Текст книги "The Journeyer"

Автор книги: Gary Jennings

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“Welcome to my chambers, Mirza Marco,” she said. “And to this.”

And somehow she undid what must have been a single knot or clasp sustaining all her clothes, for they all dropped away from her at once. She stood before me in the warm lamplight, garbed only in her beauty and her provocative smile and her seeming surrender and one ornament, one only, a spray of three brilliant red cherries in the elaborately arranged black hair of her head.

Against the pale sharbat colors of the room, the Princess stood out vividly red and black and green and white: the cherries red upon her black tresses, her eyes green and their long lashes black and her lips red in her ivory face, her nipples red and her nether curls black against the ivory body. She smiled more broadly as she watched my gaze wander down her naked body and up again, to rest on the three living ornaments in her hair, and she murmured:

“As bright as rubies, are they not? But more precious than rubies, for the cherries will wither. Or will they instead”—she asked it seductively, running the red tip of her tongue across her red upper lip—“will they be eaten?” She laughed then.

I was panting as if I had run all the way across Baghdad to that enchanted chamber. Clumsily I moved toward her, and she let me approach to her arm’s length, for that was where her hand stopped me, reaching out to touch my foremost approaching part.

“Good,” she said, approving what she had touched. “Quite ready and eager for zina. Take off your clothes, Marco, while I attend to the lamps.”

I obediently disrobed, though keeping my fascinated eyes on her the while. She moved gracefully about the room, snuffing one wick after another. When for a moment Moth stood before one of the lamps, though she stood with her legs neatly together, I could see a tiny triangle of lamplight shine like a beckoning beacon between her upper thighs and her artichoke mount, and I remembered what a Venetian boy had said long ago: that such was the mark of “a woman of the most utterly desirable bedworthiness.” When all the lamps were extinguished, she came back through the darkness to me.

“I wish you had left the lamps alight,” I said. “You are beautiful, Moth, and I delight in looking at you.”

“Ah, but lamp flames are fatal to moths,” she said, and laughed. “There is enough moonlight coming through the window for you to see me, and see nothing else. Now—”

“Now!” I echoed in total and joyful accord, and I lunged, but she dodged adroitly.

“Wait, Marco! You forget, I am not your birthday gift.”

“Yes,” I mumbled. “I was forgetting. Your sister. I remember now. But why are you stripped naked, Moth, if it is she who—?”

“I said I would explain tonight. And I will, if you will restrain your groping. Hear me now. This sister of mine, being also a royal Princess, did not have to endure the mutilation of tabzir when she was a baby, because it was expected that she would someday marry royalty. Therefore, she is a complete female, unimpaired in her organs, with all of a female’s needs and desires and capabilities. Unfortunately, the dear girl grew up to be ugly. Dreadfully ugly. I cannot tell you how ugly.”

I said wonderingly, “I have seen no one like that about the palace.”

“Of course not. She would not wish to be seen. She is excruciatingly ugly, but tender of heart. So she keeps forever to her chambers here in the anderun, not to chance meeting even a child or a eunuch and frightening the wits out of such a one.”

“Mare mia,” I muttered. “Just how is she ugly, Moth? Only in the face? Or is she deformed? Hunchbacked? What?”

“Hush! She waits just outside the door, and she might hear.”

I lowered my voice. “What is this thing’s—what is this girl’s name?”

“The Princess Shams, and that is also a pity, for the word means Sunlight. However, let us not dwell on her devastating ugliness. Suffice it to say that this poor sister long ago gave up hope of making any sort of marriage, or even of attracting a transient lover. No man could look at her in the light, or feel her in the dark, and still keep his lance atilt for zina.”

“Che braga!” I muttered, feeling a frisson of chill. If Moth had not been still visible to me, only dimly but alluringly, my own lance might have drooped then.

“Nevertheless, I assure you that her feminine parts are quite normal. And they quite normally wish to be filled and fulfilled. That is why she and I contrived a plan. And, because I love my sister Shams, I conspire with her in that plan. Whenever she espies from her hiding place a man who wakens her yearning, I invite him here and—”

“You have done this before!” I bleated in dismay.

“Imbecile infidel, of course we have! Many and many a time. That is why I can promise you will enjoy it. Because so many other men have.”

“You said it was a birthday gift—”

“Do you disdain a gift because it comes from a generous giver of gifts? Be still and listen. What we do is this. You lie down, on your back. I lie across your waist, staying always in your view. While you and I fondle and frolic—and we will do everything but the ultimate thing—my sister creeps quietly in and contents herself with your lower half. You never see Shams or touch her, except with your zab, and it encounters nothing repugnant. Meanwhile, you see and feel only me. And you and I will excite each other to a delirium, so that when the zina is accomplished down there, you will never know it is notme you are having it with.”

