The snake stone yte-2

by Jason Goodwin

  He put a hand to the wall and leaned his forehead against it. It seemed that he was in a small chamber, some seven feet across, without exits. There was about two feet of water at the bottom. He had dropped through an opening in the channel or pipe above; it could not, he thought, be more than twelve feet above or he would have got more badly hurt.

  However high it was, it was still beyond his reach.

  A thin trickle of water slid over his fingers and onto his forehead.

  He wondered if, by a miracle, the waterman would come this way.

  Then something touched his leg again, and he reached down into the water and knew immediately that no one was ever going to help him out.

  83

  The little boy slipped through the gates and went slowly up to his trench in the dirt.

  A window flew open with a squeal. The little boy did not look up.

  Marta put her head out. “Shpetin! Did you see where the efendi went?”

  The little boy picked up his stick. He pushed the dented ball along the trench.

  At the window, Marta gave an exasperated sigh and shrugged. She turned to the ambassador.

  “No, lord. I don’t know. They went together, I think, but I don’t know.”

  Palewski frowned. “I’m not easy about this, Marta. If Yashim went with the boy, he must have had a reason.”

  “Yes, lord.” Marta nodded her head slowly.

  And this, Palewski thought, is the second time the boy comes home alone.

  “You talk to him, Marta. He thinks I’m some sort of ogre. See if he’ll show us where they went.”

  Marta gave a doubtful shrug. “The boy-he’s a little strange, lord.”

  “He’s a boy, isn’t he? Boys are all-well, like boys.” Palewski felt himself at a loss. “Just ask him for me. Please.”

  84

  Yashim put his hand on a human face.

  He sprang away from the corpse, flailing through the water. He was backed into a corner before he remembered that here, in the dark, he could soon lose all sense of direction.

  All sense of proportion.

  There was no need to guess whose body it was that rolled through the water. The missing man had been found.

  Yashim tried not to think about what would happen next. He would grow cold, and weak. In the end he would drown in two feet of water, sharing the Albanian’s liquid grave.

  He needed a way out.

  Carefully now he felt his way around the pit, searching for anything that could help him climb the slippery walls. The floor was covered in loose stones and fallen bricks: the ceiling, he supposed, was slowly falling in. Once again he brushed against Xani’s corpse. Fighting a wave of nausea, he rolled the body over, feeling for anything the man had carried-a knife, a coil of rope. Something bubbled on the surface of the water, and Yashim gagged at the stench.

  He groped at the man’s chest, feeling something hard there, like a chain. On the chain was a crucifix. He pulled hard and the body lurched upward; then the chain broke and he heard the corpse sink back into the water.

  He went back to the wall, hoping it was the right one, and scratched at the wall with the end of the cross. It didn’t get him far.

  He ran his fingers over the wall, looking for a crack, a projection, anything. The wall was smooth as butter.

  He unfastened his cloak and wrung out the water. Holding one end, with his back to the wall, he flicked the cloak up and over his head. The end he was holding went limp for a few seconds, then the cloak tumbled down over his head. The end he had thrown was sopping wet. He thought for a few moments with his eyes shut. Then he shook the cloak out flat on the water’s surface. He started groping on the floor for bricks, lobbing them as best as he could judge toward the center of the cloak. After a minute he gathered the cloak together by its edges and hefted the weight. It was as much as he could do to drag it through the water.

  He set the bundle against the wall and tried climbing on it. The stones slithered down under his weight. He stepped off and tried to tie the ends of the cloak together, to make a tighter bundle. After three or four attempts he gave up. He couldn’t get the wet, slopping half knots of the cloak to hold together.

  He wasted half an hour using the crucifix and the chain to sew the cloak tight. He floated Xani’s corpse over the bundle of stones and tried to get a footing. The corpse was soft underfoot and would not keep still. He could not reach the opening.

  He felt very tired.

