The Blessing Stone

by Barbara Wood

  Like Dog’s pups resembling their mother, but resembling the wolves in the hills as well.

  One afternoon he paid a visit to Namir, who was grumbling over a quiver of arrows, trying in vain to straighten them. After offering Namir a skin of wine and taking a seat in the shade, Avram asked the old man what he had observed among goat herds. “Have you seen them do this?” and he made a gesture with both hands.

  Namir shrugged. “I have seen the goats do many things. They run and play and fight, as people do.”

  “But you have seen this?” and he made the gesture again.

  Namir brought an arrow shaft close to his eyes and inspected it with displeasure. “Yes, I suppose.”

  “Why do they do it?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Is it male and female that do it?”

  He finally looked up from his work. “Avram, have you stared at the moon too long?”

  “When you trap your live goats, do you only trap the females?”

  “Of course! The males are useless. Unless it is to eat them directly.”

  Avram told him about Bodolf’s reindeer and Hadadezer’s bulls. Namir scratched his head. “Are you saying that animals take pleasure as we do? Did one of those donkeys of yours kick you in the head, Avram?”

  “When we hunt, the animals run from us. As soon as they pick up our scent, they scatter, they do not pause to take pleasure with one another. How do we know what they do when we are not around?”

  Namir wrinkled his nose. “Eh?”

  “Animals in a pen, fed and tamed, do not run from us. Namir, I have seen with my own eyes animals taking pleasure in the same manner as humans.”

  “Lunacy!” the old man said with a laugh, but Avram saw the curiosity creep into Namir’s eyes.

  The notion would not leave Avram’s mind. He thought back to the reindeer compound—the male mounting the females. He had not known at the time that animals did that. He explored his memories of the early days of his flight, when he had journeyed across the Anatolian plain with the nomads. They had camped among wild herds and occasionally he had seen animals mount one another. Avram had thought perhaps it was a form of fighting, or play. Finally he thought of Hadadezer’s bull giving pleasure to cows. And Dog, disappearing into the hills to return with half-wolf pups.

  Was that the act that created new life? Not spirit-created but by male and female, man and woman. But how? For it did not occur every time. There was old Guri the lamp-maker who liked to take his pleasure with young girls, and they never got pregnant. And the oldest of the Onion Sisters who lay with many men and never got with child. And then he thought, girls and older women do not have the moonflow.

  He was stunned. Was that it? Everyone knew that moonflow was what the Goddess used to create babies. But what if the moonflow was like grape juice? For this was the essential miracle of life: the grapes did not ferment on the vine, nor did grape juice ferment when contained in a wooden cup. Grapes were grapes and juice was juice. It required the power of the Goddess in her cave to change it to wine.

  But it requires men to carry the grape juice into the cave.

  Avram stood as if thunderstruck. Turning his face to the breeze, he peered into the distance and saw on the rolling plain that surrounded the bubbling spring the new fields being plowed for planting. And he saw what he had not seen before: how the furrows in the ground resembled a woman’s private place. And then he pictured the seed being scattered by the hand of a man.

  Did men and women together create life?

  No, he corrected himself. It is the Goddess who creates life—that power is hers alone. But she takes from both male and female to form that new life.

  He nearly fell beneath the weight of the revelation: Wine is made the way babies are made, through the power of the Goddess. But just as grapes placed in the cave do not transform into a holy drink, but require the collaborative effort of man for them to become wine, then it follows that the moonflow on its own cannot become a child but requires the involvement of a man. And seeds scattered willy-nilly on unprepared ground are not as likely to sprout as those sown into plowed fields. Cave and field and woman: they are all Mother. They each bring forth life. But not on their own, each needs the contribution of a man.

  And then came the most staggering realization of all: Marit, who had lain with no man in eleven years, was now pregnant.