“This is grotesque.”

“You may of course decline the gift,” she said coldly. But she moved close, so that her breast touched me, and it was anything but cold. “Or you can give me and yourself a delight, and at the same time do a good deed for a poor creature doomed always to darkness and nonentity. Well … do you decline it?” Her hand reached for the answer. “Ah, I thought you would not. I knew you for a kindly man. Very well, Marco, let us lie down.”

We did so. I lay on my back, as instructed, and Moth draped her upper body across my waist, so I could not see below it, and we commenced the preludes of music-making. She lightly stroked her fingertips over my face and through my hair and over my chest, and I did the same to her, and every time we touched, everywhere we touched, we felt the sort of tingling shock one can feel by briskly rubbing a cat’s fur the wrong way. But there wasno wrong way she could have fondled me—or I her, as I discovered. Her nipples got perkily swollen under my touch, and even in the dim light I could see the dilation of her eyes, and I could taste that her lips were engorged with passion.

“Why do you call it music-making?” she softly asked at one point. “It is far nicer than music.”

“Well, yes,” I said, after thinking about it. “I had forgotten the kind of music you have here in Persia … .”

Now and then, she would extend a hand behind her, to stroke the part of me she was shielding from my sight, and each time that gave me a deliciously urgent start, and each time she withdrew her hand just in time, or I should have made spruzzo into the air. She let me reach a hand down to her own parts, only whispering in a quaver, “Careful with the fingers. Only the zambur. Not inside, remember.” And that fondling made her several times come to paroxysm.

And later she was straddling my chest, her body upright, her nether curls soft against my face, so that her mihrab was within reach of my tongue, and she whispered, “A tongue cannot break the sangar membrane. You may do with your tongue all you can do.” Though the Princess wore no perfume, that part of her was coolly fragrant, like fresh fern or lettuce. And she had not exaggerated in speaking of her zambur; it was like having the tip of another tongue meet mine there, and lick and flick and probe in response to mine. And that sent Moth into a constant paroxysm, only waxing and waning slightly in intensity, like the wordless singing she did in accompaniment.

Delirium, Moth had said, and delirium it became. I truly believed, when I made spruzzo the first time, that I was somehow doing it inside her mihrab, even though the mihrab was still close and warm and wet against my mouth. Not until my wits began to collect again did I realize that another female person had to be astride my lower body, and it had to be the seclusive sister Shams. I could not see her, and I did not try to or want to, but from her light weight upon me I could deduce that the other Princess must be small and fragile. I turned my mouth from Moth’s avidly thrusting mount to ask, “Is your sister much younger than you are?”

As if coming reluctantly back from far distances, she paused in her ecstasy just long enough to say, in a breathless small voice, “Not … very much …”

And then she dissolved into her distances again, and I resumed doing my best to send her ever farther and higher, and I repeatedly joined her in that soaring exultation, and I made my subsequent several spruzzi into the alien mihrab, not really caring whose it was, but retaining enough consciousness to hope vaguely that the younger 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 capèla 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 youdo not have to do it, and risk touching Sunlight’s ugly body. She will do that little stretching and broadening for you, with her own hand. She merely wished your permission.”

“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 and the usual numerous concubines besides. The offense with which he was charged was read aloud: “Khalwat.” That means only “compromising proximity,” but the details of the indictment were more enlightening. The merchant was accused of having made zina with two of his concubines at the same time, while his four wives and a third concubine were let to watch, and all together those circumstances were haram under Muslim law.

Listening to the charges, I felt distinctly sympathetic to the defendant, but distinctly uneasy in my own person, since I was almost every night making zina with two women not my wives. But I stole a look at my companion Princess Moth, and saw in her face neither guilt nor apprehension. I gradually learned from the proceedings that even the most vilely haram offense is not punishable by Muslim law unless at least four eyewitnesses testify to its having been committed. The merchant had willingly, or pridefully, or stupidly, let five women observe his prowess and later, out of pique or jealousy or some other feminine reason, they had brought the khalwat complaint against him. So the five women also got to observe his being taken, kicking and screaming, out to the terrace and pitched alive into the seething oil. I will not dwell on the subsequent few minutes.

