Bu Ali moved, bowed deeply before her, and on rising said, "My compliments to your guards, my lady. I will now take this dog to-"
"No, you will not. You will be rewarded for this night's work. Richly rewarded. But, as for this one-" She did not finish the sentence, but merely said to the big eunuch beside her: "You know where to take him."
Even if he had wanted to resist, Casca never got the chance. One of the eunuchs calmly brained him with something very hard and very heavy…
He was in the seraglio now, strapped to two tables, stripped naked. One table was at a convenient working height for the women with the knives. His legs were stretched out on this one, feet bound down on either side to spread apart the area of concern. The second table was propped against the wall at an angle, the upper part of his body bound to it. His head was free to move so that he could see what was going on. His mouth was free of any gag — so that he could scream. There was an enormous amount of light in the seraglio, lamps everywhere, even great torches flaming dangerously close to the cloth wall hangings.
Silence. The women — there were no eunuchs present — were waiting for something.
Or someone…
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Silence.
Whoever they were waiting for had to be pretty important. Or… Are they doing this to make it worse on me? Give me time to imagine the worst?
But Casca already knew the worst… He remembered the Quadii in the northlands… the freed women slaves… and what they had done to the men who had raped them.
But at least those women had a reasonable excuse. He got the idea that the ones that would be going after him would be sick, because there were only three of them at the table with the knives. The rest of the harem was standing back, quite a ways back, and from the look on their faces most of them did not want to be there. They had tightened the muscles around their mouths in that implication of extreme disgust that only a woman can express. And one, the little slave girl, Ruth, whom Casca had seen trying to escape, was being forcibly held by a tough old bitch.
They were all fully-clothed. Except for the three at the table with the knives, there was not the slightest suggestion that this crowd of women existed only as sex machines for the Sultan. Nor did this particular room have sexual overtones. It was a large room, very tastefully decorated. There was much use of skillfully-carved wooden pillars, excellent and expensive wall hangings, a beautiful tile floor, and intricate wooden panels on the ceiling. In comparison with Hassan al Sabah's "Paradise" — which looked like a brothel — this "private brothel" looked more like an anteroom to Paradise itself.
Except, hell! Casca knew it was not going to be Paradise for him, not after the three with the knives came after him. He wondered which of the three was the Jasmine Lady, but he had no way of knowing. These three were clothed differently from the other women. Each wore only a single filmy, gownlike garment woven of such thin threads that the cloth was almost transparent — or maybe seemed so because it clung so closely to their bodies. The curves… the hard tits… the triangular bush… These did shout sex! But it was unpleasant sex, twisted, dark sex, though the gowns themselves were white. Like priestesses in some diseased cult… Sweat was beginning to form on Casca's face, and not just from the heat of all the burning lamps and torches, either. There was something perverse and sick going on here. The cloth that covered the table, for instance. White cloth of Chin. Incredibly expensive. For a torture room? And the charcoal braziers that heated the pots of boiling oil. One was gold. Another silver. Anyone throwing wealth around that way had to have something wrong with him. Casca had lived long enough in this world to know that, when you got right down to it, it was ultimately riches that made a man respectable. A pervert who didn't respect gold… Shit! He could expect the worst. It must be the Sultan himself they were waiting for.
There were two great, carved wooden doors at the far end of the room. These now opened, swinging back to the other side, and through them walked someone in a scarlet burnoose, wearing a black mask of cloth of Chin and black leather boots. The person was flanked by two Nubian slave eunuchs who carried no weapons. Their skin was oiled until it shone, and they each wore only a black loincloth. If this one in the scarlet burnoose was the Sultan, he sure as hell had kinky tastes — and the Jasmine Lady Casca had seen in the streets must be very, very close to him; it was his clothing she had copied.
The one in the scarlet burnoose stopped just short of Casca and the three women. The two Nubian eunuchs stepped forward and loosened the burnoose, pulled it back, and slipped it from the shoulders of the one in the mask. The slaves bowed in deep abjection, turned and marched back through the doors which were then closed and barred. The sound of the heavy wooden bar falling in place echoed like very distant thunder in the room, and the one who had just come in now walked to the table, selected a knife, and approached Casca.
It was not, of course, the Sultan, but a perfectly nude woman who smelled of jasmine. She leaned across the bound Casca, the tips of her breasts brushing provocatively against the hair of his chest, and tested the ropes that held him to the table. Then she took the knife, holding it in the odd way she had in the street, and carved a single Arabic letter on the flesh of his forearm.
"So…" she said. "We begin…"
What they did to him he tried to erase from his mind, and after the pain had become totally unbearable it seemed that he had no mind left. There was only pain. And his screams. All the years of conditioning as a soldier, all the courage to bear pain, all that went for naught. And they deliberately prolonged his agony, working slowly
… slowly… slowly.
There came a time when the pain had become so great that it went beyond feeling. He no longer felt it. The nerves had been shocked beyond their endurance… or… that strange healing power in his body was in balance with what they were doing to him. The four women had overreached themselves. In their desire to make him suffer the greatest length of time they had unwittingly slowed their torture to the point that his healing power was taking over. Besides, it was obvious that the three women in the white gowns were turned on sexually by his suffering, and they were taking every opportunity now to bump into each other, to rub close to each other. They wanted sex with one another.
The Jasmine Lady, though, was not so easy to decipher. It was his body she rubbed her naked flesh against, not the three other women. In fact, she kept a distance between herself and them. From time to time she amused herself by leaning over him and cutting more letters in his bloody forearm. So far he could make out no word that made sense, but each time she leaned across him those pendulous breasts, the nipples puckered and hardened, came closer and closer to him, once even brushing across his lips as he lay screaming.
Now, with the pain no longer blinding his mind, he did not have to scream, but he continued to do so while something formed slowly in his mind. Something — it was not yet a plan. But the healing power was bringing his thinking back into play.
There was no hope that the other women in the harem might help, though most of them plainly found what the gang of four were doing so repulsive that they refused to watch. Early on the young slave, Ruth, had thrown up. Later some of the harem women followed suit.
What was strange was the silence. Except for his screams there was no human sound. When he slowed his screams and made them sound as if he were getting weaker and weaker, he could hear the breathing of the women with the knives, could, it seemed, even hear the faint whisper of sound the burning torches on the wall made.