The Blessing Stone (13 page)

And so it was that Keeka, along with the other women, was foraging for food when she came upon a plant she had never seen before. Its origin lay far to the north, in the mountains of a country that would one day be called Turkey, and over the centuries the seed of this plant had been carried on wind and wing to land and take root along the shore of Lake Galilee. Keeka, with her woven baskets and digging sticks, paused to contemplate the unfamiliar tall red stalks and broad green leaves. The clan had found many new foods in this valley, so this one was no surprise. However, as she bent to uproot one, she saw something that made her freeze.

Dead rodents lay on the ground among the new plants.

Keeka gasped and backed away. There were evil spirits in this place! As she traced a protective gesture in the air and hastily murmured a spell, something about the dead rodents made her stop and give closer scrutiny to them.

She realized after a moment that the animals must have been nibbling on the leaves of this new plant just before they had died. In fact, one was still alive, writhing in convulsions. An instant later it stiffened and lay dead. Keeka kept her distance, fearful of the poisonous spirit that inhabited the plant, but she didn’t run away because an unexpected vision was forming in her mind: Laliari lying on the ground like the rodents, killed by the plant’s evil spirit.

Suddenly she saw her instrument of revenge.

Filled with giddy excitement, Keeka rushed to the water’s edge and coated her hands with fresh mud. She then chanted protective incantations as she gingerly coaxed the rhubarb from the soil. Hastily dropping the plant into her basket, she rushed back to the water to wash and scrub her hands clean. As she did so she smiled at her cleverness, for it would not in fact be she herself doing the killing, but the malicious spirit in the plant. As she hurried back to her basket and its lethal contents, she thought of how life was going to be after Laliari was gone, and her smile widened in delicious anticipation of luring the handsome Doron into her hut.

The clan’s initial attempts at making clothing out of furs had been abysmal failures—for the pelts of such goats as they could find grew hard and stiff and unmalleable—and so Laliari’s people had shivered all through their first winter in the caves. But Laliari had seen how soft and supple Zant’s furs had been, so she and her kinswomen had experimented all the next summer in stretching and scraping the hides until they dried to a comfortable softness. Then she devised bone needles for piercing the skins in order to draw fibers through for seams. That was why she now stood on a windy hillock wearing a long tunic of warm and pliant goatskins, her feet clad in fur boots, her eight-month-old baby snug in a sheepskin pouch on her back. Laliari’s two little boys, Vivek and Josu, were warm in capes and leggings made of soft gazelle skin as they chased grasshoppers.

Laliari was a distinctive figure as she stood tall and proud on the hillock, scanning the new green growth for the first fruits of spring, for on her head she wore the clan’s gazelle antlers, tied firmly beneath her chin with animal sinew. She was thinking of a garlic patch that grew down by the stream, but unfortunately it was too early to pick them. Garlic had to wait for midsummer, which was too bad for the clan had developed a taste for it. She peered at the ancient, massive fig tree that grew on the hill, and studied the green fruit. Not yet ripe. It would be another cycle of the moon before the clan would taste of the figs’ sweetness. Finally, she spotted a mulberry bush remembered from the year before, and she was delighted to find the first early berries ready to be picked.

As she collected the mulberries into her basket, the breeze shifted and bathed her in a delicate perfume—the scent of deep blue hyacinths, blooming in the thousands over the hills and meadows. Blossoming, too, almost overnight, were fields of blinding white narcissi. After spending dark months in smoky caves, the people of the Gazelle Clan were reveling in spring’s rebirth.

Laliari herself was filled with inexpressible joy. The little baby girl asleep on her back, and close by, in the tall sweet grass, her two precious sons.

Her eldest boy, Vivek, was six years old with thick brows overshadowing his eyes, and already at such a young age was showing signs of the heavy jaw he would someday have. His resemblance to Zant came as no surprise to Laliari since it was Zant’s fertility figurine, with the blue baby-stone in her belly, that had given Laliari the child. Laliari’s second boy, Josu, was a bright little four-year-old with curly golden brown hair and chubby arms and legs. Tomorrow was the day of his nose piercing. There would be a big celebration and he would be given his own little ax and a shell necklace made of good-luck talismans.