Not all the punishments decreed by the Daiwan were so extraordinary. Some were nicely devised to fit the crimes involved. One day a baker was hauled before the court and convicted of having given his customers short weight of bread, and he was sentenced to be crammed into his own oven and baked to death. Another time, a man was brought in for the singular offense of having stepped on a scrap of paper as he walked along the street. His accuser was a boy who, walking behind the man, had picked up that paper and discovered that the name of Allah was among the words written on it. The defendant pleaded that he had only unwittingly committed that insult to almighty Allah, but other witnesses testified that he was an incorrigible blasphemer. They said he had often been seen to lay other books atop his copy of the Quran, and had sometimes even held the Holy Book below his waist level, and once had held it with his left hand.So he was sentenced to be trodden, like the piece of paper, by the executioner and the guards until he was dead.

But only during the Daiwan sittings was the Shah’s palace a place of pious dread. On more frequent religious occasions, the palace was the scene of galas and gaiety. The Persians recognize some seven thousand old-time prophets of Islam, and accord to every one of them a day of celebration. On the dates honoring the more major prophets, the Shah would give parties, usually inviting all the royalty and nobility of Baghdad, but sometimes throwing open the palace grounds to all comers.

Though I was not royal or noble, and not Muslim, I was a palace resident, and I attended several of those feste. I recall one night’s holiday celebration of some long-defunct prophet, which celebration was held outdoors in the palace gardens. Every guest was given not the usual pile of daiwan cushions to sit or recline upon, but an individual, high-heaped mound of fresh and fragrant rose petals. Every branch of every tree was outlined in candles affixed to the bark, and that candlelight shone through the leaves in every shade and hue of green. Every flower bed was full of candelabra, and their candles’ light shone through the multitudes of different blossoms in every shade and hue of every color. All those candles were sufficient to make the garden almost as bright and colorful as it was in daytime. But, in addition, the Shah’s servants had beforehand collected every little tortoise and turtle to be bought in the bazàr or caught by children in the countryside, and had affixed a candle to the carapace of each one, and had let all those thousands of creatures loose to crawl about the gardens as moving points of illumination.

As always, there was more and richer food and drink provided than I had ever seen laid out at any Western festa. Among the entertainments there were players of musical instruments, many of which I had never seen or heard before, and to their music dancers danced and singers sang. The male dancers re-created, with lances and sabers and much foot stamping, famous battles of famous Persian warriors of the past, like Rustam and Sohrab. The female dancers scarcely moved their feet at all, but convulsed their breasts and bellies in a manner to make a watcher’s eyeballs spin. The singers sang no songs of a religious nature—Islam frowns on that—but quite the other sort; I mean exceedingly bawdy songs. There were also bear trainers with agile and acrobatic bears, and snake charmers making the hooded snakes called najhaya to dance in their baskets, and fardarbab telling the tomorrows in their trays of sand, and shaukhran clowns comically garbed and capering and reciting or acting out lewd jests.

When I had got quite addled on the date liquor araq, I dismissed my Christian scruples against divination, and applied to one of the fardarbab, an old Arab or Jew with a funguslike beard, and asked what he could see in my future. But he must have recognized me for a good Christian unbeliever in his sorcerous art, for he only looked once into the shaken sand and growled, “Beware the bloodthirstiness of the beautiful,” which told me nothing of my future at all, though I recalled having heard something like that before, in the past. So I laughed jeeringly at the old fraud, and stood up and twirled and pirouetted away from him, and fell down, and Karim came and supported me to my bedchamber.

That was one of the nights on which the Princesses Moth and Sunlight and I did not convene. On another occasion, Moth told me to find something else to do with my next few nights, because she was enduring her moon curse.

“Moon curse?” I echoed.

She said impatiently, “The female bleeding.”

“And what is that?” I asked, truly never having heard of it before then.

Her green eyes gave me a sidelong look of amused exasperation, and she said fondly, “Fool. Like all young men, you perceive a beautiful woman as a pure and perfect thing—like the race of little winged beings called the peri. The delicate peri do not even eat, but live on the fragrance they inhale from flowers, and therefore they never have to urinate or defecate. Just so, you think a beautiful woman can have none of the imperfections or nastinesses common to the rest of humankind.”

I shrugged. “Is it bad to think that way?”

“Oh, I would not say that, for we beautiful women often take advantage of that masculine delusion. But a delusion it is, Marco, and I will now betray my sex and disabuse you of it. Hear me.”

She explained what happens to a girl child at about the age of ten, which turns her into a woman, and goes on happening to her thereafter, once in every moon of the year.

“Really?” I said. “I never knew. All women?”

