The Blessing Stone

by Barbara Wood

  Praise for Barbara Wood

  “All in all, an absorbing adventure tale.”

  —Booklist on The Blessing Stone

  “Engrossing…Wood skillfully interweaves the past and the present in a story as vivid and colorful as an Indian tapestry.”

  —Tampa Tribune on Sacred Ground

  “Wood’s writing is rich with history and time travel…does a wonderful job of conveying the richness of their spiritual life and bringing to light their current struggle.”

  —Booklist on Sacred Ground

  “Fans will welcome this engaging tale.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Sacred Ground

  “Good medicine for the thirsty of spirit.”

  —Kirkus Reviews on Sacred Ground

  Also by Barbara Wood

  PERFECT HARMONY

  THE PROPHETESS

  VIRGINS OF PARADISE

  GREEN CITY IN THE SUN

  SOUL FLAME

  DOMINA

  CHILDSONG

  YESTERDAY’S CHILD

  THE MAGDALENE SCROLLS

  HOUNDS AND JACKALS

  NIGHT TRAINS (with Gareth Wootton)

  THE WATCHGODS

  CURSE THIS HOUSE

  VITAL SIGNS

  THE DREAMING

  SACRED GROUND

  THE BLESSING STONE

  Barbara Wood

  This book is dedicated with love to my husband George.

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks go to some very special people: Jennifer Enderlin, my editor; Harvey Klinger, my agent; and two dear friends, Sharon Stewart and Carlos Balarezo.

  What would I do without you?

  THE BLESSING STONE

  Contents

  Prologue

  Book One

  Book Two

  Book Three

  Book Four

  Book Five

  Book Six

  Book Seven

  Book Eight

  Reading Group Guide

  Prologue

  3,000,000 Years Ago

  The Blessing Stone was born uncountable light-years from Earth, on the other side of the stars.

  It came into being in a cataclysmic explosion of stellar proportions that sent cosmic fragments plunging across the gulf of space. Like a shining ship the searing hot chunk of star mass sailed across the sidereal sea, roaring and hissing through the dark night as it hurtled toward its inevitable destruction on a young, savage planet.

  Mastodons and mammoths paused in their grazing to blink up at the flashing streak in the sky, the meteor’s iron content creating a blazing wake as it burned up in the atmosphere. Witnessing the catastrophic event was a family of frightened hominids, small creatures resembling apes except that their brow ridges were not so prominent and they walked upright on two feet. They froze suddenly in their foraging at the edge of a primeval forest, and a moment later were knocked off their newly upright stance by the shock wave from the meteorite’s impact.

  The collision heated rock so that it melted and scattered fragments like rain. In Vulcan’s furnace the meteor’s stardust liquefied and fused with crystalline elements in the earth, homely quartz fracturing to embrace cosmic microdiamonds as if by the wave of an alchemist’s wand. The crater formed by the impact gradually cooled and filled with rainwater and for two million years streams running off nearby volcanoes fed the crater lake, silting it up, covering the heavenly fragments with layer after layer of sand. Then a geological upheaval shifted the lake’s drainage basin eastward, creating a stream that began to carve out a gorge that would one day, far into the future, be called Olduvai on a continent called Africa. The lake eventually emptied and subsequent winds carried off the layers of silt to expose the meteor fragments once again. They were hard, ugly pellets glistening only here and there. But one was unique, forged perhaps by chance or luck or destiny. Born of force and violence it was now smooth and ovoid in shape from its millennia of being buffed and polished by water and sand and wind, and it flashed with a deep blue brilliance like the sky that had delivered it. Birds flew overhead, dropping seeds that sprouted into lush vegetation, providing the stone with a protective blind so that only the occasional flash of sunlight reflecting off its crystal surface indicated its presence.

  Another thousand years passed, and another, while the stone that would one day be revered as magical and horrific, cursed and blessed, waited….

  Book One

  AFRICA

  100,000 Years Ago

  The huntress crouched low in the grass, ears flattened back, her body tense and ready to spring.

  A short distance away a small group of humans scavenged for roots and seeds, unaware of the amber eyes that watched them. Although massively built with powerful muscles, the huntress was nonetheless a slow animal. Unlike her competitors, the lions and leopards who were swift and chased their prey, the saber-toothed cat needed to lie in wait and catch her quarry by surprise.

  And so she remained motionless in the tawny grass, watching, waiting as the unsuspecting prey moved nearer.

  The sun rose high and the African plain grew hot. The humans pressed forward in their endless search for food, stuffing nuts and grubs into their mouths, filling the air with the sounds of munching and crunching and the occasional grunt or spoken word. The cat watched. Patience was the key.

  Finally a child, barely wobbling on upright legs, wandered away from its mother. The catch was swift and brutal. A sharp cry from the child and the huntress was trotting quickly away with the tender body in her lethal jaws. The humans immediately gave chase, shouting and brandishing frail spears.

  And then the cat was gone, vanished through tangled underbrush to her hidden lair, the child frantically squirming and screeching beneath razor teeth. The humans, afraid to follow into the dense growth, flew into a frenzy, jumping up and down, thumping the ground with crude clubs, their shrieks rising to the sky where already vultures began to gather in the hope of leftovers. The mother of the child, a young female whom the others called Wasp, raced back and forth in front of the opening through which the cat had disappeared.

