From Pearl Hall, the central chamber of the harem, Narcissus the Great Black Eunuch heard commotion. He moved through the vestibule as fast as his opium-ravaged bones allowed. He came face-to-face with Rebekah. He glared at the guards, gazed at Rebekah, tried to decipher the cause of the tension. He controlled the urge to strike the men out of his way and send them directly to the penitentiary. “The bundle woman,” he screeched, as though for the last few weeks he had not been courting her in his every dream.

Since the day Rebekah had rested her hand on his thigh and aimed her luscious eyes at his crotch, he had sunk into her net, and had begun to encourage the impossible fantasy that she might one day bring back the feelings he had once had as a young boy. Now, as her veil slipped off her head and her glistening lips parted, he felt such vigor he itched to touch himself to ascertain that his organ had not grown back. He dismissed the guards with a wave of his hand and led Rebekah through a vestibule of glazed-tile walls painted with images of soldiers with childlike faces. They moved toward the inner quarters and the remotest part of the palace. He stepped aside to let her enter Pearl Hall.

Brushing against him, she lingered on the threshold. “If you press your ear to my chest, you’ll hear the gratitude in my heart.”

“Go in!” he ordered. “Before I change my mind. And don’t forget you’re the first Jewish bundle woman to pass through these doors.”

The partitions opened into a world of bright colors, snatches of sun-starved flesh, and husky whispers of lounging sultanas. The bodies seemed entangled into a blend of brocade and satin and pale skin glancing through lace. Rebekah tried to separate the whole into comprehensible parts.

Of the three hundred and sixty-five sultanas who resided in the harem, many were present in Pearl Hall. Women napped in each other’s arms; some shared a single hookah pipe held between the plump thighs of a sultana who sat cross-legged in the center; some checked their complexions for blemishes; others laid their heads in generous laps to be caressed, and their hair braided.

Numerous small girls, dressed as women, scurried around.

No boys roamed the hall. Why? It was customary for boys to remain with their mothers until they started their tutoring.

Was it possible that with all the sultanas available to him, the Shah had not fathered a single son?

Rebekah’s gaze settled on two women. One sat on a dais in the center and above the rest, her body spread out in lazy folds. Her thick brows, drawn from one temple to another, were raised like the wings of a lark. A dark mustache adorned her upper lip. The Bibi Sultana, Rebekah thought, the Shah’s mother. The other woman, tall and lanky, with a face as round and as pale as a moon, knelt in front of the Bibi Sultana, offering the older woman sherbet, arranging her full skirts, and fanning her with peacock plumes. Was this the Bibi’s favorite, or the present favorite of the Shah? Rebekah reminded herself to watch out for these women.