Ferghana
The Sixth Tale of the Daphne Boy
by GGDC
Author's Note: This is a tale of a unusual young man and those he encounters in the middle of eighth century AD along the Silk Road in Central Asia.
This is another in a series of tales about an undying youth named Alexander, called Iskander and Alexandros in this story. The other stories in this series so far are 'Antebellum', 'Daphne Boy', 'El Dorado', 'The Erythraean Sea', and 'Stupor Mundi'.
It contains graphic descriptions of the male human body and of consensual and non-consenual sexual activity between adult males. If any of this would offend a reader, read no further. This is not intended for persons younger than an age where they may freely and legally select their reading matter in whatever jurisdiction applies.
It is offered for entertainment. If it manages to both intrigue and to provoke prurient interest, it will have succeeded in its aim.
It is as historically accurate in its setting as I could make it, with only minor poetic license. This story, after all, is fiction. It is not a historical monograph. The characters are not intended to resemble any person living or dead though the governor of Khorasan was a real person.
For the historical and geographical background you could do worse than to read 'To the Back of Beyond' by Fitzroy Maclean.
Readers who like these stories might want to try my 'Jungle Boy' series of tales in a modern setting, posted in the Gay/Authoritarian section of the archive. See also my series 'Naked Prey' in the historical section, and my 'Track and Field' series in Gay/College.
Comments and feedback welcome.
Chapter 1. Intrigue in Merv, 750 AD
The soldiers must have had specific orders to hide behind screens in the boy brothel and to wait till I was in the throes of passion, helpless, eyes closed, my small body shuddering and spending itself, limbs boneless in sudden weakness after orgasm. I lay belly down on the bed between two lovely houri boys who had been pleasuring me at both orifices. With my face in the lap of a slender boy and his cock in my mouth, my situational awareness centered on them and the pleasurable feelings that were coursing through my body.
So I was vulnerable when four of them pounced on me, restraining my limbs as another punched me in the kidneys. The sharp pain paralyzed me long enough for the soldiers to bind me tight, arms behind my back. They dragged me off the bed and threw me naked onto the floor as other soldiers led the boys off. I hardly had time to see who my attackers were before a dark bag was drawn over my head. All I could feel was the ropes cutting off my circulation, the hard floor under my butt, and the pain in my back.
The soldiers dragged me by the arms out of the brothel and into a back alley. I could hear the clatter of their equipment and boots as the squad of soldiers hustled me down back streets to the dungeon at the governor's palace, which wasn't far away. The boy brothel I patronized in Merv was in the prosperous quarter of the city, as befitted a wealthy merchant like myself. They took me down to the dungeon and locked my wrists into shackles overhead, ankles spread wide and shackled to rings set into the floor, my toes barely touching the stones because of my slight stature. At least they removed the hood so I could see.
One dungeon looks very much like another, and this was hardly the first time in my nearly nine centuries of life (to that date) that I was an unwilling visitor to one. I briefly wondered why they were always damp and dripping, even in the desert. I found myself confronted by three men, one in a hood, obviously the torturer, the second the regional governor of Khorasan, one Nasr ibn-Sayyar, whom I had met and paid the customary bribes to, and a lean man with an intelligent face and a formidable mustache though no beard. He introduced himself as Hussein and soon occupied himself in exploring my helpless body. He reached up to stroke my slender arms from bound wrists down to my hairless armpits, then the firm pectorals pinching and tugging my tiny red nipples in their small aureoles. He slid his hands down my flanks to my hips, weighing my manhood, poking into my cleavage, emphasizing my nudity and vulnerability. He looked me in the eye and spoke in an cold even tone.
"No doubt you have many questions. Do not bother to ask. You are here only to answer questions, our questions, and be assured you will answer us, one way or another. You should feel complimented on the stratagem we used to capture you, pretty one. Your extraordinary skill with a sword or in unarmed combat is well known, and the governor wished to spare his soldiers. Quite surprising too, such martial skills in a young merchant, a small hairless lad who looks more like a houri boy than anything else. You could easily work at that brothel yourself."
"We know that you are a spy for the rebels in Bukhara and Samarqand and for the Chinese as well in the Ferghana valley. Admit that, and we can proceed in a civilized manner. Otherwise, I am afraid I shall have to ask Omar here to assist us in our inquiries."
He was tall and loomed over my short lithe form. Taking me by the chin and turning my face up to his he kissed me, thrusting his tongue into my mouth and probing before continuing in a tone of patently insincere regret, trying to soften me up for the interrogation.
"Omar is quite skilled with hot irons and steel skewers. Picture to yourself sharp metal rods like those used for shish kebab only smaller. The tender morsels they impaled would be the two soft orbs contained within the smooth hairless sac lying in the palm of my hand. How would you use them on this lad, Omar?"
"Well, sir, I'd pierce both balls front to back. Then, if he still needs persuasion, I would force a third skewer crossways through both, nailing them together. Twirling the skewers inflicts unbearable pain though it is likely to make a subject pass out. If I touch them with a hot iron, I can cook a boy's balls from the inside out. Or for something milder to start with, how about fire-hardened splinters forced through his nipples. You should see how artistically the blood trickles down a boy's ribs."
I shuddered though I realized that such talk was an attempt to intimidate me at this point with the prospect rather than the actuality of torture. I suspected they had no real evidence and were proceeding on mere suspicion that I might be a spy. Even regional governors must be cautious about abusing and alarming the class of wealthy merchants whose trade was the foundation for the city's wealth.
I have no illusions that I could hold out forever if I held some secret they wanted out of me, though in this case I was entirely innocent. I knew I could be forced to talk like any man. In truth my greatest fear has always been prolonged torture by fiends too distrustful to accept the truth as the truth until my body was wrecked. True, I have considerable recuperative powers thanks to my remarkable vitality. Scars always disappear with time, but I could hardly expect to recover from all out torture.
"Not just yet, thank you, Omar." Hussein continued. "You see, my young friend? Omar would enjoy applying his skills to your delicious body, but it would be a shame to damage such a lovely youth as yourself, to see those angelic features screwed up in pain, to make your soft voice hoarse from screams and howls. You are really the most beautiful boy I have ever laid eyes upon. So small, and slight of build, yet with a wiry musculature. Completely hairless too, not just plucked. Your skin is smooth, and strangely tanned all over. You must spend much time out of doors in the sun entirely naked to have such a deep color, especially for a young man of Frankish or perhaps Slavic extraction. We don't see too many pretty boys around here with sun gold hair and eyes the green of growing things. Those high cheekbones give you an elven appearance too. I suppose I shall have to give into temptation at some point and rape you myself before Omar absolutely ruins you."
I wasn't afraid of rape though I always deplored the indignity and unfairness of it, not the sex itself. I had much experience of rape and sexual servitude over the centuries, having spent my true youth as a rich man's catamite, a slave and a spoil of war. I later worked voluntarily in boy brothels in ancient Alexandria and Antioch in the first century BC. A century later I spent a few years in ancient Antioch as a Daphne Boy, enslaved as a temple prostitute. The cult of the nymph Daphne is allied to that of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Male acolytes, for that is what they called us, offered themselves to boy lovers. We were very popular because we were scrupulous about personal hygiene, trim and fit, and hand picked for our beauty of face and form. In some ways I still have fond memories of my time as a Daphne Boy, slave though I then was.
