Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh (5 page)

‘What did you do that for, you silly man?’ Perizade’s voice was shrill. ‘I want to know my fortune. But I know I’m destined to be your queen.’

Orkhan made no reply, but knelt and gazed at Perizade’s breasts and hips. His memory of Anadil was of a girl whose flesh was young and healthy, yet in a sense devoid of life. But Perizade’s soft heavy body was different. It seemed to speak to him of lived experience – of so many meals eaten, carpets sat upon, men embraced – and, because of this, it was infinitely desirable. He had to have her now, no matter how much he might regret it later. (He was quite certain that he would regret it.) Once again he moved towards her and placed a hand on one of her thighs.

‘What are you doing?’ She tried ineffectively to pull the dress back down over her hips.

‘I want you, Perizade.’

‘This is not what was meant to happen!’

‘This is your destiny,’ replied Orkhan.

It was after all the one-eyed man and not the viper who forced his way through the door of the Tavern of the Perfume-Makers. He pressed down hard upon the washerwoman, not caring how he hurt her. She was stony-faced and sweaty. She made no moves to help him, but her body quivered under his thrusts like a mattress filled with water. Perizade was silently weeping. She did not want to submit, but in the end she did and, at the last moment, she put her arms around him and hugged him tightly.

Orkhan lay for a long time on top of her, kissing and licking the tears from her cheeks. When, finally he did withdraw and rolled over to lie beside her, he fell instantly into a heavy post-coital doze. He awoke to a kind of nightmare, in which some immovable weight, some monstrous creature perhaps, was squatting on his face, so that he was unable to breathe. Then he realised that this was no dream, but that Perizade was indeed sitting on his face. He could dimly hear her crooning with pleasure. In a thrice, he threw her off and pushed her onto the floor. But, though he had swiftly dealt with the incubus, it was not before the viper, possessed of a will of its own, had once again drunk in the Tavern of the Perfume-Makers.

With her dress still hitched up above her hips, Perizade knelt at his feet once more, but she was smug in her prostration,

‘Now that you have acquired a taste for me I know that you will forgive Anadil and make me your queen.’

‘Witch! You are mistaken. You will share her fate.’ And pulling his robe around him, Orkhan rushed out of the pavilion.

The sky was by now an inky blue and continued to darken. A mute who stood outside the door of the pavilion, seeing Orkhan emerge, pointed towards a path, indicating that he should follow it. The shingled path was lined on both sides by a series of lacquer and silk screens topped by flambeaux. As he walked, the wailing of Perizade grew faint behind him and he began to hear the sound of running water and, further away, women’s voices and the beating of a tambourine. It was cooler now and the arrival of evening released unfamiliar perfumes. Orkhan walked slowly, alert to every sound and movement, for he now sensed that the paradise he walked in was a poisoned one. At last, he came out from between the screens into a large circular space framed by chenars and cypresses. At the centre was a dried-up fountain and on its sculpted edge sat a stunted figure.

Orkhan addressed the Vizier peremptorily,

‘Arrest that wretched woman in the pavilion. I do not want to see her again – or anyone like her.’

‘To serve the Sultan is all our joy,’ replied the Vizier, but he did not move.

Orkhan looked sharply at the Vizier,

‘And where are the ministers? Should not some of them be here by now?’

‘Some of the ministers were indeed here before now, oh my master, but, since you were entertaining that woman, it seemed inappropriate to admit them to your presence, so I sent them tiptoeing away. They are, of course, greatly looking forward to transacting government business on some future occasion. But Perizade did not please you? We can easily find another woman. My wife is a hunchback like me. I could lend her to you. You would find her a challenge, I am … ’

Orkhan gestured him to be quiet. They gazed at one another. Then, after a long silence, Orkhan spoke,

‘No ministers have been here really, have they?’

‘No.’

‘And no ministers are coming, are they – ever?’

‘No.’

‘And you have not arrested Anadil?’

‘No.’

‘And you will not arrest Perizade either?’

