The Blessing Stone (12 page)

And then clouds covered the sun, the day grew cold again and the moment ended, but Laliari’s enchantment did not. As she watched Zant bend to retrieve his sodden tunic, she marveled at his power and dark mystery, and she felt a strange new heat begin to burn deep within her. When he turned suddenly and his blue eyes captured hers, she felt her heart jump in a way it had never done before, like a gazelle within her breast—joyous, happy, leaping with life.

But then she was immediately sad, for she remembered his loneliness.

Every day Laliari would watch Zant leave the cave, spear and ax in hand, and disappear into the rain. He would return a long time later, always with a kill, but cold and shivering, saying nothing, stripping the hide off the animal and throwing the meat on the fire. She would watch him crouch down and stare into the flames, a look of forlorn sadness on his face, and she would wonder about him.
Why did he stay? Why didn’t he leave?
Once in a while he would look up, as if he sensed her watching him, their eyes would meet, and Laliari would feel something—she didn’t know what—take place in the warm, smoky confines of the cave. After a while Zant would bring the cooked meat to her and Bellek. He would make sure they both ate before he himself ate any of it even though it was his kill. And while she ate, she felt his eyes on her, eyes filled with loneliness, questioning, yearning.

They spent their days in search of food, their evenings in awkward communication, their nights in restless sleep. Neither possessed the words to describe what was happening, neither could explain the alien emotions that had them in a grip. Laliari and Zant took care of Bellek, nursing him back to health, but both sensed something else happening in the cave, something taking shape, like a ghost, but not unfriendly, perhaps like the ghost of fire, because each felt a heat rising within them. Laliari wondered how Zant’s people took pleasure, and Zant wondered how the men and women of her people came together. Unknown taboos stood between them, and the fear of breaking them.

When Laliari suddenly left the cave one day, taking her possessions and some food with her, murmuring words of reassurance to the old man, Zant understood. The women in his own clan practiced segregation during their moonflow.

When she returned to the cave five days later, Zant showed her a sight so astonishing that it opened her mind and explained so many things.

The rain had abated and the sun shone through the broken clouds. Making sure that Bellek was warm and comfortable, Zant took Laliari by the hand and led her from the cave and up a narrow trail that went to the tops of the cliffs. There, standing at the top of the world beneath a sky that went on forever, Laliari felt the wind invade her spirit and lift it to great heights. Below, she saw the rolling plains and hills, now starting to shade with the green of spring, and in the distance the immense freshwater lake where her people were camped. Laliari had never stood so high, had never had such a view of the world.

But this was not the sight that was to explain so many things. Zant wordlessly led her across the flat mesa toward its far, sharp edge. It terrified her to come to such an abrupt and precipitous drop, but Zant held her arm and smiled encouragingly. She moved to the edge and, terrified that the wind was going to carry her away, looked down.

There, she saw something that stopped the breath in her chest.

Below them, rising from the bottom of a deep ravine, was a mountain of horse carcasses. Whole animals, with only their bellies slit open, the skins and bones and tails left intact. The stench was dizzying for the carcasses were rotting. Through Zant’s gesturing and miming, the horrific picture started to form in Laliari’s mind: Zant and his people had driven this herd to its destruction. It was how they hunted. She remembered the mountain of antelope carcasses she and her kinswomen had come upon weeks ago, how they had wondered why the animals had galloped off the steep cliff to their doom. Now she understood that they had been driven by humans bent on slaughter.

But, she realized in dawning horror, they had used only a small part of the animals. As Zant spoke with his awkward words and clumsy gestures, Laliari envisioned the carnage: Zant’s people cutting open the bellies of the beasts, many of them still alive, and crawling inside to pull out the tender organs, feasting on beating hearts and steaming livers, painting themselves with blood, empowering themselves with the spirit of the horse.

Laliari was at first horrified at the waste. Her own people would have made use of every organ and sinew, even the horse’s manes. But then she saw that the most horrendous taboo had been broken: the majority of these animals were females. When her clan hunted, they only went after males, since males, unable to bear young, weren’t needed for the survival of a herd. To kill females meant killing their future offspring and ultimately killing off the herd entirely. As she looked in dismay at the wasteful slaughter—some of the horses had been pregnant—she realized that her people had encountered no horses during their trek from the Reed Sea. Were these the last of them?

