The Blessing Stone (24 page)

This was alarming news, for the wine trade was the mainstay of the settlement, wine was what had made the people prosperous and was in fact what had caused people to end their nomadic ways and settle down in the first place. “That will change now,” Avram assured his brother. “We will make the vineyard flourish again, and the next time the raiders come we will be prepared.” He was already formulating a plan in his mind: he would offer local men a skin of wine in exchange for night patrol of the vineyard.

“Where is Reina the priestess?” he finally asked in a cautious voice, afraid of what they were going to tell him.

Reina was tending her shrine, they said. The Goddess no longer came out among the people, her processions ceased ten years ago. But she was still there, as was her faithful handmaiden.

Excusing himself from the company of his brothers, inviting them to eat and drink their fill and to stay by his fire, Avram rose on unsteady legs and made his way out of the noisy encampment. He went first to what was left of the Talitha vineyard and was dismayed to find it shrunken and impoverished in the dying light of a gray day. His brothers had erected what defenses they could around a small parcel of vines, but the rest of what had once been vast and flourishing fields lay weedy and untended. There was no evidence of the wooden watchtower that had once stood here, and where their fine mud-brick house had once been was now a large tent made of goatskins.

With a growing sense of dread, Avram continued into the settlement, which was quiet as most of the citizens were making merry in the caravan camp. Here he received an even greater shock. Conditions were worse than he had first thought. Guri the lamp-maker’s dwelling, the tent of the six linen-maker brothers, the abode of the Onion Sisters, the house of Enoch the tooth-puller and Lea the midwife, Namir’s mud-brick home and that of Yasap the honey-collector—all gone. The settlement had the temporary, ramshackle look of the days of the ancestors with no sign of permanence.

When he found Parthalan the abalone hunter, Avram nearly broke down. The old man was alone and almost blind, barely subsisting in a grass shelter and managing to carve the few shells that came his way. He cried when he saw Avram and laid no blame on the young man for his own misfortune. “Life is a curse,” Parthalan said. “Death is a blessing.” Avram thought of the gifts he had brought back for Parthalan: beautiful shells for carving that would be ruined beneath the blind man’s shaky hands.

As he left the old shell-worker, Avram tasted bile in his throat. Nothing happened by chance, he knew, everything had a cause. As he looked around at the impoverished settlement and the stamp of bad luck upon everything he saw, he knew the cause. This was all Yubal’s fault. If it hadn’t been for Yubal’s duplicity, working bad-luck alliances to obtain Marit for himself, he might not have died and today the vineyard would be flourishing, the settlement prosperous.

His heart heavy with bitterness, Avram took the last path he knew he must follow: to the residence of Serophia. To Marit.

Here, too, the mud-brick house was gone, its crumbled foundation visible at the edges of the tent that had been erected in its place. She was by the entrance, feeding grass into the oven, flat barley bread browning on the hot stones. She did not look up, but Avram sensed she knew he was there.

Marit had grown beautifully plump in his absence. No longer slender, she was womanly, with flesh and curves to fill a man’s arms. But not
his
arms, he thought resolutely, for though his heart still ached with love for her and his body hungered for her touch, the memory of that last night, seeing her in Yubal’s arms, was more painful than a thousand knife wounds. He knew that he would never be able to look at her again without remembering Yubal’s deception, nor be able to lay a hand upon her skin without seeing the pair of them, naked and clasped in a feverish embrace.

“Why have you come?” she said in a voice as flat as dust.

Avram did not know what to say. He had thought she would be pleased to see him. Or at least glad to know that he was alive.

She turned and beheld him with eyes like stones. Her face, still round and beautiful, was etched with lines, and the corners of her mouth were turned down from too many years of hardship and disappointment. “I knew you were alive, Avram. Everyone else said you must be dead, but I knew in my heart what happened to you. You saw us that night, Yubal and me. You woke up and saw us and then you ran out. I waited for you to come back and when you didn’t, and days and weeks passed, I realized that you had run away, and why.”

“I had every right,” he said in righteous indignation.

