FO Initial Page Sequence Question

In our XML we have a node that looks like this,

<startPage>29</startPage>

We want to be able to use that value as the initial page number in the style
sheet fo. 
I have tried using

<fo:page-sequence master-reference="page" initial-page-number="/startPage">
and
<xsl:variable name="beginPage" select="/startPage"/>
<fo:page-sequence master-reference="page" initial-page-number="$beginPage">
Neither of these were successful. 

My questions is how can i get the value contained in the startPage node into
the initial-page-number? The error message keeps telling me that these two
things are invalid values for initial-page-number. 

Thank you in advance. 

Ben Schrooten



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