Lavina, Canto 5: Anarolyni and the Harem (Part 1 of 2)
by Julian X  /  poetry  /  27 Sep 2007
It did not take Anarolyni long at all
to discover the harem and the nursery
in Guyesp's old palace:
one of the harem girls was found with Cesinare,
and the guards divulged the secret;
he must have smiled then.
In the harem, he found some two hundred and twenty-five,
including Cesinare's first child Juheimi,
Cesinare's youngest sister Anna,
and the five daughters of Cesinare's two sisters.
He found in the nursery some twenty-one,
including Guyesp's noble foreign wife Isabel
and Cesinare's young daughter Cesinia,
plus some twenty-five children of the dead king.
Anarolyni had his guards bind the mothers of the nursery
while other guards, and Anarolyni personally,
gutted the twenty-five children,
running thick knives from their genitals to their necks,
letting their intestines and entrails hang bloody
while they went on screaming
and their mothers, watching, cried.
The new moralist on the throne
even had Isabel and Cesinia identify
their doubly royal children
on the pretext that they would be saved.
Once identified, he not only had
their babies killed before their eyes
but had their bodies removed from sight.
He and his guards then raped the mourning mothers,
under instruction, under pain of death,
to indulge their most savage of desires.
Guards not present at the slaughter
were called in shifts to brutalize and rape
the twenty-one girls.
Since guards took as many shifts as they liked,
it took eight days for the rapes to end –
and all this occurred there,
right in that bloody nursery.
Some guards held babies' corpses to the girls
and mocked them or beat them while others raped.
The nursery had become a room of horror,
its walls splattered thick with baby blood,
its air thick with the screams of twenty-one girls
who had become a brutal harem
for the king's many hundreds of guards.
Thus did all the guard become complicit,
sharers of the king's secrets and his crimes;
under his command, they indulged themselves
even with sweet Isabel and innocent Cesinia.
Near the end of the eight days, the guards,
sure of their power, became even more brutal:
they began to mutilate the girls' bodies,
slicing their nipples and clits in half
while the other guards watched in groups and laughed;
they carved their initials into the girls' flesh.
The twenty-one, still so young,
all begged for death that wouldn't come
and said "even Hell cannot be as bad as this!"
At the end of eight days, Anarolyni had the rapes stopped.
The battered, barely living girls,
who had not slept for eight days
in that slaughterhouse,
who for eight days had been raped without cease
and tortured at the caprice of hundreds of men –
these girls were at last attended by doctors.
Messengers from Anarolyni apologized on his behalf,
attributing the horrors to exuberance
spurred by the change in kingly power.
The girls were dressed in the finest silk and velvet,
and finally brought to dinner with Anarolyni himself.
The king apologized profusely and at length,
saying that the men had run amok without rules
but that order had been restored.
As he spoke of the men, he gestured to the many
standing guard in the room – many of whom
the girls recognized by looks or smell or sound.
Anarolyni promised the girls their own houses
and great wealth. They listened, bruised and scarred,
chunks of scalp missing from some,
others suffering from concussions.
There, traumatized, they were served the finest meat
cooked in saffron. The twenty-one
had barely eaten for eight days of hell
and gobbled greedily their feast,
forgetting at the prospect of hunger's disappearance.
Anarolyni then told them that they were eating
the children of Isabel and Cesinia.
As the bruised girls reacted in horror,
some vomiting their first meal in eight days,
the guards approached and stripped the girls by force.
Anarolyni leapt upon the table and strolled back and forth
as the guards bent the stripped girls down,
jammed elbows in their backs to press them to the tables,
and tied the girls' arms behind their backs.
The king savored the battered girls' horror at knowing
their troubles had not ended
more than he might have savored any meal.
Their raw, nude breasts were pressed
into the fine plates that held
the well-prepared remnants of cooked children,
as the guards retrieved a number of thin, spiked maces
and passed them out among themselves.
As Anarolyni stood observing on the table,
he commanded that the guards insert a spiked mace,
some two inches thick without their backward-leaning spikes,
into the vagina of one girl at a time
as the girls were bent forward across the table.
