The Sultan's Daughter

by Dennis Wheatley

  The prisoners were brought to within a few yards of Djezzar. Roger found himself staring into the cruel, hooknosed face with its handsome, curly beard and fine, upturned moustaches. Suddenly, in a hoarse voice, he began to plead for himself and his companions. One of his guards struck him in the mouth, reducing him to silence.

  The Pasha gave a curt order that the executions should begin and pointed to young Auby. His guards flung him to the ground and ripped off his breeches. Either from terror or because he had lost so much blood from his wound, he fainted. The two muscular Turks lugged him up between them and forced his limp body on to the stake. Suddenly he came to, his eyes starting from his head, and he gave an awful groan. But it was all over in a moment. The point of the stake came out from his neck and his head flopped forward.

  As the deed was done, Roger heard a sudden chatter of excited female voices. Looking round, he saw that about twenty feet up from the courtyard, in a wall at right-angles to the line of stakes, there was a row of open arches. They were filled by about twenty veiled women, who had evidently been summoned to see the fun. A few of them had their eyes averted, or covered with a hand, to shut out the atrocious sight of Auby’s sagging body. But the majority were staring down eagerly at it and some were crying in shrill voices:

  ‘Praise be to Allah and blessed be His Prophet! Death to the Infidels! Death to the Unbelievers!’

  But Roger’s glance rested on them only for a moment. At the sight of Auby’s death Corporal Gensonné realised what was in store for him. Giving a furious curse he turned on the guard who stood on his right and with one blow knocked him down. The other guard grabbed him by the shoulders. But Gensonné wriggled free and kicked him in the groin. Swerving away, he dodged a third man who had come at him and ran towards the great gate, which stood wide open.

  For a moment Roger was seized with an impulse to follow his example. But there had been half a dozen guards lounging by the gate. They were now running in a group to intercept the Corporal and the head jailer with three of his men had dashed in pursuit of him. Against such odds no attempt to escape could possibly succeed.

  Djezzar was roaring with laughter at the discomfiture of the two guards who had been standing on either side of Gensonné. But the Corporal’s bravery did not incline the sadistic Pasha to clemency. With an amused smile he waited as the ten Turks closed round the solitary Frenchman, seized him by the arms and dragged him, blaspheming wildly, back to the line of stakes. While four of them held him, two others wrenched the breeches from his kicking legs, then they carried him between them to the stake next to that upon which Auby’s body hung impaled. Roger closed his eyes to shut out the horror of what followed. The Corporal screamed and screamed and screamed, then suddenly fell silent. Again there came from the women’s balcony treble cries of:

  ‘Death to the Christian dogs! To Iblis with the Unbelievers!’

  Roger knew then that his turn had come. Within the next few minutes life for him would be over. Never more would he enjoy the passionate embrace of his beautiful Georgina, never again see the green fields of England. Starting forward, he shouted to the Pasha in the best Turkish he could muster, and with all the strength of his lungs:

  ‘Excellency! If you have me killed Allah will call you to account for my death. I have had no trial, but could prove my innocence. I am no enemy but a friend. I have papers to prove it. Sir Sidney Smith will vouch for me. I am not a Frenchman but English and your ally.’

  One of the guards again silenced him by striking him on the mouth. Suddenly one of the women up in the balcony cried, ‘He lies. He is a French Colonel. I knew him in Cairo.’

  Instantly Roger recognised the voice. It was Zanthé’s. Looking up he saw her leaning right out over the balcony. The tawny eyes above her yashmak marked her out from the other dark-eyed women. Djezzar also looked up and called back:

  ‘Then, moon of my delight, we’ll make him wriggle on a stick.’

  ‘No, Pasha, no!’ she cried. ‘Such a death is too swift for him. In Cairo he insulted me. I pray you give him to me so that I may see him die by inches. Give him to me for a plaything, so that I may be avenged on him.’

  Giving a bellow of laughter, the bearded Pasha waved a hand to her and shouted, ‘Beautiful one, when your red lips speak, to hear is to obey. He is yours, to do with as you will.’

