The Blessing Stone (9 page)

And so they had gone, trekking first through a dry stretch where the ground was rocky and covered with sparse vegetation, and then to a place along the backwards flowing river where willow, oleander and tamarisk grew. But as they had made their way farther north, the river narrowed and grew winding with hills rising sharply up from the banks. So unlike their own wide and flat river back home! And this river flowed like a snake, switching back on itself so that sometimes Alawa’s band was walking westward along its bank, then northward, and then eastward! As if the river couldn’t make up its mind.

They had encountered stranger sights still. North of the dead sea they had come upon an open flat plain where rich grasses grew. But where were the animals? Bellek examined the ground and found traces of droppings. So herds had indeed once passed through here. Where were they now? Had the strange nightly fog carried the animals away as it had done the moon?

And now they had come upon trees that wept. With each moonless night, with each day that still produced no pregnant members in their band, Alawa’s anxiety grew. The boys must be sacrificed soon or the moon might be lost forever.

At sunset they came upon a sight that stunned them. The women and children fell silent and stared, unable at first to take in the whole horrifying spectacle. At the base of a cliff rose a mountain of skeletons—hundreds of antelopes piled on top of one another, their skulls crushed, their bones broken. Alawa looked up and saw the sheer wall of a cliff rising above the carcasses. These animals had plummeted to their deaths from that plateau.
Why? What had frightened them so?

The women hurried on, anxious to put the unhappy ghosts of the animals behind them.

Finally they came to the shore of a freshwater lake that future generations would erroneously call the Sea of Galilee. Densely bordered with trees and shrubs, tamarisk and rhododendron, its waters teemed with fish, and abundant bird life crowded the shore. Here the mist had cleared and late afternoon sunlight still warmed the earth. Sniffing the wind and studying the clouds, Bellek held up his staff that was decorated with magic amulets and gazelle tails, and decreed that here the magic was good, here they would make camp and stay the night.

While he and old Alawa went about their nightly ritual of making the encampment safe from malevolent spirits, inscribing protective symbols on the trees and arranging stones in ritualistic order, the women unfurled the hides to create windbreaks. As the elephant tusks had been lost when the hunters drowned, it would be impossible to build proper huts, so they used tree trunks, saplings, and sturdy branches wedged into the ground. The people of the Gazelle Clan practiced communal living—shelters were apportioned not to individual families but according to groups and ritualistic purpose. There were the larger huts where the hunters slept together separate from the women; the individual huts of the revered elderly; the shelters for the young women who had not yet had babies; the women’s moon-hut; the shaman’s hut; the hut for initiating young hunters; and a few small matriarchal units consisting of grandmother, mothers, sisters, and babies. And the shelters were always round so that there were no corners where spirits could lurk.

Their priorities on this night, as they hurried to make camp before sundown, were Alawa’s hut and the moon-hut.

During menstruation women were vulnerable and needed protection from evil spirits and unhappy ghosts that were always waiting for a chance to possess a living human. This was the time of powerful magic, when it was decided if new life would begin in a woman’s body. She would look at the moon and its phase would signal her time of separation from the others. She would take her magic amulets and special food, and retreat to wait and watch for the signs: if the moonflow came, there was no child in her. But if it did not show, then she was pregnant. So the moon-hut was erected first, with Alawa chanting protective spells around the entry, festooning strings of cowry shells, powerful symbol of female genitalia, and tracing magic symbols in the earth using red ocher to symbolize precious moon-blood.

The second shelter was for Alawa. Few women lived past menopause and so those who did were treated with the greatest respect for they were believed to possess great moon-wisdom.

As the group searched for food they came upon a tree that was new to them: knee-high and leafy, laden with pods containing white, fleshy seeds. After an experimental taste to make sure the fruit wasn’t poisonous, the women began at once to harvest the chickpeas. In the meanwhile Bellek went to the water’s edge and, poor though his eyesight was, nonetheless spotted life in the lake’s shallows, causing him to smack his lips in anticipation of a meal of cooked fish. The children were sent in search of berries and eggs, with stern admonitions to observe the proper taboos even though they were in a strange land, and to make sure they did not offend any spirits.

