by Will Adams
The walls around the bed were skimmed with plaster and finished with a narrative of paint. Butros returned back down the steps for the surplus bandage and a bottle of water. He moistened the bandage then wiped the panels down. The water brought the old pigments vividly to life. In the first, a queenly woman and her retinue were welcomed ashore from a fleet of ships. The next showed a great feast, the third a hunt. In the fourth, a man and woman held hands in the mouth of a cave. Beneath them, in surprisingly crude letters, like initials carved by lovers into a tree, two sets of Phoenician characters. ‘Queen Alyssa, daughter of Belus of Tyre,’ murmured Butros, running his finger beneath them. ‘Aeneas, son of Teucer of Salamis.’
Karin closed her eyes. How simple explanations could be. Dido’s Aeneas not the warrior of Troy himself, but simply named in his honour, as so many people had been: yet a Teukrian of Salamis rather than Troy. And everything else that followed had been just the usual confusion of names. She took a pace back, the better to study the wall as a whole, the whole cavern chamber. ‘It’s the legend,’ she murmured.
‘Legend?’ asked Iain, coming to join them.
‘How Dido and Aeneas became lovers. They went out hunting together. A storm blew up. It separated them from their retinues. They took refuge in a cave.’
‘A cave?’ Iain frowned and looked around. ‘Are you saying this cave?’
‘Dido is one of history’s greatest romantic figures. Is it so hard to imagine her building her palace here precisely because it was near this cave? Or maybe she simply needed somewhere discreet to meet him. But you’re missing the point.’
‘Which is?’
She pointed at the doorway through which they’d arrived. ‘That staircase was cut through forty metres of bedrock. Straight through. But how could Dido possibly have known they’d find this place at the bottom unless she’d already visited it?’
‘There’s another way in,’ nodded Iain. ‘There has to be.’
‘Then what are we waiting for?’ said Georges. ‘Let’s find it.’
II
The four gunmen were accounted for, the cordon sanitaire declared secure. Seventeen others were dead, including the six policemen whose bodies had been found by the security gates. Twenty-one others were being treated for gunshot wounds and shrapnel injuries, and five of them were considered critical.
But it could have been so much worse.
Deniz Baştürk had had a buzzing in his ears since the first blast. What with the high levels of ambient noise, he had to watch people’s lips closely as they talked to understand what they were telling him. Mostly, they were telling him to go to hospital. He brushed these suggestions off. The nation had never needed its leader visible as much as it did right now. Besides, heightened security meant restricted access even for medical personnel, and others clearly needed treatment more urgently than he. Yasemin Omari, for one. He walked alongside her as she was stretchered out to an ambulance, her eyes woozy with morphine. ‘Don’t think I’ll go easy on you just because of this,’ she said.
He laughed and patted her hand. ‘I don’t,’ he assured her.
The exchange put him in oddly good spirits, though he knew better than to let it show. He went back up to the comms room. In the chaos, it was their best source of news. One channel kept showing a clip of him running out into the street to pick Omari up. He was surprised and somewhat dismayed by how fat and ungainly he looked, by how slowly he moved. He’d thought at the time he was breaking land-speed records. Another channel showed him berating that journalist for suggesting he was dead, while Selda swabbed his arm.
It felt strange to watch himself like this.
Shouting below. His wife had arrived. It would take more than an emergency lock-down to keep her out. He hurried down to meet her, all dressed up for Orhan’s concert. Her face was glistening as she wrapped her arms around him. Then she stood back with a reproachful look. ‘I heard it all on the radio. What were you thinking? For Omari of all people!’
‘They’d have killed her.’
‘And?’ He couldn’t tell whether she was joking or not, suspected she wasn’t quite sure either. She hugged him again, even tighter. ‘They said you were dead,’ she told him. ‘I was so scared.’
‘How do you think I felt?’
They laughed together. It felt good. But it wasn’t to last. There was a tap on his arm and he looked around to see Gonka, his senior aide. ‘Prime Minister,’ she said soberly. ‘There’s something you need to see.’
