Cybele's Secret (37 page)

Into the stillness, the two old women cried out together, chanting in a tongue unfamiliar to me. The firelight touched their faces as they raised both arms toward the rotund trunk and gnarled branches of Cybele’s tree. A swarm of insects arose, circling and dancing amongst the boughs. And on the tips of the twigs, where before had been only hard, dry wood, now sprouted the greenest of new growth, tiny leaves that uncurled under the darkness of night, hesitant and fresh. Amongst the tender shoots, a multitude of little bright birds hopped and fluttered and sang. There was no doubt about it: The goddess had come home.

“Don’t cry, Paula,” murmured Stoyan, and folded his arms around me.

But I put my hands up to my face and wept against his shoulder. The beauty of the moment was too much to take in. I heard the wild music start up again, felt the thud of many feet around me as the folk of the village danced around the fire, celebrating the return of their community’s heart. It was good. It was a rightful ending to Duarte’s quest. But this out-pouring of happiness, not to mention the sheer delight of being in Stoyan’s arms, did not outweigh the death of Pero, the terrible fates of Murat and Irene. Some of the responsibility for those deaths lay with me. If I had not wanted so badly to prove to Duarte that my father had a better claim to Cybele’s Gift, I would not be here now, and nor would Stoyan. If we had not been here, Irene and Murat could not have found their way into the mountain.

“Paula.” It was Duarte’s voice. I wiped my cheeks and moved away from Stoyan. Duarte was squatting in front of us, with several smiling villagers behind him. “No tears. This is a party. Mustafa’s people have expressed profound thanks to all of us for returning the statue here. It is their belief that in this time when other religious faiths are gaining strength in the world outside, Cybele should be sheltered here, where she will be safe from the destructive hands of those who do not understand her message.”

“We almost brought a pair of those destructive hands right to them,” I said. “What message?”

“They are singing the words now, this time in Turkish.”

“Words?” I asked stupidly.

“The words of the goddess, those written on her belly. First they were spoken by the elders in the old tongue, and now they are echoed by all.
Eat of my deep earth, drink of my living streams, for I am your Mother. Your heart is my wild drum, your breath my eternal song. If you would live, dance with me!
Somewhat obscure in meaning, but I’m told that’s an accurate translation. These people expected us tonight. Our arrival was foretold down to the exact hour.”

I nodded. After all the strange things that had happened today, a prophecy was not so difficult to accept. I was not sure I understood exactly what Cybele’s fabled last message meant. Perhaps I was simply too tired to understand.

“They honor the earth,” Stoyan said quietly, as if he could read my mind. “The earth that nurtures crops and gives them clay for their houses, the water that sustains life. In these words, Cybele bids us live in harmony with that which gave us birth. From that arises a mode of living that is simple and wise, one in which man and woman understand their part in the wholeness of things.”

I was without words. How was it he could understand so quickly, as if he had the answers stored somewhere deep inside him? That grandmother of his must have been an exceptional woman.

“These folk expect us to join them for dancing and feasting,” Duarte said. “They’ve asked me to bring my sweetheart—their word, not mine—out into the circle where they can see you properly. I know you’re tired and upset, Paula. But we owe it to them to try, at least.”

When he put it like that, there really was no choice. I got up and took off my blanket. One of the women brought me a shawl instead, dark blue with little mirrors sewn all over it, so that when I moved, I carried the moonlight with me. I put my hand in Duarte’s and we joined the dancing. Now that I had let it rest for a little, my body was protesting about the bruises and scratches it had sustained during our journey through the mountain, and I was surprised I could even walk, let alone perform any sort of capering. But the moment the music began again and the circle started to move—clapping, swaying, stamping—memories of the Other Kingdom and Ileana’s revels came flooding back to me, and the rhythm crept into my bones and my blood and made my feet light. So I danced, and with each dance I floated further away from my worldly cares, seeing an answering spark of joy on Duarte’s drawn features as we turned and stepped and moved as a pair. And after a while, this was the only place I wanted to be, my body’s surrender to the music the only thing that was keeping me from breaking apart. Even in the center of such celebration, I knew sadness was only a breath away.

