The Blessing Stone

by Barbara Wood

  Hadadezer was known far and wide as being a shrewd man. In his younger years he had started a trade in frankincense, a resin collected from a tree called lebonah—which means “white”—that grew in the north. When lighted, the incense gave off a beautiful perfume and so it had become instantly popular and in high demand in both river valleys. However, although Hadadezer charged highly for the product, he in turn had to pay the resin collectors a high cost, too, which left him little profit. But one season, as he was passing through the heavily forested country in the north, he had discovered that the fragrant wood of junipers and pines, when powdered, adulterated the frankincense in such a way that no one could tell they were receiving a diluted product. In this way he stretched his supply of the resin, charged the same price and made a much larger profit.

  Hadadezer never missed a thing. One reason for his success as a trader was that he employed a complex form of bookkeeping that only he understood. Since paper and writing still lay four thousand years in the future, the obsidian merchant relied upon a system of tokens made out of hard-baked clay, imprinted with symbols only he could identify, and strung on various cords and twine dangling from his belt.

  The people of the settlement rushed out to greet the caravan in eager anticipation of the coming night when old acquaintances would be renewed, lovers reunited, enemies found and dealt with, contracts made, promises fulfilled, and all manner of goods and services traded. As the sun climbed and delivered a scorching day, tents were pitched, cook fires lit, wineskins and beer vats broken out. And just as the citizens of the settlement would seek entertainments and pleasures in the caravan encampment, likewise would the work-worn members of the caravan, having been laboring for so long, go into the town in search of bread, beer, gambling, and sex. Hadadezer would camp at the Place of the Perennial Spring for five days, after which his men would pull up stakes, shoulder their burdens, and continue southward to the Nile River Valley where they would camp again before turning around and making the northward journey home. Hadadezer made the two-thousand-mile circuit from his mountain home in the north to the Nile delta in the south and back to his home all in a year, coinciding his visits to the Place of the Perennial Spring with each summer and winter solstice.

  Every man and woman who could walk, crawl, or be carried would be at the evening feast, for it was going to be a night of pleasure and diversion. The hardworking citizens of the Place of the Perennial Spring spent both halves of a year looking forward to the arrival of Hadadezer’s caravan. Tonight they were going to enjoy themselves.

  With one unhappy exception.

  After being allowed to observe the Procession of the Goddess as she was taken around the caravan encampment to bless the visitors and all commerce that was going to take place there, Avram had been sent back to the vineyard where he and his younger brothers were to patrol for thieves.

  Carrying his flaming torch as he went up and down the rows of vines, Avram thought longingly of the men in the caravan and the wonderful stories they always told of savage hunts and seas that drowned men, of women with fire between their legs and giants as tall as trees. They had traveled up the Nile and encountered people with skin as black as night. In the far north, they had seen an animal that was neither horse nor antelope but something in between, with two humps on its back. Avram longed to be a trader. He didn’t want to smash grapes with his feet for the rest of his life.

  He also knew that Marit would be somewhere in that great collection of happy humanity, perhaps buying henna or admiring a shell necklace. Perhaps she would stroll away from the company of her mother and sisters to watch a trained monkey perform antics, or to purchase one of the spicy meat delicacies mountain women were so famous for. And while she was there, out of the watchful eye of her family, beneath the moon and the stars, amid the sounds of laughter and brawling and revelry, and surrounded by the heady aromas of smoke and perfume and food being cooked, perhaps she would not mind if a certain boy stood close to her, perhaps even accidentally brushed her arm.

  Passion was stronger than obedience. Avram could stand it no longer. Handing his torch to his brother Caleb with a muttered excuse, he stole like a shadow out of the vineyard.

  The encampment covered the plain beyond the corn and barley fields and stretched nearly to the Jordan River, the smoke from its hundred cook fires rising to the stars. There was so much going on, so much to see and do that, as Avram delivered himself into the press of merrymakers, his mind was nearly distracted from its obsession with Marit. He stopped now and then to watch such entertainments as acrobats and magicians, dancers and jugglers, snake charmers and tricksters—all eager to separate the gullible onlooker from his precious cowrie shells.

