So, by variously and adroitly touching, caressing, teasing, tasting, fondling, tickling, nibbling jade viands and flowers and petals and moons and stars and butterflies, I succeeded marvelously in making both the twins achieve their first peak of jiao-gou simultaneously. Then, before they could realize how much unabashed singing and thrashing they had done on the way there, and perhaps get mutually embarrassed, I did other things to urge them up again to the peaks. They were quick learners and eager to partake again of those heights, so I kept my mind off my own urgent yearnings and devoted myself entirely to their enjoyments. At times, one girl would be up among the peaks by herself, and her sister would regard her—and my ministrations to her—with a wondering and marveling smile. Then it would be her turn, while the other watched and approved. Not until both the girls were dazed and delighted with their new-discovered sensations, and well moistened by their own secretions, did I play them both at once to a veritable frenzy. While both were oblivious to everything but their ecstasy, I penetrated first one, then the other—easily and pleasurably for me and them, too—and continued giving myself into one and the other, so that even I do not remember in which order, or in which twin I first made spruzzo.

After that first and musically perfect triad, I let the girls rest and pant and perspire happily for a while, and smile at me and each other, until, when they had regained their breath, Biliktu and Buyantu were joking aloud and laughing at their earlier silliness about modesty and decorum. So then, free of restraints, we did many other things, and more leisurely, so that when one girl was not actively participating she could get a vicarious enjoyment by watching and assisting the other two of us. But I did not neglect either of them for very long. I had, after all, learned from the Persian Princesses Moth and Shams how two females could be thoroughly pleasured at once, and myself with them. The doing of that was of course far nicer with these Mongol twins, since neither of them had to remain invisible during the proceedings. Indeed, before the night was over, they had shed all vestiges of prudery, and were quite ready for their innermost dan-tian to be seen by me or each other, and for their and my pink places to do or be done to, in every variation I and they could think of.

So our first night together was an unqualified success, and the precursor of many other such nights, during which we became ever more inventive and acrobatic. It surprised even me: how many more combinations can be made of three than of two. But we did not always frolic in a threesome. The twins, otherwise so identical, were dissimilar in one physiological respect: they got their jing-gi, their monthly affliction, in a tidy alternation. Hence, for a few days every two weeks or so, I enjoyed an ordinary coupling with just a single female, while the other slept apart and jealously sulked.

However, young and lusty as I was, I did have some physical limits, and I also had other occupations that required my strength and stamina and alertness. After a couple of months, I began to find rather debilitating what the twins called their xing-yu or “sweet desires”—and what I called their insatiable appetites. So I suggested to them that my participation was not always necessary, and I told them about the “hymn of the convent,” as the Lady Ilaria had named it. At the notion of a woman’s manipulating her own petals and stars and so on, Buyantu and Biliktu looked as shocked as they had on our first night of acquaintance. When I went on to tell them what the Princess Moth had once confided to me—how she relieved and gratified the neglected women of the Shah Zaman’s anderun, the twins looked even more shocked, and Buyantu exclaimed:

“That would be indecent!”

I said mildly, “You complained about indecency once before, and I think I proved you mistaken.”

“But—a woman doing to another woman! An act of gua-li! That would be indecent!”

“I daresay it would, if one or both of you were old or ugly. But you are both beautiful and desirable women. I see no reason why you could not find as much pleasure in each other as I find in you.”

Again the girls looked askance at each other, and again that caused them to blush, and that made them giggle—a trifle naughtily, a trifle guiltily. Still, it took some persuasion on my part before they would lie down naked together, without me between them, and let me remain fully clothed while I instructed and guided their movements. They were tense and reticent to do to each other what they let me do with no reticence whatever. But as I took them through the nuns’ hymn, note by note, so to speak—gently moving Buyantu’s fingertip to caress Biliktu here, gently moving Biliktu’s head so that her lips pressed Buyantu there—I could see them get aroused in spite of themselves. And after some time of play under my guidance, they began to forget about me. When their small stars twinkled erect, the girls did not need me to show them how they could employ those darling protrusions to good effect on each other. When first Biliktu’s lotus began to unfold its petals, Buyantu needed no one to show her how to gather its dew. And when both their butterflies were aroused and fluttering, the girls twined together as naturally and passionately as if they had been born to be lovers instead of sisters.

I must confess that, by this time, I had myself become aroused, and had forgotten whatever debility I had earlier felt, and so doffed my own garments and joined in the play.

That happened quite often, from then on. If I came to my chambers weary from a day’s work, and the twins were itching with xing-yu, I would give them leave to begin on their own, and they would do so with alacrity. I might go on down the hall to Nostril’s closet and sit with him for a time, listening to his day’s gleanings of gossip from the servants’ quarters. Then I would return to my bedroom, and perhaps pour a goblet of arkhi, and sit down and take my ease while I watched the girls frolicking together. After a while, my fatigue would abate and my normal urges would come alive and I would ask the girls’ permission to join them. Sometimes they would mischievously make me wait until they had fully enjoyed and exhausted their sisterly ardors. Only then would they let me onto the bed with them, and sometimes they would mischievously pretend that I was unneeded, unwanted, an intruder—and would mischievously pretend reluctance to open their pink places to me.

After some more time, it began to happen that I would come home to my chambers to find the twins already abed, and doing vigorous jiao-gou in their fashion. They laughingly referred to their style of coupling as chuai-sho-ur, a Han term which translates as “tucking the hands into opposite sleeves.” (We Westerners would speak of “folding our arms,” but that gesture is done by Eastern folk inside their capacious sleeves.) I thought the twins were clever to adopt that term to describe the way two women make love.

When I joined them, it would often happen that Biliktu would profess herself already quite emptied of joys and juices—she was less robust than her sister, she said; perhaps from being a few minutes the younger—and she would ask to be allowed just to sit by and admire while Buyantu and I cavorted. And on those occasions, Buyantu would sometimes pretend that she found me and my equipment and my performance deficient in comparison to what she had just been enjoying, and she would laugh derisively and call me gan-ga, which means awkward. But I always played along with the pretense, and pretended to be insulted by her pretended disdain, so she would laugh more loudly and give herself to me with passionate abandon, to show that she had only been jesting. And if I asked Biliktu, after she had rested for a while, to come and join me and her sister, she might sigh, but she would usually accede, and she would give good account of herself.