“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.”