The coach, when it came for us, was really only a dainty cart on two high wheels, drawn by a single midget Persian horse. Its driver helped me hoist the infirm old grandmother up to sit beside him at the front, and the Princess and I sat on the inside seat. As the cart rolled down the garden drive and out through the palace gates into Baghdad, Moth remarked that she had not yet had anything of breakfast to eat, opened a cloth bag, took from it some greenish-yellow fruits, and bit into one and offered another to me.
“Banyan,” she called it. “A variety of fig.”
I winced at the word fig, and politely declined, not bothering to mention my Acre misadventure that had made figs repulsive to me. Moth looked sulky when I refused, and I asked her why.
“Do you know,” she said, leaning close and whispering so the coachman would not hear, “that this is the forbidden fruit with which Eve seduced Adam?”
I whispered back, “I prefer the seduction without the fruit. And speaking of which—”
“I told you not to speak of it. Not until tonight.”
Several other times during the morning’s ride, I tried to broach that subject, but every time she ignored me, speaking only to call my attention to this or that point of interest and to tell me informative things about it.
She said, “Here we are in the bazàr, which you have already visited, but perhaps you do not recognize it now, all empty and deserted and silent. That is because today is Jumè—Friday, as you call it—which Allah appointed to be the day of rest, and there is no doing of trade or business or labor.”
And she said, “That grassy parkland which you see yonder is a graveyard, which we call a City of the Silent.”
And she said, “That large building is the House of Delusion, a charitable institution founded by my father the Shah. In it are confined and cared for all the persons who go insane, as many persons do in the hot summertime. They are regularly examined by a hakim, and if they ever regain their reason, they are set free again.”
In the outer skirts of the city, we crossed a bridge over a small stream, and I was struck by the color of that water, which was a most unusually deep blue for mere water. Then we crossed another stream, and it was a most unwaterly vivid green. But not until we had crossed yet another, and it was as red as blood, did I make any comment.
The Princess explained, “The waters of all the streams out here are colored by the dyes of the makers of qali. You have never seen a qali made? You must see.” And she gave directions to the coachman.
I would have expected to be taken back into Baghdad, and to some city workshop, but the cart went farther still into the countryside, and came to a stop beside a hill that had a low cave entrance halfway up it. Moth and I got down from the cart, climbed the hill and ducked our heads to go into the hole.
We had to go crouching through a short, dark tunnel, but then we came out inside the hill, and into a vastly wide and high rock cavern, full of people, its floor cluttered with work tables and benches and dye vats. The cavern was dark until my eyes got accustomed to its half-light, cast by innumerable candles and lamps and torches. The lamps were set on the various pieces of furniture, the torches were ensconced at intervals around the rock walls, some of the candles were stuck to the rocks by their own drip, and other candles were carried about in the hands of the multitude of workers.
I said to the Princess, “I thought this was a day of rest.”
“For Muslims,” she said. “These are all slaves, Christian Russniaks and Lezghians and such. They are allowed their due sabbath on Sundays.”
Only a few of the slaves were grown men and women, and they worked at various tasks, like the stirring of the dye vats, on the floor of the cavern. All the rest were children, and they worked while floating high in the air. That may sound like one of the Shahryar Zahd’s stories of magic, but it was a fact. From the high dome of the cavern hung a giant comb of strings, hundreds of strings, parallel and close together, a vertical web as high and as wide as the entire cavern’s height and width. It was obviously the weft for a qali which, when finished, would carpet some immense palace chamber or ballroom. High up against that wall of weft, hung in loops of rope that depended from somewhere even higher in the roof darkness, dangled a crowd of children.
The little boys and girls were all naked—because of the heat of the air up there, Princess Moth told me—and they were suspended across the width of the work, but at various levels, some higher and some lower. Up there, the qali was partially completed, from its hem at the top of the weft down to those levels where the children worked, and I could see that it was, even at that early stage of progress, a qali of a most intricate and varicolored flower-garden design. Each of the dangling children had a candle stuck on its head with the wax, and all were busily engaged, but at what I could not discern; they seemed to be plucking with their little fingers at the unfinished lower edge of the qali.
The Princess said, “They are weaving the warp threads through the weft. Each slave holds a shuttle and a hank of thread of a single color. He or she weaves it through and makes it tight, in the order required by the design.”
“How in the world,” I asked, “can one child know when and where to contribute his bit, among so many other slaves and threads, and in such a complex work?”
“The qali master sings to them,” she said. “Our arrival interrupted him. There, he begins again.”