  Everywhere Avram went, food was offered. Massive spits held roasted pig and goat, reed mats were heaped with mountains of flat barley bread and bowls of honey, and one could not even count the number of vats of beer with long straws for drinking. He continued his search for Marit.

  He came upon a crowd watching a dancer who wore little except bead necklaces and a belt made of shells. She was beautiful and voluptuous, all curves and sweat and flesh, shimmying and sashaying most seductively to a drum beat and the accompaniment of clapping hands. Avram did not know who she was but he wanted to burrow into her, set himself on fire in her deepest part. He felt aggression rise in him, and a heat that burned hotter than a thousand suns. His throat ran dry. His tongue filled his mouth. His eyes went like arrows to her thighs. He thought of Marit. Aching hunger filled him.

  He turned away from the dancer and saw, a short distance away, Marit’s abba passionately haggling with an ivory vendor. Molok was a short, compact bandy-legged man with a generous belly hanging over his belt, a sign of his prosperity and love of his own beer. A man of quick temper who would cut the testicles off any male descendant of Talitha who even looked in the direction of a Serophia woman.

  Avram felt his heart rise to his throat. What madness was this? Why did he persist in this obsession when clearly it could have no good ending?

  He was just about to decide that his search for Marit would only bring bad luck and that he should go back to patrolling the vineyard with his brothers as he was supposed to, when he espied a group of ladies clustered around a henna-seller. It wasn’t how the women looked that caught his attention, rather how they sounded: their laughter and one in particular, high and lilting, like the song of a certain small bird that lived in the willow trees on the banks of the river.

  In an instant the encampment vanished. The earth beneath Avram’s feet dropped away. The sky above dissolved into nothingness. Until all that was left was sweet Marit and her delightful laugh.

  “Out a the way, boy!” boomed a butcher who was trying to haul a sheep’s carcass past him.

  But Avram was made of wood—dumb and immobile. His lovesickness washed over him like warm rain. His lungs labored to breathe. He wondered if it was possible to die of being in love.

  And then Marit turned and looked at him. And a miracle occurred.

  The night suddenly returned with all its stars and moon, shining more brightly than they had in millennia, and the earth slammed up against his feet, good and solid and filled with promise; the encampment materialized again with all the laughing people and the music and dancers whirling and such a festive feeling in the smoky air. Avram’s heart slid back down to his chest while another part of him rose, and heat sprouted all over his skin. Because Marit was looking at him—right at him, her dark eyes locked with his, holding him, drinking him in, taking him into herself as she had done so many times in his dreams.

  He gulped. There could be no mistaking that look.

  The Valley of the Ravens was a riverbed that ran with raging water during winter storms but was dust-dry during the summer. Avram’s moonlit shadow followed him like an accomplice, sharply outlined on the rocky walls of the narrow canyon. He listened to the silence, to the lonely wails of jackals, to the wind whistling through the rocky ravine. There was a chill in th
e night air but his skin burned with fever. He watched the moon, full and bright, trace her eternal course across the sky.

  He held little hope that Marit would come. The subterfuge was a simple one: he had enlisted the aid of a friend to give Marit a secret message when she visited the well. He was to tell her Avram had found a rare flower in the Valley of the Ravens that he would like to show her. Marit would know it was a lie, but it was the necessary excuse she would need, if she wanted to come.

  Avram hunkered down and waited. When the breeze shifted he heard the music and laughter of the caravan’s farewell feast, and his nose picked up the occasional ribbon of cooking aromas. His stomach growled but he wasn’t hungry. His impatience and nervousness grew.

  Time passed. The moon continued across the sky. Avram jumped to his feet and paced. Marit wasn’t going to come. He had been a fool to think she would.

  And then there she was, as if she had slid down a moonbeam and landed silently on her feet.

