The Trojan Icon (Ethan Gage Adventures Book 8)

by William Dietrich

  We descended with Aimée to the dim quarters of the black eunuchs, the creatures cowering as we passed. Two intruding Janissaries suddenly burst upon us, as surprised by us as we by them. Each was holding a burlap bag.

  They hesitated. I didn’t. I shot the first and hurled the horse pick into the chest of the other, even as Aimée gave a small shout of horror. The soldiers tumbled, eyes wide with the shock of realizing they were already dead. I reloaded as our party stepped over the corpses. The pick I once more hid under my coat.

  “Bad men,” I explained.

  “Yes, Papa. You should have brought my gun too.”

  “Maybe when you’re older.”

  “Certainly not,” Astiza said.

  “You must disappear,” Aimée moaned, looking at the bodies.

  “You didn’t see this, sultana. You never left your quarters.”

  We reached a guardroom where a particularly huge black eunuch with a pike hesitantly dared block us. “Are you leaving, Nakshedil?” The sorrowful question was addressed to Aimée. The slave seemed stricken.

  For one, long, agonizing second, the French kadin looked toward the door just past him. Freedom was possible.

  “Come with us,” Astiza urged.

  But the sultana’s eyes dropped, she shook her head gravely, and took my wife’s hands. “No. As I said, my place is here. Those men—those dead Janissaries—I have to keep their kind from my son.” She kissed my wife. “May Allah protect you as you’ve protected me.” Then she addressed the guard. “Kizlar, turn your head and let these people pass. I command that they are invisible.”

  And with that the eunuch stood aside, we went past him into an even smaller anteroom, entered a closet, and descended into the earth.

  CHAPTER 38

  “I came this way before,” Astiza explained. “It leads to the Bosporus by way of the Ottoman treasury.”

  “The treasury, you say?” About time.

  “The jewels are in rooms above this one and blocked by a grate, but don’t worry about trinkets. I found more than a bauble.” She stuck tinder and lit a small lantern. Harry relaxed at the glow. He had his family again, even if we were once again in a hole.

  “You mean the Trojan relic really exists?”

  “Come and decide.”

  The passageway ran under the muffled sounds of battle, which I hoped would preoccupy Von Bonin for some time. He was as hard to kill as I was.

  “Surely a wooden statue can’t have persisted—”

  “It’s so strange, Ethan. Why is there so little faith?”

  “You mean in Greek myths? Fairy tales?”

  “In the power of spirit.”

  “You have to believe in belief, I suppose. Franklin liked facts.”

  “There is more than one kind of lightning.”

  The boom of a cannon somewhere above interrupted our discussion. Harry jumped. “Papa, can we go home?” He meant the French embassy.

  I knew we’d never return there; that our lives had once more taken an irrevocable turn. “We’re moving to a better house.” A fairy tale of my own, I feared.

  “The Pig Man is back.”

  “We’re going to get away from him.”

  Gray light beckoned. We came to a foul-looking crypt filled with old stone tombs. There, the tunnel ended. The grayness came from an iron grate above. Light throbbed from torches up there, and we could hear men shouting, shooting, and looting. I was momentarily transfixed, thinking of the wealth over my head. As unreachable as heaven.

  “Not there, Ethan, here. Come, and tell me what you feel.”

  Come where? But then Astiza pushed on a stone and a hidden door opened to a storeroom beyond. We stepped through and she lifted her light.

  Nothing glittered. The place was a menagerie of old statuary, the rubbish of empires. Discarded gods and forgotten men. All of it looked heavy and worthless.

  “There.”

  And yet when I saw it, I felt a curious thrill. The Trojan icon, the statue of Athena, was in the storeroom’s darkest corner, tucked behind a statue of a sea god and in many ways as unremarkable as a piece of driftwood. I was surprised anyone had bothered to keep her at all. The girl was slightly less than life-size; her goddess spear broken off and her features eroded. This was a sacred palladium?