It was a wonderful thing. The man called the qali master sat before a table on which was spread a tremendous sheet of paper. It was ruled in countless neat little squares, over which was superimposed a drawing of the qali’s entire intended design, with the innumerable different colors indicated. The qali master read aloud from that design, singing something on this order:
“One, red! … Thirteen, blue! … Forty-five, brown! …”
Except that what he chanted was far more complicated than that. It had to be audible away up there near the cavern roof, and it had to be unmistakably understood by each boy and girl it called upon, and it had to have a cadence that kept them all working in rhythm. While the
words
addressed one slave child after another, out of the great many of them, and told each one when to bring in his individual shuttle, the
singing
of the words either in a high tone or a low tone told that slave how far across the weft to warp his thread and when to knot it. In that marvelous manner of working, the slaves would bring the qali, thread by thread, line by line, all the way down to the cavern floor, and when it was finished it would be as perfect in execution as if it had been painted by a single artist.
“Just that one qali can eventually cost many slaves,” said the Princess, as we turned to leave the cavern. “The weavers must be as young as possible, so they are light of weight and have tiny, agile fingers. But it is not easy to teach such demanding work to such young boys and girls. Also, they frequently swoon from the heat up yonder, and fall and break and die. Or, if they live long enough, they are almost sure to go blind from the close work and poor light. And for every one lost, another slave child must be already trained and standing by.”
“I can understand,” I said, “why even the smallest qali is so valuable.”
“But just imagine what one would cost,” she said, as we emerged again into the sunlight, “if we had to employ real people.”
THE cart took us back to the city, and through it, and again into the palace gardens. Once or twice more I tried to pry from the Princess some hint of what would happen in the nighttime, but she remained adamant against my curiosity. Not until we got down from the cart, and she and her grandmother were leaving me to go to their anderun quarters, did she refer to our rendezvous.
“At moonrise,” she said. “By the gulsa’at again.”
I had a minor ordeal to go through before then. When I got to my room, the servant Karim informed me that I was to be accorded the honor of dining that evening with the Shah Zaman and his Shahryar Zahd. It was no doubt a signal kindness on their part, considering my youth and my insignificance in the absence of my ambassadorial father and uncle. But I confess that I did not much esteem the honor, and I sat wishing that the meal would hasten to its conclusion. For one reason, I felt slightly uncomfortable in the presence of the parents of the girl who had invited me to zina later that night. (Of the other girl, who would somehow share in the zina, I knew the Shah had to be the father, but I could not guess who might be her mother.) Also, I was literally salivating at the prospect of that which was to occur, even though I did not know exactly what
was
to occur. With my tongue glands thus uncontrollably gushing, I could hardly eat of the fine meal, let alone make sustained conversation. Fortunately, the Shahryar’s loquacity precluded my having to say more than an occasional “Yes, Your Majesty” and “Is that a fact?” and “Do tell.” For she did tell; nothing could have stopped her telling; but she told not many facts, I think.
“So,” she said, “today you visited the makers of qali.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“You know, in olden times there were magic qali which were capable of carrying a man through the air.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Yes, a man could step onto a qali and command it to take him to some far, far distant part of the world. And off it would fly, over mountains and seas and deserts, whisking him there in the twinkling of an eyelid.”
“Do tell.”
“Yes. I will tell you the story of a Prince. His Princess lover was abducted by the giant rukh bird, and he was desolate. So he procured from a jinni one of the magic qali and …”
And finally the story was over, and finally so was the meal, and finally so was my impatient waiting, and, like the story Prince, I hurried to my Princess lover. She was at the flower dial, and for the first time she was unaccompanied by her crone chaperon. She took my hand and led me along the garden paths and around the palace to a wing of it I had not known existed. Its doors were guarded like all the other palace entrances, but Princess Moth and I merely had to wait in the concealment of a flowery shrub until both the guards turned their heads. They did so in unison, and almost as if they were doing it on command, and I wondered if Moth had bribed them. She and I flitted inside unseen, or at least unchallenged, and she led me along several corridors oddly empty of guards, and around corners, and finally through an unguarded door.
We were in her chambers, a place hung with many splendid qali and with filmy, transparent curtains and draperies in the many colors of sharbats, looped and swathed and swagged in a delicious confusion, but all carefully kept clear of the lamps burning among them. The room was carpeted almost from wall to wall with sharbat-colored cushions, so many that I could not tell which were daiwan and which composed the Princess’s bed.
“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
not
me 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
was
no 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.