‘You want it too. Just a little soft, lingering kiss will be enough… ’
She pressed her mouth hard against his.
It was Perizade who brought this perilous seduction to an end as she came up from behind and swung a laundry paddle at the back of Roxelana’s head, so that the brilliant eyes went suddenly dull.
‘We need her dress,’ said Perizade. ‘Get her dress off her.’
This was not easy, for the dress was tight and Roxelana was heavy. As they struggled with the limp body and clinging fabric, Perizade explained that though the concubines were confined to the Harem, their servants were not. The latter were often sent out into the city on errands. Orkhan’s only chance of escaping the Harem alive was to be disguised as a woman in Perizade’s company.
Leaving Orkhan to struggle into the dress, Perizade went off to look for shawls to cover his head and shoulders. Orkhan had managed by wriggling to get the dress half way up his hips when he heard a rasping voice behind him,
‘That is my dress you have on and I want it back.’
Roxelana staggered towards him. By now her skin had turned deep black and her eyeballs seemed to have shrivelled in their sockets.
‘Oh my prince!’ she continued throatily. ‘Just one dying kiss. That is all we need to consummate our love. Just one little kiss.’
She seemed to sniff her way towards him. She put her arms around him and stuck out her tongue. It was like a twig of charred wood. She coughed and a gob of mercury appeared on her lower lip and swiftly ran down her chin. Then she loosened her clasp round Orkhan’s neck and slowly sank to die at his feet.
Perizade reappeared with plain white shawls. She did not give the corpse of Roxelana so much as a glance. One shawl covered Orkhan’s shoulders, the other went over his head and he held it together across his face with his teeth. Together they walked out of the laundry and they passed by the Valide Sultan, who was anxiously pacing about in the garden. They were detained for a while by the Janissary guards at the gate out of the Inner Court. Perizade explained to one of the soldiers that the furnaces which served the hammam and laundry were about to run out of firewood and that they were being sent on a mission to hurry up the next delivery.
While they waited for the young Janissary to return from consulting with his officer, Perizade turned and whispered to Orkhan,
‘Why did you come to me?’
‘It was as you said. We are destined to be together. I am destined to love you and I do. I need you — and, besides my viper needs to drink at your tavern. It is a hopeless addiction.’
‘That viper and tavern stuff!’ Perizade laughed. ‘That’s just Harem folklore. It is merely one of the stories made up by Afsana and the other concubines. You must just like the taste, that’s all!’
The Janissary returned and indicated that they might walk on. So they passed through the Gate of the Inner Court into the Outer Court, which was open to the public. The real world of old and young men and women, children and animals, carts, traps, sacking, planks, bales, barrels, hides, bottles, lanterns and knives seemed to explode before Orkhan’s eyes. He had left the tainted fairyland of silk, silver and porphyry forever.
Under assumed names, Orkhan and Perizade found work in the city. They prospered and, after only a few years, they set up a laundry of their own in the village of Eyup beyond the walls of Istanbul and there they continued to dwell in contentment until they were overtaken by Death, the breaker of bonds and destroyer of delights.
Praise for Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh:
‘The Imperial Harem in Istanbul is the setting for this absorbing tale of deception, temptation and greed.’
‘Irwin returns to the perfumed exoticism of The Arabian Nightmare with this lush and stylish erotic novella, set in an oriental harem where princes are caged until being killed or crowned. Orkhan enjoys the latter fate, and emerges to discover the perversions of the harem, the sensual divinations of the phalomancer, and the “Tavern of the Perfume-Makers”. Minority tastes are catered for by some obliging crocodiles.’
‘One man and a group of women named after prescription drugs run round a garden having sex. At one stage, somebody shags an alligator. Make of that what you will. Random quote: “I know now that the prick of the fairy lusts led them to the cucumber.” Smart.’
‘Robert Irwin is one of the British novelists I most admire — too clever and far too free of the usual English novelist clichés to have much hope of appearing on a current Booker shortlist.’
‘Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh is one of the pinnacles of the genre.’
‘Irwin is an expert on the Arabian text The Thousand and One Nights. This explores the sensuous world imagined by street story-tellers except that here we are told tales which, because of a proliferation of perverse sexuality, could never be told in the format they initiate. This makes the pastiche more powerful rather than less. Fairies and crocodiles turn out to have their sexual uses, and a prince finds himself victimised by the women he regards as his property.’
‘…highly satisfactory, and entirely in the spirit of the 1001 Nights.’
‘One thing you must never do in the harem is to let the Viper drink at the Tavern of the Perfume-Makers. This and other secrets of the forbidden territory are made known in Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh. Irwin’s virginal hero, Prince Orkhan, escapes from The Cage, in which the sons of the sultan are imprisoned, emerges into the harem and the foolish boy wastes no time in letting the Viper lose. Elaborate erotic sequences follows, but the book, like the stories of Scheherazade, defies simple categorisation. It’s a parable about the nature of desire and satisfaction, with an inner life as resistant to easy impositions of ulterior meaning as any story in The Arabian Nights.’
‘…for a short novel Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh has a substantial wealth of comic and ironic invention, which lends such a steamy and decadent texture to the claustrophobic setting that it takes on the aspect of those folktales you were never allowed to read as a kid, or of those Richard Burton translations you could never find at your local library — or perhaps a polymorphous perverse Gormenghast as reimagined by Henry Miller. Whatever, it’s a small but unique delight.’
‘Can you name three good works of erotic literature in the last five years?’ John Sutherland. ‘… if we’re talking about books that contain passage of good sex writing then:… Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh — good on sex with crocodiles, panthers and dwarfs.’