The Snake Stone

by Jason Goodwin

Yashim sighed: the valide’s gift was ruined beyond repair.

  It takes a book to hide a book.

  38

  ENVER Xani fitted his key into the lock and pressed the door gently. Beyond the door lay a cool, dim chamber that echoed to the sound of running water. He stepped inside, grateful to escape the heat and dust of the city, and bent down to unstrap his shoes. He laid them carefully on a stone, pushed the door shut behind him, and stood waiting for his eyes to adjust to the gloom.

  The coldness of the water still surprised him. In winter, the brothers said, it seeped into your very marrow; you spent the day wet, frozen, moving between the siphons and the cisterns of the city in fur-lined boots, your hands and hair permanently clammy, the joints of your fingers and toes swollen with the cold. It wasn’t work for old men. Which was why most of the watermen took an apprentice with them on their rounds; invariably one of their own sons.

  In summer one could be grateful for the chill and the darkness, for the quiet and refreshing sound of flowing water. Outside, the dust was baked in the hot streets, stirred up by the passage of many feet, untouched by the slightest breath of wind. In here, in any one of the dozen or so siphons and cisterns dotted around the city, one could step into the cool stillness of the forests, fifteen miles off, from where the water began its long, slow descent toward a thirsty capital. It was a privilege. Enver had paid well for it.

  He hung the key on a hook, the way he had been shown; it certainly would not do to drop a key into the maze of channels that swirled and eddied at his feet. In three months, he had been taught everything that an apprentice could be expected to know after years of following his father on the job: only by following the rules could he perhaps make up for the experience he lacked. For the brothers, the rules were like a religious ritual; just as this siphon room was, in its way, like a church or mosque, cool and quiet amid the heat and bustle of the city.

  Enver took a stick from its place on the wall and dipped it into the broad receiving tank, measuring its depth. The water from the incoming pipe flowed gently into it at one end; on the far side, in the shadow, the water brimmed against the rim of the tank, sliding noiselessly over seven shallow scoops into the distribution basins. At the appointed hour he would stop up the outlets to basins three, five and six, open the pipe to release the flow from basin two, and pass the signal down the main bore to the next man.

  Enver felt a squeeze of anxiety in his chest as he ran over the mnemonic verses he had learned. 3,5,6. Then 2. They belonged to the rules, as did the tarnished hollow ball of tin, which would shortly shoot from the delivery pipe and set his work in motion. His job now was to watch for the ball.

  Enver squatted at the edge of the receiving tank, frowning as he focused on the spout. The water purled over the lip of the spout and tumbled in a thick coil into the tank, on and on, without stopping. From time to time he saw the coil flicker; sometimes he felt sure that the water was arriving, not in a ceaseless stream but by a series of almost imperceptible pulses, like blood through the veins of a man’s wrist, gluck-gluck-gluck, and he had to close his eyes and breathe deeply to dispel the illusion. But was it an illusion? Many of the brothers were able to tell precisely when the ball was set to arrive by the most minute change in the volume of delivery, the smallest shift in the music of the waterfall. “Steady, now. Stand by,” they’d say, ever alert to the subtle change, breaking off a conversation. And a few moments later the tin ball would drop into the tank, sink a few inches, and then bob up to the surface and glide softly to the edge. “Not yet,” Enver thought; but he had misjudged, for at that moment a tiny scraping noise announced the ball’s arrival at the near edge of the tank. He hadn’t even seen it come: it must have dropped from the spout when he closed his eyes, trying to decipher the rhythm of the water.

  Disappointed, he stared down into the tank. He should pick up the ball, block the necessary distribution pipes with the rags, and then drop the ball into the exit pipe, to float away on its long journey through Istanbul. 3,5,6. Then 2. Light from a spangling of small holes in the roof of the chamber danced and dissolved on the surface of the water, as black and depthless as a pool of oil. With a sigh he bent forward and retrieved the tin ball. For a moment the light seemed to bounce from the surface around the chamber, a sudden brightening that Enver caught in the corner of his eye; then it settled once more, and he shivered. He had heard the brothers’ stories of ifrits and demons who haunted the darker corners of the cisterns; but it was growing cold now, too.

