“There are a million of them,” she said. “Sailor probably knows two million. I cannot keep track. Now, tell me, can you find Opari?”
As tired and weary as I was, I still almost laughed. Nice, blunt, and right to the point — that was Geaxi. I did manage a smile and turned to look around me before I answered. It was midafternoon and the whole camp was alive. I caught sight of Ray standing among the Basque children watching Owen Bramley and his Chinese kites. Kepa was watching too, sitting in his chair with one of his grandchildren on his knee. Miren was standing next to him, her hand on his shoulder. Dogs barked everywhere from the excitement and activity. This was a day of celebration and feast for the Basque, all on account of us. But who were we? What were we?
I looked hard at Sailor and Geaxi and said, “I need to know now who Opari is and why you need to find her.”
Geaxi started to speak, but Sailor cut her off and said, “There is a better one to answer your questions. Go and clean yourself and change your clothes. We will go to see Eder, my sister.”
Geaxi nodded her approval, and even though I wanted an answer, a hot bath and clean clothes sounded good.
An hour later, the three of us and Ray were walking the same trail on which I had heard the singing back behind the pines. Sailor had insisted on Ray coming along. He liked bringing Ray into a circle of friends and family he had never known. He wanted Ray to feel good about being Meq.
Sailor knew the trail well and, at some point only he could see, took us up through the pines and scrambling around boulders three times our size until we entered a natural clearing hidden from the world and open to the sky.
At the far end of the clearing and slightly up the slope from us, there was a small, well-constructed log cabin. In the middle of the clearing, standing by itself on a leveled stone platform, was something I had never seen before — a sundial. It was amazing. Sailor said it was an early Roman sundial that Baju had taken with him from Spain when he and Eder moved to America. It was so incongruous and yet it seemed always to have been there. Sailor said Baju had been known for centuries among the Meq as “Stargazer.” Now that he and Eder had crossed in the Zeharkatu, he preferred just Baju. He was from the mountains of Bizkaia where they respected time and silence and the night sky. He had the ability to foretell certain “events,” as Ray could the weather, and Sailor hoped Nova would inherit the trait. “One never knows,” Sailor said. “That part is tricky.”
We walked past the sundial and approached the cabin. There was a covered veranda on all four sides and standing on the one facing west and waving to us was a young man and woman with a small child perched on the man’s shoulders. As we drew nearer and I could make out their faces, I caught my breath and stopped abruptly. Except for clothes and hairstyles, they could have been my mama and papa. Geaxi seemed to know what I was thinking and turned to me. She said, “Familiar, no?”
I couldn’t reply, but I walked on with the others and when we got to the cabin, the young couple met us on the steps.
Sailor made the formal introductions and I found out Baju was also through the tribe of Vardules. Our families shared a long history. When Sailor introduced Ray, a very unusual thing happened. The little girl, Nova, who was about eighteen months old and clinging to her papa’s neck with her arms and legs, suddenly opened her arms wide and begged Ray to take her. Ray got that sheepish look again, as if he’d been caught doing something he had no idea he’d done, but he let her swing over to him and sit on his shoulders and play with his bowler hat. She was attached to him and stayed that way the entire time we were there.
Sailor’s sister watched and waited her turn. As Sailor began the words, she waved him off and came over to me, embracing me with no words at all. I held her tight. It was as natural as embracing Mama and, unexpectedly, I felt tears sliding down my cheeks. She whispered in my ear while we held each other.
“Your mama was my closest friend. I never got to say farewell.”
Slowly, we eased our hold on each other. She backed up taking my hands in hers and examining me like a rare but familiar coin. As she studied me, I studied her. It was strange. If I had been Giza and looked my real age, she would have looked younger than I did. I could even have been attracted to her, as any man would to a pretty young Basque woman, but that was not the way it was. It was a kind of Meq paradox. I was in a child’s body, and until recently she was as well but she was much, much older.
“Come,” she said. “Come with me.”
She kissed Baju and Nova, gave Sailor a lingering glance, and led me off the veranda and into the pines. We followed a winding, well-worn path up and away from the cabin until we came to an outcrop of rocks with a few boulders in the middle lying flat on their sides. They formed a gigantic, natural table with a view of the horizon at all four points of the compass. The sun was low in the west. We climbed up on the huge stone table and she sat down cross-legged, reminding me for an instant of Carolina and Georgia. The air was cool and dry, but the wind was swirling. She reached up and adjusted her hair, taking out two ivory barrettes with strange markings on them.
“Eder? Should I call you that?”
“Yes, of course,” she said. “I forgot. We never exchanged names. I have always known yours, but you must never have heard of me before today.”
“Yesterday, actually.”
She laughed a little and turned her head to the side, sliding one of the barrettes into place. “Those barrettes are beautiful,” I said. “Where did you get them?”
She held one out in front of her, turning it over in her hand and rubbing her fingers over the markings. Then she handed it to me, saying, “My mama gave them to me on my twelfth birthday — my first one. They are the oldest things in my possession. Mama said they were made in the Time of Ice, when the ice was retreating and we lived in its shadow.”
She took my other hand and rubbed my fingers over the markings. The tiny lines and half circles were etched deep in the ivory.
“That is Meq writing,” she said.
“What does it mean?”
“We do not know. We have lost the ability to read it. Perhaps you will dream the code, no?”
She stood up and looked toward the sun in the west. It was almost over the horizon, but still glowed like a round, bloodred ruby. She walked in a circle around the stone table. “Your mama would have liked it here. Your papa too. He and Baju could have watched the night sky and had all their old arguments about the stars. I miss them. I wanted them to see Nova. I wanted. ”
Her voice trailed off and she stopped to watch the sun finally set. After a few moments, she turned toward me and I knew it was time to ask her. I wanted to hear more about Mama and Papa, but that could wait. “Tell me about Opari,” I said.
Suddenly she smiled and then put her hand over her mouth. She stared at me in disbelief. “You have had the Dream?” she whispered through her fingers.
I looked away from her for some reason and saw Venus rising in the east. “I have had
She sat down slowly, cross-legged again. She leaned forward a little with her hands folded in her lap.
“Then I shall tell you,” she began. “I shall tell you what I know as best I can because I have never seen her. Sailor is the only one of us to have seen her and that was long ago in the time of Those-Who-Fled. It is rumored that the one we call the Fleur-du-Mal has also seen her, but this has always been speculation.”
She stopped for a moment with a peculiar expression on her face. “Did Sailor tell you anything? Anything at all?”
“No.”
“Ah, I see. Well, that should not surprise me. It is still difficult for him, even after all this time. He carries too many memories.”
“Go on, please,” I said. “I need to know everything you can tell me.”
She went on, speaking quietly, but urgently. “Opari is the oldest among us, if she still exists. She is over three thousand years old. At the time she was born, all Meq lived in the Pyrenees. Her family lived in the hills of Oiartzun, through the tribe of Autrigons. They wore the Stone of Blood, as you wear the Stone of Dreams. Our histories and traditions, our customs, rituals, and ceremonies were known to all the Meq and were intact and used.
