Cybele's Secret - Juliet Marillier - Cybele's Secret

I could not pursue this any further. It was Stoyan’s secret, not mine. If it had occurred to me that Murat might be able to help him, Stoyan must also have thought of it.

“Thank you, Murat,” I said. “I apologize if I was too curious. This is a very different culture from the one I am used to at home.”

“It has many secrets, kyria. Layer on layer. If you were to stay in Istanbul, in time they would begin to reveal themselves.”

The library was almost empty today. After greeting me warmly and saying Ariadne would find whatever I needed, Irene went out. The black-robed woman was nowhere to be seen. I asked Ariadne to fetch the box of papers I had studied on my last visit and settled to look at them.

The first thing I noticed was that the sheet I had spent so long poring over before was on top of the pile. I knew I had placed it farther down, in a wish, perhaps misguided, to conceal the nature of my interest. “Ariadne?” I asked.

“Yes, kyria?”

“Is someone else currently working on these papers? I would hate to disrupt another scholar’s research….”

“They have not been touched since your last visit, kyria. Alas, I have been too busy to progress with the catalog, and nobody else has asked to see these. Why do you ask?”

“I couldn’t remember where I’d put the piece I was looking at. Never mind, it should be easy enough to find. Thank you, Ariadne.”

It was odd. There was no reason for her to lie about such a thing, but I could not escape the conclusion that someone had set the piece at the top in readiness for me. I felt uneasy. It didn’t seem quite right to be in this house without Stoyan, even though all he had done the last time had been to stand by the door. I turned the sheet over, thinking I might make a copy of the symbols before I went home. The tiny, cryptic writing, the script that had appeared and disappeared before my eyes, was not visible today. There was no way to tell there had ever been anything written on that part of the sheet.

I was disappointed. Secretly, I had been hoping there might be a new message there, something that began to make sense of the clues that were coming my way. Never mind; perhaps that was too easy. I had not gone through the entire box last time. I would check the full contents today to see if there were other papers that matched this one. More pictures; perhaps more clues. If someone wanted me to solve a puzzle, I needed more information.

Because so many of the papers were old and fragile, it was a slow job. Time passed as I lifted them out onto the table, first the leaves I had looked at before, then those that were new to me. Just when I was deciding it was a wasted effort, I found it—another piece with matching borders and the same assured, ornate calligraphy, the letters curling and decorative, each a small masterpiece of control and flow. On this page there was only one picture. My heart gave a jolt; I knew immediately what I was looking at. It could not be coincidence. Whoever was setting me clues knew about Cybele’s Gift. The woman and her embroidery, the mysterious words about a quest and finding the heart, the cryptic border symbols—they were all tied up with Father’s business in Istanbul. I felt it in my bones.

The miniature was no taller than my thumb, but it captured her vividly. She was painted in ocher, a squat, round person, her face a mask with a flat nose, a wide mouth, and dark holes for eyes. Her hands were on her hips, her legs tucked under her. Gold earrings hung from her lobes, and her hair streamed out like a wild tangle of snakes. Around the exuberant locks, the artist had added a swarm of bees. I looked into the cavernous eyes and heard a deep voice say, I am the beginning. Make me whole. I started in shock. When I looked up, thinking others in the library must have heard the same strange words, the woman in black was seated opposite me at the table, her eyes fixed on my face through the narrow opening in her veil.

“Who are you?” I murmured, my gaze dropping to the embroidery that lay partly unrolled on the tabletop, far enough to show me that the two dancing girls had been joined by a third, curvaceous and graceful, with artfully dressed dark hair and bright blue eyes. My sister Iulia. After her, it would be me. Then Stela. Was that how long I had to work out the mystery, two more encounters with this woman? “Tell me! What do you want with me?” I looked at her veiled face once more. All I could see was her beautiful eyes, eyes of an unusual violet-blue shade, fringed by long dark lashes. They were just like my sister Tati’s. My skin prickled with unease. “Tati?” I whispered, not quite daring to believe.

She did not speak. I heard it in my mind instead, my sister’s voice saying, The signs—you’ve got to look for the signs, Paula. And you haven’t got much time left. Then I was by myself at the table again, my lips still framing a question that would not be answered, for where Tati had been there was only empty space. Across the library, Ariadne worked on, oblivious to what had happened.

I was cold with shock. Tati—Tati, who had not once come back from the Other Kingdom in the six years since she went there to be with her sweetheart, Sorrow. What could this mean? That a quest had been set not just for me but for my sister as well? In our forest at home, the Other Kingdom paralleled the human world, the same hills and hollows, lakes and streams existing in both. They were linked by hidden portals, doorways guarded by magic. Did that apply everywhere? Was there an Other Kingdom in Istanbul, in Bulgaria, in Portugal? I remembered the mission on which Sorrow had been sent by Ileana, the forest queen, to win Tati’s hand. That had involved an extraordinary journey, taking him to places within both our world and the other. So perhaps it was true. Perhaps concealed in the streets and gardens and palaces of Istanbul there existed secret entrances to another world, the same as the ones my sisters and I had discovered in the forest and castle of Piscul Dracului when we were growing up.

Think, Paula. My mind was awhirl. I prided myself on my scholarship, my ability to use my learning to work things out. There had to be a logical way of approaching this. I must set aside the thrill of seeing my lost sister and the bitter disappointment that she had disappeared before I could speak to her. Step by step, that was the way to handle things. I would proceed as I’d planned, starting by making a copy of the odd little patterns from the border of the first manuscript page. I could examine them at leisure back at the han.

I put them in my notebook, using the same order in case that was a clue to their meaning. There were thirty squares, each with its own decoration. As I worked steadily through the sequence, the tiny writing reappeared on the page. Find the heart, for there lies wisdom. The crown is the destination. I stared at it, looked away, looked back, half expecting it to vanish before my eyes. But it was still there. I drew more squares. Twenty-five, twenty-six…The more of them I set down, the more familiar they seemed. Perhaps they marked out some kind of mathematical sequence. I tried various possibilities for a while and got nowhere. Maybe they were a code that related to words in another manuscript or well-known book. If that was the case, it would probably be in Persian and I would have to trust someone to help me. I imagined the squares turned in various ways and tried to make them match the letters in the manuscript’s text.

“Ready for some coffee, Paula? Or the hamam?” Irene was coming across the library, smiling. “You’re looking quite pale. I can’t have you fainting from overwork.”

I slipped the manuscript pages back into their box and closed the lid. As I did so, I saw that the line of tiny writing had vanished.