The Meq

you are able to read the old writing—”

“What words? You keep saying Solomon’s words.”

Sailor glanced at Geaxi and Opari and dropped his smile. “He saw two things you and the rest of us will need — communications and safe passage. He saw a home base with satellite bases throughout the world, run by Giza, owned by Giza, and protected from the prying eyes and ears of Giza less enlightened than himself. He called it ‘the Diamond.’ A reference, I believe, to your game of baseball.” Sailor paused a moment, then added, “It was in his will, Zianno. A codicil, all prepared and ready for Owen Bramley to set in motion. Owen Bramley himself will have to tell you how it all fits together. At this point, I am afraid he knows more about how it will work than I, but—” He paused again, breathing in slowly and gathering himself, then continued. “The old man cared about you very deeply, Zianno, enough to know you could not survive on your own and keep going. You, we, us — the Meq need a strategy to survive, to last in this world, this ‘game’ Solomon called it, a ‘game’ with no time limit. He even added a prophecy, a warning, of sorts. He said the Children of the Mountains will be sought more than ever before because of man’s fear and confusion with himself and his own mortality. Soon, communication and safe passage will be the only protection from man’s ravenous pursuit of the miraculous, which he already sees in himself, but cannot prove. His fear is great. His hunt will be relentless. The Children of the Mountains will be his prey and proof.”

“Solomon said that?” I asked.

“Yes, well. something like that.”

“Who is Solomon?” It was Opari. Her voice was soft and her eyes looked into mine. I stared back. The question was innocent enough, but the answer was not.

Inside, in an instant, I felt as if I had missed a step or a beat in some unseen rhythm. A simple question, an honest question that anyone might have asked on any given day and I would have answered — splat! — suddenly became unanswerable and lay like a stone in a still pond. “Who is Solomon?” I saw the ripples, not the stone. I heard Solomon’s voice, something among his last words, “I will leave a trail. Will you be able to find it, Zianno?” Will you be able to find it, Zianno? I heard the words like a gong, a silent repetition I had been asking myself my whole life—Will you be able to find it, Zianno? The oval room became airless, suffocating. Even the shape itself became something else — octagonal or hexagonal — I couldn’t tell. Everyone in the room seemed extremely large, much too large for the cramped space of the oval room.

Opari saw it in my eyes.

“We must tell our stories another time,” she said, looking first at me, then at Sailor. It was the same look we had both seen in Carthage when she finally turned around after delivering Star’s baby.

It was and is the softest sword I have ever felt.

Geaxi couldn’t see Opari from where she was standing, but she could hear her and it was the same thing. She walked over to the rest of us and knelt in the sand. “In England,” she said. “We shall leave this until England.”

Without a word, without an outward or obvious sign from anyone, we all held our hands in the air, fingers spread and palms facing out toward each other, fingers and palms all the same size. In the candlelight, Sailor smiled. Our hands were casting shadows that exactly matched the ones stained into the wall.

“Zis is good business,” he said.

Three days out to sea off the coast of the tiny island of Gozo, just north of the slightly larger island of Malta, it rained. I had almost forgotten the feeling of getting wet from the sky. I held my face up to it and let the liquid darts sting my eyelids, cheeks, and mouth. I opened my mouth and drank it straight from the sky, laughing and spitting. Rain. Africa and the Sahara had taught me never, ever to take it for granted. I thought back to Emme’s words at the edge of the deep desert—“Do not think ahead. The Sahara will not allow it”—and standing there in it, feeling the rain again as only a scattered shower, as one among many to come, it was more than relief. It was return. But with return came an anxious, familiar habit — thinking ahead and looking ahead.

The ship was cruising west, ignoring the sudden squall and sailing through it. Star, Opari, and I were at the railing in the stern, facing east where the sun still shone. We were aboard HMS Scorpion, a frigate that was currently decommissioned and flying an Egyptian flag. It was a worthy ship that had been rigged and rerigged several times for transporting everything from troops and munitions to potatoes and raincoats. The first day at sea I had asked Willie Croft if he knew who owned the ship and he said, “Technically, an Egyptian from Cairo bought it for scrap from the British Navy. In reality me, my mother, and the Croft Foundation own it and we, in turn, lease it to the British Navy for. unofficial operations.”

