Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh

by Robert Irwin, Magnus Irvin

  ‘Before the end, you will long for death, if only to free you from the Rapture. For the moment, you behold me dressed, hooded and veiled, lest the splendour of my naked beauty blind you. I have covered myself as an act of mercy to you, lest you die of the Rapture. But now, if you are ready, I will intensify your desire by allowing you to gaze successively on the most dangerously desirable parts of my body.’

  Orkhan having nodded, Mihrimah began to fumble with the lacing of her blouse. She knelt to expose her breasts and, supporting them with her hands, she thrust them forwards for Orkhan’s attention. As she did so there was a strange trumpeting sound in the distance.

  ‘These are the first subjects of contemplation,’ she said. ‘What did Anadil call them?’

  ‘She called them her moons,’ replied Orkhan.

  ‘She was right to do so, yet what is the meaning of that?’

  Mihrimah knelt as close as she could to him, so that the tips of her breasts brushed against the golden bars of the cage. Even the eyeholes of her veil of black velvet were covered with a fine trellis of threads. Orkhan toyed with the idea that her face might be ravaged by leprosy or otherwise hideously disfigured.

  Mihrimah’s melodious voice continued to discourse learnedly about her breasts being the figures of moons in a sexual cosmos and, like all things connected with the moon, subject to change and decay. They had to be loved not only for what they were, but for what they would become – withered dugs. But the breasts were also doves’ eggs and they were pomegranates too. Above all, they were to be reverenced as the Lesser Prayer-Cushions, on which man might find his solace and spiritual salvation – the parts here standing for the whole of a woman’s body which is the Greater Prayer-Cushion. All men, in longing to return to the breast, are actually longing to return to the Divinity. The twin moons were divinely-fashioned navigational aids on this journey of mystical return.

  While Mihrimah spoke of domes of alabaster lit by rays of lunar mystery, Orkhan gazed on her breasts as if hypnotised. They were indeed very pretty, but he thought that they more closely resembled blind puppies who were in need of petting than they did mystic moons. He felt something stirring at the base of his spine.

  ‘Look at my breasts! Really look at them!’ Mihrimah insisted. ‘They seem to offer themselves to you, whether I wish it or not. They are soft and vulnerable and yet they seem to threaten you, do they not? How can this be?’

  Seeing that Orkhan made no reply, she pointed at him and continued,

  ‘Or if you cannot truly see my breasts as they should be seen, then gaze upon yourself – so hard, so tight, so compact, but with that cock you cannot control. You are very strong, a hard man, but yet you are trapped by my weakness. Seduction is nothing but the trick of the weak to capture the strong. The strong always yearns to discharge its strength in softness and become weak. But you must become weaker yet. It is time for the second stage in the discipline of the gaze.’

  And, so saying, Mihrimah threw back her hood and stripped off the veil, to reveal a mass of golden hair framing a calm and pleasantly rounded face, which, in the dim candlelight glowed like the pale moon. She smiled at Orkhan as she lectured on herself and especially her face. Her hair’s tresses were a net to trap the lover. He, the lover, was a nightingale trapped in a rose-garden in flames. The nightingale and the rose-garden were both alike doomed to perish and they would achieve union only in the mingling of their ashes. Was it nobler to love beauty or to be beautiful? Which had the finer part – the nightingale or the rose-garden?

  Though she went on speaking of the high mysteries of her sex, Orkhan as he contemplated her face, breasts and shoulders, was fantasising about what it would be like to have the woman’s flesh actually under his hands. Desire was building within him. The pain between his legs was so intense that he did not think he would be able to rise again, unless he speedily achieved some relief. He was only startled out of his brooding frustration when she announced,

  ‘Now I shall show you my other face.’ She turned away and, unclasping the sash, she lowered her trousers, talking all the while.

  ‘In this way,’ she said ‘I conquer by humbling myself before you, for the way of the lover is self-abnegation without hope of the gratification of desire. This is the penultimate stage in the discipline of the gaze before you shall behold me fully naked. Then look on my bottom and marvel!’