  They stared at each other across the brief rocky space. It was the first time the two had been alone together in their lives—always there were her sisters or Avram’s brothers, or other people in the settlement. But now it was just them, alone beneath the stars.

  Avram realized that he was shaking, from both fear and excitement. In all his fantasies he had not reckoned with the fear. It suddenly, and belatedly, occurred to him that the ancestors would be here with them in this canyon, Talitha and Serophia, ghostly combatants watching to see what taboos their progeny were going to break. He felt a cold sweat break out across his back and trace icy paths down his spine. Avram was certain that if he turned suddenly he would see Talitha standing behind him, angry, wrathful, ready to separate his head from his body.

  He saw Marit rub her arms and glance furtively to the right and left, as if she too expected to see her vengeful ancestress loom over her to deliver a lethal blow.

  But the moment stretched and all they heard was the wind whistling through the rocks, and all they saw were shadows, moonlight, and each other. Avram cleared his voice. It sounded to him like thunder.

  Marit looked down at her hands. “The flower,” she said softly. “Did you—?”

  He swallowed. “I—”

  She waited.

  He thought flames were going to erupt all over him. “I—” he began again. All his fantasies about them speaking their first words together had not prepared him for reality. Suddenly he felt the eyes of his grandmother and his abba on him, and his ancestors all the way back to Talitha, and he was stabbed with fear. Cold sweat doused the heat on his skin and he shook badly. What was he doing? Breaking his family’s most serious taboo!

  And then he saw that she, too, trembled and realized what a risk she had taken coming here, how dangerous it must be for her as well. Molok would lay red stripes on her bare back if he knew!

  They could turn away now and still save themselves. He should run up into the hills and let Marit flee back to her house. No one would be the wiser.

  But neither moved. They were prisoners of the moonlight and of their mutual desire, the fourteen-year-old girl and sixteen-year-old boy on the brink of becoming woman and man.

  Later, neither could say for sure who took the first step. But one step was all that was needed, for the rest of the steps followed in quick order and in an instant that winked out all the centuries and eons of time that had come before them they were in each other’s arms. Avram pressed his lips to hers, Marit curved her arms around his neck. In their desperate, hurried, and very awkward first kiss, each imagined the canyon walls breaking apart and tumbling down to bury the two in an avalanche. They imagined they heard the howls of outraged ancestors and thought they felt the cold breath of death rush over them.

  But in the end it was only Avram and Marit, embraced and on fire, oblivious to any ghosts that might be watching, mindless of taboos and repercussions, of bloodlines and revenge. And when they drew breath long enough to utter a word, both chose the word “love.”

  The next morning Avram watched for signs that he had brought bad luck on the family. He awoke expecting to find the house in ruins, or the roof on fire, or his skin an eruption of pustules. But the morning was calm and his grandmother was drinking her breakfast beer as usual. She did not complain of bad dreams, did not show any signs that anything was amiss. Yubal, however, seemed in a more pensive mood than usual, but Avram attributed it to the coming grape harvest.

  Avram consumed his beer and bread in nervous silence, and before he left the house, paid extra obeisance to the ancestors, leaving a larger portion of his breakfast for them than usual, praying they wouldn’t haunt the house because of his transgression with Marit.

  Although he lived in constant fear of retribution, of the ground suddenly swallowing him up, or lightning striking him from the summer sky, the days went by with no evidence of bad luck coming into the house, and so Avram grew confident and arranged to secretly meet Marit again in the Valley of the Ravens. She, too, reported nothing out of the ordinary in their house—no hauntings, no bad luck—so it must be all right with the ancestors that they do this. “It is the Goddess’s wish that we take pleasure,” Avram reasoned as he drew her into his arms. “So who are the ancestors to disobey the Goddess?”

  How they managed to keep their clandestine activities a secret was a miracle that convinced them the Goddess must be on their side, for in the weeks and months that followed, days filled with stolen kisses, nights of forbidden embraces, no one in their families suspected and the two were never found out. Avram was able to get away on the pretext of going fishing and no one found Marit’s behavior odd for she was at the age when girls grew dreamy and took walks in the moonlight. Her mother even encouraged it because such walks often resulted in pregnancy.

