“Acquired when I was young and still testing myself against the world,” said Duarte. “I come from a merchant family, respectable, prosperous, but I had turned my back on them in a foolish desire to prove myself unaided. Mustafa and I were crew together on a spice ship. He spoke much of the remote place of his birth. He hoped in time to earn sufficient silver to set out on a very particular quest. Mustafa hoped he might find the missing piece of this statue that was so central to the faith of his home community and return it there. Each night he muttered a prayer to Cybele that she would help him find what he sought and deliver him safely home to his loved ones.
“There was a shipwreck. My friend and I found ourselves washed up on an unknown shore together. We were set upon by tribesmen and imprisoned in a little hut, injured and weak. I think they believed us to be devils. Peering out through the cracks in this meager dwelling, I could see preparations for a ritual killing, perhaps to be carried out at dawn. We discovered a chink through which escape might be possible, if we were prepared to risk the jungle and its wild creatures. But Mustafa’s leg was broken; he could not walk. At first, I refused to leave without him. ‘I will carry you,’ I said, knowing we would not get far. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Go. Live.’ I told him, ‘I will not go without you. What about your mission? What about Cybele’s Gift?’ Mustafa smiled through his pain. ‘You will find it for me,’ he said. ‘Fair trade. I give you a life. You give my people a future. Go, Duarte. I will talk through the night to cover your escape. Go now!’
“I hope I never again have to make such a choice. I do not know, still, if I did right or wrong. I squeezed out of the hut and fled into the jungle. I left Mustafa to his fate. The rest of the story is unimportant. All I brought home from that unfortunate voyage were the rags on my back and my debt of honor. Mustafa’s mission had become mine. I have searched for Cybele’s Gift a long time. I will not let anyone stop me from taking it back. Not even the Sheikh-ul-Islam.”
We rewarded this narrative with a few moments’ respectful silence. There was no doubt Duarte was telling the truth. His voice was trembling with emotion. As for the future of Cybele’s Gift, I realized I would have to rethink my attitude toward it. If there was indeed a place where folk still believed in the bee goddess and pinned their hopes on the return of this symbol, it was hard to argue that the artifact belonged anywhere else. Even a scholarly and respectful collector such as the one for whom Father had been working could not better such a claim. With a certain sadness, I felt my belief in the mission that had brought Father and me all the way to Istanbul slipping away.
“How many men do you plan to take ashore?” Stoyan asked Duarte. “A climb through a mountain pass, you said. How long will that take, and what if the ship is attacked while you are gone?”
“I will take as few as possible. A small party will be quicker, but there must be enough so we can defend ourselves if necessary. Pero has volunteered. The ship will be concealed; you should be quite safe. If the
All through this speech, I was becoming increasingly edgy. Duarte had no way of knowing that the powers of the Other Kingdom had decided Stoyan and I had a quest, too. If there was some old friend of Dragua, the wood witch, in this part of the world, someone who needed a favor, Mustafa’s mountain village sounded just the kind of place where we might find her. It would be remiss of me not to warn Duarte. It seemed to me that he might not fulfill his mission unless both of us helped him. I hesitated.
“You have little to say, Paula.” Duarte’s voice came through a darkness in which I was aware that the movement of the ship had lessened and the sounds of voices from above had quieted. The
“I do believe you, Duarte,” I said, realizing I was clutching my hands together nervously and making myself relax them. “Stoyan and I have something to tell you. We have listened to your tale. Now you should listen to ours, because I believe it may be tied up with what you plan to do.”
“Very well.”
I told him everything. That my sister, who lived in a world beyond the human one, had come to us and told us about a quest. I spoke of her appearance on this very ship the day we reached Istanbul. I outlined the strange happenings in Irene’s library, the manuscript pages I suspected had been set out for me to find, the tree puzzle, the miniatures that seemed like clues to a task we were bid to undertake. I repeated the cryptic words:
“Well, Paula, you are an imaginative storyteller. I place no credence in the supernatural. I acknowledge that such beliefs remain strong in isolated places and amongst those who have good reason to adhere to them—the simpler kind of seafaring men, for instance. Folk cling to their gods and spirits in hope of finding comfort and meaning in difficult lives, and the return of items like Cybele’s Gift provides such people with heart and purpose. But I would not expect an educated young woman to have a head full of visions, dreams, and wild imaginings. Perhaps your true calling is not as a scholar but as a writer of diverting romances for the entertainment of noble ladies.”
A tumult of emotions churned inside me: anger, hurt, bitter disappointment that this man I’d been beginning to trust and to like very much had dismissed the precious secret I had confided in him as if it were nonsense. I sat there, mute, as furious tears welled in my eyes. I held them back and found words.
“You’re a fool,” I told Duarte bluntly. “I have firsthand experience of such phenomena—not dreams and visions but reality. During the years of my childhood, I regularly visited a place beyond the human world. That was a magical time, the best time of my whole life, and that realm was just as real as my everyday world. The two exist side by side. One is not fact and the other imagination. They are equal but different. If you cannot accept that, then I believe your mission is doomed to failure, because what Stoyan and I have been shown tells me you cannot succeed without us. Dismiss that at your peril.”
“Paula is right.” Stoyan’s voice was deep and certain. “I did not wish to say this, for the last thing I want is to see her put in still more danger. But I believe, Senhor Duarte, that unless she accompanies you up this mountain of yours, your quest cannot be achieved. And where she goes, I go. You have no choice but to take both of us with you.”
The next day, after sailing eastward from first light until the sun was roughly overhead, we still had not shaken off the red sails of our pursuer. I went up on deck to use the rudimentary privy and washing facilities and caught sight of our captain with Pero by the rail, the two of them shading their eyes as they gazed intently forward. I followed their gaze and my heart skipped a beat.
“Those are the cliffs he spoke of, no doubt,” said Stoyan, coming to stand beside me. A massive rock face rose above the sea a few miles ahead of us. It was formidable, a bastion. Behind it were the purple-green forms of mountains, the highest of them capped with snow. I considered my single set of borrowed clothing, in which I often got quite cold up on deck. If that was where Duarte intended to walk, I was not sure I wanted to go with him.