The night wore on, dance following dance. Various men came up and asked shyly if they could partner me, but Duarte kept a firm grip on my hand, and one by one they withdrew. Later, a line of men in animal masks performed what looked like a stylized version of the trials and tests of Cybele’s mountain. Within the sequence of dancelike moves was a part where a man in a woman’s gown balanced on another’s shoulders and then a part where a blindfolded man made a dangerous progress between two rows of women using sharp-toothed puppets on sticks. There was mock combat, tumbling, and juggling. All the while, the drummers beat out their throbbing rhythm. Flasks of drink went around; whatever it was, it kindled fire in the belly, banishing the deep chill of the mountain night. I drank very little. The dancing had kept me warm, but I became too tired to take another step. Besides, I had not spoken to Stoyan yet, not properly, and I knew that, nervous as I felt, tonight was the time to do it. I had become more and more aware of his somber expression, his narrowed eyes fixed on me and Duarte as we navigated the steps of one dance after another. I had not expected Stoyan to join in, injured as he was, though I had been thinking how much nicer this would be if he were the one out here holding my hand. But the look on his face worried me. Caught up in the thrill of the revels, I had allowed myself to forget for a little that I had something important to say to him, something that was going to take all the courage I could find.

I gave my excuses to Duarte, pleading weariness, and walked out of the dancing throng.

“You like to dance,” Stoyan observed flatly as I went over to sit by him.

For a little I did not answer. Now that I had stopped moving, the bitter cold was creeping into my bones.

“Stoyan?” I ventured.

“Mmm?”

“I have so much to thank you for I don’t know where to begin. Without you, we wouldn’t be here, the three of us. And you saved my sister.” I still could hardly believe how cleverly he had done that. “How did you think of that, using the dog to help you?”

“I simply knew what to do, Paula. It was not such a great thing.”

“My sisters are very dear to me. You probably know that already. But I didn’t realize how much I loved Tati until I saw her in trouble and couldn’t work out how to help her. Now maybe I will be able to see her again. There’s no way I can thank you for such a gift.”

He said what I expected him to say: “It is nothing, Paula.”

“I have something to ask you, Stoyan.”

“Ask, then.”

I drew a breath, ready to say the all-important words. But I couldn’t get them out. He looked so serious, almost disapproving. So I asked a different question. “You remember what happened at the swinging bridge, when those guards called you Your Excellency and let us across. Do you think…I mean, clearly they mistook you for somebody else. Did it occur to you—”

Stoyan stared down at his hands. “That perhaps I was mistaken for my brother?” he said quietly. “Yes, I thought of it. There have been many false hopes, Paula, many threads of information that frayed to nothing. I have taught myself to expect little.”

“But it could be,” I said. “If a devshirme boy proved clever and apt, it is possible, isn’t it, that even at the young age of eighteen he could be in a position of some power or authority in a region such as this? There cannot be many men who look like you, Stoyan.”

He turned his gaze on me. If I felt sick with tension, he looked worse. His jaw was tight, his eyes miserable. “It could be so,” he said. “I do not know if my brother grew up to resemble me. When they took him, he was only a child.”

“You must find out,” I said. “He could be somewhere really close, perhaps in that town farther along the coast. Some of these folk might know of him. You should look for him now, Stoyan.”

There was a little silence. Not far off, Duarte was dancing in a circle of admiring women, young girls, elderly matrons, and everything in between. On the tree above him, the leaf canopy was burgeoning into a shady mantle touched by the moonlight to uncanny silver-blue. A high chorus of birdsong rang forth from it.

“No,” Stoyan said.

“No? You can’t mean that, Stoyan. It’s your mission, your quest! It would be crazy not to pursue it when you may be so close.”

“I will take you back to Istanbul. Your father will be worried. You need to go home.”

“Duarte can take me. I’ll be fine.”

“You will travel on the
Esperança,
of course. But not without your guard. I must see you safely back to your father.”

A silence followed. This was the moment when I should speak, when I should be honest and tell him I could not face the prospect of being back in Istanbul and having to say goodbye to him. Maybe once we had been mistress and servant, but that had changed long ago, well before I had flippantly dismissed him from his position as bodyguard. He must know how his smile warmed me, how his touch awakened me. It had seemed to me, in the caves and before, that he felt the same. I was an adult woman, wasn’t I? So why was I trembling with nerves at the very thought of putting such feelings into words?