  Orkhan did as he was told. She swayed and shifted her weight from one foot to the other, so that the heavy cheeks of her bottom rose and fell, gleaming in the brilliant light. Her bottom was, he learned, like the breasts in that it was a figure of the moon and governed by the moon. It was pale and luminous and, like the moon, it could destroy man’s reason.

  Orkhan decided that he preferred Mihrimah’s bottom to her breasts, for her bottom had an imperious quality that her more tentative breasts lacked. So, as she sought to instruct him about the sand dunes over which a lover’s hands must travel, about the soft, white clouds which veiled the Divinity from man, and about the astral thrall exerted by the bottom and the bitter mystery of its dark abyss, Orkhan furtively raised his robe and in a quiet fever set to masturbating. He was desperate to come to a climax and, if possible, to do so before Mihrimah should turn to him again, but just as he was ejaculating in hot thick spurts, she turned to him and cried out in dismay. An instant later the door behind her swung open and a strong gust of wind swept through the pit and Orkhan was plunged into darkness. It was as if a vast black-gloved hand had descended, extinguishing the candles.

  Another woman’s voice, not Mihrimah’s cried out, fierce and terrible,

  ‘Unhappy the man who has failed the test of the Dolorous Gaze! Leave him to darkness and shame, the prisoner of his lust.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IN THE GIRAFFE HOUSE

  The sounds of lamentation increased briefly, then died away. Orkhan did not move, but sat in pitch darkness. Where, after all, should he go? Passionate, brightly-coloured images chased one another about in his head – he had witnessed so many unfamiliar sights, so many curious tableaux, all in the matter of a few hours. Some of the things he had seen he did not even have a name for. Other things were as yet only names. The Rapture was still only a name. At least he had saved himself from that. Eventually his eyelids fluttered and drooped and he slumped back onto the stone floor and slept where he had been sitting. Even while he slept, the viper in his mouth flicked restlessly from side to side.

  He was woken by the sounds of rustling, scratching and muttering. He opened his eyes and beheld the daylight streaming in from a lantern in the roof of the pit. He looked into the cage expecting to see Mihrimah, but there, where Mihrimah had stood on the previous evening, was an old woman in a coarse, brown robe. The woman’s head was sunk so low that it hardly rose above her shoulders. On reflection, it was more like a skull than a head, for the thin hair did not cover it, skin stretched over angular bones and the eyes were set deep within the bones. A thin wispy beard sprouted from the woman’s jaw, the jut of which was accentuated by her toothlessness. Orkhan toyed with the notion that he was indeed gazing at Mihrimah, that he had just been asleep for seventy years and that it was to this that the discipline of the Dolorous Gaze had brought him. The woman looked down on him briefly before resuming her work, scattering straw over the floor of the cage.

  Then, when she had finished this task, she shuffled out through the door at the back of the cage. There were muffled shouts. Then the door opened again and a panther padded in. The panther was followed by a muscular girl with close-cropped red hair. She was dressed in black leather – skirt, laced bodice and gloves. Her feet were bare and she carried a whip. She did not notice Orkhan, for all her attention was on the panther, which she baited with her whip, lightly flicking at the creature’s nose and muzzle. The panther, like a kitten confronted with a ball of string, snarled, lashed its tail and sought to catch at the thong with its talons. At last the girl tired of this game and cast the whip away. The panther leapt towards her an
d together they rolled over the straw. Orkhan cried out, but he was ignored, as the girl and the panther tumbled over one another. She was momentarily astride the supple, rippling, velvety back of the beast, before he slipped out from under her and in a moment she was lying under him. Her skirt had ridden up and she was wearing nothing underneath. The creature stood over her, dripping saliva on to her body, seeming to devour her with his stony green eyes, before inclining his head to lash her face with his rough tongue. She reached up to clasp his neck and together they rolled over once more. The panther began to purr as she stroked his stomach.

  Suddenly she cried out. She had just noticed that her game with the beast was being observed by Orkhan. She leapt up, as if embarrassed to be discovered at play. She strode over to the bars of the cage, with the panther slinking close beside her. Orkhan, who remained sitting, caught a blast of the creature’s breath, which was both sweet and foul.

