The Blessing Stone

by Barbara Wood

  After four days and Thorn had not rejoined the group, Tall One wept silently in her nest-bed, fearful that her enchanting stranger was dead, and wondering why he had left when the Family had so welcomed him. The passion she had started to feel for him was replaced with pain and grief, emotions the young female had never experienced before.

  And then suddenly he was there, standing on a hillock with the westering sun at his back, waving his arms and jumping up and down. The Family recognized his sounds and gestures as being good signs, and ran to him. He beckoned for them to follow, and they tramped en masse behind the young man as he led them along a curving streambed, now dry and waterless, and over another hill, along a narrow rocky canyon, until they climbed a slight incline and he pointed proudly to what he had found.

  A grove of tamarind trees. And every part of the tamarind tree was edible.

  The humans swarmed the tall, densely branched trees like locusts, grabbing for the pulpy seedpods, tearing at the leaves, stripping bark and stuffing their mouths. The fleshy fruit slaked thirst and the bark staved off hunger. Fire-Maker started a fire and everyone threw tamarind seeds into the hot stones for later consumption.

  Now Tall One wept with joy, and with admiration. Everyone had thought Thorn ran away out of hunger and thirst. But now they knew he had gone in search of food for the Family—and had found it.

  The balance of power shifted in an instant. Thorn was now given the plumpest tamarind fruit. Lion was given the leavings.

  When the tamarind trees had been stripped clean and could yield not another leaf, seed, or piece of bark, the Family moved on. But this time they carried liquid with them. Before they could consume all the moisture found in the tamarind fruit, Thorn had shown them how to squeeze the juice into empty ostrich eggs to carry with them.

  They still came upon rotting carcasses, but the marrow was good and sustaining. For a while, the volcano rested and the stars were briefly seen again. And when Thorn led the Family to an artesian well that gave them freshwater, he decreed that here they would spend the night.

  Lion was not consulted.

  The heat that had begun to burn in Tall One, the night everyone thought Thorn had abandoned them, continued to grow within her until thoughts of Thorn filled her mind night and day. She hungered for his body, for his touch. When the Family groomed by the campfire, it was Thorn she wanted to feel plastering mud on her skin. Tall One would glance shyly across the camp and see him there with the other young males, demonstrating to them how he made his sling, laughing with them. And when he looked her way, she felt the heat surge, like sparks shooting from the embers.

  Overcome with restlessness, she left the group and went to the rocky outcrop where a few sooty herons waded in the artesian water. She was vaguely aware of being glad to see the stars and the moon, even though the sky was still hazy, and she was glad the ground hadn’t rumbled in days. And she might have pondered these mysteries were she not in the grip of a strange spell.

  When she heard footfalls through the dry grass she was not alarmed. An instinct told her who it was, and why he had followed her. She turned and saw Thorn’s smile in the moonlight.

  She had seen others act this way so many times without understanding why they did it, the touching and fondling, tasting and sniffing. But now it made her warm all over. Thorn pressed his mouth to her cheeks and neck, and rubbed his nose against hers; Tall One’s hands found places on his body that made him moan. He grinned and she giggled. They began to tickle one another until Tall One, shrieking with laughter, suddenly pulled away and ran from him. Thorn gave chase, howling and waving his arms. Tall One made sure she didn’t outrun him, although she could have with her long legs. When he caught her, both screaming with laughter, Tall One dropped to her knees and allowed him to thrust into her. Before he was finished, she pulled away and, giggling, rolled onto her back and pulled him down. As he thrust into her again, she clasped him tightly and rolled over and over with him inside her, her cries of pleasure rising up to the sky.

  They spent their days completely involved in each other. He sniffed her all over. She tasted the salt in his armpits. Thorn jumped up and down and pranced. He stood as tall as he could and expanded his chest to show her how big he was. She coyly looked away, pretending not to care. Although he had his pick of females, his affection was only for Tall One. They groomed each other and slept in the same nest-bed, arms and legs intertwined. Tall One had never known such deep affection, not even for Old Mother. When she lay in Thorn’s arms she felt no fear, and when he caressed her and thrust himself into her, she clung to him with an aching passion. There was something else, too: she was no longer alone in her fear of the new danger because Thorn, too, looked up at the sky and saw how the wind blew the smoke and knew that peril lay just beyond the next dawn.

  Old Mother finally died, closing her eyes as her head was pillowed on Tall One’s pregnant belly. The Family howled and beat the ground with sticks, then finally they left Old Mother’s body in the grass and moved on.