“Such as this one?” I asked.

“Quite. Rather neat and tidy, isn’t it?”

“Quite,” I told him.

I liked Willie from the beginning. I knew he had been formally raised and educated, but his whole demeanor suggested exactly the opposite. His speech was a curious blend of formal and informal, and physically, he was simultaneously awkward and graceful. I never saw him bump into anything or break anything, but I always expected it at any moment. He had a quick mind, an honest smile, and most of all I trusted him. I still didn’t know the exact nature of the Daphne Croft Foundation and its relationship with the Meq, but I knew that I could trust Willie. I knew it because I had seen what was in his eyes when he returned from Alexandria with Star and her baby, only hours after the rest of us had returned from the oval room. I watched as he helped Star by holding her arm and elbow, though she hardly needed it. She looked radiant, even with a bandage on her shoulder, and beamed a smile across to Opari. Willie was grinning like a teenager and whether he knew it at the time or not, he was in love. It shone out from his heart straight through his eyes. Star wore a print dress he had found for her — a simple English dress. She had tied her old scarf around the waist and looped it through Mama’s baseball glove so that it hung at her waist like a purse. She carried her baby in her one good arm and her blond hair hung loose over her bandaged shoulder. I knew then that I would trust anyone who loved someone who looked so much like Carolina. Star was the image of her mother as I remembered her. To Willie, she was much more than that. All that day and night Willie kept one eye on Star and one eye on his job, which was to secure and cover the experimental planes and get all of us out to sea for our rendezvous with the Scorpion. He did that and we set sail for England at midnight. Willie made sure Star and her baby were safe and warm before he ever thought about rest for himself. He did it unconsciously and without asking, as only love compels us to do. He knew nothing of her past or what she’d been through. No one did except me and one other — the Fleur-du-Mal. What the Fleur-du-Mal had done to Star could never be corrected or taken back. Her life had been changed forever. The time she spent in Africa and at Jisil’s camp was now the core of who she was and would affect everything that came after. Jisil himself was in her memory and his child was in her arms. What that meant, no one but Star would ever know.

Two days later, standing in the rain and feeling resurrected, I wondered if Star would ever remember Carolina or Nicholas. She had not spoken to me, at least not in English, since I’d found her. She seemed to understand what Willie said to her, but only spoke to Opari in the old Berber dialect and even that was in whispers. She accepted the Meq intuitively and never addressed Opari as a child, but as an equal, a friend, the midwife of her own child. She had regained her spirit and strength completely. Willie had called it “simply remarkable” and it was, only I knew where it came from and I was not surprised. Opari had told me she would teach her English, that they would learn together. That was fine, I said, but what I really meant, what I did not say, was that I wanted her to remember not just her language or her name, but something much more elusive — her innocence.

For that to happen, the heart must allow the mind to remember and vice versa. It is tricky. It may never happen. When it does, if it does, who knows why? As Opari would say later, “All it takes is a crazy boy and a rainbow.” Perhaps. I only know that as I stood by the railing that morning off the coast of those ancient islands, laughing and spitting in the rain, I suddenly remembered that it had rained the morning Ray and I left St. Louis in search of Star. And for some reason, just as my mind focused on two large wooden crates that Ray or someone had left under the archway of Carolina’s big house, a rainbow appeared over our stern, stretching across the Mediterranean. Opari and Star had taken cover behind me and I heard Opari yell out, “You are crazy! You are crazy in the rain!” I turned toward her voice and I heard another one, softer, almost a whisper, coming from over Opari’s shoulder. It was Star. She was repeating something again and again, as if she had just discovered the sound of a stranger inside herself. “Fierce Whale,” she said. “Fierce Whale.” I walked toward her. Rain was dripping in my eyes, but I could hear her voice clearly, and in English. It was the same voice I had heard the morning of her birthday in 1904, the voice of a little girl who wanted to ride the Ferris Wheel at the World’s Fair — the voice of innocence.