  Avram went to the shrine of the Goddess to seek her counsel. He prayed and silently asked, Am I entertaining blasphemous thoughts? But then he saw Reina and recalled how, long ago, he had looked on her with youthful lust, and he had asked himself then why the Goddess had created this confounding hunger between men and women. Because it seemed to him now, as it had seemed to him as a tormented youth, that intimacy between men and women wasn’t all pleasure, as Yubal would have had him believe. “The Goddess gave us this pleasure to help us forget our pain,” his abba had said long ago. But now it did not make sense to Avram. So often the pursuit of intimate pleasure was accompanied by pain and often followed by tragedy. Why then had the Goddess created this inescapable magnetism between men and women?

  And then she spoke to him: It is to ensure that life is created, Avram.

  He began to tremble with excitement. His next question almost terrified him: And so it is man and woman, male and female? he asked of the statue with the meteorite heart.

  As if in response, the blue crystal seemed to shimmer and shoot out points of light. Avram stared at the mystical stone and looked deeply into its heart, struggling to see an answer. And in the next instant his mind opened in a blinding epiphany: where he had once seen the milky essence at the crystal’s core as the perennial spring, he now recognized it as a man’s essence when he takes his pleasure with a woman. The moonflow and man’s fluid, combining in the cave of the woman, for the Goddess to work her miracle.

  Suddenly everything fell into place. As if he had observed the world through blurry eyes all of his life and suddenly his sight was sharpened. It all made sense, the entire wondrous miracle of it. Now he saw it everywhere he went: birds building nests together, male and female, to produce eggs and feed their young; fish swimming in the streams, the females to lay eggs, the males to swim over them and bless them with their procreative essence. He felt connected to all of humankind and all of nature in a way he never had before. No longer a bystander in creation but an integral part of it. He recalled what Marit had once said about being one link in a long chain. Now he was part of a chain as well, without whom subsequent links could not be connected to those preceding. Marit, pregnant—with his child.

  It was as if the sky had opened up. For all his life Avram had wondered why, and he had wanted to delve the mysteries of nature. As he looked around himself, suddenly everything made sense, suddenly he understood.

  He went straight away to his tent where he prostrated himself before the avatars of the ancestors, and he spoke to Yubal, pouring out his heart and bearing his soul, declaring his love and reverence for the man, shedding tears of relief and joy as he called him abba, this time adding a new meaning to the word, for though it had always meant “master” or “steward of a house,” from now on it would also mean “father.”

  Avram did not make public his new knowledge for he knew people would only laugh and declare that he had stared at the moon too long. But he did quietly advise Namir to take he-goats along with the females the next time he trapped a herd, and he remarked to Guri the lamp-maker that his plan to raise pigs was not an outlandish notion. He did tell Marit, however, the miraculous news, and she accepted it for it had come from the Goddess. Avram knew that, in time, as men raised donkeys and dogs, goats and pigs, they would make the same observations as he had, and reach the same conclusions.

  At last the wall was finished.

  Everyone gathered to celebrate the dedication of the new tower, which they were going to call Jericho, which means “blessed by the moon.” Avram climbed the new stone stairway nearly twelve years to the day after
he had climbed the wooden ladder of his father’s watchtower in the vineyard on a fateful dawn that seemed so long ago. Then, he had been a beardless boy, filled with uncertainty and lacking purpose, pulling himself up rung by rung, trying to make sense of a confusing world. Now he was a man, confident and purposeful, planting his feet firmly one after the other on the stone steps.

  Among the proud onlookers was Marit, holding their child on her hip, a strapping boy of thirteen months. At her side was Dog, her belly swollen again, and flanked by a new generation of puppies. Avram had seen Dog’s first pups grow to maturity, and then romp and play and mount one another until the females were pregnant so that a third generation of domesticated dog was about to join the settlement. Namir was smiling in the sunshine, the fat and prosperous and very proud owner of a flourishing herd of goats, because he had taken Avram’s advice. Guri the lamp-maker was experimenting with pigs again, and the Onion Sisters were adding a duck pen to their plot of ground, discovering as Avram had discovered that there was a greater harmony in nature than they had previously thought, a wondrous interdependence that was like a beautiful, shimmering spider web, with animals and spirits and humans all connected in a sacred contract.

