I was very soon bored to apathy, and so were the four women—I I could see them yawn and hear them belch and smell them breaking wind—and I wondered why I had entertained any spicy suspicions of Babylonian orgies in a house full of women, just because all the women belonged to one man. Clearly, when so many women had nothing to do but wait for a summons from their master, there literally
was
nothing else for them to do. They could only loll about, no more enterprising or vivacious than vegetables, until the infrequent calls for the exercise of their animal parts. I might as well have been watching a row of cabbages going to seed, and I turned in the closet to say something like that to the Princess.
But she was grinning lasciviously, and she put a cautionary finger to her lips, then pointed it at her peephole. I leaned over and looked through, and barely suppressed an exclamation of surprise. That room had two occupants, one of them female, a girl considerably younger than any of my room’s four—and also much prettier, perhaps because more of her was visible. She had taken off her pai-jamah and anything else she wore under that garment, and was bare from the waist down. She was another dusky-skinned Arab, but her pretty face was now pink with exertion. The male occupant of the room was one of those child-sized simiazze apes, so hairy all over that I would not have known it for a male, except that the girl was fervently working with one hand to encourage the animal’s maleness. She eventually accomplished that, but the ape only looked stupidly at the upright small evidence, and the girl had to work just as strenuously to show him what to do with it, and where. But eventually that too was accomplished, while Moth and I took turns observing through the peephole.
When the ridiculous performance was concluded, the Arab girl wiped herself with a cloth, and then wiped at some scratches her partner had inflicted on her. Then she pulled on her pai-jamah and led the ape shuffling and hopping out of the room. Moth and I struggled from our closet, which had got quite warm and humid, out into the corridor where we could talk unheard by the four women still in the other room.
I said, “No wonder the wazir told me that animal is called the unspeakably unclean.”
“Oh, Jamshid is just envious,” the Princess said lightly. “It can do what he cannot.”
“But not very well. Its zab was even smaller than an Arab’s. Anyway, I should think a decent woman would rather employ the finger of a eunuch than the zab of an ape.”
“Indeed, some do. And also you know now why my zambur is so much in demand. There are many women here who must wait a long and hungry time between summonses from the Shah. That is why the Prophet (peace and blessing be upon him) long ago instituted the tabzir. So that decent women should not be urged by their yearnings to unwifely resorts.”
“I think, if I were Shah, I should much prefer my women’s resorting to each other’s zambur than to a random zab. Why, suppose that Arab girl gets pregnant by that ape! What revolting kind of offspring would she have?” The awful thought brought an even more awful one to my mind. “Per Cristo, suppose your gruesome sister Shams gets pregnant by me! Would I have to marry her?”
“Be not alarmed, Marco. Every woman here, of whatever nation, has her own native specific against such an occurrence.”
I stared. “They know how to prevent conception?”
“With varying degrees of success, but all better than relying on chance. An Arab woman, for example, before making zina, pushes inside herself a plug of wool soaked in the juice of weeping willow. A Persian woman lines her inner self with the delicate white membrane from under the rind of a pomegranate.”
“How abominably sinful,” I said, as a Christian should. “Which works better?”
“Surely the Persian way is preferable, if only because it is more comfortable for both partners. Shams uses it, and I will wager that you never have felt it.”
“No.”
“But imagine ramming your tender lubya against that thick woolen plug inside an Arab woman. Anyway, I should distrust the efficacy of that method. What would an Arab woman know about preventing conception? Unless an Arab man
wants
to make a baby, he never does zina with his woman except through her rear entrance, as he is accustomed to using other men and boys, and they him.”
I was relieved to learn that the Princess Shams was not going to be fruitful and multiply her ugliness, thanks to her pomegranate preventive, though by rights I should have been disquieted, because I was thereby participating in one of the most abhorrent and mortal sins a Christian can commit. At some time in my travels, or when I returned home to Venice, I should again be in the vicinity of a Christian priest, and I should be obliged to make confession. Of course the priest would belabor me with penances for my having fornicated with two unmarried women at one time, but that was only a venial sin in comparison to the other. I could well foresee his horror when I confessed that, through the wicked arts of the East, I had been enabled to copulate for the sheer enjoyment of the act, with no Christian intention or expectation of progeny resulting from it.
Needless to say, I went on sinfully enjoying it. If there was any slight thing that hampered my total and complete enjoyment, it was not any nagging sense of guilt. It was my natural wish that each of my zina consummations could take place inside the Princess Moth to whom I was making love, and not in the unloved, unlovely Princess Shams. However, when Moth sternly repulsed my few tentative hints in that regard, I had the good sense to stop making them. I would not risk losing a happy situation out of greed for an unattainable happier one. What I did instead, I invented for myself a story, of a kind that might have been told by the story-telling Shahryar Zahd.