"Tsk, tsk. You are leaking cum from your orifice, no doubt from your pleasuring earlier in the evening. You are primed and ready, young Iskander or is it Alexandros? And how old are you now? I have been told twenty-one but you hardly look it."
"Iskander will do, sir. Alexandros was my Christian name, I was raised a Nestorian Christian, a dhimmi, and I went by Alexandros among them. I made the profession of faith when I was sixteen, nearly five years ago. Now I use the proper Arabic form of my name, Iskander. Yes, I am twenty-one years of age."
Actually I had been born in the late second century BC. For reasons I have never understood, I had stopped growing and aging before my eighteenth birthday. No, there had been no encounter with a sorcerer nor a pact signed in blood with eldritch powers. It just happened that way. Now in the fourth decade of the eight century AD, I had lived for about eight and half centuries, not a mere score of years, though still looking like a boy in his late teens. I claimed a few more years than my apparent age so as to be taken seriously in commercial dealings. Iskander the merchant and former Nestorian was just the latest of many identities I had assumed over the centuries. My fictitious dhimmi family lived in a village destroyed a few years earlier in an earthquake.
Hussein took me in his strong arms pressing me to him and kissed me roughly, stroking my bound limbs, grabbing my taut buttocks, squeezing them and fingering my hole. He sniffed my body, still perfumed from my bath with rose petals. He complimented me again on my utterly smooth and hairless body. I could feel his rigid member through his robes. He wanted to take me carnally, as so many have over the centuries.
All my life I have been both blessed and cursed by a lovely form and face that inspire admiration and lust in the heart of any male who appreciates beautiful boys. I am small and pretty and habitually naked, looking entirely too obviously like someone's catamite or pleasure boy. With an almost fawn-like physique and a total lack of body hair, even at the fork of my legs, I often wasn't taken seriously as a male. Centuries earlier in Alexandria I had taken up the Roman habit of having all my body hair, little as there was, plucked with tweezers. After several decades of plucking it stopped sprouting. Now I was completely hairless forever. Also, I had no facial hair at all. My beard simply never came in before I stopped aging. (I have found that quite inconvenient when I wanted to disguise my appearance.)
Hussein took my ball sac in his fist and squeezed, elicting a hiss from me, then pulled back the foreskin of my member and ran his thumb around the glans and squeezed the slit open with his fingers, nodding appreciatively and possessively, letting me know that in this dungeon he owned and controlled every part of me including my manhood. I had retained my foreskin. Circumcision was not yet required of all Muslims, especially converts. (The practice is not even mentioned in the Quran.) He stroked my rump and slapped it lightly, patting it really, like a lover might. His murmurs indicated that he found my charms pleasing.
"But wait, what are these faint stripes I see on your back and ass. Faded whip marks, if I don't miss my guess. Little one, are you one of those perverse creatures who takes pleasure in pain and abuse?" Hussein asked reproachfully.
"No," I replied, my voice trembling with fury. "It is the perverse creatures who whipped me in other dungeons who took their pleasure of it. I am an unfortunate innocent dragged into custody in recent months by the Chinese in Ferghana and then by the Persians in Samarqand. They were both convinced I was spying for the other side or for your lord, the governor, and put me to the question with whips and in painful suspension. And yes they raped me too. And now it is your turn to commit these outrages. Damn all of you to hell!"
Suddenly, Hassan stopped and turned to the governor. "See, it is just as I told you. He is a merchant, no more. Certainly no spy, though undoubtedly an extraordinarily lovely boy."
"Agreed, and just as well for all of our sakes. Release him." The governor then turned to leave, saying, "Clean him up then bring him upstairs, though keep him naked. It is too bad I cannot add him to the harem, but least we can enjoy looking at him."
Hussein motioned for the torturer to free me and to wipe the grime of the street off my feet.
"I am sorry, young Iskander, but we had to be sure you weren't already an agent. You understand, a true interrogator does not need torture to discern the truth. Liars always give themselves away with small signs they are not even conscious of. I have learned to read such signs. That is one reason I am useful to my lord, the governor here in Merv. Though Omar does have his uses when a man will not tell what he knows. You understand that if a prisoner is silent and refuses to lie, then my own skill is useless."
I was escorted to the governor's cabinet where we could talk freely, sitting on comfortable pillows and sipping cooled and watered wine. Hussein insisted on sitting right beside me as we talked, taking considerable liberties with my nude body: running his fingers along the bumps of my spine, stroking my rump, slipping the blade of a hand into my cleavage, running his hands over my ribs, tweaking my tiny red nipples even fondling my manhood, the governor looking on eagerly. It was only when he sought to steal a sweet kiss that the governor reminded Hussein that this was business. Hussein could seek his pleasure of me later.
"I can see that the boy is not entirely unwilling" the governor remarked, an eyebrow lifted sardonically.
Indeed, Hussein was very attractive, tall, dark, and masculine, and his attentions were not entirely unwelcome nor without their effect. My own member had plumped up and lay thick on my thigh, a drop of fluid glistening at the tip. The fact is that I was and am a bottom boy, a sexual submissive, as Hussein had clearly guessed, responsive then to the aggressive approach he took. Also, the danger I had just escaped in the dungeon and my interrupted romp with the boys in the brothel left me unfulfilled and randy. You have no idea what it is like to have a young male's body and inclinations combined with centuries of sexual indulgence and experience.
In truth I like sex with boys who look like me but I also crave sex with powerful older males. The difference is that sex with another pretty boy is fun with an equal and an absolute delight. Sex with an older male, especially one taller and powerfully built, is a need, a craving. With a boy, I feel energized when we jump into bed and roll around kissing and laughing and touching. With a man I go all weak and submissive, ready to drop to my knees and worship as a supplicant or to bend over and let myself be taken.
"Later," Hussein assured me, tweaking my nipples one final time, then sat back as the governor described the strategic situation as he saw it.
None of what he said was unfamiliar, given my wealth of life experience, but I settled back and listened. The man clearly liked the sound of his own voice, and, to give him his due, going over the whole situation helped him organize his thoughts and gave me a good understanding of his outlook on it. He explained that they had wanted to be sure I was not already a spy before asking me to become their agent in the Ferghana valley and along the trade routes in between, reporting back to them regularly in Merv.
The city of Merv in Khorasan (just north east of the corner of Iran) lies in a large desert oasis on the southern edge of the inland delta of the Murghab River, a large well-watered zone in the midst of the Qara Qum desert (literally Black Sand). The Qara Qum is just east of the salty Caspian Sea and occupies most of modern day Turkmenistan. The Murghab delta serves as a natural stopping-point for the routes heading northeast from Iran towards Transoxiana Ð the Silk Roads to Bukhara and Samarqand and on to Khujand then east to China. Another road running at right angles, southeast to northwest, provides an easy route from the Afghan highlands and the historic cities of Herat and Balk towards the Oxus River valley and Khwarazm south of the Aral Sea.
