The Snake Stone

64

Yashim slept badly. In his dreams he saw Baradossa’s livid face, and the teeth protruding; then the dead man’s eyes turned dark and as the flames rose he saw it wasn’t Baradossa but the brazen serpent that was staring at him in all the terror of victory. And Lefevre was there, cramming his money into the serpent’s maw.

When he woke up, it was with a nagging doubt in his mind. He lit a lamp and took out Gyllius’s book, in French translation.

All other cities have their periods of government, he read, and are subject to the decays of time. Constantinople alone seems to claim a kind of immortality and will be a city as long as humanity shall live either to inhabit or rebuild it.

He turned the page. Gyllius described the layout of the city, and its walls, discussing Aya Sofia in detail, with reference to ancient sources. There were a few remarks about the Hippodrome and the Serpent Column: Yashim made a penciled note beside them, intending to check against Lefevre’s copy.

He could feel his concentration slipping. First someone had surreptitiously searched his flat, leaving nothing more than a few scattered grains of rice; next time they had smashed it apart. He thought of some of his books with a pang of anxiety. For Yashim regret was an emotion that held nothing but danger, and he had long ago succeeded in achieving a distance from it. But books were the glory of Ottoman art, and he had some he treasured. He flicked through Gyllius’s book, and opened it at random.

The Cistern remains. Through the inhabitants’ carelessness and contempt for everything that is curious it was never discovered, except by me, who was a stranger among them, after a long and diligent search for it. The whole area was built over, which made it less suspected that there was a cistern there. By chance I went into a house where there was a way down to it and went aboard a little skiff. I discovered it after the master of the house lit some torches and rowed me here and there across through the pillars…

He read the passage again, wondering what it could mean. Never discovered, except by me. Typical scholars. What of the man whose house stood over the cistern-had he not discovered it? With a skiff, no less! Yashim smiled to himself; scholars were all the same, at all times, in all lands.

He was very intent upon catching his fish, with which the Cistern abounds, and speared some of them by the light of the torches.

Yashim blinked. An underground lake, full of fish? He wondered how the fish would taste: pale, perhaps blind, their flesh would be insipid. More likely, Gyllius had simply made the whole thing up.

But the image stuck with him as he lay there in the dark, trying to sleep, of a man rowing under Istanbul in a little boat, spearing fish by torchlight.