“Close? To each other?” Yashim said stupidly. He was aware of a throbbing in his leg, and when he lifted his hand to the light he saw it was black with running blood.
“To the relics,” Amelie said. Her eyes shone in the lamplight.
Yashim felt dizzy. He heaved his way through the water and found the steps. He unwound his turban and began to tear it into strips, binding them around his calf. Amelie waded up to him. She helped him to tie the bandage and wrap another around his hand.
“I–I didn’t mean you to come.”
“No.” He felt terribly tired. “Except for you I would have stayed behind.”
Her hands were shaking. He watched her try to tie the knot with fingers that were stiff with cold.
“I’ve found the relics now,” she said.
He knew it wasn’t true. Not yet.
“He was coming to kill you,” he said.
He watched her straighten up, the bandage done. She put up a hand and pushed a lock of hair from her forehead.
“You can still help,” she said.
She waded away, with the lamp in her hand. Wearily Yashim stumbled to his feet.
“He would have killed you!” His shout sounded very faint, there in that eerie dark forest. “The way he killed the others. The way he killed your husband.”
She didn’t stop, just turned her head over her shoulder and said: “I’m doing this for Max. It’s what he’d want.”
Yashim shivered from the cold.
“You went to Millingen, didn’t you?” He called. “That’s where you were. You locked me in.”
Amelie didn’t answer. Her skirts trailed behind her like a train.
“Look,” she said at last. She lifted the lamp, and its glow fell on a plinth, supporting a column that vanished into the darkness overhead. The joint was concealed by a band of greenish copper dappled with moisture, and on the plinth itself, partly submerged in the black water, Yashim recognized a chiseled head.
Even though it was upside down, the brow lost underwater, Yashim found himself transfixed. Majestic in their classical symmetry were the great blind eyes, the flaring nostrils, the full curving lips-but demonic, too, was the expression of agony and command. It was the face of a woman. Her hair was thick and knotted.
Yashim moved closer, forgetting the cold, while the lamplight trembled in Amelie’s hand and cast shadows that flickered and ran across deep incisions in the stone. Then he pulled back with a gasp: for a moment the strands of those knotted locks had seemed to twist and writhe like living things.
“The Medusa,” he murmured with a shiver.
“Don’t you see?” Amelie gave a sudden peal of shaky laughter. “Max guessed-the myths! The Medusa turns men into stone. Her gaze is a lock. It confers a kind of immortality.”
“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.
118
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.