Khujand is situated at a strategic spot, at the mouth of the Ferghana Valley, the most fertile and densely-populated region in the whole of Central Asia, a valley 200 miles east to west, 100 north to south surrounded by upthrust mountains. Though no rain falls for five months each year, the valley is well watered by two rivers which unite in the valley to form the Jaxartes. These streams, and their numerous mountain effluents, supply water for irrigation and for the towns.
These were the regions being contested by the rising power of the Islamic Caliphate, the local tribes and states and the resurgent Chinese Empire of the Tang Dynasty. Till then the region had maintained a wonderful hybrid civilization, a mix of Greek, Persian, Chinese, and Buddhist cultures with a leavening of Nestorian Christianity. Many Persian nobles and landlords had escaped to this region after the Muslim conquest of Iran proper.
As the governor droned on, Hussein, who knew all this background as well as anyone, grew impatient, even bored. He pulled me belly down across his lap and played with me openly, stroking my rump, spreading my cleavage with his fingers, pulling my manhood back between my legs, taking it into his fist, squeezing to show his total mastery of my sexuality, tweaking and teasing. I could not help responding, spreading my legs apart, moving my ass appealingly. With my face buried in a pillow I reached back with both hands and spread my ass cheeks for Hussein, displaying my crinkly brown hole, shamelessly eager to be penetrated by fingers and then by cock.
The only problem was the governor and his lecture. I knew where the governor was going with this so I cut him short by simply saying.
"Yes governor, I will be your agent, for a consideration, as long as I can work for Hussein, please, let me spend some time with him now. He has set me on fire. I would serve him as his houri boy."
"In that case, we shall install you with the harem boys, as a perfect cover for your presence in the palace for the next few days. Hussein, why don't you take him there now? We shall fix our bargain with him on the morrow."
Chuckling and appreciative of my sudden capitulation, the governor left me with Hussein who now had license from both of us to play with me as he would.
Chapter 2. Ulterior Motives
Hussein escorted me to the male harem. I aroused smiles and smirks but no suspicion as we walked through the halls of the palace, just a small naked youth and a pretty one at that, cock tumescent and sticking out from his belly, obviously the latest addition to the harem, in the custody of a trusted servant of the governor. I looked very much like the other boys. My small stature, angelic features, and hairless body meant I could easily pass for 15 or 16, especially when I put on air of shy embarrassed innocence.
We found a pleasant alcove with a soft couch and Hussein pulled me up into his lap and kissed me, saying.
"A good spy knows how to use his charms to disarm a man with pleasure. Let's see how good you are in that department, Iskander."
The hours and then days that followed more than made up for my interrupted evening at the brothel. Hussein was tall and lean, a hand's breadth over six feet (193 cm). I am only five and one half feet tall (165 cm), and my frame carried only 122 pounds (56 kg). Though I had a strong upper storey with a wiry musculature, I was totally overpowered by a man like Hussein, a virtual toy in his hands. A large man like him can almost engulf my small physique, braced on all fours as he covered me like a stallion does a filly, penetrating me, pinching my nipples and slapping my butt.
I admit that I loved it when his alarmingly large virile member addressed my cleavage, the head tracking its length then poking at the inside of my thighs, prodding and playing with the anal ring. Fingers pushed a lubricating oil into the hole, preparing me for the fuck. I felt the monster stretch the anal ring as the head penetrated the first sphincter then the next. The shaft slid inside, pushing into me, prodding and probing.
Then came the moment I lusted for when his cock touched my joy spot. As the invading shaft stimulated my prostate, my whole body shuddered helplessly. My lithe torso rippled in a wave that started at my ass and traveled up past the hips and back and shoulders to my head cause it to shake rapidly in a reflex action indicative of the overwhelming lust that filled my body. I felt my guts clutch in an internal orgasm. As the shaft fell into a rhythm of penetration and withdrawal, the sensation became overwhelming. I lost the ability for rational thought as long as it lasted. My body was tempest tossed on a sea of sensation, the blood pounding at my temples, my boy cock as hard as if carved of wood.
These internal ass orgasms did not involve ejaculation and could go on almost forever. My partners always said my green eyes rolled sightlessly and lost focus as I surrendered himself to the good feelings coursing through me. I was one bottom boy whose randy body responded totally to a fuck as a male member worked away at my hole, finally filling it with its warm wetness. So it was with Hussein.
The man liked to prolong these sessions and the sensations they caused in me, easing off just before he came, then resuming his screwing. Even after he himself was spent, he would probe my orifice with substitutes, including his favorite, long cucumbers. I pleaded with him, complaining that the rough skin would tear my tender hole, making the anal ring bleed. He dismissed the possibility of virgin's blood for someone with so well trafficked a hole such as myself.
"Then that if you lose your grip and let the whole thing slip into me entirely? What if I could not expel it? You would have to send for a physician to open me up, spread my asslips with some brass instrument and probe my rectum for it, with all the other boys looking on and witnessing my shame. I would be utterly humiliated: the boy with a cucumber stuck up his ass."
Though I shuddered theatrically, and, I thought, quite convincingly, it did not change his mind.
In truth these little scenes turned us both on: he, the stern master, though occasionally indulgent of his wanton boy, I, the wayward shameless houri boy.
The male harem was not so tightly guarded as the female quarters, so I had some liberty to come and go during the days I spent there, even into the gardens. I liked to sun myself in the gardens, entirely naked, swimming in a branch of the river that ran through them and supplied water, reading or conversing with anyone who passed by without any concern that I was a small, nude, beardless and hairless male, a shameless boy of the harem who gave himself to other males for their pleasure. Couldn't I at least wear the diaphanous trousers many of the other boys did. It was quite a contrast with the warriors and court officials, their own bodies decently covered in concealing robes.
On several occasions the governor called me to his chambers. He liked to fuck a a boy's mouth, so he set me kneeling on a pillow while he stood over me, clubbing my face with his massive member, making me reach for it, to kiss and smooch his purple helmet and lick around the flange. His was one of the largest cocks I had seen up to that time. I was afraid I might choke on it, be unable to breathe. He told me how exciting it was for him to have a boy with such delicate features to play with, how pretty I looked down there so small and submissive with my pouty lips around his cock, sucking and slurping. He was glad I kept my golden locks long enough for a good grab so he could control the pace of the face fuck. Though he was never too rough with me, I was always glad to get back to Hussein.
Of course my relationship with Hussein was purely physical. It was never love. We did not spend all that much time together in the harem, just a few days, nor did we get to know one another socially, nor were we especially compatible intellectually. I am even sure I really liked the man, although I would credit him with shrewdness and physical courage.
In between all the fun, we settled our bargain for my services as a spy. I did not want money so much as immunities from taxes and exactions in kind. I also get a through grounding in procedures to keep in touch with Hussein, how to get messages through in dummy shipments of spices and the like. They did not expect skullduggery of me. My mission was a passive one, to keep my eyes and ears open for anything noteworthy that came me way, then pass it along.
I was admirably situated to gather commercial, military, and political intelligence. I made my home in Kokand, the main transportation junction in the Fergana Valley in the southwestern corner of the valley, the junction of two main routes into the Fergana Valley. One lead northwest over the mountains to Tashkent, and the other west through Khujand.
