Chapter 27
‘Two more nights to go, my boy, and then we’ll be out of this dump,’ Abu Abdallah said. ‘By the grace of God.’
The light was fading rapidly in their superior chamber in the hospital of al-Bayyazin. Sinan watched a musician wrapping up his lute down below in the courtyard, while two other players chatted beside him. It was strange, Sinan reflected, to listen as they did each day to music that was purely instrumental. But understandable: the passions aroused by the poetry of song would be dangerous to the inmates of the psychiatric wing. For Sinan, the space where the singer should have been was always filled with thoughts of Lubna, the qaynah, the singing slave. He wondered what her voice was like in song; if it had the rough-edged timbre of her speech, or whether melody rounde
