The King at the Edge of the World Read online

  The King at the Edge of the World is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Arthur Phillips

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Phillips, Arthur, author.

  Title: The king at the edge of the world : novel / Arthur Phillips.

  Description: New York : Random House, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019019018| ISBN 9780812995480 | ISBN 9780812995497 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Turkey—History—Ottoman Empire, 1288–1918—Fiction. | Great Britain—History—Elizabeth, 1558–1603—Fiction. | James I, King of England, 1566–1625—Fiction. | GSAFD: Historical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3616.H45 K56 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019019018

  Ebook ISBN 9780812995497

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Simon M. Sullivan, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Michael Morris

  Cover images: Private Collection/Bridgeman Images (monkey); © Purix Verlag Volker Christen/Bridgeman Images (crown); wwing/Getty Images (rosary beads)

  v5.4

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Part One: Mahmoud Ezzedine, 1591

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Two: Geoffrey Belloc, 1601

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Three: Matthew Thatcher and David Leveret, 1601

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Four: Matthew Thatcher and James Stuart, 1602

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue: Mahmoud Ezzedine and God

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Arthur Phillips

  About the Author

  We know our enemies are lying to us. But what intelligence coup could convince you that their claim is not a lie or a cover story? That there is no Soviet-American missile gap. That Hussein hides no WMD. If the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence, then what the hell ever could be?

  —T. MCCRADY HEWES, A Life in Intelligence

  In her correspondence with the Sultan [asking for help against the Catholic Spanish], the Queen [Elizabeth I] emphasized the fact that as a Protestant Christian, she rejected the veneration of idolatrous images which the Pope and the Spanish king practiced. Her Christianity, she implied, was closer to Islam than was Catholicism….Catholics were saying in [Constantinople] that “the English lack nothing to make them sound Mussulmans, and need only stretch out a finger to become one with the Turks in outward appearance, in religious observance, and in their whole character.”

  —NABIL MATAR, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685

  1.

  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.

  2.

  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 importa
nt, there was no pleasure 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 gratifying 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 flower’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.

  3.

  THROUGHOUT THEIR STAY, the ambassador and his men had audiences with the English sultana at Greenwich and Nonsuch palaces and hosted her and her people in turn to feasts à la Turkeska at the ambassador’s residence, where they slaughtered all their meat themselves in the correct manner. For months, official negotiations were conducted in the cold rooms of the queen’s palaces or upon her green parklands. Conclusions were reached in matters of sea-lanes and free overland passages, the exchange of captured pirates/sailors, various immunities and protections for Englishmen voyaging in the empire of the Ottomans. Much of the diplomacy was a duel of imaginations, conceptions of events that had not yet occurred but were suddenly pressingly possible.

  “And if an Englishman traveling in Qustantiniyya should wish to convert to the religion of Mohammed?” asked the ambassador’s chief adviser, Cafer bin Ibrahim. This particular question amused those of the English negotiators who had never left England but deeply troubled those English who had traveled, especially in Mahometan lands. There was much to be said for any religion that promised wealth, opportunity, and wives in this world. (This was a truth as obvious as air to the Turks, one they lived with daily. Back in Constantinople, bin Ibrahim always hurriedly sold any of his Christian slaves who were considering converting to the true faith, or else he would have had to free them at a loss, enslavement of his co-religionists being illegal.)

  Conversely, the question arose of Turk merchants traveling within England and of their free and safe passage throughout the kingdom, of what protections the queen might guarantee a hypothetical Mahometan buyer of, say, tin. Could such a one reside unmolested in London? Or travel to mines farther inland? And pray to Allah and his saints as his law demanded, five times daily? Even when it was pointed out that Jews (who were obviously worse and more dangerous) sometimes were free to move about, the English found the prospect of a freely roaming Turk so astonishing and obviously unsanitary to the body politic that the topic was temporarily set aside. But then one of the queen’s privy councillors, Robert Beale, pointed out that if (as the Turkish negotiators insisted) any Englishman in the Ottoman Empire who of free conscience wished to swear allegiance to Mohammed could not be prevented from doing so, then any Ottoman wishing to profess his devotion to Jesus Christ was similarly at liberty to do so while in England. The Ottoman ambassador readily agreed to this reciprocity, unable to conceive of any Ottoman who would see an advantage—spiritual or economic—in apostasy or, for that matter, take up permanent residence on this island. England was simply too poor and Christianity too unpromising in this life. After all, they were scarcely able to convince some of the English pirates to return from Constantinople. Even those in prison.

  Meanwhile, at the suggestion of Dr. Ezzedine, all the men of the embassy performed zakat by paying, as their wealth allowed them, for the release or well-being of Turkish prisoners held in England. Ezzedine went further and, under escort, searched in the darkest parts of London for a rumored community of Moors awaiting passports or funds to sail for happier places. Dr. Ezzedine would have given generously to these unfortunates, if he could have found them.

  What would Saruca and Ismail think of this place? He sketched it for them, in pictures and words, the palaces and the creaking wooden buildings where mythological Moors could not be found. But it was impossible to properly capture with paper. Ismail often claimed he would explore the world, to see every corner of the sultan’s empire, but he still was shy around other boys and hid behind his father’s legs, and Ezzedine suspected that the sight of these houses painted with the sign of plague would ruin his sleep for days. “Sometimes, it’s much nicer to stay at home,” he had told his father almost every night for a few weeks when he was smaller.

  Later, Ezzedine had brought Ismail to see the chamber of maps at the Sublime Porte, showed him the far-off corners of the empire, where Sarajevo and Buda and Athens and Jerusalem and Cairo sat, so many difficult months away from Constantinople and Ismail’s beloved caged birds. As a mark of respect to his father, Ismail was permitted to see the globes and even to set one of them to turning. Ezzedine watched as the question of scale began to trouble the child. “Are we all residing on this one tiny dot? But how can that be?” It seized the boy’s mind for a month to come, and at times Ezzedine despaired of getting Ismail to understand. “Even Mother? Even my birds? Even you? All of us live on a black dot? But it is not black on the ground outside….”

  Finally, Saruca succeeded where Ezzedine had failed. Ismail explained to his father, “Look how small the boats are on the water when we stand on the top of the hill. But they are not small when we are near them. They don’t change, but they seem small. So if a bird flew very high, we would seem small enough to fit on a spot.”

  Saruca teased her husband that night: “If you would like me to take over the boy’s education, I will make time in my day.”

  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.