Yashim’s laugh.
118
THERE was nothing for it, Yashim thought as he ran his hands around the tunnel’s mouth.
He turned and groped for Amélie’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 Amélie a hundred, five hundred yards along the tunnel, his chances of finding the right way out in the dark were slim. Amélie’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 Amélie 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 Amélie 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 Amélie’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 Hürrem 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 Amélie: 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. Amélie 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 Amélie 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.
Before it was six inches wide, Yashim paused and put his eye to the crack.
He was looking across an expanse of cracked and polished marble toward a vast barred window, about fifteen yards away. The light hurt his eyes. Looking up, he saw a domed ceiling. Something about the scale of the building and the dusty blackness of its walls reminded him of someplace, but for a moment he could not imagine where he was.
He pushed again. The wall, he saw, was mounted on a pivot, so that as one end swung out the other swung inward. Soon he was able to squeeze himself into the gap and use his back and legs to turn the stone, and it was then that it rushed in upon him.
They had found a way into Aya Sofia.
Not on the ground floor, and nowhere near the old high altar. The spiral stairs had been built inside one of the vast pillars that supported the great dome, and they were emerging much higher up, in the deserted gallery that stretched out beneath the quarter domes of the greatest building of the ancient world.
119
FAISAL al-Mehmed ran his eyes along the low shelves that surrounded him in his booth outside the Great Mosque, and shook his head. So many shoes! In weather like this, everyone wanted to go into the mosque; nobody wanted to come out. But as soon as the rain stopped they would rush upon him, demanding to have their shoes again, causing confusion.
Faisal al-Mehmed abhorred confusion, in a holy precinct above all.
A movement in the crowd made him look around. A man and a woman he didn’t remember seeing before were emerging from the doorway, into the torrential rain, and already, he noticed, they were soaking wet. The woman could barely walk: the man had one arm around her, and in the other he held her hand.
Faisal ran a hand down his beard and nodded. So many people came to this mosque without a pious thought—merely, even, to shelter from the rain. Where was the piety, in using a mosque as shelter? True piety was oblivious to rain.
Faisal smiled a benediction on the couple, for in his heart he understood that they possessed Enthusiasm.
120
WHEN Yashim woke it was late. The thunderstorms had cleared away as if they had never been, and a hot afternoon sun was already tracing a pattern of slanting shadows across the room.
He got up slowly, feeling light and hungry. There was a loaf of bread that was no longer fresh; he broke off a piece and chewed at it, and then in self-disgust he put the bread down and riddled the stove. He blew on the embers and fed their glow with trickles of charcoal from his fingers, listening to its dry rustle, feeling its insubstantial weight, wondering as he watched the glow spread how something so light could generate so much heat. He placed his hand flat above the stove and savored the burning heat on his palm.