She held the lantern over her head, gathered up the hem of her skirts with her free hand, and began to slowly descend the spiral of water basins leading down to the mouth of the tunnel.
At the bottom she stepped into the shallow water. Drops of condensation on the lantern threw whirling freckles of light deep into the tunnel, skimming across the rough brick walls to vanish suddenly in the black wings of her own shadow on the roof.
She reached into her pocket and took out a small ball of white wax and a reel of black cotton thread. She softened the wax against the lantern and used it to fasten an end of thread to the opening of the tunnel, an inch or so above the waterline. She stood up and tucked up her skirts. Loosely holding the cotton reel in the crook of her fingers, she entered the tunnel, paying out the thread behind her.
At the first fork she veered to the right, without hesitation, but about five yards in she stopped to listen. The water sluiced softly around her feet. Instinctively she glanced back: the pressing darkness took her by surprise, and she swung the lantern nervously over her shoulder. A drip from the roof landed on the tip of her nose, and she jerked back.
Calm yourself, she murmured, wading on. Concentrate on the detail. Roman bricks. A later repair, using cruder materials; perhaps builders had crashed through the roof in some remote age. The Turks seemed to have rediscovered the secret of Roman cement, she thought. The walls were bare; nothing could grow down here.
Amelie Lefevre. An archaeologist. Like my husband.
She began to count her steps.
She counted a hundred, two hundred. At five hundred paces she began to feel the weight of the city pressing down on her, slowly sealing off the distant mouth of the tunnel. She stopped counting.
This is the Snake, she told herself. It has stood firm for a thousand years, a lost feat of Byzantine engineering.
I’m in good hands: Byzantine workmen, a Renaissance scholar—and Maximilien Lefevre.
She had read it all in Yashim’s book; the book her husband had hidden in his apartment. The book that Max had always meant her to find.
The reel snagged in her hand. She looked down and took another out of her pocket. She tied the ends of the thread together, curved her fingers over the new reel, and went on.
112
A thought, a memory, was stirring in Yashim’s mind. He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes, oblivious to the people passing in the street.
Amelie had vanished into thin air. The only clue to her plans lay in the book she had taken with her. Gyllius must have identified to Amelie—and perhaps, before that, Lefevre—the location of the Byzantine relics.
Amelie believed in their existence. They lay, she had said, in a hollow space beneath the former church of Aya Sofia. A crypt.
The way to the crypt lay through a network of tunnels that ran beneath the city. Most of them were no bigger than rabbit burrows, but some were big enough to admit the passage of a man. One, at least, seemed to run from the siphon in Balat to the church of St. Irene on the grounds of the Topkapi Palace, where Yashim had seen its mouth. Close to where Gyllius claimed to have gone down beneath a man’s house and flitted through a cavernous cistern in the dark. A hollow hippodrome, as Delmonico had said: the Atmeydan, where the Serpent Column had stood for fifteen hundred years.
Between Topkapi Palace, Gyllius’s cistern, and the Suleymaniye Mosque stood one ancient building more famous than the others. Aya Sofia, the Great Church of the Byzantines.
Yashim held his eyes shut tight.
The waterpipe must lead to the Hippodrome.
Gyllius would have realized that three hundred years ago: he must have guessed where the relics were to be found.
And then he had left the city to go with the Ottoman armies to Persia. As if someone, or something, had frightened him away. Just as Lefevre had been frightened, three centuries later.
Men do not live for three hundred years, but ideas do. Memories do. Traditions do.
The sou naziry had made the point himself.
Yashim flung himself from the wall and began to run.
113
AMELIE stood at the lip of the tunnel with her lantern raised. Her eyes were shining.
Gyllius had been telling the truth.
She was standing a few feet above a vast underground lake. From its glittering black surface huge columns of porphyry and stone reared upward from their massive plinths, glinting in the lamplight until they were lost in the darkness overhead.
Slowly she descended the steps until she reached the level of the water.
