I could only nod as I struggled to get to my feet, biting back the pain with clenched teeth.
“Here, let me help,” Ghazanfer said. And I welcomed the bone-cracking strength of his arms.
“Oh, God!” I gnashed my teeth over what wanted to be a scream when we finally reached the privy. “I’ve forgotten the catheter.”
“I’ll go,” Ghazanfer said, helping me to sit on a bench for the agonized wait. “In your turban?”
“Where else does a eunuch carry his parts? It’s on the table.”
He will find another maidservant to send for it, I thought. I begged God—whatever God there might be, for certainly Ghazanfer’s merciful, half-smiling deity was not in the swirl of my pain—to let me die quickly of the shame. And of the pain.
But Ghazanfer Agha did not delegate this, no matter what a kapu aghasi’s natural reflex must be. He returned, and the heaving of his breast told me he’d forced his huge bulk much more quickly than his usual dignified gait.
The kapu aghasi helped me up and held me while I began my straining business. The catheter shook in my hands.
“I cannot,” I moaned. “The way is clogged.”
But it was only the silver tube choked with hot pus. Ghazanfer rinsed it out and then let me try again.
Relief left me shaking with weakness as great as a child’s. The huge khadim all but carried me back to my room, helped me to plumped-up pillows, plied me with yet more juice. I never wanted to have to pass anything else in my life again, but I drank at his insistence and my lips wavered in thanks; speech was beyond me.
Then my guest settled back on his rugs and took up all the burden of talk for himself. His tones were those with which he might lullaby an invalid child. But rather than a child’s fables, these were a eunuch’s. Too full of wonders to be believed, and yet, in my fevered head—
Ghazanfer told how Medina’s guardians sat all day on a raised platform between the sacred tomb—veiled with black silk and latticed with scent-releasing aloewood—and the gateway to the mosque. Here, in happy brotherhood, they sat, read and prayed. The scene entered my fever-forged brain, grew vivid by the vivid force of Ghazanfer’s words.
From this platform, the khuddam had a perfect view of every pilgrim who ventured in. They could instruct the ignorant, male and female, in the proper worship to make. They could mediate with the greater Mediator on the pilgrim’s behalf, calling into the shrine, “O Prophet, a faithful one comes” as we everyday eunuchs warn the women that a man is about. Should a khadim’s keen eve detect impiety, he could be down off the platform in a moment, brandishing the cane he carried (no other weapons being allowed in the precinct) to soundly teach the careless a proper fear of Allah.
Scholars even kept the biographies of the tomb’s most famous guardians, so their names and great deeds might not be forgotten. The present head agha had sent his Constantinople counterpart a leather-bound collection of such histories. Ghazanfer had many of them memorized, the heavy swing of their Arabic.
One of the khadim of olden time, one awesome Kafur Agha, so the story ran, had possessed a wondrous voice. “Such a wondrous voice—” Ghazanfer’s own high tones made this seem rather ludicrous. And yet—”That when he raised it to chide misbelievers, the very ground would shake and glass could shatter. One day the muezzin, concealing secret sin within his heart, heard that voice from high up on his minaret and plunged—for fear—unto his death.”
Medina’s eunuchs, so I learned, tended the Garden of Fatima, two dozen date palms clinging miraculously to the desert sand in the open space between gateway and shrine. Ghazanfer described how the dates could not propagate without the eunuch’s hands. The long spurs of the male tree must be cut off in the proper season and hung amidst the female blooms. In due time, the eunuchs gathered the fruit and sent it as gifts to those in the world they felt most deserving of such divine favor.
“Such favor is not bought,” my guest assured me, then added laconically, “It is for the humble, the weak, the truly pious as only Medina’s khuddam know humility and meekness, as only they can teach it. For the greatest of men, from the world of men, must come and kiss their hands and hems, these sexless creatures they have scorned elsewise. You would not, for example, see an imperial kitchen explode into flames over Fatima’s dates.
“When it comes time to replace the sanctuary’s black silk curtains, six of the most pious khuddam alone are chosen. They fast, they pray. Then they blindfold themselves and thus bring the ladders. They climb and replace the worn drapes with new, all blindfolded to spare their eyes the fearsome baraka of that within.” There was, Ghazanfer reminded me, such a veil in Jerusalem’s temple of old.
“And then, every evening as dusk begins to fall, the eunuchs rise up off their platform. Solemnly, they drive every worshipper burdened by sex out and lock the great silver-studded doors after them. Then they take up lamps, our brothers do, in the gathering dusk, and solemnly circumambulate the darkening shrine. With their own hands and the purest oil, they kindle the wicks hung from silver and golden chains that will illuminate the holy place in the still desert air until dawn.
“It may be—yes, the head agha told me it is so—that some whole man or other sometimes makes pious supplication to the guardians. He is desirous to watch this final, private rite. The agha then may scrutinize him, obtain references, train him for months. And if, at length, the supplicant is deemed worthy, he is permitted within yet a while after the gates have closed. And he may—just may—even be allowed to carry oil and fire, to light the lamps, to pray. But if it is to be so, he must give up the trappings
