The Blessing Stone

by Barbara Wood

  Thus did Avram pass his second winter among the People of the Reindeer, hunting seals and bringing them back to Frida, sleeping in her arms at night, laughing with her in the day—although night and day were all the same. She showed him lights in the northern sky, dancing phantoms of fabulous colors. He told her about the desert and sea of salt with no life in it. They made love in their cocoon of fur and ice, and in Frida’s arms Avram forgot for a while the shame that had driven him here, and the crime he had committed. He buried his face in her corn-silk hair and declared her to be the love of his life, but she only laughed and teased him for she had heard him call for Marit in his sleep, and she knew that a dark-haired dream-woman was her competitor.

  Avram learned to live by a new rhythm of light and dark. The days were brightest from spring to late summer, and darkest between autumn and spring. For three months the sun never dropped below the horizon, and for three months it never rose. The cycle of changing seasons was the appearance and disappearance of solid ice on the sea. He learned about Bodolf’s gods and the superstition of his people, and Avram respected their beliefs. He learned to like the taste of seal meat, and in the summer followed Frida up to snowy peaks from where they could see the entire world. The People of the Reindeer tattooed themselves by using a fine bone needle to draw soot-covered thread under the skin, and one spring Avram bravely suffered the needle-art on his forehead. The Place of the Perennial Spring became a dream, Marit and the others seemed like people he had made up. That land of warmth and sunshine, so far from this land of cold and snow, could not possibly exist.

  When one of the sled dogs gave birth to a litter of pups, Avram found one little dog more endearing than the rest, and began visiting the pen where they were kept. The feeling must have been mutual for the pup began to whine every time Avram left, and finally jumped out of the pen and followed him back to the timber house. Avram named her Dog and she became his constant companion after that.

  It was during his fifth summer with the People of the Reindeer that the dreams began. Scenarios involving Yubal and Marit, Reina the priestess, his brothers, even Hadadezer; warm, seductive dreams colored in the greens and golds of the Jordan’s springtime. Avram’s sleeping mind swam like a baby toward the warmth, his fingers reaching for red poppies and pink peonies, for sweet dates and juicy pomegranates. Dreams so real that when he awoke he was astonished to find himself back in the frigid north, and he wondered how his soul was able to travel such great distances in so short a time.

  The dreams increased in frequency and intensity until they made him weep and mope like a sick dog. Bodolf and Frida grew alarmed. So they sent for the stone-caster.

  The reader of stones was small and old, her body like a withered brown nut inside its shell of seal and reindeer furs. But her eyes were as sharp as the North Star, and twinkled with an intensity that made Avram believe she would have the answers.

  Everyone sat in a circle and watched as the oracle blew into a leather bag and then tossed stones onto a square of soft sealskin. She pointed with a crooked finger to each. Her voice crackled: “This stone holds your hopes and fears. This stone is what cannot be altered and must be expected. This stone tells your present situation.” She looked at Avram. “You wish to stay. You wish to go. This is your dilemma.”

  “Can the stones tell me which to do?”

  She breathed softly, slowly. “There is an animal spirit at your side. One I do not recognize. A small beast with tall horns that curl like smoke. Its hide is the color of mead, black stripes outline its white belly.” She raised her eyes. “It is your clan spirit.”

  “The gazelle,” he said in wonder. How could she describe it so well when she had never seen one before? “What does it want me to do?”

  She shook her head. “Not what it wants you to do.” She stared at him for a moment, her starlight eyes two pinpoints in her aged face. “There is another stone,” she said at last. “Not of these. There.” She pointed to the pouch lying on his chest. “Blue like the sky, transparent like the sea. This stone possesses the answer.”

  Avram lifted the phylactery from beneath his fur jacket and opened it with care. Bringing the crystal out, he cradled it in the palm of his hand, this powerful stone that had been given to his people by Al-Iari herself before the beginning of time. When he looked into its heart he saw the cosmic diamond dust and realized that it was the bubbling spring that was the heart of his home. He thought, The crystal is the heart of the Goddess, it belongs in the shrine at the Place of the Perennial Spring.