  He shook the cloak, to dislodge some of the stones, tucked in the corners, and dragged the bundle up to the level of his chest. Water poured from the cloak. He squeezed it, and it grew lighter.

  He summoned his strength and tossed the bundle high up against the wall. It dropped back, into his arms. He tried again, taking a step back. When he had thrown it he reached forward to catch it, if it fell. This time he heard a muffled splash. The cloak did not fall back.

  Yashim found stones on the floor and began to lob them upward.

  The work kept him from feeling the cold.

  When he had lobbed a dozen stones into the dark, he stopped and listened. There was a new sound, of gurgling water. He stepped forward and touched the wall. He couldn’t feel anything. He put his lips to the wall and felt the water trickling down.

  It was cold as ice.

  He went back to lobbing stones, in the dark.

  It was only another way to die.

  85

  “You’re quite sure?”

  “Quite sure, Dr. Millingen. Thank you.”

  “At least you have some fine Turkish slippers now,” he said, smiling.

  “Yes. You have been kind.” She turned to the little sunken door and knocked.

  Widow Matalya answered the door. She did not know what to think, finding the Frankish woman on her doorstep, with a strange man. Dr. Millingen tipped his hat politely, and the old woman sniffed, transferring her distaste onto a solid target: hats, she thought, were very nasty things.

  “Please, madame-do keep in touch.”

  Amelie gave him a curious smile. “I shall have to, I suppose,” she said.

  She went in. The old woman closed the door and turned with a very set expression on her face, her lips compressed.

  “Monsieur Yashim-Yashim efendi-he’s upstairs?” Amelie pointed a finger.

  The widow’s eyes bored into her.

  “I think I’ll just go up and see,” Amelie said gaily. “Salut!”

  86

  Palewski put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Look here,” he said, breathing hard. “Are we going far? A long way?”

  The boy looked up and nodded.

  “In that case,” the ambassador said firmly, “we’ll take a chair.”

  He snapped his fingers at a couple of men squatting against a wall.

  “My treat,” he said, smiling. “Just point these fellows in the right direction, there’s a good boy.”

  Down on the shore they swapped the chair for a caique. The little boy pointed up the Golden Horn.

  “Fener? Balat? Fener stage, boatman, please.” Perhaps Yashim had simply gone off home, he thought. But once they reached Fener, the little boy made some complicated signs and shook his head vigorously.

  “All right,” Palewski said. “We’ll walk, I see. Not too far now, eh?”

  He regretted taking the boy’s advice as he toiled up the hills, but they were in a shabby neighborhood that Palewski did not know, and there were no lounging chairmen here.

  Finally the boy jumped up onto a low wall and sat there, kicking his heels and looking intently at a doorway across the street.

  “He went in there?”

  Palewski climbed the steps. There was a padlock on the door, so Palewski turned around and caught the boy’s eye. He pointed at the door. The little boy nodded.

  Palewski glanced up and down the street. Apart from the little boy on the wall, it seemed perfectly empty.

  Stanislaw Palewski, unlike Dr. Millingen, was not a man who placed much faith
in the benefits of regular exercise. His arms were thin; his legs were long. But he was still capable of sudden, violent physical effort.

  He stood back, leaned against the parapet, and doubled those long legs by bringing his knees up close to his chin.

  Then with a splintering crash he brought both feet down hard on the door and burst it open.

  The ambassador turned to the little boy, who was watching him with astonishment from across the street, and gave him a most unambassadorial wink.

  Then he went into the icy gloom to find his friend.

  87

  Yashim was singing an old song from the Balkans, about a man who went down to the river and caught the soul of his dead lover in his nets.

  He spun slowly in the darkness, sometimes kicking his legs, sometimes reaching for a better grip on the man who had become his new friend. They’d only just met, too, he thought. Dear Xani! Stinking, buoyant, and obliging. What very good luck it was they’d met, at last.

