A Boner for War
The Vizier's Tent 08 July 1683
3 minutes read
The Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa stood stark naked in his tent, which stood raised in richly embroidered gold and green above the sprawling tent city of 130,000 Turks, Syrians, Greeks, Armenians, various Arabs, Wallachians, Kurds, Azeris, Bosnians, Serbs, Turkmen, Tatars, Bulgarians, vagabonds, thieves, righteous fathers, indignant scribes, petulant tailors and just about any other sort of person you could squeeze out of 2,000,000 square miles of empire. The tent stretched itself out like a very tired and pissed-off cat to the east of the crumbling walls of Vienna.
They had been in siege for a couple of months – which was about two or three months too long, in Mustafa’s considered opinion. Vienna would soon fall however, the army would get all the blondes and spoils they had been promised, and he would have a nice new summer home far, far away from the nagging, fat, unkempt tub of a Sultan in Constantinople.
He stood, legs hip-width apart, firm on his soon-to-be-land, which was currently hidden beneath carpet after silk carpet, and breathed in deeply. His hugely inflated lungs broadened his chest, motes of gunpowder hanging ever so slightly in the air like the faintest chiffon catching in the back of his throat. He looked at his penis hanging there, limp but very ready.
It only seemed to get hard when there was a war on.
That was generally okay for his job, he thought, but produced troubles in logistics for creating sons, and sons at this point in his life were almost as important as war. He had tried to increase the odds by having more than one wife, but protocol didn’t allow him to bring them on campaign. There was also the problem, he presupposed, of spending his life and legacy for the son who would inherit all his hard work, complain like the greedy little ingrate he would invariably be, and then probably have him killed. Still, protocol of a different kind dictated that he had to have a son and so, to get things going and otherwise up and ready, he had to start a war.
Mustafa sauntered over to a full-length, embossed silver mirror standing in one corner of the tent and stood there, contemplating his reflection. Sucking in his belly, he thought back to the time he had started this particular war.
Kara Mustafa had never really wanted to be a warrior or a person in charge of lands of warriors, as he was as Grand Vizier of the Warriors of the Divine Light, the Imperial Army of the Sublime Porte, the Ottoman Empire. However, having a father who had been vizier before him had set the course before he knew what a course even was and, before he knew it, Mustafa had been training with sword, spear, bow, musket and just about anything else you could put through a man since he had been old enough to dress himself.
Dressing himself was the issue, though. He had an affinity for silks which, given his family standing, wasn’t that much of an issue. What was, however, was how long he would linger on every stitch, detail, embroidered flower or leaf, and how he would stroke the fabric as one would one daughter’s hair; or a woman, her lover’s back.
Mustafa’s part in all this had started on an unusually chilly late August afternoon the year before. He had been brought to audience with the Sultan to discuss the coming campaign to take Vienna. It was to be a campaign that even Suleiman the Magnificent – a guy who actually deserved that title – a hundred years before hadn’t quite managed.
The conversation, with all the requisite elaborate metaphors and entendres of impending troop mobilisations and the moving of men, earth and heaven to get this damn Golden Apple they had been trying to get for over a hundred years, had already been making unsightly bulges and walking slightly uncomfortable for the grand vizier. As the Sultan blathered on about his flowers or hunting and the blossoming of the Porte through the west, Mustafa could already hear the cannon fire. If the Sultan saw the massive erection he had behind his powder blue brocade robes of office, he may not have that long to live as it wasn’t necessarily appropriate in that sort of situation.
He also knew he wouldn’t have long to live if he didn’t take Vienna.
And so, here he was, at war, just outside the walls of the Golden Apple, with riches and hopefully retirement just within his grasp, and his boners were beginning to become problematic. Slippery silk robes and the constant sound of artillery exacerbated the situation, and so, much to the consternation of his manservant, he elected to wear wool underpants. He wasn’t, however, wearing them now, and, as he traced his delicate fingers over the roses – tediously boring and Western – engraved along the border of the mirror, he was struck anew by how his erection resembled the national flower of the empire. Tulips, the flower of courtly refinement, the symbol of the Sons of Osman and their flowering civilisation, ripe with sublime beauty and opening towards Heaven. He meditated on that for a second as a bombardment started in the background.
He was now at war.
And hard.