The Snake Stone

by Jason Goodwin

  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

  AMÉLIE 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.

  Amélie 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.

  Amélie 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.

  He put a hand to the wall and leaned his forehead against it. It seemed that he was in a small chamber, some seven feet across, without exits. There was about two feet of water at the bottom. He had dropped through an opening in the channel or pipe above; it could not, he thought, be more than twelve feet above or he would have got more badly hurt.

  However high it was, it was still beyond his reach.

  A thin trickle of water slid over his fingers and onto his forehead.

  He wondered if, by a miracle, the waterman would come this way.

  Then something touched his leg again, and he reached down into the water and knew immediately that no one was ever going to help him out.

  83

  THE little boy slipped through the gates and went slowly up to his trench in the dirt.

  A window flew open with a squeal. The little boy did not look up.

  Marta put her head out. “Shpëtin! Did you see where the efendi went?”

  The little boy picked up his stick. He pushed the dented ball along the trench.

  At the window, Marta gave an exasperated sigh and shrugged. She turned to the ambassador.

  “No, lord. I don’t know. They went together, I think, but I don’t know.”

  Palewski frowned. “I’m not easy about this, Marta. If Yashim went with the boy, he must have had a reason.”

  “Yes, lord.” Marta nodded her head slowly.

  And this, Palewski thought, is the second time the boy comes home alone.

  “You talk to him, Marta. He thinks I’m some sort of ogre. See if he’ll show us where they went.”

  Marta gave a doubtful shrug. “The boy—he’s a little strange, lord.”

  “He’s a boy, isn’t he? Boys are all—well, like boys.” Palewski felt himself at a loss. “Just ask him for me. Please.”

  84

  YASHIM put his hand on a human face.

  He sprang away from the corpse, flailing through the water. He was backed into a corner before he remembered that here, in the dark, he could soon lose all sense of direction.

  All sense of proportion.

  There was no need to guess whose body it was that rolled through the water. The missing man had been found.

  Yashim tried not to think about what would happen next. He would grow cold, and weak. In the end he would drown in two feet of water, sharing the Albanian’s liquid grave.

  He needed a way out.

  Carefully now he felt his way around the pit, searching for anything that could help him climb the slippery walls. The floor was covered in loose stones and fallen bricks: the ceiling, he supposed, was slowly falling in. Once again he brushed against Xani’s corpse. Fighting a wave of nausea, he rolled the body over, feeling for anything the man had carried—a knife, a coil of rope. Something bubbled on the surface of the water, and Yashim gagged at the stench.

  He groped at the man’s chest, feeling something hard there, like a chain. On the chain was a crucifix. He pulled hard and the body lurched upward; then the chain broke and he heard the corpse sink back into the water.

  He went back to the wall, hoping it was the right one, and scratched at the wall with the end of the cross. It didn’t get him far.

  He ran his fingers over the wall, looking for a crack, a projection
, anything. The wall was smooth as butter.

  He unfastened his cloak and wrung out the water. Holding one end, with his back to the wall, he flicked the cloak up and over his head. The end he was holding went limp for a few seconds, then the cloak tumbled down over his head. The end he had thrown was sopping wet. He thought for a few moments with his eyes shut. Then he shook the cloak out flat on the water’s surface. He started groping on the floor for bricks, lobbing them as best as he could judge toward the center of the cloak. After a minute he gathered the cloak together by its edges and hefted the weight. It was as much as he could do to drag it through the water.

  He set the bundle against the wall and tried climbing on it. The stones slithered down under his weight. He stepped off and tried to tie the ends of the cloak together, to make a tighter bundle. After three or four attempts he gave up. He couldn’t get the wet, slopping half knots of the cloak to hold together.

  He wasted half an hour using the crucifix and the chain to sew the cloak tight. He floated Xani’s corpse over the bundle of stones and tried to get a footing. The corpse was soft underfoot and would not keep still. He could not reach the opening.

  He felt very tired.

  He shook the cloak, to dislodge some of the stones, tucked in the corners, and dragged the bundle up to the level of his chest. Water poured from the cloak. He squeezed it, and it grew lighter.

  He summoned his strength and tossed the bundle high up against the wall. It dropped back, into his arms. He tried again, taking a step back. When he had thrown it he reached forward to catch it, if it fell. This time he heard a muffled splash. The cloak did not fall back.

  Yashim found stones on the floor and began to lob them upward.

  The work kept him from feeling the cold.

  When he had lobbed a dozen stones into the dark, he stopped and listened. There was a new sound, of gurgling water. He stepped forward and touched the wall. He couldn’t feel anything. He put his lips to the wall and felt the water trickling down.

  It was cold as ice.

  He went back to lobbing stones, in the dark.

  It was only another way to die.

  85

  “YOU’RE quite sure?”

  “Quite sure, Dr. Millingen. Thank you.”

  “At least you have some fine Turkish slippers now,” he said, smiling.

  “Yes. You have been kind.” She turned to the little sunken door and knocked.

  Widow Matalya answered the door. She did not know what to think, finding the Frankish woman on her doorstep, with a strange man. Dr. Millingen tipped his hat politely, and the old woman sniffed, transferring her distaste onto a solid target: hats, she thought, were very nasty things.

  “Please, madame—do keep in touch.”

  Amélie gave him a curious smile. “I shall have to, I suppose,” she said.

  She went in. The old woman closed the door and turned with a very set expression on her face, her lips compressed.

  “Monsieur Yashim—Yashim efendi—he’s upstairs?” Amélie pointed a finger.

  The widow’s eyes bored into her.

  “I think I’ll just go up and see,” Amélie said gaily. “Salut!”

