‘I’m here,’ she said.
Mr Ahmadi all but pounced on her. Gently pushing her back down into the dark gap between two huge piers of basalt, with limber and sinuous strength he dropped himself in after her. By the time Fitz found a safe path across the fall and had climbed down into the crevice, he found the others had already pushed further down, inside a kind of tunnel or passage that – from somewhere in its recess, seemed to be bathed in the yellow glow of the sea’s evening.
Mr Ahmadi was helping Navy pull off her wet clothes. She was shaking violently. Almost bare, her teeth clattering against one another, Navy in the near darkness seemed scrawny and battered, but vital.
Mr Ahmadi unfastened the pin at his neck, and drew his heavy cape from off his shoulders. Its inner lining, thick and furred, would make a terrific towel. ‘Take this,’ he said to Navy, ‘and get yourself dry.’ He signalled to Fitz to help her, while he climbed – with absolute caution and silence, picking his way as if over broken glass – back towards the sky.
‘It’s a good thing he had his cape,’ said Fitz, embarrassed as he helped wring the water out of Navy’s jumper, then her trousers.
‘Always handy to have a dry cape – for wrapping round half-drowned girls – in underground caves,’ she said, shooting out the phrases with her usual levity, between racking shudders. She started to laugh.
Mr Ahmadi turned suddenly, hushing them, his finger pointing up towards the rocks above.
‘Someone’s here,’ Fitz whispered to Navy, clapping his hand over her mouth. He thought he had heard voices just as he was easing himself down into the tunnel. ‘There was another boat. We don’t know who it is.’
‘But we were seen, and so we can guess,’ whispered Mr Ahmadi, rejoining them, ‘so we’ll stay down here, out of sight, and wait.’ He pulled the cape tight round Navy’s shoulders and back. She sat beside Fitz on a stone, still shivering, and put her head to his. For a few minutes, with Navy’s chin and draggled hair nestled on his shoulder, he began to feel as safe and solid as the island itself.
‘I’m sorry for dropping you,’ said Fitz.
Navy’s eyes had closed, but now they popped open, serious and solicitous. She drew back.
‘You didn’t,’ she said. She pulled the cape ever more tightly round her. ‘I let go.’
Fitz shook his head, trying to shed this thought the way a cow, cumbered by flies, will wag and twitch its ears. He remembered Navy’s arm swinging up – the look in her eyes.
Don’t let go.
‘I let go,’ she repeated. ‘And I’m glad I did. Otherwise I wouldn’t have found it.’
Navy stopped shivering. With a darting, familiar motion, she tucked her orange curls, stained brown by the saltwater, behind her right ear, then behind her left. For a moment she held her lip in her teeth.
‘I remembered where we are. What this place is. This is where the Heresy began. This place, what they did here, entombing the shāh, after such a journey –’ She broke off. ‘Everything they taught us, everything you taught us at the Heresy – all our lessons – they started from this idea, that you have to accept your death. And there, on the edge of that cliff –’ here she shook again, once, in a violent spasm – ‘I was fighting to hold on to my life. I suddenly realized that that wasn’t going to be the way to find anything at all. We came to an island in the sea, in the middle of a storm. Night is falling. We were looking for a tomb in a shadow. Come on,’ she said, and cocked her head, as if in disappointment. ‘There was only ever one way we were going to find it. I had to let go.’
‘And the whirlpool –?’ Mr Ahmadi was whispering still, but his voice was no less urgent for that.
‘The current there was amazing. Terrifying. It felt like I was being pummelled with hammers. With anvils. Falling into the water I had taken a huge breath. I really filled my lungs. I guessed that that pool was going to spit me out somewhere interesting, but maybe it would take a while. I held my breath. I covered my head with my arms. And I let myself be pulled by the current. Wherever it was going, I went. All the while I counted, steady, trying to match my pulse to a slow beat, to stay calm. All the while I could feel myself going down, being sucked under, and I started to get scared because I could feel the pressure rising, and the pain in my chest. I had this almost uncontrollable urge to open my mouth and take it all in – whatever was there – the rush of foam and air and water and surge that was all around me. But I didn’t. I died in it, let myself be carried. And then, all of a sudden, with no explanation – and I never came up at all – I was in the air. I was breathing. All around me things were swirling in the water, like fish or slimy things circling round me, touching me everywhere – and then I realized that it was air, bubbles, rising in the water all around me, and that they had been pushing me up, making me float. I didn’t even have to swim. And then I saw that, although I was in the dark, above me there was a kind of cavern, and it was bright with sunlight, and there were steps – a whole staircase, carved in the stone, leading up. When I walked up it –’
A rock shifted above their heads, sending a little
