Mary Reed: Three for a Letter

Mithra aid me, he muttered, plunging up the stony track as quickly as he could. He glanced over his shoulder, expecting to see Barnabas about to overtake him, but the mime wasn’t even on the path. Instead he was running off towards the base of the cliff.

The dwarf’s short legs gave him an awkward gait. Under other circumstances it might have been a comical sight. Now, with a child’s life at stake, his inexplicable action was horrifying.

Then John understood as Barnabas carefully chose his spot and began working his way up the side of the rocky precipice. John would have said it was a nigh impossible feat, but Barnabas was somehow finding unseen hand-holds, his powerful arms and legs pulling and pushing him quickly upward as surely as they had propelled him through hundreds of the comical acrobatic stunts for which he was justly famous.

John continued painfully on a journey that seemed to take an eternity. Each time the crumbling track began to point directly to the cliff top it soon looped back on itself, forced away from its course by a sheer rock face or an impassable outcropping. He could have climbed Mithra’s seven-runged ladder faster, John thought grimly, as he fought his way up the hellish incline.

As he finally emerged between two boulders marking the end of the path, a wash of sunlight stabbed out over the windswept rocks forming the flat peak of the island.

And there, at the edge of a precipice overlooking the sea, stood Minthe, her torn garment testimony to a struggle. Her long silver hair streamed down her back.

A small distance from her Barnabas crouched, holding Sunilda firmly in his arms.

The girl looked over his shoulder at John with eyes that might have seen a hundred lives.

“Lord Chamberlain,” she greeted him calmly. “I am very happy that you and Barnabas have arrived, for I am afraid that Minthe has betrayed me. Porphyrio has not appeared despite his promise. In fact, there’s nothing below this high place but jagged rocks. I conclude from this that Minthe intended to kill me and that she is not, after all, my friend.”

Minthe made no reply.

From the mainland came a rousing cheer. So unexpected and loud was the sustained sound that John’s gaze was drawn back toward it for an instant.

Sunilda screamed shrilly.

John whirled. The child was lying almost at the edge of the precipice with Barnabas’ hands clamped around one of her thin ankles.

Minthe was gone.

“She jumped,” shrieked Sunilda hysterically. “I didn’t want her to die. I tried to grab her.” Now she was sobbing. “Minthe, Minthe, come back! I didn’t mean what I said!”

“She squirmed out of my arms,” Barnabas explained. “I only glanced away for a heartbeat…”

John hurriedly pulled the bitterly sobbing Sunilda away from the drop, away from anything that might be visible below.

As he turned back towards the path, he saw Paul standing silently between the boulders, staring at the girl with a strange expression on his face.

Sunilda grew quiet and deathly still. It was the sort of shocked reaction John had seen soldiers experience after a battle.

Barnabas helped the girl back down the path. John and Paul followed slowly. As they left the summit, Paul turned to stare toward the precipice where Minthe had been standing not very long before.

“What is it?” John asked in an undertone.

“Nothing, excellency, nothing. I’m just sorry I arrived too late to help save that poor creature from flinging herself into the sea. Although to tell the truth, I imagined that I saw the girl…but no, my eyes are old and dim and surely I was mistaken. Now, thank the Lord, we can forget this terrible nightmare. It is surely ended now.”

Choppy waves rocked the boat as it carried Paul, John, and Sunilda back to the mainland. The girl seemed to have recovered with remarkable rapidity from her ordeal and showed them where the boat that had brought Minthe and herself to the island had been hidden.

John did not voice his thought that for Minthe to navigate the dangerous strait between land and island during a thick fog indicated how pressing she considered the mission to be accomplished. The effort must have cost her enough to allow Barnabas to scale the cliff before she and Sunilda could make the climb to its brink. And he, too, and Paul, had risked all in the same mad crossing.

Now the girl was talking of her friendship with Minthe. The men remained silent as she poured out her love for a woman who had treated her as her own child and was now gone forever.

“She has gone to join Gadaric,” she insisted. “You shouldn’t have stopped me following her, Barnabas. And as for you, Lord Chamberlain, I am not at all pleased with your interference.”

John was silent, intent on rowing.

“You see,” the girl went on, “Minthe was the only one who really cared about me. She was very clever, too.”

It was not what Sunilda had said about the woman a short while ago. The girl was, John thought, already constructing a much more pleasing reality for herself. He also sensed that once they reached land, Sunilda would never again speak of the lost woman, so he took his opportunity to inquire how the seemingly magick abduction had been accomplished.

“It was easily done,” the girl replied with a slight smile. “Minthe gave me a sleeping potion to put in Bertrada’s wine. Then I knocked over a stool, threw the bedclothes around, and crept away into the fog without any of the other servants even noticing me leaving.” She finished and sat staring silently at her feet, her face as blank as a block of stone waiting for the chisel.

The journey seemed to John to take much less time than their voyage to the island. The tide must be on the turn, he thought, assisting their passage. Paul, who already looked uneasy at being carried along by the labor of one so highly placed as John, looked more and more disturbed the faster the small boat cut through the water.

“It’s not natural,” he muttered at last. “The current’s all wrong.”

John, concentrating on getting back to solid ground as quickly as possible, did not mention his gratitude for the sea’s assistance in his task, replacing the whale.

As they approached the shore, he could see knots of villagers still clustered on the headland despite the fact that the ceremony had ended. Doubtless they were waiting for Theodora to withdraw to the villa, signaling permission for them to return to the village. Godomar’s service would have concluded by now. John wondered if Peter had found it at all enlightening.

Although from his viewpoint most of the coast road was blanketed with trees and bushes, John’s eye was caught by movement half concealed by the vegetation. He had the impression of a group of people moving purposely toward the headland.

Then his attention was diverted by a thump against the side of their boat. Sunilda let out a brief shriek.

Looking down into the water John saw what it was-the half deflated leather ball that formed the head of the straw man. Seawater had made its painted features run into a leer. The rest of its body was nowhere to be seen.

“Look!” Sunilda pointed up at the looming headland as the keel finally grated on shore nearby. “Bertrada’s waiting for me.”

The faint sound of bells came to their ears. It was very strange, John thought, because they sounded exactly like the ones suspended from Theodora’s litter which, he could clearly see, still sat on the headland. Furthermore, there was no breeze.

In fact, the air had become preternaturally still.

Paul made his religion’s holy sign as he stared out toward the island.

“The goats…” Paul muttered, his superstitious fears seemingly undiminished by his discovery of the creatures’ true nature.