Now a sultan’s harem, Mills thought, a sultan’s harem was just the last place on earth one should think about running amok. And if that sultan also happens to be one of your emperor sultans, as this one is, with sway not only over entire countries and populations but over entire climates as well, from deserty Africa to the frozen Kush, then that sultan is one hell of an important man; and if, without batting an eyelash, he can cannonade a complete elite corps off the face of the world simply because it was rumored that they might have spilled some soup, and if he’s gone to the trouble of becoming a sultan emperor in the first place with all the expense of men and materiel
that
takes just so he can have dibs on two or three hundred of the prettiest girls in all those respective countries, populations and climates, and if he’s taken the additional pains to house them all in one place where he can keep his eye on them, and in a style like this where the girls themselves don’t do a thing, not wash a bowl, dry a dish, make a bed, fix a meal, rinse something out in the sink of an evening or even just pick out their own clothes, what they think suits them best, shows off their color or makes them less hippy; and if he’s gone to the further bother of training up specialist surgeons who have nothing better to do than cut the nuts off fellows who themselves have nothing better to do than see to it that the two or three hundred girls don’t either, then that sultan is not only one hell of an important man but one hell of a jealous one, too. And I for one, Mills thought, who changed my life and sealed the fates of maybe five thousand others because I happened to throw him a salute with the wrong hand, I for one, who already have, don’t want any part of him. I already took those vows to stay on the wagon. What harm will it do me to keep them? No sir. It don’t bother me that I may be losing Bufesqueu’s respect, or that old Fatima used to think of me as just one more steer around this place. I don’t want no part of
him,
and I don’t want no part of
them.
What he didn’t know was that he was more a living legend than ever.
Alib Hakali asked to see them, and he and Bufesqueu left the laundry where for almost a month now their official assignment had been to fold sheets for the harem. “Maybe he wants to put us to work doing something else. After all we’re trained Janissaries. We’re wasted in that laundry. Maybe he wants to try us out guarding the ladies. Wouldn’t that be something?” Bufesqueu said, patting his pants and nudging him. “I mean there’s nothing wrong with the nig-nog slave broads, but those harem women must be wondrous. I tell you, George, in the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.”
Mills forbore to answer. He said nothing in response to Bufesqueu’s rhapsodies as his friend went on about their possible new duties.
A eunuch stepped stolidly in front of them, barring their way.
“Bufesqueu and Mills to see the Kislar Agha as ordered,” Bufesqueu told him and the man moved aside.
It was the first time either of them had seen the Chief Eunuch since Bufesqueu had asked for sanctuary. Even reclining, fat and sassy as some Sumo Santa Claus, his black bulk spilling over the pillows he pressed against on his heavily reinforced litter, he was as large as Mills remembered him. He sucked on a hookah and watched benignly as first Bufesqueu and then Mills offered their deferential salaams. Without bothering to remove his water pipe he absently returned their greeting, a huge hand briefly flickering from black to pink like flash cards turned in a stadium.
“If you’re worried about the guards,” he said, setting the hookah back on its stand and exhaling a thick steam of sweet smoke, “they’re gone. The Overland has been burned. I took care of the guards.”
“The guards, Kislar Agha?” Bufesqueu said.
“Chief Eunuch. We won’t mince words. Call me Chief Eunuch. At the gate, the guards at the gate. I pulled the tongues out of their necks personally. I broke their bones in my torture chambers. I tore their equipment off with my hands.”
Mills flinched.
“Why do you pale? They were bad guards. You’d never have gotten past good ones.”
“Torture chambers, Chief Eunuch?” Bufesqueu said.
“This is the best-equipped seraglio in the world,” he said. “We have fourteen mosques on the grounds. We have two hospitals and an arsenal with the latest weapons. We’ve kitchens and bakeries and the finest schools. We’ve sports fields and stables, conference rooms and hospitality suites. We’re centrally located and close to a major body of water. Why shouldn’t we have torture chambers too?” He sat up abruptly, effortlessly, showing none of the strain heavy people reveal when they move in furniture. He leaned forward conspiratorially. “The torture chambers bother you? Relax please. You think I’d send two incompetent guards to a torture chamber? Of course not. That’s for the big fish.” He held out his right hand. “
This,
” he said, and extended the left, “and
this.