  ‘May Allah reward you, mighty Pasha,’ she called down. ‘I’ll have him castrated, then he shall live on offal served in our chamber-pots.’

  The mail-clad men surrounding Djezzar roared their applause and the women up in the balcony with Zanthé broke into peals of shrill laughter.

  At a sign from the Pasha, two of the guards took Roger by the elbows, hurried him away across the courtyard, down the spiral stairs, thrust him back into the dungeon and again shut him up there in the pitch darkness.

  Sinking down on the floor, he propped his back against the slimy wall. His thoughts were so chaotic that for a few minutes he could hardly grasp that, temporarily at least, his life was safe. By a miracle he had escaped the excruciating agony of having a four-inch stake rammed through his intestines and dying with its point lodged in his gullet.

  Zanthé’s unexpected appearance at the critical moment had at first amazed him. But after a few moments’ thought he realised that it was not particularly surprising. When the Sultan had declared war on France the previous autumn, the Turkish officials in Cairo would have been secretly apprised of it long before Bonaparte learned that the Porte had openly become his enemy. Naturally, on one excuse or other, the highly placed Turks in Egypt would have slipped away to Syria, taking their women with them. As Acre was the capital of Syria it was logical that Zanthé, and whoever was now her protector, should have taken refuge there.

  As Roger’s mind cleared he began fearfully to speculate on what was in store for him. He had been saved from an agonising death, but only by a woman who nursed a bitter hatred for him. She had shouted down that she intended to have him castrated. At the thought the saliva ran hot in his mouth and his flesh crept. Swallowing hard, he wondered if he would not have been more fortunate had he suffered those few minutes of searing pain and now was dead.

  In a swift series of pictures his mind ran back over the key episodes in his association with Zanthé. He had taken her by force, enjoyed her, then found that she had spoken the truth when she had declared herself to be a virgin. Yet he had been for several weeks afterwards under the illusion that, although she had at first fought him off, the pleasure she had later felt during his embrace, wordlessly confessed beyond dispute by her passionate response, had been a positive indication that next time she would give herself willingly to him.

  But when he had carried her off from the Viceroy’s palace she had swiftly shattered that optimistic belief. With renewed distress, and now with fear, he recalled how she had declared that should he again attempt her she would resist him to the utmost. He remembered also the intense resentment she had expressed at his having ravished her on that first occasion.

  And now she had him at her mercy. She could not have made plainer her reason for asking of Djezzar his life. Clearly, she intended to revenge herself on him by depriving him of his manhood and, not content with that, meant to extract payment from him, by hours of degradation and torment, for every moment of pleasure he had had with her.

  He did not have very long to wait before his punishment began. After he had spent about an hour in miserable contemplation of his fate the jailers came for him again. They marched him up to the courtyard, across it and through a door under the balcony from which the women had watched the impaling of Auby and Gensonné, then up a flight of stairs and through several passages to a door on which the Chief Jailer knocked loudly with the hilt of his dagger. After a few moments an iron grille was lifted and a pair of heavily lidded eyes peered at them. The door was then opened by a hugely fat negro with several chins, whom Roger at once placed as a eunuch. At a piping call from him, two other eunuchs appeared, took the prisoner o
ver from the jailers and hustled him inside.

  The vestibule through which they took him was lit by hanging lanterns made from silver filigree work, encrusted with coloured glass. By the soft light they gave he saw that the walls were hung with rich silk Persian rugs of beautiful design and that the place was furnished with chests of rare wood inlaid with ivory. No sound penetrated to this luxurious apartment and the delicious scent of jasmine hung on the still air.

  Roger was taken through a hanging curtain of beads, down a corridor, through another room—an aviary, where dozens of cages held twittering birds of every rainbow hue—then into a loftier chamber with on one side slim, marble pillars supporting arches of lace-like carved stone. The arches gave on to a long balcony that had a lovely view over the bay, in which the ships of Sir Sidney Smith’s Squadron were lying at anchor.

