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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