  Avram reached the top of the tower, and when he emerged into the brilliant sunshine, a roar rose up from the crowd. The citizens of Jericho looked upon their achievement with great pride and feelings of security, for nowhere in the world were there walls such as these, walls that they knew no invaders could pull down. As he welcomed the deafening roar, feeling at peace and exonerated of his past sins, Avram allowed his thoughts to float away over the miles until they reached the People of the Reindeer—Frida, and the child she had been carrying when he left. His child.

  Avram had left his blood up there in the frozen north, the bloodline of Talitha, the bloodline of Yubal, to be carried on by others, so many miles away.

  Interim

  Avram never understood why it was to him that the knowledge of fatherhood had been given. But the Goddess had her reasons and for the rest of his life he thanked her morning and night, his prayers full of praise for the Mother of all. In time, although not in Avram’s day or in the days of his sons and grandsons, the Mother of All would be joined by a Father of All, until someday, in the not too distant future, the Mother would be supplanted entirely by the Father.

  Jericho prospered. Avram and Marit had more sons, Namir’s goat herd increased, more litters were born to Dog and to Dog’s puppies, Guri ceased being a lamp-maker and became a prosperous pig farmer. More crops were planted, wheat and corn, cotton and flax, more animals were domesticated and raised for their milk, eggs, and wool. With increased bounty and good luck, the people made sacrifice to the Goddess. Her shrine was enlarged and her priestesses grew in number. As the centuries passed, the wall gradually bore no more resemblance to the one engineered by Avram for, as it turned out, down through the ages the walls of Jericho would fall many times to be rebuilt again and again.

  The manufacture of textiles came to Jericho, and the alphabet and writing. Two thousand years after Avram and Marit joined their ancestors, a man named Azizu was at his potter’s wheel and accidentally knocked it over. As he watched it spin away on its side, an idea came to him. It took many attempts and failures but Azizu succeeded in making two wheels roll on an axle, upon which he placed a cart. He could now transport ten times as much pottery as before, and he credited his inspiration to a visit to the shrine of the Goddess where he had kissed her blue-crystal heart for luck. Four thousand years after Hadadezer dazzled Avram with copper nuggets scooped out of a streambed, men were mining copper and tin and smelting them together to form bronze. A thousand years after that, men discovered iron and how to master it, and the world changed forever.

  As populations increased, settlements became villages and villages became towns. Leaders rose from the masses and called themselves kings and queens to rule over others. Al-Iari’s power grew, her shrine became a tabernacle and then a temple with priests and priestesses. Her people called themselves Canaanites, and travelers from Babylon and Sumer recognized her as their own beloved Ishtar and Inanna. Alongside Baal, she was worshiped for her fertility, and though her countenance changed over the years and her statue replaced many times, the ancient blue crystal remained her heart.

  And so she had lived, protected and adored, for thousands of generations from the time of Laliari and Zant. And then invaders came from the valley of the Nile led by a ferocious conquering pharaoh named Amenhotep who brought back not only human captives but captured gods and goddesses as well. Among them was the patron Goddess of Jericho, who was housed temporarily and out of respect in the shrine of a lesser Egyptian goddess, where her crystalline heart caught the eye of an adulterous queen.

  When the queen was laid to rest in a tomb splendid beyond imagining (due to the guilty conscience of the king who had poisoned her) the blue crystal went with her, and there queen and crystal slept in a dark, airless world, anonymous and forgotten for a thousand years until tomb-robbers, drunk on beer, smelling of urine and covered in fleabites, smashed their way into the tomb and brought the ancient blue stone back out into the light of day. The teardrop of sky-hued meteorite changed hands over a succession of years as it was bought, sold, stolen, fought over, and gambled away until it wound up in Alexandria, in the possession of an important Roman official who had the stone set in a beautiful gold necklace for his wife.

