Time Dancers by Steve Cash

garlic, and sour orange rind. At both ends of the table several bottles of champagne were chilling on ice. Owen said each bottle was a 1911 Perrier-Jouet, one of the finest vintages of any champagne since 1874.
    Ray took one look at the array of delicious, steaming dishes and fresh-baked bread that covered the table, then summed up everyone’s reaction. “Damn!” he said, looking over at Ciela with a broad grin across his face.
    Carolina rose from her seat before we began eating and gave a toast and short speech that was neither somber nor joyous. She mentioned Unai and Usoa, though she had never really known them, and she thanked God, Ray, and me for bringing Star and Caine to safety. She ignored the obvious danger that could still exist and said we should be grateful for the moment, the food, and the unique family we had become. Following with a toast of his own, Owen Bramley began by recounting his and Ray’s adventures and difficulties while trying to crate and haul Baju’s sundial to St. Louis all those years ago. He segued into comparing our odd family with the formation of Woodrow Wilson’s idea for a League of Nations and the upcoming conference in Versailles. It was typical Owen logic and rhetoric and as he rambled on, my mind drifted to thoughts of Opari. She was sitting across the table, looking at me, smiling. I no longer heard Owen’s voice. I only heard the echo of her voice, her simple words, “Tonight, my love.” I smiled back and lifted a silent toast to her, and the feast began.
     
    Here vigor failed the towering fantasy.
    But yet the will rolled onward, like a wheel
    In even motion. By the Love impelled,
    That moves the sun in heaven and all the stars.
    —DANTE ALIGHIERI, Paradise, Canto XXXIII
    It was well after midnight. Holding the inside of the frame with my hand, I leaned out one of our bedroom windows, over the sill, out far enough to look up and catch a glimpse of the great Milky Way overhead. I wanted to see if the stars were still burning. I wanted to see if they still wheeled through the sky or if they had stopped in place, because I was certain I now knew what made them move.
    “Be careful, Z,” Opari whispered out at me. “It is some distance to the ground.”
    “I couldn’t fall tonight. Not now, it would be impossible.”
    She smiled and kissed the knuckles of my hand holding the frame. “What do you see?”
    “I see what I never have before.”
    She laughed and turned, walking back toward the bed while removing the old barrettes from her hair. I watched her every move. She was as graceful and silent as Geaxi, with an added mystery in her step, as if she walked surrounded by a field of excited particles. I now knew one of her most intimate secrets. It is the reason kings, sultans, priests, and princes, even jealous empresses, have for centuries sought her presence and given her the same protection as their royal treasuries. It is not just the Stone of Blood, nor the gems that adorn it, nothing like that. It is something much more sublime and yet overwhelming, a knowledge every Giza and Meq has within them, but very few ever experience. Opari is a vessel of this knowledge, this experience. This is her “gift.” It is the most refined of all her “abilities” and in this world, in this form, her most powerful ally.
    The experience lasts a little over an hour for Giza and can last two or more hours for the Meq. Beginning at approximately 10:00 P.M. and in various stages until about 12:30 A.M., through Opari’s touch and guidance, I had been shown this “gift,” this dance, this fugue, this impossible balance of control and surrender, and led to a sublime perimeter of possibilities and particles. I returned with a feeling of renewal I had never felt before. I felt connected to everything, to the…“Love impelled, that moves the sun in heaven and all the stars.”
    “Opari,” I said, ducking my head back in the room, “does it have a name?”
    She was just turning out