Central Asia was historically the theater for the first major interaction between Chinese civilization and another urbanized culture. In the first century BC the Empire of the Han was gratified to break out of its isolation in East Asia and find that, beyond the lands of the horse barbarians to the west of China proper, there were cultures with cities and writing and valuable commodities to trade for Chinese silks. This lead to the opening of the Silk Road from the 1st century BC.
The lands of Central Asia on the near side of knot of mountains in the center of the continent were only intermittently under Chinese control. Culturally part of the Persia, they were a hodgepodge of peoples and cultures and religions: Zoroastrian, Nestorian, Buddist, animist. Periodically a strong Chinese dynasty roused itself to penetrate to the region to control the silk trade and the source of fine cavalry mounts, the 'blood sweating' horses of Ferghana.
In the early eighth century AD, Ferghana was once again the focus of fierce rivalry between the Tang Dynasty of China and an expanding Muslim power. The Chinese had won two earlier battles in 715 and 717 against Arab forces. The Ferghana valley really was the garden spot of Central Asia. The climate is dry and warm rising to quite hot in summer. Light snow fell only in December and January.
The warm weather at 40 degrees north latitude in the middle of the continent is why I loved the summers at my country villa with its orchards of peaches and pistachios, the gardens I had expanded from the previous owner, the pool I had created in the small stream that ran through my property where I could swim daily in the warm weather. Except for business hours in the town or when I went on caravan, I usually spent the summer naked, eating on the patio, talking with friends or disporting myself with intimate companions, reading or tinkering away on minor inventions. Of course I regularly practiced archery and sword fighting and unarmed combat, preferably naked.
I will admit to a degree of vanity. Yes I do like to display myself, to let people see how terribly pretty and well-formed and sexy I am. If that is a fault, surely it is a minor one, and I plead my physical beauty in my own defense. I really am a comely youth, well worth looking at, like a classic statue come alive.
Even in the spring and fall I liked to run nude and barefoot around the property for exercise, much as I used to in the Greek and Roman cultural sphere. The folk thereabouts retained some folk memory of the old gymnasium of the past, but I was one of the few who cared to exercise entirely unclothed, though usually discreetly, in private. I longed for the days of old when I lived in ancient Damascus, then culturally a Greek town, one of the cities of the Decapolis in Roman Syria.
I frequented the gymnasium there daily. Once a week, my friends and I went out of the city to swim and dive in the river above the town. We swam back and forth in the cool waters or splashed and played the grab ass games typical of youth. Afterwards we picnicked nude and talked and joked and sang songs and then paired off for lovemaking. It was all quite casual and carefree, an excuse to get together with friends, a chance to be naked in public, to show off our hard bodies, clean limbs, and youthful faces. It had been a wonderful age to live in, when naked young men could mingle publicly without anyone raising an eyebrow much less a hand in opposition. Alas, all this ended with the rise of puritanical creeds.
I decided to throw my lot in with the Muslims for several reasons. First off, they discriminated against those not of their faith. Although Muslims usually tolerated Christians and Jews as People of the Book, they laid many burdens upon them: extra taxes, distinctive dress, legal disabilities, and most distasteful to me, mandatory disarmament leaving one defenseless. A Christian could be killed for striking a Muslim, not matter what the circumstances. That is why I had professed Islam. Certainly not out of conviction. I held to no creed in any event and was appalled at how the rise of Islam had destroyed the world I had known for seven centuries, the world of Antiquity, of Greece and Rome and Persia, when the Arabs were merely a congeries of barbaric tribes isolated on their subcontinent.
I also believed the Muslims would win the contest for control of Central Asia. Chinese power was great but they had to project it so far from their centers of power and population across vast deserts and mountains. The Arabs held the river valleys and oases and great cities Central Asia and could draw on their wealth and manpower to buttress their control. Many Arabs had settled in Merv recently. In the long run, the Chinese must lose their grip and retreat beyond the mountains.
Too bad really. I admired Chinese civilization, especially that of the Tang which combined vigor with refinement. I had travelled there half a century earlier and marveled at the wealth and technology of the empire, especially the use of paper, unknown outside China, for documents and books. Poetry and sculpture and painting were of a very high order. Arabs make much of their calligraphy, and indeed it is beautiful, but the Chinese have made it into an art form of its own. Their thousands of ideographs allow greater variety of shape and stroke than the Arabic alphabet restricted to a few dozen letters.
The Chinese were enthusiastic in adopting Buddhism but were not religiously intolerant the way the Arabs were. I despise few things more than religious intolerance, especially when it leads to forced conversions and religious warfare. Islam divides the world into the House of Submission (Islam) and the House of War (everyone else). This world view is inherent in its creed.
It is not just because I got caught up in them and enslaved that I have always regretted the fratricidal wars that the Byzantine and Sassanian empires fought in the early seventh century that fatally weakened them just before the onslaught of the Arab armies. They would otherwise have been able to contain Islam in a much smaller compass, letting the Zoroastrians prevail in the Persian cultural sphere and the Christians around the Mediterranean. If you must have religions, then let there be many of them rather than one dominating so much of the world.
Muslim power now extended from the Atlantic Ocean in Morocco and Spain to beyond the Oxus, though blocked to the north at the Caucasus where the Khazars had stopped their advance. Otherwise the Muslims were advancing on all fronts, across North Africa into Spain by 711 and into Central Asia. They had nearly conquered Constantinople itself in 718. Only the last minute invention of an incendiary substance called Greek Fire, akin to modern napalm, allowed the Byzantine Navy to turn back the challenge and restore control of their Anatolian heartland to the Byzantines. Much of the world I had known was now in Muslim hands, and I must come to terms with it, especially with so much of Europe impoverished and semi-barbric.
Yes, there was always India and China, but I don't blend in so well in those regions. In those days we knew nothing of Australia or of the Americas, and Russia hadn't even been founded by the Vikings.
Chapter 3. Kokand
After three days in the harem I finally got to put on clothing and returned to the caravanserai where I had been taken lodging. To cover my absence, Hussein had sent a message that I was ill and being cared for at the house of a certain nobleman in town. Now fully 'recovered', I finished my business in Merv and joined a caravan bound for Kujand.
"You outfit yourself like a soldier." the caravan chief Ibrahim remarked as I settled my weapons about me.
"Sometimes you have to fight like one to protect yourself." I pointed out. This was my first journey with him. I was gratified to be part of his caravan. He had a reputation for competence and honesty and getting his caravans through unscathed.
Along the Silk Road I habitually carried a straight double edged sabre in a scabbard on my back with the hilt protruding over my right shoulder. The scabbard moves with the motion of the rider's body and does not let the sword slap about like one hung from a baldric. It is also more convenient dismounted since it does not trip you up when you run, or get in your way when you climb or fight with hands and feet. I have always preferred straight blades to curved ones, even when mounted, and never cared much for the scimitar or tulwar, popular though such blades were in those regions.
