by S. W. Perry
‘I know this is hard for you, Hadir, but can you recall if there was much blood? Did the wounds look freshly made?’
Hadir winces. His face is not made for dark thoughts. ‘Was little blood, most only here.’ He splays his fingers down the sides of his ribcage. ‘Maybe the beast who killed Sayidi Sy-kess drink it all.’
‘You knew Master Sykes well, Hadir. I presume you knew his routine. What reason would he have to be outside the city walls at night?’
The boy might be an astute trader, but where his friend Adolfo Sykes is concerned, he hasn’t yet learned to dissemble. ‘I do not let myself ask this question,’ he says, his composure crumbling.
‘Why not?’ Nicholas asks, though he suspects he knows the answer.
‘Because it means it was not an accident. It means my friend was kill-ed – but not by wild beasts.’
‘Did Adolfo Sykes have enemies?’ Nicholas asks as gently as he can.
Hadir shakes his head. ‘He was a good man. No enemy!’
Nicholas thinks, I would have said the same thing of Solomon Mandel, if anyone had asked me. He remembers what Hadir had told him on the road from Safi, how Sultan al-Mansur had forgiven his old foe al-Seddik: Sometimes a new sultan will punish his enemies after a battle. Sometimes he will command that the skin shall be flayed from their living bodies…
He looks again at the patch of dirt Hadir has led him to. A small scorpion emerges from the meagre shade of a rock and sets off in a slow scuttle towards the nearest acacia bush.
‘I’ve seen all I need to see here,’ Nicholas says. ‘Now show me where your friend is buried.’
A twenty-minute walk brings Nicholas to the Aduana quarter, a district of warehouses and private dwellings where the Christian community of Marrakech plies its trade with its hosts across a mud-brick frontier ten feet high. In the heat, Nicholas feels as though he’s walked from Bankside to Barnthorpe without resting on the way.
To his relief, it is shady in the lanes of the Aduana. But the shadows cannot dim the colourful garb of its inhabitants. Instead of soberly dressed Woodbridge merchants or the dark-gowned worthies he’s seen in the Exchanges in Antwerp or Rotterdam, here the factors and the middlemen, the sellers and the buyers are draped in vividly coloured clothes. He sees silk gowns, linen ponchos, brilliantly dyed cloth coats, pantaloons and galligaskins of every hue under the sun. From Hadir, he learns these are Christians from Andalucía, Constantinople, Alexandria, from the Balkans and the Levant, some even from Persia. Hadir exchanges greetings with many of them. Nicholas begins to understand now why Cecil House is so full of busy, serious-faced clerks hurrying to and fro. If Adolfo Sykes was but one single agent in the Cecils’ vast network of intelligencers, the reports flowing into Cecil House must give Lord Burghley and his crook-backed son an almost god’s-eye view of the known world.
The Christian church in the Aduana is a mud-brick building almost indistinguishable from the others in the lane, save for an iron three-bar cross of Eastern design above the entrance. In the adjoining graveyard, Nicholas walks amongst a score of dirt mounds, each bearing a simple cross. Adolfo Sykes’s resting place is the newest. The stone still bears the recent marks of the mason’s chisel, and the wind has not yet softened the dirt mound beneath it. Though he has had cause in his life to question the deity to whom this little plot is sacred, Nicholas stands for a moment in silence and offers up a prayer that Adolfo Sykes’s suffering is at an end.
‘Why does Sayidi Nich-less wish to see the grave of a man he does not know?’ Hadir asks, his gentle brown eyes focused on the grave, as though he’s embarrassed by his own question.
Not wanting to ensnare himself in a hasty lie, Nicholas takes his time replying.
‘A friend of his, in England. He hadn’t heard from Master Sykes for some time. When he learned I was coming here, he asked me to seek news of him.’
Hadir looks him in the eye. ‘Is this friend you speak of the minister of the English queen? The minister who sent Sayidi Nich-less here to study our medicine?’
‘Just a friend,’ Nicholas says, before making a discreet bow and turning away from the grave.
An innocent question? he wonders. Or has Hadir Benhassi started drawing his own conclusions about my visit to the grave of Adolfo Sykes?
When Sumayl al-Seddik had told him ‘my tent shall be your tent’, he was being somewhat modest, Nicholas discovers the next day.
