Chapter 10: The Bedchamber

A visit to the bedchamber for further instruction, with a diversion to the dreaded erga, before her first calling to the sheik's bed that evening.

THE BEDCHAMBER

This afternoon Mustafa took me to the bedchamber to continue my introduction to the ways. He came to my room smiling and in good humor telling me that I was to take the place of Hortensia on his roster for tonight. “He asked about you, I am certain you will be called. You will offer him more than food tonight,” he smiled. “But before that, we must go to the bedchamber to finish your instruction. Follow me.”

Mustafa pushed open the heavy bronze doors to Sheik Ali’s bedchamber, the heart of a harem girl’s existence. Ahead of me, behind a large intricately carved mashrabiya screen, laid an intimidatingly opulent room resplendent with painted archways and ceilings, spiraled columns and marble floors, and brilliantly colored silks and damasks. And against walls and between columns colorful rugs draped down, their patterns mirrored in a shallow reflecting pool carved into the marble floor.

From behind the entrance screen led a narrow walkway, marked in the floor by lines of contrasting marble mosaic, between which ran a long carpet. Where the narrow carpet ended the lines of mosaic tiles opened out into a large circle before the bed, clear except for a small round carpet at its center.

The Master’s bed, square and easily large enough to sleep three or four, stood on a raised dais. Four wooden pillars at each corner supported an ornately carved and painted canopy and to one side hung many ropes each ending in a large colorful tassel. On the bed lay a polished silk cover, the color of rubies and wine, stitched with gold thread into a pattern of squares. Sewn to the center of each square was an iridescent teardrop pearl—“perhaps the tears of captive girls who had laid there”, I imagined. From a ring set high in the ceiling a white silk canopy swooped down over the bed and in my mind I saw myself on the bed with the white canopy draw closed around it, surrounding me in a misty cloud of seclusion, a lover by my side intent on seduction.

Cushions, plump rolls, and puffy pillows at the head of the bed promised sumptuous comfort, in stark contrast to the promise held by a coiled whip that hung on a corner post, its leather handle tooled into the form of an erect phallus.

For light, perforated brass lanterns hung by chains from the ceiling, and there were candleholders set on floor and tables. As well, there were several windows, cut through the thick stone walls, but high enough to keep prying eyes from breaching the privacy of the bedchamber. Tightly shuttered, they kept out the cold and the khamsin dust, opened they allowed in cooling breezes, depending on the needs of the season.

On one side of the walkway, a huge carpet held a scattering of silk cushions and a large bolster. On the opposite side, despite the Holy Qur’an forbidding illustration of the human form, carved bas-reliefs depicted nude women posed in suggestive ways. These bas-reliefs formed the backdrop to a small sunken bath in which a submerged marble shelf served as a seat. Cakes of soap, sponges and vials of oils and perfumes in ornate bottles, arranged around the edge, were in easy reach of the bathers. Wisps of mist floated over the surface of the water and I later learned that burning charcoal cleverly heated the bath from below, which explained this mist.

If you are from a more temperate country, you may be surprised to learn of a heated bath in a hot desert climate, but here days could be stifling hot, and after sundown, a determined chill could set in, often accompanied by a cool sea breeze. A private bath, never mind a heated bath, was the epitome of luxury. I had never before seen so much water in a household, reflecting pools and private baths were uncommon, and by any measure an expression of extreme wealth.

A small wooden door, set in the stone wall, opened to the toilet, which was outside in a high-walled room open to the skies. A second similar door opened to a hallway leading to the rear of the wives apartments, so a wife could come and go to the bedchamber without chance of anyone in the main courtyard seeing her. An open arched entranceway led to the Master’s wardrobe and dressing room, another to a storage room for cottons, candles and lamp oil, and yet another opened to a dark passageway leading to the base of one of the gilded towers. There at the end of the darkness, was the most feared room in the entire complex—the erga.

Next chapter in the book

ERGASTULA

Mustafa’s smirk and forbidding tone of voice gave a sinister introduction to the horrors of the erga as he informed me that “Here is where the Master or his eunuchs chastise errant slave girls for breaking the rules of the harem, or for not serving him to his satisfaction. Please enter.”

Next Review Chapter is Chapter 12: First Night

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