The Meq Read online

  I walked to Sailor’s window and gazed out at the same view I had from my own. It was getting dark and light at the same time. The full moon was rising. Something basic and fundamental occurred to me. I suddenly felt light, almost weightless, as if I were a piece of paper no bigger than Kepa’s note and I might, at any second, fly out of the window, over the stream, up the face of the mesa, and disappear in the western sky. I turned to Sailor.

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here,” I said.

  “Do? You are not supposed to do anything. In time, you will have a dream, we hope. A dream your father and his father and his father never had.”

  “Why do you think I will have the dream?”

  “I do not think it—I hope. There is no way to know, but there is also no reason for you to worry and doubt. Besides, tomorrow you meet Eder-Meq, my sister, and her Ameq, Baju Gaztelu, and their daughter, Nova. Nova is newly born and I have only seen her once myself. Kepa is planning a feast that will last all day and night. Do not worry, Zianno. You have time. You are Meq, remember? You have all the time in the world, so enjoy it.”

  “You have a sister?”

  “Yes, it is strange to see her aging, but always good to see her, nevertheless.”

  “Was that her singing we heard? From the wagon?”

  “Yes.”

  I remembered the melody, the ancient melody, and the way the notes rose and fell, hanging on to each other like hands across an abyss, lifting and swaying, never letting go.

  “The song’s about return, isn’t it?”

  Sailor had long since finished lacing his boots and he stood up, motioning toward the door for us to leave.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Return to where?”

  “We do not know.”

  That night, we had what I’m sure was, for Kepa’s clan, a quiet meal. There were but fourteen people at the table and it only lasted two hours. During the meal, I noticed Pello watching me; not in a menacing way or even staring—just watching.

  Kepa talked about the problems the Basque sheepmen were having. More and more grazing land and forest were being federalized and made into reserves where the itinerant Basque and his sheep were not welcome. Some were called “tramp farmers” and discriminated against like the Chinese had been. No one wanted to do the work of the Basque, but no one wanted the Basque to do it either.

  Afterward, I walked with Kepa to a low stone wall overlooking the long valley and the stream. The water was shining in the moonlight.

  “The stream looks magic tonight,” I said.

  “Yes, it does,” he said, then stepped up on the wall, looking back at me. “It is a small stream, but a good stream. A small stream that flows into another that flows into the Bruneau that flows into the Snake . . . not unlike ourselves, no?”

  I told him I wanted to know more about my papa, about their times together, and he promised many stories and tales to come. He told me I was welcome here as long as I liked and would be for the rest of his life and his son’s and his son’s sons’. We said good night and I walked back to my room, thinking the long day was over.

  There was a lamp already lit on the nightstand next to the bed. I spread the blanket out and sat down, dead tired and ready for sleep. I took the telescope out of its case, just to see it once more before I slept. I thought about my papa holding it, using it. I thought about where he might have used it and wondered if he kept notes and if he did where they would be and who might have them, and then I thought about Kepa and I opened his note and read it again—“Good for wonder, good for wolves!”—and I thought about the Fleur-du-Mal and I thought about Carolina and I wondered, wondered . . . then I fell asleep, for how long I don’t know, but the telescope had rolled off the bed and hit the floor, waking me, opening the door to a Walking Dream.

  I pick up the telescope and walk out of the room. I walk outside and back to the stone wall. I step up and over the wall and I land on four legs. I am heavy, but graceful. I am grazing, making my way down the slope toward the stream. I know my way, I have been here before, but this time there is something different, something new, something that has never been here before. I take a different path to the stream. I see the wolf ahead of time. He is surprised. The ritual is well known and understood. He is alarmed and I see it in his eyes. He starts upstream, loping through the rocks in the shallow water by the shore. I follow easily. He takes the familiar path, but this time I close the gap. I pick up speed and so does he. We run for miles and I see the jewels and dead bodies strewn among the rocks. I pay no attention. I close the gap even more. We ascend, climbing the mountain, toward the source of the stream and the place I cannot follow, the place I have never been allowed. I change shape and walk upright on two legs, but I continue to climb and gain ground. The wolf stops and turns and stares. He has never seen me, not this me. I start to cry out. The wolf turns and runs to where the stream pours out of the mountain; the dark pool and spring where I cannot go. He does not look back and leaps into the swirling abyss. I stop at the edge and look down. There is a trail of stars where he has disappeared. I remember the telescope. I take it out and extend it, looking through the veil of water and stars until I find the wolf retreating, changing; form became feeling and feeling became beauty and she was revealed . . . naked . . . innocent . . . and wearing the Stones. Then something else happened—something so outrageous, unknown, and unexpected that I woke up.

