The Snake Stone Read online

  Boyer seized on Yashim’s change of tack. The ambassador’s report was beyond his jurisdiction, but this was easy.

  “You are quite mistaken. This Madame Lefèvre, whoever she may be, has not been seen at the embassy,” he said crisply, mentally connecting himself with his coffee and a warm croissant. “Good day, monsieur.”

  He turned on his heel and strode off across the hall, leaving Yashim staring after him, a puzzled frown on his face.

  Either the little diplomat was lying—or Amélie had gone somewhere else, after all. She had disappeared into the great city as suddenly as she had come, taking her little bag and a head full of dangerous new ideas. Determined, she had said, to find out who had killed her husband.

  Yashim’s frown deepened. Ideas were dangerous, certainly; but men could be deadly.

  111

  AMÉLIE Lefèvre shivered as the door swung shut behind her.

  She set her lantern on a low shelf, opened the glass pane, and lit the wick with a trembling hand. The air was very cold.

  She held the lantern over her head, gathered up the hem of her skirts with her free hand, and began to slowly descend the spiral of water basins leading down to the mouth of the tunnel.

  At the bottom she stepped into the shallow water. Drops of condensation on the lantern threw whirling freckles of light deep into the tunnel, skimming across the rough brick walls to vanish suddenly in the black wings of her own shadow on the roof.

  She reached into her pocket and took out a small ball of white wax and a reel of black cotton thread. She softened the wax against the lantern and used it to fasten an end of thread to the opening of the tunnel, an inch or so above the waterline. She stood up and tucked up her skirts. Loosely holding the cotton reel in the crook of her fingers, she entered the tunnel, paying out the thread behind her.

  At the first fork she veered to the right, without hesitation, but about five yards in she stopped to listen. The water sluiced softly around her feet. Instinctively she glanced back: the pressing darkness took her by surprise, and she swung the lantern nervously over her shoulder. A drip from the roof landed on the tip of her nose, and she jerked back.

  Calm yourself, she murmured, wading on. Concentrate on the detail. Roman bricks. A later repair, using cruder materials; perhaps builders had crashed through the roof in some remote age. The Turks seemed to have rediscovered the secret of Roman cement, she thought. The walls were bare; nothing could grow down here.

  Amélie Lefèvre. An archaeologist. Like my husband.

  She began to count her steps.

  She counted a hundred, two hundred. At five hundred paces she began to feel the weight of the city pressing down on her, slowly sealing off the distant mouth of the tunnel. She stopped counting.

  This is the Snake, she told herself. It has stood firm for a thousand years, a lost feat of Byzantine engineering.

  I’m in good hands: Byzantine workmen, a Renaissance scholar—and Maximilien Lefèvre.

  She had read it all in Yashim’s book; the book her husband had hidden in his apartment. The book that Max had always meant her to find.

  The reel snagged in her hand. She looked down and took another out of her pocket. She tied the ends of the thread together, curved her fingers over the new reel, and went on.

  112

  A thought, a memory, was stirring in Yashim’s mind. He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes, oblivious to the people passing in the street.

  Amélie had vanished into thin air. The only clue to her plans lay in the book she had taken with her. Gyllius must have identified to Amélie—and perhaps, before that, Lefèvre—the location of the Byzantine relics.

  Amélie believed in their existence. They lay, she had said, in a hollow space beneath the former church of Aya Sofia. A crypt.

  The way to the crypt lay through a network of tunnels that ran beneath the city. Most of them were no bigger than rabbit burrows, but some were big enough to admit the passage of a man. One, at least, seemed to run from the siphon in Balat to the church of St. Irene on the grounds of the Topkapi Palace, where Yashim had seen its mouth. Close to where Gyllius claimed to have gone down beneath a man’s house and flitted through a cavernous cistern in the dark. A hollow hippodrome, as Delmonico had said: the Atmeydan, where the Serpent Column had stood for fifteen hundred years.

