and ugly Princess Sunlight was enjoying her employment of me as much as I was enjoying it.
The tripartite zina went on for a long time. After all, the Princess Moth and I were in the springtime of our youth, and we could keep on exciting each other to renewed flowerings, and the Princess Shams gleefully (I assumed) gathered in my every bouquet. But at last even the seemingly insatiable Moth seemed sated, and her tremors dwindled, and so did my zab finally dwindle and sink to weary rest. That member felt quite raw and chafed by then, and my tongue ached at its roots, and my whole body felt empty and expended. Moth and I lay still for a while of recuperation, she limp upon my chest, with her hair disposed across my face. The three ornamenting cherries had long before been shaken loose and lost. While we lay there, I was conscious of a smeary wet kiss being bestowed upon my belly skin, and then there was a brief rustling sound as Shams scuttled unseen out of the room.
I got up and dressed, and Princess Moth slipped into a scanty little tunic that did nothing really to cover her nakedness, and she led me again through the anderun corridors and out into the gardens. From a manaret somewhere, the day’s first muedhdhin was warbling the call to the hour-before-sunrise prayer. Still unchallenged by any guards, I found my own way through the gardens to the palace wing where my chamber was. The servant Karim was conscientiously waiting awake for me. He helped me undress for bed, and he made some awed exclamations when he saw my extremely spent condition.
“So the young Mirza’s lance found its target,” he said, but he did not ask any audacious questions. He only sniffled a bit, seeming aggrieved that I would not be having further need for his small ministrations, and he went to his own bed.
My father and uncle were absent from Baghdad for three weeks or more. During that time, I spent almost every day being escorted about and shown interesting things by the Shahzrad Magas, with her grandmother trailing, and almost every night I spent indulging in zina with both of the royal sisters, Moth and Sunlight.
In the daytime, the Princess and I did such things as going to the House of Delusion, that building which combined a hospital and a prison. We went there on a Friday, the day of rest when the place was much frequented by citizens at leisure, and also by foreign visitors from elsewhere, as one of the chief amusements of Baghdad. People came in families and in groups shepherded by guides, and at the door everyone was given by the doorkeeper a large smock to cover his clothes. Then all would stroll through the building, being lectured by the guides on the several kinds of madness exhibited by the men and women inmates, all of us laughing at their antics or commenting on them. Some of those antics were truly risible, and some were pitiable, and others were entertainingly lewd, but other doings were merely dirty. For example, a number of the deranged men and women appeared to resent us visitors, and pelted us with anything that came to their hand. Since all those inmates were sensibly kept naked and empty-handed, their only available missiles were their own body wastes. That was the reason for the doorman’s distribution of smocks, and we were glad to be wearing them.
Sometimes in the nights in the Princess’s chamber, I felt like some kind of inmate myself, subjected to supervision and exhortation. On perhaps the third or fourth of those occasions, early in the night’s proceedings, before the sister crept in, when Moth and I had just disrobed and were enjoying our preliminary play, she stopped her roving hands to hold my roving own, and said:
“My sister Shams would beg a favor of you, Marco.”
“I was afraid of this,” I said. “She wishes to dispense with you as intermediary, and take your place up front.”
“No, no. She would never. She and I are both happy with the arrangement as it is. Except for one small detail.”
I only grunted, being wary.
“I told you, Marco, that Sunlight has had zina often and often. So often and so vigorously that, well, the poor girl’s mihrab opening has been quite enlarged by that indulgence. To speak frankly, she is as open down there as a woman who has borne many children. Her pleasure in our zina would be much increased if your zab were in a sense enlarged by—”
“No!” I said firmly, and began to wriggle, trying to move crabwise out from under Moth. “I will not submit to any tampering—”
“Wait!” she protested. “Hold still. I suggest no such thing.”
“I do not know what you have in mind, or why,” I said, still wriggling. “I have seen the zab of numerous Eastern men, and my own is already superior. I refuse any—”
“I said be still! You have an admirable zab, Marco. It quite fills my hand. And I am sure that in length and girth it satisfies Shams. She suggests only a refinement of performance.”
Now that was vexatious. “No other woman ever complained of my performance!” I shouted. “If this one is as ugly as you say she is, I suggest that she is hardly in a position to be critical of whatever she can get!”
“Hark to who is being critical!” Moth mocked me. “Have you any notion how many men dream, and dream fruitlessly, of ever lying with a royal Princess? Ever even once seeing a Princess with her face unveiled? And here you have two of them lying with you absolutely naked and compliant each night! You would presume to deny one of them a small whim?”
“Well … ,” I said, chastened. “What is the whim?”
“There is a way to heighten the pleasure of a woman who has a large orifice. It enhances not the zab itself, but the—what do you call the blunt head of it?”
“In Venetian it is the fava, the broad bean. I think in Farsi that is the lubya.”
“Very well. Now, I noticed of course that you are uncircumcised, and that is good, for this refinement cannot be accomplished with a circumcised zab. All you do is this.” And she did it, tightening her hand around my zab and pulling the capela skin back as far as it would go, and then a trifle farther. “See? It makes the broad bean bulge more grandly broad.”
“And it is uncomfortable, almost to hurting.”
“Only briefly, Marco, and bearably. Just do that as you first insert it. Shams says it gives to her mihrab lips that fine first feeling of being spread apart. Sort of a welcome violation, she says. Women enjoy that, I think, though of course I cannot know until I am married.”
“Dio me varda,” I muttered.
“And of course
“Would Shams wish anything further?” I asked acidly. “For a monster, she seems uncommonly finicking.”
“Hark at you!” Moth mocked me again. “Here you are, in company that any other man would envy you. Being taught by royalty a trick of sex that most men never learn. You will be grateful, Marco, someday when you desire to give pleasure to a woman of large or slack mihrab, you will be grateful that you learned how. And so will she be grateful. Now, before Sunlight arrives, make me grateful a time or two, in other ways … .”
5
ON some days, for entertainment and edification, Moth and I attended the sittings of the royal court of justice. It was called simply the Daiwan, from its profusion of daiwan pillows on which sat the Shah Zaman and the Wazir Jamshid and various elderly muftis of Muslim law, and sometimes some visiting Mongol emissaries of the Ilkhan Abagha. Before them were brought criminals to be tried, and citizens with complaints to be heard or boons to be asked, and the Shah and his wazir and the other officials would listen to the charges or pleas or supplications, and then would confer, and then would render their judgments or devisements or sentences.
I found the Daiwan instructive, as a mere onlooker. But had I been a criminal, I would have dreaded being hauled there. And had I been a citizen with a grievance, it would have had to be a towering grievance before I should have dared to take it to the Daiwan. For on the open terrace just outside that room stood a tremendous burning brazier, and on it was a giant cauldron of oil heated to bubbling, and beside it waited a number of robust palace guards and the Shah’s official executioner, ready to put it to use. Princess Moth confided to me that its use was sanctioned, not only for convicted evildoers, but also for those citizens who brought false charges or spiteful complaints or gave untruthful testimony. The vat guards looked fearsome enough, but the executioner was a figure calculated to inspire terror. He was hooded and masked and garbed all in a red as red as Hell fire.
I saw only one malefactor actually sentenced to the vat. I would have judged him less harshly, but then I am not a Muslim. He was a wealthy Persian merchant whose household anderun consisted of the allowable four wives