‘Just tell me.’
‘I really think you need to see this for yourself, sir. Please.’
He sighed and took Sophia’s hand, followed Gonka back up to the comms room. It had become crowded, yet people edged away from him a little, as though he’d somehow become toxic. He felt the chill of premonition. The screens were no longer showing footage of him. They’d switched to live feed from Istanbul’s Taksim Square. It had been completely cleared earlier by the police, but protesters were now flooding back in, at least two hundred thousand already, if he was any judge, and thousands more arriving every minute, waving banners and flags, Turkish and union and regional and football and others, raggedly bellowing out some vaguely familiar slogan that he couldn’t quite make sense of, what with his hearing still impaired. His heart sank to his boots. It never finished. It never fucking finished. Tonight, of all nights, hadn’t he earned a break?
Everyone was looking strangely at him, even Sophia. She let go his hand and took a pace back. He had the sense that people were expecting him to say something pertinent, but he didn’t have the first idea what. ‘What’s that shit they’re chanting?’ he asked.
Gonka frowned at him, as if she suspected he was pulling her leg. Then she realized he was serious. ‘It’s your name, Prime Minister,’ she told him gently. ‘It’s your name.’
III
It was Iain who found it, playing his torch over the gallery roof. ‘There!’ he said, illuminating a narrow gash in the rock perhaps fifty feet above.
‘Christ!’ muttered Karin. ‘But how do we reach it? How did they reach it?’
A good question, for the wall wasn’t just smooth, it angled back in as it rose. And there was an overhang directly below the cleft that promised few if any holds. With time, good light and the right equipment, Iain might have made the traverse. Without them, it was impossible. Yet there must have been a way up somewhere. He turned his torch on the facing wall and found the answer: pairs of peg-holes that ascended in a spiral until they stopped directly across the cavern from the cleft: holes into which scaffolding poles would once have slotted, supporting a staircase and presumably a bridge. He stood beneath the gash then paced out the distance to the facing wall. He made it thirteen feet. He tried to visualize leaping it from a standing start.
‘It’s not possible,’ said Georges. ‘It can’t be done.’
‘Then give me a better idea,’ said Iain sharply. He checked their coil of rope: thirty metres long, steel eyelets in both ends. He replaced it in the pack then slung it on, pulling the straps as tight as they would go. His shoes were wrong for climbing. He kicked them off. The slurry was rising remorselessly beneath them. He tucked the torch into his waistband and went to the wall.
‘Be careful,’ said Karin, touching his wrist.
‘Count on it.’ The holes had no lips but he could anchor himself in them by making fists of his hands. His feet were too wide for most of them so he had to take his weight upon his toes. The first section was fast, even so, with the cave still bellying out. With a foot in the lower hole of a pair, and a fist in an upper, he’d feel out the next set of holes, then heave himself up and across. Then he’d reset himself and start again. The wall soon turned vertical, however, then began to slant back in. The strain built incrementally upon his shoulders, neck and calves. But he kept going and finally he reached the place where the staircase finished, where a bridge would once have crossed the cavern to the cleft in the facing wall. He anchored himself then twisted around to sh
ine his torch at it. It was tall, narrow and jagged, with the promise of more open space behind. He shone his torch either side then up at the roof, but could see no way to climb around or across to it. ‘How’s it going down there?’ he called out.
‘The concrete’s still rising,’ said Georges, doing his best to keep his voice level, not entirely succeeding.
‘Okay,’ said Iain. There was nothing for it. He rested his torch carefully in one of the peg-holes, angling its beam to illuminate the gash. Then he turned himself carefully around, resting most of his weight on his right heel. Now that he was up here, in this awkward posture, it was clear to him that he couldn’t hope to leap directly to and through the cleft. The best he could hope for was to grab its bottom lip then haul himself up. He closed his eyes to visualize in his mind how it would go. He rehearsed it until he had it fixed. Then he braced himself, bent his legs and leapt.