  He gripped the ball in his fist and stared down at his own reflection in the black water.

  For a fraction of a second, he caught sight of a second face, staring up out of the dark tank.

  Enver had no time to wonder. He gasped, and something took him by the back of his head, so that the last thing Enver Xani saw in this world was the sight of his own face rushing toward him, its mouth open in a silent scream.

  39

  IT was late in the evening when Yashim arrived at the gate of Topkapi Palace. Two halberdiers scrambled to their feet as he entered, and one of them placed his foot carelessly over a pair of dice on the stones.

  “Quiet times,” Yashim murmured.

  The halberdiers grinned foolishly. Yashim went past them and into the first, more public court of the palace. He crossed the cobbles in the shade of the planes, remembering when the great court had been full of people—soldiers respectfully dismounting, the standing grooms, the pashas coming to and fro, surrounded by their retinues, cooks bawling out orders, flunkeys darting everywhere on errands, cartloads of provisions rolling slowly toward the imperial kitchens, turbaned kadis gravely discussing the judgments of the day, oblivious to the noise, harem carriages rattling off toward some sheltered picnic spot by the Sweet Waters, Black Eunuchs trotting home with their shopping in a string bag, a swaggering group of Albanian irregulars, trying not to look awed, with pistols in their sashes, little boys staring up at the collection of severed heads displayed on the column, and around them, between them, the ordinary people of Istanbul, whose conversation was an underlying murmur like the sea.

  The court was silent; only the gardeners squatted at their quiet tasks, beneath the swaying branches of the planes.

  Where, Yashim wondered, had it all gone? Not to Besiktas, certainly, the sultan’s new Frankish palace on the Bosphorus, where sentries in kepis stood to attention outside little boxes, close to the railings. At Besiktas, carriages turned in smartly across the raked gravel, wheels crackling on the stones, and people in stamboulines got out, went up the steps, and disappeared.

  Across the First Court stood the Gate of Felicity, whose conical towers could be seen from the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn. He wondered if it was still the Gate of Felicity, now that it no longer opened into the dwelling place of God’s Shadow on Earth. Could one still count oneself happy to pass through that gate, yet no longer able to share the same ground as the sultan himself?

  As soon as he had phrased the question in his mind, Yashim knew it wasn’t the ground that he was thinking of, but the shadow of protection under which he had always operated. The sultan trusted him. A word would save him—but the word would not come from a sick man, far away in his palace on the Bosphorus. The French ambassador’s report would pass into other hands. Yashim’s involvement with the archaeologist would seem, at best, foolish. The slur would mark him like a stain on his character, a faint question mark over his good judgment.

  He knocked, and waited. After a while the wicket gate opened, and an old halberdier of the tresses, a man he knew, welcomed him in without ceremony.

  “The valide, it will be, efendi. She’s expecting you?”

  Yashim nodded. Only a few years ago—it seemed a lifetime—he would have been challenged instantly and whisked through with the certainty that a hundred pairs of eyes were watching him enviously from behind! The old man fished up a bunch of keys and led Yashim across the Second Court, fiddling with them in his hand.

  “I have ’em all n
ow, efendi,” he said cheerfully. He payed them out as they walked: the key to the kitchens, the key to the stable block. “This one,” he said, holding a huge iron key up to the light, “you’d never guess.”

  “The grain bins,” Yashim said.

  “That’s right, efendi. That’s the one. The grain bins. Heavier than the grain now, I expect. This little one?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Yashim admitted.

  The old man chuckled. “I’ll show you something, efendi. Just you watch.”

  They stopped at a small door set into the farther wall of the Second Court. To their left stood the divan room, with its vast jutting eaves, where the great pashas had discussed the business of an empire that stretched from the gates of Vienna to the Pyramids. Kingdoms had been broken in that hall; armies raised for glory, and for defeat; the fate of whole races settled; men had been honored or destroyed by a word, a sign, a stroke of the pen. Now it was empty.

