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this, until he was done chewing his confection. “Loving someone is laying your heart bare to that someone and invite a dagger’s thrust.” He smiled, and carefully overlooked the disappointment in her eyes.
    Eminee held up the chainlet, inspecting her creation. “Some people do not always approach with a dagger at the ready, my husband.”
    “Then they are holding it behind their backs, my love.” Suddenly as playful as a youth, he abandoned his pipe, jumped up and snapped the chainlet from her hand. “Only
you
do not, and that is why I lay my heart bare to you alone, is it not?”
    “Do you, my husband. Do you really?”
    Uncomfortable at her suddenly intense stare, he turned away for a moment, holding up the beads to the light. “Of course I do. You hold in your hands the heart of the Lion of Hyperus, my lady. Many a woman would envy you. Many a man, too, although the first thing he would do would be to squeeze all life out of it.”
    “And that is why you greet all men with threats?”
    “Not always threats,
Güzelim
. Sometimes, I make promises. Sometimes vows. I even honor my promises and vows from time to time. It depends on the occasion.”
    “You believe in nothing, Alhi, no religion. So how can you vow? On what?” Eminee smiled, to soften her words. Alhi had hanged men for less insolence than this.
    But he merely laughed out loud at her innocence. “No religion? You wrong me cruelly, Eminee! I have more religions than any other man. I am a devout Muslim with Ottomans. A passionate follower of the carpenter’s son with the Christians. As orthodox a jew as any circumcised man when I am with the Jewish.”
    “That is what I meant.” Eminee threw caution to the winds. “A man of all faiths is a man of no faith.”
    “You are wrong,
Güzelim.
I do believe in something. I believe in good fortune. And that is my only true religion.”
    Alhi was twirling the worry-beads between his fingers, chuckling. “These worry-beads Eminee, made by your own loving hands, would be thought a wonderful talisman to a Tepeleni, and I thank you for making them for me. But my true talisman is
you.
Oh, no, do not argue.
That
is what I believe in! Ever since you became my wife, fortune has favored me, and you have shown me my true self, even when others have been at their boot-licking pains to hide it from me.” He laughed again, a roaring, boisterous laugh. “If I ever lost you, then I would know that fortune’s emissary was no longer with me. And then I should be lost.”
    And Eminee did not argue any further, for she believed that he was, for once, speaking the truth.

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X
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    A lhi’s harem danced and sang for his pleasure, they played the mandolin to help him sleep, and spent their days in readiness to spend the night in his bed, if summoned to do so. But they were many and he was one, so their life was a dull, boring life full of petty plots or conspiracies, gossip and vanity. Most of them had acquiesced in their fate and way of life, but there were always among them the ambitious ones. To them, the harem and their master’s bed were the battlefields on which they would chase their aspiration of bearing the Pasha a son. A son would make a harem girl a most favored wife, for sickness and misfortune could whisk away even the richest men’s sons without warning and a man knew no other safety in old age than plentiful and devoted sons.
    If Eminee saw this risk, she never acknowledged it. Alhi’s ever-growing reputation brought an unceasing stream of woman to his harem, and she took them all in as if they were long-lost daughters returning home.
    “A new girl has arrived from the Turkish regions,” she one day announced to Alhi.
    “Summon her. Let us see what she looks like first.” Alhi was standing on the balcony of his vast bedchamber and had been thinking of anything but women.
    Eminee ordered the harem eunuchs to bring the new girl in and remove her veil, so that Alhi could have a good look at her