Sofia
head was lower than my torso, the blood throbbing in my brain. This time they wanted me awake.”I told her how they bound me tight about the abdomen with linen bands till the circulation pulsed to a stop. I told her how they made the cut, quick, clean, and close to the belly, with a piece of new-chipped obsidian as this was less likely than forged knives to fester. How they cauterized the wound with iron, red-hot from the fire. And how both cutting and burning caused pain enough to wipe heaven and earth from existence.
“And for this they wanted you awake, poor Abdullah?” my lady asked.
“They wanted me awake because for two hours after they have swabbed you with comfrey and myrrh—and I can’t bear the smell of these simples to this day, even at your hands, lady—after this, and after they have made a pack of clean desert sand to take the place of what you’ve lost—”
“‘In the desert,’ Old Whiny said, ‘we used to bury them up to their necks in sand. Well, we had the sand for it there. We hardly lost a one.’
“—After this, and while you vomit where there is nothing left to vomit, and faint as the pain rips down your legs and kills them, your torturers must keep you on your feet. They must walk you back and forth and back and forth in the tiny hut, the scene of your very death throes. Back and forth to keep the blood going to heal what you can never be healed of. And all the while, there in a bucket, gathering voracious spring flies, is all that’s left of your manhood.”
“Nur Banu—” Esmikhan gulped. “Nur Banu once had a eunuch that came to us all the way from China. He kept his—his parts with him always, preserved in honey, in a jar on a chain about his neck. He believed he would see no life in the hereafter if they weren’t buried with him.”
I felt a flush of fear. What if the heathen beliefs of a single man from the edge of the map might prove true after all? My own beliefs were so disturbed by what had happened to me that I gave this fear some moment’s dreadful credence.
Then I moved the scene quickly on to three days later, three days of which I have very little recollection, and that recollection is crucified with pain.
“I will gloss over those tortures except to remark that all those three days, I was unable to relieve myself. Though they refused even water for my parched tongue, the pressure on my bladder swelled up into the ghastly amputation.
“On the third day, they came to remove the bandages. They seemed to expect something, but nothing happened.
“Old Whiny whined: ‘A plug of pus. He cannot pass his urine. It’s death for certain, and in the most horrible way. I’m sorry, old man. We did our best—’
“Anger clenched my inflamed flesh and, when the easiest way would have been to avoid the pain—a pain greater than any I had known—anger pushed against it. Anger pushed out the hard, yellow plug, and a fountain of putrid, scalding urine followed. Old Whiny got all soiled and stinking, but he didn’t care. ‘You’ll have to give him a catheter, Salah, old man. But the khadim will live.’
“He could not have given me a harsher sentence. Life,” I concluded. I shook now from head to toe and vomited up the mulberries.
***
When my belly was empty, Esmikhan Sultan opened her palm. In it lay the catheter. She had found it earlier, much earlier, and tried to give it to me then. But I had been so caught up in the spilling of this horrible tale that no muscle left to me could sphincter off, I hadn’t taken it. I took it now.
“When we get home, Allah willing, I will have a jeweler make you a new one, Abdullah, a silver one,” she said.
I laughed harshly. That was a ridiculous substitute. But I did remember when I’d thought to buy a coral for old Piero’s ear. Where was he now, sleeping with fishes? I had lost my chance, for that as for so many things.
I took the catheter from her hand and turned my back. The brass was warm from her touch.
XLIX
Esmikhan Sultan couldn’t sleep.
“You expect me to go back to sleep after what you’ve told me?” she asked. “How can I sleep?”
She was having no trouble eating, however. She popped mulberries into her mouth like a nervous tic and, between whiles, scraped the leaflets off stem after stem of a patch of wild thyme our scrambles had uncovered by its thick scent.
“I eat when I’m distressed,” she apologized.
“Lady, all your life you’ve slept under the watchful eye of creatures who’ve undergone torments similar to mine.” Personally, I was exhausted, suddenly more exhausted than I’d ever been in my life. The reliving of the past six months had turned my joints to a stiff, achy gel.
“But I never knew,” she protested. “People don’t talk about things like that.”
“You assumed the sexless ones were born that way.”
“Perhaps. Yes. Why not?”
“Well, they’re not.”
“Don’t be angry with me. You can’t be angry with me for ignorance.”
“No. I’m not angry. Just tired. Let’s go to sleep.”
Her neat little mother-of-pearl teeth worked on another stalk with nervous precision. It must be distress that moved her. What else could make a person eat so much thyme straight without intervening pulse or meat stew?
“But I just can’t think how to make it better,” she fretted.
“Sleep would help—for a while, anyway.”
“All these years I’ve reaped the benefit...”
“Yes, and the benefit of little slave girls torn from the bosom of their families.”
“I don’t feel so badly about that. I don’t know a single girl—once she gets used to it—who isn’t better off in our harem than she was starving and shivering at home.”
“Maybe they are careful to move the malcontents from your ladyship’s view.”
“We are kind to them; their fathers used to beat them.