a show of accepting these terms against his better judgment. In reality, he was ready to do whatever it took.
“Is this blackmail?”
“More or less.”
“All right. Let him go.”
“And then . . . you’ve got to let him come back.”
Padre Zefiro was stunned.
“What? Are you insane?”
“No Vango, no queen.”
“I repeat: Are you insane, Fratello?”
“No, I’m not insane. Vango is the one who knows where she is. He will bring her here.”
By this stage in the conversation between the two monks, there was only one way to revive their guardian angels, who would have passed out in a cold faint from the shock, their halos askew.
The only way was to explain a few facts.
Zefiro, who had become a wise man in all matters, nonetheless kept one vice hidden, a single crazy and chaotic passion. For many years now, he had had in his service an army of young and vigorous buccaneers, which he dispatched to pillage the other islands in the archipelago.
They would come back in the evenings, trembling, laden with gold and sweet delicacies, exhausted from the many miles they had covered, and they would unload their booty in front of their master.
These pirates were bees.
Zefiro was a beekeeper.
On the first day he’d arrived on the island, he had established five hives. These roaming bees consoled him for the journeys he would no longer be able to make, since a secret had condemned him to found the invisible monastery and to stay there until his final breath.
And so for many years, alongside his life as a monk, Zefiro had been a pirate chief, seeking out his bees morning and evening on their return from an adventure. But they had all died a few months ago, destroyed by a late-summer storm. Zefiro had kept his despondency well hidden and had even managed to cheer up the cook, who wept on account of there being no more clear honey for his gingerbread.
In the aftermath of that catastrophe, Zefiro had been looking for a queen. He needed a queen bee to attract a new swarm and to build up his hives again.
From his base in the kitchen, Vango had heard Brother Marco complaining about the situation. He had told the cook that he knew of at least three or four bee colonies in the cliffs of Salina. He could easily find a queen so that the apiary on Arkudah could be reborn.
The truth was, if they’d asked him to find a kangaroo or a coconut, Vango would gladly have promised to bring one back. He would have done anything to earn the right to return. But this time, he wasn’t lying. He was as familiar with the bees as he was with everything else that lived on his island. In his eyes, this kind of challenge was child’s play.
The next morning, the monks lent him one of the boats they kept hidden in a deep cave that had an opening at sea level on the western cliff of the island. Vango went away for four days and came back with two queens, some matches, cakes, and beef. The monks gave him a greater welcome than if he had been a prophet.
That evening, over a stew cooked for the monastery the way Mademoiselle had taught him, Vango understood that he had won his freedom. The freedom to come and go, invisible among the invisible ones.
And from then on, he divided his time between the wild nature of his island, with all of Mademoiselle’s warmth and knowledge, and the great mystery of the invisible monastery, where he would spend more and more time. He lived the life of a smuggler between two islands, supplying Zefiro with anything he lacked, posting slim letters for him in the post office at Salina, and receiving in exchange a warm welcome from the monastic community.
Vango observed the life of the monks and tried to understand it. He was interested in finding out what sustained them. And he kept an even closer eye on Zefiro.
The monk and the child didn’t say much to each other. But their rugged characters were complementary. The hardest stones make the sparks fly. A deep friendship was being forged between them.
Why
Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Martin A. Lee, Bruce Shlain