Just as I was allowing myself to be carried away by my passion for Princess Damila, the distraction in the corner of the room brought me back to the real world. Oblivious to it, the Princess was sucking on my stiff, aching nipple, and she was easing me out of my harem pants, a process I was happily aiding. The feel of her fingers as they slid between my swollen lips made me gasp. But my eyes…
Jess seemed a bit sulky after the Princess left. Eventually I did what I knew I was going to have to do, and asked her what was wrong. I was not sure I wanted to hear the reply, but sure I did not want a day of sulks.
‘She will be your next one then? The Princess. I could see you two devouring each other with your eyes.’
‘Darling, don’t be jealous, it isn’t as though we are monogamous. I love…
By the morning it was known that I had saved the life of the Sultan. I found myself the heroine of the Palace.
The fellow whom they had caught had yielded up the story. It was the Druze, they put out, who had encompassed the death of the Sultan; but that was not the truth. There was a harsher, more rigorous variety of Islam, which looked upon the Ottomans as lax betrayers of the role of Caliph,…
That was our last night at the Topkapi Palace. At the time, I thought it would be a few months, and then we should be back to normal; I could not have been more wrong. The morning following our night of passion, the Sultan marched south – on the Damascus road.
We said a tearful farewell to the ladies of the Seraglio. Calliope, the mother of the Sultan and my lover and protector, wept, and pulled…
The ideas I put to Will were ones I had mediated on hard.
The arrival of my new love, Jess, had not meant that my initial love, Svetlana, the woman from Rus who had arrived in the Seraglio with me and the Circassians, was out of the picture. The Sultan loved her gorgeous figure, and her personality was far more pleasing than that of her rivals. But she had no political ambitions, and was content…
I loved telling stories, and did so to the Sultan many evenings before he pursued his lustful desires with my fellow concubines. But there was something special about practising my art at a banquet. I suppose I loved the reaction from a wider group of people. There was a special pleasure in store, because that evening’s event was for the English ambassador, and would be attended…
I had told Calliope, my patroness and mother of the Sultan, of my design, and she had offered me the inner sanctum, where no eunuch ever came. That was typical of her generosity to me. I had brought her much pleasure, and she was unselfish in allowing me to have some of my own.
She had bought Jess for me at the slave market. She had offered me objects of greater value, and…
Calliope explained that there had been a fresh influx of slaves at the market, and that she liked to choose those for the Seraglio; she suggested that I might enjoy the trip, saying it would be a treat.
Since arriving in Istanbul, I had not left the Topkapi Palace. As it was the size of the village I had spent my life in, plus some, that was not quite the hardship it might have seemed. It was…