The minister’s mansion is near the el-Badi Palace, close enough for the rotund little courtier to answer the sultan’s whim without working up an undignified amount of perspiration. Like most fine houses in Marrakech, its external walls are an unremarkable, unadorned expanse of mud-brick. Only when he is inside does Nicholas see the beauty – and the wealth – on display. He sits with his host and Professor de Lisle on cushions in a fragrant garden, shaded from the worst of the sun beneath a row of fig trees. Musicians serenade them with strangely enticing music played on lutes with extravagantly long necks. A spicy fish pottage is served. ‘We call it shebbel,’ al-Seddik tells him. ‘It is similar to your English salmon.’ But Nicholas cannot think of any salmon he’s ever eaten that was plucked by hand from an ornamental cistern full of water piped down from the Atlas mountains. The dish is serviced to him by a black slave more than six feet tall, as handsome as an angel, and purchased – as his master is happy to explain – at huge expense from the most exclusive slave merchant in Timbuktu. His companions, not one of them less imposing, cast cooling water scented with ambergris from brass censers over the diners. The plump little courtier, Nicholas decides, has a taste for the exceptional.
The meal is commenced without formal prayers, Nicholas notices. Al-Seddik simply mouths his own grace before tucking into the food with his bare fingers.
As they eat, Nicholas learns where this great wealth comes from: interests in gold mines, in tanneries, in slaving ships. And al-Seddik is humble in his gratitude for his good fortune. ‘I am a simple man, with simple tastes,’ he assures Nicholas on more than one occasion. ‘Why Allāh, the most merciful, the most compassionate, has chosen me for such favours, I cannot imagine, other than that I might contribute much al-waqf to my fellows. The Bimaristan al-Mansur hospital will ensure that I may continue to thank Him long after I have passed into heaven.’
Nicholas cannot stop himself smiling as he thinks of what old Baronsdale, the president of the College of Physicians, would make of this, with his parson’s rectitude and stern frugality.
The talk turns to physic, de Lisle translating the more arcane matters that al-Seddik’s otherwise excellent English cannot encompass. Nicholas discovers that the Moors practise medicine much as the Europeans do, using the same Galenic and Hippocratic texts from antiquity. Plague, he learns, is as much a tribulation here as it is in London, though London is happily spared the malignant ills caused by eating too many musk-melons and apricots, which al-Seddik terms fruit-fevers.
‘Tomorrow, Dr Shelby, you must visit our Bimaristan,’ al-Seddik says, as though he’s kept the best dish till last. ‘I think you might find it a little different from your hospitals in England. A procedure is to be performed that may interest you. Have you perhaps witnessed a… a…’ He struggles to find the correct English. ‘Help me, please, Professor – an operation on the qassabat al-ri’a – the pipe of the lung?’
‘The windpipe,’ says de Lisle in a superior voice. ‘The procedure to be performed is a laryngotomy.’
Nicholas’s eyes widen in surprise. To his knowledge, the procedure has been performed successfully only once in Europe, and that almost fifty years ago. Al-Seddik might just as well have invited him to watch a hanging or a burning – because the subject’s chances of survival could hardly be worse.
29
‘It’s nothing but a sentence of death,’ Bianca tells Jenny Solver, barely able to keep the tears of pity from pooling in her eyes. ‘They might as well drag the poor souls to Tyburn and hang them. It would be quicker and a deal more merciful.’
‘
I heard it from Alderman Goodricke’s maid,’ the other woman replies, with the customary joy of an inveterate gossip, ‘so it must be true.’
Bianca shakes her head in disbelief. ‘A wooden house, thrown up on the Pike Garden, to imprison all who have the sickness? It’s positively heartless. They should be treated in their own homes. If they must die, let it be in the bosom of their families.’
‘It’s better than having them wandering the streets, passing on contagion,’ Jenny Solver says with a busy flick of her hair.
But Bianca will not have it. ‘It’s a tragedy the monasteries have all been pulled down,’ she says. ‘They could have sought shelter there. When we had the plague in the Veneto, the holy houses were a place of refuge.’