My goods travelled on camels in the care of camel drivers I had engaged, guarded by four of my own men, all professionals who did favor curved blades. We used twin humped Bactrian camels, much larger than the single humped dromedaries of Arabia. I myself was mounted on a horse as the route was well marked and provided with wells at convenient stopping points. I also had a remount with me to spare my horse. A short recurved bow with a quiver of arrows hung from the saddle along with a round helmet I could don at need and a circular shield against arrows. Otherwise I did not care for armor. Stirrups had come into use in the last two hundred years so my seat was much more secure than in the past when I had had to ride bareback or else wedge myself into a Roman style cavalry saddle. I also carried a parrying dagger at my belt and throwing knife up my left sleeve plus a sling with lead bullets in a pouch.
I wore light weight garments, close fitting trousers and a loose silk shirt with a light colored cloak with a hood to ward off the sun. I rather disliked the long robes of the Arabs and avoided them when I could. Why cover your body so completely? So confining and unflattering to the male physique. Sometimes I would get off my horse and walk or trot along with it to maintain my own physical conditioning. You cannot do that in robes.
We soon crossed the broad Oxus River into Transoxiana which literally means the land across the Oxus River. It is the longest river in Central Asia, at 1500 miles (2400 km), half again the length of the Ohio in North America, and is itself an avenue of commerce, navigable for half its length from its mouth at the Aral Sea. The region extends to the Jaxartes River, a stream fully 1,400 miles long (2,200 km) though with only half the flow of the southern river and not navigable anywhere along its length.
Alexander the Great extended Greek culture into the region with his conquests of the 4th century BC, making Transoxiana the most northeastern point of the Hellenistic culture. The great southern bend of the Jaxartes River is where, in 329 BC, the conqueror founded the garrison city of Alexandria Eschate ("Alexandria the Furthest"), the city now known as Khujand and our destination. I had visited it myself twice in preceding centuries before settling in the region just two years earlier.
All went well for three days. We made good progress across the stretches of desert pavement that alternated with others of loose sand. (Desert pavement is a surface covered with closely packed and interlocking angular or rounded rock fragments the size of pebbles or cobbles.) Then a thunderstorm that started out with heavy rain abruptly turned into a sandstorm, a phenomenon known as haboob. More common in the Sahara than in Central Asia, it caught our caravan by surprise. One moment our faces were turned up in delight as the cooling waters fell from the sky. The next we were wrapping our faces in sodden cloths so we could breathe. Our horses and camels suffered terribly till be got them into the lee of a huge rock formation where we all hunkered down to wait it out.
The sandstorm passed and with it most of our good luck. Split hooves, sour water, cranky mounts, poorly tied retaining ropes that let cargo slip to the ground, all slowed us down. Once we had to stare down an armed party, obviously bandits, who finally decided we looked too tough to handle. I knew then why Ibrahim had such a good reputation. He quite cooly had men working as drovers throw off their concealing robes to reveal their armor, with weapons brandished in their hands. I had my bow at the ready. I shoot in the manner of the Huns holding extra arrows in two fingers of the bow hand. That let's me fire off six arrows in ten seconds and put them all into a different target, to create a breach in an attacker's lines, allowing me and mine to break out of an encirclement.
The next day, we reported the encounter to troops patrolling from Samarqand, and later heard they had tracked down and killed the outlaws. Good riddance. Bandits rank along with pirates as the kind of people I most despise. Vermin who contribute nothing. All they do is take, kill, and destroy.
"Good news, true," Ibrahim allowed, "but bandits are like cockroaches. You are never rid of them entirely."
I was anxious to get back to my villa with my precious cuttings of a new variety of apple. Apples do not breed true from seed. You must propagate them from cuttings. Half my cargo was apple cuttings, kept alive by careful watering as we crossed first the Qara Qum and then the Qyzyl Qum, (Red Sand) Deserts. I wanted to graft them to the trees in my orchard in Kokand. I am not exaggerating when I say I had stumbled upon the Golden Delicious apple or something very close to it in an abandoned orchard in Persia. When we finally arrived in Kujand, I wasted no time and broke off from the caravan and negotiated the road to the Ferghana Valley.
My villa outside Kokand had a large staff to take care of my fields and gardens and orchards, to provide artisans for the household and to help with my tinkering, for security, and to support my comfortable life style. That included a very pretty lad named Qasm. Only seventeen and a half, he was small and dark haired and slender and incredibly cute and personable with a fine singing voice too. Also very talented in bed, in part the benefit of my training. Yet he was a nice kid too. He never gave my majordomo Ali any real trouble though he did like to tease him. He had a good situation for an orphan, and he knew it. He was shy at first, but soon blossomed and got used to the habitual nudity I insisted on for him indoors and out, weather permitting. I was teaching him to read and write and figure and had promised him a place in my establishment when he succeeded.
He greeted me enthusiastically but understood my distraction with my cuttings. Over the next few days, I spent most of my waking hours grafting the cuttings to my apple trees. He sometimes laughed that my gardens and orchards were his only rival. In truth I do like making things grow, especially tree crops and perennials, both long lived like me. As a gentleman farmer I could enjoy agriculture and horticulture in a way a peasant cannot, leaving unwanted drudgery to others. I was thinking of putting in a vineyard the following year. I had just the spot picked out for it too.
Qasm was a town boy, an orphan from the streets, but he liked to work beside me in the gardens. My majordomo Ali would often find us naked, likely on hands and knees, planting, gathering, checking for bugs, mounding earth around celery stalks to make them turn white. I did not look much like a master on those occasions, just one of two bare lads kneeling on the ground, brown cheeks resting on bare feet, lithe torsos bent over, genitals dangling between slender thighs, ribs and spinal bumps prominent as, trowel or knife or short handled hoe in hand, we bent to our mundane tasks, firm muscles playing under our skin. We exuded vitality, two fine specimens of the human animal, bare and bronzed.
Afterwards we washed up with the water from a hot spring on my property. The spring itself was too small and much too hot to bathe in, but I conducted the outflow in a pottery pipeline laid into the ground, mixing it with cool stream water into a small pool beside the house, enclosed by movable screens. We sometimes did not wait to get to the sleeping chamber but made love right there in the bathing pool, our small wiry bodies slick with soap and soaking wet, laughing like children. Sometime he hopped up with his butt on the edge of the pool offering his cock to me while I stayed in the water. Sometime, we reversed the positions. We were quite shameless and vocal in our lovemaking. My servants were discreet, but we never made any attempt to hide what was going on. We were lovers, as anyone could see for themselves.
We always shared a bed. Even if I was tired and just wanted to sleep, I liked to have his youthful body next to mine. His body warmth and aroma of boy were pleasing, soothing when I was tired or exciting when I was randy. He learned to recognize my moods, whether I wanted to simply hold him or to make love. I liked to sleep with him spooned into me. He was a most delightful companion.
I should add that Qasm had the most beautiful brown eyes, very large for his small face, giving him an impish look that was exceedingly cute. He knew it too, trading shamelessly on it when he had been naughty. I was gentle with him; spankings were just foreplay with us, never a real punishment. If needs be Ali would take a strap to the lad for a major infraction. Alas, sometimes the only path to enlightenment of the male teenager is through a firm application of leather to rump. To his credit, the boy took that philosophically. He knew that he wasn't always the innocent angel his youthful beauty might make one suppose.
