The Meq tm-1

by Steve Cash

  As soon as I awoke, I knew something had changed. Star was awake and staring at me. It was not hostile or even lively. It was as if she was searching for something underwater and couldn’t quite get the physics right, couldn’t quite reach it. But she was alert and conscious. I rose up and faced her, sitting cross-legged the way Carolina, Georgia, and I used to. Neither of us spoke. She saw Jisil’s horse not far away and, without taking her eyes from mine, nodded toward the horse. I slowly shook my head and she looked down once, but that was her only reaction. She reached one hand up from her belly and held it over her wounded shoulder, asking me with her eyes if I was the one who had attended to it. I nodded once. I showed her Jisil’s map and pointed to Carthage, asking her with my eyes if that’s where we should go. She nodded once. I smiled and she didn’t. She hadn’t decided yet if she trusted me, but she held on tight to Mama’s glove and the old scarf. I stayed silent and we traveled that way. The fact that I was still a child, still “physically” the same, was a blessing and a curse. It would help her remember her past, possibly, but never explain her present. I stayed silent and tried to let the present win her trust. The past would come later.

  We rode overland and off the trail the last fifty miles approaching the ruins of Carthage. Only Jisil’s horse had drawn any real attention. Our skin color and appearance seemed to have little effect on the few people we saw. It was another world to the one in the deep desert. Star had to dismount twice along the way because of the pain, not in her shoulder but in her belly and back. We were walking with the horse between us when we stopped on a natural rise that opened up two views around us. It was twilight and the sun was setting in the west over what I assumed were the Atlas Mountains. To the north and east, in the long shadows, were the fields and pastures, roads and ghosts of roads leading to what had once been Carthage and the harbor beyond.

  It was a good place to camp and let Star rest. I had no idea of the final arrangements in the deal Jisil had made. I knew I’d never seen Cheng work alone and I didn’t expect him to now.

  The site was not inhabited nor was it deserted. There was evidence of excavations begun and abandoned. Some fields had been plowed and sowed around the broken stones of temples and markets. Robber trenches from centuries past crisscrossed the various sections of the old city. It was haphazard and ragged. The Romans hadn’t left much standing and time since had given it no dignity. The wind blew in from the north. The Mediterranean was a dark blue band in the distance. I smelled the faint scent of goat in the air and looked down the rise toward the remnants of a stone gate or tower. Foraging in and around the ancient foundations were a few goats and sitting on one of the stones with his back to me was a boy about my size, the goatherd. He seemed harmless, but I didn’t want any surprises. I was going to leave Star where we were and try to find Cheng somewhere among the ruins, before he found us. I decided to find out who the boy was. He might have heard or seen the movements of someone like Cheng. Another boy, another goatherd, would not intimidate him and any information he gave me would be more than I had at the moment.

  I helped Star lie down on her side and covered her up, making sure she was out of the wind and had Mama’s glove under her head. She held her belly constantly and grimaced at times, but never made a sound. I knew she would need attention soon, the kind of attention I knew nothing about. I waited for the last rays of light, then walked slowly around and down the hill, toward the goatherd.

  I had barely rounded the hill when I felt it, more acutely and more powerfully than I ever had before. The impact literally hit me like a blow to the chest and I changed my gait, slowing to a single measured step at a time. It was the presence of Meq, and more than one, I was sure of it.

  I looked down at the goatherd. He hadn’t moved. He sat on the stones facing west, but his goats were nowhere in sight. I walked silently, listening with my “ability” and drawing closer. He wore the heavier cloth of the northern tribesmen, with no turban. There was a hood instead, attached to his robe and gathered at the back of his neck. He kept his head averted. I could not see his face. When I got to within ten feet, I stopped and waited.

  “Where have you been?” the voice asked.

  Suddenly an arm and a hand reached out from the robe. The hand waved me over. There was a small ring on the first finger, a star sapphire mounted in silver. It was the same hand that had come out of the darkness of a carriage long ago in St. Louis and helped me in. It was Sailor.

  I sat down on the stone next to him without a word. As he turned to face me, I noticed his high-laced boots under his Arab robe. His star sapphire sparked with color in the starlight. I looked at his face and in his eyes. The same. His “ghost eye” winked at me.

  “I think it was Mencius, the Chinese philosopher, who said that a great man is he who does not lose his child’s heart,” Sailor said. He smiled faintly. I was staring at him, speechless.

  “I think he meant to say ‘a great-looking man,’ ” he finished with a broad smile. “Do you not agree, Zianno?” He posed in profile, then laughed out loud.

  I was still in a stunned silence.

  “I felt your presence as soon as you came around the hill,” he said. “I was hoping you would come soon. I have been expecting you for some time and I could have used your help.”

  That woke me up. “You could have used my help,” I said. “Do you know where I’ve been?”

  “No, that was why I asked.”

  He acted as if I’d seen him only yesterday. At first I was angry, then just as quickly I realized that time and its passage were different for Sailor and all the old ones. The desert had taught me something, but I still had much to learn from my own kind. Sailor was not alone, however, and I could feel the presence of another. It was strong and familiar. I finally smiled and Sailor and I embraced warmly. As we did, I whispered in his ear, “We’re not alone, are we?”