‘No,’ the Vizier was looking a little uncomfortable. ‘I am the Sultan’s slave and I hoped for the best, so I did not want him to hear what would have displeased him.’

‘Well then, you have failed, for I am most displeased. You are no longer my Vizier. Before I have you arrested, you will explain yourself.’ But, even as he heard himself speak, Orkhan knew that his words were empty and the Vizier now turned scornful,

‘You cannot arrest me! I think that you must be living in some blood-boltered dream of your own, going around giving orders: “Arrest this person!”, “Arrest that person!” “Execute this person!”. The world you find yourself in is not like that, nor is it in your powers to dismiss me as Vizier.’

Orkhan sat down heavily beside the Vizier.

‘So, tell me what is the world really like? I think it is time for you to tell me what will please me not.’

‘Oh my master, you may think that you rule as Sultan over an empire of men … but here in the Harem, you actually live on sufferance in a republic of women. There was a time – a hundred years ago perhaps – when the Sultan ruled over the Harem and the Palace, as he did over the Empire. Then the
fitna
of the women occurred. You should know about this word,
fitna
. It has entered our language from the Arabic. It means discord, revolution, sedition, but it also means temptation or seduction. It has other meanings too. It means a trial, burning, and melting, rapture, madness and possession. Finally,
fitna
also means woman. A hundred years ago, women used their seductive powers to stage a revolution in the Palace and they used beguilement, artifice and drugs to enslave the man who was then Sultan. Ever since that time, the woman who holds the rank of Valide Sultan has controlled everything. The eunuchs, the mutes and the slave girls all move to her command – and only her command.’

‘So I – so the Sultan has become nothing but a plaything of the Harem?’

‘Alas! Would that it might be so! It is easy, after all, to imagine worse fates than that. No, things in the Harem have taken a graver turn. It is all because of the hellish Prayer-Cushion movement … ’

‘What is this business with prayer-cushions?’

‘Ask not. It is better that you know nothing of this – at least until you absolutely have to.’

‘No, the time for secrets and whispers is over. I want to know everything now. Speak plainly and tell me what danger can there possibly be in prayer-cushions?’

‘Well, if you must … but you will be sorry that you asked. Of course there is no danger in a cushion, in the sense of some soft, embroidered pad on which a man may take his ease. But I speak of the movement known as the Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh. It is a very ancient and evil sect followed by some of the tribes who inhabit the depths of the forests and swamps of the Balkans. Though it has flourished in the Balkans, it has nothing to do with either Islam or Christianity, being much older than either. Its devotees hold that man can only reach God through women. They believe that women are not of the same race as men. Women are spirits, friendly demons of a kind, who have been given flesh and placed upon the Earth in order to monitor man’s spiritual progress towards the Divinity. Women are men’s prayer-cushions and intercourse with them prepares man for Mystical Union with the Divinity.’

Orkhan pondered the Vizier’s words, before asking,

‘Indeed, it all seems strange and mad, but it does not seem so very dangerous. Why should any man fear the Prayer-Cushion of the Flesh?’

‘Oh my master, consider that if a man has prolonged sex with a Prayer-Cushion woman, it involves his total destruction and remaking, for that is the meaning of
fitna
. Having been seduced, the man’s soul has to be melted down in order that he may experience the Rapture and it is possible the Rapture may kill him, but whether a man comes out of it alive or not is irrelevant. Long before that, the man has been seduced into total self-abnegation and his original personality has been burnt up in the fires of ecstasy. The thing which walks away from the bed has nothing in common with the man who originally lay down there with a Prayer-Cushion of the Flesh.’

Orkhan had been trying to concentrate on the meaning of what the Vizier was saying, but he found it difficult. The problem was that every time the Vizier said ‘woman’, or ‘women’, or ‘bed’, the tongue in Orkhan’s mouth stirred. What did the meaning of an Arabic word matter and what did practices of ancient Balkan sects matter, if only the viper that coiled and uncoiled behind his teeth could be given its drink? It was getting harder and harder to think of anything except soft, white, fleshy thighs.

