Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh

tell you a story as we walk.

The story the Vizier told was as follows:

Hundreds of years ago, one of the first of the Sultans, an ancestor of Orkhan’s, led his armies against the Kingdom of Nabatea and ravaged it. Nabatea was (and still is) notoriously a foul and idolatorous land, inhabited by sorcerers, poisoners and cannibals, and the Sultan’s armies dealt with them accordingly and the Turkish soldiers only withdrew after turning most of the territory into a wasteland. Although the Nabateans were almost all wholly evil, it must be conceded that they did possess the virtue of patience. In the year that their land was devastated by Turkish armies, a girl was born to the King of Nabatea. The king, the proud father, gave orders that poison was to be added to the child’s suckling milk. In accordance with his orders, the nipples of the wet-nurse were smeared with the poison. There are different reports of which poison was used — perhaps aconite, perhaps mercury, perhaps arsenic — but, whatever the substance, it was fed to the little girl in the tiniest quantities, so that, instead of the poison killing her, the baby became accustomed to its ingestion, and, as the baby grew into a girl, poison continued to be added to her food, so that every vein of her body was saturated with the deadly stuff.

This was in the great age of the poisoners when toxicology was the master science. There are no such poisoners now, alas! But, to return to the girl — Aslan Khatun was the name of this princess — she had become a poison damsel and the very saliva from her lips could burn through porcelain. Once she reached the marriageable age, the King of Nabatea wrote to the Ottoman Sultan proposing a perpetual peace between their two realms and that this peace be confirmed by a marriage alliance between his daughter and the Sultan’s heir apparent, Prince Nazim. His design, of course, was to kill the Sultan’s son, for the moment the prince embraced the princess he would infallibly die from the poison carried in the juices of her saliva, or the moisture between her legs. Her body was so impregnated with poison that the interior of her vagina was like a nest full of angry wasps. Sex with a poison damsel is one of the recognised forms of the Death of the Just Man.

The Ottoman Sultan naively agreed to the king’s proposal and Aslan Khatun set out on the long journey from Nabatea to Istanbul. On the day of her arrival in that city she was brought before the king and his son. Aslan Khatun was radiantly beautiful — literally so, for there was a strange silvery sheen to her skin. (Perhaps it was arsenic that she had fed upon, for arsenic is reputed to be good for the skin.) Prince Nazim fell in love with her at first sight. When he saw her standing tall and graceful before him, he knew he needed no other blessing from life, save to be possessed of her body. And in the course of that evening’s wedding feast, she, very much against her will, slowly and reluctantly fell in love with him. She had been trained from birth by the women of the Nabatean court in all the arts of seduction, and though now she did not want to seduce this young man, whom she first thought she liked and then realised she desired madly, nevertheless every word she spoke and every little gesture she made seemed to hint at the delights of love. She knew no other language and so she lured the man she desired and yet did not desire to his doom.

At last, the moment came for Prince Nazim to lead his bride to the nuptial chamber. This was the moment for which Aslan Khatun had been raised, so that she might avenge the wrongs suffered by her native land. But now she realised that she cared nothing about avenging the injuries of Nabatea. Before the amorous prince could lay a hand on her, she warned him to desist. If he valued his life he had to keep away. She went on to explain her father’s evil design. ‘You may look, but do not touch,’ she said, ‘for I love you more than I love my father and his poisonous dreams of revenge’.

But Nazim, who was already in love with her, having heard her confession, only became the more besotted with the Nabatean princess. He knew that he loved her, he loved all of her, and if poison was part of her, the fluid that coursed through her blood and her saliva, then that poison was also something to be loved. He swiftly decided that his life was well lost for a moment of loving rapture with this radiant woman. So he said this to Aslan Khatun and, before she could resist, he took her in his arms and embraced her fiercely. Then he kissed her and drank her bitter saliva greedily and in his last remaining moments he went on to ravish her, before expiring in great pain and fierce delight. In the morning the courtiers came and found the prince dead on the nuptial couch. His corpse was already black from the deadly, putrefying liquids which coursed through it. Aslan Khatun sat lamenting beside the bloated body of her lover and, when she asked to be buried alive in the tomb of the man who had been her husband for one night, it was a request which the courtiers were happy to agree to.