  If only Xani were still warm, Yashim thought dreamily. The pit was slowly filling, deeper and deeper as the flow backed up against the cloak and stones overhead. He heard a tapping, unlike the sound of water gushing into the pit from the blocked conduit above. For some minutes he tried to imagine what it could be, before he discovered that it was the sound of his own chattering teeth.

  He found that his whole body was shaking, convulsing in sudden spasms that shook his grip on the dead man and sometimes sent him spluttering and flailing beneath the surface of the ice-cold water. Sometimes he had a sense of being underwater altogether; sometimes he closed his eyes and felt a wave of great lassitude and peace wash through him, so that he wanted to let go and sink, gently and dreamily, into the depths. He had not touched the bottom of the pit in hours, it seemed. Now and again he found himself beneath the spout of water dropping from the blocked conduit.

  He heard someone singing an old Turkish marching song, in a small, tired voice. He thought it must be Xani. Then he supposed it was him. Either way it no longer mattered. He could not feel his legs.

  But he must have drifted off into another pit, because the spout had stopped dropping on him: he could no longer hear it splashing on the surface. He saw himself floating endlessly from pit to pit, but he was too tired to be anxious about that. Xani’s corpse began one of its gaseous rolls beneath him, and he felt himself sliding off again, back down into the deep murk, into the comfort of the cold and the dark. He’d fought it so hard before, but he could no longer remember why. He knew that this time he would let himself go.

  It was then, and only slowly, that he began to sense that he was not floating anymore. He lay faceup, with a pain in his back, breathing air. His elbow stirred. It made a rough, rasping sound-the first noise that was not gaseous or liquid he had heard in hours. He turned himself over with difficulty and stretched out his hands. The movement seemed to take minutes, as if he were rolling a huge stone uphill. He could no longer feel his hands, and to make them obey him he tried hard to imagine them there, at the end of his unfolding arms, groping weakly on the bricks.

  With a slowness that was immeasurable, in the dark, he began to squirm up the conduit. It was hours before he remembered that he had to keep to the right. It was the first moment of real terror he had experienced since his ordeal began. Perhaps he had already missed a turn? He might have gone a hundred yards already, he might have gone five. He could no longer judge.

  He saw Xani crawling up the pipe beside him, with his guts trailing in the water.

  A blaze of magnificent fireworks went off inside his head.

  He heard his old friend Palewski calling his name.

  He crawled for a minute, then for a year, and after a night and a day Palewski was there, but very, very small, like a mouse in his little hole.

  Palewski was shouting, and then Yashim was in a litter and was jouncing, jouncing over the cobblestones, retching and trembling and wishing he could simply die.

  Like happy Xani. Big and fat and soft, twirling forever and forever in a little eddy underground.

  88

  Bundled into shawls, Yashim slept for sixteen hours. He woke to find Amelie beside him, reading a book.

  “What you need,” she said, “is the old lady’s soup. I’ll fetch you some.”

  When she had gone, Yashim tested his limbs: his joints were sore, he had some chafing on his chin and chest, and all his muscles ached, as if he had run a long way. He sat up, feeling weary. The thought of soup made him feel sick; but strangely, when Amelie presented him with the bowl, he found that he was starving.

  “There’s no bread,” she said apologetically.

  “It can be arranged,” Yashim said. “I’ll call the boy. You’ll find some money in that purse.”

  He stuck his head out of the window. “Elvan!”

  “Is this enough?” Amelie held up a coin.

  Yashim nodded. “That will be enough.” He set the soup aside and closed his eyes.

  Darkness. He was in the pit again. His limbs twitched. He opened his eyes and there was Amelie, the steaming bowl, his own room.

  “The Gyllius. You read it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it suggested-some idea?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  Yashim closed his eyes again. He was very tired, but he was not afraid of the dark. He, above all people, could not be afraid of the dark.

  Long ago, reaching manhood, he had stepped into a region that was darker than any tunnel underneath the city, an unrelieved blackness that ran through his veins and turned his eyes backward in their sockets. His despair had been a cell from which there was no escape at all: the prison of his own ruined body.

