“They are doubtless safe. The Emir’s position between the two factions seems to be well-entrenched. The contesting groups will leave the palace mostly undisturbed, once they’ve conducted visits to determine that no undesirable is in hiding here.”

  “They would probably consider our foreign ladies undesirables at this juncture.”

  “I agree, Qaid. But no one will enter the harem. Once inside, they will be safe there. Even if someone should manage to visit the harem, Saida and Claire should, within the harem, be indistinguishable from the other concubines, especially since Claire’s hair and complexion are more Arabic now. That will also serve to conceal her true background.”

  “Then that’s as good as we can do, and it will at least be adequate for their safety. I doubt they’ll be happy about the situation, but we seem to be out of options at the moment. Let the girls know what’s happening. Then you may hand them over to the harem masters and return to the oasis, if it’s safe enough to do so.”

  “I will do that immediately, Qaid. I have only an hour or so before they enter.”

  “Then goodbye for now, dear trusted Agha.”

  When Ali had shut off the satellite phone, Elliot asked him, “Are you sure they’ll be safe in the seraglio?”

  “It’s probably the safest place in the sultanate right now, and definitely safer than trying to get them out under the current circumstances.”

  Still concerned, he asked Ali, “What will happen to them in the harem?”

  “Honestly? I really don’t know. I’ve never visited uncle’s harem, nor seen what’s done with the girls there.”

  “You’ve never been in the harem at all?”

  “No. My uncle wouldn’t let me. I think he feels I need to mature socially and in my sexual discipline before he’ll expose me to the secrets of the seraglio. He believes I’m something of a playboy.”

  “You are a playboy.”

  “Hmm … then it would appear that he’s correct.”

  * * * * *

  It was just after breakfast in the palace. Agha Rezai managed to talk briefly with a distraught Claire and Saida, before the Grand Eunuch came to lead them into the seraglio’s initiation and processing suite. The Agha watched as the huge bronze doors clanked loudly shut, enclosing his charges in the safety of the palace’s inner sanctum.

  The Grand Eunuch paused to lock the solid doors behind them. They’d entered the harem! Claire’s legs felt weak and Saida appeared about to faint.

  The eunuch Aziz was waiting for them at the end of the corridor. The hall was ornately decorated with off-white, gold-trimmed, plaster frieze work in complex, curving patterns. The floor was yellow and white marble tiles, arranged in a simple checkerboard pattern. Soft light filtered into the hall, but Claire couldn’t detect its source. The overall effect of the decor was to plunge a person back into an earlier period of Arabic culture and artistry.

  Aziz bowed to the Grand Eunuch, who nodded at Aziz and left them. They continued on to another apartment. Aziz told them to remove their pantaloons and halter tops and kneel on the floor, sitting back on their heels with their knees spread wide apart, and their hands, with fingers intertwined, behind their necks. This caused their breasts to be thrust forward, thus well-exposing both their breasts and intimacies.

  “This is the harem’s equivalent to ‘first position’ in ballet,” he said with good humor. “We call it ‘tulip.’ If you should not know what position to assume, this one will always suffice. It is also the one you will use most often. In it, you are like the open petals of a flower for the Emir or his select, close friends. There is another, similar, position, where your hands are positioned on your thighs, palms up. This is called ‘repose.’

  “Your life, henceforth, is intertwined only with the life of the seraglio. You may put all other cares behind you. You exist to serve the Emir. In return, you will live a confined, but highly-pampered life of luxury and, for the most part, physical pleasure – if you allow yourselves to embrace the harem’s norms. But it is still a couple of days before that will commence.

  “This will be a somewhat strenuous day for both of you, and especially for you, Saida. Since you two are designated to be a matched set within the harem, you’ll be made to look as much alike as possible, and, over time, be taught how to work together to please the Emir, whenever he calls upon you. You will also be exotics. In your case, that was to center around the two of you being more rounded, plumper, and full of figure than the other residents of the seraglio, who are all quite thin. We had been told you were both fuller of figure than you are, so we have some work to do there.”

