The Blessing Stone (19 page)

Avram was also miserable because he was leaving in a week and would be gone for a year. And so he, too, had drunk more wine than he was used to.

When the procession reached the Talitha house, Reina invoked the blessings of the Goddess and the gathered company cheered and wished both families well. Molok and his sister kissed Marit good-bye, her sullen brothers glowered at Yubal and sent him a silent message that they were going to be closely watching out for the welfare of their sister. And then the gathering broke up with Yubal and Avram stumbling drunkenly to their pallets while the grandmother took Marit to the women’s side of the house.

The moon was fat and yellow and gibbous, more like a spring moon than a winter one, and it pierced the straw roof in a thousand tiny rays. The radiant light also found its way through the small window in the mud-brick wall and fell across Marit as she lay wide-eyed in her new bed. She was waiting for Avram. They had agreed that once everyone was asleep, he would come to her bed.

But where was he?

She listened to the silence in the house, broken only by the snores of the old woman and the younger brothers, then, deciding she could wait no longer, she slipped out of bed, naked, and tiptoed across to the other side.

At that same moment, Yubal tossed and turned in a moon-affected dream in which his beloved bed partner, Avram’s mother, appeared to him, saying she was not dead after all and that she had come back to him. But as he took her into his arms and they started to make love, he awoke suddenly and blinked in a drunken fog, unable to distinguish between dream and reality. Where had she gone?

Hearing a sound, he rolled his head to the side and saw her— Avram’s mother, young and slender and naked, tiptoeing across the communal room. She was coming to the men’s side of the house, to him.

Yubal managed to get to his feet and stagger over to her, roughly pulling her into his arms.

Marit’s cry wakened Avram. He blinked in darkness and frowned at the two human figures captured briefly in broken moonlight. He had trouble keeping his vision from going double. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. Two people in a clinch, naked.

He got up and fell to his knees. No, he must be dreaming. It was a hallucination.

He looked at them again. The image swam before him, as if the house had somehow sunk beneath the perennial spring and was underwater. He saw pale arms writhing like snakes, and two heads performing a strange dance. Legs stumbling, bodies squirming. Lovers in an aquatic embrace.

And then he experienced one of those moments of absolute clarity in the midst of a drunken stupor: Marit! In Yubal’s arms!

He tried again to get to his feet, but the floor beneath him swayed and swooped like the watchtower in a storm. His stomach rose to his throat and he realized he was going to throw up.

He rushed outside in time, vomiting in his grandmother’s small cabbage garden. He gulped night air and when he started back for the house, nausea rose again.

Yubal’s hands on Marit’s body.

He tried to go back but a sickness worse than that caused by the wine overwhelmed him.
Yubal and Marit!
His thoughts flew and collided, finding no cohesion, just a jumble of blurry concepts and feelings.

So he turned and ran. Sweating and feeling sick, with the world spinning around him, he plunged into the vineyard where his intoxicated brain exploded with a shower of irrational thoughts. It came into Avram’s jumbled mind that Yubal had planned this all along so he could have Marit.

“No,” he whispered as he fell to the ground. “It cannot be.”

He tried to make sense of what his eyes had seen, but his brain was soaked in too much wine, thoughts did not come in a logical order. Suddenly, anger and jealousy exploded within him.

Raising his fist skyward he shouted, “You betrayed me!” He choked on his sobs as he swayed on unsteady legs. “You did this on purpose! Bringing my beloved into the house and sending me away to the Great Sea. You have wanted her for yourself all along! Curse you, Yubal! May you die a thousand terrible deaths!”

Sobbing, filled with nausea, the world twirling around him, Avram ran again, crashing through vines, his eyes blinded by tears, sickness of soul and body overwhelming him as he plunged headlong into a darkness that finally swallowed him entirely.

Bright light. Moans.

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.