SHEIK OF DESIRE, CHAPTER 10
"The Mountain of the Stars"
By Tommyhawk1@AOL.COM
Pavel did pay attention to the Harem Master's words, though he found little of use in what was said. He did find, due to a careless question of his own, that this Harem Master was actually not the true Harem Master, but was a servant of the Sultan's brother, Hassan bin-Hadid, who was rarely seen and not interested in his official harem duties, so this servant was left unsupervised and virtually independent in his actions. One duty Hassan could not shirk or delegate to his agent was the protection of the new arrivals prior to the blessing of their marriage at the mosque; ergo, Pavel was to spend the night with Hassan and the true marriage would begin tomorrow.
The Harem Master's lecture was followed by dinner, at which Jethro and Jassem were treated as equal guests; as a special privilege of the Harem Master and by dint of their marriage, it appeared. Jethro seemed enthralled and kept asking all sorts of questions about the harem, how it was laid out, where the servants slept, how they kept out unwanted guests and so on. Pavel didn't get it, and Jassem seemed bored, but Jethro kept up the stream of questions until the Harem Master was getting visibly tired of the questions.
The Harem Master ended Jethro's queries by turning to Pavel during a brief break while Jethro was drinking. "It is time now for you to go to the Sultan's elder brother, so that he may adjudge your worthiness of being Mahmoud's husband."
"He gets a veto?" Pavel thought he saw a way out.
"Of course." the Harem Master said, and then, seeing the light in Pavel's eyes. "But he is more interested in the stars than in the things on this world. I think he will find you worthy after a very brief conversation and then return to his star-watching. The Sultan's other husbands have reported as much to me."
"Oh." Pavel said. Well, it was worth a shot.
"My servants will show you the way." the Harem Master rose and so, perforce, did they. Pavel followed the servants and Jethro stepped up beside him. "Did you get all that?" he whispered out of the side of his mouth.
"Get all what?" Pavel said.
Jethro looked exasperated. "The details of the house layout and the disposition of the guards at night!" he said. "So we can escape!"
"Oh." Pavel realized his blunder. "Yeah, I was listening, but I kind of lost track."
"It's a cinch we won't be able to go down the sides of this, uh, outcropping we're about to go up." Jethro pointed out. "We'll have to come back through the palace. At least watch the trail now with an eye to where we can hide and where they put their guards."
"Right. Sorry." Pavel did and all he saw was a hopeless situation. Three guards were at the foot of the trail they had to climb. The staircase up the small mountain outcropping was straight, broad and even. Hiding places? What hiding places? They'd be as obvious as a Slan at a wedding orgy! He would have pointed this out to Jethro, but two of the guards had flanked him, pushing Jethro back to walk behind him, and he was thus kept silent until they made it up the Observatory steps. Pavel saw and felt the omniprescent mist release him the way it had on his descent into the valley of Connobar after his capture during the Sperm War; it could not climb this particular piece of the mountain.
Pavel had to admire the craftsmanship. The roof, though not overly large--perhaps some twelve feet in diameter--was hemispherical and made of what appeared to be a single piece of clear glass. Yet above it was a smaller outcropping reached by a ladder, and it was here that Pavel saw a figure hunched over a peculiar device. The figure turned, saw them, and began to descend the ladder. Halfway down, the abrupt darkness of sunset came on.
Inside the observatory building, Pavel saw that this room was actually a living quarters. One section held a rumpled bed, another had a table which held food of differing qualities, from fresh to rather decayed, the pillows were dirty and disarranged. The ceiling was more of an affectation than of any real use, it seemed.
The door at the other end opened and in walked the owner of the premises. You could tell he was Mahmoud's brother, but he was quite a good deal older than Mahmoud, gray hair and deeply lined face. But the face was friendly.
"Sheik Hassan bin-Hadid, we present to you your brother Mahmoud's third husband. Is it your will that this marriage be validated by your family?" one of the guards said formally.
"We shall examine this one carefully and report to you in the morning." the man said while leering at Pavel.
Pavel sighed. Well, he'd had uglier lovers than Hassan, though rarely one so dirty. He looked around the room with a vague disgust; his fathers, both trained in military neatness, would never have allowed a place to get this filthy!
Once the guards were gone, Hassan slumped and seemed to add years to his figure. "Ah, make yourself comfortable, young man. There's food over there, though you'd better pick carefully among it, it's been a while since I had a servant come up here and clean this place."
"I noticed." Pavel said.
Hassan just chuckled. "A bold one, I see. Most of the ones the guards bring up are too busy trying to gain my favor to be so rude."