  It was also where his own heart belonged, back among his own people. He knew that now. During his sojourn among the People of the Reindeer, Avram had been unaware of the change slowly taking place within him. His grief had faded, and with its ebbing a new emotion had flowed into its place: a longing to go home.

  When he said good-bye to the People of the Reindeer, he gave the wolf’s fang to Bodolf, because the wolf was their enemy. Bodolf in turn gave him a chunk of amber carved in the shape of a polar bear. He kissed Frida, who was nine months pregnant, and wished her well. Then he hefted his bundle on his back, clasped his spear and bow and, with Dog loping at his side, struck off southward toward the ice bridge that would take him to the other side of the sea, back on the track that had brought him here five years prior.

  By the time Avram reached the mountain village that was Hadadezer’s home, it was a year since he had left Bodolf and his people and over nine years since leaving the Place of the Perennial Spring. He and Dog had spent an adventure together, journeying back across the mountains and rivers that Avram remembered from before. They were good companions for each other, sleeping together for warmth, Dog sounding the alarm if danger was nearby, Avram sharing his nightly catch with the faithful canine. They had also saved each other’s lives—once, when a bear attacked Dog and would have killed her had it not been for Avram’s skillfully thrown spear, and another time when a wildcat jumped on Avram and would have clawed him to death had it not been for Dog’s strong jaws. For Avram, it had also been a time of discovery. His only relationship with animals had been to use them as food or clothing. But this new contract between the dog and himself brought a quiet joy he had never known before.

  When they arrived at the stone fortress in the mountains, the pair caused a commotion as men on watch wanted to kill the “wolf.” But Avram was able, by invoking the name of Hadadezer, to force them to spare the dog. And when he was led through a maze of high stone walls and tunnels, people gawked and murmured about the wild animal in their midst.

  The fortress town was a peculiar assemblage of houses so clustered together that they shared common walls, forming a strange honeycomb of dwellings that had no windows or doors, the entrances being openings in the rooftops. Avram was led into a courtyard so overshadowed by walls and surrounding mountain peaks that no sunlight touched the paving stones. Here Hadadezer was living out his final days, on a splendid platform littered with pillows and furs, attended by servants who saw to his every need. His face was as round as the full moon and gleaming with sweat, his body huge and ponderous with swollen feet that looked as if they had not touched the ground in years. His eyes nearly bugged out of their folds of flesh when he saw his visitor. “Great Maker, it is my old friend Yubal!”

  Avram stopped short and wondered if the trader were seeing ghosts. And then he realized Hadadezer was looking at him. “You are mistaken, for I am Avram, son of Chanah of the House of Talitha. You would not remember me—”

  “Of course I remember you!” the old man boomed. “Great Maker, what a blessed day it is to see the son of my good and dear friend, may his spirit know peace!”

  “Son?” Avram said.

  Hadadezer waved arms as large as legs of lamb. “I speak figuratively, since obviously a man cannot have sons. But your resemblance to Yubal, may he rest with the Goddess, is proof of the dear man’s strong spirit and influence upon you!” He snapped an order and a most amazing object was brought out into the courtyard: a slab
of obsidian almost as tall and wide as a man, knife-thin and as flat as the dead sea, and encased in a shell frame. When angled just right, Yubal’s ghost materialized inside the volcanic glass. Avram jumped back and traced a protective sign in the air.

  Hadadezer laughed. “Do not be afraid, lad! It is only yourself, a mirrored reflection!”

  Mystified, Avram turned his head this way and that, lifted one furclad foot and then the other, and realized that the image was indeed himself.

  It made him suddenly nervous. The only place one could see one’s reflection was in water, and it was considered very bad luck to stare into water for it might steal one’s spirit. Now he stared in fascination at the bearded man observing him from the black glass. It was Yubal, to the last hair.

  “Come come, sit,” said Hadadezer. “We will eat and drink and talk about the old days, which were better than these days. Since the beginning of time, the old days have always been the best.”

  While his host’s servants brought out an enormous vat of beer with two long straws, Avram reported on his long, extraordinary journey, leaving out only the reason why he left.