Taking the pot of medicine Bianca has prepared for her – a decoction of drop-wart to get her urine flowing properly – Jenny Solver purses her plump lips in objection. ‘Then we’d have two plagues, Mistress Merton: pestilence and papistry.’
Fuming, Bianca watches her leave. I should have put pepper in it, she tells herself – that would put a stop to your gossiping for a while.
Once alone, her thoughts turn to Reynard Gault. She has yet to prepare the preventatives she’d promised him. She wonders if he really needs them, or if it was – as she suspects – simply a way of drawing her closer to him, so that he can discover what he thinks she knows about Nicholas’s journey to Barbary.
She has concluded – if there had ever been any doubt – that she does not care for Reynard Gault. There will be no fetid, temporary communal sick-houses thrown up for the likes of him. His kind have comfortable homes in the countryside to flee to. Men like Gault can distance themselves from the pestilence. They can buy themselves a measure of safety. Here on Bankside, people do not have that luxury.
For a moment she considers letting him stew, only attending to his request when she’s exhausted every reason to delay. But then the old, familiar worm of curiosity starts to squirm. She knows in her heart Gault wants more from her than medicines.
She can feel now, as she recalls their exchange in his fine new house, the insistent pressure of his fingers squeezing her arm in a manner quite at odds with the gallant’s mask he wears. His sudden reaction still makes her shudder, even now. She wonders, not for the first time, what brought about such a sudden parting of the curtain, allowing her to see a darker world beyond. His desire to know why Robert Cecil sent Nicholas to Morocco burned in his eyes like a fever. For a moment, she feared he was going to try to beat out of her a secret she didn’t possess.
Which means Nicholas has lied to her; there is something more to the commission he’s undertaken for Robert Cecil than the mere desire for knowledge. Nicholas, she hisses to her empty, silent shop, what have you got yourself mixed up in? Haven’t you learned your lesson yet, that nothing good can come of dealing with the Crab?
But as she begins the task of gathering the ingredients to make Gault’s preventatives, spooning sweet-smelling powders from clay pots, taking up sprigs of herbs, pouring oils from little pewter pots into a stone mortar, the fear begins to gnaw at her heart that this time Nicholas has placed himself in a danger too distant for her to come to his aid.
She thinks again of going to Robert Cecil at Windsor and confronting him. But she knows she wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near him, certainly not now that the pestilence has come to Southwark. They’d slam the town gate in her face.
No, she thinks, the only way to find out what Nicholas has got himself embroiled in is to pay reluctant court to the one man who seems to want to know as badly as she does.
Arnoult de Lisle arrives next morning after the al-fajr prayers, to conduct Nicholas to the Bimaristan al-Mansur. The Frenchman is dressed in the Moor fashion, in a cream linen djellaba. With his tanned face, it is all too easy to take him for a native of Barbary, expect when he speaks. His French accent is cultured, his English fluent.
Professor de Lisle is reader in Arabic at the Collège de France, appointed by King Henri himself, Nicholas can hear al-Seddik telling him. He wonders what other talents de Lisle might be keeping hidden: subversion of the alliance between the Moroccan sultan and the English queen, for instance.
The walk to the Bimaristan takes them across a broad public square thronged with people. The sun beats down on merchants selling oils, honey, parsley and oregano; troupes of wrestlers; jugglers and snake-charmers; young boys with solemn faces and bells on their wrists, performing energetic dances to the applause of the crowd. There are men sitting on stools who turn spindles on foot-lathes, fortune-tellers, acrobats, professional storytellers, even a display of severed heads stinking and plum-dark on their poles, reminding Nicholas of the traitors’ heads that grace the top of the gatehouse on London Bridge. Were it not for the heat, it could be Bankside on any May Day.
But when he enters the Bimaristan al-Mansur, Nicholas wonders if perhaps the Frenchman hasn’t led him to one of the sultan’s palaces by mistake.
It takes Nicholas a while to grasp the full magnificence of what he’s seeing. He stares in silence around the high vaulted chamber of gleaming white marble; at the slender pillars whose spreading crowns seem made of stone lace; at the intricate patterns of blue, red and gold tiles beneath his feet, each one no larger than a pebble; at the glittering water flowing from a fountain in the shape of a six-pointed star laid on its side and set upon a stepped dais. It is unlike any hospital he has ever seen. He imagines the patients must think themselves already in heaven.
