The Journeyer - Jennings Gary - Страница 57
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“Bruto barabao!” grunted Uncle Mafio. “How is it done, Jamshid?”
As expressionlessly as if he was reading from a medical text, the wazir said, “The slave is taken into a room dense with the smoke of smoldering banj leaves, and he is set in a hot bath and he is given teryak to sip, all that done to dull his sense of pain. The hakim doing the operation takes a long ribbon and winds it tightly about him, starting at the tip of the slave’s penis and wrapping inward to the roots, bundling in with it the cod of testicles, so that the organs make a single package. Then, using a keenly sharp blade, the hakim removes that whole beribboned package with a single slicing stroke. He immediately applies to the wound a styptic of powdered raisins, puffball fungus and alum. When the bleeding stops, he inserts a clean quill, which will stay there during the slave’s whole life. For the chief danger of the operation is that the urinary passage may close in the healing. If, by the third or fourth day afterward, the slave has not passed water through the quill, he is certain to die. And sad to say, that does occur in perhaps three out of five cases.”
“Capon mal capona!” exclaimed my father. “It sounds gruesome. You have actually witnessed such a procedure?”
“Yes,” said Jamshid. “I watched with some interest when it was done to me.”
I should have realized that that accounted for his always melancholy aspect, and I should have kept silent. Instead I blurted, “But you are not fat, Wazir, and you have a full beard!”
He did not rebuke my impertinence. He replied, “Those who endure castration in infancy never grow a beard, and their bodies grow corpulent and feminine of contour, often even growing heavy breasts. But when the operation is done after a slave’s passing puberty, he remains masculine, at least in outward appearance. I was a full-grown man, with a wife and son, when our farm was raided by Kurdi slave-takers. The Kurdi sought only robust worker slaves, so my wife and little boy were spared. They were merely raped several times apiece, and then slain.”
An appalled silence ensued and might have got uncomfortable, but Jamshid added, almost offhandedly, “Ah, well, can I complain? I might have been a mere millet farmer to this day. But having been relieved of a man’s natural desires—to sow and cultivate land and lineage—I was freed to cultivate my intellect instead. Now I have risen to become Wazir to the Shahinshah of Persia, and that is no small attainment.”
Having so graciously dismissed the subject, he summoned the slave dealer to come and give ear to our requirements. The dealer left his assistants to oversee the inspection of the two slaves already on display, and came smiling and rubbing his hands together.
I had half hoped that my father would buy for me a comely girl slave, who could be more than a servant, or at least a young man of my own age, who would be a congenial companion. But of course he told the dealer not what I might want, but what he wanted for me :
“An older man, well versed in travel, but still agile enough to travel farther yet. Wise in the ways of the East, so that he can both safeguard and instruct my son. And I think”—he flicked a sympathetic glance at the wazir—“not a eunuch. I had rather not help to perpetuate that practice.”
“I have the very man, messieurs,” said the dealer, speaking good French. “Mature but not old, wily but not willful, experienced but not inflexible to command. Now, where has he got to? He was here just moments ago … .”
We followed him about through his herd—or herds, I should say, for there were a considerable number of slaves in the pen, and also a number of the tiny hinna’ed Persian horses which drew his wagons from town to town. The pen was partly fenced and partly enclosed by those canvas-hooped wagons, in which he and his assistants and his merchandise traveled by day and slept by night.
“The ideal slave for you, messieurs, this man,” the dealer went on, as he kept looking around. “He has belonged to numerous masters, hence has traveled widely and knows many lands. He speaks several tongues, and has a vast repertoire of useful talents. But where is he?”
We continued circulating among the men and women slaves, who had lengths of light chain connecting their ankle rings, and among the midget horses, which were not fettered. The dealer began to look slightly embarrassed at having misplaced the very slave he was trying to peddle.
“I had loosed him from the skein,” he muttered, “and shackled him to one of my mares, which he was currying for me—”
He was interrupted by a loud, piercing, prolonged equine whinny. With a ripple of orange mane and tail, a little horse came flying out through the front flaps of one of the covered wagons. Literally, it was in flight for a moment, like the magic glass horse of which the Shahryar Zahd had told us, for it had to bound from the interior of the wagon bed and clear the driver’s bench and the dashboard to get to the ground below. As it made that high arcing bound, a chain attached to its rear leg came trailing in the same looping arc, and at the other end of the chain a man popped out legs-first through the canvas flaps, like a stopper yanked from a bottle. The man also flew over the front of the wagon and hit the ground in a thump of dust. Because the horse tried to flee farther yet, the man got dragged about and raised quite a cloud of dust before the slave dealer could catch the frightened animal’s bridle and bring that brief entertainment to a halt.
The little horse’s orange mane was silkily combed, but its orange tail was disheveled. So were the man’s nether regions, for his pai-jamah were down around his feet. He sat for a moment, too winded to do anything but make several faint exclamations in several languages. Then he hastily rearranged his garments, as the slave dealer came and stood over him and bellowed imprecations and kicked him until he got upright. The slave was about my father’s age, but his scruffy beard appeared to be only about two weeks’ growth and did not adequately conceal a receding chin. He had bright, shifty pig’s eyes and a large fleshy nose that drooped over fleshy lips. He was no taller than I, but much thicker, with a paunch that drooped as did his nose. All in all, he looked something like a camelbird.
“My newly acquired mare!” the dealer was raging, in Farsi, still kicking the slave. “You indescribable wretch!”
“The mischievous horse was wandering, master,” whined the wretch, his arms raised protectively around his head. “I had to follow—”
“The horse wandered up? And climbed into a wagon? You lie to me as readily as you lie with innocent animals! You execrable pervert!”
“But give me due credit, master,” whimpered the pervert. “Your mare could have gone farther, and been lost. Or I could have gone with her, and escaped.”
“Bismillah, I wish you had! You are an insult to the noble institution of slavery!”
“Then sell me, master,” sniveled the insult. “Foist me onto some unsuspecting purchaser and get me out of your sight.”
“Estag farullah!” the dealer prayed toward Heaven at the top of his voice. “Allah pardon me my sins, I thought I had done just that. These gentlemen might have bought you, abomination, but now they have seen you caught in the act of raping my best mare!”
“Oh, I dispute that accusation, master,” said the abomination, daring to speak with an air of righteous indignation. “I have known much better mares.”
Speechless of words, the dealer clenched his fists and teeth and roared, “Arrrgh!”
Jamshid interrupted this singular colloquy, saying sternly, “Mirza Dealer, I assured the messieurs that you were a trustworthy seller of dependable merchandise.”
“Before Allah, that I am, Wazir! I would not sell, I would not give them this walking pustule! I would not sell him to the harridan wife Awwa of the Devil Shaitan, I swear it, now that I know his true nature. I sincerely apologize to you, messieurs. And so will this creature apologize. You hear me? Apologize for that disgraceful exhibition. Abase yourself! Speak, Nostril!”
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