“The hakim said that the hashish fumes will quell any nausea. And he told me all the ingredients of the philter. Fern seed, dodder leaves, the chob-i-kot root, powdered antler, goat wine—other innocuous things, none of them noxious. I certainly would not swallow the stuff myself, or ask you to, if it were otherwise.”
“Very well,” she said, her smile becoming a rather wicked grin, and she tilted the phial and took a sip. “I will spread the bhang on the brazier.”
She had left most of the philter for me—“Your body is larger than mine, perhaps harder to change”—and I drank it down. The little room quickly filled with the thick, blue, cloyingly sweet smoke of the hashish, as Chiv stirred it into the brazier coals, meanwhile muttering to herself in what I took to be her native tongue. I lay back at full length on the hindora, and closed my eyes, the better to be surprised when I opened them to see what I had changed into.
Maybe I fell into a hashish-drugged sleep, but I do not think so. The last time I had done that, the dream occurrences had been mixed and swimmy and confused. This time, all the consequent events seemed very real and sharp-edged and happening.
I lay with my eyes closed, feeling all over my naked body the heat from the stirred brazier, and I vigorously inhaled its sweet smoke, and I waited to feel some difference in myself. I do not know what I expected: perhaps the unfolding at my shoulder blades of bird wings or butterfly wings or peri wings; or perhaps the unfurling of my virile member, which was already erect in anticipation, to the massive size of a bull’s. But all I felt was a gradual and unpleasant increase of the room’s thick heat, and then a definite need to void my bladder. It was like that common morning phenomenon, when you wake with your member in candelòto stiffness, but only gorged by vulgar urine, which makes it an embarrassment for employment in either of its normal functions. You do not then want to utilize it sexually, but you also dislike to disengorge it by urination, because in that erection it always pees upward and you usually make a mess.
This was not at all a promising beginning to my amatory expectations, so I continued to lie still, with my eyes closed, and hoped the sensation would go away. It did not. It increased, and so did the room’s heat, until I was annoyed and uncomfortable. Then a pain suddenly went through my groin, as it sometimes does when micturition is too long withheld, but so intensely hurtfully that, not meaning to, I let at least a brief spurt of urine. For another moment, I only lay there feeling ashamed of myself and hoping that Chiv had not noticed. But then I realized that I had felt no sprinkle on my bare belly, as I should have done if my erect organ had peed into the air. Instead, I felt the wetness down the inside of my legs. Unusual. A small puzzlement. I opened my eyes. All around me there was nothing but the blue smoke haze; the walls of the room, the brazier, the girl, all were invisible in it. I cast my glance downward, to see why my candelòto had behaved so oddly, but my view of it was impeded by my breasts.
Breasts! I had the breasts of a woman, and very fine ones they were, too: shapely, upthrusting, ivory-skinned, with nicely large, fawn-colored areole around tumescent nipples, the whole array shining with sweat and a trickle meandering down the cleft between. The philter was working! I was changing! I was embarked upon the most bizarre journey of discovery I had ever undertaken!
I raised my head to see how my candelòto accorded with these new additions. But I still could not see it, for I also had an immense rounded belly, like a mountain to which my breasts were the foothills. I began to sweat in earnest. It should be a novel experience to be a woman for a while—but an obesely fat woman? Maybe I was even a deformed woman, for my navel, which had always before been nothing but an insignificant dimple depression, was now a protrusion, perched like a little lighthouse atop my mountain stomach.
Unable to see my member, I groped for it with a hand. All I encountered was the hair on my artichoke, but it was rather more luxuriant and kinky than I was accustomed to feeling. When I reached down past it, I discovered—no great surprise now—that my candelòto was gone, and so was my cod. In their place I had the organs of a woman.
I did not leap up screaming. After all, I had been inviting and expecting a change. To have changed into something like a rukh would probably have been more of a shock and dismay to me. Anyway, I was confident that the change was not going to be permanent. But I was not entirely happy, either. The organs of a woman should have felt familiar enough to my inquiring hand, but they too had a disturbing difference about them. To my fingers, they felt tight and hard and hot, and nastily clammy from my involuntary micturition. They did not, to my touch, resemble the soft and darling and hospitable purse—the mihrab, the kus, the pota, the mona—into which I had so often put fingers and other things.
Besides that, to my self they felt … how do I put this?
I would have expected, if I were a woman being fingered in my private parts, even if by my own fingers, to feel some pleasurable sensation or an intimate tickle or at least a comfortable old acquaintance. But now I was a woman, and I perceived only the prod of fingers, and it made me feel only molested, and my only internal response was a surge of irritability. I slowly slid a finger inside myself, but it did not go far before it was blocked, and then the soft sheathing around it rejected it—I could almost say spat it out. There was something up there inside me. Perhaps a precautionary plug of sea salt? But my probing aroused in me more revulsion than curiosity, and I was disinclined to probe again. Even when I deliberately let a finger lightly flick my zambur, my lumaghèta—that tenderest part of my new parts, as sensitive as an eyelash to any touch—I felt nothing but an intensification of my peevishness and a wish to be let alone.
I wondered: does a woman when fondled never experience anything nicer than this? Surely not, I told myself. Then maybe a fat woman never experiences anything? I had yet to fondle a really fat woman, but I doubted that. Anyway, in my new womanly incarnation, was I a fat woman? I sat up to see.
Well, I still had that grossly swollen abdomen, and now I could see that it was made even uglier by a discoloration marring the taut ivory skin, a brown line that extended from my protuberant navel down to my artichoke. But the belly seemed to be the only fat thing about me. My legs were slim enough, and hairless, and would have been pretty, except that the veins of them were all raised and visible and squirmy-looking, like a net of worm burrows just under the skin. My hands and arms also looked slim enough, and girlishly soft. But they did not feel soft to me; they felt gnarled and painful. Even as I looked at them and flexed them, both of my hands crooked in a cramp that made me groan.
The groan was loud enough to have brought some response from Chiv, but she did not materialize out of the blue smoke around me, even when I several times called her name. What had the philter made of her? I would have supposed, just on the principle of turnabout, that if I had become female, Chiv would have become male. But the hakim had said that Majnun and Laila sometimes disported themselves as both of the same sex. And sometimes one or both of them had availed themselves of invisibility. Still, the philter’s main purpose was to enhance the partners’ lovemaking, and in that I judged this trial philter to be a failure. No kind of partner—male, female, invisible—was likely to want to couple with a creature as grotesque as what I had turned into. Nevertheless, what had become of Chiv? I called her again and again … and then I screamed.
I screamed because another sensation had shaken my body, a sensation more gruesome than mere pain. Something had moved, something that was not me, but it had moved inside me, inside that monstrous bloat that was my belly. I knew it was not just unsettled food in my stomach, for it happened somewhere below my stomach. And it was not ill-digested food making wind in my lower gut, for I had known that sensation before. That can be unpleasant enough, and sometimes startling, even when it is not noisy or noisome. But this was something different, something I had never experienced before. It felt as if I might have swallowed some small sleeping animal, and it had been digested well down into my bowels, and there it had suddenly awakened and stretched and yawned. My God, I thought, suppose it tries to fight its way out!