  But Astiza took my hand as if I were blind and pressed my palm to the wood. It was smooth and dry, again like wave-polished driftwood, and yet I detected a faint resinous smell reminiscent of cedar. And there was more than that. Very faintly, so imperceptible that I could have been imagining it, the wood seemed to vibrate, like the feel of a kitten’s purr. No, that’s too strong—it was a simple sense of life in very old, very dead wood. A presence. An aura. A charge a thousand times more subtle than electricity. And yet my hand was warming.

  “They’ve cast it away like an unwanted heirloom,” I marveled.

  “The Turks obviously don’t know what it is. But someone persuaded them to keep it down here with the other castoffs. It’s eroded and worn, but it has strange power.”

  “Wood that lasts three thousand years, through several empires?”

  “Not wood. Not flesh. Not stone. Not steel. This is sky scratchings. Stardust. The clay of Adam. The goddess incarnate.”

  “Papa?” Harry tugged my leg.

  “How could it still be the palladium from Troy, Athens, Rome, and who knows where else?”

  “The legend is that Constantine buried it under his famous column, later toppled in an earthquake. I’m guessing the Turks rebuilt, found this when they re-erected the column, and thought it a pagan idol unfit for Islamic beliefs. Unsure why the Romans buried it, they stuck it down here.”

  “Papa?”

  “So this statue is the Trojan palladium, the only object in the world that can make an empire invincible?”

  “If you believe. Let it touch you back, Ethan. Admit it into your soul.”

  And it did touch me, the statue giving off some vague sense of potency and terror. This was older than mere wood. It was older than the oldest stones. It was primeval, meteoric. It hardly mattered if the assertion by a possessed child was true, Czartoryski had said of the Icon of Kazan. Russian troops believed it true, and victory resulted, just like Joan of Arc.

  “Papa, look.”

  “In a moment Harry. So how do we take it? Will it blind us?”

  “Not if it trusts our hearts.”

  “My heart?”

  “Believe, husband. Then she’ll protect you. She seeks restoration.”

  “You know that?”

  “I feel that. There’s a low tunnel we can drag her through, just over there.” She stooped beneath a bronze horse to peer at an opening and pointed. “I escaped this way.” Then her face became confused. “But it’s dark.” She crawled, reached, and slapped something solid. “Ethan, it’s been bricked up!”

  “Just since you were down here?

  “It can’t be, but it is. Why? How?” She crawled back.

  “Someone is foiling us. Following us. Which means there’s no way out unless we go back to the harem. Hauling a wooden statue with Janissaries running amuck.”

  “Papa!” Harry’s tone was urgent. “There’s a man.”

  I looked down. My son was looking up and out, to the room that held the old tombs. I followed his gaze and realized a shadow had fallen on the grate that divided this basement from the treasury proper. Someone was kneeling up there, listening. Watching. I raised my rifle and walked back.

  And then a spout of fire came from down the iron bars, dazzling us with its light. Astiza screamed. I yelled.

  I fired my rifle reflexively and the bullet ricocheted off the iron bars and bounced down amid us, whining like a hornet. I’d narrowly missed killing my own family. Now my weapon was empty and my dread complete.

  Lothar Von Bonin
laughed. “Oh, this is the best of days!” The grate, its lock apparently shattered, was thrown back. The Prussian peered down with his one good eye, the orb seeming to protrude from his face like that of a Cyclops. “You’ve led us to it like dogs. No, don’t move—I’ll roast you if you try!”

  First he threw down unlit torches. Then a rope dropped and the seemingly indestructible Prussian slid down it. He’d doubled the line around the grating overhead and after descending he pulled the hatch down with a clang. The rope slithered free.

  Von Bonin was burned all right, his skin blistered, but he stood as sturdily as I remembered from St. Petersburg. In fact, he seemed oddly renewed. The good eye was bright, his grin demonic. He aimed his prosthetic arm at us.

  “That’s twice you’ve missed me today, Gage. A sign from heaven, no?”

  “I’d say hell. And the third time’s the charm.”