  “No,” he whispered back. “There is another and she is the reason I knew you would return.”

  I pulled back and stared at him again. What did he mean? Who did he mean?

  “Why are you here, Sailor? I mean here, in this spot, now?”

  He paused for only a moment and unconsciously turned the sapphire around his finger. “Because I have found Opari,” he said. “And she is here.”

  “Opari?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would she be here?”

  “To buy a slave. She has done it for years. I have followed her since that night in the Forbidden City. Zeru-Meq discovered her escape and I began following her in Macao. She has always bought slaves, traded in them, but never personally made the transaction. This is a first. I have already seen her here with that baboon of a eunuch who usually buys them for her. They are waiting for the slave now. A girl, I believe, coming from the south with an Arab chief.”

  I looked back toward the hill where Star was resting. I listened hard for anything out of the ordinary.

  “They are waiting for me,” I told Sailor. “The Arab chief is dead and I have the girl.”

  “Then we shall use the girl as a Trojan horse, so to speak, and confront Opari.”

  “No,” I said. “This girl will be no slave for anyone any longer.”

  Sailor gave me a studied look and his “ghost eye” clouded slightly. “Why?” he asked.

  I told him who Star was and the condition she was in. I told him of her connection with Jisil, the Fleur-du-Mal, and the Prophecy. And I told him of the promise I had made to Carolina, a promise I would keep. I told him whoever was trying to buy Star and her unborn baby was either doing it behind the Fleur-du-Mal’s back or he was behind it all. He was obsessed with breeding his own assassin.

  “The Fleur-du-Mal believes this?” Sailor asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I always thought his aberrance did not affect his intelligence. I was wrong.”

  I didn’t respond. I was struggling to try to make sense of everything. One thing did not make sense at all and went against everything I felt
in my heart. Opari. How could she be doing this? Even in that one moment we shared, I learned enough to know that she would never have had anything to do with someone like Cheng. Or would she? The heart is not a predictor of anything to come or a lie detector for what has been. Love can make mistakes. If Opari was doing this, then I would do what I had to do to keep Star free. Star was the truth. All I had to do was follow the lies.

  “Where did you see them, Sailor. this eunuch and Opari?”

  “Come with me. We must be cautious, but there is something odd.”

  “What?”

  “She seems not to be aware of my presence, and yet I can feel hers even now.”

  I didn’t say so, but I felt it as well, strong and catlike, somewhere around the walls of everything else, on the move, watching.

  I followed Sailor down the slope only a few hundred yards to one of the old wall lines of ancient Carthage. Sailor had a pack hidden there with several things inside. He pulled something out and handed it to me.

  “You left this in China,” he said. Then he glanced up at the moon and down to a distant point on the hill. “Take it out and I will tell you where to look.”

  It was Papa’s telescope in the old cylindrical case that Kepa had given to me. The brass was polished and the two pieces locked solidly in place. Sailor told me to look downhill near an abandoned excavation where wooden shacks had been constructed during the dig, then left to the elements. All were missing windows and some had no roof. One had a gas lamp inside that was lit and casting light on a young girl in Arab dress and a sickly, yellow old man. He was not wearing a bowler. He was bald except for a few straggly gray hairs. His face was sunken and his body was hunched over and leaning to the side where he sat. His eyes, the eyes I had seen for so long in my mind, were no longer razor slits. They were swollen, dark, and sagging. It was Cheng. I swung the telescope over to the girl’s face and focused in on her eyes. Her green eyes. I had seen the face and the eyes once before.

  “Do you see her?” Sailor asked.

  “Yes, but that is not Opari.”

  “What?” He grabbed the telescope and pointed it down the hill, focused in, then backed off. “Explain this to me, Zianno. I do not understand,” Sailor said very seriously.

  “That is a girl named Zuriaa. Did you not look at her eyes? They are green.”

  Sailor looked startled, unnerved, like something given had been inexplicably proven wrong. “No,” he said. “It was the presence. The presence was always too strong for me to doubt. She has the presence of a very old one. I can feel it now. Do you not, Zianno?”

  “Yes,” I said. “More than ever.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I don’t know.” I looked at Sailor and he was deeply troubled. If anything, he knew what the Meq could and could not do. I wondered what he would say about the possibility of a sixth Stone. “I know the old man too,” I said. “His name is Cheng and. and. ”

  “And what? Why do you hesitate?”

  I realized that Sailor had not put the two men together — the one he had been watching and the one who had murdered his good friend and brother-in-law.

  “He is the same man, Sailor. The same evil whose presence we felt at the train station in Denver. And he’s done a few other things since.”

  He never changed expression, but Sailor’s “ghost eye” began to swirl with clouds. He was Umla-Meq, the Stone of Memory, and he felt he had been betrayed by his own memory and instincts. It had been almost three millennia since he’d actually seen Opari, but how could he have mistaken her presence? I’m sure he felt he should have recognized Cheng also, though he’d never actually seen him before in his life.