Pavel reddened. "I didn't mean...."
Hassan cut him off. "Not at all. You're right, this place is a habitation fit only for pigs. But I'm so busy with my work that I let it go more than I should."
"May I serve my Master and you, Sheik Hassan, by cleaning for you?" Jassem offered.
"Eh? No, no, I'd never find anything again. Just make yourselves comfortable for the night and leave me alone to do my work. I work nights and sleep days, so you can have the bed."
"What do you do?" Pavel asked.
Hassan looked at him. "Do you really mean that?"
"Yes." Pavel said. "You watch the stars. My fathers were both star-travelers, and they talk about traveling in space. They make it sound nice."
"Your fathers were travelers in space?" Hassan became excited. "Well, then, young man, won't you come up to my observation platform and tell me what you think of my discoveries?" Hassan turned around and left them behind, still talking. "Everyone laughs at me and won't listen when I tell them the importance of what I'm learning here. Nobody listens, but you..." but he was out of hearing range.
"Better go with him." Jethro advised. "We'll wait until shortly before dawn to make our escape anyway. Give the guards a chance to get sleepy, or horny, or both."
"I'll leave you two alone, so you can have a honeymoon, then." Pavel grinned.
Jethro frowned, then turned his eyes over to Jassem, who was taking on the unsavory task of sorting out the food on the table, most of it going into a pile to be discarded. "Well, I can't say it's how I planned to pick my husband, but I could have done worse."
Jassem turned and smiled shyly at them.
"I'd better go before Hassan figures out he's talking to himself." Pavel said.
Pavel made it out, and found Hassan waiting for him at the foot of the ladder.
"There you are!" Hassan said. "Sorry, I'm just so excited. Your fathers, which star did they come from? Can you point to it?"
"No." Pavel admitted. "They say that their ships were pulled along a rather long distance, and neither of them knows the direction they were pulled."
"I didn't think so. It was the same with my own people nearly a century ago." Hassan said. "That's part of my discovery. Come up and I'll show you."
Pavel followed him up the ladder. Hassan moved sprightly for his age.
"First, the sun. Have you noticed the place where the sun sets?"
Pavel remembered his shock of the prior evening. "Yeah, the sun. What happens to it? It's like it just goes out."
"It does just go out!" Hassan said gleefully. "I've observed it do so numerous times. A shame it turned off while I was coming down the ladder. I try to watch it each night, so I can track the movements better. But I can extrapolate for tomorrow."
"But what happens to the sun?"
"Come up and look at what I have and I'll explain."
Pavel went up and saw that the contraption he had seen dimly was an array of lenses which projected onto a screen.
"This screen is looking directly at the sun's last position before it turned out. Can you see anything there?" Hassan asked him.
Pavel looked closer. He could make out easily enough the stars on that screen, lighter patches quite visible. But they were spaced evenly around.
"No. It must have gone over the horizon."
"Not this quickly." Hassan said. "That's the horizon there." he pointed to a dark line at the bottom.
"So where is the sun?" Pavel asked.
"That's the question." Hassan said. "And I have the answer. Want to hear it?"
"Yes."
"The sun isn't really there." Hassan said, and watched his face.
"That's silly!" Pavel said. "It's there all day long."
"Yes, but it's not there when the day is done." Hassan said. "I hope one day to make an excursion into the mountains, and set up so I may observe watch a sunrise. Tell me, the horizon, is it flat or mountainous in the direction of sunrise?"
"Flat." Pavel grinned. "There's an ocean to the east of us."
"East, yes." mused Hassan. "You're sure of that?"
"Sure." Pavel said. "Sun rises in the east."
"Well, if you define it that way, I suppose so." Hassan said. "But I have measured the turn of our planet, and I can tell you that we have a motion retrograde to that of the Earth. Therefore, defining east and west by the directions our mother planet turns, and assuming that the direction of the nearest axis is to the north of us, then the sun here rises in the west and sets in the east. Your home is not to the east of us, it is to the west."
"Okay." Pavel shrugged. "I guess so."
"Doesn't bother you yet?" Hassan said. "I just told you that our sun is a ghost of unknown properties and our world spins in a backwards direction, and you are not yet impressed?"
"No, no, it's interesting." Pavel said. "I mean, the sun's so bright you can't look at it, so I hadn't really thought about it. The trees keep us from seeing much of a sunrise, though I'm told it rises from the ocean just like it always does. The mountains make sunset something nobody has ever seen. I was surprised to see the sun just go out like that, but..." Suddenly, the importance of that struck Pavel. "What is the sun then? It's not a star? It's got to be a star!"