  86

  PALEWSKI put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Look here,” he said, breathing hard. “Are we going far? A long way?”

  The boy looked up and nodded.

  “In that case,” the ambassador said firmly, “we’ll take a chair.”

  He snapped his fingers at a couple of men squatting against a wall.

  “My treat,” he said, smiling. “Just point these fellows in the right direction, there’s a good boy.”

  Down on the shore they swapped the chair for a caïque. The little boy pointed up the Golden Horn.

  “Fener? Balat? Fener stage, boatman, please.” Perhaps Yashim had simply gone off home, he thought. But once they reached Fener, the little boy made some complicated signs and shook his head vigorously.

  “All right,” Palewski said. “We’ll walk, I see. Not too far now, eh?”

  He regretted taking the boy’s advice as he toiled up the hills, but they were in a shabby neighborhood that Palewski did not know, and there were no lounging chairmen here.

  Finally the boy jumped up onto a low wall and sat there, kicking his heels and looking intently at a doorway across the street.

  “He went in there?”

  Palewski climbed the steps. There was a padlock on the door, so Palewski turned around and caught the boy’s eye. He pointed at the door. The little boy nodded.

  Palewski glanced up and down the street. Apart from the little boy on the wall, it seemed perfectly empty.

  Stanislaw Palewski, unlike Dr. Millingen, was not a man who placed much faith in the benefits of regular exercise. His arms were thin; his legs were long. But he was still capable of sudden, violent physical effort.

  He stood back, leaned against the parapet, and doubled those long legs by bringing his knees up close to his chin.

  Then with a splintering crash he brought both feet down hard on the door and burst it open.

  The ambassador turned to the little boy, who was watching him with astonishment from across the street, and gave him a most unambassadorial wink.

  Then he went into the icy gloom to find his friend.

  87

  YASHIM was singing an old song from the Balkans, about a man who went down to the river and caught the soul of his dead lover in his nets.

  He spun slowly in the darkness, sometimes kicking his legs, sometimes reaching for a better grip on the man who had become his new friend. They’d only just met, too, he thought. Dear Xani! Stinking, buoyant, and obliging. What very good luck it was they’d met, at last.

  If only Xani were still warm, Yashim thought dreamily. The pit was slowly filling, deeper and deeper as the flow backed up against the cloak and stones overhead. He heard a tapping, unlike the sound of water gushing into the pit from the blocked conduit above. For some minutes he tried to imagine what it could be, before he discovered that it was the sound of his own chattering teeth.

  He found that his whole body was shaking, convulsing in sudden spasms that shook his grip on the dead man and sometimes sent him spluttering and flailing beneath the surface of the ice-cold water. Sometimes he had a sense of being underwater altogether; sometimes he closed his eyes and felt a wave of great lassitude and peace wash through him, so that he wanted to let go and sink, gently and dreamily, into the depths. He had not touched the bottom of the pit in hours, it seemed. Now and again he found himself beneath the spout of water dropping from the blocked conduit.

  He heard someone singing an old Turkish marching song, in a small, tired voice. He thought it must be Xani. Then he supposed it was him. Either way it no longer mattered. He could not feel his legs.

  But he must have drifted off into another pit, because the spout had stopped dropping on him: he could no longer hear it splashing on the surface. He saw himself floating endlessly from pit to pit, but he was too tired to be anxious about that. Xani’s corpse began one of its gaseous rolls beneath him, and he felt himself sliding off again, back down into the deep murk, into the comfort of the cold and the dark. He’d fought it so hard before, but he could no longer remember why. He knew that this time he would let himself go.

  It was then, and only slowly, that he began to sense that he was not floating anymore. He lay faceup, with a pain in his back, breathing air. His elbow stirred. It made a rough, rasping sound—the first noise that was not gaseous or liquid he had heard in hours. He turned himself over with difficulty and stretched out his hands. The movement seemed to take minutes, as if he were rolling a huge stone uphill. He could no longer feel his hands, and to make them obey him he tried hard to imagine them there, at the end of his unfolding arms, groping weakly on the bricks.

  With a slowness that was immeasurable, in the dark, he began to squirm up the conduit. It was hours before he remembered that he had to keep to the right. It was the first moment of real ter
ror he had experienced since his ordeal began. Perhaps he had already missed a turn? He might have gone a hundred yards already, he might have gone five. He could no longer judge.

  He saw Xani crawling up the pipe beside him, with his guts trailing in the water.

  A blaze of magnificent fireworks went off inside his head.

  He heard his old friend Palewski calling his name.

  He crawled for a minute, then for a year, and after a night and a day Palewski was there, but very, very small, like a mouse in his little hole.

  Palewski was shouting, and then Yashim was in a litter and was jouncing, jouncing over the cobblestones, retching and trembling and wishing he could simply die.

  Like happy Xani. Big and fat and soft, twirling forever and forever in a little eddy underground.

  88

  BUNDLED into shawls, Yashim slept for sixteen hours. He woke to find Amélie beside him, reading a book.

  “What you need,” she said, “is the old lady’s soup. I’ll fetch you some.”

  When she had gone, Yashim tested his limbs: his joints were sore, he had some chafing on his chin and chest, and all his muscles ached, as if he had run a long way. He sat up, feeling weary. The thought of soup made him feel sick; but strangely, when Amélie presented him with the bowl, he found that he was starving.

  “There’s no bread,” she said apologetically.

  “It can be arranged,” Yashim said. “I’ll call the boy. You’ll find some money in that purse.”

  He stuck his head out of the window. “Elvan!”

  “Is this enough?” Amélie held up a coin.

  Yashim nodded. “That will be enough.” He set the soup aside and closed his eyes.