Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh

‘The Imperial Harem in Istanbul is the setting for this absorbing tale of deception, temptation and greed.’

Steve Baker in
The Express Magazine

‘Irwin returns to the perfumed exoticism of
The Arabian Nightmare
with this lush and stylish erotic novella, set in an oriental harem where princes are caged until being killed or crowned. Orkhan enjoys the latter fate, and emerges to discover the perversions of the harem, the sensual divinations of the phalomancer, and the “Tavern of the Perfume-Makers”. Minority tastes are catered for by some obliging crocodiles.’

Andrew Crumey in
Scotland on Sunday

‘One man and a group of women named after prescription drugs run round a garden having sex. At one stage, somebody shags an alligator. Make of that what you will. Random quote: “I know now that the prick of the fairy lusts led them to the cucumber.” Smart.’

Michael Holden in
Loaded Magazine

‘Robert Irwin is one of the British novelists I most admire – too clever and far too free of the usual English novelist clichés to have much hope of appearing on a current Booker shortlist.’

Hugh Macpherson in
The Scotsman

‘
Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh
is one of the pinnacles of the genre.’

The Erotic Review

‘Irwin is an expert on the Arabian text
The Thousand and One Nights
. This explores the sensuous world imagined by street story-tellers except that here we are told tales which, because of a proliferation of perverse sexuality, could never be told in the format they initiate. This makes the pastiche more powerful rather than less. Fairies and crocodiles turn out to have their sexual uses, and a prince finds himself victimised by the women he regards as his property.’

The Good Book Guide

‘highly satisfactory, and entirely in the spirit of the
1001 Nights
.’

Chris Gilmore in
Interzone

‘One thing you must never do in the harem is to let the Viper drink at the Tavern of the Perfume-Makers. This and other secrets of the forbidden territory are made known in
Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh
. Irwin’s virginal hero, Prince Orkhan, escapes from The Cage, in which the sons of the sultan are imprisoned, emerges into the harem and the foolish boy wastes no time in letting the Viper lose. Elaborate erotic sequences follows, but the book, like the stories of Scheherazade, defies simple categorisation. It’s a parable about the nature of desire and satisfaction, with an inner life as resistant to easy impositions of ulterior meaning as any story in
The Arabian Nights
.’

Jane Jakeman in
The Independent

‘… for a short novel
Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh
has a substantial wealth of comic and ironic invention, which lends such a steamy and decadent texture to the claustrophobic setting that it takes on the aspect of those folktales you were never allowed to read as a kid, or of those Richard Burton translations you could never find at your local library – or perhaps a polymorphous perverse
Gormenghast
as reimagined by Henry Miller. Whatever, it’s a small but unique delight.’

Gary K. Wolfe in
Locus

‘Can you name three good works of erotic literature in the last five years?’ John Sutherland. ‘… if we’re talking about books that contain passage of good sex writing then: …
Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh
– good on sex with crocodiles, panthers and dwarfs.’

Rowan Pelling in
The Guardian’s Erotic Debate

‘The dream of monsters produces reason.’ Shaykh Ayog

Title

Praise

Dedication

Chapter One  
Man in a Cage

Chapter Two  
The Perfumed Battlefield

Chapter Three  
The Fat Butterfly

Chapter Four  
Parrot in a Cage

Chapter Five  
In the Giraffe House

Chapter Six  
Fairy Intrigues

Chapter Seven  
Water Sports

Chapter Eight  
Dying of Pleasure

Copyright

The women lay heaped like pack-ice round the walls of the Cage. As Orkhan sat shivering in the courtyard, he imagined the ladies of the Harem at ease beyond the Cage’s walls. The women were braiding each others’ hair; they practised embroidery; they strummed at dulcimers; they smoked narghiles; they studied books on the pleasuring of men; they scratched themselves and waited for their master. The Harem was nothing other than a series of waiting-rooms before sex. He could picture the women at their idle amusements only in his mind’s eye. But sometimes – rarely – the breeze did carry the actual voices of the women, singing or laughing, over the high walls of the Cage –
the Kafes
. The rare sound of women, like the gurgling of a fountain was cooling and soothing.

He spent most of his days imagining the Harem beyond the walls. His every third thought was woman-shaped. If he had studied mathematics or astrology for a quarter of the time that he had spent thinking about women, then, young though he was, he would already have become a venerated sage. But his thoughts about women did not progress in the same way that puzzling over astrological theorems might have done. He had concluded that there was something about the smoothness of their forms which defeated logic. It seemed to Orkhan that he would have done better to have spent the last fifteen years meditating on a tiny pebble. For an inhabitant of the Cage, thinking about women was a branch of speculative philosophy, since no woman had ever set foot in the accursed place. Orkhan had last seen his mother at the age of five. He had a dim memory of being in one of the smaller pavilions in the gardens of the Palace and of vainly clinging to a vast skirt embroidered with tulips and then the black hands coming from behind to pull him away. It was all but certain that Orkhan would die before he ever saw a woman again.