These are my torture chambers.”
Bufesqueu nodded and Mills stared. The Chief Eunuch laughed merrily. “No,” he said, “you don’t understand. You think I’m trying to intimidate you, to threaten obliquely like some fat Mex bandit with silver teeth. I didn’t call you here to threaten you. I called you here to
comfort
you. That about the guards should have taken a load off. They’d have talked. Your whereabouts would have gotten back to the Sultan. Oh, Lawd, dis nigger be misunderstood sho ’nuff.
“Because I’ll tell you why you’re here and it’s got nothing to do with sanctuary.
“I was fourteen years old when the slavers captured me. Fourteen! Do you know what that means? Do you?”
Mills shook his head.
“You don’t? What were you like when
you
were fourteen? Did you have a girl? A crush on the teacher?”
Mills shook his head.
“No? Then I bet you wrung it out. What about it? Did you wring it out?”
Mills blushed.
“
Sure
you did. You
still
wring it out.”
Mills shook his head fiercely.
“No? Why’d God give you hands? Why’d God give you hands you don’t wring it out?”
“I wring it out,” Mills said shyly.
“I
never
wrung it out,” the Chief Eunuch said. “I was fourteen. In my tribe, among my people—the beasts in the jungles, the parasites in the turds, the great apes and lions, the slavers and mortality tables—you were a man when you were eleven. I never wrung it out because I already had a wife. The real thing, you know? The genuine article. Absolute pussy.
“So I already had a wife when the slavers got me. Listen, am I breaking your heart? You think this is some love story I’m feeding you? That I pine for lost love, our burr-headed kid? Or maybe you think you’re way ahead of me. That they took her too, that she’s here now perhaps, the Sultan’s favorite with her jackknife fucks. Why would I tell you? Why would I tell white boys? You Christers! What, you’re going to deny your faith? Jesus, you Christers! It’s all a little barbaric, ain’t it? The idea of a harem. Or maybe you don’t think it’s barbaric, only wasteful. You Christers. To tell you the truth, if you want the opinion of one fatted, sufflated, darky gelding, it isn’t. It isn’t barbaric. If you’re the Sultan himself it ain’t even wasteful.
“I was fourteen years old. I’m talking about full-blown puberty. I’m talking about interest and appetite and lust and prurience, all the successive sexual steps like the diatonic scale. Because there ain’t any blade long enough or keen enough either to cut
that
out of a man. They buried me up to my chest in the sand for three days to let my wounds heal. But desire don’t flag. It swarms like the hair on the
kopf
of a corpse. And I
still
want to wave it around like an amputated hand, or lean my weight on it like a missing leg. So I walk around with this hard-on of the head. Alib Hakali,” Alib Hakali said. “Alib Hakali, the spayed spade.
“All right. You can go now. Watch your step.”
“What was that all about then?” Mills asked his reality master when they were alone.
“I’m not sure,” Bufesqueu said. “I think he was trying to tell us that he understands.”
“I don’t know.”
“Those guys at the gate,” Bufesqueu said, shuddering.
“I know.”
“I mean why’d he have to do that? He must want us around.”
“Why?”
Bufesqueu shrugged. “You know,” he said speculatively, “all the rest of those freemartins, they must be the same way he is.”
“Horny? You think?”
“Why not? If those slavers picked them after they was already ripe. Why not? If he’s telling the truth. If he ain’t one in a million like some bloke in a textbook. That’d be awful.”
“Hey,” George said, “I bet that
was
what he was trying to tell us.”
“There must be some way,” Bufesqueu said. “There must be some way Nature has of getting to a eunuch.”
“He was warning us,” Mills said.
“Warning us, hell. He was teasing us.”
This was the table of organization:
At the bottom of the chain were the female slaves, women like Fatima who served not only the harem women but their eunuch overseers as well. Above them were the novices, females new to the seraglio who may or may not have slept with the Sultan. Above these were the officially decreed favored ladies, and above the favored ladies were women who had already mothered one or more of the Sultan’s children, called royal prince or princess but of no more real rank than the female slaves. At the top of the chain was the Valide Sultan, the Sultan’s mother, a figurehead who maintained a residence in the seraglio, which she rarely visited except for those two or three times a year when she presided as hostess at teas. Officially she was also headmistress of the harem schools, but in actuality had even less to do with these—they were for the royal princes, and the curriculum dealt entirely with court protocol and was administered by women who had never been presented there: the female slaves, the novices—than she had with any of the other functions of the seraglio.
