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 know their meaning….’
Orkhan thought of Anadil and her jangling jewellery and daft lessons on the parts of the body. Mihrimah, pale in the shadows, continued to talk on and on about how he had so far learnt only about sex and not about love. Yet sex was a necessary preliminary, a dim adumbration of the Rapture that lay ahead. Sex with stupid people, such as Anadil and her washerwoman, was good spiritual discipline for a man. She was saying that on the following day he should go and seek the pardon of those ladies, for that was the lover’s way of abjection…
Orkhan sat listening quite contentedly as Mihrimah walked about her cage, talking about the mysteries of desire and extinction. Man was born to love the transient and the passing, the flesh that grew raddled and hung slackly. It was only because fleshly beauty was passing that it was truly loveable. Of course, nothing Mihrimah was saying about mystical sex made any sense at all to him, but she had a lovely voice and her vanity was charming — as was the waggle of her hips as she paced about her cage. He was happy to sit and watch this creature forever. All the same, it occurred to him that Mihrimah would have all her occult nonsense about lunar rapture, the exaltation of servitude and whatnot rapidly knocked out of her, if only he could get his cock inside her. He had just decided that Mihrimah was a nice, ordinary young woman and that her mad notions were the natural outcome of not having been with a man — of having spent too long in a Harem which was not being serviced by a proper man — when she began to speak of the Dolorous Gaze,
‘Before the end, you will long for death, if only to free you from the Rapture. For the moment, you behold me dressed, hooded and veiled, lest the splendour of my naked beauty blind you. I have covered myself as an act of mercy to you, lest you die of the Rapture. But now, if you are ready, I will intensify your desire by allowing you to gaze successively on the most dangerously desirable parts of my body.’
Orkhan having nodded, Mihrimah began to fumble with the lacing of her blouse. She knelt to expose her breasts and, supporting them with her hands, she thrust them forwards for Orkhan’s attention. As she did so there was a strange trumpeting sound in the distance.