The Blessing Stone (7 page)

When Tall One’s descendants reached the Nile, they split up, some to stay, others to push on, and the blue stone was carried northward to where glaciers coated the world in blinding white ice. Tall One’s people encountered others who were already there—another race of humans who had sprung from separate ancestors and who were therefore slightly different, heavier, stockier, and hairier. Clashes over territory were inevitable and the magic water-stone fell into the hands of the foreign clan, who worshipped wolves. A medicine woman of this Wolf Clan looked deep into the crystal’s heart and recognized its magic, and so she had it set into the belly of a stone figurine.

Thus did the water-stone become a symbol of pregnancy and female power.

THE NEAR EAST
35,000 Years Ago

They had never seen fog before.

The frightened women, so far from their home and hopelessly lost, thought the white mist was a malevolent spirit creeping into the woodland on ghostly feet, cutting the fugitive humans off from the rest of the world, keeping them imprisoned in a silent, featureless realm. By afternoon the mist would dissipate enough to give the women a brief glimpse of their surroundings and then, when the stars came out, would sneak back and isolate the women once more.

But the mist wasn’t the only menace in this strange new landscape where Laliari’s tribe had wandered for weeks. Ghosts were everywhere—hidden, nameless, terrifying. Therefore the wanderers stayed close together as they moved through this hostile world, shivering in the swirling mist because they wore only grass skirts—adequate clothing for the warm river valley that had been their home but insufficient in this strange new land into which they had been forced to flee.

“Are we dead?” Keeka whispered as she held her sleeping baby against her breast. “Did we perish with the men in the angry sea and now we are ghosts? Is
this
what it is like to be dead?” She was referring to their blindness in the thick fog, the eerie way their voices carried, the dull sounds their bare feet made on the ground. It was as if they were moving through a realm not of the living. Keeka thought they must at least
look
like ghosts—certainly her companions did as they moved cautiously through the thick white mist, bare-breasted women with hair down to their waists, their bodies heavily ornamented with shell, bone, and ivory, bundles of animal hides strapped across their shoulders, their hands clutching stone-tipped spears.
But they hadn’t the faces of ghosts,
Keeka thought. Their eyes, stretched wide with fear and confusion, were definitely human. “
Are
we dead?” she repeated in a whisper.

But Keeka received no response from her cousin Laliari who was too filled with grief to speak. Because worse than the menacing fog and the cold and the unseen ghosts was the loss of their men.

Doron’s dark head disappearing beneath the violent water.

She tried to picture her beloved Doron as he had been before the tragedy—young, beardless, of slender build—a brave hunter who preferred to sit peacefully and carve ivory by the nightly campfire. Doron liked to laugh and tell stories, and he had a rare tolerance for children. Unlike the other men of the clan who had no patience with youngsters, Doron didn’t mind them crawling into his lap and in fact enjoyed it and could be seen laughing (although he did turn red with embarrassment when caught). But mostly Laliari remembered Doron’s embrace at night, how he would fall asleep afterward with his arms around her as he breathed softly into her neck.

Laliari choked back a sob. She must not think of him. It was bad luck to think of the dead.

The invasion had caught them by surprise. Laliari and her people had been going about their daily life in the river valley they had inhabited for countless generations when strangers from the west had suddenly appeared across the grassy plains, hundreds and thousands of them, saying that their land inland was drying up and becoming a desert. They had explained their plight while greedily eyeing the grassy expanses on either side of Laliari’s river, the grazing herds, the plentiful fish and bird life. A bounty of food. But they had wanted it all for themselves. The ensuing territorial dispute had been long and bitter, with the stronger and more numerous newcomers driving Laliari’s clan northward, forcing them to flee with their possessions on their backs—the massive elephant bones that formed the framework of their moveable tents, and the hides that stretched over the bones to make the tent walls. When the clan reached the delta where the river branched, they had encountered more people, much like themselves, but unwilling to share their food sources. And so another bloody battle over land and food had taken place, resulting in Laliari’s people being pushed out again, this time eastward.

