The Journeyer - Jennings Gary - Страница 107
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“Anyway, if you are with child, surely an experienced—surely a clever Romni juvel knows how to get rid of it.”
“Oh, yes. There are various ways. I only thought you ought to have some say in the matter of disowning it.”
“Then what are we quarreling about? We are in complete accord. Now, in the meantime, I have something for you. For both of us.”
As I dropped the last of my garments, I tossed onto the hindora a paper-wrapped packet and a small clay phial.
She opened the paper and said, “This is only common bhang. What is in the little bottle?”
“Chiv, have you ever heard of Majnun the poet and Laila the poetess?”
I sat down beside her and related to her what the Hakim Mimdad had told me about the long-ago lovers and their facility at being so many other kinds of lovers. I did not, however, repeat what the hakim had said when I volunteered myself and Chiv as test subjects for his latest version of the philter. He had looked dubious and he had muttered, “A girl of the Romm? Those people claim to know sorceries of their own. It could conflict with al-kimia.” I concluded my account with the instructions he had given me. “We share the drink from the phial. Then, while we wait for it to take effect, we set the hashish burning. The bhang, as you call it. We inhale the smoke and that exhilarates us and suspends our wills, and makes us more receptive to the powers of the philter.”
She smiled, as if quietly amused. “You would try a Gazho magic on a Romni? There is a saying, Marco. About a fool’s taking the trouble to lay sticks on the devil’s fire.”
“This is not some foolish magic. This is al-kimia, carefully concocted by a sage and studious physician.”
The smile stayed on her face, but it lost its amusement. “You said you saw no change in my body, but now you would change both our bodies. You scolded me for what you called pretending, but now you would have us both pretend.”
“This is not a pretense, this is an experiment. Look, I do not expect a mere—I do not expect you to comprehend Hermetic philosophy. Just take my word that this is something much loftier and finer than any barbaric superstition.”
She unstopped the phial and sniffed at it. “This smells sick-making.”
“The hakim said that the hashish fumes will quell any nausea. And he told me all the ingredients of the philter. Fern seed, dodder leaves, the chob-i-kot root, powdered antler, goat wine—other innocuous things, none of them noxious. I certainly would not swallow the stuff myself, or ask you to, if it were otherwise.”
“Very well,” she said, her smile becoming a rather wicked grin, and she tilted the phial and took a sip. “I will spread the bhang on the brazier.”
She had left most of the philter for me—“Your body is larger than mine, perhaps harder to change”—and I drank it down. The little room quickly filled with the thick, blue, cloyingly sweet smoke of the hashish, as Chiv stirred it into the brazier coals, meanwhile muttering to herself in what I took to be her native tongue. I lay back at full length on the hindora, and closed my eyes, the better to be surprised when I opened them to see what I had changed into.
Maybe I fell into a hashish-drugged sleep, but I do not think so. The last time I had done that, the dream occurrences had been mixed and swimmy and confused. This time, all the consequent events seemed very real and sharp-edged and happening.
I lay with my eyes closed, feeling all over my naked body the heat from the stirred brazier, and I vigorously inhaled its sweet smoke, and I waited to feel some difference in myself. I do not know what I expected: perhaps the unfolding at my shoulder blades of bird wings or butterfly wings or peri wings; or perhaps the unfurling of my virile member, which was already erect in anticipation, to the massive size of a bull’s. But all I felt was a gradual and unpleasant increase of the room’s thick heat, and then a definite need to void my bladder. It was like that common morning phenomenon, when you wake with your member in candeloto stiffness, but only gorged by vulgar urine, which makes it an embarrassment for employment in either of its normal functions. You do not then want to utilize it sexually, but you also dislike to disengorge it by urination, because in that erection it always pees upward and you usually make a mess.
This was not at all a promising beginning to my amatory expectations, so I continued to lie still, with my eyes closed, and hoped the sensation would go away. It did not. It increased, and so did the room’s heat, until I was annoyed and uncomfortable. Then a pain suddenly went through my groin, as it sometimes does when micturition is too long withheld, but so intensely hurtfully that, not meaning to, I let at least a brief spurt of urine. For another moment, I only lay there feeling ashamed of myself and hoping that Chiv had not noticed. But then I realized that I had felt no sprinkle on my bare belly, as I should have done if my erect organ had peed into the air. Instead, I felt the wetness down the inside of my legs. Unusual. A small puzzlement. I opened my eyes. All around me there was nothing but the blue smoke haze; the walls of the room, the brazier, the girl, all were invisible in it. I cast my glance downward, to see why my candeloto had behaved so oddly, but my view of it was impeded by my breasts.
Breasts! I had the breasts of a woman, and very fine ones they were, too: shapely, upthrusting, ivory-skinned, with nicely large, fawn-colored areole around tumescent nipples, the whole array shining with sweat and a trickle meandering down the cleft between. The philter was working! I was changing! I was embarked upon the most bizarre journey of discovery I had ever undertaken!
I raised my head to see how my candeloto accorded with these new additions. But I still could not see it, for I also had an immense rounded belly, like a mountain to which my breasts were the foothills. I began to sweat in earnest. It should be a novel experience to be a woman for a while—but an obesely fat woman? Maybe I was even a deformed woman, for my navel, which had always before been nothing but an insignificant dimple depression, was now a protrusion, perched like a little lighthouse atop my mountain stomach.
Unable to see my member, I groped for it with a hand. All I encountered was the hair on my artichoke, but it was rather more luxuriant and kinky than I was accustomed to feeling. When I reached down past it, I discovered—no great surprise now—that my candeloto was gone, and so was my cod. In their place I had the organs of a woman.
I did not leap up screaming. After all, I had been inviting and expecting a change. To have changed into something like a rukh would probably have been more of a shock and dismay to me. Anyway, I was confident that the change was not going to be permanent. But I was not entirely happy, either. The organs of a woman should have felt familiar enough to my inquiring hand, but they too had a disturbing difference about them. To my fingers, they felt tight and hard and hot, and nastily clammy from my involuntary micturition. They did not, to my touch, resemble the soft and darling and hospitable purse—the mihrab, the kus, the pota, the mona—into which I had so often put fingers and other things.
Besides that, to my self they felt … how do I put this?
I would have expected, if I were a woman being fingered in my private parts, even if by my own fingers, to feel some pleasurable sensation or an intimate tickle or at least a comfortable old acquaintance. But now I was a woman, and I perceived only the prod of fingers, and it made me feel only molested, and my only internal response was a surge of irritability. I slowly slid a finger inside myself, but it did not go far before it was blocked, and then the soft sheathing around it rejected it—I could almost say spat it out. There was something up there inside me. Perhaps a precautionary plug of sea salt? But my probing aroused in me more revulsion than curiosity, and I was disinclined to probe again. Even when I deliberately let a finger lightly flick my zambur, my lumagheta—that tenderest part of my new parts, as sensitive as an eyelash to any touch—I felt nothing but an intensification of my peevishness and a wish to be let alone.
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