It was hard to remember now the terror she had once felt in this land, or that her people had ever felt like strangers here. The clan had come to love this place by the freshwater lake. She lifted her face to the breeze and thought of Zant. She hoped he had found his people, that he was happy now, and hunting with them. Laliari had never gone back to the cave where she first met him, for a child lay buried there and Bellek had declared the cave taboo.

Hearing a high-pitched whistle, Laliari turned to see her cousin Keeka come walking up. Despite the chill in the air, Keeka was bare-breasted and proudly displaying a beautiful periwinkle necklace one of the hunters had made for her. Keeka had put on weight in the years since their flight across the Reed Sea; once the clan had settled here by the lake, Keeka had reverted to her old habits of hoarding food.

However, to Laliari’s surprise, Keeka had come to share this time. She held out a basket containing broad green leaves and declared that it was a wonderfully delicious new plant she had discovered. Laliari gratefully accepted the basket and offered Keeka a basket of mulberries in return. As Keeka went off smiling, already pushing handfuls of mulberries into her mouth, Laliari took a small nibble of the new plant and found the rhubarb leaf unremarkable.

“Mama.”

She looked down to see Josu’s little hands reaching, so she handed a leaf to him and then gave one to the older boy. Vivek tasted the leaf and, making a face, spit it out. But Josu happily munched on his piece of rhubarb.

Having filled two large baskets with mulberries, Laliari called her boys to her and they headed back to the camp on the shore. Other women were arriving now with their gatherings: dandelion greens and wild cucumbers, coriander seeds and doves’ eggs, as well as a good haul of bulrushes for making baskets and for their edible piths. Men returned to camp with netted fish, baskets of limpets, and two young goats freshly skinned. All would be apportioned out according to rules, and everyone would eat well.

While ritualistic incantations were chanted, the meat was butchered and roasted and handed around, first to the hunters’ mothers, then to elders, and so on with the hunters themselves receiving the last. Laliari breast-fed her baby and saw to it that her boys received enough food. While Vivek happily scooped yolk from an egg, little Josu continued to grasp the rhubarb leaf in his hand, nibbling at it all the time. Someone had come upon a field of early wheat and had shared it out. Each person bundled the stems together and held the ears over the fire until the chaff was mostly burned off. Then they rubbed the ears between their palms to get the wheat grains out and pop them into their mouths.

After the meal, the camp turned noisy as usual, with the women attending to grooming and basket-weaving, the men to sharpen flint knives and talk of the day’s hunt. It was some moments before Laliari noticed that Josu was complaining of pain in his mouth. She took a look and saw curious lesions on the insides of his cheeks and lips. She was instantly alarmed. Had an evil spirit entered him? Josu did not yet have the protective piercings in his nose and lips.

“And here,” he added, pressing his hands on his abdomen.

“You have pain there?”

He nodded.

Laliari’s heart jumped. The ghost had entered his mouth and was now in his stomach!

As she tried to think of what to do Josu started to shake. She drew him into her arms. “Are you cold, my precious one?”

Big round eyes stared back at her as the tremors suddenly grew worse.

Now other women came around, inspecting the boy, putting their hands on him and murmuring concern.

Laliari held him close and rocked him. When he suddenly started wheezing and gasping for breath, Laliari cried out for Bellek. By the time the old man arrived with his amulets and spells, the rest of the clan was gathering around to watch. Bellek examined the boy and set about immediately to working his medicine. As the flames from the various fires danced beneath the stars, casting the humans in alternating glow and shadow, he placed powerful talismans on Josu’s body, chanting mystical spells as he did so. Then he dipped his fingers into jars of pigment and painted healing symbols on the boy’s forehead, chest, and feet.

Josu’s breathing grew worse.

At the edge of the group, as she tossed nuts with supreme indifference into her mouth, Keeka watched in detachment. Due to her own basic greed it had not occurred to her that Laliari would offer the rhubarb leaves to her children first. So now the evil spirit had entered the boy instead of Laliari. Keeka was intelligent enough to know she wouldn’t have another chance and that Doron was not to be hers. Still, she derived some satisfaction from the look of terror on her cousin’s face, and the tears streaming down her cheeks.

