The Snake Stone by Jason Goodwin Read Free Book Online Page A

light of the wardroom, for the bruising on the side of his head had come up. He was still bandaged, with one eye covered; the other peered with difficulty through swollen, bulging lids. His breathing, however, seemed normal now.
    Yashim squatted by the bed. “They’ll be giving you some fish today. Lüfer.”
    “Too much soup,” said George finally. His voice was a croak.
    “You’re a big man, George. Fish is just the start of it. We’ll get you onto some proper meat in a few days.”
    George made a faint whistling sound between his lips. It appeared to be a laugh. “Tough to shit,” he croaked.
    “Yes, well, perhaps that’s right.” Yashim frowned. “The nuns will know.”
    George closed his one eye in agreement. Yashim bent closer. “What happened, George?”
    “I forgets,” he whispered back.
    “Try to remember. You were attacked.”
    The eye opened a crack. “I slips, falls over.”
    Yashim rocked back on his haunches. “George. You were badly beaten up. You were almost killed.”
    “No beating, efendi. Is accident. I falls on stairs.”
    “So you remember that, do you?”
    George’s eye swiveled toward him.
    “Who pushed you, George?”
    The eye slid away. Nothing.
    “The Hetira?”
    But his friend had rung down the shutter on his one good eye. His swollen face was incapable of expression.
    George was a proud man. Tough and proud enough to take a beating—and too proud to speak, as well.
    Or too afraid.
    Yashim had a question for the nun as he left.
    “Only his wife, efendi. She’s been coming here every day. She always talks. He is a good man. He listens to his wife.”
    “And does she think—that he had an accident?”
    The nun lowered her eyes and answered demurely. “We do not judge our people, efendi. We try only to heal.”
    She glanced at him then, and Yashim turned his head away. Muttering a farewell, he found his own way out into the street, and heard her bolt the door at his back.

16
    W IDOW Matalya’s brow furrowed and uncreased as she made her count. She champed her toothless gums together, and the hairs trembled on a large black mole on her cheek. Now and again her fingers twitched. Widow Matalya did not mind, because she was asleep.
    She dreamed, as usual, about chickens. There were forty of them, leghorns and bantams, scratching about in the dust of the Anatolian village where she had been born more than seventy years ago, and the chickens in her dream were exactly the same as the chickens she had tended as a young woman, when Sipahi Matalya had ridden through her yard and sent them all squawking and flapping onto the roof of their own coop. Sipahi Matalya had taken her to Istanbul, of course, because he was only a summer sipahi, and they had shared a very happy marriage until he died; but now that her children were grown she thought very often of those forty birds. Awake, she wondered who had eaten them. Asleep, she checked that they were all safe. It was good to be young again, with all that ahead of one.
    Twenty-nine. Thirty. She scattered a little more grain and watched them pecking in the dirt. Thirty-one. Thirty-two. Or had she gone wrong? The noise of the chickens’ beaks hitting the earth was confusing her. Bam! Bam! Thirty-two, thirty-three.
    The lips stopped moving. Widow Matalya’s eyes opened. With a sigh she levered herself ponderously off the sofa, adjusted her headscarf, and went to the door.
    “Who is it?”
    “It is Yashim, hanum,” a voice called. “I have no water.”
    Widow Matalya opened the door. “This is because the spigot in the yard is blocked, Yashim efendi. Someone is coming. We must be patient.”
    “I have my bowl,” Yashim said, holding it up. “I’ll go and find a soujee in the street. Can I get some water for you, hanum?”
    Yashim was gone for half an hour, and he came back looking exasperated.
    “You needn’t worry about the standpipe. It’s the whole street,” he said. “Plenty of water beyond the Kara Davut. Here, I filled