Sitting on the lowest step of the fountain is an old man in a white djellaba. He plucks strange notes from a stringed instrument with a long neck, which looks too fragile to produce such calming music. His face seems unmoved by the beauty of the sound he makes. He could have been sitting here for a thousand years, Nicholas thinks, his music soothing back to health countless generations of the sick.
Al-Seddik appears, his white beard jutting out beneath his gleaming smile of welcome, his round little body wrapped in pale-blue silk – a plump damson in bejewelled slippers.
‘It is our tribute to Allāh, the most generous, the most bountiful, for his gift of physic,’ he says proudly, one downy forearm wafting carelessly to encompass the magnificence.
‘It’s beautiful,’ says Nicholas, almost lost for words. ‘Very clean.’
‘For hygiene,’ al-Seddik tells him. ‘This is the command of the great al-Abbas al-Majusi. A Christian may know him better as Haly Abbas. You have heard of him in England, perhaps?’
‘I studied a translation of his Complete Art of Medicine, at Cambridge,’ Nicholas says. ‘Not entirely with success; my Latin is a little shaky.’
‘We have a copy in our library,’ says al-Seddik proudly. ‘It is an original – six centuries old.’
Nicholas purses his lips to show how impressed he is. He’s not even sure there were physicians in England that long ago. ‘I’d like to see it,’ he says, thinking of John Lumley. ‘A friend of mine has a translation of Avicenna’s Canon in his library – printed in Paris more than a century ago.’
Al-Seddik beams with pleasure. ‘Ah, the great Ibn Sina! We have an original of the Canon – the al-Qānūn Fi al-Tabb – too.’
‘An original?’
‘Of course.’
‘Six hundred years old?’
‘Give or take a few decades,’ al-Seddik says, clapping Nicholas on the arm in friendly commiseration. ‘Personally, I prefer al-Majusi. His method for siting hospitals was the guiding principle when this location was chosen.’
‘That must have been the part where I had trouble with the Latin.’
Al-Seddik laughs. ‘The builder of a hospital must lay out pieces of meat in the places he is considering.’
‘Meat? As an offering?’
‘We are not heathens, Dr Shelby,’ al-Seddik protests amiably. ‘The builder should choose the place where the meat lasts longest before spoiling. This indicates a location conducive to healing. It suggests good air.’
‘In London it’s ha
rd to escape the smell of spoiling meat wherever you live.’
‘Do you also have fountains in your hospitals?’ al-Seddik asks, dropping a coin for the musician.
‘Only if the barber-surgeon accidentally cuts through an artery,’ Nicholas replies. He takes another look around the hall of gleaming stone. ‘Surely only the richest can afford treatment in a place like this.’
‘On the contrary. Thanks to our system of al-waqf, where rich men give a portion of their treasure, anyone may come here. Man; woman; sultan or pilgrim; even slaves are treated here.’
‘And the procedure you wish to show me – Professor de Lisle says it is a laryngotomy.’
‘Given its rarity in Christendom, I thought you would find it of interest. Come.’
Al-Seddik leads them through more cool high-vaulted chambers to a large room in the heart of the Bimaristan. At its centre is a waist-high platform, tiled with the same intricate patterns that cover the floor, each tiny square so polished that Nicholas thinks he could be standing in a treasury full of rubies, emeralds and topaz. Set into the ceiling is an opening – again in the shape of a six-pointed star – and beyond it an awning on the roof to keep out the worst of the sun.
But it is the man lying on the platform that draws Nicholas’s gaze. Clad in a simple cloth shirt that comes almost to his knees, he seems to be in the grip of a trance. Surrounded by such beauty, he would make Nicholas think of a dead pharaoh in his tomb, were it not for the slow, desperate sawing of his breath.
‘The patient is slowly suffocating because of a tumour in his throat,’ al-Seddik tells him.
‘Do you expect him to survive the procedure?’ Nicholas asks, knowing the chances are slim.
‘Inshā Allāh. In England I think you say, “If God wills it”.’
‘It has been performed successfully only once in Europe – by Signor Brassavola, in Ferrara,’ Nicholas says. ‘And that was before my queen ascended the throne. We hold it to be too risky a procedure to attempt.’