City of the Lost (40 page)

‘For both of us,’ she assured him.

He nodded and kissed her forehead. Tears prickled his eyes, regret for what might have been, for the terrible things they’d now write about him. How narrow the gap between patriot and monster. ‘The Lion and the Wolf,’ he said.

She pressed the muzzle against his temple. ‘The Lion and the Wolf,’ she agreed.

The new chamber was vast and bizarrely shaped, like something from a surrealist nightmare. The doorway through which they’d spilled stood at the top of a flight of steps that widened as they led down to an open atrium in which the slurry was pooling fast, thickened by all the sand it had picked up on its journey through the site. They’d already hauled themselves out of this onto a second flight of steps, facing the first, that led up to a large platform with sinuous walls and further staircases; while above them a ceiling swooped low in places but elsewhere soared so high that Iain’s torch beam barely reached it.

It took Karin a few moments to work out that this was because it wasn’t a normal chamber at all, but rather a cavern in the limestone made to look like one, its natural contours left largely untouched, but its walls smoothed down then skimmed with plaster or cut with niches for the countless oil lamps and other ornaments that gleamed and twinkled in the torchlight.

That they were trapped here was immediately obvious, yet Karin felt unaccountably calm. She helped Iain carry Andreas up to the upper platform, where they laid him on the ground. Beneath the dust and sand, the floor was tiled with squares of pink and white marble. Against the far wall, two divans slouched either side of a low bronze table. There were frescoes in the plaster, though too dusty to make out. It was all astonishingly well preserved, as though shut up for a matter of decades rather than millennia.

Georges came to join them. He’d fished two packs from the sludge and now unpacked them to see what supplies they had: two large bottles of water, a selection of snack bars, a first-aid kit, a coil of red mountaineering rope, a spare torch and fresh batteries. Iain took the first-aid kit over to Andreas, set about cleaning and redressing his leg. For his part, Butros took the spare torch and went exploring. Karin went with him. At the top of a short flight of steps they found a bed on a raised dais set in an alcove in the rock. They both stopped dead for a moment, unable quite to believe what they could see. The bedstead’s gilt frame was inlaid with ivory and strung with woven ropes covered by desiccated and shrunken skins, while twin headrests of carved and painted wood lay at the far end. But that wasn’t what had frozen them. What had frozen them was the skeleton that lay upon the skins, and the pitted bronze sword that ran through its ribcage, as though they’d impaled themselves upon it, as Dido had supposedly done.

The walls around the bed were skimmed with plaster and finished with a narrative of paint. Butros returned back down the steps for the surplus bandage and a bottle of water. He moistened the bandage then wiped the panels down. The water brought the old pigments vividly to life. In the first, a queenly woman and her retinue were welcomed ashore from a fleet of ships. The next showed a great feast, the third a hunt. In the fourth, a man and woman held hands in the mouth of a cave. Beneath them, in surprisingly crude letters, like initials carved by lovers into a tree, two sets of Phoenician characters. ‘Queen Alyssa, daughter of Belus of Tyre,’ murmured Butros, running his finger beneath them. ‘Aeneas, son of Teucer of Salamis.’

Karin closed her eyes. How simple explanations could be. Dido’s Aeneas not the warrior of Troy himself, but simply named in his honour, as so many people had been: yet a Teukrian of Salamis rather than Troy. And everything else that followed had been just the usual confusion of names. She took a pace back, the better to study the wall as a whole, the whole cavern chamber. ‘It’s the legend,’ she murmured.

‘Legend?’ asked Iain, coming to join them.

‘How Dido and Aeneas became lovers. They went out hunting together. A storm blew up. It separated them from their retinues. They took refuge in a cave.’

‘A cave?’ Iain frowned and looked around. ‘Are you saying
this
cave?’

‘Dido is one of history’s greatest romantic figures. Is it so hard to imagine her building her palace here precisely
because
it was near this cave? Or maybe she simply needed somewhere discreet to meet him. But you’re missing the point.’

‘Which is?’

She pointed at the doorway through which they’d arrived. ‘That staircase was cut through forty metres of bedrock.
Straight
through. But how could Dido possibly have known they’d find this place at the bottom
unless she’d already visited it
?’