In my mind’s story, I made Sunlight not what she was, the ugliest female person in Persia, but
the most gloriously beautiful.
I made her so
beautiful
that Allah in His wisdom decreed: “It is unthinkable that the divine beauty and the blessed love of the Princess Shams should be limited to the enjoyment of any one man alone.” And
that
was why Shams was not married, and never would be. In obedience to almighty Allah, she was constrained to dispense her favors to all good and deserving suitors, and that was why I was currently the favored one. For a while, I utilized that story only when necessary. During most of each night’s zina, I had no need of anything more than the real loveliness and closeness of the Princess Moth to stir and sustain my ardor. But then, when our mutual play had made the delicious pressure mount inside me until it could no longer be contained, and I had to let it go, then I brought to mind my invented, alternate, imaginary, unreally sublime Princess Sunlight, and made her the receptacle of my surge and my love.
As I say, that sufficed me for a while. But after that while, I gradually fell prey to a sort of mild lunacy; I began to wonder if my story might not be something near
the truth.
Getting increasingly demented, I began to suspect a deep secret here, and to suspect that, by the workings of my subtle mind, I had been the first and only to uncover that secret. Eventually, I had got so deranged that I began making new hints to Moth : hinting that I really would like to see her unseeable sister. Moth looked worried and agitated when I did that, and even more so when I daringly began mentioning her sister’s name on occasions when we were in the presence of her parents and grandmother.
“I have had the honor of meeting most of your royal family, Your Majesty,” I would say to the Shah Zaman or the Shahryar Zahd, and then add in an offhand manner, “Except, I think, the estimable Princess Shams.”
“Shams?” he or she would say guardedly, and would look about in a shifty sort of way, and Moth would begin talking volubly to distract us all, while she rudely and almost literally elbowed me out of whatever room we were in.
God knows where that behavior might finally have got me—perhaps committed to the House of Delusion—but then my father and uncle returned to Baghdad, and it was time for me to say farewell to all three of my zina partners: to Moth and Shams and my story-made Shams.
MY father and uncle returned together, having met somewhere on the roads north from the Gulf. On first setting eyes on me, before we even exchanged a greeting, my uncle jovially roared out:
“Ecco Marco! For a wonder, still alive and still vertical and still at liberty! Are you not in any trouble then, scagaròn?”
I replied, “Not yet, I think,” and went to make sure I would not be. I sought out the Princess Moth and told her that our liaisons were at an end. “I can no longer stay out at night without causing suspicion.”
“It is too bad,” she pouted. “My sister has by no means tired of our zina.”
“Nor have I, Shahzrad Magas Mirza. But in truth I am much weakened by it. And now I must regain my strength for the rest of our journey.”
“Yes, you do look somewhat strained and haggard. Very well, I give you leave to desist. We will say our formal farewells before you depart.”
So my father and uncle and I sat down with the Shah, and they told him they had decided against taking the sea route to shorten our way eastward.
“We thank you sincerely, Shah Zaman, for having made the suggestion,” my father said. “But there is an old Venetian proverb. Loda el mar e tiente a la tera.”
“Which means—?” the Shah said affably.
“Laud the sea and attend to the land. In more general application it means: Praise the mighty and the dangerous, but cling to the small and secure. Now, Mafìo and I have done much sailing on mighty seas, but never aboard such ships as those of the Arab traders. No overland route could be less safe or more risky.”
“The Arabs,” said my uncle, “build their ocean-going ships in exactly the same slipshod way they build their ramshackle river boats, which Your Majesty sees here at Baghdad. All tied and fish-glued together, not a bit of metal in the construction. And deckloads of horses or goats dropping their merda into the passenger cabins below. Maybe an Arab is ignorant enough to venture to sea in such a squalid and rickety cockleshell, but we are not.”
“You are perhaps wise not to do so,” said the Shahryar Zahd, coming into the room at that moment, although we were a gathering of men. “I will tell you a tale … .”
She told several, and all of them concerned a certain Sindbad the Sailor, who had suffered a series of unlikely adventures—with a giant rukh bird, and with an Old Sheikh of the Sea, and with a fish as big as an island, and I do not remember what else. But the point of her recitation was that Sindbad’s every adventure had proceeded from his repeatedly taking passage on Arab ships, and each of those craft getting wrecked at sea, and his surviving to drift alone onto some uncharted shore.
“Thank you, my dear,” said the Shah, when she had concluded the sixth or seventh of the Sindbad tales. Before she might begin another, he said to my father and uncle, “Was your trip to the Gulf entirely unprofitable, then?”
“Oh, no,” said my father. “There was much of interest to see and to learn and to procure. For example, I bought this fine and keen new shimshir saber in Neyriz, and its artificer told me it was made of steel from Your Majesty’s iron mines nearby. His words bewildered me. I said to him, ‘Surely you mean steel mines.’ And he said, ‘No, we take the iron from the mines and put it into an ingenious sort of furnace, and the iron becomes steel.’ And I said, ‘What? You would have me believe that if I put an ass into a furnace it will come out a horse?’ And the artificer had to make much explanation to convince me. In solemn truth, Your Majesty, I and all of Europe have always believed that steel was a totally different and much superior metal to mere iron.”
“No,” said the Shah, smiling. “Steel is but iron much refined by a process which perhaps your Europe has not yet learned.”
“So I improved my education there in Neyriz,” said my father. “Also, my trip took me through Shiraz, of course, and its extensive vineyards, and I sampled all the famous wines in the very wineries where they are produced. I also sampled—” He paused, and glanced at the Shahryar Zahd. “Also, there are in Shiraz more comely women, and more of them, than in any city I have visited.”
“Yes,” said the lady. “I was born there myself. It is a proverb of Persia that if you seek a beautiful woman, look in Shiraz; if you seek a beautiful boy, look in Kashan. You will be passing through Kashan as you go on eastward.”
“Ah,” said Uncle Mafìo. “And for my part, I found a new thing in Basra. The oil called naft, which comes not from olives or nuts or fish or fat, but seeps from the very ground. It burns more brightly than other oils, and for a longer time, and with no suffocating odor. I filled several flasks with it, to light our journey’s nights, and perhaps also to astonish others like myself who never saw such a substance before.”
“Regarding your journey,” said the Shah. “Now that you have decided to continue overland, remember my warning of the Dasht-e-Kavir, the Great Salt Desert to the eastward. This late autumn season is the best time of year in which to cross it, but truthfully there is no good time. I have suggested camels for your karwan, and I suggest five of them. One for each of you and your personal panniers, one for your puller, one for the burden of your main packs. The wazir will go with you tomorrow to the bazàr and help you choose them, and he will pay for them, and I will accept your horses in exchange for that payment.”
“That is kind of Your Majesty,” said my father. “Just one thing—we have no camel-puller.”
“Unless you are well versed in the management of those beasts, you will need one. I probably can help you with that item, too. But first get the camels.”
So the next day, we three went again to the bazàr in company with Jamshid. The camel market was an extensive square area set off by itself, and it had a raised skirting of stone laid around it. The camels for sale were all arrayed standing with their forefeet on that shelf of stone, to make them seem to stand taller and prouder. That market was vastly more noisy than any other part of the bazàr, for to the customary shouting and quarreling of buyers and sellers were added the angry bellowing and mournful groans of the camels, as their muzzles were repeatedly seized and twisted to make them demonstrate their agility in kneeling and rising. Jamshid made that test and many others. He tweaked the camels’ humps and felt up and down their legs and peered into their nostrils. After examining almost every full-grown beast on sale that day, he had five of them led apart, a bull and four cows. To my father he said:
“See if you agree with my selection, Mirza Polo. You will note that all have much larger forefeet than rear feet, a sure sign of superior staying power. Also they are all clean of nose worms. Always keep a watch for that infestation, and if you ever see worms, dust the nostrils well with pepper.”
Since my father and uncle owned to no expertness in camel trading, they were pleased to concur in the wazir’s selections. The merchant sent an assistant to lead the camels, hitched together in single file, to the palace stables, and we followed at our leisure.
At the palace, the Shah Zaman and Shahryar Zahd were waiting for us, in a room well heaped with gifts they wished us to convey for them to the Khakhan Kubilai. There were tightly rolled qali of the highest quality, and caskets of jewels, and platters and ewers of exquisitely worked gold, and shimshirs of Neyriz steel in gem-encrusted scabbards, and for the Khakhan’s women polished looking glasses also of Neyriz steel, and cosmetics of al-kohl and hinna, and leather flasks of Shiraz wine, and tenderly wrapped cuttings of the palace garden’s most prized roses, and also cuttings of seedless banj plants and of the poppies from which teryak is made. The most striking of all the gifts was a board on which some court artist had painted the portrait of a man, a man grim and ascetic of mien, but blind, his eyeballs being all white. It was the only delineation of any animate being I had ever seen in a Muslim country.
The Shah said, “It is a likeness of the Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessing be upon him). There are many Muslims in the Khakhan’s realms, and many have no idea what the Prophet (blessing and peace be his) looked like in life. You will take this to show them.”