“You had no right! You were jealous of Yubal and me without even knowing what it was you saw. You jumped to a conclusion and judged both of us. You thought that Yubal and I were taking pleasure together.”

“It is what I saw.”

“Avram, did you stare at the moon too long? If you had but watched a moment longer you would have seen me pull myself from Yubal’s embrace, you would have heard him call me by your mother’s name. You would have seen him apologize in embarrassment, you would have seen him start back for his bed, and then you would have seen him clutch his head and fall to the floor. Had you no better faith in either of us? Your
abba
and your beloved?”

He blinked. “I thought—”

“That’s your trouble! Too much thinking!” She dashed a tear from her cheek.

He stared at her, too dumbstruck to speak.

“No man would lie with me after that. I became an untouchable woman because they believed I was cursed and that I made men drop dead with my touch. In all these years I have not known the comfort of a single embrace.”

“Why did you not set everyone right?” he cried.

“How does one fight a rumor, Avram? People will believe what they wish to believe, whether it is the truth or not.” She added bitterly, “Certainly
you
did.”

“All these years,” he whispered hoarsely, “how you must have hated me.”

“I did at first. And then I grew to feel only contempt. While everyone else said you must be dead and prayed for you, I kept my counsel. Who would listen to me anyway? A woman with a curse upon her!” Placing her hands on her hips, she tipped her chin and said in a challenging tone, “You are the only man I have lain with. Can you say the same, Avram? In these ten years, how many women have you lain with?”

He stared at her, a helpless fool, as his mind counted off the women: the feather-workers, the nomads, the cockle-eaters, the bison hunters, Frida, Hadadezer’s nieces.

She turned away from him and threw more grass into the oven. “Ten years wasted. You and I are in the midway of our lives, Avram. Your grandmother lived to be sixty-two, but she was blessed. No one lives that long. All we can hope for now is a few more years of good health before we become a burden to our families. And a burden I shall be, for the Goddess has chosen to withhold children from me. I am barren, Avram, and there is nothing less deserving of food and shelter than a barren woman. Now go away. Feel sorry for yourself elsewhere. You will find no pity here.”

He stumbled out into the night, dazed and confused. Great Goddess! cried his mind. What have I done?

His feet led him to the only place left for him to go. The shrine of the Goddess was smaller and humbler than the mud-brick one he remembered and was made only of timber and grass with an adjoining hut where the priestess lived. He had heard from his brothers that Reina had been reduced to low circumstances, even though she was still the priestess of Al-Iari. She had been raped by the marauders, they said, and the experience left her bitter. On top of that, because the blue stone had vanished, many people turned away from the Goddess—especially after the raiders, and the locusts, and then the bad-luck summer when all crops failed. People blamed the priestess for misinterpreting the signs and so Reina no longer received the generous gifts from the past but was getting by on bare subsistence.

He found her stirring a pot of gruel over her fire, adding herbs by the pinch. Her hair was gray now, but carefully combed and braided. She no longer wore a dress of fine linen; stained doeskin covered her thin frame. She looked tired, defeated. Avram was suddenly at a loss. He had come to her for comfort and guidance, to have his world set right again. But the priestess looked more in need of succor than himself. He didn’t know what to say, so he shuffled his feet to announce his presence.

She looked up. Her eyes widened. “Yubal!”

“Be calmed, Lady Priestess,” he said quickly, “I am not Yubal, I am not a ghost. I am Avram.”

“Avram?” She picked up a lamp and brought it closer to him. In the light he saw the dark circles under her eyes, the age that the past ten years had placed upon her, and the hollows in her cheeks. It alarmed him. Even the priestess was not immune to the bad luck of this place.

Her eyes filled with tears as she inspected every inch of his face, taking in his long braided hair, his man’s beard, even the gray at his temples, though he was not yet thirty. Her eyes seemed to feast on him as they took in his broad shoulders and thick chest, then they returned to his face, lingered for a moment on the curious tattoo, and she smiled. The smile softened her features and made her look younger. “Yes, it is Avram. I see that now. But how like Yubal you are! I heard that the caravan had arrived, but no one told me that you had arrived with it. Come, we must drink and reminisce, and thank the Goddess for your safe return.”