Finally Alawa appointed someone to watch for the moon, with instructions to waken everyone at first sighting. With luck, this would be the night the moon rose before the fog came back.

While the women and children gathered around the comforting fire to eat and groom one another, to mend baskets and sharpen spears, to nurse babies and to try to forget their fears, Alawa slipped away to go to the water’s edge. If the moon did not show itself tonight, she had decided, then she must act. Tomorrow, the little boys would have to die.

As Keeka fed her six children, she watched the old woman shuffle away from the camp, her once proud body now painfully bent beneath the weight of the gazelle antlers. Keeka had suspected for some time that a secret burdened Alawa. She knew what it was. Alawa was preparing to choose her successor.

And because the Keeper of the Gazelle Antlers was the clan’s most important person, the Keeper always had the best hut, the best food. Keeka wanted to be Alawa’s successor, but it wasn’t something she could simply request. The choice was determined by omens, by reading the signs and interpreting dreams. Once the choice was made, the successor would live at Alawa’s side constantly to learn the clan’s history, to hear the stories and memorize them, as Alawa had done when she herself was a young woman many seasons ago. And now added to the clan’s long history would be a new story—the invasion of the people from the west, the clan’s flight up the river valley, the drowning of the men in the new sea, the loss of the moon, and this trek to find a new home.

As Keeka watched Alawa disappear through the lakeside brush, her attention was captured by a high-pitched laugh. Her cousin Laliari had taken one of the orphans into her lap and was tickling him. Keeka’s thoughts grew cold. She had a suspicion that Alawa might choose Laliari.

Keeka’s hatred of her cousin had begun two years earlier when the handsome Doron had joined the Gazelle Clan. Keeka had done everything she could to entice him into her hut, but he was interested only in Laliari. And that was rare. Physical joining between men and women was always random and serial, with few rules and no commitments. But Doron and Laliari had developed a unique affection that had rendered them disinterested in others, a relationship that foreshadowed marriage and lifelong pair-bonding, concepts that would not exist for another twenty-five millennia.

The more Keeka had wanted the handsome young hunter, and the more he ignored her, the more her desire had grown until having him had become an obsession. When he drowned in the Reed Sea Keeka had felt a secret glee for now not even Laliari could have him. Added to her feelings of triumph over her cousin was the fact that Laliari was childless, her baby having died before it had lived one season. And since there was no moon in this new land to give her another, Keeka, with her brood of six, looked upon her cousin with a sense of smug superiority.

Now she was loathe to think of Laliari being chosen as Alawa’s successor.

Eating was done, grooming finished, so it was the hour for stories. The women waited for Alawa to appear in the firelight and begin her evening recitation. Laliari’s people craved stories because stories connected them to the past and made them feel part of an otherwise baffling and frightening cosmos. Stories connected them to nature; myths and legends brought comfort in familiarity and explained mysteries. The women and children always fell silent when Alawa began in her frail, creaking voice: “Long, long ago…before there was Gazelle Clan, before there were people, before there was the river…our mothers came from the south. They were birthed by the First Mother who told them to go north to find a home. They brought the river with them. With each moonrise they made water to flow, until they came to our valley and knew their wandering was over…”

As Alawa’s absence from the campfire stretched on, the women tried to curb their fears. They knew she was searching for the moon. But now that night had fallen, the fog was creeping back into the valley and the women suspected Alawa would once again not catch sight of the moon.

Laliari looked up and tried to peer through the foggy ceiling. The moon was more than the giver of babies and regulator of women’s bodies, it provided valuable light during the night when it was needed. Unlike the sun, which shone uselessly during the day when it was already light, and unlike the sun, whose face was too bright to be looked upon, a person could gaze at the moon for hours on end and not be blinded. The moon, depending upon its phases, caused flowers to open at night, cats to hunt, tides to swell. The moon was predictable, comforting, like a mother. Every month, after the terrifying days of the Dark Moon, the clan would gather at the sacred spot on the river and watch for the first rise of the Baby Moon—a fingernail sliver on the horizon. They would heave sighs of relief, and then cheer and dance as it rose in the sky, for it meant life was going to continue.

