Steve Cash - The Meq

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.