He crashed into the facing wall. The impact was much harder than he’d expected and it left him winded. He flailed with his hands for grip but the rock was smooth and there was nothing to hold onto and he began slipping remorselessly down so that he knew he was about to fall. He clawed crazily at the rock with everything he had, with his feet and hands and chin and knees and elbows, and somehow he gained traction and heaved himself up through the mouth and inside before turning to lie there on his back, panting mightily, his heart hammering.
It was half a minute or so before he’d recovered enough even to look around. He’d left his torch on the other side of the cavern, of course, so that the light in here was minimal. But he was lying in a shallow well at the foot of a slanted, narrow shaft that vanished into complete darkness above him. The rock was raw here, not smoothed as in the cavern beneath, but jagged with juts and knobs. And there were steps cut in a steep spiral in the shaft’s walls.
He started climbing. It quickly turned black as pitch. He continued upwards for perhaps thirty feet until he bumped up against something solid. He felt above him, a blind man learning a new face. A pair of wood and metal trap-doors had been laid flat across the shaft’s full width, and were held in place by two locking-bars. He tried to wrest these free, but they were too tightly wedged. He set his back against a wall and stamped one with his foot. Nothing. He kept at it until he was rewarded by a hint of give. He went at it even harder and suddenly it fell loose and clattered free to the foot of the shaft, bouncing out the gash and crashing to the floor fifty feet below. The trap-doors creaked and lurched fractionally downwards, allowing trickles of sand to fall upon his face; and something mighty stirred and groaned above him, a giant rousing himself after a long slumber. And he had a sudden and convincing intuition at that moment, of a city under siege, its Achilles heel a cave system leading to its underbelly. Simply concealing its entrance wouldn’t be enough. It would need to be buried so deep beneath sand and earth that no one would ever find it. If so, then releasing the second locking-bar would bring the whole lot down upon him, crushing him beneath it.
He climbed back down to the foot of the shaft, seeking some cunning way to give himself a chance. But if he used the rope himself, and it went wrong, Karin and the others would be stranded on the cavern floor until the concrete claimed them. He knelt on the ledge, leaned out, called down to them. Georges turned on his torch. They were standing on the bedstead, the highest place in the chamber, yet still the slurry was lapping around their knees.
He was out of time.
The deaths of his wife and son had been the most brutal experience in Iain’s life. It hadn’t just been the overwhelming grief of bereavement itself, it had been the mixture of guilt and self-loathing and falling short that had come along with it, and which he’d never quite managed to shake off since, irrational though it was. For he’d always seen it as his fundamental role in their family to keep Tisha and Robbie safe, whatever it took. And so what use was he? What possible use was he?
There was a knob of rock at the foot of the shaft. He knotted one end of the rope around it then tested it to make sure that it would hold. When he was satisfied, he threw the other end down to Georges. ‘Stay where you are for the moment,’ he told him. ‘There’s a blockage I need to clear first.’
‘A blockage?’ asked Karin.
‘Wait until I come back here, or until it’s all finished spilling out. Then climb up and we can get the fuck out of here.’
‘What about you?’
‘I’ll be fine,’ he told her. He could hear the slightly tinny note of falseness in his voice, so he didn’t hang around to argue. He climbed briskly back up to the trap-doors. It was difficult to get leverage on the second bar. The way the doors had lurched down had pinned it even more tightly into its slots. He’d need to relieve the pressure on it somehow. He turned around so that his back was against the wall then bent his legs and straightened his back and pressed his hands and head up against the trap-doors, like Atlas carrying the heavens. He breathed in deep to flood his bloodstream and muscles with oxygen, then he gave it everything, straining to straighten his legs, a weightlifter going for gold. The locking-bar loosened a fraction, enough for him to knock it away with his elbow. The trap-doors instantly burst open, releasing a torrent of dry sand. He grabbed the wall and clung gamely on for a second or two but the deluge was too much, it ripped him free and sent him tumbling down the shaft, helpless as a child caught by a freak wave. The sand already fallen at least buffered his landing, but instantly he was pinned beneath the extraordinary weight of the continuing cascade, like some vast grain elevator in full spate. Within moments he was buried so deep that an eerie silence fell. He was lying on his front with his back bent and his arms up to protect his head, creating a tiny pocket of air beneath him. He tried to move an arm or leg, but he simply couldn’t. The weight upon him was so crushing that it was all he could do to breathe.