What had started as a large exodus of several hundred people had by then been reduced to a band of eighty-nine, with the women, children, and elderly going ahead while the men stayed at the rear to protect them from the pursuing delta-dwellers. They had come to a vast expanse of boggy marsh and reeds and had started across. Just as the women made it to the other side, they turned in time to see a monstrous wall of water come rushing from out of nowhere, a swift deluge racing across the vast marshland as it swallowed up the unsuspecting men who were halfway across.

The women, on their high ground, had stared in shock as they watched the hunters vanish in an instant beneath the turbulent water, arms and legs tumbling like fragile sticks, the men’s cries silenced as water filled their lungs. And then the flood had grown calm and the women, not knowing that this marshy expanse was subjected to the vagaries of neap tides and spring tides—making it a swampland part of the time, an inundation at others—believed themselves to be standing at the edge of a newly formed sea.

Dazed and in shock, they had turned northward, following the eastern edge of the new sea until they had come to an even larger body of water—wider than their own river at its widest point, wider than the new sea covering the marshland of reeds and the bodies of their men. In fact, this vast sea went on to the horizon and the women could see neither land nor trees on the other side. It was also their first time seeing breakers and they screamed in fright at the water rolling toward them in huge waves, crashing on the beach, retreating, only to roll forward again, like an animal trying to attack them. Although they had found bountiful food here in the tide pools—limpets, periwinkles, and mussels—the women had turned and fled, moving inland away from the sea that would one day be called Mediterranean, and crossed a hostile wilderness until they came to a mist-filled river valley that bore little resemblance to their own.

Here, cut off from their ancestral land, from their men and everything they knew, their search for a new home had begun—a ragtag wandering band of nineteen women, two elders, and twenty-two babies and children.

As they trekked through yet another fog-shrouded dawn, having spent another moonless night in fear, the women kept hopeful watch for signs of their clan spirit, the gazelle. They had not sighted one since leaving their river valley. What if there were no gazelles in this strange land? Would the clan die without its spirit? Laliari, trudging along with her kinswomen through the unfamiliar valley, was haunted by an even more frightening thought: that there were worse things than losing their clan spirit. Worse things even than losing their men. Because in this strange mist-enshrouded world they could not see the moon. They had not, in fact, seen it in weeks.

Laliari was not alone in her fears. While the other women mourned the loss of their men, even greater was their grief over the loss of the moon. It had not shown its face in many days and they were beginning to fear that it might be gone forever. Without the moon there could be no babies, and no babies meant the ultimate death of the clan. Already the early signs were among them: in the weeks since they had been roaming on their own, not one of the women had become pregnant.

As Laliari shifted the heavy burden on her shoulders, she looked ahead at the two elders who led the small band through the fog and tried to take comfort from the thought that Alawa and Bellek, with their supernatural powers and knowledge of magic, would find the moon.

But Laliari could not know that Alawa was impelled by a deep terror of her own and that she harbored a terrible secret.

Old Alawa was Keeper of the Gazelle Antlers and therefore keeper of the clan’s history. Her name meant “the one who was searched for” because when she was a small child she had gotten lost and the clan had searched for days for her. She had the honor of wearing the gazelle antlers on her head, strapped under her chin with strips of animal sinew. Alawa’s earlobes had been so stretched over the years with ornamental plugs that they rested on her bony shoulders. Between her withered breasts hung necklaces of shell, bone, and ivory. Amulets covered the rest of her body, not for ornamentation but for ritualistic magic. Alawa’s people knew that for survival every bodily orifice must be guarded against the invasion of evil spirits. In childhood, the nasal septum was pierced with an ostrich quill and kept open through adulthood with an ivory needle. This prevented evil spirits from entering the body through the nostrils. Ears were pierced, top and bottom, as well as lips. Magic amulets were strung from belts so that they hung protectively over buttocks and pubis, for spirits were known to enter human beings through the rectum and vagina as well.