  He intended the gift to be a punishment.

  Book Four

  ROME

  64 C.E.

  Lady Amelia’s prayer was a desperate one.

  Please let the child be healthy.

  The shrine of the household gods held several Roman deities, therefore Lady Amelia had her pick of some of the most powerful in the pantheon. But since the circumstances called for the special intercession of a goddess who empathized with a mother’s plea, Lady Amelia had chosen one whom people called Blessed Virgin (because she had conceived a child without assistance from a man), a goddess who had known suffering when her son was hung on a tree to die, to descend to the underworld and to rise resurrected. Therefore it was to this compassionate mother, the Queen of Heaven, to whom Lady Amelia now made her plea. “Please let the child be without blemish or flaw. Let my daughter’s husband find favor with it and accept it into the family.”

  Her whispered words died in the morning silence. Died because there was no meaning behind them, no faith. Her prayer was a sham, lip service to a piece of marble. Lady Amelia was going through the motions of piety because it was expected of her; as a model Roman matron she always did the right thing, always kept up appearances. But in her heart she was completely without faith. How could a woman believe in goddesses when men had the right to dispose of women’s babies?

  Her prayer finished, she crossed herself, touching shoulders, forehead and breast because she had once been a follower of Hermes, the ancient savior-god known as the Word Made Flesh. The signing of the cross was from years of habit. Lady Amelia no longer believed in its power. She remembered a time when prayers were a comfort, when the gods were a comfort. But now the gods were gone and there was no comfort in the world.

  Cries suddenly filled the house, echoing off walls and columns and statuary. Her daughter had been in labor for a day and a half and the midwives were beginning to despair.

  Lady Amelia turned away from Blessed Virgin Juno, mother of the savior-god Mars, and delivered herself into the shaded colonnade that enclosed the villa’s interior garden where a fountain splashed sweetly on this warm spring day. Lady Amelia did not bother to visit the shrine of the ancestors. She hadn’t prayed to them in years. Without gods there could be no afterlife and without an afterlife the ancestors could not exist.

  She slipped silently past the atrium where young men were playing dice and laughing, unconcerned about the screams that tore the morning peace. They were Amelia’s three sons and two sons-in-law, as well as close friends of the youth whose child was struggling to come i
nto the world. As she passed the open doorway she saw her daughter’s husband, a young father-to-be reclining at his ease, drinking wine and rolling dice as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

  Perhaps he hasn’t, she thought in uncharacteristic rancor. Childbirth was the concern of women alone.

  A thought flew like a shadow across Amelia’s mind, swift and dark like a raven: We women carry children inside our bodies, we feed them with our breath and our blood, our beating hearts pump life into them, and for nearly ten months the child and the mother are one. And then come the birth pains, the tearing of the flesh and rush of blood, the agony of pushing the new life out into the world. However, for you, young father, there is no pain, no blood. A moment of pleasure and nine months later you drink wine and roll dice and decide the fate of the newborn.

  Amelia experienced a pang of resentment. Not just toward her son-in-law but toward all men who decided life and death as blithely as if it were the toss of dice. She had not always felt this way. There was a time when Amelia, wife of the powerful and noble Cornelius Gaius Vitellius, had believed in the gods and had thought life was good, that men were good. But all joy and faith had been extinguished the day death had been chosen over life.

  A day not unlike today.

  Her path was blocked suddenly by an elderly man. The Bird Reader, whom she had hired to interpret the signs. The old Greek plied a lucrative trade because Romans were a superstitious people, always watching for signs and omens, reading meaning into every cloud and thunderclap. For a Roman the day could not begin without first determining if it was an auspicious day for conducting business, for getting married, for making fish sauce. And of all the instruments of augury, from knucklebones to tea leaves, the flight of birds was the most important—even the word “auspicious” was derived from auspicium, which meant the divination of flights of birds.

  “I have read the auspices, Lady,” the Bird Reader began. “I see a man. His arms are opened wide, ready to embrace you.”