  Oh God, they are going to fatten us up like a couple of prize farm animals, Claire thought sullenly. I just hope we can get out of here before that happens.

  “Saida, because of our discovery and, for the most part, approval of C’amila’s exotic piercings and lovely tattoos, they will also become part of your erotic attributes. So, Saida, over the next day or two, you will be matched to C’amila in that regard.”

  What does for the most part approval mean? Claire questioned in her thoughts.

  Saida, having heard that message several days ago and acutely shocked by the surgeon’s and jeweler’s examination of Claire and her at that time, still hoped being pierced and tattooed like Claire could be put off until they were rescued, when the requirement would become moot. “I understand what you will do with us,” she added meekly, “but I hope that you will wait a few days while I adjust to all the other changes here.”

  “Alas, no. That is not possible. Your adjustment to being here has been the idle time of the past three days. The Grand Eunuch has instructed me to move his plan along quickly, beginning now. Don’t worry; this is not the Middle Ages. You will be treated kindly and feel very little discomfort.” Aziz thought she feared the pain, and was trying to reassure her.

  Saida gulped, and said nothing further. Still, her mind worked furiously, trying to come up with an idea that would delay what now appeared to be the inevitable.

  A beautiful woman, heavily made-up in the ancient Egyptian style, wearing pantaloons cut away in the front to expose her intimacies and only an open bolero as a sort of very short, sleeveless jacket, entered with a tray of Turkish coffee in three tiny cups: porcelain ones for Claire and Saida, and a silver one for Aziz. Small cookies accompanied the coffee. More calories, Claire thought as she, nonetheless, reached for a couple. So did Saida. Their appetites were unrelenting.

  Both girls noticed the lovely flower apparently tattooed onto the harem girl’s lower abdomen. There was something else strange about her, but Claire couldn’t quite figure out what it was.

  In a few minutes, despite the coffee, both women began to feel drowsy. “I feel very tired already,” Saida said, her eyes drooping. “I think I need to rest for a while. Perhaps the Grand Eunuch won’t mind if we put off the day’s activities until tomorrow or the next day.”

  Aziz chuckled. “No, Saida. You feel tired because of the elixir we added to your coffee to help you relax. This is a mercy, you see, to enable you get through your ordeal comfortably.”

  Both women felt a ringing in their ears and a persistent – though not entirely unpleasant - tingling all over. Two assistants arrived with wheelchairs and helped Claire and Saida into them. They were almost unconscious as they were taken to a sterile-looking, white room, equipped like an operating theater, but with two beds. There was nothing Middle-Eastern traditional about the room. It could have been the treatment room in a clinic anywhere in the modern world. The assistants helped the incapacitated, currently uncaring ladies onto the beds and partially raised the head of the bed so they were half reclining, half sitting.

  Mbutu arrived with a tray on which were two sterile containers holding Saida’s breast implants. They were already filled to make Saida’s breasts the same size as Claire’s, once they’d been implanted. Via injection, Majid could make them larger, or remove gel to make them smaller, so that Saida and Claire would remain matched as they continued to put on weight, until they developed the plump bodies the Grand Eunuch desired for the Emir’s pleasure.

  Majid was a skilled surgeon. After an injection that put her deeply to sleep, he completed Saida’s breast augmentation in less than two hours. He could already see that the results would be excellent and, after healing, Saida would very closely match C’amila.

  Majid decided to let Saida rest quietly for a while, and he moved over to Claire.

  Claire was barely awake, still tingling. She couldn’t hear clearly above the ringing in her ears. Time seemed to stand still and rush ahead simultaneously. Already, she had no idea how long she’d been lying there. When she opened her eyes she saw the distorted vision of a familiar-looking Arabic man, dressed identically to Aziz, bending over her.

  “C’amila, do you remember me? I am the eunuch physician Majid.” She heard the man speak high-pitched, highly-accented English above the ringing. Who was C’amila? Oh yes, she was C’amila now. And she remembered Majid from somewhere far away in her mind. “I am first going to give you a lovely nose ring, to match all the other concubines in His Highness’s harem. It will be charming for you, of course.”