“Excuse me,” said Uncle Mafìo, with uncharacteristic hesitancy. “I thought lifelike images were forbidden by Islam. And an image of the very Prophet himself … ?”
The Shahryar Zahd explained, “It does not live until the eyes are painted in. You will engage some artist to do that just before you present the picture to the Khan. It requires only two brown dots painted onto the eyeballs.”
The Shah added, “And the picture itself is painted in magic tinctures which in a few months will begin to fade, until the picture totally disappears. Thus it cannot become an image of worship, like those you Christians revere, which are forbidden because they are unnecessary to our more civilized religion.”
“The portrait,” said my father, “will be a gift unique among all the gifts the Khan is forever receiving. Your Majesties have been more than generous in your tribute.”
“I should have liked to send him also some virgin Shiraz girls and Kashan boys,” mused the Shah. “But I have tried to do that before, and somehow they never arrive at his court. Virgins must be difficult of transport.”
“I just hope we can transport all
this,”
said my uncle, gesturing.
“Oh, yes, with no trouble,” said the Wazir Jamshid. “Any one of your new camels will easily carry all that burden, and carry it at the pace of eight farsakhs in a day, and for three days between drinks of water, if that be necessary. Assuming, of course, that you have a competent camel-puller.”
“Which now you do have,” said the Shah. “Another gift of mine, and this one is for you, gentlemen.” He signaled to the guard at the door and the guard went out. “A slave which I myself only recently acquired, bought for me by one of my court eunuchs.”
My father murmured, “Your Majesty’s generosity continues to abound, and to astound.”
“Ah, well,” said the Shah modestly. “What is one slave between friends? Even a slave which cost me five hundred dinars?”
The guard returned with that slave, who immediately fell to the floor in salaam, and cried shrilly, “Allah be praised! We meet again, good masters!”
“Sia budelà!” exclaimed Uncle Mafìo. “That is the reptile
we
recoiled from buying!”
“The creature Nostril!” exclaimed the wazir. “Really, my Lord Shah, how did you come to acquire this excrescence?”
“I think the eunuch fell enamored of him,” the Shah said sourly. “But I have not. So he is yours, gentlemen.”
“Well … ,” said my father and uncle, uncomfortable and unwilling to give offense.
“I have never known a slave more rebellious and odious,” said the Shah, dropping any pretense of lauding his gift. “He curses and reviles me in half a dozen languages which I do not comprehend, except that the word pork occurs in all of them.”
“He has also been insolent to me,” said the Shahryar. “Fancy a slave criticizing the sweetness of his mistress’s voice.”
“The Prophet (on whom be all peace and blessing),” said the creature Nostril, as if ruminating aloud to himself. “The Prophet called that house accursed where a woman’s voice could be heard outside its doors.”
The Shahryar glared venomously at him, and the Shah said, “You hear? Well, the eunuch who bought him unbidden has been pulled asunder by four wild horses. The eunuch was expendable, having been born under this roof to one of my other slaves, and having cost nothing. But this son of a bitch shaqàl cost five hundred dinars, and should be more usefully disposed of. You gentlemen need a camel-puller, and he claims to be one.”
“Verily!” cried the son of a bitch shaqàl. “Good masters, I grew up with camels, and I love them like my sisters—”
“That,” said my uncle, “I believe.”
“Answer me this, slave!” Jamshid barked at him. “A camel kneels to be loaded. It groans and complains mightily at each new weight of the loading. How do you know when to load it no further?”
“That is easy, Wazir Mirza. When it
ceases
to grumble, you have laid upon it the last straw it will bear.”
Jamshid shrugged. “He knows camels.”
“Well … ,” mumbled my father and uncle.
The Shah said flatly, “You take him with you, gentlemen, or you stand by and watch while he goes to the vat.”
“The vat?” inquired my father, who knew not what that was.
“Let us take him, Father,” I said, speaking up for the first time. I did not say it with enthusiasm, but I could not have watched again an execution by boiling oil, even of this obnoxious vermin.
“Allah will reward you, young Master Mirza!” cried the vermin. “Oh, ornament upon perfection, you are as compassionate as the old-time darwish Bayazid, who while traveling found an ant caught in the lint of his navel, and went hundreds of farsakhs back to his starting place, to return that abducted ant to its home nest, and—”
“Be silent!” bellowed my uncle. “We will take you, for we would rid our friend the Shah Zaman of your reeking presence. But I warn you, putridity, you will enjoy precious little compassion!”
“I am content!” cried the putridity. “The words of vituperation and beatings bestowed by a sage are more to be valued than the flattery and flowers lavished by the ignorant. And furthermore—”