“Yes, and they must bear that moon curse until they get old and dry up in every respect. The curse is also accompanied by cramps and backaches and ill temper. A woman is morose and hateful during that time, and a wise woman keeps herself away from other people, or drugged to stupefaction with teryak or banj, until the curse passes.”

“It sounds frightful.”

Moth laughed, but without humor. “Far more frightful for the woman if there comes a moon when she is not cursed. For that means she is pregnant. And of the damps and leaks and disgusts and embarrassments which then ensue, I will not even begin to speak. I am feeling morose and ill-tempered and hateful, and I will betake myself to seclusion. You go away, Marco, and make merry and enjoy your body’s freedom, like all damned disencumbered men, and leave me to my woman’s misery.”

Despite the Princess Moth’s depiction of the weaknesses of her sex, I could not then, or ever since then, think of a beautiful woman as being inherently flawed or faulty—or at least not until she proved herself to be so, as the Lady Ilaria once had done, and thereby had lost all my esteem. Out here in the East, I was still learning new ways to appreciate beautiful women, and still making new discoveries about them, and I was disinclined to disparage them.

To illustrate: when I was younger, I had believed that the physical beauty of a woman resided only in such easily observable features as her face and breasts and legs and buttocks, and in less easily observable ones like a pretty and inviting (and accessible) artichoke mound and medallion and mihrab. But by this time, I had had enough women to realize that there were more subtle points of physical beauty. To mention just one: I am particularly fond of the delicate sinews that extend from a woman’s groin along the inner sides of her thighs when she opens them apart. I also had come to realize that, even in the features common to all beautiful women, there are differences which are discernible, and exciting for being so. Every beautiful woman has beautiful breasts and nipples, but there are innumerable variations in size and shape and proportions and coloration, all beautiful. Every beautiful woman has a beautiful mihrab, but oh, how delectably different each is from another: in its placement forward or underneath, in its tint and downiness of the outer lips, in its purse-likeness and purse-tightness of closure, in its zambur’s position and size and erectability … .

Perhaps I make myself sound more lecherous than gallant. But I only wish to emphasize that I never could and never did and never will disprize the beautiful women of this world—not even then, in Baghdad, when the Princess Moth, although herself one of them, did her best to show me their worst. For instance, one day she arranged for me to sneak into the palace anderun, not for our nighttime frolic, but in the afternoon, because I had said to her:

“Moth, do you remember that merchant whom we saw executed for his haram method of making zina? Is that the sort of thing that usually goes on in an anderun?”

She gave me one of her green looks and said, “Come and see for yourself.”

On that occasion, indubitably, she had to have bribed the guards and eunuchs to look the other way, for she did not merely get me unseen into that wing of the palace, but also put me into a corridor wall’s closet which had two peepholes drilled to look into either of two large and voluptuously furnished chambers. I peeped through one hole and then the other; both rooms were empty at the moment.

Moth said, “Those are communal rooms, where the women can congregate when they weary of being alone in their separate quarters. And this closet is one of the many watch places throughout the anderun where a eunuch takes station at intervals. He watches for quarrels or fights among the women, or other sorts of misbehavior, and reports them to my mother, the Royal First Wife, who is responsible for order being kept. The eunuch will not be in here today, and I will now go and let the women know that. Then we shall watch together and see what advantage they may take of the warder’s absence.”

She went away and then returned, and we stood back to back in the close space, each with an eye to one of the holes. For a long time nothing happened. Then four women came into the room I was watching, and disposed themselves here and there on the daiwan cushions. They were all about the age of the Shahryar Zahd, and about equally as handsome. One woman was apparently a native Persian, for she had ivory skin and night-black hair, but eyes as blue as lapis lazura. Another I took to be an Armeniyan, for each of her breasts was exactly the size of her head. Another was a black woman, Ethiope or Nubian, and she of course had paddle feet and spindly calves and a behind like a balcony, but she was otherwise fairly comely: pretty face with not too-everted lips, shapely bosom and fine long hands. And the fourth woman was so dusky of skin and dark of eyes that she must have been an Arab.

But the women’s believing themselves to be not under scrutiny, and free to do what they liked, did not provoke any libertine throwing off of restraint or modesty. Except that none wore the chador, they were all fully clothed, and remained so, and they were not joined by any sneaked-in lovers. The black woman and the Arab had brought with them some kind of hand-held needlework, and occupied themselves with that lethargic pastime. The Persian sat with pots and brushes and little implements, and painstakingly manicured the finger and toe nails of the Armeniyan, and when that was done, both the women began coloring the palms of their hands and soles of their feet with hinna dye.