‘There’s another way in,’ nodded Iain. ‘There has to be.’

‘Then what are we waiting for?’ said Georges. ‘Let’s find it.’

The four gunmen were accounted for, the
cordon sanitaire
declared secure. Seventeen others were dead, including the six policemen whose bodies had been found by the security gates. Twenty-one others were being treated for gunshot wounds and shrapnel injuries, and five of them were considered critical.

But it could have been so much worse.

Deniz Ba
ş
türk had had a buzzing in his ears since the first blast. What with the high levels of ambient noise, he had to watch people’s lips closely as they talked to understand what they were telling him. Mostly, they were telling him to go to hospital. He brushed these suggestions off. The nation had never needed its leader visible as much as it did right now. Besides, heightened security meant restricted access even for medical personnel, and others clearly needed treatment more urgently than he. Yasemin Omari, for one. He walked alongside her as she was stretchered out to an ambulance, her eyes woozy with morphine. ‘Don’t think I’ll go easy on you just because of this,’ she said.

He laughed and patted her hand. ‘I don’t,’ he assured her.

The exchange put him in oddly good spirits, though he knew better than to let it show. He went back up to the comms room. In the chaos, it was their best source of news. One channel kept showing a clip of him running out into the street to pick Omari up. He was surprised and somewhat dismayed by how fat and ungainly he looked, by how slowly he moved. He’d thought at the time he was breaking land-speed records. Another channel showed him berating that journalist for suggesting he was dead, while Selda swabbed his arm.

It felt strange to watch himself like this.

Shouting below. His wife had arrived. It would take more than an emergency lock-down to keep her out. He hurried down to meet her, all dressed up for Orhan’s concert. Her face was glistening as she wrapped her arms around him. Then she stood back with a reproachful look. ‘I heard it all on the radio. What were you
thinking
? For Omari of all people!’

‘They’d have killed her.’

‘And?’ He couldn’t tell whether she was joking or not, suspected she wasn’t quite sure either. She hugged him again, even tighter. ‘They said you were dead,’ she told him. ‘I was so scared.’

‘How do you think I felt?’

They laughed together. It felt good. But it wasn’t to last. There was a tap on his arm and he looked around to see Gonka, his senior aide. ‘Prime Minister,’ she said soberly. ‘There’s something you need to see.’

‘Just tell me.’

‘I really think you need to see this for yourself, sir. Please.’

He sighed and took Sophia’s hand, followed Gonka back up to the comms room. It had become crowded, yet people edged away from him a little, as though he’d somehow become toxic. He felt the chill of premonition. The screens were no longer showing footage of him. They’d switched to live feed from Istanbul’s Taksim Square. It had been completely cleared earlier by the police, but protesters were now flooding back in, at least two hundred thousand already, if he was any judge, and thousands more arriving every minute, waving banners and flags, Turkish and union and regional and football and others, raggedly bellowing out some vaguely familiar slogan that he couldn’t quite make sense of, what with his hearing still impaired. His heart sank to his boots. It never finished. It never fucking finished. Tonight, of all nights, hadn’t he earned a break?

Everyone was looking strangely at him, even Sophia. She let go his hand and took a pace back. He had the sense that people were expecting him to say something pertinent, but he didn’t have the first idea what. ‘What’s that shit they’re chanting?’ he asked.

Gonka frowned at him, as if she suspected he was pulling her leg. Then she realized he was serious. ‘It’s your name, Prime Minister,’ she told him gently. ‘It’s your name.’

It was Iain who found it, playing his torch over the gallery roof. ‘There!’ he said, illuminating a narrow gash in the rock perhaps fifty feet above.

‘Christ!’ muttered Karin. ‘But how do we reach it? How did
they
reach it?’

A good question, for the wall wasn’t just smooth, it angled back in as it rose. And there was an overhang directly below the cleft that promised few if any holds. With time, good light and the right equipment, Iain might have made the traverse. Without them, it was impossible. Yet there must have been a way up somewhere. He turned his torch on the facing wall and found the answer: pairs of peg-holes that ascended in a spiral until they stopped directly across the cavern from the cleft: holes into which scaffolding poles would once have slotted, supporting a staircase and presumably a bridge. He stood beneath the gash then paced out the distance to the facing wall. He made it thirteen feet. He tried to visualize leaping it from a standing start.