"It is a star, it is just not a nearby star. The light of our sun appears to be a gift from Allah." Hassan said. "Its light is drawn in from somewhere else. I have been watching the other stars, trying to identify which star it actually is, whose light is being sent to us from so far away. Once I know that, I can try to determine why we receive its illumination here. That was when I made my next discovery. How many stars are in the universe?"
"Gosh, I don't know." Pavel said. "Billions and billions of them in billions and billions of galaxies...."
"No." Hassan interjected softly.
"What?"
"Look up at the stars in the sky. That constellation there of four bright stars."
"I know them." Pavel smiled. "My fathers and Uncle David and Uncle Lukas named them after themselves before I was born."
Hassan smiled. "My people have given them other names, but that is not important. Notice the stars and where they are, and how bright they are. I am going to move my apparatus around to display those stars on my screen. Stars have different brightnesses, yes? Stars which are too faint to be seen by the unaided eye can be seen if you draw in enough light, yes? My apparatus draws in one hundred times more light than the human eye, and focuses it. We should see a hundred times more stars this way, yes?"
"Yes." Pavel agreed.
"Notice the stars and be ready to compare." Hassan continued with his lenses and Pavel looked at the stars, uncomfortable. What was Hassan talking about?
After a short time, Hassan said. "When I put this lens into its nest, you will see the stars on the screen. Are you ready to compare the sky with the screen?"
"Yes." Pavel said.
Hassan dropped the lens and the blur on the screen became points of light.
Pavel stared and his jaw dropped open. There were no new stars visible! The ones he saw with his eyes were there, bright ovals, but no other stars!
"There's only the stars in the sky visible." Pavel said. "Is it galactic dust?"
"I don't know." Hassan said. "But I think not. I think that we no longer live in the universe of our ancestors. This is another, and smaller universe. I have counted, over twenty-five years, the number of stars in the sky. There are exactly 817 stars and no more, all of which may be seen by the unaided eye. My apparatus is useless, therefore, to the discovery of more stars. None of the stars we see is the star whose light we see in the sky by day, which is our sun. None of these stars are more than twenty light-years away from us, so they are visible though quite small in size. When Allah brought us here, he took us completely away from the worlds and the stars of our ancestry, and the star charts and books of astronomy that I have collected at great expense and effort are worthless except as historical relics or general reference works." Hassan gestured to a parchment on an easel. "I have drawn the night skies anew and now I search for the place where our forefathers came through, voyaging from our ancestral universe into this new one. This is the important work I do, while my younger brother administers Medina Jadeed for me." Hassan looked at Pavel, smiled. "You do understand, don't you? I am grateful. It has been so lonely for me here. Will you tell the others what you have learned? Try to find me students to teach, to carry on my work when I am gone?"
"I'll be happy to." Pavel said. "And when you're ready to make that trip to my valley, my family will be happy to help you and talk to you, I'm sure."
"You had better go back and rest, then, for tomorrow Mahmoud will take you to the Mosque of the Blessing of Allah." Hassan said. "Think of what you have learned. Later, if you like, come back and I will show you more."
"Thank you." Pavel descended the ladder. He stopped at the door to the quarters and looked up at the lone figure, outlined against the stars, doing his own battle alone against the vast mysteries of the universe.
He started to enter, and then heard the sounds. Jethro and Jassem were making love. Well, it WAS their honeymoon night. He'd give them some time alone yet. He went around the building to the side, found a quiet place to sit, a rock that looked out over the plains. Pavel looked the "family constellation" and mused. Eight hundred stars? Twenty light years? Was that ALL? Was the universe then, despite what his teachers and fathers had said, really small enough for the mind to comprehend? And is that frightening, or comforting to know?
He looked at the sky above him and was deep in the contemplation of it all when suddenly rough, grimy hands clutched over his mouth while another arm circled his chest and pinioned him.
He was about to struggle, bite, kick, scream, when he heard, "Quiet! It's me, Commander Sachsen!"
Pavel froze.
"You'll be quiet?"
Pavel nodded.
"Good." Sachsen released him and Pavel turned to look at him. His uniform, usually so tidy, was torn, grimy and in disarray. He had lost his cap someplace, and his T-shirt somewhere else, his jacket was open, exposing his ample chest. His boots were there, but tied by their laces to hang from his belt, he was barefoot, kneeling behind Pavel.
Pavel started to speak, but Sachsen placed a dirty finger over Pavel's lips, shushing him. His eyes bored deep into Pavel's, his chest heaved from the exertion, his lips open.
His chest heaved, he swallowed hard and...and he seized Pavel tightly. His lips pressed against Pavel's own!
