Steve Cash - The Remembering

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 only ones, we were simply the newer ones. What this meant and would mean was still not clear, but we were on a path of understanding and the path led straight to the Remembering.

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.

Now they were connected to us in the deepest and most intimate ways, West to Geaxi and Fielder to the Fleur-du-Mal. During the first few months at Morgan Manor, I watched Fielder and the Fleur-du-Mal become closer, although they did not display the kind of physical closeness that Opari and I shared, as well as Nova and Ray and Sailor and Sheela. His arrogance would probably not allow it. Neither Opari nor I could fathom why they were each other’s Ameq. How could Fielder love a cruel and cold-blooded killer, and how could the Fleur-du-Mal love at all? Even in her presence, he never denied or regretted a single act, yet that did not seem to concern Fielder in the least. One of the contradictions in the Fleur-du-Mal is that he is as honest as he is evil. Maybe that was their connection. Both their natures were contradictory and unpredictable. She ignored his arrogance and he ignored their physical differences and each embraced the other’s intellect. Watching West and Geaxi interact was similar in that Geaxi’s personality did not seem to change — her droll wit and blunt manner remained — but in her eyes there was a brand-new understanding that was universal and joyous. In her heart, Geaxi had come home.

Five years. For the Giza five years can prove to be a long stretch of time, even a lifetime for some. For the Meq five years is nothing. Sailor once told me that in the past it was not uncommon for the Meq to discuss the brightness of a single star for a hundred years or more. It was that way at Morgan Manor. With so many of us living in one place, long walks along the coast and treks inland among the barren and beautiful foothills of Black Mountain were common and frequent and usually filled with discussions that always led back to the Remembering. Seasons ran into seasons and time passed around us unnoticed and barely felt.