The Blessing Stone (20 page)

Thus did Avram continue his flight from the Place of the Perennial Spring. The feather-workers gave him a tearful farewell and a handsome feathered cape lined with goose down, and with the new family he traveled across the Anatolian plateau, a gentle plain of short grasses and stunted willow trees, wild tulips, and peonies. They followed large herds of horses, wild asses, and antelopes. Avram saw the two-humped camels, fat marmots basking in the sun, rose-colored starlings that flocked in the thousands, and cranes that built nests on the ground. But these wonders might as well have been ash and stone for all they moved him. Avram did not tell the nomadic family his name or his story, but he worked hard for them and kept his peace. When the women crept into his bed his response was as objective and automatic as it had been with the feather-workers. He gave them pleasure with his body, but gave nothing of his heart.

When they reached the western edge of the plateau, he bade the family farewell and continued on down to the coast, where he reached a narrow body of water that he mistakenly took for a river, not knowing that it was in fact a strait connecting two major seas and separating two continents. Avram also did not know about shrinking glaciers on the European continent and the resulting rise in sea level that would, over the millennia, turn this small strait into a major shipping lane that would one day be called the Bosporus.

Here he saw boats for the first time, and found a man who would take him across to the other side. Avram had just turned eighteen and thought his life was over.

He journeyed alone.

If he encountered signs of humans, he went the long way around to avoid them. And in his new self-sufficiency during his relentless trek westward Avram the dreamer gradually became Avram the hunter, trapper, fisherman. He fashioned snares to catch rabbits and spears to catch salmon. He dug for shellfish along beaches and slept beside a lonely fire at night. The feather cape protected him from wind and rain, and during the hot summer he propped it on poles for shade. His skinny adolescent body began to build muscle, and his beard came in. He continued west when he could, but when he encountered coastlines and found himself at the edge of seas with no opposite shores, he moved northward, not knowing he was tracing routes that eight millennia hence would be followed by men named Alexander the Great and St. Paul.

In an estuary on the east coast of what would one day be called Italy, he came upon a village where people ate a tremendous number of cockles; they even had a special flint tool expressly for opening them. They lived in grass shelters that blew down with each storm. Because Avram had by then journeyed to exhaustion and needed to rest, he stayed with them for a season and then moved on. But he had not told the cockle-eaters his name nor his story, nor had he learned their language, for he considered life now a fleeting impermanence and the knowing of names and stories was no longer important. Whenever he yearned for his home at the Place of the Perennial Spring, or felt warm feelings in that direction, he hardened his youthful heart and reminded himself of the crime he had committed and the dishonor he had brought upon his family, that he was a cursed man and fated to be cast out from his own people forever.

The horizon continued to beckon, just as it had in his childhood, except that now he followed it not to see what was on the other side but because there was nowhere else to go. And in his mindless need to put miles beneath his feet, nowhere did he find another settlement like his own at the perennial spring. He had once thought that people everywhere lived in mud-brick houses and kept their own orchards, but he saw now, as he trekked northward, crossing nameless rivers and meadows, climbing hills and peaks, that the citizens of the Place of the Perennial Spring were unique in the world.

He also knew something else: because of the wolf’s fang Yubal had given him in the sacred wine cave, he could come to no harm. In the days and weeks traveling to the source of the Jordan River and beyond, and then westward across the Anatolian plain, and finally the treacherous crossing in a shallow boat, no harm had come to him. The cockle-eaters had welcomed him, others treated him warily. Animals let him pass in peace. And so he came to realize that it was the power of the wolf spirit that was protecting him.

But the protection brought him no joy or succor for there was a cruel irony in Yubal giving him the wolf’s fang. Had Yubal kept it for himself, Avram’s curse might not have killed him.

He continued northward, following mighty rivers and surviving in mountains higher than any he had ever seen. He found dense forests of birch and pine and oak where the principal game was red deer and wild cattle. Here he came upon a race of bison hunters. He traded his feather cape, which was no longer splendid but still a novelty, for furs and boots and a proper spear. He joined hunting groups, stayed a while, and then moved on. He never revealed his name, never told his story. But he hunted well, always shared, respected the laws and taboos of others, and never lay with a woman without her consent.

