Chapter 17: The Wrath of a Woman Scorned

“EXACTLY WHAT IS THIS, and who are you?” Esmira demanded from behind me.

I spun in my embrace with a naked Josie to see my wife standing right beside me. Behind her, I could see the open door to our palazzo. How could I have been so careless? I almost never entered the secret room from the palazzo and then only when I knew it was deserted. There was nothing I could do but own up to the situation.

“This, my beloved wife, is my devoted minion, Josie. Once a few thousand years ago, she asked me to possess her, and I have,” I said. I watched as Esmira tried to process what I’d said.

“You have a slave? From how long ago?” she screamed.

“What’s it been, Josie, my love? Three thousand and maybe five hundred years?” I asked my possession.

“Oh, Bob, we can celebrate our anniversary anytime you want,” she answered.

“How can you keep this little slip of a girl as your sex slave? It’s inhuman! You must free her at once!” Esmira insisted.

“Josie, are you an unwilling slave? Do I treat you inhumanely? Do you want to be free of me?” I asked.

“Oh, Bob! Don’t use words like that! Slave? I’m right where I want to be. And the sex—as you should know, Esmira—is fantastic. We were just about to go to bed. Please join us!”

My dear Josie had no qualms about having any number of women in my bed as long as I paid enough attention to her—and I did. Dear Esmira did not see it that way. The world had become progressively less tolerant of others since it stopped accepting a pantheon of gods and now fought wars over one or two who staked exclusive claim to the entire world. It was a trend I feared would continue a long time.

If you have never been scolded by an Italian woman who has had her honor slighted, pray to whatever gods you may that you never have the privilege. I, as meekly as I could, agreed with her that I was a monster and unfit to be her husband. She couldn’t believe a demon had entered the Catholic Church and married her before God, then took her precious virginity and forced children on her, all while maintaining a harem of teenage whores for my own enjoyment. I was a monster—not only an affront to her, but to God himself. Surely, the very walls of the cathedral I worked on would crumble and fall once it was known a demon had helped to build it. I had a special place reserved for me in the lowest circle of hell and she would see to it that I suffered for all eternity.

I was not sure that suffering for all eternity in hell would be worse than suffering the next few years living with Esmira.

Speaking of hell, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy had debuted about 100 years previously and nearly every library had a copy. As a favorite son of Firenze, there were many copies in the area, being the second most popular book next to the Bible. And probably more closely quoted by both laymen and priests as a description of the heaven and hell and purgatory that awaited all souls upon death. In the volume The Inferno, Dante holds that there are nine circles of hell, the last of which is reserved for treachery and includes Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. Interesting that the two murderers of Caesar were on a nearly equal footing with Judas Iscariot, but that is of no matter.

The interesting thing is that no demons are depicted herein as being tortured in hell. They are, in fact, the torturers and only Lucifer seems to suffer as he chews on the living bodies of the three traitors. I will provide a clue that pointing this out to my darling wife did not have the desired effect of lessening her wrath.

Scarcely a day went by that Esmira did not harangue me about my level of depravity. I took to sleeping in the winery. My marriage bed was colder than the stone floors. And since I was in the winery, I moved several barrels of wine into the infinity room where they were stored with casks from different ages of the world.

In the infinity room, we already knew that people did not age unless they had a marker for aging, like a growing child. In the same way, the things we brought into the infinity room, like wine, did not age further, either. So, there was a lifespan for wine in the natural world, but it stopped aging in the infinity room. Since most wine of that era was better drunk young, moving recently fermented wine into the infinity room was not in any way harmful to it. I had casks of wine from all over the world, collected over three-and-a-half millennia, that were as good and as fresh today as they were the day I acquired them.

And I drank quite a bit. A lot. Far more than my share.

I often visited the infinity room where my harem was more than sympathetic about my poor marriage. They did their best to keep me from despairing. I always went on a sales trip before going into the infinity room, though. I knew a couple of secluded caves where I could hide the satchel, lead the horse and wagon inside, and close the gateway for a few hours (or days) of peace and love. I would return home after a week or two in the infinity room feeling fine and refreshed. I would give my wife a loving kiss, silencing her raving about my demonic ways for an instant. If I was very insistent, she was silent for an hour or more while I made sure she enjoyed—thoroughly—every sensation a wife should receive from her husband. Bringing home a sack full of gold always helped to smooth my return, as well. As far as my wife was concerned, I’d sold the wine and brought her the payment, which enabled her to elevate her position with servants of her own.

I did not count on her treachery.

She followed me.

At first it was only to verify her suspicions that I was a horrid cheating demon. Then it was to find out if there was a way to trap me.

I’ve mentioned the demons of Egypt, called djinni, before. They were always kept trapped in a bottle or a lamp or some such container. It is essentially what Pinaruti had intended to be my fate. Well, the djinni are mentally a little slow. No offense if you happen to be one. A djinn is summoned from the primordial mass by a conjurer, much like I was. I can scarcely call the level of conjurer a mage. The djinn is then lured into a container, and the conjurer pops a cork in it. Demon sealed in a bottle and bound to the will of whoever releases him. Time and time again. I don’t know, but I suspect the conjurer just dropped a bit of sugar candy into the bottle to lure him inside.

My infinity room was full of my own special kinds of sugar candy in the form of Nimia, Josie, Penelope, Princess, Pari, Zhi, Chione, Lakshmi, and all the other lovely women who had attached themselves to our household. I was often willingly in my satchel.

But I had created many safeguards on my little world. I enchanted the satchel with a look-away spell that would make it nearly invisible to anyone who wasn’t literally in touch with it. I kept it on my person at all times, unless I was inside. After the unfortunate discovery, I always made sure I closed the gateway behind me so no one could stumble in. I didn’t think there was any way to be trapped there.

I was wrong.

I suspected she had hidden on the wagon when I went on a selling trip and slipped off at the very last minute when I led the horse inside. Then I closed the gateway and she felt around until she found the satchel. I was completely unaware that I had been trapped until two weeks later when I attempted to open the gateway and leave. It would not open! I tried everything. I pounded. I screamed. I swore revenge. I went to my library, which now contained thousands of books and scrolls collected over millennia, and read everything I could find regarding sealed magic chambers.

Nimia joined me. She had read nearly all the books in the library, learning the various languages from the librarians and people we had picked up along the way. There was likely no one in all of the infinity room she could not communicate with—and not by reading minds, like I did. She spoke their languages. She brought me books with spells and incantations and she tried them with me. She pointed out the hieroglyphic scripts that told how to capture a djinn. The best we could tell was that it was a simple matter of putting a cork in it. In any room (or container) all one needed to do to trap the demon inside, was to close the door from the outside.

It was easy for me to think of the infinity room as an entire world, impossible to wrap in an enclosure. But the truth was that this entire world was contained in a normal satchel that could be carried over the shoulder. I was trapped.

And so, I got drunk.

I emerged from my room in our house—which had grown to palatial proportions—only to rail against the unopening gateway to the wide world outside. I was quite sour.

My women didn’t know quite what to do. They attempted to entertain me and make sure I was distracted. To them—and to all the million or so residents of the infinity room—nothing was different. No one ever left the infinity room unless I disguised a man to go breed my current lover. The children born in the infinity room were just normal people. They grew up, met mates, had jobs, and died. Their parents aged with them. It was almost exactly as it had been on earth.