We both had a position to maintain, so I never took Ali to bed or let him take me. I did not mind sharing Qasm if the boy was willing, as he was. Ours was a cheerful and prosperous household, everyone drew fair wages, no slaves among them; all were fed and well dressed and the guards well armed. I had no family to spend my wealth on and spurned extravagance and ostentation. It cost nothing to run around naked as I did so often. I would dress well but not extravagantly and I never had expensive hobbies, collecting art or the like. Let others be patrons of the arts if they would. Even when I entertained at home it was never extravagantly.
Now my years in Kokand was one of those periods in my life when I was not looking for real love, just entertainment and companionship. Qasm served my needs well. Love is wonderful when it happens, but for someone like me the price is very high. At times the centuries lay heavily on my soul. The saddest thing about never growing older is that you must eventually lose everyone you ever loved or befriended. Gods know many of them were more worthy of my gift than I.
There haven't been many true loves in my long life though many casual lovers. My last real love before settling in Kokand was a century before, an 'older' man named Peroz who had purchased me as a slave, rescuing me from a really bad situation, and later given me his love, his friendship, his trust, and my freedom. He was shrewd in business, kind in his personal dealings, brave when he had to be but never belligerent. To this day I follow his example of quiet charity for orphans. A sea merchant himself, he had supported a small orphanage for children whose fathers were lost at sea.
Chapter 4. Intrigue in Ferghana
I sent reports to Merv every month or so, whenever I had something worth writing about. I did not see Hussein till the following spring in Khujand. We met secretly. I think he was sounding me out more than anything else, to make sure my allegiance had not shifted.
"You are not known for your piety, young Iskander though you are careful to go through the motions. I sometimes wonder how committed you really are."
"Were you ever noted for piety yourself, at my age?" I countered. "I take the world as I find it. If I indulge in pleasures I also pay taxes, give alms, and do my part to improve agriculture in these regions. I don't make trouble for anyone. I have a good reputation among my fellow merchants. But you must know all this."
"Yes, but matters are coming to a crisis. Are you sure of those Chinese cooks in your household?"
"Of course," I assured him. I supposed Hussein was just too much the spy master to appreciate that most people go about their lives with never a thought of intrigue.
Two of my cooks were young Chinese chefs, hired from Hsian as I had come to appreciate the cuisine of the Middle Kingdom during my last stay there. Chinese food combined novelty with great variety. Szechuan cuisine was as different from Hunan then as it is now. My sojurn in China was one of the best periods of my life. I was impressed with how advanced their civilization was in the natural sciences and technology especially metallurgy, paper making, wood block printing, silks, etc. (The compass came a bit later.) I had made no secret of my admiration for things Chinese.
The Chinese were well versed in other arts too. Their boy lovers had techniques I had never encountered before, and that was saying something. What they could do with a silk cord wound in a variety of ways around a young male's genitals was little short of wondrous. They heightened the sensation by binding the boy spread-eagled on his back, helpless to reach or to protect his manhood, totally exposed to whatever they would do with him. At first it was simply tickling and teasing, dragging the silk cord across nipples and belly or using the cord as a light whip. I had never felt so helpless and aroused as when they went to work on me, happy to play with a young male of such unusual looks: blond hair, green eyes, straight nose, utterly hairless everywhere including a completely bare groin. The used yellow cords to match my hair, binding and winding, separating the balls and winding them separately. Sometimes they wove a braid around my rigid member or slipped a noose around the glans to control my cock, letting the head turn purple from the infusion of blood.
Then they brought out their acupuncture needles. No it was not to inflict pain, though there was a bit of that, but to stimulate and to control arousal, inserting needles carefully into the base of the cock or behind the balls and elsewhere. The sight of needles poking into my flesh me down there was both frightening and exciting. They also pushed needles through my nipples. The acupuncturist would twirl a needle to simulate the various channels they imagined connected the different parts of the human body. (Their chart looks like nothing in nature, not the nervous system, the circulatory system, or the lymph system.) For whatever reason, it works. I cannot remember when I have ejaculated so long and hard. It was awesome, a geyser.
I was drawn from my reminiscences by a theatrical clearing of the throat.
"Have you heard anything about the new Chinese commander, General Gao Xianzhi? How well does he get along with the commanders of his Qarluq mercenaries?"
"Not too well, from what General Li Siye let slip when he visited me last month."
I had written Hussein that General Li, though of princely blood, was another gentleman farmer, and had sought me out about my golden apples. He was impressed by the color and taste of the few fruit I still had in cold storage, and I promised him cuttings once my own trees were well along.
"General Li himself is incorruptible, but you might work on the mercenaries, who are always ready to change coats for the right price."
I pointed out that some of the local allies in the Ferghana might switch allegiance too. I named names, but refused Hussein's request to suborn them myself. Too risky. I insisted that our bargain was that I would watch and listen and report, and that was all. I knew he must have other agents in the valley, if only to compare our reports. Let them stick their necks out. I wasn't doing this for money but to be on the winning side. He was cross at my refusal and excess of caution but had to accept my limits. I had the satisfaction of startling him as I remarked ever so casually:
"Do tell Ibrahim to be careful. I rather like the old fellow."
He proposed that, for old times sake, we spend the night together. I agreed if only to placate the man. As the governor's spy master, he had great influence. With a war in the offing, I wanted to stay on his good side, especially after our disagreement. I attended him at his safe house where he had his guards strip me and carry my clothing away then bind me tight with my wrists behind my back and hobbles on my ankles.
That night in bed he was more energetic than usual and much rougher than ever before. My bonds recalled our meeting in the dungeon in Merv. He took advantage of my helplessness, slapping my face, mocking me for being so small and unmanly, girlishly pretty and hairless even at the fork of my legs, a submissive boy so easily placed on his knees or with his rump in the air, bunghole twitching, anxious for penetration by a real man. Now I expected some of that as foreplay, as any bottom boy must, but he was especially vehement about it that night.
He pulled my ballsac back between my legs, circling the root with thumb and fingers, pulling the orbs to the bottom of their sac, running his thumb over the smooth skin, likening it in shape to a plum, indeed reddened much like one from his ministrations and my arousal. He offered his opinion that I was very lucky indeed that the governor had not ordered them cut off, to enroll me as a castrato in his harem. That would have ensured that I remained youthful and hairless and beardless for years of sexual servitude.
"The governor told me that when you pleasured him with your mouth, there wasn't the least bit of stubble on your face or chin. He likes his boys smooth, and your face was the smoothest of any boy ever. We realized you could not really be 21 then, nor nearly 22 years of age now. You must must have lied simply to be taken more seriously, as a young man rather than the beardless boy you are."
"I think the governor still regrets that for the good of the realm he had to let you go. He loves submissive teenage males, and your coloring is unique and exciting." Hussein explained.