As Laliari cradled one of the motherless little ones in her arms, her thoughts drifted to the baby she had given birth to a year ago. The moon had given it to her shortly after Doron joined the clan. The infant didn’t live long, however, and Laliari had had to take it away to the craggy hills in the east and leave it there. Many times after that, she would look toward the rising sun and imagine her baby there. She wondered if his ghost was unhappy. She had felt a curious tug to go back to that spot, but it was bad luck to be near the place of dead things. If someone died in a hut, the hut was burned down and the clan moved farther along the river to set up a new encampment.

Looking back on the time of her baby’s sickness and death, Laliari could only blame herself, for surely she had unwittingly offended a spirit so that it punished her by killing her child. And yet Laliari was always so careful to follow the rules and obey the laws of magic and luck. Was that why their territory had been invaded by strangers followed by the death of their hunters in the killing sea of reeds? Had the entire clan somehow overlooked something? Then how were they to hope to survive in this new place when they didn’t know any of the rules?

She knew it was bad luck to think of the dead, yet it brought such comfort to fill her mind with memories of Doron. How they had met, for instance. The annual Gathering of the Clans took place every year during the inundation when the river overflowed its banks. Thousands came from up and down the valley, erecting round shelters and hoisting clan symbols. It was during the Gathering that disputes were settled, kinship lines drawn, alliances formed and reinforced, news and gossip shared, debts paid, revenge meted out, and most important of all, family members exchanged. Those families with few women received women from families with a surplus. And those short on men, vice versa. It was a lengthy and complex process carried out by all parties, with elders intervening in instances of conflict. Doron and another young man had been exchanged for two young women from Laliari’s clan. Laliari had been sixteen and she and Doron had spent a week covertly scrutinizing each other. It had been a time of shyness and excitement, of awakening instincts. Laliari had never noticed before what wonderfully strong shoulders men had—Doron in particular—and nineteen-year-old Doron had found himself flustered at the sight of Laliari’s narrow waist and flaring hips. By the time the annual gathering had broken up and Doron had gone with Laliari and her clan to their ancestral land, they were spending every night in each other’s arms.

Suddenly overcome with grief, Laliari rested her forehead on her knees and began silently to cry.

Down at the water’s edge, another soul was racked with grief. Alawa, looking out over the expanse of water, had come to a painful decision: this was how the boys must die—by drowning, as the hunters had died.

She turned at the sound of footsteps and saw Bellek’s familiar silhouette emerge through the tall reeds. He stood beside her for a long moment, his bony chest rising and falling in labored breathing. He had known for some time that Alawa was coming to an important decision.
She is getting ready to choose her successor,
he thought.

He would have liked to have a say in the choice, but only the Keeper of the Gazelle Antlers knew who the next Keeper should be. It had nothing to do with opinions and votes but with what the spirit world wanted, what the gazelle spirit wanted. And only Alawa knew what was in her dreams and what her magic stones were telling her.

“Is it to be Keeka?” he asked softly, hoping it was not. Keeka possessed a streak of gluttony that he feared might be detrimental to the clan. If the choice were his, he would pick Laliari because the keeper of the clan’s stories had to be free of selfishness.

Alawa shook her head slowly because of the weight of the gazelle antlers. When she was younger the horns had been almost weightless. But with age, they had grown heavy so that her neck bent beneath them. “Tomorrow the boys must die,” she said in a croaking voice.

He looked at her as if he had not heard correctly. “What did you say?”

“The little boys must die. The ghosts of the hunters are jealous of them and that is why they haunt us and why the moon stays away. If the boys do not die, then the clan will die. Forever.”