  “I’ve been awaiting your arrival in this crypt. My spies bribed guards who told of a woman spotted by the Bosporus shore. It was easy enough to guess a sally port. But what was our priestess doing there? The aga gave me a few men to brick this chink in our defenses so no one else could investigate. I did so. I researched the old legends and palace plans. And Astiza lingered in the embassy in Galata, forlornly waiting for you, even as you tarried at the Dardanelles. Oh, I was impatient! Were we wrong to rely on our Egyptian seer? We had to chase her from her bedroom. A boat race made it convincing. A Janissary revolt flushed her into action. And her husband to the rescue, so I could have it all! My prize, and my revenge.” He nodded at his own genius.

  “You’ve trapped yourself with us,” I said.

  “We can’t get back into the harem,” Astiza added.

  “Oh, I suspect we could if we shouted and pounded long enough. But the last thing I want is to retreat to that mob scene. Treachery. Revenge. Mayhem. Oriental madness. I like the quiet down here. Just the four of us, with a pagan idol and an unloaded gun.”

  “Where’s Pig Man?” Harry asked suspiciously, like the bark of a small dog. “He’d better not hurt Mama.”

  Von Bonin looked at my son with distaste. “It was Cezar Dalca who told me the legends behind your Transylvania quest. At first I didn’t believe it. The Trojan palladium? After all these years? But the Czartoryskis are mad for the past, and I’ve been feeding on their passion for a long time. I realized that there might be something to it if they believed. And Ethan Gage does have a knack for trying to take things that aren’t his, does he not?”

  “So do you.”

  “And what about poor Lothar? Consider my plight. Amputated. Burned. My Prussia caught in the middle of Europe. This statue could make us invulnerable, no? So justice prevails. Selim and Mahmud are being thrown into the Imperial Cage and Mustafa will rule. Aimée Nakshedil will become a scullery maid. No more Sebastiani. No more French. No more using the Turks to outflank the Russians. Napoleon was checked in February at the battle of Eylau, and when he abandons Poland and his Polish whore, we’ll take back the Grunwald swords, too. All has changed in an afternoon, Gage: Your defeat and my victory.”

  My family had drawn up in a little trinity of fear. Von Bonin kept the stump of his arm stiffly poised as if he were a statue himself.

  “You’re certainly satisfied with yourself.”

  “I like to win. Now I have.”

  “Then let us go,” I tried. “We’ll slow you down.”

  “But our reunions aren’t complete, I’m afraid, and I need brute labor. Surrender your rifle, Gage. Carefully, so I don’t ignite your son. Come, come, hurry. Pouch and powder too.”

  “This is for a two-handed man, Lothar,” I said as I gave up the gun, feeling the twitch of the hidden pick in the small of my back. “Take the statue. I’ll help you boost it up to the treasury if you let my family go. You’re right. I never should have crossed you.”

  Von Bonin glanced upward. “Do you think the Turks would let me stroll away with the Trojan palladium? That they wouldn’t torture me to find out why I want weathered wood? I can’t go that way anymore than you can. Nor can I let your family free when I’m its newest member. We’re a fellowship now. All of you and me.”

  “After blocking our escape route,” Astiza said.

  “Yes. And no.” He looked beyond us to the shadowy statue of Athena. “I’m afraid your palladium looks heavy and is reputed to be quite dangerous to carry. People have been blinded. I’m already missing one eye and was grievously burned on the Canopus. I really can’t risk further injury. Do you know what it’s like to live in constant pain, the result of villains grinding on your amputated arm and hurling burning rum in your face? Most distressing. So the Gage family will carry the statue for me. I’ll reload while you bring out the palladium. I do quite well with one hand, Monsieur Gage.” Cradling the gun in the crook of his amputated arm, he rammed down powder and bullet with the other. “Yes, two ways to kill you now, fire and lead. Just a reminder.”

  We dragged out the wooden sculpture. It weighed about the same as a small woman. “Carry it where?”

  “Every home needs water, including Topkapi. Pipes and sewers have underlain this peninsula for fifteen hundred years. Yes, we’ve been doing research, and our own quiet digging. It ‘s amazing what remains hidden to those who won’t look, and available to those who do. The key to life is paying attention.”

  “Research? Who is ‘we’?” But of course I guessed.

  “The sarcophagus—lift the lid.”

  It was one of the old Roman tombs, sealed with a marble slab, and I feared we’d find Dalca lying inside. But instead of a body or bones we discovered the sarcophagus had no bottom. Heaving off he lid gave access to a dark, narrow well.