  The halberdier fitted the key into a tiny lock. With a single twist the door swung open.

  “Surprised, efendi? That’s right, that little key.”

  There was no need to say any more.

  Yashim went inside. The entrance to the harem was like a street in miniature, open to the sky for the next few yards, with the windows of the Black Eunuchs’ apartments projecting over the paving stones. Only it was a street of perfectly polished marble, with fountains that flowed from niches in the walls; and it was utterly silent.

  The door closed behind him. He heard the slap-slap of slippers on the flags, and an old black man in a beautifully embroidered kaftan and a vast white turban came around a corner, fanning himself with a fan made of reeds.

  “Hello, Hyacinth.”

  “Oy, oy, Yashim. It’s getting late.”

  “I’m sorry.” Only two or three years earlier, this would have been the most important time in the life of the harem: the hour of gossip and intimacy over food, when thousands of succulent dishes would stream from the palace kitchens to the sultan’s apartments; the hour, above all, of the gözde’s final preparations, bedecking, perfuming, calming the nerves of the girl fortunate enough to have been selected to share the sultan’s bed that night. The whole harem would have fluttered and twittered like a forest of little birds.

  The stillness was audible now.

  “Ask the valide, Hyacinth, if she will receive me.”

  40

  “C’EST bizarre, Yashim. As he gets older, my son grows more and more infatuated by the European style—yet I, who was born to it, find that I prefer the comforts of oriental tradition. He hardly comes here anymore, only to see me. His new palace delights him. I find it looks like a manufactory.”

  Yashim inclined his head. The Queen Mother was propped up on her sofa against a cloud of cushions, with the light as ever artfully arranged behind her head, a blind drawn across the little side window, and a shawl across her legs. She walked rarely now, if at all; yet her figure was still graceful and the shadows on her face revealed the beauty she had once been and still, in a sense, remained. Beneath a kaftan of silk velvet she wore a fine chiffon robe whose collar and sleeves were embellished with the most delicate Transylvanian lace; the lace, Yashim recalled, was made by nuns. The swirl of her turban was fixed in place by a diamond and emerald aigrette. Her hands were white and delicate. Did the valide not know that her son was dying at Besiktas?

  “I am very old, Yashim, as you well know. Topkapi has been my home—some would say my prison—for sixty years. It, too, is old. Well, the world has moved on from us both. By now, I like to think, we understand each other. We share memories. I intend to die here, Yashim, fully dressed. At the sultan’s palace at Besiktas I’d be popped into a nightgown and tucked up in a French bed, and that would be an end of it.”

  Yashim nodded. She was perfectly right. So many years had passed since a young woman, the captive of Algerian corsairs, had been delivered here, to the harem quarters of the aged sultan Abdul Hamit, that it was easy to forget how well the valide knew the European style. Aimée Dubucq du Riviery, a planter’s daughter on the French island of Martinique: she was a Frenchwoman. The same inscrutable law of destiny that had taken her to the sultan’s seraglio, where she had finally emerged as valide, had led her childhood friend, little Rose, to the throne of France, as Josephine, Napoleon’s own empress.

  A nightgown. A tight French bed. Yashim knew how the Europeans lived, with their mania for divisions. They parceled up their homes the way they segregated their actions. The Franks had special rooms for sleeping in, with fussy contraptions created for performing the act itself, and all day long these bedrooms sat vacant and desolate, consoled by the dust rising in the sunlight—unless they belonged to an invalid. In which case the invalid herself shared the loneliness and desolation, far away from the household activity.

  The Franks had dining rooms for dining in, and sitting rooms for sitting in, and drawing rooms for withdrawing into—as if their whole lives were not a series of withdrawals anyway, tiptoeing from one room and one function to the next, changing and dressing all over again, forever on the run from engagement with real life. Whereas in an Ottoman home—even here, in the harem—everyone was allowed to float on the currents of life as they sped by. People divided their lives between what was public and what was reserved for the family, between selamlik, the men’s quarters, and haremlik: in the poorest homes, they were divided only by a curtain. If you were hungry, food was brought in. If you wished to sleep, you unfolded your legs, reclined, and twitched a shawl over yourself. If you were moody, someone was sure to drop in to cheer you up; ill, and someone noticed; tired, and nobody minded if you dozed.