  ‘Who are you?’ said the girl, looking down on Orkhan.

  ‘My name is Orkhan. I am your Sultan’.

  The girl seemed neither surprised nor impressed.

  ‘I am Roxelana,’ she said, as she fumbled in her bodice, before producing a key at the end of a chain. ‘Roxelana means “the Russian”.’ And she gave the panther a final stroke before picking up her whip, unlocking the cage door and joining Orkhan on the other side. The trapped and abandoned panther gazed balefully up at Orkhan.

  ‘I call him Babur,’ said Roxelana. She stood close beside Orkhan and gazed down on her former playmate. Her face was smudged and there was a scratch of blood on her shoulders. She smelled of sweat and the panther. Her voice was husky as she had not yet recovered from her exertions and her breasts rose and fell as she struggled to regain her breath. Those breasts seemed to Orkhan to more closely resemble extra muscles than any conventional feature of a woman’s body. Roxelana was, like her panther, a mass of sinew and muscle.

  ‘Are you one of the concubines of the Harem?’ he asked doubtfully.

  She let out a laugh that was half delighted, half scornful,

  ‘Ha! I could not bear to have anything to do with the Harem women. No, I am one of the animal girls who work in the Imperial Zoo. I would much rather serve animals than the ninnies of the Harem.’

  ‘There is an Imperial Zoo? Where is it?’

  She gave him a curious look,

  ‘It is here. You are in it. Why else should you be talking to an animal girl and standing in front of a cage containing a panther? This is Babur’s cage.’ And she pointed to a brass plaque attached to the bars at the top of the cage. The inscription in swirls of decorative calligraphy announced that THIS IS THE PANTHER, MARVELLOUS IN HIS BEAUTY, WHOSE BREATH IS SWEET AS THE SPICES OF JAVA.

  ‘But last night there was no panther,’ said Orkhan who was wondering if he was going mad. ‘Last night I saw a woman who said she was called Mihrimah stand behind those bars and start to undress herself in front of me.’

  ‘Ah! So it was Mihrimah? That girl thinks that the sun shines out of her arse, that moonlight issues from her cunt and she believes that she is the mother of cosmic mysteries, that her body is an orchard, a sea, a desert, a fountain, a mirror, a mystic robe and, at the end of it all, a bloody Prayer-Cushion for man to kneel on as he prays before the Holy of Holies. She’s mad, quite mad … She also thinks that she can walk into the Zoo and do what she likes, take over its cages, turn out the animals, give orders to the staff. The insolence of those courtesans and dancing girls takes my breath away. The reality is that Mihrimah and the rest of the concubines are good for nothing, except fucking – and doing embroidery. But they lie about in the Harem and thoughts of sex rot away their soft insides and eat up their little brains. All that Prayer-Cushion rubbish that they preach … it’s only the product of not enough proper sex. Cooped up in their cramped dormitories, they pleasure one another and fantasise about men, but all they ever see is eunuchs.’ She paused to calm herself and get her breath back, before continuing, ‘But we are all prisoners here, women, eunuchs and animals. Of course, the main zoo is over at the Hippodrome. This is only a little zoo within the Harem for the pleasure of the Sultan’s concubines. We have wild boars, gazelles, porcupines, a buffalo, a small herd of giraffes … Two of the giraffes are homosexual and they use their necks to court one another.’

  She placed her gloved hand in his. Her eyes sparkled.

  ‘Come and see the homosexual giraffes.’

  She led him up out of the pit and down a roofed and cobbled street that twisted between cages and storerooms. They came to a low doorway over which was written, THESE ARE THE SULTAN’S HUNTERS WHO SIT ON THE GLOVES OF LADIES AND WAIT TO BRING DEATH FROM THE SKIES. Roxelana ducked in and Orkhan followed her through the imperial mews. Hawks in plumed leather helmets stirred restlessly on their perches. Roxelana explained that this was a short cut. Then they emerged out through another low door into the high-roofed and airy giraffe stable. HERE ARE THE HAPPY OFFSPRING OF THE MATING OF CAMELS AND LEOPARDS WHO ARE CALLED GIRAFFES

  ‘Everywhere in the Harem is so cramped,’ said Roxelana. ‘Apart from the hammam, I think this is the biggest building there is.’