  “Thank you,” Claire mumbled. She was so deep into la-la land that she would have thanked him for cutting off her arm. Very distantly, she felt a cold Q-tip enter first one, then the other nostril. After a few moments, or an hour, she couldn’t tell which, nor did she care, she thought she saw, then felt, something like a pair of pliers being inserted into her nose, with a jaw in each nostril. She felt a pressure on her septum, then a very slight, almost unnoticeable pressure and sting, as the punch forced a hole through it. She saw, and thought she felt, Majid fumbling around with her nose. He was swabbing it with another liquid to stop the slight bleeding. Then Claire felt something slide through her still-numb septum as a 5/8 inch, 12-gauge, gold ring was inserted in her nose and snapped permanently shut.

  With bleary eyes, Claire looked into a hand mirror that Majid was holding up. She was now able to see what he’d done to her. She saw the pretty gold ring in her exquisite nose. How nice, her muddled mind thought at that moment.

  She heard Majid say something like, “hellwa.” The Arabic sound for something beautiful or lovely, which she did recognize. “Now you wear the ring of the seraglio. You were beautiful before it; now you are more so.”

  Majid returned to the still-sleeping Saida and repeated the procedure. She now also wore the harem’s signature ring in her pretty nose. She was so far under the influence of the narcotic sedative that Saida wasn’t aware of anything that had been done to her.

  Majid returned to Claire. He rolled a cart containing a tattooing gun and various capsules of dye up next to him, as he sat on a padded stool close to her bed. Claire felt another prick on her arm; she was injected with enough anesthetic to convey her even farther from reality than she had been. As yet, she wasn’t quite asleep.

  Aziz, acting as Majid’s assistant, fastened a strap over her chest, another over her stomach, just above her navel, and fastened her ankles to padded cuffs at the end of the bed. Her legs were strapped down above and below her knees. She lay there, almost comatose, uncaring.

  Majid dipped a transfer tattoo in alcohol and carefully positioned the two-inch tattoo an inch and a half below Claire’s navel. In half a minute, he removed it, leaving the outline of a zainab, a desert flower, on her abdomen. The flower was a hymenocallis, a spider lily, a recognized symbol of the Arab culture.

  The buzzing of the tattoo gun sounded in the small operating room, as Majid etched the symbol of the Emir’s harem onto Claire. He first outlined it in deep green and then filled in the white of the flower along with shading to make it appear almost three-dimensional. He was done in just over an hour – still an indeterminate time to Claire, who drifted somewhere south of consciousness and just north of oblivion.

  He tattooed the Arabic word for concubine:

  in dark green script, onto the top side of Claire’s right wrist. The word could easily be read by anyone holding up her hand, facing her. The color used was unique to this Emir’s seraglio. The dark green Arabic script tattoo would henceforth identify her as a member of the Emir’s harem, insuring her return to the palace, should she ever attempt to leave on her own, or be spirited away by kidnappers – a risk not unheard-of in the sultanate.

  After a quick lunch and a brief rest, Majid and Aziz moved over to Saida again. Still another injection kept her asleep while he tattooed an identical desert lily in the same position on her. Then he tattooed the same Arabic script on her wrist. He duplicated Claire’s sea horse on the left side of Saida’s back, in the same spot where Claire’s was. Next, he tattooed the intertwined initials, which the eunuchs thought were just an abstract design, on Saida’s right breast. Finally, he added permanent eyeliner to match Claire’s.

  By then, it was late in the afternoon. Majid decided to stop for the day and continue in the morning. After he applied a rapid-healing balm to their noses and tattoos and Saida’s implant incisions, Claire and Saida were taken back to their individual bedrooms in the induction apartment.

  Claire and Saida awoke early the next morning. Claire reached up to rub her face, to bring herself awake. She felt the pain in her septum and her fingers detected the small, delicate ring. She jumped up to look in the full-length mirror next to her bed.