  One morning when the sky was filled with smoke and the ground rumbled, Honey-Finder’s oldest daughter, having recently entered puberty and discovering exciting new instincts blossoming within her, watched Thorn while he created a new sling out of sinew stripped from the carcass of an eland. She eyed his broad shoulders and strong arms, then she approached him, giggling, and bent over, wiggling her bare bottom. Thorn was instantly aroused. But she wasn’t the partner he desired. Jumping up, he looked around for Tall One and, seeing her shelling seeds from baobab pods, ran up to her. He tickled her, played with her hair, jumped around and made comical noises. She laughed and pulled him down among the bushes where they coupled beneath the hot sun.

  Lion watched in cold detachment. Ever since the stranger had arrived, the females had stopped offering themselves to him. Children followed the newcomer around, males looked upon Thorn with admiration. With his killing stones Thorn managed to bring down the occasional bird that braved the smoke-filled sky. At night he amused them with his comical miming. Everyone loved Thorn.

  The idea was Honey-Finder’s, since she too was unhappy with the way Thorn had upset the balance of power in the Family. Now that Lion had been deposed, so had she, with Tall One, now pregnant, taking her place as the dominant female.

  They approached Thorn with smiles and gestures of friendship— Lump, Hungry, Nostril, and Honey-Finder, Lion’s loyal faction. He was sitting beneath the shade of an acacia, working stiff sinews into new slings. Thorn had harvested the long tendons from the decomposed carcass of a giraffe, and now he chewed them and pounded them with rocks until they were pliant enough to make an accurate weapon.

  He looked up into Honey-Finder’s grin. She was offering him a handful of small withered apples. Thorn was delighted. This strong female had not warmed to him since he joined the Family. He was pleased to know now that she had finally accepted him. As he rose to his feet and reached for the apples, Lion and the other males suddenly appeared carrying clubs and sticks and big rocks.

  Thorn gave them a puzzled look. Then he grinned and offered them a share of the apples. When Lion slapped the fruit away, Thorn’s face went blank, and in the next instant they were upon him, five large males swinging their weapons against his slender body.

  Holding up his arms to protect himself, Thorn stumbled backward and fell against the tree. As the blows came raining down upon him, he tried frantically to understand what was happening. He fell to his knees and scrambled for the slings lying in the grass. He held them up, but Lion’s club slammed against his forearms. Thorn tried to do something funny, to make them laugh, but blood was streaming from his nose and scalp. As he fell to his knees, he held out his hands in a question: why? Lion swung his club hard to the side of Thorn’s head, creating a loud crack. As he curled up and tried to protect himself, Thorn cried out beneath the rain of blows and kicks. Just before he lost consciousness, his mind came alive with images: of the female who had birthed him, of the camp in the valley where
he had grown up, of laughing with his siblings, of knowing the freedom of the savanna beneath the hot sun. And then pain swept over him like a black tide. His last thought before death was of Tall One.

  Having heard the cries, Tall One and the others came crashing through the brush, and when she saw Thorn’s savaged body, she shrieked up to the sky. She fell upon Thorn and bellowed her outrage. She pulled at his shoulders, trying to wake him up; she licked his wounds and tasted his blood. She took his battered face in her hands and let her tears fall upon the bruised flesh. But he remained still and unbreathing. The family watched in silence as Tall One continued to wail and beat the ground with her fists. And then she, too, fell deadly silent, and when at last she rose to her feet, everyone fell back.

  She was a vision of power—tall and pregnant with the blue water-stone flashing between her full breasts. She met the eyes of Thorn’s killers one by one, and all of them except Lion and Honey-Finder looked away in shame.

  Silence fell over the scene, broken only by the buzzing of insects and the distant sound of earth rumbling. The whole Family looked on, even the children held their tongues as Tall One challenged her adversaries with an unwavering glare.

  And then, all eyes following her, she bent slowly and retrieved from the grass one of Thorn’s slings and a stone. Lion drew himself up in preparation, fingers tightening around the grip of his club. But Tall One moved so swiftly and unexpectedly that she caught him off guard. In the wink of an eye, she had Thorn’s sling fitted with the sharp stone and with one arching sweep of her arm, brought it squarely against Honey-Finder’s skull.

  Startled, the older female staggered back. Before anyone could react, before Lion could raise his club even, Tall One swung the sling again, this time catching Honey-Finder between the eyes. With a cry she fell, and in the next instant Tall One was standing over her, swinging the sling downward with great force, again and again, until Honey-Finder’s face was bashed beyond recognition.