She didn’t ask him why he went away or where he had been or why he had come back. It was as if all curiosity was gone from her. Or perhaps, he thought, ten years of hardship had taught her to accept and no longer to question. She had no wine to offer, and the beer was diluted and flat, but he accepted it with gratitude and sat with her beside a smoky brazier, for the winter night was growing cold.

Reina drank, and it shocked him that she did not first pour out a libation for the Goddess. “It is good to see you again, Avram,” she said warmly. “Seeing you is like having Yubal back. I was in love with him, you know.”

This caught him off guard. “I did not know.”

“It was my secret. But although I never took pleasure with him, the desire was there in my heart, and so I think the Goddess punished me for breaking my vow of chastity. When the raiders attacked and brutally used me, it killed within me all desire for Yubal or for any man, and taught me that pleasure between men and women is not pleasure but pain.”

He looked into his wooden cup, at the meager ration of beer with debris floating on its surface, and felt his heart tumble within his chest. “I am so sorry,” he whispered, feeling as bereft as the wastelands of Bodolf’s people. “How did such bad luck come to our people?”

She shook her head. “I do not know, or even when it began. Perhaps it started with something small, maybe someone stepped on someone else’s shadow, or a servant girl broke a pot, or an ancestor was insulted.”

“I ran away,” he said.

She nodded, her eyes fixed on the small flame of the oil lamp.

“I saw something that I mistook for something else and like a coward—”

Reina held up a hand hardened with calluses. “What is in the past is gone. And tomorrow may never come. So we must live for this moment, Avram.”

“I came seeking forgiveness.”

“I have none to give.”

“I meant from the Goddess.”

She gave him a startled look. “Did you not know? The Goddess has abandoned us.” She spoke simply and without rancor, as if all rage had been drained from her. This alarmed him more than if she had vented her fury at him as Marit had done.

And suddenly he realized the magnitude of his transgression. The bad luck of this place had not been brought on by a broken pot or an aggrieved ancestor. It was
his
fault. Avram, son of Chanah, of the bloodline of Talitha.
He
had caused this calamity. “Great Goddess,” he murmured, as the terrible picture unfolded before him: his misjudgment of Yubal and Marit, his stealing of the crystal, and his cowardly flight to the north.

Drawing the phylactery out from under his tunic, he pulled it open and spilled the blue stone into his hand. He held it out to Reina, the crystal catching lamplight and shooting it back like stars.

She gasped. “You brought the Goddess home!”

“No,” he said. “She brought
me
home. You must show the stone to the people so that they know the Goddess has returned to them.”

She wept for a moment, her face buried in her hands, her thin shoulders shaking. Then she composed herself and took the stone from him, gently, as if it were eggshell fragile. “I shall not tell them yet. For there are those who will remember that the stone disappeared the same night you disappeared, and will calculate that it came back the same day you returned. I shall plan a special moment and reveal the miracle to them in a way that casts no suspicion upon you. I will build her a bigger shrine, a new one, better than the old. I will throw a huge feast and let the people know that the Goddess has returned to them.”

Avram said, “I thought I had returned with new wisdom, for I have seen the world and the people in it. But I discover that I have no wisdom at all and that I am as wretched as I was when the feather-workers took me north. All this bad luck happened because of me. What must I do to atone and bring good luck to our people once again?”

She laid a hand on his arm. “Have you paid your respects to Yubal since your return? You must do so, Avram. Honor him at once, and pray to him. Yubal was wise. He will show you the way. And,” she added with a tremulous voice, “bless you for bringing the spirit of the Goddess back, for now she will bring prosperity to her children.”

As he started to leave, he paused and said, “Marit is without children. Can you help her?”

“She came to me and we tried, year after year. I gave her amulets and potions, prayers, and spells. I gave her placenta to eat and smoke to inhale. But month after month her moonflow appears.” Reina held the blue crystal to her breast and her smile shone as it had done in the old days. “But perhaps now there is hope, for Marit is yet in childbearing years.”