  “Oh!” She exclaimed. To her, the little ring stood out as though it were ten times its actual size. She immediately hated it. It made her look and feel like a slave. Then she looked down and saw the desert lily tattooed below her navel. As she gingerly touched it with her fingers, she saw the Arabic script on her wrist. They’d permanently marked her and never even bothered to ask! She screamed and burst into tears, as she heard Saida shout even louder from the other bedroom.

  Saida continued to cry out. Claire, tremendously distressed at what had been done to her, knew she needed to get to Saida. Putting aside her own anguish for the moment, she rushed into the other room, where Saida stared, horrified, at her reflection in the mirror. The terribly distraught woman was holding her hands just above her chest, unable or afraid to touch the well-wrapped, but obviously enlarged orbs beneath. She was screaming in unintelligible Arabic.

  Before Claire could say anything to comfort Saida, Aziz burst into the apartment.

  “YOU BASTARD!” Claire exclaimed. What gives you the right to do this to us?!” Seeing that Aziz didn’t understand, she waved her hand over her nose and belly tattoo, held up her wrist, and then pointed to Saida’s bound breasts.

  Saida was sobbing and mumbling something in Arabic to Aziz between sobs. Aziz was answering her when Majid entered, just before Claire was about to grab Aziz and kick him in the balls she suddenly realized he didn’t have.

  “WHY?” Claire yelled at Majid. She knew he spoke enough English to answer her.

  Majid seemed shocked that the two women would be upset at all. “You merely wear the septum ring, the desert lily, and the harem wrist marker that all concubines in the Emir’s harem have. Surely you must realize that. And we added your seahorse and breast design, which is covered by her bandages, to Saida, so that she would match you, as intended. Her breasts have been enlarged to match yours.”

  Claire rushed at Majid who grabbed her in his big arms, holding her tight with only one, as she pounded his bare chest with her fists. His other hand reached behind him and pulled a syringe from his belt. Claire felt a sting in the back of her upper arm as he sedated her. She slumped quickly and he laid her gently on the floor before injecting Saida, who was being restrained by Aziz.

  “I was hoping they’d eat something before we began today,” Aziz lamented. They will have gone too long without eating otherwise.”

  “We’ll take them into the surgery and I’ll intubate them with a nasogastric tube so we can give them some nourishment while we continue their preparations. I didn’t expect this outburst. Tomorrow, when they awaken, we’ll be sure to have them restrained, until they calm down and begin to adjust to the little changes that have been imposed on them.”

  They called Mbutu, who helped them move the unconscious Claire and Saida into the operating room where they’d been worked on the day before. Majid prepped them with the feeding tube and a slow IV drip to keep them both hydrated and asleep.

  “I will commence with the excision of their inner beauty lips and clitoral hoods first,” Majid told the other two. “Then I’ll trim Saida’s outer lips to match C’amila’s and then pierce Saida’s beauty bud. Mbutu can finish with the other piercings on both concubines. Let’s begin with C’amila.”

  They strapped the comatose Claire down to the bed and elevated her feet and legs in gynecological stirrups, fastening them in place. Her genitals were well-exposed for the surgeon to begin his modification of the young woman’s intimacies.

  Though she was deeply unconscious, he injected the area around Claire’s labia minora with a local anesthetic, lest she even dream of the pain she would feel if awake. He clamped her petite outer lips back, out of the way, as the other two looked on with interest. Aziz had seen this before, Mbutu hadn’t.

  Using a scalpel and surgical scissors, he skillfully and, completely cut away Claire’s sensitive, arousing inner lips, her labia minora, carefully cauterizing as he went along. He continued up to and around the top of her clitoris, removing her clitoral hood as part of the procedure. When he was done, no trace of her inner lips remained to mar the area between her outer lips and around her clit, save the faint ring where they’d been attached. That would fade as she healed. The result would be as though her inner lips and hood had never existed.

  Her outer lips would now close together completely, like those of a small child, presenting a pleasingly closed cunt, devoid of protruding inner lips. The view of her clitoris would be barely obscured by her small outer lips when they closed; her clit ring would be visible where the lips met at their upper edge. The not-insignificant contribution of her inner lips to her sexual pleasure would be gone, but her clit would be more exposed to stimulation.