  Between Topkapi Palace, Gyllius’s cistern, and the Sulëymaniye Mosque stood one ancient building more famous than the others. Aya Sofia, the Great Church of the Byzantines.

  Yashim held his eyes shut tight.

  The waterpipe must lead to the Hippodrome.

  Gyllius would have realized that three hundred years ago: he must have guessed where the relics were to be found.

  And then he had left the city to go with the Ottoman armies to Persia. As if someone, or something, had frightened him away. Just as Lefèvre had been frightened, three centuries later.

  Men do not live for three hundred years, but ideas do. Memories do. Traditions do.

  The sou naziry had made the point himself.

  Yashim flung himself from the wall and began to run.

  113

  AMÉLIE stood at the lip of the tunnel with her lantern raised. Her eyes were shining.

  Gyllius had been telling the truth.

  She was standing a few feet above a vast underground lake. From its glittering black surface huge columns of porphyry and stone reared upward from their massive plinths, glinting in the lamplight until they were lost in the darkness overhead.

  Slowly she descended the steps until she reached the level of the water.

  She shivered involuntarily in the silent forest: columns as far as she could see, beautifully made, the pride of pagan temples from all across the Roman world. The Byzantine emperors had plundered them for this, the greatest cistern ever built, lost to the world and buried beneath the ground.

  She took another step, and the icy water closed around her ankles. She felt for the next step with her foot; the water reached her knees. There were no more steps. She let out a gasp of relief.

  She set the cotton reel on the step behind her. Gritting her teeth, she began to wade through the inky water.

  The relics were here, she knew it.

  Somewhere, among the frozen columns of antiquity, she would find the sign.

  114

  ONE hand outstretched, the other coiled loosely around the thread in which he had placed his faith, Yashim scuttled forward in the dark.

  Somewhere up ahead, linked to him by the slenderest filament of cotton, a woman was advancing to her death. Whether she was brave or ignorant, Yashim could not judge, but the penalty would be the same.

  Grigor had talked about the city’s boundaries. Between faith and faith; between one district and the next; between the present and the past.

  But the watermen patrolled another boundary few people in Istanbul were even aware of: the frontier between light and dark. Beneath the streets, hidden from view, the pulsing arteries of Istanbul.

  The dead, cold, dark world that gave the city life.

  And the watermen were prepared to kill to preserve their unique knowledge of that world.

  Yashim’s turban brushed against the low roof, dislodging a shower of mortar. Amélie had a lamp, he was sure of that, any moment he would see it.

  He glanced over his shoulder. For a moment he was confused, disoriented. Had he somehow doubled back—moving away from her lamp? For there it was: a dim brightening that came and went behind him.

  He shook his head. His eyes, in that darkness, were playing tricks.

  He kept going.

  115

  THE sou naziry blinked. He stooped and touched the ball of wax with his finger.

  The wax broke away easily from the stone. The sou naziry picked it up and felt the tug of the thread between his fingers.

  He put out his tongue and moistened his lips.

  He had thought, until this moment, that the job was done.

  The sou naziry pic
ked up his lantern and loosened the dagger in his belt. The dagger had a jeweled hilt and its blade was curved.

  The sou naziry picked up the line of thread and entered the tunnel.

  116

  AMÉLIE fought the weight of her skirts trailing in the water as she zigzagged to and fro between the great columns, tracing their cold outlines with her fingers, searching for the sign she knew would be there.

  Not five hundred yards away Yashim felt a change in the atmosphere of the tunnel, the dampness lifting as he blindly approached the cistern. He looked back: there was no doubt that someone was coming down the tunnel behind him now. He felt the faintest tugging of the thread in his hand, and saw the lamp swaying as it grew closer. Whoever it was could move faster through the cramped tunnel than he could. Someone practiced. Someone prepared.

  Yashim hesitated. Sooner or later, the man would track him down—unless he found some side passage where he could hide. But in the dark his chances of finding one were slim. And what if he did? What if he saved his skin—and the waterman went on to discover Amélie?