  While Avram and Marit expressed their secret love through the seasons, oblivious to the rest of the world, lost in each other’s eyes, a change took place in the sixteen-year-old. When he was with Marit he felt complete, as if they were one soul sharing two bodies. And when they were apart he felt hollow and without purpose. Worst were the five days each month she spent in the moon-hut in special communion with the Goddess—at those times Marit was not only separated from him physically but spiritually as well, for the sequestered days were spent in prayer and ritual and in direct communion with Al-Iari.

  Avram and Marit shared not only their love and their bodies, but their dreams as well. He told her that he longed to be a trader like Hadadezer. He didn’t want to smash grapes with his feet for the rest of his life. The problem was, his dream was in conflict with his heart, for if he adopted the trader’s life then he would never be at home and he would not see Marit for long stretches at a time. How was he to reconcile the two?

  Marit’s vision was different: “I love being part of a long chain of life, to know that I came out of my mother, who came out of her mother, all the way back through Serophia to the Goddess Al-Iari herself. It gives me great comfort and also a sense of wonder to know that my daughters, when I have them, will grow up to continue the chain.”

  Avram was suddenly struck by the unfairness of life. A woman’s bloodline continued while a man’s did not, except through his sisters.

  By the time half a year had passed, and it was nearly time for the winter solstice and the return of Hadadezer’s caravan, Avram and Marit were proud of how well they had kept their secret. They had even managed to pretend in front of others that they didn’t like each other. In their youthful naiveté they believed they could keep this up forever.

  There was no greater proof of the life-creating power of the Goddess than in the making of wine. For wasn’t the cave the Earth Mother’s womb? And wasn’t the grape juice from Yubal’s vineyard like a woman’s monthly moonflow? Everyone knew that when a woman’s moonflow was held within her womb, a child began to grow. And so did the miracle of wine come about: the grape juice was carried into the cave-womb and held there in mystery and darkness until, six months later, men went in to find it
had been miraculously transformed into a drink with “life.”

  Therefore the tasting of the vintage was the most important and solemn religious rite at the Place of the Perennial Spring. The Goddess herself, carried upon the shoulders of four sturdy men, her blue-crystal heart glinting in the first rays of sunlight, led the procession to the sacred cave in the south. The statue had been carved a hundred years ago from a single block of sandstone. It stood three feet tall and was marvelous in its detail, from Al-Iari’s large, all-wise eyes to the delicate sandals on her feet. The crystal stone, ancient and magical and powerful beyond all knowing, was seated between the Goddess’s bare breasts.

  The morning air was crisp and chill, the winter solstice being just days away as the parade marched solemnly across the plain and down to the river, continuing south to the dead sea where the sacred wine caves were. The cliffs were reached at noon, whereupon Reina the priestess brought everyone to a halt. Seeing that the Goddess was placed upon her throne of rock, Reina conducted a prayer. A sheep was sacrificed and placed upon the altar. Then Avram’s grandmother, his abba, Yubal, Avram, and his three younger brothers proceeded alone up the narrow path to the mouth of the cave.

  Not a sound was heard among the hushed gathering, for the first tasting of the summer vintage would tell the people how the rest of the year would go.

  Avram’s grandmother paused at the entrance and, lifting her arms, prayed aloud to the Goddess and to any spirits or ghosts that might be nearby. She spoke words that had been passed down from Talitha’s day, when the first wine was created in this cave, then she dusted the threshold with frankincense and bay leaves, a sacred mixture meant to sanctify the area. She went in first, to strike flints and light the oil lamps that had been placed there in the summer. She stepped with a light foot lest her intrusion disturb the sacredness of the cave.

  When she satisfied herself that the wineskins were untouched, that no sacrilege had been committed here during the months of fermentation—for it was death to anyone who entered the sacred wine cave—she beckoned to Yubal. He was the abba of the house, he was also the abba of the vineyard, he must take the first taste.