There was the grit of dirt on Pavel's cheek from Sachsen's own. Pavel's body, so recently cleaned, was touched by the filthy hands, stroking him. He was wearing the typical garb of the harem, a brief vest and loose pants, there was nothing that prevented those heavy, grimy hands from playing over his body at their will.
Pavel looked up, around, they were alone, and reasonably private. Unless Hassan came down from his perch and around the house, they would not be seen. "Take it out!" he hissed at Sachsen.
Sachsen tugged at his pants and stood up, the proud pale cock standing free in the night air, the big officer looking like some extraordinary icon of military pride and male lust. Pavel dove and took the cock in his mouth. It fit inside wonderfully; a welcome warmth of musky masculinity, heavy with the exertion of his body and the added scent of raunchy male rut.
Those hands entwined themselves into Pavel's hair, transferring their load of griminess into his clean hair. Pavel drank in the scent of his rescuer, the salty sweat, the deeper effluence of male pheromones that were pumping themselves into the air, until Pavel was surrounded by the aura of pure rut, awakening an animal nature that lurks deeply inside, released now to hold sway over the body for a time.
Sachsen's cock pulsed in Pavel's mouth, and he stroked it as well as he could. Sachsen grunted and thrust his hips imperiously at Pavel's mouth, forcing him to faster and faster actions. Finally, with a snarl of impatience, he pulled Pavel's face away from him, holding him by the hair on his head in one firm fist, and Pavel looked up into the soldier's need, staring back at him like a pure presence, and he knew what was to happen next.
He let Sachsen lower him to the ground and pulled at his pants, tugging and kicking them free. Commander Sachsen hovered over him, his big chest inflating and blowing in large motions, and then Sachsen's hand reached down and brought up that wonderful Connobaran cock of his. Hawking spit onto his palm, he quickly rubbed it over his cockhead and then lowering his body onto his free hand, he guided that hard, soldier's cock towards Pavel's anus.
Pavel felt the inadequately lubricated cock as a wad of hot flesh pressing against him, but he knew that only the last vestiges of civilization were holding back Sachsen who was floundering in his need, he gritted his teeth and took it into him as Sachsen pushed in, accommodating the gray-clad Connobaran officer as quickly as his tender body would let him.
Grunting softly like an animal, Sachsen pushed into him, his teeth clenched tight and his handsome face distorted by his lust and his need, his eyes blazing in the darkness as with a palpable light of their own.
Finally, the thick shaft was inside him and Pavel relaxed. At least, with Connobarans, this was all that was required of him. But Sachsen's cock pulsed rapidly, and then Sachsen seemed discontent with this as well, and his hips began to move back and forth, slowly, then more rapidly.
The strokes were fire within Pavel's bowels, it was like he was catching the fire of Sachsen's need, as if it were within Sachsen's sweat that dripped onto him in lumps of cold fire, to burn alight anew as they contacted his skin. He clutched Sachsen's hips with his feet and fucked back at the big officer, seeing the man before him as white within gray, and all male humping upon him, taking him, owning him!
Grunting eagerly, Sachsen pounded him faster and then Pavel, as he felt his own need rise in him, heard Sachsen holding back from frenetic groans, choking them back out of the need for silence, and Pavel felt the hot salty jizz spray into him.
His ass was on fire! The heat of the cock, the heat of the sperm spraying into him, it struck alight the very core of his soul, and he groaned and his own seed flashing out of him, spurting onto the grimy chest over him, washing it off Sachsen to land on Pavel, come and dirt, sweat and oils of the body all mixing onto him, befouling him utterly, and yet inflaming him more.
Sachsen fell onto him, heavy and dirty and feeling absolutely wonderful, as Pavel felt that strong chest heaving upon him, lifting the big body up by the sheer force of the bellows within, pressing him down and squashing his will perfectly flat.
Sachsen caught his breath with a few desperate gulps, and then rested on his forearms.
"Sorry about that." he said softly. "I had to pass right under this large vent of the mist to get here. No wonder they weren't watching my approach from that direction. I thought I'd go mad for a while."
"What are you doing here?" Pavel whispered. He held Sachsen in place on top of him, he didn't want to release the big gray-clad warrior just yet. He felt too damned good!
"I'm trying to save you! Rashid told me where you would be taken and of Mahmoud's plans for you. Question is, am I in time to keep you from being dipped in those Waters of Life?"
"They're taking me there tomorrow."
"Then we have to get you out of here, right now." Sachsen looked around.
"Jethro's inside the building." Pavel said. "With Jassem."
