since dead, had saved his life a second time.
Amelie calmed down gradually. First she stopped shaking; then she lifted her head.
“We’re very close,” she said, and she pulled away.
“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.