“Stoyan…I…”

He said nothing.

“I have something to say to you. Please hear me out.” My heart was pounding. “Stoyan…I know we are worlds apart, the two of us. When Father and I came to Istanbul, when we hired you, all we needed was someone who would be strong and reliable and keep trouble away. We never…I never…” This was going badly already. I cleared my throat and tried again. “We’ve become friends, you and I. Good friends. What just happened in the caves, that seemed to show…I mean, I do know there are enormous differences between us, education and background, language, profession, the fact that your home is in Bulgaria and mine far away in Transylvania. People—society, the world—would view anything between us as ridiculous, impossible. And there’s your quest for your brother. That means you’ll have to stay in the region well after Father and I have to leave. Any sensible person would tell us we should just say goodbye when we get back to Istanbul and enjoy the memory of what we’ve shared here, a remarkable, exceptional adventure….” Now I was going to cry. I ordered myself to get the most important words out, the ones I was leading up to, but my stupid tongue would not obey.

Stoyan’s features were transformed by the firelight into a mask of orange-gold, his scar a sharp slash across his cheek, his mouth particularly tight. That look was less than encouraging. It seemed to me that the more I blundered on, the further inside himself my friend was retreating. While I struggled to find the right words, the ones that would tell him what was in my heart, his grimness set a chill on me, making such honesty almost impossible. What had happened to the closeness we had felt in the mountain, the desperate clinging of our hands on our wild chase through the dark, the unspoken trust we had shared in the cave of the creatures? He had touched me with tenderness after I crossed that bridge. His eyes had spoken sweet words after we came across the lake. Now he was as silent as stone.

“What I’m trying to say is that despite all those things, despite the many reasons people would think it’s unsuitable, I…I don’t want to say goodbye when we get back to Istanbul. And I did wonder if…” I could hardly launch into a marriage proposal. Maybe I was not the most conventional of young women, but it seemed wrong to take the initiative in this most traditionally male of duties. “If there might be some way we could…we could be together.” That sounded even worse, as if I were proposing something quite improper. “I don’t mean…” I added hastily, then faltered to a halt. His face remained guarded and wary, even after that. It was quite obvious he was not going to come out with an expression of love. From an arm’s length away, I could tell that his whole body was strung up with tension.

“Are you finished, Paula?” he asked.

“Don’t worry,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself and looking at the ground. “It’s obvious you think it’s a silly idea, so just forget I ever suggested it.” There was hurt all through me, a pain I could never have believed possible. He didn’t need to say a single thing more for me to know I had messed this up completely. Yet I had been sure, almost sure, that he felt the same way I did.

“One cannot argue with this logic.” Stoyan’s voice cracked, and although my heart had gone cold, I reached out, intending to take his hand. He drew it away. “You say, let us be together despite this, despite that. If a man truly loves, Paula, such a word as this does not enter his mind. He does not consider the obstacles, the restrictions, the reasons why his choice may be flawed or impractical. He gives no heed to what others may think. His heart has no room for that, for it is filled to the brim with the unutterable truth of his feelings.”

“But—” I blurted out, desperate to make him understand that I did love him and that if I hadn’t been so tired and nervous, I would have said it much better.

“Hear me out, Paula, please. I cannot say this twice over. As you have reminded me in such a timely fashion, your future is one of wealth and opportunity, of scholarship and achievement. You will move in circles far beyond the reach of a man like me. If we imagine things might be otherwise, we entertain a delusion born of the strange adventures we have undertaken together. Were we to seek something further, and I cannot pretend the idea has never entered my mind, we would soon find ourselves at war. You would seek from me an erudition and cleverness I have no capacity to offer, and you would become bitter that you had tied yourself to a man of such limitations. I would…Never mind that. By the time we return to Istanbul, you will look back with gratitude that I answered you thus, Paula. You inhabit one world, the same world as Duarte, with its privileges and its possibilities. I exist in another entirely.”