I took Hussein's mockery and strapping and slapping, and rough penetrations well enough because I must, trussed up as I was, though I was quite relieved when he decided not to fist me after all, as he had threatened to. I do not want a man's hand and arm shoved into me, especially small as I am. It is too much aggression and pain and too little sensuality and pleasure, as far as I was concerned. He used, indeed abused me, all night and then the next morning, leaving me sore and bruised and worn out, riding off with a smirk on his face, leaving me to get ready for the storm that was approaching. I guess he thought I had no option but to accept such treatment since the governor really did not need my services as an intelligence agent, now that war was imminent. Damn the man.
This was not the first time Central Asia was the battle ground of military forces from the Far East and Southwest Asia. During the Han Dynasty in 97 AD a General Ban Chao led a a force of 70,000 men, all light cavalry and mounted infantry, through Merv itself, during a military expedition against barbarians harassing the trade routes along the Silk Road. Allied to local rulers, he established a camp on the southwest coast of the Caspian Sea. His army eventually forced the exodus of the ancient XiongNu tribes who then migrated further west into Europe proper. Their descendants became known as the Huns, and their king Atilla was called by Christians of the fifth century the Scourge of God for his depredations on the late Roman Empire.
This new clash looked to be of equal historical significance.
I readied my villa for defense as best we could. A villa after all is basically a farmhouse and its outbuildings, not a military fortress. The purpose of its defenses, such as they were, was to discourage raiders, not to thwart an army or hold off a siege, though we had emergency stores to last for several months, mostly against a bad harvest or other disaster like a plague. The farmstead was easily approached, on gently sloping land along a stream. A military fortress would have been perched on a crag.
The enclosing wall was ten feet high (3 m) with a wooden walkway all the way around about six feet (2 m) off the ground, leaving a chest-high parapet. The wall was roughly circular to enclose the largest area within the smallest perimeter. With barracks for the guards and quarters for servants and farmers and artisans, workrooms, smithy, storerooms, barns, stables, etc. it amounted to a walled hamlet with a population of nearly one hundred. Some of its defenses were not exactly obvious like the plank road in front of the gate that could be pulled up to uncover 'gopher holes' to trip horses in a mounted charge.
At the last minute, we would also spread caltrops to either side. On my orders, the blacksmith had been making them whenever he had an idle moment. A caltrop is like a child's toy jack, made of two large nails, pointed at both ends, and twisted together so the points formed a tetrahedron. No matter how it was tossed on the ground, it always lands with three points braced to the ground with the fourth point up, ready to impale the soft hoof of a horse, shod or not or the boot of a man for that matter. A hand pump could take boiling water from the hot spring and shoot it through a tube from nozzles on either side of the main gate.
No matter how well defended, the gate is always the weakest point in any fortification because it is basically a hole in the wall whose whole purpose is to let things through, not to keep them out, like the wall does. Now a castle could improve a gate with outer fortifications, a T shaped or L shaped double entrance, murder holes, and the like. All we had were farm buildings with loopholes for bowmen in their thick walls and a curtain wall joining them with crenellations to shield our archers. Our gate was just a set of iron bound wooden doors, with a swivel bar to lock them shut, though I had provided for braces between their center beams and holes in the ground behind them.
Our rear gate next to the stables opened onto a narrow strip of land between the wall and the stream as it exited the enclosure. Only a footbridge crossed it near the villa, though there was a ford half a mile downstream. The stretch of stream just outside the wall acted like a moat with a steep bank and hidden pools of quicksand just under the surface. That would stop any mounted or infantry charge in its tracks, letting our archers pick off the attackers at leisure.
Both our main gates were normally left open, except at night. We were on good terms with our neighbors so we had little to fear, yet it seemed a sensible precaution to lock up after dark. I really hoped the contending armies would pick some place else to fight than my immediate neighborhood. We would lose, no matter what the outcome.
Our little army consisted of seventeen professional guards, from which I drew a detail of four when I went on caravan, plus twenty-odd farmers and artisans, and a little over a dozen domestic servants including those who served the rest of the household. I had drilled the guards intensively and given decent weapons and some training to the others, so I had a force of some two and one half score, though I rather wished we had more archers among them. The women and children could help too, preparing food, tending the wounded, carrying water, putting out fires, and such. These folk were grateful and loyal to me and would be stout in defense of their lives and homes.
Of course the fields and orchards were completely outside the walls. Only my personal garden and the kitchen garden plus the stable yard and village square were within our perimeter. I had dug a well and a cistern to supplement the water we usually drew from the stream. It was across the compound and up slope of the stables and the popular Roman style garderobes I had had constructed to replace the original more primitive arrangements. An enemy could not use thirst as a weapon. (The hot water from the spring was not potable for its bad taste.)
"Do you really think we can hold off an attack, lord." Ali asked.
"A raid yes, certainly. An army, certainly not." He had to be satisfied with that ambiguous answer.
We went about our business as usual though now with a watcher always on the high tower next to the gate. Ali, as majordomo, helped organize our preparations with Qasm acting as his runner, relaying oral messages and orders to our staff. I also sent him with written messages to our neighbors warning that they would do well to look to their defenses. Some of the locals rather enjoyed the sight of his lithe physique as he ran along the trails in only a very brief loincloth and a sheen of sweat. Whatever his flightiness in normal times, Qasm was conscientious and diligent in his new duties. He wanted to prove to everyone that he was not just a pretty face and his master's bum boy, but a reliable member of our little community. I was quite proud of the lad, now eighteen, growing into manhood.
Chapter 5. The Talas River
The war broke out in May. Armies on both sides mobilized their allies. The fighting pitted Arab, Kyrqyz, and Nepali forces fighting for the Abbasid Caliphate, against the regular Chinese army, Qarluq mercenaries, and local forces from the Ferghana valley.
Hussein and Ibrahim had done their work well, At the critical battle of the Talas River, just across the mountains from Ferghana, the Qarluq withdrew from the fighting. That and the hesitation of the local levies led to disaster for the Tang forces. The Chinese regulars were cut off, defeated, and slaughtered, and would have been annihilated but for the courage of the rear guard lead by General Li Siye. He lead charge after charge armed only with a staff, which he used to good effect.
Historians and legend have made much of the battle of the Talas River in 751. Some call it one of the decisive battles in history. Thereafter China withdrew from Central Asia, yielding political control to the newly established Abbasid Caliphate with its capital in Baghdad. Indeed that is what ultimately happened but not just from that one battle. Actually the Tang struck back in the next year or two. By 753, with their armies reconstituted the Chinese ranged as far as Gilgit in northern Pakistan. The Qarluq returned to their allegiance.
What really finished the Chinese in Central Asia was the fatal weakening of the Tang Dynasty as the result of the rebellion of An LuShan. A military commander of turkic descent, he tried to set up a new dynasty. Little known in the West, this immense struggle is imprinted in popular memory in China with larger than life figures including the imperial concubine Yang Guifei, one of the four great beauties of Chinese history, very roughly a combination of Lady Macbeth, Lucrezia Borgia, and Madame de Pompadour.
China fell apart. Provinces asserted their autonomy. Warlords waged civil war. Loyal forces struck back. All sides enlisted barbarian soliders. Vast numbers perished from slaughter and starvation and disease. The chaos produced a death toll as high as 36 million, over one in ten humans living on the planet at the time. The Tang dynasty shrank to just a shadow of its former self. Never again would a native Chinese dynasty control Central Asia.