  “And what is that?” Hadadezer said, noticing the dog for the first time. She had curled up by Avram’s feet and rested her head on her paws.

  “She is my faithful companion.”

  “You travel with a wolf? And I thought I had seen everything! What is the world like?” Hadadezer asked after sucking up a good quantity of beer and running his hand over his mouth.

  “It is as different as people are different. There are men who live as bears, men who live on ice, men who crawl into caves on their bellies and paint the images of animals they have slain.”

  “And towns? Did you see towns?”

  “Only here and the Place of the Perennial Spring.” He was suddenly filled with melancholy, to speak of his birthplace, and to be again in the company of someone from his past. Memories rushed back and thickened his throat.

  Perhaps Hadadezer saw the mist come into Avram’s eyes, for he said quietly, “We all wondered where you went to. Most people thought you were dead. Did you run away because Yubal was dead? Yes, I thought so. You were young and frightened. It is understandable. After Yubal died and you disappeared, it was obvious to everyone that it had been a big mistake to try to unite the two families. Clearly the curses of Talitha and Serophia were upon everyone.”

  Platters of food were set before them: fowl cooked with stuffing, vegetables in oil, flat bread, tiny bowls of salt, and a revolting concoction called yogurt.

  “Yes, I suppose it came as a shock to you, poor lad,” Hadadezer continued as he helped himself to a roasted pigeon stuffed with mushrooms and garlic, “to hear of Yubal’s death. It did not surprise me, though. Not a bit.”

  Avram’s hand, holding a pickled walnut, stopped at his mouth. “What do you mean?”

  “Yubal had a complaint of the head for a long time. I gather he did not tell you? Perhaps not to worry you. Whenever he got angry or exerted himself his head would pound most painfully. He asked me if I had a medicine and I said I did not. However, I warned him to go easy on his temper and his body as I had seen this affliction fell much younger men. They say he died while exerting himself with a young girl.” Hadadezer nodded sagely. “That would do it.”

  Avram stared in frank astonishment at the mountain of a man whose beard was flecked with yesterday’s dinner. Yubal already had a condition that was waiting to kill him? Then it wasn’t Avram’s curse that did it?

  He was thunderstruck. After carrying the burden of guilt all these years, and having it suddenly lifted—

  Yubal had already had death within him.

  I did not kill my beloved abba.

  Avram could barely keep from crying out with joy. Suddenly ecstatic, he wanted to sacrifice immediately to the Goddess and to whatever local gods there were. He felt like jumping up and throwing his arms around the mountainous Hadadezer. He wanted to dance and tell everyone what a beautiful place the world was. Instead he took a long draw on the beer and smacked his lips with pleasure.

  Hadadezer shifted his great weight on the platform that served not only as his carrying chair but as his bed as well, and said, “A lot happened after that, my boy. Two years after Yubal’s death, the raiders came. This time they were more thorough. Many people died. And then locusts the next year.”

  Avram was suddenly solemn, and ravenous for news of home. “Is my grandmother still alive? How are my brothers?”

  “As it turned out, the night Yubal died was my last visit to your home. When I returned here to the mountains I realized my journeying days were over. I turned the caravan trade over to my sister’s sons so that I could enjoy what years are left to me. My nephews report only the broader news—raiders, locusts, withered crops. But the names of who are alive, who are dead—” He spread out his hammy hands. He went on to explain how his caravan trade had fallen on hard times, due in part to the misfortunes of the Place of the Perennial Spring. “They no longer trade in wine,” he said, “and that is one thing I sorely miss.”

  The drinking straw fell from Avram’s hand. “What happened to the wine?”

  Hadadezer shrugged. “They make only enough for themselves.”

  Avram envisioned his brothers toiling in the vineyards, men now, no longer boys, struggling to cultivate the vines, bring the grapes to harvest, fill the winepress, and then transport the skins to the sacred cave. All without the wise and unflagging supervision of Yubal.

  “You say you are going back?” Hadadezer asked as he discreetly slipped an empty goatskin under his tunic and urinated into it. Avram wondered how the man emptied his bowels, and tried not to think of it.