The other elder was Bellek, clan shaman and Keeper of the Mushrooms. Like Alawa, his hair was long and white and strung with beads that clicked gently as he walked. His only clothing was a loincloth made of soft gazelle skin, and his body was as heavily decorated with magic amulets as Alawa’s. Bellek carried dried mushrooms in a leather pouch, but he also searched for fresh ones in the wooded areas on the banks of this foreign river. Although mushrooms were plentiful and the band ate well of them as they traveled through this strange land of mists and ghosts, Bellek was looking for one mushroom in particular, the one with a long thin stem and distinctive cap that he always thought resembled a woman’s nipple. These were the mushrooms that, when ingested, transported a person into a metaphysical plane where supernatural beings dwelled.

Laliari was thankful that the clan still had Bellek and Alawa, for elders were the clan’s most prized members and together, Laliari was certain, the old pair would find the moon.

As if sensing the girl’s eyes on her, Alawa stopped suddenly and turned to peer through the mist at the younger woman. The others also stopped and looked at Alawa in alarm. The silence that engulfed them was terrifying, for it was the silence of ghosts holding their tongues, of evil spirits waiting to pounce. Several of the women gathered their little ones close to them and held babies tight. The moment seemed to hang suspended in time, Laliari held her breath, everyone waited. And then Alawa, having come to a secret decision, turned and resumed her weary trek.

Alawa’s secret decision was this: that it was not yet time to tell the others of her new knowledge, which made her heart heavy with sadness. She had read the magic stones and studied her dreams, she had looked into the campfire smoke and tracked the flight of sparks, and altogether they had revealed a terrible truth that left no doubt in Alawa’s mind.

For the survival of the clan, the children must die.

By afternoon the fog cleared, as they had known it would, allowing the refugees a view of unfamiliar woodland and sandy river bank before the sun dipped to the horizon and robbed them of light.

They stopped to rest. While Keeka and other young mothers settled down to breast-feed and adolescent girls went to draw water, Laliari opened the last of their date reserves and distributed them among the group. The dates had been gathered days before, at a small palm grove on the river. With everyone throwing stones and rocks at the clusters of chewy fruit high overhead, they had reaped a rich harvest, feasting on the spot and then filling their baskets to carry on their backs.

While the others ate, Alawa separated herself from the group to find a partially sunny spot for the reading of her magic stones. At the same time, Bellek, stooped and nearsighted, scrutinized every twig and branch, every shrub and blade of grass to determine whether this was a lucky place to stay. So far, he had seen little good magic here.

Sixty-five thousand years in the past it had not occurred to a man named Lion that his people could alter their circumstances. But it
had
occurred to a girl named Tall One and it was her actions that had led to the survival of her race. This was her legacy to her descendants, to know that they need not be at the mercy of their environment. However, down through the millennia, as humans had multiplied and expanded the boundaries of their world, Tall One’s descendents had grown extreme in their new knowledge of change and control, for now they tried constantly to manage every microscopic aspect of their environment through the appeasing and honoring of ghosts. They had to be always on the alert in order to keep their world in balance. The slightest misstep could upset the spirits and bring bad luck upon the people. If they crossed a stream they would first say, “Spirit in this stream, we wish to pass in peace.” When they killed an animal, they asked its forgiveness. They were forever “reading” their surroundings. Whereas their ancestors of sixty-five millennia earlier had paid no heed to a smoking volcano, Laliari and her family read omens in the slightest spark from an ember. Which was why Alawa, as she interpreted the toss of her magic stones, wondered what they had done wrong at the Reed Sea to cause it to swallow up the hunters. Of course they hadn’t known it was going to be a sea, so how could they have spoken the appropriate words? They hadn’t even known its name so how could they have invoked its spirit? But surely there
had
been signs to read—there were always signs. What had they missed that would have prevented the catastrophe?