‘The Jesuit. I saw the look on your face – like a man who’s noticed he’s about to step on a scorpion.’
Nicholas gives his host a grim smile. He feels a pool of perspiration overflow his top lip. ‘We have a certain distrust of Jesuits in my country.’
‘And so you thought he and I might be in league, yes?’
Nicholas’s reply feels like the most transparent thing he’s ever said. ‘Of course not. Why would I think that?’
De Lisle claps him wetly on the shoulder. ‘You can relax, Dr Shelby. Fra Cyprien has come to Marrakech to arrange a ransom. It is a regular occurrence.’
‘A ransom? For whom?’
‘Did you not see the slave market when you arrived? Fra Cyprien has come to negotiate the return of a fellow Catholic taken by Moor corsairs. They stopped his ship off Sagres last September.’
Amongst the echoing voices, Nicholas thinks he can hear Cathal Connell’s: You can’t traffic with the Moor and not come to appreciate his proficiency in the meat trade, Dr Shelby…
‘The man’s family can afford one thousand marks,’ de Lisle continues. ‘The slave owner wants fifteen hundred. Hopefully, Fra Cyprien will negotiate a compromise. A slave’s value is sometimes greater than his worth as a mere beast of burden – if he has resources to call upon.’
‘And if there is no agreement?’
‘Then Fra Cyprien will return home a disappointed man. And the poor Catholic will remain a slave – unless he can find someone else to pay the ransom.’
It seems a plausible explanation for the Jesuit’s presence, Nicholas thinks. The only question in his mind is: is it the truth?
When they have taken enough ease in the heat, the two men pass into a chamber where attendants ladle cold water over them from polished bronze bowls. From there, it is but a few steps to the alcoves from which Nicholas had heard the groans and cries emanating. He and de Lisle stretch out on stone plinths while the masseurs go to work, showing neither man much mercy.
Giving himself up to the unfamiliar mix of agony and ecstasy, Nicholas notices an attendant moving amongst the plinths. The man is dispensing oil from a clay jar to the masseurs. He moves with a strange lopsided gait.
‘See? That’s what can happen if you don’t have a rich family and a Fra Cyprien to call upon,’ says de Lisle, once again catching the focus of his guest’s gaze.
‘An accident?’
‘Castration,’ de Lisle says brutally. ‘Marcu is from Sicily. The poor fellow came here in payment of the devshirme. He was then unwise enough to attempt an escape.’
Nicholas gives de Lisle a blank look. ‘The devshirme – what is that?’
‘The blood-tax. Every year young men from the Christian coastal villages around the Mediterranean are given up by their families to the Moors. In return, the corsairs spare those same villages from destruction. The boys have a simple choice: renounce their Christian faith, become a Mohammedan and serve the Moors as warriors – or die.’ A sad shake of the head. ‘Being poor, they have no need of a negotiator like Fra Cyprien. They have nothing with which to pay a ransom.’
‘It’s not much of a choice, this blood-tax,’ Nicholas says, suppressing a groan as the masseur harrows the flesh between his shoulders.
‘On the contrary. It can be a good life, better than the one they left behind. They are enlisted as janissaries – the sultan’s elite warriors. They are fed well. They have status. They can take their own slaves in conquest. All they have to do is forget that their immortal souls have been damned by apostasy.’
Nicholas glances again at the hobbling, butchered Marcu. ‘If someone was threatening to do that to me – or worse – then I might consider turning my back on the Almighty,’ he says. ‘Few of us have no limit to the courage in our hearts.’
De Lisle turns his head and smiles. ‘Never fear, Dr Shelby. No one will ask us to pay the blood-tax. You and I, we are useful to powerful men. Best we keep it that way, eh?’
Nicholas’s education continues the following morning. It continues in much the same vein for almost a week. By day, he spends his time in the Bimaristan al-Mansur, with Arnoult de Lisle and Surgeon Wadoud as his guides. He tours the wards, which Surgeon Wadoud calls iwans, and speaks through the Frenchman to the patients. He visits the iwan where maladies of the eye are treated, and the ward reserved for women, though he is not permitted further than the delicately arched entrance. He sees where those who are sick of mind are cared for, and it is as unlike London’s Bedlam – where the mad dwell in a misery that is by no means confined to the spirit – as he can possibly imagine. When he lingers in the spacious gardens, watching the recuperating patients sitting in the shade of the orange trees while they recite passages from holy texts in gratitude for the wisdom that Allāh has revealed to his physicians, he cannot help wondering what old Baronsdale and the fellows of the College in London would make of it all.
Sometimes he catches Surgeon Wadoud glancing at him with cool interest, as though she cannot quite fathom the foreigner who has appeared in her domain. She seems disinclined to ask him about physic in his world. But then what would he tell her – that far from benefiting from a system like al-waqf, English hospitals have scarcely prospered since the queen’s late father threw down the monasteries and forced the sick to search for relief elsewhere? What could he offer her that would match the fabled Bimaristans of Damascus, Cairo and Baghdad, which she tells him have existed for almost a millennium?
On the seventh day Sumayl al-Seddik arrives to escort him to the Bimaristan’s library, where Nicholas is permitted to view the ancient texts by Ibn Sina, al-Zahrawi and Ibn al-Nafis. He looks on in awe as de Lisle translates the Moorish writing, lines of strangely sweeping curlicues that remind him of wave-crests blown on a summer wind. He learns about the importance of foods to aid recovery: foods that heat, and which the Moors call garmi – goose and duck and the flesh of a male goat, peaches and olives; and foods that cool, which are termed sardi – female goat meat, melons, figs and pomegranates. He learns the classifications of an irregular pulse by the animalistic names the Moors use: gazelle, ant and rat-tail; and the fifteen different varieties of pain.
By now he has begun to feel a measure of guilt. If he was back on Bankside, tending to the sick at St Tom’s as his professional self has told him more than once he should be, he’d have precious little to offer them in comparison. But most of all, he feels like a thief who’s been given the key to a vast treasure store.
‘Is there news of when I might present my letter to the sultan?’ he asks al-Seddik when his tour of the library is over.
The Moor rubs one hand over his silk-sheathed belly, as though in anticipation of another good meal. ‘Soon. Very soon. Inshā Allāh.’ He gives Nicholas a diplomat’s smile. ‘It is a little like heaven: one trusts one will get there one day, but there is no certain way of knowing quite when.’
When Nicholas returns to the Street of the Weavers a short while later, the mud-brick walls still shimmer from the heat of the sun, even though it is almost evening. The lane is deserted, its only occupant a scrawny grey cat playing idly with a half-dead lizard beneath a date palm.
Approaching the house, he sees that Hadir has left the door open in anticipation of his return. He steps through the low entrance and into the cool darkness of the interior passage. He stands still for a moment, breathing in the scent of orange blossom from the trees in the central courtyard. Then he calls out to let Hadir know he’s arrived.