  Then came a shout from one of the males. He gestured for them to leave and they all as a body loped away from the thorny patch. Wasp refused to move even though two females tried to pull her away. She threw herself to the ground and yowled as if she were in physical pain. Finally, frightened by the thought of the cat returning, the others abandoned her and made a swift escape to a nearby stand of trees where they hurriedly clambered up into the safety of branches.

  There they remained until the sun began to dip to the horizon and shadows grew long. They no longer heard the cries of the stricken mother. The afternoon silence had been broken only once by a single, sharp scream, and then all was still again. With stomachs growling and thirst impelling them to move on, they climbed back down, glanced briefly at the bloody spot where they had last seen Wasp, then they turned toward the west and resumed their search for food.

  The small band of humans walked tall and straight as they crossed the African savanna, their long limbs and slender torsos moving with a fluid, animal grace. They wore no clothing, no ornamentation; in their hands they clutched crude spears and hand axes. They numbered seventy-six and ranged in age from sucking infant to elderly. Nine of the females were pregnant. As they pressed relentlessly forward in their eternal search for food, this family of first humans did not know that a hundred thousand years hence, in a world they could not imagine, their descendants would call them Homo sapiens—“Man the Wise.”

  Danger.

  Tall One lay motionless in the nest-bed she had shared with Old Mother, her senses suddenly heightened to the sounds and smells of dawn. Smoke from the smoldering campfire. The sharp aroma of charred wood. T
he air bitingly cold. Birds in the overhead tree branches, waking up to the day, whistling and cawing in a cacophony of birdcall. But no lion’s growl or hyena bark, no serpent’s hiss that were the usual warnings of danger.

  Nonetheless Tall One did not move. Though she shivered with cold and wished to warm herself against Old Mother, who would be at the fire stones poking the embers to life, she remained in bed. The danger was still there. She sensed it strongly.

  Slowly she lifted her head and blinked through the smoky dawn. The Family was stirring. She heard the raspy, early morning wheezing of Fishbone, so named when he had nearly choked to death on a fish bone and Nostril saved him by thwacking him hard between the shoulder blades, sending the bone flying across the campfire. Fishbone hadn’t breathed right since. There was Old Mother as usual, feeding grass to the feeble fire while Nostril squatted next to her examining a nasty insect bite festering on his scrotum. Fire-Maker was sitting up and nursing her baby. Hungry and Lump still snored in their nest-beds while Scorpion urinated against a tree. And in the half-light, the silhouette of Lion as he grunted in sexual release with Honey-Finder.

  Nothing out of the ordinary.

  Tall One sat up and rubbed her eyes. The Family’s sleep had been disturbed during the night by frantic shrieks from one of Mouse’s children, a boy sleeping too close to the fire who had rolled over onto the hot embers and gotten badly burned. It was a lesson every child learned. Tall One herself bore a burn scar the length of her right thigh from when she had slept too close to the fire as a child. The boy, though whimpering now as his mother applied wet mud to the raw flesh, seemed all right. Tall One looked at the other members of the Family who were starting to shuffle down to the water hole to drink, their movements sleepy and sluggish. She saw no signs of fear or alarm in them.

  Yet something was wrong. Although she could neither see it nor hear it nor smell it, the young female knew with every instinct in her body that a threat lurked nearby. But Tall One had not the mental intellect to grasp what it was nor the language to convey her fears to the others. In her mind she heard: warning. But if she were to speak the word, the others would quickly look around for the poisonous snakes or wild dogs or saber-toothed cats. They would see none and wonder why Tall One had alerted them.

  It isn’t a warning for today, her mind whispered as she finally left the security of her nest-bed. It is a warning for tomorrow.

  But the young female in this family of early humans had no way of expressing her thought. They possessed no concept of “future.” Danger that was coming was alien to creatures who knew only of danger that was now. The humans on the savanna lived as the animals around them lived, grazing and scavenging, seeking water, running from the predators, relieving sexual urges, and sleeping when the sun was high and their stomachs were full.

  As the morning sun rose, the Family dispersed from the protection of the cattails and reeds and headed out onto the open plain, feeling safe now that dawn had broken completely over their world to dispel night and its perils. Tall One, her heart filled with nameless dread, joined the others as they abandoned the night camp and began their daily search for food.

  She paused now and again to scan her surroundings, hoping to glimpse the new menace she sensed so strongly. But all she saw was a sea of lion-colored grass dotted with leafy trees and rocky hillocks stretching away to distant hills. No predators trailed the group of thirst-driven humans, no threat hovered on the wing in the hazy sky. Tall One saw antelope herds grazing, giraffes nibbling, zebras switching their tails back and forth. Nothing strange or new.

  Only the mountain ahead on the horizon. It had been asleep just days ago but now was spewing smoke and ash into the sky. That was new.