  A giraffe lazily sought to entwine his neck round that of his neighbour. Hands on hips, Roxelana stood gazing up at the animals in rapt delight. Orkhan followed her gaze. The creatures did not resemble the giraffes in the bestiary which he used to study in the Cage. They were strange, but then everything was so strange to him, and surely Roxelana was the strangest creature in her zoo. She slapped the flank of one of the languid giraffes, seeking to urge it on in its seduction, then turned to Orkhan and smiled. He was certain that he had never seen such strong white teeth or such brilliant eyes before. Suddenly he realised that he was desperate for her – desperate to feed off her energy and drink from her overflowing life.

  ‘Aren’t they wonderful?’ she said, pointing at the animals who had begun to nuzzle one another.

  ‘Never mind the giraffes,’ he said. ‘What about me?’

  He yanked at her arm and pulled her down on to a heap of straw. She pulled up her skirt, ready for him.

  ‘Now, quickly. If you want me, it must be now, before the jinns come.’

  Those were the last words that it was possible to make sense of, as she started to moan noisily. She gestured to him to make haste as he struggled out of his robe. Even in the dung-scented air of the giraffe stable, he could smell Roxelana. Her skin, caked as it was with dried sweat and saliva, stank. Also, it seemed that she had used rancid butter to give her helmet of red hair more of a sheen. The insides of her thighs were moist and smelt of cat. Like Anadil, she was clean-shaven between the legs. Driven by the cravings of the viper, he tried to thrust his head down there, but she was impatient.

  ‘Not like that. I want something bigger than your tongue inside me.’ She wrestled under him and pulled him up and grabbed at his cock. She reminded Orkhan of his brother princes with whom he used to wrestle. Powerfully aroused, he entered her masterfully. However, the sensation of mastery hardly lasted more than a moment, for she so fiercely bucked and thrashed under him. Her eyes rolled and her teeth were gritted. Finally, she made such a great heave that he was unable to stay inside her. He withdrew and lay beside her and waited for her frenzy to abate.

  ‘I am accursed!’ she wailed. ‘Forgive me, master, yet it is not my fault.’ Now she was weeping. ‘It is the fault of the jinns. Whenever I even think about sex, the jinns enter my body and possess it. It is the jinns who make me do such frightful things.’

  She buried her head in the straw and continued to weep. Then, as her sobbing subsided, she raised her tear-stained face to Orkhan and said,

  ‘I need to be purified. You can purify me. You can whip the jinns out of me. Please, I need to have the jinns driven out of me. They cannot bear the pain, but I, Roxelana, can bear anything. If you flog me, O Sultan, I promise you that you will then be able to enjoy my body as is your right.’

  Now she was in a new fever of impatience. She ste
pped out of her black skirt and with trembling hands set to unlacing her bodice. The bodice fell to the ground and, as she turned away from him, Orkhan saw that her broad shoulders were already covered with a light tracery of scars. Then she turned to him again and presented him with the whip.

  ‘Flog me now,’ she implored. ‘I am begging you for it. I need it.’ And she turned away and bent to present her back for chastisement.

  Orkhan struck at her a couple of times, but she was not satisfied.

  ‘Harder. It must be harder. You have to draw my blood, for the jinns are in my blood. You have to let them out.’

  Her broad bottom seemed made for whipping and he struck at it again and again. Ugly red weals began to break up its milky smoothness. For the first time since his release from the Cage, Orkhan felt himself to be truly a sultan and, as he continued to lash out at Roxelana, he began to fantasise about how he would deal with Anadil and the other ladies of the Harem. He worked a little way up her back before pausing for breath.

  Then she said,

  ‘You must be able to do better than this. Harem girls have whipped me harder than you have. Come on, I really want to feel it – your touch of mastery.’