She turned to the man who both excited and mystified her, and now horrified and repulsed her, as he had done the night they first met. A man who could lay such a gentle touch on the festering wound of a frail old man, yet who could drive hundreds of horses to a useless death and think nothing of the waste of it. As he continued to talk, gesturing northward with his gnarled hand, thumping his chest, exhibiting pride and bravado, but his eyes betraying the stark loneliness that had dogged him these weeks, revelation like a dawn broke in her mind: that Zant wasn’t the last of his kind after all. His people, having overkilled in this valley, were now forced to move northward in search of more herds. They were the Wolf Clan, he explained, and so they were following the wolf packs tracking the herds. His people were camped just a few days’ journey northward, past the lake and into the mountains, where they waited for him.

Finally Bellek was healed and Zant declared that it was time for him to move on. He gathered his possessions and they began a sad goodbye. Now was the time of permissible touching, for they were parting.

“Lali,” he said in such a forlorn way that it moved her heart, and his rough fingertips on her cheeks sent waves of heat through her body. She covered the hand with her own and pressed it to her face, turning her head so that her lips met the calloused palm in a long, painful kiss.

Beneath his heavy brows, tears shimmered in blue eyes. He spoke her name again, but no sound came out. Emotions without name, feelings without definition flooded her. Nothing had touched her this way before—not Doron’s first embrace, nor witnessing his death. This dark and perplexing stranger from another world had found places deep within her that she never knew existed, and wakened a new spirit, one that hungered and burned and believed it would die without Zant.

He drew her into the circle of his arms and she brushed his cheeks with her mouth. His breath was hot on her neck; she felt his manhood hard against her. He lowered her to the cave floor, and she drew him down upon her. He called her Lali and feverishly stroked her limbs. She murmured “Zant” and opened herself to him. He was bigger than Doron in all ways, and the feel of him took her breath away.

Bellek, waiting outside on the rocky ledge, and understanding these things, hunkered down and began to pick nits out of his hair.

Zant stayed with Laliari for seven nights and seven days, during which time they explored and discovered one another, spending the daylight hours in fishing and hunting and the nighttime hours in passionate embraces. When he finally departed they knew they would never see each other again. Laliari’s place was with her own people where, although she did not yet know it, she would one day wear the gazelle antlers. And Zant must hurry north to join his clan, not knowing that because of their form of hunting, whole herds of mammoths, horses, reindeer, and ibex would be driven over the edges of cliffs, many of them to the extinction of their species. Zant and his people would migrate north in ignorance of the fact that their own race was on the verge of total extinction, for reasons that would still remain a mystery 35,000 years into the future, when he and his kind would be called Neanderthals.

After Zant had gone, Laliari sadly collected her things and prepared to go back to the lake with Bellek when she found tucked into one of her baskets the little figurine with the blue baby-stone in its belly. A final gift from Zant.

As they traipsed across the plain, Laliari assisting Bellek for now he limped, they both silently wondered if the camp would still be there since they had been gone for so long. But then they saw the smoke from the campfires and heard on the wind the laughter of children. And when they drew closer they saw—

Ghosts!

Bellek stopped short and made a strangled sound in his throat. But Laliari’s eyesight was better and so she could see that the men in the camp were not ghosts but their very own hunters, once believed lost in the sea but now very much alive. They picked up their pace and soon Laliari was running, desperately searching for one familiar face in the group. And then she saw him.

Doron, who had survived drowning in the angry sea.

They had been swept miles downstream, they explained dramatically to their excited audience, and deposited on the shore—the
opposite
shore from where the women were. And so they had had to wait for the tide to change and for the Reed Sea to withdraw before they could cross. They had had no idea where the women had gone. It had taken them days before they picked up the band’s trail, after that they had simply followed Bellek’s magic symbols, which he had carved into trees during the women’s progress up the river valley.