The Cage was located in the heart of the warren of buildings, courtyards and covered alleys that comprised the Imperial Harem. The princes it imprisoned lived in a complex of rooms built around a flagged courtyard with a tiny garden at its centre. An arched colonnade running round two sides of the courtyard allowed the princes shelter from the sun and rain as they exercised or lazed about. A dormitory and two low-domed reception rooms led off from the colonnaded walkway and smaller cells were reached from the reception rooms. A handful of elderly deaf-mute eunuch servants shared the princes’ confinement. These slept where they could in the storerooms and the kitchen on the other two sides of the courtyard. The Cage’s windows all looked inwards on the dismal garden and supplies were delivered through a hole in the kitchen wall. The solitary, iron-studded door of the Cage was only opened to permit the entry of a doctor or the departure of a corpse. On the rare occasions when the door did open Orkhan and his companions strained to catch a glimpse of the corridor beyond, which was known inauspiciously as the Passage Where the Jinns Consult.

Beyond the dangerous Passage was the Harem and, beyond the Harem, the rest of the Palace and beyond the Palace was Istanbul, but Orkhan could not expand his imagination half so wide. Until a week ago there had been nine princes in the Cage. But one day last week, while the princes were lunching, picnicking in the courtyard, the door of the Cage had swung open and a pair of black eunuchs filled the opening. They did not enter the courtyard but stood at the door and beckoned to Barak, the oldest of the princes. Barak had bowed his head and passed between the eunuchs through the door and down the Passage Where the Jinns Consult. He had never looked back. Barak and Orkhan (the second oldest of the princes) had had a pact, that whichever of them should be released first, would, if he was able, send for the other. But there had been no summons from Barak nor any word of his fate. Indeed, no news of the world outside had ever entered the Cage.

The Cage was, like the Harem, a waiting room, but, whereas the Harem’s odalisques waited for the delights of the bedchamber, the occupants of the Cage waited and prepared themselves for sovereignty or death. Their fates were dependent on the health and humour of the Sultan Selim and his Harem. One day it must happen that Selim would die and on that day courtiers and soldiers would come hurrying to the Cage and, having plucked out one of the princes, they would proclaim him Sultan. On the other hand, it was really more probable that, before that longed-for day arrived, Selim acting under the influence of an ominous dream or the whispered words of a jealous concubine, would suddenly and capriciously issue instructions for the execution of one or more of his sons. On that day then muscular deaf-mutes would be lining the Passage Where the Jinns Consult and one of them would be holding the silken bowstring, for it was the honourable tradition of the Ottoman house to execute its princes by strangulation.

It was possible, Orkhan thought, that Selim was dead and that Barak, who had forgotten his promise to Orkhan, was the new Sultan. It was alternatively possible that the old Sultan was still alive and had made Barak governor of Erzerum or Amasya. It was, however, all but certain that Barak was dead by strangulation. Orkhan had read that the victim of such a fate invariably experienced an erection and ejaculation, the little death of orgasm serving to mask the greater death which followed so close behind. It was one of the forms of dying classified in the books, for a reason he had not yet fathomed, as ‘the Death of the Just Man’. Orkhan was as diligent in his study of death as he was in his thinking about women.

There were still hours to go before the sun would have risen above the walls of the Cage, but it had been hot all night and Orkhan was not shivering from cold. Suddenly he realised that it was not – or not just – the probable fate of Barak, which filled him with foreboding and fear. He had had a dream that night. He now remembered it, but it was not for him to interpret it, for everyone knew that, whereas the dream belonged to the person who had it, its meaning belonged to the first person it was given to for interpretation.

In search of an interpreter, Orkhan re-entered the room used by the princes as their dormitory. The seven princes lay sleeping on the stone floor. Once they had slept here on mattresses and, moreover, the reception rooms had been liberally strewn with carpets and cushions. But then Barak, their leader, had called them round him and spoken to them about the meaning of their lives. Each of them was, he said, preparing himself so as to rule as a Sultan or die like a man. So, whatever their destiny, effeminate softness had to be shunned. They should cultivate Ottoman virtues and practice to make themselves fit, hard and strong. ‘Are we not men?’ The princes had followed Barak’s lead and from that day on they had exercised and practised at weightlifting, archery and wrestling. They bathed only in cold water. They cut their garments of silk into pieces. The princes had also gone about the Cage collecting cushions, carpets and mattresses for a bonfire. For the last two years they had slept on stone.

In the dormitory, Orkhan’s half-brother, Hamid, lay staring expressionlessly up at the ceiling. He was the only one of the princes who was awake and it was he who followed Orkhan out into the courtyard. Hamid had been born to a Hungarian concubine. He was red-haired and pale-skinned. His chest was remarkably hairy for one so young.