  Sailor closed the telescope and handed it to me. I was setting it back in its case when we both heard an agonized, guttural scream from up the slope and behind the hill. I knew it was Star.

  Neither Sailor nor I hesitated. We turned and sprinted through the darkness, first up a winding trail, then to a shortcut between the brush and scree.

  “You care greatly for this girl, this Star?” Sailor shouted as we climbed.

  “Yes,” I shouted back.

  “She is like family to you? Like blood?”

  “Yes.”

  I was getting winded and worried. I kept tripping over rocks and I hadn’t heard another sound from over the hill.

  “Then you have found family?” Sailor yelled.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think Eder and Nova have found this family? Do you think—”

  “Yes,” I said and grabbed his sleeve to stop. We were near the crest of the hill and I wanted to go on quietly from there.

  We caught our breath, then started a slow crawl to the very top of the rise, directly above the place I’d left Star. Sailor kept rambling on about the last time he had been in Carthage, the last time he had crawled to peer over a ledge in this city of the Phoenicians. It was unlike him to keep talking, especially under the circumstances. He asked if I knew the story, if I knew what had happened. I was only vaguely paying attention, but I said yes, Eder had told me. Then he asked if I knew who had been with him, but before I could answer we reached the lip of the rise and leaned over to witness something that neither of us ever expected. It changed my life forever, and Sailor’s too, no matter what he would like you to believe.

  Below us, my one and only oil lamp was lit and secured in the sand, and protected from the wind by Jisil’s saddle, which had been propped on its side. Jisil’s horse was nowhere in sight. The saddle was being used as a backboard for Star to lean against and hold on to for support. Star was lying on her back with her head and shoulders leaning forward. She was dripping in sweat. Her eyes were open and glazed. She was staring between her legs at a young girl who was bent over a naked, motionless baby, born premature and not breathing, just like the one I’d seen born in the alley in Saint-Louis. The young girl was performing the same cleansing of the baby’s mouth and throat that Emme had. She moved rapidly and with great expertise until she had cleared a passage, then she leaned down and carefully, purposely, breathed life into the child. Within sixty seconds, the baby let out three fierce and tiny cries. The young girl wet her little finger and gently wiped the baby’s eyes, nose, and mouth. Then she wrapped the baby in Star’s old scarf with the drowning Chinamen and helped her lean back against the saddle, placing the baby in Star’s arms. She bunched several blankets around them to keep out all wind and drifting sand, then sat cross-legged in front of them, waiting for the new life to take comfort and take hold.

  She never looked up at us, even though she was aware of our presence. I watched with a fascination that only began there and has never since ceased. It was Opari.

  I couldn’t see her face, but her hair was shining black and still cut straight at the shoulders. She wore loose, white cotton trousers that were tied at the ankles with the straps of her sandals and at the waist with a wide leather belt. Her arms were bare and hung from something resembling a shawl, but heavier and covered in designs I had never seen anywhere.

  After several minutes, Star and the baby were breathing evenly, sleeping and possibly even dreaming. Opari turned slowly in the sand and looked directly into my eyes. It felt as though I had been struck in the center of my chest and every atom in my being had been charged with light and grace.

  “Hello, my beloved,” she said, as simply as life itself. She had an accent, but it only seemed to soften the language, not confuse it. “You must forgive me,” she said. “It is berri, no, I mean new to me, the English. I will learn well, in time.”

  “Yes,” I said, but my voice was a whisper, choked and barely audible. I cleared my throat and said, “We have time.”

  She looked to my left and I followed her eyes as they met Sailor’s. They had not spoken in almost thirty centuries.

  “You look well, Sailor,” she said.

  “And you, Opari,” Sailor said quietly. Then the answer to the puzzle that had unnerved him spread across his face. “So it was you following
me all these years,” he said. “And you let me think the other was the presence.”

  “Yes,” Opari said, then waved for us to be quiet and pointed to a curved shelf of rock, exposed to the wind on one side and sheltered on the other. She wanted us away from Star and the baby.

  We met her at the low shelf of rock and all huddled close together, out of the wind. Opari glanced at me once and looked over at Sailor to speak. I watched her lips as she formed the words and they moved out of her mouth. I could not believe I was where I was.

  “There is no time to hear reasons,” she said. “Zuriaa and the eunuch have heard the baby being born. They will, how you say, ikertu?”

  “Investigate,” Sailor answered.

  “Yes, they will investigate.”

  “I will not lose Star and the baby,” I told her.

  Opari looked at me and reached up with the tips of her fingers and touched my lips. “This is the girl and the child they wait for, is it not?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said, and took her fingers in my hand and felt her skin for the first time.

  “What is this?” Sailor asked, dumbfounded. “No one told me of this,” he said, nodding his head toward my hand holding Opari’s fingers. “When did this happen? Is this why you left China, Zianno?”

  “No, not quite.”

  “Then why?”

  “It is complicated.”

  “And who is Zuriaa?” he asked.

  “She is Ray’s sister.”

  “Who is Ray?” Opari asked.

  “He is my friend. I think Cheng might have—”