‘It’s not possible,’ said Georges. ‘It can’t be done.’

‘Then give me a better idea,’ said Iain sharply. He checked their coil of rope: thirty metres long, steel eyelets in both ends. He replaced it in the pack then slung it on, pulling the straps as tight as they would go. His shoes were wrong for climbing. He kicked them off. The slurry was rising remorselessly beneath them. He tucked the torch into his waistband and went to the wall.

‘Be careful,’ said Karin, touching his wrist.

‘Count on it.’ The holes had no lips but he could anchor himself in them by making fists of his hands. His feet were too wide for most of them so he had to take his weight upon his toes. The first section was fast, even so, with the cave still bellying out. With a foot in the lower hole of a pair, and a fist in an upper, he’d feel out the next set of holes, then heave himself up and across. Then he’d reset himself and start again. The wall soon turned vertical, however, then began to slant back in. The strain built incrementally upon his shoulders, neck and calves. But he kept going and finally he reached the place where the staircase finished, where a bridge would once have crossed the cavern to the cleft in the facing wall. He anchored himself then twisted around to shine his torch at it. It was tall, narrow and jagged, with the promise of more open space behind. He shone his torch either side then up at the roof, but could see no way to climb around or across to it. ‘How’s it going down there?’ he called out.

‘The concrete’s still rising,’ said Georges, doing his best to keep his voice level, not entirely succeeding.

‘Okay,’ said Iain. There was nothing for it. He rested his torch carefully in one of the peg-holes, angling its beam to illuminate the gash. Then he turned himself carefully around, resting most of his weight on his right heel. Now that he was up here, in this awkward posture, it was clear to him that he couldn’t hope to leap directly to and through the cleft. The best he could hope for was to grab its bottom lip then haul himself up. He closed his eyes to visualize in his mind how it would go. He rehearsed it until he had it fixed. Then he braced himself, bent his legs and leapt.

He crashed into the facing wall. The impact was much harder than he’d expected and it left him winded. He flailed with his hands for grip but the rock was smooth and there was nothing to hold onto and he began slipping remorselessly down so that he knew he was about to fall. He clawed crazily at the rock with everything he had, with his feet and hands and chin and knees and elbows, and somehow he gained traction and heaved himself up through the mouth and inside before turning to lie there on his back, panting mightily, his heart hammering.

It was half a minute or so before he’d recovered enough even to look around. He’d left his torch on the other side of the cavern, of course, so that the light in here was minimal. But he was lying in a shallow well at the foot of a slanted, narrow shaft that vanished into complete darkness above him. The rock was raw here, not smoothed as in the cavern beneath, but jagged with juts and knobs. And there were steps cut in a steep spiral in the shaft’s walls.

He started climbing. It quickly turned black as pitch. He continued upwards for perhaps thirty feet until he bumped up against something solid. He felt above him, a blind man learning a new face. A pair of wood and metal trap-doors had been laid flat across the shaft’s full width, and were held in place by two locking-bars. He tried to wrest these free, but they were too tightly wedged. He set his back against a wall and stamped one with his foot. Nothing. He kept at it until he was rewarded by a hint of give. He went at it even harder and suddenly it fell loose and clattered free to the foot of the shaft, bouncing out the gash and crashing to the floor fifty feet below. The trap-doors creaked and lurched fractionally downwards, allowing trickles of sand to fall upon his face; and something mighty stirred and groaned above him, a giant rousing himself after a long slumber. And he had a sudden and convincing intuition at that moment, of a city under siege, its Achilles heel a cave system leading to its underbelly. Simply concealing its entrance wouldn’t be enough. It would need to be buried so deep beneath sand and earth that no one would ever find it. If so, then releasing the second locking-bar would bring the whole lot down upon him, crushing him beneath it.

He climbed back down to the foot of the shaft, seeking some cunning way to give himself a chance. But if he used the rope himself, and it went wrong, Karin and the others would be stranded on the cavern floor until the concrete claimed them. He knelt on the ledge, leaned out, called down to them. Georges turned on his torch. They were standing on the bedstead, the highest place in the chamber, yet still the slurry was lapping around their knees.