  The valide took the book and raised an eyebrow.

  “I may seem terribly old to you, Yashim, but I do hope you aren’t wondering whether I knew the author.”

  Yashim giggled. The valide reached for a pair of spectacles and put them on. She glanced warningly at Yashim over the rims. “I have my vanities, quand même,” she said.

  Yet Yashim was too delighted with the novelty of seeing a woman in spectacles to consider their effect on the valide’s beauty. He knew her for a reader, of course; but the spectacles made her seem, well, magnificently wise.

  She examined the brown leather cover of the little book at some length, turning it this way and that. She ran a slim finger behind the boards and opened the first page. She tilted her head.

  “I do not think,” she said, “it is the sort of book which would interest us. For a start, it’s not in French. De Aedificio et antiquitae Constantinopolii,” she read slowly. The hand holding the book sank to the cushions. “Dancing. Deportment. The interminable tragedies of Monsieur Racine.” She paused. “It was a long time ago, Yashim, and we were educated—to adorn, not to be scholars. I think it’s Latin,” she added with a little shiver.

  Yashim, who had already guessed as much, tried to conceal his disappointment. “I thought—perhaps—you would be familiar with it.”

  “Latin, Yashim?” The valide gave a bright little laugh. “But no, you are right. I’m sorry, it is so long ago.” She ran a finger beneath an eyelid, to wipe away a tear. “How silly of me. I was thinking of my mother. A very clever woman. Not in my way, of course. She was a dreamer, idéaliste. Father wanted us to be pretty. But my mother—she did try to teach us something, beyond dancing and the use of our fans. Even Latin.” She smiled sadly. “I think it was always too hot.”

  She looked up almost shyly. “I have not spoken of them for many years,” she said. She removed her glasses and set them down on the carpet beside her. “The edifices and antiquities of Constantinople,” she said, handing the book back. “I’m not much help. You probably already know when it was published.”

  “In Rome, in 1560.”

  The valide gave Yashim a long look. “There is something going on between you and your friend Palewski, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Valide?”

  She tut-tutted and wagged a finger. “Tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk. Palewski is a we
ll-educated man, and he was brought up in a Catholic country. A cold country, where it is easy to learn Latin, among other things. I think his Latin would be better than mine. Why do you not consult him? He is your friend.”

  Yashim looked away. “Monsieur Palewski has put me in an awkward situation,” he said stiffly.

  “I see. It was his intention to do so?”

  Yashim shook his head. “No.”

  The valide cocked her head to one side. “Friendship is an opportunity, Yashim, and our lives are short. Have you spoken to him?”

  “I have not.”

  “Flûte! Don’t be such a fool, young man. Take this book to your friend.” She smoothed the shawl around her shoulders. “Now I am tired.”

  She closed her eyes and let out a great sigh.

  “Latin!”

  41

  YASHIM left the palace gate and crossed to the fountain of Sultan Ahmed. In spite of himself he veered left, passing the domed baths that the great architect Sinan had built for Roxelana, the wife of Suleyman the Magnificent. One of the baths was being used as a store. Weeds, even a little crooked tree, sprouted from the cracked lead roofs.

  He went out into the Hippodrome.

  There was nothing overbearing in the Serpent Column’s height, nothing to draw the eye, but once your eye was drawn, Yashim had found, it was always hard to look away again. Its very littleness mocked the pretensions of the greater monuments. Denuded of their plaques, speaking a lost language, they only gestured helplessly at vanished glory.

  Three snakes, symmetrically entwined, raised themselves high above the ground. Simple yet intricate. Yashim wondered what Lefèvre’s little book had to say about it: The Edifices and Antiquities of Constantinople. It would say, presumably, that it had come from the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, the seat of oracular wisdom in the ancient world. But what of the author himself? Would the author have been frightened by those glaring heads?