  But Roger knew that they were much too far off for anyone in them to hear a cry for help, however loud his shouts, and after one glance to seaward his gaze became riveted on Zanthé. She was seated at the far end of the room, cross-legged on a low divan heaped with cushions. Squatting on the floor near her were two other women and behind the divan stood a fat, elderly negress. All the women were wearing yashmaks, but the silk of Zanthé’s was so diaphanous that, as Roger advanced, he could see her lower features clearly through it.

  Agitated as he was, he still found her beauty breath-taking. Her curling hair, with its rich bronze lights, serene forehead, dark, tapering eyebrows, magnificent tawny eyes and red, full-lipped, cupid’s bow-mouth were all as he remembered them and as he had so often visualised them when day dreaming about her. When he arrived at about ten feet from her divan he was about to bow to her but was not given the chance.

  Two of the powerful eunuchs seized him by the arms, forced him to his knees, then pushed his head forward towards the floor, while the third shouted in the thin, high voice of a castrato:

  ‘Down, Christian dog! Down! Lick the floor in obeisance to Her Exalted Highness, daughter of the Sultan Abd-ul-Hamid, Descendant of the Prophet, Shadow of Allah upon Earth, Padishah and …’

  He was still declaiming shrilly when one of the other eunuchs struck Roger a sharp blow on the back of the head. His face hit the marble floor with such force that his lips were bruised and his nose began to bleed. Jerking up his head he stared at Zanthé and exclaimed in French:

  ‘Can that which was said in jest really be true? That … that you are a daughter of the Sultan?’

  Her face remained impassive, but she gave a slight shrug and replied in the same language, ‘I am the only daughter of the late Sultan. But do you take me for such a fool as to have revealed it to you while I was in Cairo? Had I done so when we first met you would have demanded a King’s ransom for me and, on the second occasion, your General would have kept me as a valuable hostage.’

  ‘But … but,’ Roger stammered, ‘how can you be? You … you said that you were French.’

  ‘I told you that my mother is French, and that is true.’

  The enormity of his crime now came home to Roger. To lay hands on a woman of royal blood in any country was lése-majesté; and in Turkey, where all women of good class were so jealously guarded, to have forcibly deflowered a Princess must merit the most ghastly tortures that the Eastern mind was capable of conceiving.

  ‘Had I but known—’ he began.

  ‘That which is done is done,’ she said sharply, ‘and had I been but a merchant’s daughter I would have felt no less the disgrace you inflicted on me.’ Then she gave an order in Turkish to her Chief Eunuch, the meaning of which Roger did not grasp.

  The eunuch clapped his plump hands and two more eunuchs, who had evidently been waiting in an adjoining chamber, came waddling in. One of them carried a large bowl filled with water, the other brought soap and towels and, under one arm, two long bamboo poles. The eunuchs on either side of Roger continued to hold him down on his knees while the basin was set in front of him. The blood from his nose was running down over his lips and dripping from his chin, so he thought he was about to be allowed to wash it from his face. He was swiftly disillusioned.

  One of the newcomers splashed water on his head while the other rubbed soap on it, until his hair was in a thick lather. The Chief Eunuch then produced a razor. Suddenly realising that they intended to shave his head, he began to shout and struggle. In spite of their rolls of surplus fat, the men who held him were very strong; so in his weakened state he could not have got away from them, and he did not try for long. The Chief Eunuch gave the top of his right ear a sharp nick with the razor. Fearing that if he resisted further his ear might be cut off, Roger let himself go limp and submitted to having his head shaved.

  It was over twenty hours since he had had anything to drink, but the craving he had felt during the early part of the day had later receded to the back of his mind under the compulsion of far stronger emotions. Now the sight of the bowl of water caused, his thirst to return with such force that he even licked in with his parched tongue some of the soapy water that ran down from his head to the corners of his mouth. Unpleasant as it tasted, as soon as the last locks of his hair had been thrown aside he wrenched himself forward, plunged his face into the basin and lapped up several gulps of the water remaining in it.