  He let the thread drop from his fingers. Without it he could move faster, trusting to luck that the tunnel would not fork again, or that when it did he would be able to retrieve the thread and find out which branch the Frenchwoman had taken.

  His fingers trailed against the walls. For several yards he felt the rough serrated brick beneath his fingertips and then, quite suddenly on the left side, his hand trailed through the thin air. Gingerly he traced the opening with his fingers. He slid one foot, and then another, into the gap. There was a step up.

  Yashim wasted no more time. He scrambled into the opening and up several steps, then flattened himself against the wall, and waited.

  He saw the darkness gradually dissolve.

  He heard the splash of the waterman’s feet as he ran through the shallow stream.

  Then the light was blinding and Yashim could see nothing at all, only the light and the sparkle of the light as it bounced from the curving surface of a steel blade.

  And somewhere, hundreds of yards away, up a bad-smelling side tunnel that had been blocked now for almost a day, a thin trickle of water began to seep through a bloated lump of meat and bone, and stones, and sodden wool.

  Yashim flung himself back against the steps and kicked up at the waterman’s lantern with both feet. It exploded as it smashed against the roof of the tunnel and the light went out, but he and the sou naziry had recognized each other. As Yashim’s feet hit the ground he twisted and struck out with his right hand, knuckles bent.

  He hit something, he couldn’t tell what, and whirled around. He slipped his cloak from his shoulders and held it out like a screen in the tunnel.

  He felt the drag on his fingers as the naziry’s knife sliced into the cloth; then he brought both hands down as hard as he could, trying to bundle the man by his wrists and pin them to the ground.

  But the naziry was quick: the bundle was empty. Yashim fell sideways on his knees, onto the steps, and felt the pressure of the naziry’s foot against the torn cloak.

  He sprang for the steps again on one leg, the other kicking out into the darkness. It touched something, but without force. As he tried to pull it away the naziry seized hold. Yashim kicked down with his free leg, but his strength collapsed as a searing pain tore through his calf.

  He bent forward, his outstretched hands colliding with the second blow aimed at his body. Yashim felt the blade slice through the joint of his thumb. He grabbed in the dark and found a wrist. For a second his grip held; he pulled up his right leg and slammed it down as hard as he could along the line of the naziry’s knife arm, catching him on the side of his head.

  The wrist slid violently from his grasp. Yashim scrambled backward, up the steps, and listened, with one leg raised. In the other he could feel the blood pulsing through a wound in his calf.

  He heard nothing: no breath, no splash. Nothing but a sound like a gentle smack that seemed to come from far away. A sound that meant nothing to him, couldn’t help him win.

  And then silence.

  A faint breeze hit his face.

  Yashim kicked out with all his strength, into the darkness.

  He realized that the naziry had been closer than he’d thought when he caught him on the shoulder before his knees unbent. He followed through with a mighty heave, and had the satisfaction of hearing the naziry fall back with a grunt.

  Which was the last thing Yashim heard before the tunnel erupted with a roar that seemed to fill the darkness, echoing from wall to wall like a cannon shot. A foam-flecked wind rushed over him, dragging at his legs. Something struck at his foot. He heard a screech like metal.

  Then nothing. Only a rumble, far away, and a soft gurgling in the tunnel below.

  Yashim lay perfectly still. The event had been so sudden that he could not understand it.

  But two hundred feet away Amélie turned in terror as a vast jet of water surged from the mouth of the tunnel, shattering against the nearest column in an explosion of spray and flying debris with a noise like thunder.

  Bits of rubbish slapped into the water all around her, and then the water stopped. Something that could almost have been a human figure slid from the column, crashed onto the plinth, and toppled with a splash into the dark lake.

  As Amélie reached up to brush a streak of slime from her cheek, she noticed something very pale and tentacled bobbing beside her in the water. She lowered her lamp for a better look.

  Motionless on the hard steps, Yashim heard her scream.

