Juliet Marillier - Cybele's Secret

here on my ship, and you shouldn’t be out on the streets of Istanbul alone. Where’s your guard? And how on earth did you get in here without anyone seeing you?”

“Tell me the truth,” I demanded, hands on hips. “You’ve got it, haven’t you? Cybele’s Gift?” Casting my eyes around the cabin, I spotted a very familiar box at the foot of the narrow bunk that ran along one wall. The iron lock and reinforcing bands were unmistakable.

“As you see.”

“Father would have outbid you,” I said. “You knew he was going back there this morning; you knew he would make a better offer than anything you could scrape together. Instead of going through with the process properly, as any self-respecting trader would, you sent in your band of thugs to beat him in the street before he could even get to Barsam’s house. I have only one word for a man who does that sort of thing: heartless. Your behavior sickens me. You were planning this, weren’t you, even as you practiced your charms on me last night over supper? You’re disgusting!” I drew a deep breath. My whole body was vibrating with rage.

Duarte rose to his feet. He was a tall man; the cabin seemed too small to accommodate him. “Paula—” he began; then I heard a commotion from the dock outside: shouts, crashing, the sounds of a street brawl of momentous proportions. Duarte took a quick look through the porthole and an instant later was gone, slamming the door behind him. I flung myself across the cabin, wrenching at the handle, but the wretched thing wouldn’t open. He’d locked me in.

I hammered and shouted, but nothing happened. The din from outside was loud enough to drown my pathetic efforts completely. I kept trying anyway, until my hands hurt and my throat ached. I cursed my own stupidity. It had been pointless to come here. Duarte was never going to listen to me. Why should he? He was the sort of man who went straight for what he wanted, not caring at all who fell by the wayside.

The sounds from outside were getting louder—mostly grunts, screams, and oaths in several languages. There was one word I picked out clearly above the rest of it. “Paula!” The voice was familiar.

I clambered onto a stool and looked out the porthole. At the foot of the gangway, a full-scale brawl was in progress. Kicks and blows were meeting flesh, men were flying through the air to land with sickening thuds on the boards of the landing or, in one instance, with a splash in the waters of the Golden Horn. People were bleeding— this was no spur-of-the-moment scrap but brutal and serious combat. At quite some distance stood an official- looking figure, a big, turbaned man with a staff in one hand. He was watching with every appearance of being mightily entertained and made no move to intervene.

It was wrong. It was all wrong. It was the most one-sided contest anyone could imagine. What I could see below me, through the narrow view the porthole offered, was quite clearly a mob attack on one solitary individual. It was amazing that the white-faced, black-haired, rather busy person in the center of it all had managed to keep his feet for so long. His eyes were blazing with determination, his mouth was fixed in a snarl, his clothing was soaked with sweat, and he was using every bit of skill and strength he had to keep the mob at bay. While they maintained their assault, there was no way he could get a foot onto the plank laid from the dock up to the Esperanca’s deck. There could be only one reason why he had come here. If they killed him, it would be my fault.

“Stoyan!” I shrieked. “Behind you, there!” For I had seen what he could not: the flash of a knife in a man’s hand.

He couldn’t hear me. He couldn’t hear the scream that built up in me as I waited to see him struck down and trampled beneath the booted feet of the mob. As the weapon rose, ready to stab, something flew through the air to crash onto the heads of two of the attackers and splinter with explosive effect into the general fray. A rain of similar missiles followed. From the deck of the Esperanca, people were shouting: “Vinde, por aqui, saltai! Soltai-o, seus filhos de caes!” Then again, in the tone of a command, “Saltai! Saltai!”

I was screaming with the best of them by now and pounding my fists on the wall beside the porthole—“Watch out! Duck! Look left!”—as Stoyan whirled and dodged and staggered right on the edge of the dock, his assailants moving like a dragging garment all around him. A hurled stone struck him on the forehead, and a crimson stream began to pour down into his eye, half blinding him. He put up a hand to dash the blood away, and in a sudden flashing movement, someone struck at his arm. He stumbled. “No!” I screamed. “Stoyan, no!” For I could see what might be next, and it froze my heart.

The gangplank was being pulled up; Duarte did not want this unruly crowd on his well-kept ship. A gap of two arms’ lengths opened up between the plank and the dock. Someone on the ship, recognizing belatedly that Stoyan could not understand the crew’s shouts, yelled out in Greek, “Jump! Come on, jump!”

With the hands of several attackers grabbing at his dolman and sash, Stoyan jumped. I saw the leap. The landing was beyond my line of vision. I didn’t hear a splash; but then I probably wouldn’t. The mob was howling for Stoyan’s blood, and the crew of the Esperanca were shouting imprecations in return. I needed no Portuguese to interpret those; I could guess. Then, from the deck, a command rang out in a voice I recognized. A moment later the ship shuddered and creaked and, to a chorus of angry shouts from the shore, began to edge away from her mooring. Duarte da Costa Aguiar was sailing his ship out of Istanbul with me on board.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I demanded. The Esperanca was heading north up the Bosphorus under full sail. The crew had settled to their various tasks with the ease of well-oiled pieces of machinery, and having finally been liberated by a tongue- tied sailor, I stood on the deck facing Duarte, the wind whipping the folds of the long black garment around my body and tossing my hair into my eyes. “Why didn’t you wait until I was safely ashore before you sailed? And where’s Stoyan?”

“To answer the last question first,” Duarte said, his expression somewhere between amusement and irritation, “your friend is on board and being tended to by one of my crew. He’ll live; his injuries are more spectacular than serious. Why didn’t I wait? It’s bad enough having a hotheaded young woman on my ship, not to speak of her pugnacious bodyguard, without throwing in a brawling mob for good measure. What do I think I’m doing? Taking my ship on the voyage I always intended to make, for perfectly legitimate reasons.”

“Legitimate. I doubt it. Why the rush? Couldn’t you have pulled away from the docks and waited until the crowd dispersed? Then you could have put the two of us back onshore. In case you missed it when I mentioned this before, my father was set upon by thugs this morning and severely beaten. I need to get back before—” I faltered, realizing how this sounded.

“Before he learns that you left him on his sickbed to race out and get yourself in trouble? Before Master Teodor discovers he is not only without his daughter, but has lost his bodyguard as well, thanks to the fellow’s need to chase after that same daughter and bring her to her senses? You are too ready with your accusations, Paula. If you did not want your father worried, you should have stayed at home.”

I swallowed a retort. It was clear to me that, in the matter of the assault on my father, the most likely perpetrator was Duarte or his agent—I did not think he would perform deeds of that kind in person. Hadn’t someone said he always took care to avoid being caught? He wasn’t going to admit it to me, and I’d made a big mistake in