In all this time he kept the blue stone close to his chest, hidden, a symbol of his crimes and his shame. Since his flight from the Place of the Perennial Spring he had not brought it out of the phylactery. But not a day went by in which he was not aware of its presence there: cold, impersonal, judging. And at night when he was visited by dreams—of Marit searching for him in the Valley of Ravens, Yubal calling him down from the watchtower—he told his companions nothing of his torment.

The day arrived when the restlessness came over him again. Looking northward, he asked the bison hunters what lay in that direction, and they said, “Ghosts.”

So Avram said farewell to the bison hunters and headed north to the land of ghosts.

Bundled in furs with spears and arrows strapped across his back, and trekking on snowshoes the bison hunters had given him, Avram finally came to the edge of a vast, white wilderness. It was more snow than he had ever seen, endless snow with no mountains opposite, not even a horizon, and the winds blew more fiercely than he had ever imagined, howling gusts that sounded like the shrieks of a thousand demons that cut through his flesh to freeze his very core. He thought,
I have come to the end of the world. This is my destiny.

As he started across, the wind shifted and blew his fur hood back, blasting his face with an icy breath. Quickly pulling the hood back up and holding it securely beneath his frozen chin, he proceeded forward, unaware that he was in fact crossing a sea, that he was no longer on land. What lay at the end of this journey he had no idea except a vague notion that he was going to the land of the dead. As it occurred to him that he might have already died and this was a mere formality, the ice beneath his shoes suddenly gave way, plunging him into the icy water.

Avram frantically fought for a handhold on the ice, but it kept breaking beneath his fur gloves. As he thrashed about in the water, something bumped against his legs, and he glimpsed a big brown monster swimming around him. Terror filled him. He no longer wanted to be dead but very much alive. But his efforts were futile as he felt his legs go numb in the water, a numbness that began creeping up his body. When his last handhold on the ice broke away and the frigid water closed over his head, his last thought was of Marit and warm sunshine.

Avram was flying. But not like a bird, he realized, for he was half-sitting, half-reclining, his arms tucked snugly across his chest beneath a pile of furs.
Is this how the dead travel to the land of the ancestors?

As he blinked through a ring of fur around his face, he saw the white-on-white landscape rushing past. He frowned. Not flying, yet he wasn’t running either, for his legs were stretched before him and likewise swaddled in warm furs. He looked directly ahead and when his eyes were able to focus, he saw that he was being carried away by a pack of wolves.
I am to be their dinner.
Maybe it was revenge for Yubal killing that wolf all those years ago. So, the fang was no longer protection.

Eat me then,
his muddled mind cried out.
It is what I deserve.
And he lapsed again into unconsciousness.

When he awoke next, the flying sensation had slowed and he saw small, round, white hills drawing near. He looked at the wolves again and this time realized they were no ordinary wolves, and they appeared to be tethered together with leather straps. When he heard a yell, he realized someone was standing immediately behind him, towering over him, calling commands to the wolves. Avram tried to see a face but it was hooded with fur.

Deciding that he wasn’t sure he liked being dead, he fainted again and the next time he awoke it was to find himself in a small dark place that smelled of burning oil and human sweat. He blinked and tried to focus. The ceiling was made of ice. Was he in an ice cave? But no, he could see the seams where the blocks of ice came together. A house—made of ice. And he was lying in a bed of some kind, and beneath the furs he was naked. Someone had taken his clothes! He tried to feel for his phylactery but there was something wrong with his arms. He could not move them.

