Robert Irwin - Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh

‘So I — so the Sultan has become nothing but a plaything of the Harem?’

‘Alas! Would that it might be so! It is easy, after all, to imagine worse fates than that. No, things in the Harem have taken a graver turn. It is all because of the hellish Prayer-Cushion movement… ’

‘What is this business with prayer-cushions?’

‘Ask not. It is better that you know nothing of this — at least until you absolutely have to.’

‘No, the time for secrets and whispers is over. I want to know everything now. Speak plainly and tell me what danger can there possibly be in prayer-cushions?’

‘Well, if you must… but you will be sorry that you asked. Of course there is no danger in a cushion, in the sense of some soft, embroidered pad on which a man may take his ease. But I speak of the movement known as the Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh. It is a very ancient and evil sect followed by some of the tribes who inhabit the depths of the forests and swamps of the Balkans. Though it has flourished in the Balkans, it has nothing to do with either Islam or Christianity, being much older than either. Its devotees hold that man can only reach God through women. They believe that women are not of the same race as men. Women are spirits, friendly demons of a kind, who have been given flesh and placed upon the Earth in order to monitor man’s spiritual progress towards the Divinity. Women are men’s prayer-cushions and intercourse with them prepares man for Mystical Union with the Divinity.’

Orkhan pondered the Vizier’s words, before asking,

‘Indeed, it all seems strange and mad, but it does not seem so very dangerous. Why should any man fear the Prayer-Cushion of the Flesh?’

‘Oh my master, consider that if a man has prolonged sex with a Prayer-Cushion woman, it involves his total destruction and remaking, for that is the meaning of fitna . Having been seduced, the man’s soul has to be melted down in order that he may experience the Rapture and it is possible the Rapture may kill him, but whether a man comes out of it alive or not is irrelevant. Long before that, the man has been seduced into total self-abnegation and his original personality has been burnt up in the fires of ecstasy. The thing which walks away from the bed has nothing in common with the man who originally lay down there with a Prayer-Cushion of the Flesh.’

Orkhan had been trying to concentrate on the meaning of what the Vizier was saying, but he found it difficult. The problem was that every time the Vizier said ‘woman’, or ‘women’, or ‘bed’, the tongue in Orkhan’s mouth stirred. What did the meaning of an Arabic word matter and what did practices of ancient Balkan sects matter, if only the viper that coiled and uncoiled behind his teeth could be given its drink? It was getting harder and harder to think of anything except soft, white, fleshy thighs.

Finally Orkhan confessed,

‘I do not understand. I have no idea what you are talking about.’

‘I do not understand it myself,’ replied the Vizier. ‘Only the women understand these things.’

He was about to say more, but at that moment a girl in a page’s uniform came marching up the path and delivered a message to the Vizier. He, having read it, began to argue fiercely with the page girl. Finally he shrugged and dismissed her. Then he turned to Orkhan.

‘It seems that Mihrimah awaits her Sultan.’

‘Is Mihrimah a person who commands sultans?’

The Vizier did not trouble to reply to this. Instead he said,

‘We are going to a different part of the Harem which is distant from the parts you have so far visited. I will tell you a story as we walk.

The story the Vizier told was as follows:

Hundreds of years ago, one of the first of the Sultans, an ancestor of Orkhan’s, led his armies against the Kingdom of Nabatea and ravaged it. Nabatea was (and still is) notoriously a foul and idolatorous land, inhabited by sorcerers, poisoners and cannibals, and the Sultan’s armies dealt with them accordingly and the Turkish soldiers only withdrew after turning most of the territory into a wasteland. Although the Nabateans were almost all wholly evil, it must be conceded that they did possess the virtue of patience. In the year that their land was devastated by Turkish armies, a girl was born to the King of Nabatea. The king, the proud father, gave orders that poison was to be added to the child’s suckling milk. In accordance with his orders, the nipples of the wet-nurse were smeared with the poison. There are different reports of which poison was used — perhaps aconite, perhaps mercury, perhaps arsenic — but, whatever the substance, it was fed to the little girl in the tiniest quantities, so that, instead of the poison killing her, the baby became accustomed to its ingestion, and, as the baby grew into a girl, poison continued to be added to her food, so that every vein of her body was saturated with the deadly stuff.

This was in the great age of the poisoners when toxicology was the master science. There are no such poisoners now, alas! But, to return to the girl — Aslan Khatun was the name of this princess — she had become a poison damsel and the very saliva from her lips could burn through porcelain. Once she reached the marriageable age, the King of Nabatea wrote to the Ottoman Sultan proposing a perpetual peace between their two realms and that this peace be confirmed by a marriage alliance between his daughter and the Sultan’s heir apparent, Prince Nazim. His design, of course, was to kill the Sultan’s son, for the moment the prince embraced the princess he would infallibly die from the poison carried in the juices of her saliva, or the moisture between her legs. Her body was so impregnated with poison that the interior of her vagina was like a nest full of angry wasps. Sex with a poison damsel is one of the recognised forms of the Death of the Just Man.

The Ottoman Sultan naively agreed to the king’s proposal and Aslan Khatun set out on the long journey from Nabatea to Istanbul. On the day of her arrival in that city she was brought before the king and his son. Aslan Khatun was radiantly beautiful — literally so, for there was a strange silvery sheen to her skin. (Perhaps it was arsenic that she had fed upon, for arsenic is reputed to be good for the skin.) Prince Nazim fell in love with her at first sight. When he saw her standing tall and graceful before him, he knew he needed no other blessing from life, save to be possessed of her body. And in the course of that evening’s wedding feast, she, very much against her will, slowly and reluctantly fell in love with him. She had been trained from birth by the women of the Nabatean court in all the arts of seduction, and though now she did not want to seduce this young man, whom she first thought she liked and then realised she desired madly, nevertheless every word she spoke and every little gesture she made seemed to hint at the delights of love. She knew no other language and so she lured the man she desired and yet did not desire to his doom.

At last, the moment came for Prince Nazim to lead his bride to the nuptial chamber. This was the moment for which Aslan Khatun had been raised, so that she might avenge the wrongs suffered by her native land. But now she realised that she cared nothing about avenging the injuries of Nabatea. Before the amorous prince could lay a hand on her, she warned him to desist. If he valued his life he had to keep away. She went on to explain her father’s evil design. ‘You may look, but do not touch,’ she said, ‘for I love you more than I love my father and his poisonous dreams of revenge’.

But Nazim, who was already in love with her, having heard her confession, only became the more besotted with the Nabatean princess. He knew that he loved her, he loved all of her, and if poison was part of her, the fluid that coursed through her blood and her saliva, then that poison was also something to be loved. He swiftly decided that his life was well lost for a moment of loving rapture with this radiant woman. So he said this to Aslan Khatun and, before she could resist, he took her in his arms and embraced her fiercely. Then he kissed her and drank her bitter saliva greedily and in his last remaining moments he went on to ravish her, before expiring in great pain and fierce delight. In the morning the courtiers came and found the prince dead on the nuptial couch. His corpse was already black from the deadly, putrefying liquids which coursed through it. Aslan Khatun sat lamenting beside the bloated body of her lover and, when she asked to be buried alive in the tomb of the man who had been her husband for one night, it was a request which the courtiers were happy to agree to.