"Who's the old man up there?"
"Sultan's older brother. And a nice old guy."
"Ought to take him out anyway, keep him from sounding the alarm. Anyone else around?"
"Not up here." Pavel said. "It's considered to be escape-proof."
Sachsen gave a crooked grin. "It nearly is. If I hadn't been an experienced rock-climber, I never would have made it up here." Sachsen sat down on the rock Pavel had vacated and put his boots back on, pulling the socks out of his boots' toes where he had stashed them.
"We can't climb down?" Pavel looked over the edge, not far from the rock. "How did you climb up that?"
"It wasn't easy." Sachsen admitted. "But I saw them bring you up here. Soon as night fell, I started climbing along the outer wall of the city and then up here. Fortunately, nobody expects you to be stupid enough to try this stunt. And they're right. You're not escaping that way, I'd hate to have to go back down it in the dark. Going up is easier, you can see where you're heading. Down, you have to feel about with your toes and glances down, in the dark, you'd make a misstep for sure."
"So what do we do?"
"Why don't you take the crevice around my observation point?" Hassan's quiet voice said to them from the darkness nearby.
Sachsen sprang to his feet.
"Be calm, young warrior, I am not your enemy here." Hassan said smoothly. "You will not be the first to escape from this tower and me utterly baffled at how you accomplished it. They all think I'm half-witted, you know."
Sachsen must have believed him, for he briefly turned his attention to pulling up and fastening his trousers. "Where is this way down you mention?" he asked. "Let me see it."
"Certainly." Hassan said. "Shall we summon your friends as well?"
"Yes, we all leave here." Pavel said firmly.
"Might be better to get you to safety first and come back for the others later." Sachsen said. "Easy enough to do when we have the angels to bring in added forces."
"No, you had best all escape tonight, if you are going to." Hassan said. "Come, I will show you the way."
Pavel put his head in and saw Jethro and Jassem on the bed, intertwined, comfortable and asleep. He called them awake and they got up, got dressed and came out.
Sachsen regarded Jethro's attire. "Where's your uniform, soldier?"
"They're washing it, I'm told." Jethro said, standing proudly erect. "This is what they gave me."
Sachsen looked at him, then smiled. "Good to have you back again, Private Jethro. It's been quite an adventure for you, hasn't it, son?"
"Yes, sir." Jethro said.
"Now, if you'll show us this other way out, we're ready to look." Sachsen said to Hassan.
"This way." Hassan led them to his tower, around it towards the mountain. "It is possible for an athletic person to go down by this route. I would not dare with my old body to try it. But others have gone down it."
Pavel looked down. It was rugged, a sharp "V" of rocks and crevices.
"It will do." Sachsen said approvingly. "But we'll need to start now if we're to have time to get away from view before dawn. Trouble is, will you sound the alarm once we're part of the way down?" Sachsen looked at Pavel. "Will he?"
"I don't know." Pavel admitted. "I've been lied to so many times since I got here, I don't know who to believe any more."
"We'll tie him up and leave him in his quarters." Sachsen decided. He looked at Hassan. "Better that way. Otherwise, we'll have seemed to escape from right beneath your eyes."
Hassan seemed resigned. "If you must, you must."
"He is the Sultan's elder brother!" Jassem was outraged. "We cannot dishonor him this way!"
"You have a better idea?" Sachsen turned. "Who are you, anyway?"
"I am the servant to Sheik Al-Fajr and the husband of Jethro." Jassem declared with dignity.
"Husband?" Sachsen was startled.
"They do those things quickly here, sir." Jethro said. "But he's telling the truth."
"Then he'll come with us, soldier." Sachsen said. "Get your...husband ready and let's move out."
"We'll need to carry some of the food if we are to travel." Jassem said. "I will fetch it."
"We'll need lights, as well." Pavel said. "Going down that will be rough enough in daylight."
"I have torches I can give you." Hassan said. "A few, anyway. They're around here somewhere."
"Let's take us all inside and get this party moving." Sachsen said.
A short time later, They were all wearing a small sack slung around their bodies which was filled with all the edible food in the place, as well as containers of water. Hassan was bound up on the bed, and Sachsen insisted on making the knots tight. Sachsen insisted this was to help the old man, give him a viable story about their escape without admitting his aid. It made sense to Pavel.
The torches they had gave a small light to see by as they started their flight down the crevice. As long as Pavel watched his footing carefully, he saw he would be fine. But the going was slow and the night was wearing out on them fast. And the torches would not last them through the night.
And come morning, the Sultan would be looking for his errant spouse, and this was the first place they would look when they found him missing.