The Blessing Stone

by Barbara Wood

  Laliari’s grass skirt seemed to baffle him as he tilted his head this way and that, poking the long dry fibers with a curious finger. He plucked at the woven grass belt, pulling it away from her waist, as if puzzling over the mystery of how grass grew out of her skin. Then he stared long and hard at the ivory needle piercing her nose, and when he reached up to touch it, Laliari slapped his hand away.

  When the old man had eaten his fill and closed his eyes in weariness, Laliari devoured the rest of the rabbit, sucking the bones clean and licking the grease off her fingers, the whole time keeping her eyes on the ugly stranger.

  Finally he grew bored and went back to his fire. It was warm in the cave and eventually they all fell asleep. Laliari wakened during the night to see the stranger lying prone on the grave, sobbing. She was puzzled. She understood grief, but didn’t he know the bad luck he was calling upon himself by staying so close to a corpse? Laliari herself wished she could flee from this cave. But the rain was coming down hard outside now, and Bellek’s leg wound had rendered him unable to walk. Visions of the dead child in the pit filled her head again, and thoughts of his ghost lurking in the shadows made further sleep impossible.

  Eventually the stranger sat up and, after sitting for a long moment on the mound of dirt, as if working out a decision in his mind, gestured for Laliari to join him at the fire.

  She held back until curiosity overcame her. She looked at Bellek, who was sleeping fitfully, then went across to the fire, giving the child’s grave a wide berth.

  When she crossed her legs and sat, she glanced at the stranger’s possessions clustered near his bed of furs: flint-tipped spears and hand axes, small leather bags bulging with mysterious contents, hollowed-out stone bowls filled with nuts and seeds. She held her hands over the fire to warm them. Keeping her head bowed, she studied the stranger from beneath her lashes. Necklaces of animal sinew and strung with bone and ivory lay upon his hairy chest. His hair, long and tangled, was knotted with beads and shells. Small purple tattoos dotted his arms and legs. In other words, he looked like any man from her own clan, except for his thick facial features.

  She wondered why he was here all alone, where his people had gone.

  Finally she looked directly at him and said, “Who are you?”

  He shook his head. He didn’t understand.

  Using repetitive gestures, pointing to herself and then to him, she finally got her question across. He thumped his chest and from his mouth came something that sounded like “Ts’ank’t.” But when she tried to repeat it, the closest she could come was “Zant.” And “Laliari” was so beyond him, no matter how hard he watched her lips and tongue as she pronounced it, it came out “Lali” and so Lali she was.

  They attempted further communication with Zant naming other things—the cave, the fire, the rain, even Bellek—using words from his own language. But Laliari had difficulty repeating them. And when she said words in her own tongue, Zant tried to pronounce them but gave up after a while. Finally they fell silent, recognizing the limits of their communication abilities, both gazing into the flames to ponder this miracle of meeting a human from another world. But a question dominated Laliari’s mind, and finally she could contain it no more. Pointing to the tender mound in the center of the cave floor, she gave Zant a questioning look.

  She was startled to see tears fill his eyes. Few men in her clan openly cried, and when the tears fell down his cheeks, she grew alarmed. There was power in tears, just as there was power in blood and urine and saliva. But he merely wiped them away and uttered an incomprehensible word. When she gave him a puzzled look, he repeated the word, and as he repeated it over and over, pointing to the mound, she realized that he was saying the child’s name.

  Laliari jumped to her feet in horror and, quickly looking around the cave for the boy’s ghost, made frantic magic gestures to protect herself.

  Zant didn’t understand. He liked saying the boy’s name. It brought comfort. Why did it frighten her? Rising from the fire, he shuffled back to the grave where he knelt and lovingly patted the newly packed earth. But Laliari could only shake her head in fear.

  Zant pondered this. He came back to the fire and, squatting again, reached inside the pelt that covered his torso and brought out a small gray stone. He held it out to Laliari.

  When she didn’t take it, he grunted a word and, to her great shock, smiled. It transformed his face. Suddenly the brutishness vanished and he seemed as ordinary as one of her own kinsmen. He kept offering the stone and she finally took it. Cupping it in her palm she frowned over it, uncomprehending.

  The gray stone, which had clearly been shaped by tools, filled her hand. Pointed at the top and bottom, the middle part was comprised of smooth, rounded bulges. Laliari had no idea what it was until Zant touched her bare breast with a fingertip and then touched one of the rounded protuberances on the stone. She stared harder, and after a moment the shape became recognizable. It was a pregnant woman.

  Laliari gasped. She had never seen the representation of a human before. What magic was this that she could hold a small woman in her hand?

  And then the firelight glanced off the figurine in sharp flashes and Laliari saw that fixed into the statuette’s abdomen was the most beautiful blue stone she had ever seen. It looked like frozen water, or a piece of the summer sky. It was like the blue of Zant’s eyes, and when it caught the firelight, shot back such dazzling reflections that Laliari was mesmerized.

  She brought the stone closer and gazed hard into its translucent heart. The fire crackled, Bellek snored in his corner. Laliari kept staring into the crystalline blue depths until she saw—She cried out.

  Within the blue stone she could see a baby in a womb!