  But the humans ignored it—Nostril, as he caught a grasshopper and popped it into his mouth; Honey-Finder, as she yanked up a clump of flowers to see if the roots were edible; Hungry, as he scanned the smoky sky for vultures, which would mean a carcass and the chance for meat. Ignorant of the threat the volcano posed, the humans went about their relentless foraging, walking barefoot over red earth and prickly grass, roaming a world made up of lakes and marshes, forests and grasslands, and inhabited by crocodiles, rhinos, baboons, elephants, giraffes, hares, beetles, antelope, vultures, and snakes.

  Tall One’s family seldom encountered others of their own kind, although they occasionally sensed that humans lived beyond the boundaries of their own small territory. It would have been difficult to venture past the edges of their land for these were difficult barriers to cross: a steep escarpment along one edge, a deep and wide river along another, and an impassible marshland defining the third. Within these borders had Tall One’s family, following instinct and memory, roved and survived for generations.

  The Family traveled in a tight group, keeping the old ones and females with children in the protective center while the males kept to the periphery with clubs and hand axes, ever watchful for predators. Predators always targeted the weak, and this band of humans was weak indeed; they had been without water since the day before. They trudged beneath the rising sun, their lips and mouths parched as they dreamed of a river running clear where they would find tubers and turtle eggs and clumps of edible vegetation, or perhaps a rare, tasty flamingo captured among papyrus stalks. Their names changed as circumstances changed, for names were nothing more than devices for communication, a way to enable family members to call out to one another or to speak of one another. Honey-Finder received her name the day she had found a beehive and the Family had tasted sugar for the first time in over a year. Lump got his name after climbing a tree to elude a leopard, only to fall to the ground and receive a blow to his head that formed a permanent knot. One Eye lost his right eye when he and Lion had tried to scare off a pack of vultures that were feeding on a dead rhinoceros, and one of the vultures had fought back. Frog was clever at catching frogs by distracting his catch with one hand and grabbing it with the other. Tall One was so named because she was the tallest female in the Family.

  The humans lived by impulses and instincts and animal intuitions. Few of them entertained thoughts. And since they had no thoughts they had no questions, and therefore they had no need to come up with answers. They wondered about nothing, questioned nothing. The world was made up of only what they could see, hear, smell, touch, and taste. Nothing was hidden or unknown. A saber-toothed cat was a saber-toothed cat—a predator when alive, a food source when dead. For this reason the humans were not superstitious and had not yet formed concepts of magic, spirits, or unseen powers. They didn’t try to explain the wind because it didn’t occur to them to do so. When Fire-Maker sat to start a fire, she didn’t wonder where the sparks came from, or why it had occurred to an ancestor a thousand years prior to try to make fire. Fire-Maker had learned simply by watching her mother, who had learned in turn by watching her mother. Food was anything they could find, and because they possessed limited speech and social skills, hunting was so primitive as to be confined to the smallest game—lizards, birds, fish, rabbits. Tall One’s family lived in ignorance of who or what they were and the fact that they had just completed a long evolutionary road that meant they and their kind would remain physically unchanged for the next hundred thousand years.

  They were also unaware that, with Tall One and the new danger she sensed, a second evolution was about to begin.

  As she searched for edible plants and insects, a vision haunted her: the watering hole they had woken to that dawn. To the Family’s dismay, during the night the water had become so covered with volcanic soot and ash as to be undrinkable. Thirst had driven them on when they would normally have stayed to eat, and it drove them now, continually westward, doggedly following Lion who knew where the next fresh water lay, their heads rising above the tall grasses so that they could see the herds of wildebeest moving in the same quest for water. The sky was a strange color, the air smelled acrid and sharp. And directly ahead on the horizon, the mountain coughed smoke as it had never done before.

  T
all One, her mind wrestling with an unaccustomed puzzle, was also plagued by a memory—the terror that had visited them two nights before.

  Night was never quiet on the African plain, with lions roaring over fresh kills and hyenas emitting shrill cries to alert partners of the promise of food. The humans who sheltered at the edge of the forest slept fitfully, despite the fires they kept going against the darkness, to give light and warmth and to keep the beasts away. But two nights ago had been different. Habituated to lives constantly fraught with peril, the humans’ fear had been heightened and sharpened, making them blink in the dark and listen to the pounding of their hearts. Something strange and terrible was happening to the world around them, and because they had no words for these new calamities, no cohesive thoughts in their primitive minds that might bring reason and therefore comfort, the frightened humans could only huddle together in the grip of sheer, mindless terror.

  They had no way of knowing that earthquakes had shaken this region many times before, or that the mountain on the horizon had been shooting lava into the sky for millennia, going dormant occasionally, as it had for the past few hundred years. But now it was alive, its cone casting a terrifying red glow against the night sky, the earth trembling and roaring as if with life.

  But only Tall One remembered these terrors as the others in her group swept their eyes over the ground and vegetation, watchful for termite hills, plants laden with seedpods, and trailing vines that might promise bitter berries.

  When One Eye kicked a rotting log to expose squirming grubs, the humans fell upon the feast, grabbing the larvae and stuffing their mouths. Food was never shared out. The strongest ate, the weakest starved. Lion, the dominant male in the group, pushed his way through to seize large handfuls of the white morsels.