you can’t see anything else around them.”
“And you can’t do it on purpose? You can’t will yourself to see something?”
“No, I don’t have nothing to do with that.”
I looked at him a long time while both of us stood there on the end of the platform like two kids, two brothers or cousins, watching the rain and waiting, waiting for something.
“Do you ever think it’s a curse?” I asked him. “Not just being the ‘Weatherman,’ but the whole thing, being Meq, I mean.”
“No, I try not to think about it like that.”
I put my hands in my pockets and turned to look at the flat cotton fields surrounding the station. I felt the Stone that I still carried there, cold and silent. It never gave me a reason or an answer. “I wish I felt about us the way Sailor or Geaxi does,” I said.
“You sure you want to?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I feel these days.”
He bent down and picked up a penny from the platform in front of him. He turned it over in his hand, then tossed it side-arm through the rain somewhere deep into the cotton field. “You ain’t lived as long as they have,” he said. “Give yourself another hundred years and then ask yourself how you feel.”
When we boarded the train and were back in our seats, he turned to me and said, “By the way, are you gonna tell me or not?”
“Tell you what?”
“Did you find her? Did you find Opari?”
“Yes and no.”
“Yes and no?” He paused, looking at me with streetwise eyes that had seen every kind of bluff and con there was. He took his bowler off and adjusted what was left of the brim, then set it on the seat next to him. I watched him, then turned and looked out of the window at the flat land and flimsy shacks that reminded me of ones I’d seen up and down the Yangtze. I turned back and told him everything, the whole story, and I told him as rapidly as I could, so that when I left out the part about Zuriaa, I hoped he hadn’t noticed. And I told him about the “Honeycircle” and everything that happened there. And then I told him that I was going to kill the Fleur-du-Mal as soon as we found Star.
Ray picked up his bowler again and examined it carefully, looking for any imperfections, of which there were many, and then slowly set it on his head at just the right angle. He looked straight at me with clear green eyes. “Well, Z,” he said. “It seems like that son of a Carthaginian’s got it comin’.”
I almost laughed out loud. “Where did you hear that phrase?” I asked him.
He looked back with a blank expression, then we both sniggered and started to laugh together, loud and long enough to draw attention from the other passengers. “I heard Kepa say it,” he finally answered. “I thought it kinda rolled off the tongue.”
I laughed again and then asked him about Kepa, Miren, Pello, and the others. He said Kepa was still as strong as barbed wire, but he and Pello were worried about the future of the Basque way of life in the territory. More and more, the sheepmen were being forced off free-range land. They had formed mutual aid societies in Boise and other places, but Kepa was not optimistic. I asked him if that had anything to do with him bringing Eder and Nova to St. Louis and he said no, that had been Eder’s idea. Nova would begin the Itxaron the following year and Eder wanted her to know more about the world than just the high desert and the womb of protection that Kepa and his Basque tribe provided. When Ray mentioned Nova, I noticed his concern for her was as great as Eder’s, maybe greater, but he agreed that she should live among the Giza and learn their ways. He said he thought Nova could “see things,” but he didn’t explain it further and I didn’t ask. I did ask if Eder had told him anything of Unai and Usoa, since he had never met them and it was they who we would seek first in New Orleans. He said Eder thought the Wait had taken its toll on them. They had been together so long, she said their only thoughts were for each other.
I looked out of the window of the train and tried not to think of what that meant. Thoughts only of each other, only of your beloved. I could not let myself think that way, not if I wanted to find Star. I looked at the live oaks and cypresses, some thick with moss, and the tangle of rotted logs and brush beyond. We were approaching New Orleans from the west, skirting the edge of Lake Pontchartrain. Suddenly the image of Captain Woodget came to mind and I remembered that Usoa had said he was living there, somewhere across the lake. I promised myself to try to find him, if and when I could.
We wound through the outskirts and finally stepped off the train well after midnight. Ray had not been to his “town” in over forty years and New Orleans, in the fall of 1904, was no longer anybody’s “town.” It was a wide-open and well-lit city with an international port and a legalized red-light district. However, it didn’t take Ray long to adapt. Within twenty minutes of me telling him I knew only that Unai and Usoa lived somewhere near the Vieux Carre, in a house owned by a man named Antoine Boutrain, we were in the French Quarter and he was asking all the right questions in just the right way, streetwise and elusive, vague and straight to the point. He was a master at it and within another twenty minutes we had a description and an address.
The house was less than two miles away on a street just off St. Charles Avenue. The street was dark and claustrophobic with heavy, overhanging limbs on both sides. “Orange trees,” Ray said. “The Creoles loved ’em.” The house itself was stuccoed brick and set back from the street. It had a wide front door and four sets of long, rectangular windows, floor to ceiling. There was a single gas lamp burning faintly by the front door and in the pale light I could see the house had once been painted yellow, but the bricks were now chipped and weatherworn and the color was mostly a memory. Ray said, “Your move.”
I took a step toward the house and stopped. I was certain I heard singing. I looked at Ray and could tell he had heard nothing. I listened harder and even though there was melody, the singing wasn’t really singing, it was more like breathing. Then it stopped abruptly.
I nodded to Ray and he followed me along a brick path around the house and through a trellised arbor of bougainvillea to an open courtyard. In the middle there was a circular, tiled fountain and pond and lying near it, either unconscious or dead, was the woman Isabelle.
“What the. ” Ray said and started toward her.
“She prefers to fall asleep and wake up in the same place, monsieur.” It was Usoa and she appeared out of the blackness like a ghost. “Most often, that place is her own boudoir, but other times, as is now the case, she finds somewhere else to run from her dreams. We always make sure she is safe and wait for her to wake.”
She turned to me and smiled. From behind me, a shadow moved and another voice said, “
Unai walked over to Usoa silent and barefoot. Indeed, they were both barefoot and wearing long, beaded tunics made of muslin, which looked to be simple nightshirts, but I knew they were more than that and probably from somewhere I’d never been. Usoa reached into a pocket hidden in the folds of her tunic and then took Ray’s hand, placing the traditional cube of salt in his palm.
Ray glanced at me, then mumbled, “Uh. well. ”
“You are Ray Ytuarte,” Usoa said softly. “We have heard of you through Eder and we welcome you. I am Usoa Ijitu—”
“And I am Unai Txori,” Unai finished.
I noticed they introduced themselves informally. It was unusual for old ones and their whole demeanor seemed more relaxed. Their names together meant “Gypsy/Bird” and standing there barefoot in muslin tunics they seemed just that.
Ray glanced again at Isabelle, who was snoring peacefully on the ground. Usoa smiled at him. “Damn,” he said.
She turned and took Unai’s hand in hers, then lifted it to her lips and held it there, nodding once.
“We have something to tell you,” Unai said. “You will be the first to know.”
“What is that?” I asked.
He paused for only a moment, then said, “We have decided to cross in the Zeharkatu. For eleven hundred years, we have waited and soon the Wait shall end. Next year, in Spain, there will be a Bitxileiho. It is near our home, our ancestral home, and we will use the circumstances to cross. It is right. It is time.”
My mind raced. I had question after question, but I only asked the first one. “Why now?”
Unai laughed and Usoa kept his hand tight against her lips. He said,
