“Come!” she shouted. “Come quickly!”
Sailor walked into the water without a word. Opari and I glanced at each other and followed. When we got to the slab of stone, I could see that under the raised end there was actually an opening, a kind of trapdoor. The shallow water of low tide was disappearing down the opening in a descending spiral. Geaxi stepped off the stone and lit the candle with a match she had tucked behind her ear. In the flickering light, I could see steps, also descending in a spiral and a slightly diagonal direction.
“The water only follows the spiral for two fathoms,” Geaxi said. “Watch your step and stay close,” she added, then walked into the darkness under the stone and beneath the sea.
The light from the candle was weak and Opari held my hand as we tried to keep pace with Geaxi. Sailor pointed out niches in the walls that had once held oil lamps. I asked him who had carved the steps and niches and he waved us on, remaining silent. I felt as though we were winding our way down and through the empty shell of a giant nautilus, the mollusk I had first seen in the Indian Ocean.
After twenty steps or so, the passage began to level out and the water that had been descending with us gathered and swirled in a pool. The carved steps wound around the pool and beyond, ascending slightly. The pool served as a drain and collection point for another passage whose opening was triggered by the weight and volume of the water above it. That passage, Sailor said, connected with another, then another, and so on until all water was returned to the Mediterranean. Gravity determined its course, but I still had no idea where ours was leading.
“We are nearly there,” Sailor said, reading my eyes.
Geaxi had stopped and was waiting for us only a few more steps up the incline. She was standing where the steps ended and the passage became completely level. The carved stone gave way to sand underfoot — old sand, dry and crystalline, reflecting the candlelight and leading to something ahead in the dark. The entrance to the corridor had been enlarged and bordered with huge, perfectly beveled, square-cut stones.
“The Greeks did this,” Sailor said and he ran his fingers along the edge of one of the stones. “They discovered this place and thought it too small, so they carved away, thinking as always it was somehow meant for them. I am afraid they were mistaken. It was here long before they brought their chisels. Still, one must admire their attention to detail.”
Geaxi led us on. Arcane signs and symbols appeared on the walls. Animals and birds and fish, real and imaginary, overlapped and joined, all drawn at different times and ages. A single Greek word was engraved over one of the drawings, an outline of a hand exactly my size. The word was “KTEMAESAEI.” I pointed it out to Sailor.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
Without slowing down or glancing back, he laughed bitterly and said, “A possession forever.”
Suddenly Geaxi’s candle flared and I realized we had reached the end of the corridor and entered a higher, broader chamber. There was no other entrance or exit. It was a room, an oval room, and it was instantly familiar.
In the candlelight, I saw two wooden planks, roughly sawn and set on stones in the center of the room as a kind of table. Around the planks, resting on the sand, there were several mats like the ones in the bombed-out building above. Geaxi placed the candle on one of the planks and emptied the bread, cheese, olives, and what appeared to be two wineskins on the other plank. She smiled and removed her beret with one hand, waving it over the table, as if welcoming us to a feast. But it was Sailor who spoke first.
“Sit down,” he said. “And let us speak of the Meq.”
We sat down facing each other, all of us cross-legged on the mats. Geaxi began to split the bread and reached into her vest for a knife to slice the cheese. Opari and I held each other’s hands. Behind Sailor, in the background at the deep end of the oval room, I caught a glimpse of a black-stained, indented circle in the stone wall. There were shadows of two small handprints on either side. There was something written in the stone in a circle around the circle.
“This — this place,” Sailor began and he raised his forefinger and traced the circumference of the room in the air. His star sapphire shot back brilliant blues and greens as it passed through the candlelight. “This place is Meq. It is very old, from before the time of ‘Those-Who-Fled,’ possibly and probably from before the ‘Time of Ice.’ ” He paused and glanced at Geaxi, then stared hard at Opari and me. “We are not sure of its purpose. We. we speculated that this place and others like it will lead us to the next Remembering. The Gogorati.” He stopped again and made sure he had Opari’s attention. “This was why we searched for you, Opari. This place is reason enough for proof that the Gogorati is not a myth. It will occur. no matter what Zeru-Meq believes. And since this place does exist, we must unite. Those who carry the Stone must be of one mind if we are to solve the riddle that is here, now, in this place. All five Stones are required at the Remembering. All five Stones will be required even to find it.”
“I am here because of Zianno,” Opari said softly. “But my heart has.
“Awakened,” Geaxi translated and leaned over, offering us both an olive.
“Yes, awakened,” Opari said, then she looked each of us in the eyes, ending with Sailor. “I have been sleeping, Umla-Meq. You must forgive me. Now, tell me of your riddle.”
“I wish I could,” Sailor said. “But, alas, we cannot read it, let alone determine its meaning.”
“Who is ‘we’?” I asked. “You mean Geaxi?”
“No. Another. The one who found this place long ago and two others like it in all the years since. He knows more about these oval rooms than any other.”
“Who is he?” Opari asked.
Sailor smiled and almost laughed under his breath. “He has used the name ‘Mowsel’ for centuries, but his
“He lives?”
“Yes,” Sailor said. “He lives.”
“Ayii,” Opari said, then she made a high-pitched trilling sound with her tongue against her teeth, a sound I had only heard made by women in the deep desert. I pressed her hand and she glanced at me, then turned to Sailor and spoke in her softest voice. “He was a ghost, a myth to us as children. We were never thinking he was real. Can this be true?”
“Yes, but I see him rarely,” Sailor said. “And speak to him only when necessary. He found me almost two thousand years ago.”
“To help you find Opari?” I asked.
“No. That was incidental to him. He has always sought something else, something a bit more difficult to find.”
“What?”
“Who we are. The answer to the question all of us carry and never ask — why are we here? Why do the Meq exist at all? But even he cannot read the old script. He can read an altered version and even write in a later, transitional script, but not the old one — the original. No one can.”
“Like the one behind you?” I asked. “In the circle around the dark circle in the wall?”
Opari looked at me while Sailor and Geaxi stared blankly at each other, then turned to me. It was Sailor who said, “Yes, exactly like that.”
I walked to the far end of the room and knelt in the sand in front of the dark, indented circle. I put my two hands on the wall and let my palms and outspread fingers press into the spaces that fitted them perfectly, that were made by someone long, long ago. Someone with hands exactly my size, exactly
A good joke is always difficult to predict, but somehow easy to follow. It is the same with the truth. As I was kneeling in the sand, I thought back to the cold day in St. Louis when Ray had held Papa’s baseball and drawn a circle within a circle on the frozen glass of my bedroom window at Mrs. Bennings’s House. I remembered how I felt when he told me what it was to be Meq. I don’t know how my eyes looked to Ray, but as I turned and looked at Sailor, Geaxi, and even Opari, I saw in their eyes a mirror image of how I had felt watching Ray draw his circles on the glass and listening to his simple, powerful truth.
I motioned for Sailor to come and kneel next to me. I took his hand and the finger with the star sapphire and translated for him as I traced the characters and lines in the script with his finger. It read as follows:
