The Blessing Stone

by Barbara Wood

  Avram lay perfectly still, wondering why he felt so sick. His head pounded and his stomach churned. His mouth felt as dry as dust and tasted sour.

  Another moan. He realized it had come from his own throat.

  Bit by bit he lifted his lids and accustomed himself to the light. Sunlight, pouring through an opening in a tent.

  Why was he in a tent?

  When he tried to sit up, nausea rolled over him in such a powerful wave that he fell back onto the bedding. A bed of furs. Not his own bed.

  Whose tent was this? And why was he in it? How did he get here? He tried to remember, but his mind was as murky as a mud pond. Memory came to him in vague recollections: the feast celebrating the alliance of the two families, the procession to his house, his grandmother leading Marit to the women’s side of the house, he and Yubal dropping to their sleeping mats.

  After that, nothing.

  When he heard a humming sound, he turned toward it and saw a dusky-skinned woman packing cookware into a basket. He tried to speak, and when she saw that he was awake, gave him a water skin to drink from, explaining as she did so that she and her sisters had found him outside their tent, lying in his own vomit. They had brought him in and cleaned him up, and then left him to sleep it off.

  He sat up and cradled his head, which was filled with angry demons. The sixteen-year-old could not recall having ever felt this rotten in his life. I was sick? Vomiting? But why here in the caravan encampment, why am I not at home?

  He managed to get to his knees, and then to his feet, but he swayed unsteadily and his head pounded mercilessly. In confusion, he watched the dusky-skinned woman busily carrying things out of the tent. In fact, all that remained was the bed he had slept on. Then he remembered: Hadadezer’s caravan was leaving this morning.

  I must get home before they notice I am gone.

  But at the tent opening, the blinding sunlight stopped him. Slapping a hand over his eyes, he fought down rising nausea and tried to pull himself together. His bladder was full and he urgently needed to relieve himself.

  There was privacy behind the tent, and as he urinated, saw the vast encampment breaking up. Then he turned toward the settlement where he realized a great chorus of wailing and crying was being lifted to the sky, a sound made only when someone important had died.

  Going around to the front of the tent where the dusky-skinned woman was pulling up stakes, Avram asked her what had happened in the settlement. She explained that a wine-maker had been making love to a girl and had died in her arms.

  Avram blinked at her. Wine-maker? Making love to a girl?

  It all came flooding back: Avram waking to see Yubal kissing Marit. The flight into the garden, the raised fist and curse shouted to the sky. And then—

  Now he remembered, a twisted horrid scenario that he had watched from his hiding place among the vines: a scream, followed by Marit running from the house. His grandmother coming out, crying and beating her breast. Avram’s brothers stumbling about as if they had been struck by lightning. Other people arriving, going into the house. The neighbors shouting, “Yubal is dead! The abba of the House of Talitha has gone to his ancestors.”

  Avram now remembered his drunken shock at the time, hidden in the vines, rooted in stupefaction. Yubal was dead?

  And then the memory: Avram, shaking a fist to the sky. “May you die a thousand horrible deaths!”

  He had run blindly from the vineyard, sick and confused, finding himself at the shrine of the Goddess.

  The memory came back dim and murky. Al-Iari’s house, small and low-ceilinged, its dark interior illuminated by oil lamps casting light upon shelves stocked with magical amulets, healing herbs, potions, powders, and fertility charms. And upon her altar—

  The statue.

  And dazzling in the lamplight, the blue stone. The Goddess’s heart. Her forgiving heart. Avram in drunken desperation had impulsively thrown his arms around Al-Iari’s stone legs, losing his balance and taking the craven image with him. A loud crack.

  Avram now staggered against the tent as if he had been struck. The Goddess lying shattered on the floor.

  It could not have been real! It was all a monstrous, twisted nightmare.

  When he heard someone asking him a question, he blinked at the dusky-skinned woman. “Did you know the wine-maker?” she repeated.

  But all he could think of was the shattered statue of Al-Iari. No nightmare, it had been real. He had killed the Goddess!

  And then another memory: the blue crystal, his hand blindly reaching for it, curling around it, fumbling for his phylactery, pressing the stone inside the soft leather pouch.

  Breathless with shock, Avram brought his hand up now and laid it upon his chest where he could feel, beneath his tunic, the bulge of the phylactery. But now it was larger and had a new hardness.

  The blue stone, the heart of the Goddess.

  He tried to move, tried to cry out, summon tears, impel his lungs to voice his outrage and grief. But nothing within him moved, his body would not obey. Like a man under a spell he watched the women tear down their tent and pack it onto a sledge, and when they started walking with the rest of the members of the caravan, a mass exodus moving away from the Place of the Perennial Spring, Avram without thinking fell in with them.

  They were a family of seven women: grandmother, mother, three daughters, and two female cousins. They told him they were feather-workers and that he was welcome to accompany them. And so he went with the feather-workers, a mute, nameless boy who might have made the women wary were he not so pleasant of countenance and clearly the son of a wealthy family.

  The days and weeks went by in a haze. Avram did hard labor for the women during the day and at night they stroked him and kissed him, saying he was a very pretty boy, and drew him into their lush bodies. After a while the numbness wore off and Avram recognized the utter wretch that he was. He had killed his abba, brought disgrace to his bloodline, broken a contract with Parthalan, abandoned Marit, and, by stealing the heart of the goddess, had as good as killed her as well. And so he let the feather-workers, who did not know the details of his tragedy, console him and offer him refuge.

  They did not know that the boy traveling with them was but a shadow, a soulless shell that had no purpose. His body moved with instinct—sleeping, eating, urinating. When a cup was placed in his hands, he drank, and when the women visited his sleeping mat at night, his body reacted as a man’s and he took his pleasure. But Avram himself felt no pleasure, no hunger or pain. He moved in a realm that was of neither the living nor the dead.

  Northward the caravan went, a slow moving river of burdened humanity, stopping at small settlements and then continuing on, past the freshwater lake and the Cave of Al-Iari, into the lush woodland where the lebonah tree grew. Avram pulled the feather-worker’s sledge and pitched their tent at night while his feminine companions fed him and delighted over his youth and innocence. And though he had lost all care for his own safety and well-being, something in him made him stay hidden from Hadadezer, who had been Yubal’s friend.

  Numb of mind, body, and spirit, Avram watched the feather-workers at their skilled labors. Their talent, known the length of the caravan route from the mountains in the far north to the delta of the Nile, lay in their instinct for layering feathers on leather the way they are layered on a bird. They were also skilled in use of color so that their fans, capes, belts, and headdresses commanded the highest prices.

  Knowing there was an evil spirit of sickness inside him, the matriarch fed Avram medicinal concoctions designed to drive evil spirits away. She crooned over him and laid healing hands on him. Her daughters and nieces gathered around him in a loving circle and sang to him. Especially when he woke from bad dreams in which he found himself running after Yubal, trying to call him back.

  Maybe it wasn’t an evil spirit inside him after all, the grandmother finally decreed when their ministrations did not help. Maybe the boy’s own spirit had died. And once dead, a spirit could not
be revived.

  It was spring when the caravan finally emerged through a mountain pass and wound down to a vast, grassy plateau where other families were camped beside a shallow lake. The feather-workers invited Avram to continue on with them to their village of stone houses just a day’s journey away, where he could live a life of leisure with them for two years before they joined Hadadezer’s caravan again. But he felt a compulsion to move on, the setting sun beckoning for reasons he did not understand. He learned that this was a winter camp and that once the rains ceased the families camped here would pull up stakes and follow the herds that went in search of spring grasses. So he went around the tents and offered himself as a hard worker in exchange for being allowed to travel with them.

  Thus did Avram continue his flight from the Place of the Perennial Spring. The feather-workers gave him a tearful farewell and a handsome feathered cape lined with goose down, and with the new family he traveled across the Anatolian plateau, a gentle plain of short grasses and stunted willow trees, wild tulips, and peonies. They followed large herds of horses, wild asses, and antelopes. Avram saw the two-humped camels, fat marmots basking in the sun, rose-colored starlings that flocked in the thousands, and cranes that built nests on the ground. But these wonders might as well have been ash and stone for all they moved him. Avram did not tell the nomadic family his name or his story, but he worked hard for them and kept his peace. When the women crept into his bed his response was as objective and automatic as it had been with the feather-workers. He gave them pleasure with his body, but gave nothing of his heart.

  When they reached the western edge of the plateau, he bade the family farewell and continued on down to the coast, where he reached a narrow body of water that he mistakenly took for a river, not knowing that it was in fact a strait connecting two major seas and separating two continents. Avram also did not know about shrinking glaciers on the European continent and the resulting rise in sea level that would, over the millennia, turn this small strait into a major shipping lane that would one day be called the Bosporus.

  Here he saw boats for the first time, and found a man who would take him across to the other side. Avram had just turned eighteen and thought his life was over.

  He journeyed alone.

  If he encountered signs of humans, he went the long way around to avoid them. And in his new self-sufficiency during his relentless trek westward Avram the dreamer gradually became Avram the hunter, trapper, fisherman. He fashioned snares to catch rabbits and spears to catch salmon. He dug for shellfish along beaches and slept beside a lonely fire at night. The feather cape protected him from wind and rain, and during the hot summer he propped it on poles for shade. His skinny adolescent body began to build muscle, and his beard came in. He continued west when he could, but when he encountered coastlines and found himself at the edge of seas with no opposite shores, he moved northward, not knowing he was tracing routes that eight millennia hence would be followed by men named Alexander the Great and St. Paul.

  In an estuary on the east coast of what would one day be called Italy, he came upon a village where people ate a tremendous number of cockles; they even had a special flint tool expressly for opening them. They lived in grass shelters that blew down with each storm. Because Avram had by then journeyed to exhaustion and needed to rest, he stayed with them for a season and then moved on. But he had not told the cockle-eaters his name nor his story, nor had he learned their language, for he considered life now a fleeting impermanence and the knowing of names and stories was no longer important. Whenever he yearned for his home at the Place of the Perennial Spring, or felt warm feelings in that direction, he hardened his youthful heart and reminded himself of the crime he had committed and the dishonor he had brought upon his family, that he was a cursed man and fated to be cast out from his own people forever.

  The horizon continued to beckon, just as it had in his childhood, except that now he followed it not to see what was on the other side but because there was nowhere else to go. And in his mindless need to put miles beneath his feet, nowhere did he find another settlement like his own at the perennial spring. He had once thought that people everywhere lived in mud-brick houses and kept their own orchards, but he saw now, as he trekked northward, crossing nameless rivers and meadows, climbing hills and peaks, that the citizens of the Place of the Perennial Spring were unique in the world.

  He also knew something else: because of the wolf’s fang Yubal had given him in the sacred wine cave, he could come to no harm. In the days and weeks traveling to the source of the Jordan River and beyond, and then westward across the Anatolian plain, and finally the treacherous crossing in a shallow boat, no harm had come to him. The cockle-eaters had welcomed him, others treated him warily. Animals let him pass in peace. And so he came to realize that it was the power of the wolf spirit that was protecting him.

  But the protection brought him no joy or succor for there was a cruel irony in Yubal giving him the wolf’s fang. Had Yubal kept it for himself, Avram’s curse might not have killed him.

  He continued northward, following mighty rivers and surviving in mountains higher than any he had ever seen. He found dense forests of birch and pine and oak where the principal game was red deer and wild cattle. Here he came upon a race of bison hunters. He traded his feather cape, which was no longer splendid but still a novelty, for furs and boots and a proper spear. He joined hunting groups, stayed a while, and then moved on. He never revealed his name, never told his story. But he hunted well, always shared, respected the laws and taboos of others, and never lay with a woman without her consent.

  In all this time he kept the blue stone close to his chest, hidden, a symbol of his crimes and his shame. Since his flight from the Place of the Perennial Spring he had not brought it out of the phylactery. But not a day went by in which he was not aware of its presence there: cold, impersonal, judging. And at night when he was visited by dreams—of Marit searching for him in the Valley of Ravens, Yubal calling him down from the watchtower—he told his companions nothing of his torment.

  The day arrived when the restlessness came over him again. Looking northward, he asked the bison hunters what lay in that direction, and they said, “Ghosts.”

  So Avram said farewell to the bison hunters and headed north to the land of ghosts.

  Bundled in furs with spears and arrows strapped across his back, and trekking on snowshoes the bison hunters had given him, Avram finally came to the edge of a vast, white wilderness. It was more snow than he had ever seen, endless snow with no mountains opposite, not even a horizon, and the winds blew more fiercely than he had ever imagined, howling gusts that sounded like the shrieks of a thousand demons that cut through his flesh to freeze his very core. He thought, I have come to the end of the world. This is my destiny.

  As he started across, the wind shifted and blew his fur hood back, blasting his face with an icy breath. Quickly pulling the hood back up and holding it securely beneath his frozen chin, he proceeded forward, unaware that he was in fact crossing a sea, that he was no longer on land. What lay at the end of this journey he had no idea except a vague notion that he was going to the land of the dead. As it occurred to him that he might have already died and this was a mere formality, the ice beneath his shoes suddenly gave way, plunging him into the icy water.

  Avram frantically fought for a handhold on the ice, but it kept breaking beneath his fur gloves. As he thrashed about in the water, something bumped against his legs, and he glimpsed a big brown monster swimming around him. Terror filled him. He no longer wanted to be dead but very much alive. But his efforts were futile as he felt his legs go numb in the water, a numbness that began creeping up his body. When his last handhold on the ice broke away and the frigid water closed over his head, his last thought was of Marit and warm sunshine.

  Avram was flying. But not like a bird, he realized, for he was half-sitting, half-reclining, his arms tucked snugly across his chest beneath a pile of furs. Is this how the dead travel to t
he land of the ancestors?

  As he blinked through a ring of fur around his face, he saw the white-on-white landscape rushing past. He frowned. Not flying, yet he wasn’t running either, for his legs were stretched before him and likewise swaddled in warm furs. He looked directly ahead and when his eyes were able to focus, he saw that he was being carried away by a pack of wolves. I am to be their dinner. Maybe it was revenge for Yubal killing that wolf all those years ago. So, the fang was no longer protection.

  Eat me then, his muddled mind cried out. It is what I deserve. And he lapsed again into unconsciousness.

  When he awoke next, the flying sensation had slowed and he saw small, round, white hills drawing near. He looked at the wolves again and this time realized they were no ordinary wolves, and they appeared to be tethered together with leather straps. When he heard a yell, he realized someone was standing immediately behind him, towering over him, calling commands to the wolves. Avram tried to see a face but it was hooded with fur.

  Deciding that he wasn’t sure he liked being dead, he fainted again and the next time he awoke it was to find himself in a small dark place that smelled of burning oil and human sweat. He blinked and tried to focus. The ceiling was made of ice. Was he in an ice cave? But no, he could see the seams where the blocks of ice came together. A house—made of ice. And he was lying in a bed of some kind, and beneath the furs he was naked. Someone had taken his clothes! He tried to feel for his phylactery but there was something wrong with his arms. He could not move them.

  A voice nearby, and then a shadow on the wall. He blinked again and saw a face come into focus. Old, wrinkled, and grinning toothlessly. She spoke. At least, he thought it was a she. And then, to his shock, she suddenly threw off his blankets, exposing him to the air. “Indecent woman!” he cried, only to realize that the cry had been inside his head. He couldn’t move his jaw, nor even open his mouth. As Avram lay limp and helpless, the old woman pried open his mouth and peered inside, then she inspected his navel and prodded his testicles. Finally her rough hands started to work on his frozen flesh, first clasping and pressing his fingers, then gently massaging life back into them. She lifted his hands to her mouth and blew on them. He felt neither the warm breath nor the touch of her hands. And when she moved down his body, he continued to feel nothing.