  I was alone on a slab of rock jutting out over a four-hundred-foot drop. The sun was just rising over the mesa. I had no idea where I was or how I got there. The telescope was in my hand. From behind me I heard a voice.

  “Do not move, señor. Before you stand, let me help you.” It was Pello. He said he had followed me all night and watched me, keeping his distance, but at some point he lost me and didn’t find me until that moment when I cried out. I asked him where we were and he said we were far to the south, miles from camp.

  He helped me up and we started back along a narrow ledge, then down through brush and scrub cedar until we found a trail he knew by heart.

  It took five hours to walk back to Kepa’s camp and when we finally stepped over the low stone wall and were in the compound itself, no one seemed to notice. Most were gathered by the veranda of the central building, children especially.

  They were surrounding a tall man with red hair and a bristly red mustache, wearing wire-rimmed glasses and showing everyone how to assemble a Chinese kite. Some other men were preparing several lambs for an open-pit cookout. I asked one of them who the red-haired man was and he said his name was Owen Bramley and he and someone I might know had arrived by train in Boise the night before and made their way here this morning. I looked at Pello and he shrugged.

  I walked toward my room, and just before I went in, I saw Sailor talking to someone, someone our size. Neither one of them saw me approach. They were deep in discussion about something. Then I saw two things I hadn’t seen in a long time, but they were still familiar—a black beret and black ballet slippers. It was Geaxi, and as I got nearer, I could just hear the end of her sentence “. . . but she is no longer there, she has vanished.”

  From behind them, I said, “I know who you seek.”

  They both turned at once and stared at me.

  “You seek Opari,” I said.

  They both showed no surprise, but they continued to stare.

  “And I know her Bihazanu, her heartfear.”

  “What is it?” Geaxi asked.

  “Me.”

  8

  IZAR

  (STAR)

  “Follow your Star.”

  The words are simple, but the real thing is a little tricky. Does it mean direction? Is it Destiny?

  If you could chart the movement of the largest, farthest, fastest supernova and still find the smallest grain of interstellar matter—stardust—would it answer the why, the where, the who? Would it finally connect you in a line of time and circumstance to a singular continuum like the drawn lines of a
five-pointed star?

  If only it were that simple.

  The trick in chasing Destiny is to feel it as a rider, a rider on a spinning ball waiting for a rare chance in time. Those few moments of balance between darkness and light where the Infinite is in motion and the motion is felt as a dance, as a solution that dissolves the question.

  You are suspended, and yet, you have met Destiny. You have been eclipsed.

  S ailor and Geaxi kept staring at me. They could have been two strange children, perhaps brother and sister, dropped off suddenly by someone and left without a ride. Their looks were a mixture of disbelief, bewilderment, and wonder.

  Sailor walked over to me. He looked at my torn clothes, the caked mud on my face and hands, and the blood-crusted scratches on my arms that were healing and disappearing as he looked.

  “You have had the Dream?” he asked, almost in a whisper.

  “I have had a dream,” I said. “Something—someone—was revealed to me. I know that her name is Opari. She has great strength, power, and cunning. She knows that you seek her and in her heart of hearts, somehow, for some reason, fears me. She doesn’t know me, but she fears I will find her.”

  Sailor turned for a moment and glanced at Geaxi. Silently, gracefully, she closed the few paces between us.

  He turned back to me and said, “Your father and your father’s fathers never had anything revealed to them. They had to be told her name, and even then, she never revealed herself to them.”

  “I think I surprised her and I think I know why, but I can’t be sure until I see her.”

  Once again, Sailor and Geaxi looked at me and smiled. I hadn’t seen that smile since being surprised by her so long ago on that hot afternoon down that dark alley in St. Louis.

  “Hello, young Zezen,” she said and she reached in her vest and took out a cube of salt, placing it in my hand and closing my fingers.

  “Egibizirik bilatu,” I said.

  “Five fingers—one hand,” she answered.

  “I haven’t heard that one.”

  “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.r />
  “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 a dream,” I said and turned back to face her. “Sailor said I should ask you about Opari.”

  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. Our written language was still practiced and passed down. It was an ancient culture even then, and known only to a few Basque of the five tribes. Our ‘differences’ and ‘abilities’ were totally unknown to the rest of the world. Then the Phoenicians came.