“With me along the strip of herbage strown
That just divides the desert from the sown
Where name of Slave and Sultan is forgot...
Look to the blowing Rose about us—‘Lo,
Laughing,’ she says, ‘into the world I blow,
At once the silken tassel of my Purse
Tear and its treasure on the garden throw...”
He did not come to the end of his verse before she interrupted him with their own refrain again.
“No, no. Please, love, no.”
“Why? Oh, why?”
“He will know.”
“He will not know...”
By now I had followed the voices to their source. Setting my ear against the closed door to confirm it, I then quietly lifted the latch and slipped in. Why I did not make my presence known at once and run instead of slip along quietly to stop that thing, I shall never know. Perhaps they were so far gone that the lack of control reached out and strangled me as well. But I must also plead how startled I was—there, in the Sultan’s harem! Such a thing had never been seen or even thought before, and both the horror and the unknown of it gave rise to a stumbling confusion.
I was standing in the doorway of a long, dark dormitory, lined on either side by the pallets of the slaves, as regular as janissaries on review. The occupied bed stood out at once, as will a soldier with his bandolier askew. It was about two-thirds down on the left-hand side and I suspect it had been chosen because the clerestory of windows above skipped it with its light. Yet, one could guess how long it had been since the choice had been made, for half the pallet now caught the slant of the midwinter sun.
That weak light was more than enough to allow me to pick out the figure of the woman. She lay on her back and I noticed for the first time a curious, distinctive sort of roundness to her chin, pierced in the center by a dimple. Her caplet was gone and her amber-colored hair was a pillow of fire beneath her head. One elbow was up as that hand luxuriated in that hair. It also served to elongate and emphasize the breast on that side.
The top buttons of her waist-cinching jacket had been undone and the undershirt loosened enough to leave the breasts loose, low mounds rounded by their own weight but with startling peaks of nipple in high contraction. These the dark head of her partner bent from time to time to nuzzle until she groaned aloud and pushed that head away.
Then I could see that die belt of her shalvar was loose as well.
All of this I saw in a flash, and in that same flash recognized who the couple were. Although the man had died his outer, identifying robes and was still in deep shadow, the fact that the woman was Safiye s Mitra meant he could ooh be one—Nur Banu’s Persian eunuch.
In that same moment, he suddenly shed the last of his garments. He did so in a sine, rapid movement. But as the man’s site of generation still hovered over her shoulders, the young woman gasped to see what existed where only atrophy should be. He was kneeling astride her, but in die half a blink while his garment was still in the air, she managed to work herself free from that straddle with a reflexive shudder. Now his arms were free at last. They caught her shalvar and draped them down about her knees so she could not stand, but stumbled to the ground again. On all fours now, Mitra tried to crawl away down the aisle between the ranks of beds.
Her escape would have been hopeless, but I came alive. I rushed and shouted at them as if they were dogs copulating in the street. And as one rushes at dogs, I picked up a pitcher of ice-cold water on my way. Before any of us knew what had happened, I’d dashed them with it.
The sounds that followed were as loud as they were inhuman. Nur Banu’s eunuch bellowed like a bull. I met him with equally vehement curses, and the woman cried and squealed and caterwauled like a stuck pig.
I must have been almost as startled and dazed as they, for the next thing I realized, the eunuch was coming at me with a heavy brass ewer and murder in his eye. I hedged around until I’d put myself between that threat and the girl, but I could do little more. One blow I deflected with my pitcher, but it was only cheap pottery and it shattered in a thousand sharp-edged pieces all over the beds and the floor around us. Though I raised a now-empty hand against it, the next blow landed square on my right temple and brought me to my knees. The strength of those arms certainly had nothing effeminate about it.
My head seemed to burst with the blare of trumpets and my vision narrowed with popping circles and stars. In all that colliding mass of sensations, there was only space for one image to penetrate. By all that is in the earth, but it was a bizarre one! His member—on which indeed there were the scars of a cutter’s knife, but very faint and shallow—let loose at that moment and sent milky ribbons of fertility floating down on every side. I was grateful for the next blow, brought down with the anger of orgasm, that blanked me away from my senses altogether.
I came almost immediately to see again. From my curious perspective on the ground I saw the naked Persian drop his weapon and stagger backwards helplessly. I thought I must be dreaming or that he had already dealt me the death blow and I had gone beyond, for I could make no sense of this. Then I saw a great pair of