  When the eunuchs had dried Roger’s head with a towel and stood back from him, Zanthé surveyed their handiwork with a smile, her two women burst out laughing and the negress gave vent to a strange cackling sound. At a word from Zanthé the old woman brought a mirror and held it up in front of Roger, so that he could see himself. The sight of his head, as bald as an egg, came as a horrid shock and his bronzed face surmounted by the pinkish scalp from which the hair had been shorn gave him the appearance of a clown. As he was inclined to be vain of his normal good looks he could have wept with anger. But far worse was to follow.

  Pushing him over on his back, two of the eunuchs held him down while two others pulled off his boots and stockings. They then lashed his bare feet securely to the bamboo poles and lifted them waist-high, so that his body, shoulders, arms and head still lay sprawled upon the ground. When the poles had been brought in, he had wondered to what use they were to be put. Now a memory flashed into his mind of someone once telling him of the Turkish torture known as the bastinado. It consisted of whipping the sensitive soles of the feet with a thin, springy rod.

  Next moment he was experiencing that form of torture. The Chief Eunuch produced a rod and he brought it sharply down on Roger’s upturned left foot. He let out a yell. Therod swished down on his right foot. He yelled again and began to beg for mercy, but his pleas were ignored. Swish, swish, swish, the cuts came down with ruthless regularity, while he squirmed and twisted, shouting, screaming and vainly beating his hands on the floor. By the time Zanthé called a halt to his flagellation, the soles of his feet were raw, bleeding and giving him as much pain as though they had been held in front of a red-hot fire.

  When the cords that tied his ankles to the poles had been untied, he was near fainting and lay, a sobbing wreck of a man, before the divan on which sat the beautiful girl whom he had robbed of her virginity. But she had not done with him yet. At an abrupt word from her the eunuchs began to strip him.

  Pulling off the crumpled and dirty travelling coat that he had worn since soon after his arrival in Naples, and throwing it aside, they quickly divested him of his other garments. In his present state he was indifferent to the shame of being exposed naked, but when his money-belt was taken from him he rallied himself sufficiently to call out to Zanthé, ‘In that you’ll find a blue diamond that I procured as a gift for you while away in Alexandria.’

  The belt was handed to her and after going through several of its pockets she fished out the slender chain from which depended the jewel that Sarodopulous had given him. His fleeting thought that the gift might serve to appease her was swiftly dashed. After a casual glance at it she threw it down on the divan beside her and said contemptuously:

  ‘I have a score of st
ones, each worth not less than fifty times the value of this little bauble. But it will serve as a gift for one of my tire-women who is about to marry.’ Then she looked at the Chief Eunuch and added, ‘Go to it now. Let us get finished with this business.’

  Again water, soap and towels were brought. Roger was thrown on his back and one of the eunuchs sat on his chest so that he could not see what was being done to him; but he felt his private parts being lathered, then shaved, and he dared not move from fear of receiving a severe cut.

  The weight of the eunuch on his chest drove the breath from his lungs, the soles of his bleeding feet felt as though they were being held before a fire, his injured wrist was aching dully. Yet his mind was suffering greater torture than his body as he visualised the awful thing that was about to happen to him.

  He felt the rough towel against his flesh again, then a loop of string was put over his testicles and drawn tight. His eyes starting from his head he yelled to Zanthé to have mercy on him.

  Her cold and imperative voice cut through his shouts. ‘Enough! Be silent! This is only preparation. It will be a week yet before we make a neuter of you.’

  The eunuch got up off him and two others hauled him to his feet. They pained him so much that he could not stand on them. Between them the eunuchs got his shirt over his head and threw his travelling coat round his shoulders, then half-dragged and half-carried him out through a side door, up two flights of stairs and into a sparsely furnished attic. It had a narrow, open, arrow-slit window and he was just sufficiently conscious to realise that night had fallen. The eunuchs threw him on a narrow divan and left him, locking the door behind them.