For my folk at the villa, the main impact of the war was from a raid by Nepali auxiliaries returning to their own land through the Ferghana valley. They saw no reason why, along the way, they shouldn't raid what had been lands owing allegiance to the Chinese. A rather disorganized force of several hundred attacked our villa early that fall.
Our watchman banged the iron triangle to signal their approach. We pulled up the planks in front of the gates and let their impetuous initial charge dissolve into chaos as their horses broke their legs in the gopher holes or stepped on caltrops, throwing their riders. Their own dead animals formed a barrier to further charges. A second charge at the rear gate ending ignominiously as the quicksand trapped the riders and the near bank of the stream broke the charge as horses struggled to get over it.
The next day, our discharge of hot water from the spring stopped an infantry assault at the gates. The Nepalis had better archers than we did. A man can learn to use a crossbow in days, but the recurved bow takes years of practice to master. Half our archers used cross bows lacking the range of the recurved bow used by the enemy, but our men were effective enough since they could take cover behind the parapet. The Nepalis were out in the open.
I directed the military operations of the defense, wearing my helmet, carrying my small shield to fend off arrows and with a breastplate too. Qasm fought at my side, armed with a sword, dressed in a handsome new tunic and bearing a large shield to protect my rear and himself. Occupied with the overall defense, I could not always pay attention to the immediate threat of an enemy soldier trying to scale the wall.
At one point the boy yelled and cursed. I turned to find an arrow had transfixed his shield penetrating the meat of his shoulder. We ducked behind a creneallation and extracted the arrowhead, binding his wound. He stayed loyally at my side, fending off first one and then another of the enemy who had boosted themselves from their saddles across the wall. Who says pretty boys don't make good fighters?
Ali organized the logistics, keeping everyone fed, making sure our wounded were tended to. We lost a few good people including one of only two blacksmiths, but the enemy withdrew after two fruitless days of fighting, riding on to look for easier prey. They took petty revenge setting fire to the fields and orchards. I lost my golden apples to their fires, damn them.
"We won, we won!
Qasm called out happily as the enemy withdrew. I put my arm around his waist and squeezed to show my own happiness, careful of his shoulder wound. Ali contented himself with a weary smile. We stayed buttoned up till the next day, then went forth to salvage what we could. Not all of my orchards had burned, but all of the trees with the golden apples had. I sent a letter to General Li explaining why I would not be able to supply him with cuttings after all.
Qasm traded shamelessly on his war wound, insisting on being babied for the next week. Indeed we had to modify our lovemaking to spare him pain, which was real enough. I was happy to indulge him. I let him lie back on the cushions while I did my level best to pleasure him. After all, he might well have saved my life. In later years he grew quite proud of the scar left by the arrow, as well he should have been. The boy had proved himself. He might still be physically a small smooth pretty boy, but Qasm had become a man.
I put him to work assisting Ali in managing the estate, dressed decently now in a tunic (admittedly a skimpy one). In time he became Ali's right hand man. One of their first joint projects was a schoolroom for the children and any adults who wanted to learn to read and write. I should have thought of it myself.
The Arabs enticed two captured Chinese prisoners to show them the secret of paper manufacture. The first paper mill in the Arab world opened in Samarqand a few years later. The manufacture of paper spread rapidly across the Muslim world and eventually to benighted Europe.
The triumphant Caliphate, in gratitude for my work as a spy, awarded my villa a tax exemption and immunity from military levies of manpower and goods for thirty years. Hussein delivered it personally, smiling sardonically at my household arrangements especially my young lover. My commercial interests were quite successful in their own right so I let the extra income flow through my hands to my people, setting aside only annual contributions to a contingency fund and to a fund for capital improvements. As long as the villa broke even after all expenses and contributions to reserves, I was satisfied to leave to my workers the fruits of their labors. My people were conscious of the rapacity of some other landlords in the area toward their dependents. Their gratitude at my forbearance helped cement our bond.
I spent nearly two decades in the Ferghana, one of the most pleasant periods in my existence. I can seldom stay very long in any one place since I do not age as others do. Through theatrical tricks I can give the impression of getting older over the years, even without makeup. I change my style of clothing, from the casual dress of of a youth to the flashy dress of a young man and later the more sober raiment of a mature man. I speak differently, first with the shaky unsure voice of a youth, then the confident voice of a young man full of himself, later in the more cautious and thoughtful speech of a man in his thirties.
Like Qasm himself as he grew older, though one step ahead, I changed my hair styles, from that of a tousled twink to the carefully groomed locks of a young man, to the shorter and more sober cut of a man no longer in his twenties. If I had had facial hair, I might have grown first a mustache and then a full beard, though I really do not like facial hair. Qasm himself did affect a thin mustache in his early twenties but he spared me the sight of a scraggly beard which would have been the best he could ever have managed. He remained slim and pretty even into his thirties.
All of such subterfuges can be effective for only so long. I do not like to rely on makeup except for very short term disguise. I spend far too much time in the nude exercising, sweating and swimming, cleaning my body in shower or bath to rely on such trickery as false crows' feet put on with ink or powders to make the hair at the temples gray. In my sleep my relaxed body looks especially youthful, as my lovers could plainly see.
After a while, even the people at the villa, well disposed though they were towards me, began to wonder. The danger was not from them but that men of power would suspect me and torture me for the secret of immortality. I have no such secret to reveal. Indeed I am not truly immortal; I simply do not age. I am not invulnerable. Someday I will die from foul play or misadventure: a gun, a knife, an accident, a war, and earthquake, or shipwreck. Something will kill me.
When it grew impossible to conceal my continued youthfulness, I went on Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. Two months later, I ensured that word reached the villa of the unfortunate demise of Iskander from disease. Ali and Qasm took over the villa, as I had provided in my will. Neither had the talent or interest to keep up my commercial endeavors, but those were already hollowed out, much of the capital sent abroad to myself under a new identity in Constantinople.
Epilogue
My villa served as the kernel for the growth of a full fledged village and in modern times a suburb of Kokand. To this day, the autumn festival there features songs and stories about how a namesake and descendent of Iskander of Makedon and his close friend Qasm held off the barbarian hordes. I actually visited it during festival time in Soviet days. It left me with a good feeling about my people and myself.
It would be so easy for me to yield to hedonism and cynicism, and to disregard the needs and aspirations of my fellow man. I couldn't give you a reason why I don't, at least one that would satisfy a philosopher. All I know is that I sleep easier at night knowing that I am one of those people who, in modern parlance, adds value. There are far too many on this small planet of ours who only subtract.
Bless Luther Burbank for rediscovering the Golden Delicious Apple in the twentieth century. It and the Granny Smith from New Zealand are my all time favorite varieties, much more so than the bland and rather misnamed Red Delicious variety.
Only recently could I write of these things, choosing, from caution, to cast them as fiction, a series of fanciful tales of an immortal youth written under a pseudonym. My secret is safe for no one in these days of modern science will believe it. In this tale, all of the names are real. The events described really did happen just as I have written.