Thursday, october 28, 1999
U.S. Wins World Series AGAIN!
- Headline in today's newspaper
I suppose that if I were a player for the New York Yankees, I'd have a lot to write about today. It's even possible that had I watched a single baseball game in the last nine years I'd now have something interesting to report.
As it is, there appears to be nothing in my life worth recording here.
It's times like these that I'm ever so thankful that I have my prior lives to draw upon....
Eight hundred years ago, in an area south of the Black Sea now part of eastern Turkey, there existed the Seljuq sultanate of Rüm. Konya was its capital, and I - well, I was an apprentice guard assigned by unknown superiors to the Harem of Fate.
By common agreement, the ancient and beautiful Konya had been the first city to re-emerge from The Flood, many centuries before.
The Seljuks were a nomadic, war-like people who had spent a good part of the 11th century conquering much of Asia Minor and were now on the verge of spending the best part of the 12th watching their empire dissolve into a motley collection of tiny, quarreling principalities.
I was one of those uneducated rural people who thought that my personal commitment to law and order might stave off the ebb tide of a history we had not yet realized was inevitably capricious and cruel.
Instead of wasting my life tending sheep in the mundane hills of Anatolia like the others in my family had been content to do for untold generations, I pledged my life to the Sultan instead....I'm not sure what I expected when I first left the dusty hills for the stone-clothed magic of Konya. Battles with Black Sea pirates, perhaps (Kara Deniz pirates, I would have called them then). Maybe a quick and glorious liberation of the Christian-occupied enclave of Seleucia to our south. All I was sure of was that Sultan knew best, and I was eager to give my arm over to his greater will and mind.
I greeted my assignment to the Harem of Fate with much confusion. While other, more knowledgeable recruits virtually squealed with delight at the announcement of their own postings to this bejeweled fortress in the very heart of Konya, I myself did my best to swallow a frown and repel a faint. It was a posting that seemed singularly devoid of heroic possibilities, and when I learned the details of what my tasks there would actually consist of, I took it as a harsh rebuke to my martial abilities.
Nonetheless, I did as I was told, keeping my despair and my sorrow to myself, and taking what solace I could from the fact that I'd still be serving the Sultan, however meagrely....The Harem of Fate was a peculiar place and institution, unique in all my lives and without anything quite like it in the modern day world.
It was where the virgins were kept and raised before being turned over to those men who had been sentenced to die for their crimes....The 12th century was a time when capital crimes were numerous and frequent, and the turbulent sultanate of Rüm seemed to give rise to them the way the warm spring rains gave rise to reeds. Thousands of offenders were apprehended every year, trials were invariably swift, and the penalty of public beheading was meted out before cheering masses every day at dawn.
In surreal counterpoint to the roughness of these apprehensions, however, in unironic mockery of the inexactitude which marked the trials, and in starkest contrast to the swiftly falling blade of the executioner, there was The Night Before.
The Night Before.... When even the most heinous of fiends was escorted to a finely attired bedchamber and allowed to pass the final six hours of his life alone in the company of a beautiful virgin, raised for him alone....As odd as it sounds to say it now, it all made perfect sense at the time. The people of Rüm unquestioningly believed that even the most dastardly of human fiends might yet merit a second chance. Not even the Sultan, however, could say exactly which particular fiend might merit this second chance, and the consequences of guessing wrong were simply too horrible to grant any fiend the freedom which might clearly decide the matter.
Instead, the entire question was thrown into the hands of God by means of the Harem of Fate on The Night Before.
Those fiends deserving of a second chance would have it bestowed upon them by the Almighty Himself in the form of a child.My job as a Guard of the Harem was two-fold: To make sure that no man got to the virgins before the condemned men assigned to them did, lest the judgment of God be confused; and to make sure that no condemned man attempted to artificially extend his life beyond the six hours he was permitted to spend alone in the company of his last hope and comfort.
To say that I would have rather been fighting pirates or liberating towns held by the fiercest Crusaders would be something of an understatement, though my peers seemed to thoroughly accept their role in the Seljuq criminal justice system.
At least they never complained to me about the fringe benefits of good food, soft beds, and easy access to all the other delights of Konya which soldiers in distant provinces could only dream of....I'd been at my post for no more than two months when an unfortunate commotion in the execution yard (best left undescribed) left me alone for some moments with one of the virgins who had taken to her sickbed that very morn. To my great surprise, she violated her strict training by throwing off her ermine covers, rushing to me, and speaking. At first I thought it was the delirium of fever causing her to act this way, but she soon did her absolute best to disabuse me of that notion.