A minute passed. Another. The air turned sour. A headache started and quickly grew fierce. He began to feel dizzy and knew it wouldn’t be much longer. An image came unbidden to him then, of Tisha and Robbie the last time he’d seen them alive, cheerfully waving him off after his final leave. He knew it was only his oxygen-depleted brain playing tricks, but the way they were waving felt like forgiveness; it felt like letting go. And the burden of having fallen short that he had been carrying around all these years finally lifted from him, leaving him feeling almost weightless. A voice began whispering in his ear. He tried to ignore it but it wouldn’t go away. It kept telling him that it wasn’t his imagination, that the weight of sand truly had lessened. And suddenly he realized the significance of that, that the torrent must not only have poured itself out, but also have spilled out of the cleft onto the cavern floor, leaving only a relatively small mound of it above him. With his last reserves of strength, he wrenched himself around. He began to scrabble at it with his hands and it was so fine and dry that it parted easily now and then he was breaking clear of it and gasping for air even as Karin, digging down to him from above, cried out in relief and threw her arms around him and hugged him with a fierceness that was almost a declaration in itself.
They lay there together for a while as he recovered. The shaft rose high above them, offering a miraculous glimpse of night sky. And then, astonishingly, a helicopter, drawn perhaps by this inexplicable new sink-hole in the ground, passed clattering overhead; and its searchlights caught him and Karin for the briefest moment in its twin beams, as they basked in the relief of it, in the sheer physical joy of being utterly spent, yet still alive.
EPILOGUE
Nicosia, four days later
The sun was out, making rainbows on cobbles slick with soapsuds. Across the square, waiters were laying tables for lunch, stiff white cloths and heavy steel cutlery and fat glasses for water and wine. Karin felt an immense contentment as she watched them. What a pleasant life, to move from café to café with the sun, holding hands with Iain.
She felt fifteen again. Fifteen, and in love.
Every so often, someone would notice her or Iain and do a double
take; but less than yesterday, in turn less than the day before. Sic transit gloria mundi, as her old professor would have put it. Thus passes the glory of this world.
A waiter sashayed through tables to bring them new drinks. Grenadine for her, orange juice for him. Alcohol was somehow redundant. They clinked out a toast, eyes meeting over the top of the ice-misted glass. Another thrumming of the strings. It was absurd. But that wouldn’t last forever, and then what?
Iain, seemingly, had no doubts. He was possessed of a new serenity since their ordeal beneath Varosha, as though he’d put old ghosts to rest. He talked of their future together as a settled thing. At dinner the night before, he’d explained how he’d reconfigure his flat for her. ‘This is ridiculous,’ she’d protested. ‘We’ve only known each other a week.’
‘So?’ he’d asked.
At times his certainty thrilled her. At others it made her wary. It meant she’d have to be the sheet anchor, the rational one. And there was plenty to be rational about. Money, for a start. Good jobs were hard to come by in her field, and her debt wouldn’t retire itself. Iain waved all that aside. But damned if she’d live off him; damned if she would. She drained her grenadine, put down the empty glass, got to her feet. ‘You know that thing I have to do.’
He nodded. ‘You sure you don’t want company?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘Later, then.’
She stooped to kiss his cheek. She liked it when he didn’t shave. It was a brisk fifteen-minute walk from the Old City to the Société Genève. No sign of the manager. But then she’d timed it for his lunch-hour. The way the tellers glanced at each other suggested they’d been gossiping about her amongst themselves. The cocky young man was free. She walked straight up to him and told him what she needed. He led her to the back office for the master key and to register her details. But his composure failed him on their way down to the basement. ‘So that was pretty cool,’ he grinned. ‘You and your friends in Famagusta.’