While we were yet standing at the top of the stairs, there came a strange, chanting wail from across the city. It seemed to emanate from one of the slender towers I had seen from my bed. This sound waxed and waned eerily, and was quickly fortified by other chants and wails.
Upon listening for a moment, it occurred to me that I had heard this very sound before, though I could not remember where or when. "What is that?" I asked, turning to Farouk.
"Ah!" he said, reading the expression on my face. "It is the muezzin," he explained, "calling the faithful man to his prayers. Come." He turned and led me towards the pavilion where he sat me down upon a cushion. When I was thus settled, he said, "If you will please excuse me, I will return momentarily."
Farouk took himself a few paces away, turned his face to the east, bowed low three times, then knelt, placing hands flat before him and touching his nose to the ground. I watched him perform this curious ritual, rising now and then to bob his head up and down once or twice, before lowering his face again.
Though I did not doubt my physician's sincerity, his actions put me in mind of the gyrations some of the monks at the abbey would perform, with their genuflecting and kneeling and prostrating themselves, up and down, down and up, repeating the same words over and over again in a high reedy voice until they formed a meaningless gabble.
Farouk continued for a short while, then he rose, bowed to the east, and returned to where I was sitting. "The night is growing cool," he announced, "and I do not think it wise for you to become chilled. I shall return you to your room now."
He helped me to rise from the cushion, and we began shuffling back to the stairs, and had just reached them when the chanting began again. This time, however, the cry did not come from the finger-thin towers, but from the streets below, and it was not one person only, but many voices. I looked to Farouk for an explanation. He simply smiled, and lifted a hand to the raised edge of the roof.
I turned and we made our way to look down into the street where a huge crowd, a veritable multitude, thronged the narrow streets, and they were all chanting and crying out in attitudes of imprecation, as if beseeching the amir for recognition or a favour. I watched them, but could form no opinion of their actions. "What do they want Farouk?"
"They want your health, my friend," he answered.
He chuckled at the expression of incredulity that appeared on my face. "Who are they?" I wondered. "What can they know of my health?"
"It has become known in the city that the amir's new slave is ill," Farouk said, spreading his hands wide. "The people have come to pray for your recovery."
"Why tonight?"
"This night is no different from any other since you came," he told me.
"They come every night to pray?" I wondered. "For me?"
The physician nodded and cupped a hand to his ear. After a moment he said, "They ask God to raise up the amir's servant. They entreat Allah, All Wise and Compassionate, to restore your health, and bring you once more to happiness and prosperity. They ask the Holy Angels to stand over you and protect you so that the Evil One may no longer ravage your body and spirit. They ask God's peace and blessing on you this night."
The chanting prayers continued for a time, weaving a curious, ululating music in an unknown tongue. A sharp crescent moon had risen low and now gathered radiance in the night-dark sky. I felt the soft warmth fading in the air, and smelled the evening's sweet perfume. The strangeness of the place swirled around me like currents in a pool of hidden depths; I shivered to think of plunging myself in those exotic waters. Oh, but I was already immersed to the neck.
Their prayers finished, the people began creeping away. In a few moments, the streets were empty once more and silent. I gazed down into the now-quiet darkness with a feeling of curious astonishment. That all those people, unknown to me as I to them, should intercede for me-a mere slave in the amir's house-was more than I could credit.
Sure, I could not help thinking that it would not have happened in Constantinople, or anywhere else in the Christian world that I knew. Indeed, I had stood before the emperor, Christ's own Vice-Regent on Earth, the very Head of the Church Universal, and had received not so much as a cup of cold water, or a kindly word-and I a fellow Christian! But here, a stranger in a foreign land, I had received a continual outpouring of prayer from the moment I had arrived. All this time, they had prayed for me, a stranger unseen and unknown.
Such care and compassion, such blind faith, both astounded and shamed me. That night I lay long awake thinking about what I had seen, and fell asleep wondering what it could mean.
49
We walked to the rooftop garden again the next day, and lingered there a little longer before shuffling slowly back to my room. Exhaustion dogged my last few steps and Farouk helped me undress, whereupon I collapsed onto my bed with a groan, feeling as if I had worked the entire day heaving heavy boulders over a wall. I slumped back onto the cushions and Farouk drew the covering over me. I was asleep before he left the room.
He returned the next morning as I awoke. A tray of fruit, bread, and a steaming hot drink lay on a wooden tripod beside the bed. When he saw that I was awake, he sat down and took my hand in the peculiar wrist grip he had used before. He looked at me thoughtfully for a long moment, then replaced my hand, and said, "You are making a good recovery, my friend. As it happens, Amir Sadiq would like to see you today. Shall I tell him you are feeling well enough to sit with him?"
"Yes, of course, Farouk. I would be happy to speak with him whenever he wishes."
The physician smiled. "Then I will suggest that you speak together this morning while you are feeling strong. You can rest again, and then we will walk a little. Yes?"
"Certainly," I replied. "Whatever you think best. I owe my life to you, I think. If not for you, I would have died."
The white-robed physician held up his hands in protest, and shook his head. "No, no, no. It is Allah, All Wise and Merciful, who alone heals. I merely made you comfortable so that this healing might take place." He regarded me with his gentle, dark eyes for a moment. "For myself, I am only glad you are feeling better."
"Thank you, Farouk," I said.
He rose to his feet and said, "I will leave you now and return when I have spoken to the amir. It would be best if you would eat everything I have brought for you. We must begin rebuilding your strength."
Upon receiving my promise, he left me to myself. After a time, Kazimain appeared as I was finishing a bunch of blue-black grapes-the only fruit on the tray which I recognized. She smiled when she saw me, and came to the bedside, knelt, and selected a spherical fruit with a red skin; it looked a little like an apple, but had a tufted knot at one end, and the skin was very tough. She showed me how to break it open, speaking a word as she did so, but I could not make out what it was. Farouk returned just then, bearing a bundle of clothes, and said, "She is telling you that the name of this fruit is narra. The Greeks call it by another name, but the word escapes me."
Kazimain pushed her thumbs into the leathery red skin, gave a twist of her wrists, and the fruit split in two, revealing an interior of hundreds of tightly packed seeds, glistening like rubies. She broke off a small section, loosened a few of the little jewels into her palm, and offered them to me.