The poor girl was simply in a panic, completely terror-wracked by the thought of the activities she was scheduled to participate in that very night. I'd not actually thought of these vacant-faced, smooth-skinned beings as human before, but as she talked - well, things seemed to change.
She sobbingly told me that she was about to be given to a fiend of fiends - a brute of a beast - a Patzinak from the north. A monster who had grabbed a taro - a visiting nobleman's scimitar - in the market square of Sinope and wildly sliced down men, women, and children indiscriminately - again and again - until a sudden sleep had succeeded in quelling a madness which the strongest venders and best-armed customers on the scene could not. The brute had been kept in chains ever since - and muzzled, too, since nothing else short of sharp blows to the head might stay his perpetual rantings and screams. Then prospect of actually laying eyes on such a demonic creature, let alone spending the hours between midnight and dawn locked up in a room alone with him, had driven her half mad. She begged me to use my influence to change her ordained mate, or else slay her on the spot, or - at the very least - to provide her the means to slay herself.
My head was a-swirl. The commotion in the yard, the unprecedented approach, the eyes and mouth so like my own, the nearness of one so small and frail and sweet-smelling, the heat of the day - all combined to produce in my young, barely 20-year-old head thoughts and feelings I can scarcely describe. I did my best to comfort her, to convince her to return to her bed and accept the will of God as best she could, but she only clutched me all the tighter in response, and stained my purple tunic with her sobs.
"If nothing else, at least give me this - a donation - a bit of male snot - no use to you - but just possibly capable of helping me avoid bearing the spawn of the Devil Himself!"
She suddenly produced from some fold or pocket a Holy Vial - a small glass tube all her kind were provided with and taught to use to harvest the tears produced on The Night Before by those experiencing the alpha and the omega of life and love, for later use in rituals I knew not the details of.
"Please!" she begged, with the pathetic half-choked bleating gasp of a lamb being carried to sacrificial slaughter.
With the hopeless trembling of tender sprouts betrayed by their own roots as the whirlwind swiftly approaches....
Time was short. My mind confused.
If only she had been a pirate or a Christian....The strangely-attired legionarri burst in through the wafer-thin panels the moment I handed her back her weeping Vial. There were no fewer than 360 levels and classes of guards, troops, armed escorts, hussars, spahi, lancers, and dragoons in the immediate employ of the Sultan that I knew about. I have no idea where these brusque and efficient fellows may have fallen in authority among them. All I know for sure is that they were far superior to me in authority and power; and as insignificant as my petitioner had made a bit of man snot seem just a moment before, they were quite capable of reversing the apparent merits of all her arguments in a flash....
I've never been able to learn if the so-called fiend of fiends, that berserk member of the Patzinak tribe was executed next dawn or not. My own secret execution at three in the morning proved to be an insurmountable hindrance to my finding out at the time, and I rather lost interest after my death. I now suspect that he never even existed, let alone actually slayed with a single stroke the only giraffe known to be in Asia at the time while it was in that Sinopean market place as part of what we would now describe as a "good will tour" on behalf of the Sultan. It used to bother me that I was treated even worse than such a fiend would have been, had he existed, for no manner of pleading with my arresters succeeded in winning for me so much as a single minute with a non-virgin such as might reveal God's granting of a second chance before my head was separated from my body and both carried on pikes to the dark, swift-flowing river. It doesn't bother me anymore. For one thing, it has been 800 years now, and for another, I started to see things from their point of view after the first 500 or so had passed.
It simply wouldn't do to let word get out that a guard in the Harem of Fate was less than pure and utterly trustworthy. The entire system of justice could have teetered and collapsed had the very possibility of what I had done leaked out.
Thus, a public execution was impossible.
And there simply couldn't be a Night Before for me.
And as my ad hoc executioner said, as he raised his blade to strike the fatal blow, "God is Great. If He wants you to have a Second Chance, He's on his own."If only his blade had been as sharp as his theology, maybe it wouldn't have taken the incompetent fool six strokes to get through my puny neck.
But then, if only I had had the good sense to be born a Yankee ballplayer in this life, this scar-opening entry could have been avoided.
Guess the best we all can do is just go back to bed and try to accept things as they are, whether we happen to be virgins or not....
Back To A Nicer, Not So Distant Past
(©1999 by Salik Sejim, 1114-1134)