Anarolyni knelt before one girl after the next,
pulling their hair back to watch their mouths go wide
as the mace forced its way inside.
He nearly climaxed to hear the screams
of the others awaiting their fate
or moaning from the sheer voluminous mass
and the spikes of the mace sticking out of their sexes.
The guards then passed out large knives of surgical sharpness
exactly as they had the maces before.
As Anarolyni watched and appreciated the screams and moans,
each girl was forced to stand, the motion tearing her up within,
and had her breasts sliced off, one by one,
then was pressed forward,
back into the plates of cooked tenderloin.
The other girls watched, glacing up from the table
into which they were pressed,
and thereby knew what was coming
to beg and plead and cry as their time came.
The severed slivers of breastmeat were placed
on exquisite platters that lined the center of the table.
By the time the last girl had her breasts sliced off,
some of the first were passing out from loss of blood,
and all conscious were crying plaintively for death.
Anarolyni, standing over them on the table,
promised to let any girl die
who swore she liked the treatment, the rapes,
the dinner, all nine days of the ordeal:
if a girl would swear she loved it
and make him believe it, he swore
he'd let them die. A few tried,
but Anarolyni said he found them unconvincing
and refused to let them die.
He then volunteered to let any girl die
who'd rape another with that other's mace,
thus helping that other to die.
Some agreed, others volunteered to be victims,
all weeping at wanting to die so terribly
that they would add to nine days of torture.
Yet many girls, dying already, did take this offer:
forced to keep the maces still within their own bodies,
these sad girls, battered for eight days straight
and mutilated towards the end – these sad young girls
stood breastless, their chests covered in blood
and a mace handle sticking out
of their own gaping, bloodied cunt,
so mutilated that it barely resembled a vagina,
and moved other girls' maces in and out,
making them squirm and cry
with what little energy they yet possessed.
And the girls performing the act cried too,
even knowing they were themselves dying
and aiding their friends in the only release.
Not all the girls took Anarolyni's offer, but by then
all the girls were near death anyway.
Without helping any girl to die, Anarolyni
and his men began to sodomize the girls
even as the mace stuck out of their vaginas,
stabbing the girls in the face, gouging out their eyes,
cutting off their noses, cutting off slices of lip as if from fish,
mutilating their faces as the girls began to expire anyway.
One guard observed with a laugh
that he'd been sodomizing his girl
for several minutes, cutting apart her face all the while,
before he realized that she was already dead.
The girls began to die, one by one,
generally bleeding to death, breastless,
with spiked maces still inside them,
their faces cut to ribbons, eyes
dangling or laying severed on the floor.
And thus did Isabel, the noble wife arranged for Guyesp, die
just two and a half years after her wedding day:
this daughter of Nicholas Hironamti, renowned
for her beauty as well as her blood, married at nineteen
and was broken, in the harem, in the months following;
she was loved maturely and deeply by Lavina;
she passed into Cesinare's possession,
and he had favored her until he grew bored;
to him, not her husband, she bore a child
and lived in the nursery
until she saw her child gutted before her
and spent eight days of rape and mutilation,
until that dinner at which she and others
ate her own incestuous child
and where this noble Hironamti girl
had a spiked mace inserted deep inside her,
where this famous Hironamti had her breasts cut
and placed on a platter before her, where this heralded Hironamti
was sodomized and had her face cut to ribbons
as she bled to death, inside and out.
Guyesp, who formed the harem to avoid the trap of marriage to her,
who had her beaten and humiliated and broken,
would have wept to see her end thusly.
And Cesinare, while more brutal, had loved her in his way
and favored her for a time, as his brother's wife,
dead to the world and thus entirely his;
even in his vicious moods, he too would have wept.
And thus did Cesinia, beautiful youngest daughter of Cesinare, die too,
having been thrown at thirteen into her own father's harem,
having been enjoyed by her father in the same bed
with her own sister Juheimi, and
having birthed a child at fourteen from her father's seed –
the same age at which she later died
in the manner I have just related.
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