  “Yes, I am going home. It has been nearly ten years.”

  Hadadezer nodded, handing the goatskin to a servant and wiping his hands on his beard. “I wonder, my young friend, if we can work a business deal together, you and I.” And when the shrewd trader laid out the plan that was in his mind, Avram had to concede that it served both their purposes. When the caravan next struck southward for its annual circuit, Avram would walk at its head.

  He spent the summer in Hadadezer’s peculiar mountain town, enjoying the trader’s hospitality and accepting the coy invitations of Hadadezer’s nieces into their beds. While he was there he saw many new wonders, for these hardy people were an industrious and inventive race: experiments in pottery made of clay and baked in an oven; nuggets of copper being melted and molded into tools; men starting to train cattle to pull plows. When Avram exclaimed over a woman suckling a lamb at her breast, Hadadezer said: “We have observed that a young kid or lamb forms a quick attachment to its mother. When separated from the herd at birth and suckled by a human wet nurse, it bonds with its human mother and lives tamely with the human family. We learned this by accident. A woman who had lost her baby took a wild kid out of grief and suckled it, and it followed her around the village ever after. Now we have tame goats. No need to hunt,” added Hadadezer, a man devoted to finding ways to conserve his energy.

  Avram was taken to a string of stone structures where female cattle were housed, cows that had not been born in the wild but here in the mountain stables where they were kept for their milk, just as Bodolf’s reindeer had been.

  “You have noticed that we worship the bull, Avram,” Hadadezer said, who had been brought to the milking stables on his carrying platform. “The bull is the creator of life. Our women bathe in bull’s blood in order to get pregnant.”

  Avram had noticed the steer horns that were present in many homes, and symbols of the bull everywhere. He stared in astonishment at the placid beasts who allowed men to handle them. What magic did these people possess that they could tame animals?

  “In the time of our ancestors,” Hadadezer said as he offered Avram a cup of yogurt, “before we built this mountain town, when we still lived in tents and roamed the plain, we worshipped the earth and the sky for we knew nothing of how the bull gives the cow its calf. And then our anc
estors were told by the gods to stop roaming and to build this place, and to bring animals in from the plains and keep them here so that the spirit of the Great Bull could make our people fruitful. This is what makes my people so strong, Avram, the spirit of the Great Bull, whereas your people are born of the moon, which makes them weak. I mean no insult but speak only the truth. You will see for yourself how life at the Perennial Spring has lost vigor and vitality. I would send a bull with you if I could, but they are impossible to manage.”

  Avram noted that Hadadezer spoke of bulls the way Bodolf had spoken of the reindeer, so that he wondered if each race was propagated by a different god. It would explain why people over the world varied in their appearance and characteristics—the People of the Reindeer with their pale hair and skin from drinking reindeer milk; Hadadezer’s people with their reddish complexions from the blood of the bull. And my people are small and dark, for we are born of the moon and her realm is the night.

  As he dwelled among the stone walls and ruddy-skinned people, learning their ways and sleeping with their women, accustoming his stomach to yogurt, cheese, and milk, a strange disease began to creep into Avram’s soul. It was not an illness of the flesh, not heralded by physical signs or symptoms, but rather a disorder of the spirit. It entered Avram’s body by way of dreams that were sinister and turbulent, and memories that came unbidden, dark and disquieting, all centered upon one theme: the night Yubal died. In slumber was Avram forced to relive that night over and over, seeing himself wake up, discovering the two naked figures embraced in the darkness, realizing that Yubal had engineered everything so that he could have Marit for himself. The pain of that discovery came back with fresh force every morning that Avram wakened from dreams that left him drenched in sweat. In all his years of journeying across strange and foreign lands he had given little thought to Yubal’s duplicity, the very thing that had caused Avram to curse Yubal in the first place. But now that he knew it was not his curse that had killed Yubal, now that he was free to remember the other aspects of that fateful night, Avram was plagued with the inescapable and brutal truth that the man he had loved and revered had arranged for Avram to go away with the abalonehunters so he could have Marit to himself.