As soon as the Vizier had finished this story, Orkan wanted to know why he had told it.

‘Does everything have to have reason? It is a fairy-story told for pleasure.’

‘Did Barak sleep with a poison damsel?’ Orkhan persisted.

‘He certainly did not. There is no such thing as a poison damsel. As I said, it is merely a fairy-story. The story of Nazim and and Aslan Khatun is, like the stories of Majnun and Layla, or Khusraw and Shirin, a romance about lovers. Enjoy my story and enjoy your life. You are young, strong and a prince. You still have the capacity for adventure, romance and love. An ageing, hunchbacked dwarf like myself has never had your fortune… Yet nature did not make me the way I am. For that I curse my parents. Do you know what a gloottokoma is?’

Orkhan indicated that he did not.

‘Gloottokoma is a Greek word. It means a box which is designed for the making of dwarfs. In my early years as a child in a Greek village I spent almost all the hours of the day in a series of boxes, which were designed to stunt my growth, for my parents had decided that I should be reared as a dwarf and sold for a good price to some king’s palace. The less of me there was, the more valuable I would be. Other people in our village were rearing their girls to become concubines. As I remember it, the whole village was composed of slave farms. Similarly, in Egypt we hear that there are specialists in the manufacture of entertaining cripples. In Jezira there are surgeons who are masters of the art of creating ‘laughing men’ — men whose lips are so distorted that they seem always to be laughing, for in such a manner they may earn a living as cheerful-seeming beggars. There are also craftsmen who specialise in giving boys deformed limbs or giant testicles. Cages and boxes in which monsters like myself are created are scattered throughout the world. This is the rottenness of the age.’

Orkhan thought about this. ‘You have not done so badly. You have become Imperial Vizier.

The Vizier smiled,

‘Well anyway, you are young, the night is young and you are going to see Mihrimah. Enjoy what is to come for as long as you may.’

They passed down a series of narrow, covered streets, flanked by tiers of cells for the use of concubines and eunuchs. The Vizier stood aside to allow Orkhan to pass through a door and alone descend a flight of steps which led down into a kind of oval pit. There was a rank sort of smell which he was unable to place. A couple of candles had been placed on the floor of the pit, but these flickered in the faint draught so that it was some time before he was able to see that the far end of the pit was caged off and that behind the close-meshed golden grillwork of the cage stood a veiled and hooded woman.

Orkhan cautiously made his way between the candles and, pressing against the cage’s bars, gazed at the woman inside. She wore a blouse of white silk gauze which hung over thin rose-coloured trousers of damask, embroidered with silver flowers. A broad scarlet sash ran round her waist and this was fastened with a clasp of diamonds. The woman’s feet were encased in white leather boots studded with gold. Behind her, at the back of the cage was a door on which was painted the crudely executed image of a black cat.

Orkhan spoke first,

‘Lady, who are you? And who has imprisoned you in a cage? Shall I set you free?’

‘My name is Mihrimah which means “Sun-Moon”, but my title is that of Durrah, the “Parrot”. Nobody has imprisoned me. Rather I have arranged to have myself locked in here for your own protection, lest I kill you.’ The woman’s voice was sweet, but, seeing how Orkhan pressed against the golden bars, she became insistent, ‘If you value your life, do not attempt to break into the cage. Instead, sit down and I will explain to you why the “Parrot” is in the cage, as well as the meaning of my name. Sit down, listen and admire.’

Orkhan obeyed and Mihrimah continued,

‘We who are Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh teach and test incessantly, but we never repeat ourselves and no man in our care ever experiences the same orgasm twice. Anadil having given you your first lesson, it falls to me to take you over that same ground again. Since I am your second designated concubine, I take the title of Durrah, the “Parrot”, and I repeat what you have experienced before and I go over it, in order to make sure that you have understood it. And yet we never repeat ourselves, so that, whereas Anadil only spoke of externals, I point to their inner meanings. Just as Anadil’s beauty is only a shadow of mine, so in her prattling she served you merely the outer husks of sense, while I deliver the inner kernel, for foolish Anadil knows the names of things, but she does not