Finally Orkhan confessed,

‘I do not understand. I have no idea what you are talking about.’

‘I do not understand it myself,’ replied the Vizier. ‘Only the women understand these things.’

He was about to say more, but at that moment a girl in a page’s uniform came marching up the path and delivered a message to the Vizier. He, having read it, began to argue fiercely with the page girl. Finally he shrugged and dismissed her. Then he turned to Orkhan.

‘It seems that Mihrimah awaits her Sultan.’

‘Is Mihrimah a person who commands sultans?’

The Vizier did not trouble to reply to this. Instead he said,

‘We are going to a different part of the Harem which is distant from the parts you have so far visited. I will tell you a story as we walk.

The story the Vizier told was as follows:

Hundreds of years ago, one of the first of the Sultans, an ancestor of Orkhan’s, led his armies against the Kingdom of Nabatea and ravaged it. Nabatea was (and still is) notoriously a foul and idolatorous land, inhabited by sorcerers, poisoners and cannibals, and the Sultan’s armies dealt with them accordingly and the Turkish soldiers only withdrew after turning most of the territory into a wasteland. Although the Nabateans were almost all wholly evil, it must be conceded that they did possess the virtue of patience. In the year that their land was devastated by Turkish armies, a girl was born to the King of Nabatea. The king, the proud father, gave orders that poison was to be added to the child’s suckling milk. In accordance with his orders, the nipples of the wet-nurse were smeared with the poison. There are different reports of which poison was used – perhaps aconite, perhaps mercury, perhaps arsenic – but, whatever the substance, it was fed to the little girl in the tiniest quantities, so that, instead of the poison killing her, the baby became accustomed to its ingestion, and, as the baby grew into a girl, poison continued to be added to her food, so that every vein of her body was saturated with the deadly stuff.

This was in the great age of the poisoners when toxicology was the master science. There are no such poisoners now, alas! But, to return to the girl – Aslan Khatun was the name of this princess – she had become a poison damsel and the very saliva from her lips could burn through porcelain. Once she reached the marriageable age, the King of Nabatea wrote to the Ottoman Sultan proposing a perpetual peace between their two realms and that this peace be confirmed by a marriage alliance between his daughter and the Sultan’s heir apparent, Prince Nazim. His design, of course, was to kill the Sultan’s son, for the moment the prince embraced the princess he would infallibly die from the poison carried in the juices of her saliva, or the moisture between her legs. Her body was so impregnated with poison that the interior of her vagina was like a nest full of angry wasps. Sex with a poison damsel is one of the recognised forms of the Death of the Just Man.

The Ottoman Sultan naively agreed to the king’s proposal and Aslan Khatun set out on the long journey from Nabatea to Istanbul. On the day of her arrival in that city she was brought before the king and his son. Aslan Khatun was radiantly beautiful – literally so, for there was a strange silvery sheen to her skin. (Perhaps it was arsenic that she had fed upon, for arsenic is reputed to be good for the skin.) Prince Nazim fell in love with her at first sight. When he saw her standing tall and graceful before him, he knew he needed no other blessing from life, save to be possessed of her body. And in the course of that evening’s wedding feast, she, very much against her will, slowly and reluctantly fell in love with him. She had been trained from birth by the women of the Nabatean court in all the arts of seduction, and though now she did not want to seduce this young man, whom she first thought she liked and then realised she desired madly, nevertheless every word she spoke and every little gesture she made seemed to hint at the delights of love. She knew no other language and so she lured the man she desired and yet did not desire to his doom.

At last, the moment came for Prince Nazim to lead his bride to the nuptial chamber. This was the moment for which Aslan Khatun had been raised, so that she might avenge the wrongs suffered by her native land. But now she realised that she cared nothing about avenging the injuries of Nabatea. Before the amorous prince could lay a hand on her, she warned him to desist. If he valued his life he had to keep away. She went on to explain her father’s evil design. ‘You may look, but do not touch,’ she said, ‘for I love you more than I love my father and his poisonous dreams of revenge’.