A hand reached out and plucked away the woman’s scarf. Somebody spat. The woman shrank closer to the gatekeeper, who waved his hand ahead of them, trying to clear a path.
“She is a mad Giaour! Only mad! Please, good people, let us pass. She is going!”
The crowd surged around them, angry, yelling faces, men jostling for a better view: Faisal al-Mehmed’s voice was lost in the hubbub.
The crowd surged around them as he took the woman to the narrow gate. Faisal al-Mehmed began to pray, his voice echoing the voice of the imam overhead. “There is no god but the One God!”
The gate was thronged with worshipers arriving for prayers. It seemed to Faisal al-Mehmed that they would be cut down before they ever got through.
80
Yashim slid his feet through the water, one hand trailing against the wall of the tunnel, the other outstretched in front of his face.
He tried not to think. All his life he had had a horror of confinement. Even as a little boy he had fought like a wolf if his playmates tried to pin him down. He never followed them, either, into the caves they used to explore around his home on the Black Sea coast: there were rockfalls sometimes; tales of miners, trapped underground, used to visit him at night. Once had he been trapped himself. Confined, unable to move, staring wild-eyed at the men and the knife. The horror had risen in his gorge-and his life was changed.
He tried not to splash; it seemed to him that the level of the water had risen, that it was by his ankles, but the cold was so intense that he could not be sure. All that mattered was to get deep into the tunnel, away from the torchlight.
If only the pipe would curve.
A few steps farther on, his hand came up against a curved edge. He stopped and groped around. As far as he could tell in the dark, the channel forked; he was between two openings, both the same size, both carrying the current. He squatted down and glanced back.
For a dizzying moment he felt that he was staring at a solid wall, as if the tunnel had sealed itself behind him, and he reached out in a panic. The movement of his hand revealed to him the existence of a faint glow, which seemed to hang in the air in front of him. As he watched, it grew brighter, an aureole of faint light surrounding a pinprick of flame in the darkness.
The waterman was coming down the tunnel.
Yashim felt sick. He squeezed his eyes shut and fought the panic, fought the thought that he was being pressed deeper and deeper into the ground.
It’s a maze, he murmured to himself. Only a maze. In a maze, you must follow a rule.
Two tunnels. One bore to the left: it might descend the hill toward the Fener. The other, tending to the right, presumably took a line to the south. Yashim tried to picture the shape of his city, the rise and fall of its hills. One or both of these pipes might lead to another siphon, where the water pooled at a lower level than the tank it came from. Sooner or later, if that were the case, the pipe would start to grow full of water, like a curving reservoir, and he would have to stop moving.
Left or right?
Which way would the waterman come?
Yashim was right-handed.
The rule, in a maze, was to keep turning the same way at every bend. Trail his left hand on the wall and reach forward with his right.
That was the way.
Yashim put out his hand and groped for the opening on his left.
He started down. He felt the floor of the tunnel sloping. His hand trailed along the wall. It was no longer rough to the touch, but slimy and knobbled: he imagined it caked in calcareous lumps, dripping with shiny algae.
He advanced several yards. He almost missed the first turn, because he was swaying as he scuttled forward, and his hand missed the wall for a foot or two. When he reached out again he felt a hard corner; groping back, he discovered the opening he’d missed and turned into it. He thought of the horror of losing his way back.
Now he leaned his shoulder against the wall on his left. Like that he was in less danger of missing a turn, and from time to time he could pause and rest.
He wondered how much farther he needed to go. Three turns already, the chances of discovery were increasingly remote.
He decided to make one last turn, and then he would wait.
He shoved himself along, spreading the weight between his legs and his left shoulder, and that is when he found the turn.
He swiveled into it.
Something hard caught his foot as he slid around the corner.
He put out his hands, and fell into the void.
81
Amelie felt the crowd around her, dense and hostile, and the old man’s grip on her arm. He had been angry, but now he seemed only afraid. She bowed her head and tried to avoid the blows she could almost sense were about to rain down on her head.
She had no time to think that she had been a fool.
Someone touched her shoulder, and she wriggled forward, propelled by the weight of the crowd at her back and the old man’s insistent tugs. There was the gate, crammed with men; the sound of voices she couldn’t understand filled her ears. She lowered her head and saw blood on her bare foot. She didn’t remember cutting herself. She had left her shoes at the fountain.
They neared the gate. Whether the angry crowd behind her couldn’t make itself understood over the muezzin’s chant, or whether people were simply too astonished by the spectacle of the gatekeeper half dragging a foreign woman from the precincts of the mosque, the churning flow through the gate seemed to stop and for a moment there was a way through. The old man plunged in.
They surged through the gate; the men coming in met the following crowd like two waves, and for a moment each checked the force of the other. It was just enough time.
The gatekeeper dragged her forward.
A carriage was rattling down the slope from Topkapi Palace, pulled by two grays; the coachman stood on the box and someone was leaning from the window.
Amelie made a sudden wrench, and the gatekeeper’s hold on her arm was lost. Without a thought she flung herself toward the horses.
One of the horses flung back its head. The driver lunged on the reins.
Amelie closed her eyes and turned her head away.
From far away she heard a voice saying, in French: “ Vite, madame, vite! Jump in.”
Another hand was beneath her elbow, tugging her upward.
She half fell, half leaped through the carriage door.
“Quick, Hasan! Drive on!”
The jolt threw her back into a seat. She opened her eyes.
There was a man in front of her, kneeling up on the opposite seat and giving orders to the driver through the hatch.
He turned to her with a worried expression.
“I have no idea, madame, what brings you here, but I believe we have been of some service.”
He glanced through the window.
“We’ll beat them yet,” he said darkly. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Dr. Millingen, the sultan’s physician.”
82
Yashim shot to his feet. The water reached to his knees. He was aware of a searing pain in his left arm.
A kind of sob escaped him, like a cough. The pain made him wince, but he could move his fingers and he did not think he had broken a bone. He sloshed forward through the icy water, sliding his feet over the ground, and touched a wall in the dark.
Like the tunnel itself, it was slimy. He reached up with his good arm and tried to find the top, and when that failed he began to follow the wall with his hand, looking for an opening. He counted four corners, and didn’t find one. Once he stumbled against something soft and large, which seemed to be rolling on the floor under the surface. He drove it away with his foot and tried not to think about it again.