  But in the end he had found a way. Not a way out, exactly, but a way, perhaps, of seeing in the dark. It made him useful. Yashim the eunuch: a guide when others fell into the darkness, too.

  Until sometimes a woman came, beautiful, shedding her own light, a woman, perhaps, with brown eyes and a cloud of brown hair, who watched him as he slept. And fetched him soup. And who shed so much light that as she passed he was dazzled, blinded-and would stay blind, long after she had gone away. Groping in the dark, again.

  It was not her fault.

  Yashim opened his eyes. Amelie had her arm stretched out, and she was looking at her hand with a concentrated expression on her face, wiggling her fingers.

  Then the coin fell to the floor. She bent to pick it up.

  “The Great Church,” Amelie said, turning the coin around her thumb. “Aya Sofia.”

  Elvan knocked on the door. Yashim sent him to the Libyan baker for a round of bread. He took the coin with a curious glance at Amelie, and sped off on his errand.

  “The Byzantine Greeks believed in an old legend about Aya Sofia,” Amelie explained. “The legend was that one day an enemy would succeed in breaking into the city. Everything would appear lost-except that the enemy would never reach the Great Church. Before that happened, the archangel Gabriel would appear with a flaming sword and drive the invaders out.”

  “Hmmm.” Yashim looked doubtful. “It didn’t happen.”

  “No. But Max always said that every myth contains a kernel of truth. So when the Turks broke into the city there was, in fact, a miracle at Aya Sofia. Just not the miracle everyone hoped for.”

  “No archangel.”

  “No. But a priest, saying mass. When the Turks arrived, he vanished.”

  “Vanished?”

  “Stepped into one of the great pillars, apparently, carrying the Host. The legend goes that he’ll reappear on the day the cross is raised over the dome again.”

  Yashim frowned. He tried to picture the scene: Ottoman troops crashing against the great doors of the church, the terrified people huddled inside for protection, and a priest at the altar with a cup and plate. Something about the picture in his mind was vaguely familiar: he couldn’t remember. Something he’d seen, perhaps? Something Lefevre had said. But at that moment Elvan reappeared with the bread, and the memory w
as lost. Yashim gave him a few piastres, and he bowed out with unusual solemnity.

  Instead, Yashim recalled a legend in Grigor’s book, about the emperor being turned to stone.

  “Max thought those stories carried a message,” Amelie explained. “Perhaps the tale of the priest means that the Greeks had time to hide their treasure before the Turks came in. Aya Sofia is one of the biggest buildings on earth. The most ambitious building project in world history, after the Pyramids.”

  She took a lock of hair and twisted it with a finger.

  “But there’s no crypt in Aya Sofia. Most churches have crypts, to represent the world of the dead. At Aya Sofia they raised the largest dome in the world, like a microcosm of the universe-the whole of God’s creation. It’s odd if they didn’t build a crypt in there, as well.”

  Yashim broke the bread and dipped it into his soup. “It’s said that Mehmed came into the Great Church the morning after the assault and found a soldier hacking at the marble floor. He was angry. He said: ‘You soldiers can take whatever you can carry, but the building belongs to God-and me.’ Aya Sofia was preserved.”

  “Perhaps he knew there was something under there. But they never got an opportunity to look, did they? As far as I know, Aya Sofia hasn’t been touched now for four hundred years.”

  “They added minarets,” Yashim pointed out.

  “On the outside.”

  They looked at each other.

  “That trick,” Yashim said. “The trick you were doing with the coin. Where did you learn that?”

  Amelie laughed. “I still haven’t. Max used to teach me, but I haven’t got the fingers for it, I suppose. He could make the coin run through his fingers and then- pouf! It vanished. Just like that priest.”

  Yashim drank his soup. He put down the empty bowl. “Your husband-Max. Dr. Lefevre. He was a doctor of archaeology, wasn’t he?”