“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.
Sailor 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.