  “Yes, down you go. We dug the connector after Astiza was spotted. We knew something was down here, pondered old maps, and made our coffin into a door. Appropriate, no? But when we got this far we didn’t know where to go next. There was nothing here. Was it all a lie? So we had to follow the Gage family. You found the palladium for us. Now, statue first, and then you two. I’ll follow with your son.”

  I couldn’t see a chance. He’d burn us if I shouted to the Turks. He’d shoot if I tried a tackle. We’d have to wait for the scoundrel to drop his guard.

  It was a ten-foot climb down a crude ladder into blackness, me hoisting Athena down to my wife. We couldn’t run away with Von Bonin holding Harry. We waited in the dark, fetid water lapping at our boots.

  “Cradle the statue and back away. I’d hate to burn your boy.” The Prussian herded Harry down and lit a torch. And yes, we were in another tunnel of damp stone with a skin of water on the floor. Our nemesis had slung my rifle across his back and tied the rope from his waist to a noose around Harry’s neck, just like the keeper at Balbec. My son looked miserable.

  “It’s just for a little while, Harry,” I said. “Be patient.”

  “Too much bad, Papa.”

  “All the more reason for us to be good.”

  Von Bonin snorted. Then he lifted the torch, throwing light down a long passageway that ran deep under the palace and city, perpendicular to the corridor from the harem above. This tunnel was Roman-straight, five feet high with finely fitted masonry. The adults had to stoop.

  “Built by Constantine and likely lost, forgotten, and rediscovered more than once,” Von Bonin said. “Crusader accounts mention it from their sack of Constantinople in 1204. Three days of murder, looting, and rape of their fellow Christians. This is why I can’t take the pious too seriously. In the end, it’s every man for himself.” He gestured with the torch. “Go, go. Carry the palladium between you.”

  “It’s heavy.”

  “Do I care? Warn me if it blinds you.”

  That statue was awkward, but no longer hot. I felt no loss of vision; I suppose we had the luck of Odysseus. We carried Athena horizontally, the spear jutting like a stubby lance. It was tiresome labor in a tunnel a
t least a kilometer long.

  “An old aqueduct or storm sewer, I’m guessing,” Von Bonin said. “Not good to be down here when it rains.”

  At length the passage angled steeply upward, with stone steps to one side. “That’s right, up! Ah, breathing hard, are you? Tiring for the pretty woman? Don’t you dare put it down. This relic must be on the Bosporus before the rioting has ended.”

  Astiza and I were sweating, but I felt moving air.

  “I smell a lake,” Harry said.

  “Clever little imp. Yes, almost there.”

  A lantern shone ahead, and I saw the glitter of water. We came out onto a stone quay and gaped.

  We were in an enormous cave, except this was a cavity built by man. It was an underground reservoir, a vast, barrel-vaulted cistern with a brick roof supported by classical pillars, probably recycled from old Greek and Roman temples. The cave floor was a dark lake, the columns rising out of the water like the trunks of a submerged forest. I quickly estimated a hundred of them disappearing into blackness, and supposed there could be hundreds more. The reservoir was as still and opaque as a pool of oil.

  “An ancient Byzantine cistern, completely forgotten by the Ottomans,” Von Bonin said. “A reservoir to slake a city, but the old pipes filled and the old doors buried by rubble. Today’s fools drop buckets down narrow wells and never think to investigate why their water is so plentiful. But we realized this was the backdoor to Topkapi Palace, and the only way to sneak out the statue. So now our reunion is complete.”

  “Reunion?”

  “There.”

  And with sinking heart I recognized who the ‘we’ fully was. Watching us from a kayik was a huge, hunched form with sunken eyes darker than the limpid water. Cezar Dalca waited in a boat like Charon, helmsman to Hades. He was no longer grossly fat and immobile but cadaverous, starved, like a snake that hasn’t eaten. His chest rose and fell as he stared greedily at Astiza. So he’d escaped his castle, escaped Canopus, and would escape Constantinople until he could crawl back down into some new lair, feeding on innocents and bloating like a leech.