will be eaten by lions.”
“I will reassure him. The English don’t have lions.”
The next morning, however, the boy was in no mood to be condescended to. “I didn’t say lions,” he said, stamping a foot. “I said Lionheart. You are going to where Richard Lionheart came from.” Ezzedine tried not to laugh. “But Lionheart died long ago. And all the Crusaders were defeated long ago. There are no more Crusaders.”
“But his people may still be like him. And want to hurt you.”
“I promise I will be safe,” said Dr. Ezzedine, kissing the top of the boy’s head. It smelled of something dusty but sweet, like a flow- er’s pollen.
Saruca told him the night before his departure, “It is bad that you go. I don’t want to watch you leave. So I practice imagining it and accepting it. I don’t want to curse your absence.” She kissed him in the morning as he stood outside, the boy clinging to his leg. “I accept this,” she said, before she began to weep and pulled the crying boy away. The doctor walked down to the sea. He tried not to look back but didn’t succeed.