Brother Makhoosh

Brother Makhoosh's name literally translated into 'uncertain', but brother Makhoosh was very certain about a lot of things. A man and a woman must make love to make a baby. A man fucking a man must be punishable by death. So some saw it as ironic that brother Makhoosh had young boys as concubines, often changing in less than a month.

When questioned about his young boys, brother Makhoosh would 'pshaww' and laugh it away. His war against homosexual infidels and his love of young boys was not contradictory for him. In fact, he saw his practices as a confirmation of the Holy Book. He saw it as a man satisfying a man, without having sex. The boys would satisfy, as he liked to joke in private, his holy staff, and he would sometimes poke around theirs. A man satisfying a man was not wrong -- it was the act of fucking that was wrong. When men satisfy men, they become independent of women, and are not dependent on them for satisfaction. Why give women the unnecessary leverage of pleasure when all they were needed for was making babies, brother Makhoosh argued. A man who lusted after women was a man not to be trusted, brother Makhoosh thought, he could compromise the ideals of the glorious nation and religion in his heat. Men could be trusted, and men satisfying men was not lusting. It was more like a business, or a get-together. Brother Makhoosh prided himself on comparing men satisfying each other with men going out to a coffee shop and getting hookah together. A hookah. Brother Makhoosh would never let it out, but he was really proud of the joke.

It was a good deal for the boys. Brother Makhoosh treated his former concubines rather well. Many of them would go on and rise the ranks in the army, and politics; many would become businesspersons, a few artisans; and a very few really naughty ones would turn out to be whores. Brother Makhoosh  never quite understood the logic of paying an older man to satisfy you when you could get young, lovely flowers with cheeks like apples for free, but he never brought the issue in the deliberations. Men had certain needs, and they needed to be satisfied. The boys would never go into academia of religion though, and they would never make it to the Council, but it was acceptable. He had brought them out of nowhere and poverty to the city, and had arranged acceptable living conditions for them. Without him, they would be dead as lowly conscripts, or be raped by their landlord; he had given them a future, a good life, and rarely but surely, pleasure. They were often thankful, and he was glad about that. Brother Makhoosh prided himself in making the world a littler happier.

Brother Makhoosh never imagined that his growing concubinage of nine-to-twelve year old boys from outside provinces would change the very structure of capital years later. The center had lavished upon itself since the great war of the people, always at the cost of provinces. Some provinces were higher in the food chain than others: brother Makhoosh's province, which was particularly rich in minerals did quite well. The capital, however, was much further ahead than even the closest province. Brother Makhoosh's rule on getting his boys was simple: no one from the capital, and no one from his province. Brother Makhoosh's rise in popularity was quite a coincidence-- he would go out to the provinces several times a year looking for young boys with milky skin and rosy cheeks and eyes like coal and lips like red chillies. The subjects, optimist and stupid as they always are, assumed that the honorable member  of the grand Council was there to see them. Every province he went to, every village he graced with his presence, he was welcomed wholeheartedly with goats and dances. Where native sons of province in the Council didn't go, brother Makhoosh went often. The people loved him. Brother Makhoosh's interests laid elsewhere.

Scouts would be sent, bargains would be made, promises would be given, and attractive young men meeting brother Makhoosh's requirements would set to the capital with brother Makhoosh, vaguely aware of their future. Young boys like to gossip, more than young women do for they are not burdened with the baggage of being seen as gossip-mongers, and the boys in the provinces and villages brother Makhoosh went to did. A brother of a friend's cousin's first uncle's son who was in the army now, had said that brother Makhoosh's man-part was green and thin like a garden-snake. No, no, someone else would claim, he had it in good authority that it was red and blue, and nothing like a garden snake at all. The third one would chime in that his uncle's son had told him he had a friend who knew it was shaped like a plum, and shriveled and brown like an apricot. They would then go research on each other to confirm who was the likeliest to be correct.

These boys, who went to the capital with brother Makhoosh and spent most of their lives there, would number 612 by the end, though brother Makhoosh would long have lost count by then. They would be the true representatives of their provinces in the capital -- the representatives in the Council didn't want to be seen as provincial, and the businessmen who  made trips to the capital had their own interests there. The women from the provinces in the whorehouses of the capital and brother Makhoosh's grown young men would form fraternal relations, those only beacons of hope for the lands no one thought or cared for.