It was the Chief Eunuch’s show. With his private army—the guards had been part of it—he ran the seraglio like a small country, supervising everything from deciding the menu to choosing which woman would be sent that night to the Sultan, and for all that they had a table of organization, for all that they were centrally located and had schools and riding stables—by tradition the Chief Eunuch was awarded three hundred or so horses for his personal use, one for each woman in the harem proper—there was little for any of them—the women, the eunuchs and slave girls—to do. Mills would learn this.
One day a woman came into the laundry where Mills was folding sheets. His arms raised, extended, he held a piece of sheet in his teeth, leveraging it with his upraised chin to fold down the middle. He was arched backward to keep the bottom of the sheet from touching the floor. He was watching the sheet’s edges, trying to align them, when she spoke.
“My,” she said, “it’s grand you’re so tall, that you’ve such long arms and strong jaws. It must be ever so sublime to have such balance.”
“It’s bloody marvelous,” Mills said, still not looking at her. “If I wasn’t so lovely endowed, the goddamn sheet could go all untidy from dragging along the ground and some bimbo might get bedsores from calf to ass. Bufesqueu’s on break. He’s in back watching the laundresses.”
“What a manly voice,” she said. “If I had such a voice I’d boom out work songs while I toiled. Would you know any sheet-folding work songs you could sing for me?”
Mills turned to look at her and thought she was smiling at him behind her veil. She was a large woman, older than the slaves he had seen, and it occurred to him that she might be one of the women from the harem. Not a novice certainly, since novices were usually in their teens and, to judge from her looks, what was visible to him above the veil that covered the lower half of her face, probably not one of the favored ladies. It was possible she was the mother of some royal prince or princess. “Was there something I could help you with, ma’am?” he asked, looking over her shoulder for the eunuch who would be sure to accompany her.
“And so gallant!” she exclaimed.
“There are some extra sheets and pillowcases in the back. If I asked someone I’m sure I could …”
“Blankets!” she said. “A dozen of those special thick woolly blankets.”
“A dozen,” George said. It was high summer.
“I’ll wait,” she said.
“I could only find one,” he said when he returned. “The rest are in storage.”
“Aren’t you kind to take all that trouble,” she said. “You know,” she said, “I
could
use some sheets. Eight might just do it. And some pillowslips too. Sometimes it gets so warm of an evening I’ll wake in my bed and it’s soaked so with perspiration it’s just impossible to fall back to sleep. If I had extra linens …”
“Oh sure,” George said. “Sheets is no problem.”
“Lovely,” she said.
“Eight sheets,” George said, taking them from a pile he’d already folded. “And eight pillowcases.”
“Super,” she said. “There
is
just one problem.”
“There is?”
“This pile. It’s so heavy. I don’t think I could carry it back by myself.” Mills had seen slave girls half the size of this woman lift baskets of wet wash that had to weigh over a hundred pounds. “Your eunuch?” he suggested.
“I’m a daughter of the harem,” she said.
“A daughter …”
“One of the Sultan’s daughters,” she said shyly.
A royal princess, Mills thought, adding to his list.
“I have no status,” she said. “Eunuchs don’t even bother to guard us.” She actually closed an eye and winked at him. Mills thought of Bufesqueu’s country of the blind.
“Well,” he said, “I have no status either. I can’t leave my post.”
“I meant with the others,” she said. “I’m certain I have status over
you.
”
“Oh me,” Mills said, picking up the blanket and pillowslips, picking up the sheets. “Me,” he said, “sure.”
She led him across soft lawns, she led him across paths of crushed pine cones. Eunuchs saw her and waved familiarly. They went by a schoolhouse where the royal princes were learning their lessons in court protocol. The windows were open and Mills could hear one of the younger children reciting, “One may walk in the palace with his head covered if my father, the Sultan, is away on state business.” George glanced into the open windows over the stack of laundry he carried. Nine royal princes, he thought. “Evrevour?” the teacher said. Evrevour rose to stand beside his desk. “One has no right to chew his food after my father, the Sultan, has already swallowed,” Evrevour was saying as they walked on.