A voice nearby, and then a shadow on the wall. He blinked again and saw a face come into focus. Old, wrinkled, and grinning toothlessly. She spoke. At least, he thought it was a she. And then, to his shock, she suddenly threw off his blankets, exposing him to the air. “Indecent woman!” he cried, only to realize that the cry had been inside his head. He couldn’t move his jaw, nor even open his mouth. As Avram lay limp and helpless, the old woman pried open his mouth and peered inside, then she inspected his navel and prodded his testicles. Finally her rough hands started to work on his frozen flesh, first clasping and pressing his fingers, then gently massaging life back into them. She lifted his hands to her mouth and blew on them. He felt neither the warm breath nor the touch of her hands. And when she moved down his body, he continued to feel nothing.

She stopped and gave him a worried look. After uttering a few incomprehensible words, she crawled out of the shelter through an opening he had not noticed before. “You didn’t cover me up!” he wanted to cry, but his lips and tongue would not obey.

She did not leave him for long and when she returned, another person was with her, a tall, broad-shouldered figure. Avram watched in puzzlement as the second person divested itself of layers of clothing to reveal full breasts, narrow waist, and flaring hips. She laid herself alongside Avram and took him into her arms. The old woman covered them up and left the ice hut.

Avram drifted in and out of consciousness many times before he came fully awake. The first thing he noticed were golden lashes lying on the crests of pale cheeks, a fine long nose and wide pink mouth. He would learn much later that her name was Frida and that it was she who had saved his life when she pulled him from the ice.

His recovery took weeks and was mostly left to Frida and the old woman, who massaged him and fed him fish and soup and healing herbs. Men came to look in on him, squatting inside the small ice house and asking questions that he did not understand. Each night he fell asleep in Frida’s warm arms and woke the next morning to find her flaxen hair spread across his chest. The morning he awoke with an erection, the old woman declared him cured and Frida did not sleep with him after that.

Later he would learn why they had saved his life and why they had shared with him what small food stores they had. Before he had fallen into the ice, before he had started his trek across the frozen sea, a wind had blown his hood back from his head, and Frida had seen it. Unaware that there were people nearby, Avram had pulled his hood back up and started across the frozen waste, but not without Frida having seen the black hair and swarthy skin. Among their gods, she would later explain when Avram had learned their language, were dark-haired ones who were the guardians of the woods and caves and who possessed wondrous powers.

Finally one morning the old woman set his clothes before him, dried and soft again, and which he eagerly donned. He was overjoyed to see his phylactery, still on its leather thong, and it appeared to have been untouched. But he opened it anyway, to make sure he had lost nothing valuable in his mishap with the ice, and although the old woman watched in curiosity as the objects spilled out—the string that was his withered umbilical cord, a baby tooth, Yubal’s wolf fang—it wasn’t until she saw the blue crystal that she cried out.

To Avram’s astonishment, she hurriedly crawled out of the ice house and he could hear her shouting outside. A moment later, the biggest man Avram had ever seen squeezed his way inside. For an instant Avram thought the stranger was going to steal the crystal. Instead, the man squatted on the ice floor and stared in wonderment at the stone. He looked at Avram and asked a question, to which Avram could only say, “I do not understand your language.” The man nodded and started to leave. Then he stopped and beckoned for Avram to follow.

With the phylactery securely around his neck and hidden beneath his fur tunic again, Avram took his first steps outside to discover that the “morning” had only been in his imagination, for he found himself in a land of constant darkness.

The people clustered around him, shyly curious about the newcomer. They wore hooded jackets, pants and boots of waterproof sealskin, and they all looked so alike that he wondered how the men and women found each other for their pleasure. But most of all they resembled ghosts, for their skin was like white smoke and their hair the color of pale wheat. And they were tall! Even the women towered over Avram. They seemed to find novelty in his short stature, black hair, and olive complexion.

The leader of the clan introduced himself as Bodolf.

In his journey across the continent, Avram had encountered bears. They were what Bodolf reminded him of—a huge, pale bear with a thunderous laugh. Bodolf did not oil his beard as the men in Avram’s clan did, but he did braid his long blond hair. However, the braids were not ornamented with shell and beads, but rather with human finger bones. “Plucked from the corpses of our enemies,” Bodolf later boasted.