  When it was over Tall One turned to Lion and spat contemptuously at his feet.

  He did not move. With hot wind whipping volcanic ash and cinders about her, Tall One kept her eyes on Lion, fixed them on him, skewering him to the spot, even though he was bigger and stronger and carried spears and a club, and his back was armored with the rotten pelt of a lioness.

  As they challenged each other with locked gazes, mutual hatred filling the air like sparks from the volcano, and the Family looked on, breathlessly awaiting the next move, the earth suddenly shook, more violently than it had ever done, knocking people off their feet.

  Instinctively the Family ran for nearby trees, but Tall One did not move. Behind the forest rose the fiery mountain. Ash rained down, hot coals and incandescent debris. The top branches exploded with fire.

  And suddenly it all came clear to her, the nameless danger that had begun to stalk her months ago, her growing sense of dread, of knowing something was wrong. Now she made another leap: This place was not good. And although her species had lived and evolved here for millions of years, it was time to leave.

  She looked down at the water-stone hanging between her breasts. She lifted it up and held it in the flat of her hand like an egg, and as she turned her back on the fiery mountain, she saw that the narrow end of the blue stone pointed directly ahead, toward the east, and at its diamond-crystal heart she saw a river and the promise of water.

  Raising an arm, she pointed toward the west where the sky was filled with black volcanic smoke and she cried, “Bad! We die!” Then she lifted her other arm and pointed to the clear sky in the east. “There! We go!” Her voice was strong and rang out over the rumbling noise. The Family exchanged nervous glances and she could see by their posture that many wanted to go with her. But they were still afraid of Lion.

  “We go,” she said more firmly, pointing.

  Lion turned toward the smoking volcano in a gesture of defiance and fearlessness, and as he began to walk, others followed after him— Hungry, Lump, and Scorpion.

  Tall One spat contemptuously on the ground again, then she took a last look at Thorn, his poor battered body already disappearing beneath a fine coating of ash. She looked at the others—Baby, Nostril, Fire-Maker, Fishbone—and when she saw that they were staying with her, she turned her back on the lethal cloud filling the western sky and took her first decisive step eastward, back the way they had come.

  They didn’t pause to look back at Lion and his small group heading resolutely westward, but stayed close to Tall One whose long stride nearly outpaced them. Along the way they stopped to collect ostrich eggs and fill them with fresh water, and when they found food, Tall One instructed her companions not to eat everything but to carry seeds and nuts with them, against future need.

  As they trekked eastward, the ground continued to rumble, and finally the mountain exploded. Tall One and her group turned to see an enormous black cloud rapidly spreading across the sky, blotting out the sun and engulfing the west in a doomsday inferno. It was to be the final eruption of a volcano that would, on a far future day, be called Kilimanjaro. And it smothered in an instant Lion and his stubborn little band of followers.

  Interim

  Filled with sadness over the death of the young male who had so charmed her, and with the resolution never to forget him, Tall One turned her back on the garden that had once been her world and, armed with the water-stone, and believing that her power to lead her people came from this rather than from within herself, continued to take her Family eastward where, as she had predicted, they found freshwater. She paused long enough to give birth to her first child, not knowing that he was the progeny of the young male named Thorn. Then they moved on until finally they reached a seashore bountiful with shellfish and, when they dug into the ground, freshwater wells. They found here also a new kind of tree that provided food, water, and shade: the coconut palm that grew in abundance. Here the Family stayed for another thousand years until they grew too populous for the local food supply and had to splinter again. Some headed southward along the coast to settle southern Africa, but the majority moved northward following the shorelines of lands that would someday be called Kenya, Ethiopia, Egypt. They stopped for generations, populating a place, and then moved on, always in search of new food sources and untouched territory. And with them went the blue stone, handed down from generation to generation.

  As the millennia passed, the descendants of Tall One spread their seed along rivers and valleys, over mountains and forests, braving new territory that was far away from their origins, learning to build shelters or to live in caves, creating words and ways to communicate, developing new tools and weapons and hunting techniques. As language skills improved, so did social organization, which enabled the creation of planned hunting parties. Humans evolved from scavengers to predators. Thinking was born and therefore questions, and with questions came the need for answers. And thus were spirits, taboos, right and wrong, ghosts, and magic born. Thus did the blue stone, sparkling fragment of an ancient meteor, having traveled with the humans, revered and cherished, become no longer powerful in itself but powerful because of the spirit that inhabited it.

  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.

  Book Two

  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.