Chapter 40: Cooked And Eaten

When the unfortunate Italian was fully recovered from his operation, he was taken into a small annexe to the harem where the newly recruited eunuchs were schooled in their duties, until the Chief Eunuch deemed them capable of looking after the Emir's wives and concubines. A gruelling time followed for Ernesto, for three reasons. He was not a young boy who can learn things quickly; he spoke only the most rudimentary Kobekistani; and his background did not include the concept of slavery, so he was always aware that he was not there of his own free will.

The problems he had often centred round the use of the small dog-whips carried by all the harem eunuchs. Naturally, whipping someone is a skill which needs to be learned, and so the trainees had to practice. The only available bodies for this purpose were each others' and Ernesto came in for more than his fair share of being whipped, because the others were almost all young boys, so the oldest were whipped the most.

All things pass, however, and the day eventually came when the Chief Eunuch pronounced him ready to go to work in the harem. All the trainees, when they left the school annexe, served for a time in the kitchens where any mistakes they made would not be seen by the higher ranking members of the harem, so Ernesto had no opportunity of seeing Rubina, or Nabiha as everyone in the harem called her. Because he had been castrated as an adult, and because the Chief Eunuch had exhorted the Chief Medical Officer to do so, the testicles had been removed without impairing any of the other functions of the body, and so Ernesto was still capable of an erection and so of satisfying a woman's needs, without the contact amounting to full sexual congress by the Kobekistani system of casuistry. He was, therefore, kept quite busy by those women of the kitchen staff who were not cut and sewn, and the Chief Eunuch expected he would be in much demand when he moved into the concubines' area of the harem.