By now Josu was unconscious and the whole clan looked on, speechless.

And then suddenly he began to convulse.

“Save him!” Laliari cried as she held him.

As old Bellek quivered in indecision, the convulsions stopped. “Josu?” Laliari said in sudden hope.

The boy’s chest expanded in a deep breath, then he released it in a long, ragged shudder. And then he was still.

The silent-sitting was the most profoundly sorrowful sitting the clan had ever performed, and even when they started to tear down the camp—for now they must move on and leave Josu’s little body to the elements—still no one spoke, their movements heavy and plodding, their faces etched with grief.

But it was urgent that they leave, now that the ritual had been performed, and while the others shouldered their burdens to begin the trek farther along the shore, Laliari did not move. She remained beside her son’s corpse, her face whiter than the remnants of snow on the distant mountains. The clan members milled about nervously, terrified of the bad luck she was bringing upon them.

When she suddenly gathered the cold little body into her arms and wailed up to the sky, the others shifted in fear. We must leave her, half of them said. But she has the gazelle horns, argued the others. Doron squatted close to her, indecision shadowing his handsome face. He reached out but dared not touch her.

After several moments of bitter weeping over her son, Laliari finally fell silent and a strange mood settled over her. She became deadly calm, her eyes blank and staring. What they were fixed upon were the caves in the nearby cliffs. Suddenly she thought of the one in which she had met Zant, and the child buried there. Reaching into a small bag that hung from her belt she brought out the stone figurine with the blue baby-crystal in its abdomen. As she gazed at it she recalled the night Zant had first shown it to her, the night he had buried a child. She hadn’t understood at the time what he was trying to tell her, but now it came to her: the crystal did not represent a womb with a baby in it—it was a grave with a child in it.

My son will not be left to wild animals. He will not be left to the wind and the ghosts. And he will not be forgotten.

While the others watched in bewilderment, Laliari first made sure her infant was safe and sleeping in its pouch on her back, then she gathered up Josu’s body, instructed Vivek to hold onto her skirt, and she began to walk away from the camp.

The others hung back, wondering what she was doing. But when Bellek began to limp after her, the rest began to follow. But they remained at a distance, trailing behind the old shaman out of curiosity. Was he going to order her to leave the boy and come away? And where was Laliari going?

They had their answer when she reached the foot of the cliffs and began the awkward climb up the rocky trail they had used for the past seven years. She had to pause several times to allow Vivek to catch up, or to shift her awkward burden. It was necessary at times to lay Josu down and lift Vivek up and over boulders, then to pick up her tragic burden and resume her resolute progress.

She never once looked back.

The cave Laliari chose was one that had not been lived in for it was small and shallow, and the ceiling too low. But it was protected from the elements and the floor was soft and sandy. Gently laying Josu down, she took the digging stick that always hung from her belt and began to dig.

Everyone crowded at the entrance, peering in, whispering, none brave enough to go inside. After a few minutes Laliari’s baby began to cry. She paused in her digging to unstrap the pouch from her back and bring her infant daughter to her breast. When the child had nursed and was asleep again, Laliari laid the baby in a safe spot and resumed digging.

When she had created a pit, she picked up Josu’s body and tenderly laid it inside, arranging him in a comfortable position, as if he were asleep. Then she rose to her feet and went out of the cave, the others falling back to let her pass. They all stood on the rocky precipice to watch as she moved among boulders and shrubs collecting wildflowers and fragrant boughs. When her arms were full, she brought the foliage back and gently spread it out on Josu’s body. The she covered him up with sandy soil, filling the pit and patting the earth down so that it was firm.

She then went to the cave entrance where her six-year-old son stood with Doron. Taking Vivek’s hand, she led him to the grave where she said to him, “You are not to be afraid. Your brother is asleep now. He is safe from ghosts and from harm. And he can do no harm to you. His name is Josu and you will always remember him.”