Jason Goodwin - The snake stone

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

The snakes reared again as Amelie 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.”

She ran her hands over the sculpted marble. “It’s about suspending time. Freezing it.”

She put her hands on the top of the plinth and began stirring the water with her feet. “They’re here. I know it. The relics are here.”

“I don’t think so, Amelie.”

She didn’t answer, but moved slowly round the plinth, feeling the ground with her feet.

“It’s too cold! I can’t feel anything. Yashim, for God’s sake, help me.”

Yashim didn’t move.

“We can do this for Max. We must do it, can’t you see? After this there’ll never be another chance.”

He thought she was going to wring her hands. Instead, she waded through the water and put her arms around his neck.

She drew him down and kissed him with her cold lips.

“Not for Max, Yashim. Do it for me.”

He felt her thigh pressing against his. She kissed him again.

She broke away slowly and sank down into the water, kneeling. Her skirts billowed around her like the scalloped edge of a fountain.

She gathered them toward her, then plunged her hands into the water, groping around the base of the plinth.

Yashim closed his eyes. For a moment he saw Maximilien Lefevre on his knees, in Yashim’s apartment, tipping the contents of his bag onto the floor.

He stepped up to the plinth and began to circle its base, scudding his icy feet across the floor of the underground lake. They met on the far side, in the shadow, and when Yashim raised her up she came up dripping and shaking.

“ Ca suffit,” he said. It’s enough. “We have to think now, how to get out of here.”

Her teeth were chattering now too hard for her to speak. She tried to pull away, but Yashim had her by the waist and she was shaking. He picked up the lamp.

Halfway across the lake, Amelie fainted in his arms.

Her head dropped back and her weight fell on his arm. His other arm shot up to keep his balance and the lamp flew from his hand. For a moment it blazed in an arc above the sunken cistern, throwing its light across the hall of columns, across the black water, before it cracked audibly against a plinth and vanished.

Yashim watched it go.

He stood for a few moments in the dark.

And a sound he had not heard for what seemed like a very long time broke the impenetrable silence of the cistern.

It was weak and shaky, but it was, after all, his own.

Yashim’s laugh.

There was nothing for it, Yashim thought as he ran his hands around the tunnel’s mouth.

He turned and groped for Amelie’s arms. He put his hands under her armpits and began to drag her back into the tunnel. The angle was awkward, his back bent and protesting. Every few yards he stopped to catch his breath, the sweat now rolling down his face. To make things worse, the cut on his hand had begun to run again, where the bandage had slid off.

He had no real idea of what to do next. Even if he did manage to drag Amelie a hundred, five hundred yards along the tunnel, his chances of finding the right way out in the dark were slim. Amelie’s thread had disappeared-probably the naziry had gathered it up as he followed.

He gritted his teeth and pulled his burden for another few yards. He felt dizzy and sick, weak with the cold and the loss of blood. He put out a hand to steady himself and almost toppled sideways.

He felt a step beneath his fingers. Presumably, he thought, the steps where the naziry had found him. It seemed long ago.

He wondered if he should leave Amelie here, on the steps, while he groped for a way out. But even if he did get out, what then? How would he get back? What help could he possibly call on out there-he could hardly expect the watermen to come running. And in the meantime Amelie might wake up and find herself alone, in the dark, buried alive.

He dragged her onto the lower step and laid her head down gently on the stone. Stepping over her with exaggerated care, he began to mount the steps.

The stairs took several right-angled turns before Yashim found himself in what felt like a narrow corridor, in which he could stand upright. The walls were straight, and he ran his fingers along them until he reached another set of steps at the far end. The entrance to these steps was festooned with hanging cloths that crumbled at his touch and stuck to his fingers.

The second flight of steps were spiral, and they went on turning and turning until Yashim felt bewildered. Several times he slipped and fell; climbing stairs hurt his calf. His final fall came when he walked straight into a wall and recoiled, blood dripping from his nose. The wall was built across the stairs. Yashim ran his hands over it and over the surrounding walls, uncertain what he was looking for but deeply unwilling to admit that the whole exercise had been futile. But so it was: if there had once been an entrance to the tunnels from this spot, it had long ago been blocked. If Amelie’s cistern was the same one Gyllius had seen, it must lie beneath the Hippodrome; except for the open space, much had changed in that district since olden times. Ibrahim’s palace. Ahmed I’s Blue Mosque. The lovely baths that Sinan built for Hurrem Sultan, Suleyman’s Russian wife, close by the entrance to Topkapi Palace and Aya Sofia. Monumental buildings.

He laid his head against the wall and screwed his eyes tight. He felt sick and dizzy; everything he touched felt as though it were toppling, sliding, moving about. He wondered how long he had been away from Amelie: perhaps even now she was awake, blundering about and crying in the dark…

He raised his head and turned, eyes closed, feeling for the outside wall of the stairs, where the steps were widest. He set his back against the curve and began to descend. A festoon of cobwebs brushed his hair, so old and dusty that they hung in strands, like the matted hair of a dervish. He jerked his head away.

For a few moments he stared back, incapable of believing what he was seeing. Understanding that he could see.

He glanced up the steps. At the top, where the wall ran across the stairs, a thin vertical bar of light had opened in the angle of the two walls.

Yashim scrambled back down the spiral stairs. Amelie was still lying where he had left her. Her breathing was shallow and her skin felt like ice. He took her in his arms and sat her upright, then slapped her cheeks.

After a while she began to moan.

He dragged her to her feet, holding her arm around his shoulders, his other hand encircling her waist, and began to half drag, half carry her up the steps. The movement seemed to bring her around. He felt her stumbling on the last few steps, and when they entered the corridor he was able to take the lead, holding her firmly by the arm and murmuring encouragement.

“We’re almost there, a few more steps. There’s a way out, you’ll see the light soon.”

He got behind her as they reached the spiral staircase and helped her climb. Her movements were slow and heavy, and he remembered how hard it had been for him to move when he crawled out of Xani’s pit, when every muscle had weighed a ton and all he had wanted to do was fall asleep. Sometimes Amelie did seem to drift away, and he had to brace himself and catch her as she slid back on top of him. But at last he saw the darkness starting to dissolve.

She sat quiet while he put his shoulder to the stone. A little grunting noise gradually changed into a low growl as the stone began to move and the bar of light widened inch by inch.