  117

  HE saw Amélie first, bathed in a halo of light from the lamp she had set beside her on the plinth. She had a hand to her mouth.

  He called out: “Amélie! C’est moi. Yashim!”

  Amélie moved back against the plinth. Her skirts spread around her like a lily pad.

  Yashim started down the steps. He barely noticed the water until he stumbled over the naziry, floating facedown.

  He waded past the corpse.

  Amélie was crying as he approached, her hands at her neck not trying to stop the tears.

  Yashim took her silently into his arms. She seemed to be rattling against him. He squeezed her tight, absorbing the convulsions that had gripped her.

  Very slowly, holding her against his chest, he turned around. Her head moved as if she were staring at something; then it relaxed and fell against his shoulder. Yashim looked down, through her hair, at the hem of her skirt in the water. In the dim light he could make out a human hand.

  He shivered and squeezed the girl hard. How it had happened he did not properly know, but Enver Xani, long since dead, had saved his life a second time.

  Amélie calmed down gradually. First she stopped shaking; then she lifted her head.

  “We’re very close,” she said, and she pulled away.

  “Close? To each other?” Yashim said stupidly. He was aware of a throbbing in his leg, and when he lifted his hand to the light he saw it was black with running blood.

  “To the relics,” Amélie said. Her eyes shone in the lamplight.

  Yashim felt dizzy. He heaved his way through the water and found the steps. He unwound his turban and began to tear it into strips, binding them around his calf. Amélie waded up to him. She helped him to tie the bandage and wrap another around his hand.

  “I—I didn’t mean you to come.”

  “No.” He felt terribly tired. “Except for you I would have stayed behind.”

  Her hands were shaking. He watched her try to tie the knot with fingers that were stiff with cold.

  “I’ve found the relics now,” she said.

  He knew it wasn’t true. Not yet.

  “He was coming to kill you,” he said.

  He watched her straighten up, the bandage done. She put up a hand and pushed a lock of hair from her forehead.

  “You can still help,” she said.

  She waded away, with the lamp in her hand. Wearily Yashim stumbled to his feet.

&nbs
p; “He would have killed you!” His shout sounded very faint, there in that eerie dark forest. “The way he killed the others. The way he killed your husband.”

  She didn’t stop, just turned her head over her shoulder and said: “I’m doing this for Max. It’s what he’d want.”

  Yashim shivered from the cold.

  “You went to Millingen, didn’t you?” He called. “That’s where you were. You locked me in.”

  Amélie didn’t answer. Her skirts trailed behind her like a train.

  “Look,” she said at last. She lifted the lamp, and its glow fell on a plinth, supporting a column that vanished into the darkness overhead. The joint was concealed by a band of greenish copper dappled with moisture, and on the plinth itself, partly submerged in the black water, Yashim recognized a chiseled head.

  Even though it was upside down, the brow lost underwater, Yashim found himself transfixed. Majestic in their classical symmetry were the great blind eyes, the flaring nostrils, the full curving lips—but demonic, too, was the expression of agony and command. It was the face of a woman. Her hair was thick and knotted.

  Yashim moved closer, forgetting the cold, while the lamplight trembled in Amélie’s hand and cast shadows that flickered and ran across deep incisions in the stone. Then he pulled back with a gasp: for a moment the strands of those knotted locks had seemed to twist and writhe like living things.

  “The Medusa,” he murmured with a shiver.

  “Don’t you see?” Amélie gave a sudden peal of shaky laughter. “Max guessed—the myths! The Medusa turns men into stone. Her gaze is a lock. It confers a kind of immortality.”

  “The emperor,” Yashim stammered. “Turned to stone.”

  The snakes reared again as Amélie wheeled on him. “Yes! The emperor dies, and the emperor will awake. Something hidden will one day reappear and shake the world.” She set the lamp on the plinth. “The emperor was just a poor, brave man who could do nothing to stop the Turks. But in myth—he’s an idea! God’s agent on this earth. The idea of sacred power.”