And now here they were, the clan reunited once again. Laliari looked at Doron with tears of joy but in her thoughts, Zant…

That night, as Bellek regaled everyone with the tale of their sojourn among the caves—even though he had spent most of it asleep—and as Laliari passed the fertility figurine around the circle for everyone to marvel over, there suddenly came a shout from the edge of the camp. One of the hunters who had been appointed to moon-watch came running into the light, waving his arms, a wild look on his face. Everyone jumped up and ran through the trees and into a clearing where they saw—

Everyone gasped.

The moon was rising big and round and bright in the starlit sky.

The Gazelle Clan held a big celebration that night in which Bellek dispensed the magic mushrooms. Soon, everyone around the campfire was delighting to hallucinations, intensified colors, and a glorious sense of well-being. Their hearts swelled with affection for one another, their pulses quickened with desire. Couples paired off, Doron guiding Laliari to the privacy of reeds and cattails. Bellek found himself cuddled in the arms of two rapturous young women. And Freer, Doron’s fellow hunter, sought comfort between the hot and welcoming legs of No Name, forgetting her outcast status.

The next morning, everyone agreed that it could be no coincidence that the moon had returned with Laliari and Bellek. And Laliari, herself trying to explain the stupefying phenomenon, said the moon must have come with the blue stone the stranger in the cave had given her.

The others were dubious of Laliari’s conclusion and quietly decided she was wrong, until a month later when most of the women in the clan discovered they were pregnant, including No Name. The figurine was examined more closely this time and now there could be no mistake: there were the breasts and abdomen of a pregnant woman, and at the center of the blue crystal a baby could clearly be seen.

The stone had brought the moon, and therefore life, back to the clan.

And so another celebration took place with everyone singing Laliari’s praise. As she modestly accepted the honor, thinking sadly of Zant but happily of Doron, she failed to see on the other side of the circle a pair of eyes watching her—Keeka, who was not at all overjoyed to have her cousin back from the caves.

Revenge was on Keeka’s mind.

She had been secretly glad when Laliari’s exploration of the caves had stretched into weeks. Although she had been frightened, like everyone else, that Bellek might be dead and that they were now without someone to read the omens and guide them, she had secretly hoped her cousin would never come back. And then when Doron and the other survivors had shown up, Keeka had seen her chance to make Doron hers. It had almost worked, too. He had started sitting beside her during the evening meal and showing interest in sleeping with her—and then Bellek and Laliari had stepped out of the mist!

In the seven years since, Laliari had risen in status among the clan because they believed her fertility stone had brought the moon out of hiding. So powerful was the blue stone that even barren She Who Has No Name had given birth and now she had her old name back and was respected as a mother. The clan had elected Laliari the new Keeper of the Gazelle Antlers. Now she had three children, Doron slept in her hut instead of with the hunters, and everyone loved her. Keeka, in her jealousy, could stand it no more.

But the method of revenge had to be carefully thought out. Laliari must not know that it was Keeka who had killed her, otherwise Laliari’s ghost would haunt Keeka for the rest of her life. But how to kill someone without their knowing it? All the methods she could think of—using a spear or a club, pushing Laliari off a cliff—lacked the necessary anonymity. And she couldn’t fool her cousin the way she had fooled old Alawa. When Keeka had crept into the old woman’s hut to strangle her—which she had been forced to do after she had overheard Alawa tell Bellek that they must kill the little boys, Keeka’s boys!—she had covered her face with mud and disguised her hair with leaves, convincing the old woman that she was a ghost. But Laliari was of sharper mind and eyes, she would know who her assassin was.

The women were out on the rolling plains gathering spring plants. In their new home the clan had adapted to a new seasonal rhythm. Instead of being governed by the annual flood of a river, as they had been in their ancestral valley to the west of the Reed Sea, they were now regulated by the cycle of autumn fog, winter snow, flowering spring, and summer heat. They had had to learn new migratory patterns of game and birds, and when to go in search of edible wild fruits and grains. Grass skirts were no longer sufficient against the winter cold, and so they had learned to fashion tunics and leggings out of animal skins. In the winters they retreated to the warm, dry caves in the cliffs, but emerged in the spring to build grass shelters by the freshwater lake.