The lovely female musicians were all of a similar beauty.
They had been chosen by the sultan with the care and vanity of a teamster assembling a match-set of chariot horses. Dark-haired, olive-skinned, large-eyed and full-lipped. Each dressed in flowing white robes, with gold hems. As they played their strings, cymbals, and pipes from their golden shell alcove up in the mezzanine of the sultan's harem, below them the monarch of the southern desert, Ozymandias the Great, slapped his hands to the soft jiggling flesh of the slave girl's ass and squeezed the bountiful rump as his tongue lapped the tangy juices of her sex smothering his mouth and nose.
The sultan's favorite concubine laughed in unrestrained wanton joy as she threw back her head, her long black hair swirling wildly about her head and shoulders, and rotated her wide hips, enthusiastically grinding her drenched pussy down on the face of the monarch who lie on a pile of satin pillows and silken cushions. The king was young, strong, and handsome. He was a man of prodigious conquering appetites, as the women of his perfumed seraglio could well attest. While Ozymandias sucked loud and obscenely at the tasty cunt covering his face, another slave girl nestled his testes in her soft palm as she repeatedly plunged her pretty head up and down, his turgid cock encased tight by her throat.
A night breeze blew in off the desert, gently bellowing the long lengths of red silk curtains draping the floor to ceiling windows of the pleasure dome. The zephyr disturbed the thin, lazy columns of incense smoke to fretting and swirling above their ivory-legged braziers, as the doxie on the face of the desert-ruler climaxed with a piercing scream, momentarily drowning out the soft music. She gushed hot around the tongue fucking into her. And the over-aroused monarch responded with a violent jerk of his cock and shot searing seed down the eager and willing throat of the second girl.
The other women in the room, lounging on pillows of their own, or wading in the lotus-petaled waters of the vast bathing pool, cast sultry glances toward their master. Each fervently hoped to be taken in her turn by the sultan. Aside from any carnal gain, to be rutted by Ozymandias was to obtain high status within the rooms and gardens of the extensive harem.
After his seed was spent, the sultan pushed the slave girl from his face, the other off his phallus, and he rolled on the cushions until he could grab a wineskin lying close by. With a bellowing laugh he pulled the stopper from the skin with his teeth, then guzzled the sweet red wine until it ran over his lips and down his chin and dripped from the curls of his blue-black beard.
Betimes, he thought, tis good to be the Sultan.
It was in such a blissful state that he was informed, by a hesitant and visibly shaken messenger who intruded upon the rather salacious proceedings, of the escape of the hostage Banturian princess from her inescapable prison tower.
By all reports, Ozymandias was highly displeased at the news, evidenced by the fact that he not only had the messenger killed but all the guards on duty during the time of the princess' escape were beheaded before the Sun rose.
Perhaps more telling, the incident so disturbed the young man that it put him off his harem activities for nearly a week.
:.
For nearly a week, he'd been stowed-away within the huge empty barrel of the water wagon.
Z'mbutu had found himself in many an odd and terrifying circumstance in his eventful life but he couldn't recall a predicament quite so uncomfortable as his current one.
He looked across the space which separated him and the most royal Crown Princess Kimya. He could just make out her seated figure in the gloom of the barrel, but not her features. The phosphorescent compound which he'd painted the interior's curved walls gave a feeble green light that did not well illuminate details. Over the years he'd discovered the method of distilling the paint from the bio-luminescent scales of the big-eye cavefish. They rode in an unending muted emerald twilight as the water wagon, part of a long caravan, rumbled and jerked along the great paving blocks of the Eastern Road, which lead away from Ozymandias' Forbidden City now hundreds of miles to the west.
"The air in here grows fouler by the minute," the princess said. Her tone haughty and unhappy. "And the odor of your unwashed body is an intolerable offense to the senses."
By Z'mbutu's count, that was her highness' one hundred and thirty-fifth complain about the stink of the confined quarters. He tried to take the carping in stride, after all, it was a fact that the air in the tank was foul. It was true that Z'mbutu was unwashed. It was also true that he could smell the stench emanating off the royal bitch equally as well as she could his own.
Leave it to a princess not to appreciate the fact that I suffer in the same full measure as she, Z'mbutu thought, disgruntled.
"My apologies, your grace. It shouldn't be much longer now, o' most patient one," he said, using the reassuring tone of the professional courtier. "We're nearing the oasis. Tonight you will be shed of this wagon in addition to my company."
The princess did not deign to reply, lapsing instead back into a sullen silence. In the normal course of events, the royalty and aristocracy of Banturia never spoke to commoners outside their immediate household.
It was just as well, Z'mbutu thought. After a week of being shut up with the high-born woman, her voice tended to grate mightily on his ears. Besides, for all her sundry criticisms, Kimya had yet to thank him for rescuing her from her inescapable prison. The blatant lack of appreciation rankled Z'mbutu's considerable pride.
People, he thought, just tain't no good, whatsoever.
As far as the alchemist was concerned, the escape, from its conception, planning, and through its execution had been both brilliant and flawless. The rescue had taken nearly eight months to engineer, but when it finally unfolded, it had been a thing of beauty. At least, in Z'mbutu's opinion.
He'd arrived in the Forbidden City during the year's first planting, after the river had receded back into its banks from its bi-yearly floods. The flooding had fertilized the land with the organic-laden silt of the long Blue River.
Z'mbutu had entered the city as a librarian's assistant, in the Sultan's Royal Library, as the well-meaning but n'er-do-well son of a Nubian mfalme. The persona he projected had been of a self-effacing, generous, and studious man. Inoffensive. No one saw him as a threat, indeed, he was considered a soft touch among the other junior librarians when it came to lending coin. And Z'mbutu was careful to keep it that way. He was frequently found in some out of the way corner of the Royal Library reading a scroll or book, never bothering to collect on his debtors. To the senior library authorities he was all but invisible.
Besides laying his plans to rescue the princess, Z'mbutu was actually doing research of his own. It was something he'd been pursuing for the last ten years of his life, that of finding the location of the legendary Well of the Jinns. The birthplace and lair of the fabled and dreaded jinnis. Within the library of the Forbidden City he ferreted, as only a scholar can, delving deep into the archives of the extensive house of scrolls, tomes, clay and stone-tablets.
The alchemist believed his months of diligence had borne fruit. He thought he now knew where the Well of Wonders, the headquarters of the Jinnis, was located.
"I shall make certain that my father and husband both hear of the extreme discomfort which I was forced to endure at your crude and incompetent hands."
