crossing can only take place during what the Travelers called the “Empty Ring” and the Meq call the Bitxileiho, or Strange Window. The Bitxileiho is the peculiar and mystical celestial event known as a total solar eclipse. Similar to birds that know instinctively when to migrate, the Meq know in advance when and where these events are going to take place. Whatever magic there is in being Meq is crystallized, energized, and reborn during this timeless phenomenon of cosmic geometry. To the Meq, a total solar eclipse is terrifying, wondrous, paralyzing, and transforming all at once, and only during the precious few seconds and minutes of totality can the mutual metamorphosis of a Meq crossing and marriage take place. This was essential for what Fielder and West had in mind.
Following traditional routes from valley to valley and river to river, they walked south until they reached the foothills of the Pyrenees. From there, Fielder “counted” the number of Meq living in the mountains among the Basque. The Meq totaled one hundred eighty-four souls who were in the Wait. There were no children under the age of twelve because there had not been a crossing in six hundred years. Fielder’s ability also enabled her to locate the leaders within every tribe and she focused on one Meq in particular. At this point in her story, Fielder looked directly at Sailor. Calling him by his true name, she said, “It was your ancestor, Umla-Meq. He was the one we went to see.”
There is no future without memory. Fielder chose the oldest Meq with the longest memory to distribute the five stones and give them names. Surprisingly, he welcomed Fielder and West without question, and their physical appearance seemed to inspire a mild curiosity rather than hesitation or fear. Their kind had long disappeared from the landscape and it simply made no difference to him or the rest of his tribe how Fielder and West appeared. He was far more interested in what they had to show him — the stones. And when he found out what each stone could do, he welcomed them for as long as they wished to stay. Fielder told him they had only come to present the stones as a gift and witness the Bitxileiho, which was about to occur over the Pyrenees and across the great sea to the south. Fielder knew she could tell him how to use the stones, but little else. That was the way it had to be. The inexplicable future event that had been revealed to Fielder and West could not be revealed to the Meq. The length of time involved was too great to comprehend, even for the Meq, and it had to happen on its own, if it happened at all.
Two days later under clear skies and shortly before midday, every Meq and Giza in the Pyrenees experienced a total solar eclipse. The smooth disc of the moon slid gracefully into place in front of the sun, and for the next two minutes and thirteen seconds a wheel of fire burned in the center of a black sky, while five Meq couples, who by coincidence were all Egizahar, crossed in the Zeharkatu. Sailor’s ancestor and his Ameq were among them.
During the crossing, Fielder and West concentrated as one spirit and used the “Voice” to implant and imprint a future time and place in the collective unconscious of the five couples. This information would resonate forward in the minds and memories of every generation of Meq to come, even into Africa, and though the profound nature of this information would remain, the reason for it would elude them all. Eventually, this information would become the central mystery and sacred destination in Time for every Meq on the planet. It would be called the Gogorati, the Remembering.
After the crossing, the five stones were distributed to the five couples and given names: Blood, Will, Silence, Dreams, and Memory. Sailor’s ancestor became the first Stone of Memory. Fielder and West stayed another day, then bid the Meq farewell and headed west. They wandered for months before they settled on a lonely and remote spot along the coast of what is now Portugal. Fish were fat and plentiful, as well as wild berries and greens, and though they were isolated, they felt at home. Twelve centuries later, West carved the last of the spheres and they left it behind, hoping for the best. Traveling north, they finally ended their journey on the beautiful coast of South Wales. There they would endure and learn to live among the newcomers, and wait, and wait, and wait, while Fielder “listened” and “followed” the lives of the Meq.
When Fielder finished her story, she looked each of us in the eyes, ending with the Fleur-du-Mal. “West is correct, Xanti. I am the reason we know so much about you while you know nothing of us. I have ‘felt’ you since you were born. I have ‘followed’ all of you.”
“Why did you not simply come to us?” Geaxi asked. “You could have come to us. You could have … revealed this long ago.”
“No, we could not,” Fielder answered. “It must come from you. We cannot interfere. You must find your own way to us.” She paused and smiled at me. “And because of the Stone of Dreams, you did.”
The Fleur-du-Mal asked, “What if Zezen had not been able to read the spheres?”
“Yes,” Sailor added, “I was pondering the same thought. We have only forty-three years until the Remembering occurs and—”
“Forty-three years?” West interrupted. He looked completely surprised. “No, no, not forty-three years, Umla-Meq.” He held up his hand and spread his fingers wide. “Five years — what you call the Remembering is in a little less than five years.”
I said, “That was what you meant when you said we were ‘just in time.’ ”
“Yes,” West replied, then grinned. “It seems that like a clock that has run on its own for a very long time, the Meq are a few seconds slow.”
“But you have not answered my question,” the Fleur-du-Mal said. “What if Zezen had not shown us how to read the spheres in time? What would you have done?”
“We would have continued waiting.”
The Fleur-du-Mal raised one eyebrow. “For what … another Remembering? You have waited over thirteen thousand years for this one … and I assume for Geaxi and me. Is not this Remembering the only one for us? After what I have heard and what I have felt today, I am certain this Remembering was and is inevitable.”
“Yes,” Sailor said, “is it coincidence or destiny that we are here?”
“Both,” Fielder answered. “For us, the Meq and the Traveler, it is both.”
Out the windows to the west there was only a faint glow where the sun had slipped below the horizon. Inside the big room, West turned on a few lamps and Fielder leaned over to gather the empty teacups onto the tray. Ray, who had not yet made a sound or moved a muscle, said, “I got just one question. Is this Remembering gonna tell us why we are the way we are?”
No one said a word. No one had an answer.
In the space of a single afternoon the Meq had changed forever — past, present, and future. Now we no longer were the
Fielder and West extended an open-ended invitation to stay at the manor and we accepted. Morgan Manor, as it had long been known in that part of South Wales, became our home for an indefinite period of time. Koldo said his farewells and drove the tour bus back to Cornwall and Caitlin’s Ruby. He had never asked what we were doing or why. He was just acting as his father and his father’s father would have acted. He was the last Aita of the tribe of Vardules, protectors of the Stone of Dreams.
In the first few days at Morgan Manor, we learned its history and that Fielder and West had a relationship and connection to the Morgan family and their estate much like the Meq had at Caitlin’s Ruby. And the connection, or coincidence, went even deeper. It was rumored that an ancestor of the current Morgan family, Mr. John Dawes Morgan, had known Caitlin Fadle intimately and was possibly the father of her son, though it was never proven.
Fielder and West had established similar relationships with the “newcomers” in the area going back in time to the end of the last ice age. West said they had also lived nearby but farther inland, twice for a period of time on the River Wye and for a few thousand years or so in the Lliw uplands. He spoke of whole millennia as if they were minutes or hours on a clock. In the months that followed, listening to West and Fielder was mesmerizing, exhilarating, and enlightening. We not only heard about times, places, and animals barely imaginable, but we learned the living history of the planet itself. Within their lifetimes, Fielder and West had seen and experienced entire geological and climatic epochs come and go. They had long known of the ecliptic path and had witnessed the entire twenty-six-thousand-year cycle of the precession of the equinoxes. They knew the causes and effects and they had endured and remembered it all. There were no living beings more connected to this Earth than the two long-living Travelers.