  Zant tried to explain that long ago his forebears had taken the blue stone from southern invaders and a medicine woman of his people had had it set into the belly of this stone figurine. What Laliari could not know was that when Zant’s ancestors had followed animal herds south into warmer climates, they had carried the blue stone back into the territories of its original owners, Tall One’s descendants, of which, ironically, Laliari was one.

  Now he was trying to explain a connection between the pregnant figurine and the dead child in the pit. But Laliari, for all her desire to understand, remained in the dark.

  Suddenly a loud moan filled the cave, and Bellek cried out for Laliari. When she went to him, she saw that he was curled on his side and shivering badly. She tried rubbing his cold limbs and breathing her warm breath upon him, but his shaking only grew more violent, and his lips were turning blue. Gently pulling her away, Zant gathered the frail old man into his arms and carried him back to the fire. Laying Bellek in the circle of warmth, Zant took one of his own bedding furs and tucked it over the trembling body. After a while Bellek was quiet again, sleeping peacefully. Zant laid a huge clumsy hand on the fragile forehead and murmured words that Laliari, mystified, did not understand.

  Bellek’s condition worsened. His wound festered and he burned with fever. But Zant took diligent care of him. Despite the pouring rain, he ventured each day from the cave and returned with food that the old man could eat—soft roots, eggs, and nuts ground into an edible mush—and medicines—aloe for the wound, willow bark steeped in hot water for the fever. As Laliari watched how tenderly Zant ministered to the old shaman, cradling Bellek’s frail head in his meaty arm as he helped him to drink and chanting softly in his foreign tongue, her initial wariness and revulsion of the stranger began to wane.

  Still, he remained a man of mysteries.

  Why was he alone? Where were his people? Had his clan died out because there was no moon? Was the child in the pit the last of his kind and now Zant was alone?

  What had happened to the herds of animals in the valley, where had they gone?

  Finally there was the little pregnant woman with the blue-stone baby in her abdomen. What did it mean?

  As these questions crowded her mind, Laliari was also worrying about her own people in t
heir camp by the lake. Without the powers of Alawa and Bellek they were defenseless and vulnerable. And surely they were terrified by now—never before had her people seen such days of endless downpour. As she looked toward the opening of the cave and the steady rain beyond, she thought of the lost moon, the animals gone from the valley, Zant the last of his kind, and she wondered, Is the world coming to an end?

  While Zant continued to take care of Bellek and nurse him back to health, it was a time of exploration and discovery for the man and woman from two different races. Zant instructed Laliari in the knowledge of local healing herbs found in the valley, and Laliari collected roots and vegetables, demonstrating how her people cooked them. But these Zant scorned. His people ate meat only. He dismissed the greens with a contemptuous wave of the hand. “For horses,” he said. “Not for men.” He explained that he was a member of the Wolf Clan and wolves were meat-eaters. Laliari had never seen a wolf.

  There were peculiar rock bowls scattered about the cave, each containing residues of burned animal fat. Zant demonstrated their purpose by setting fire to one and handing the bowl to Laliari. She looked on in astonishment. It was a steadily burning light. Since her people were not cave-dwellers and lived in shelters with openings to the sky—and therefore to the stars and moon—they had never invented lamps. And while her people had learned to carry embers to start a fire in the future, fire itself was never carried!

  Zant carried things in bags fashioned from animal bladders, stomachs, and hides. Laliari, coming from a river valley rich in tall grasses and reeds, carried a basket, which mystified Zant, having never seen grass woven together before.

  Because Zant and his people were meat-eaters, they had never been good at catching fish. Why should they with so much game around? But now game was scarce in the valley, and hunting was poor in the rain, so Laliari demonstrated how to fish with a net made of vegetable fibers and animal sinew. Choosing a day when the rain abated briefly and the sun broke through the clouds, they went down to a stream teeming with fish. Unfurling the net she carried in her basket, Laliari weighted it with stones and threw it into the stream. Zant, excited to see so many squirming fish caught in the net, splashed into the water to haul it up. But he slipped and fell in, causing Laliari to howl with laughter as he climbed back onto the bank and comically shook himself. His fur tunic was drenched, so he stripped it off and laid it on boulders to dry. When she saw his naked torso, Laliari’s laughter died.

  His skin was as white as summer clouds, but covered in fine black hairs that glistened with droplets of water. His chest was deep, his shoulders and arms powerfully muscled. A loincloth of soft leather covered his manhood, but his buttocks were exposed, firm and white, and pimpling with bumps as the sun went behind a cloud and the day turned cold. When Zant raised his arms to wring out his long hair, Laliari saw muscles and sinews ripple and move beneath his wet skin in a way that made the breath catch in her throat.

  When the sun came out an instant later, Zant turned to it and lifted his face to receive the warm rays. He stood completely still, his nakedness dappled in sunlight and shadow, glittering with water, his long black hair streaming down his back. Laliari observed him in profile, the powerful chest pushed forward, the heavy brown and large nose thrusting skyward, and she wondered in bewitched amazement if this was what a wolf looked like.

  And then clouds covered the sun, the day grew cold again and the moment ended, but Laliari’s enchantment did not. As she watched Zant bend to retrieve his sodden tunic, she marveled at his power and dark mystery, and she felt a strange new heat begin to burn deep within her. When he turned suddenly and his blue eyes captured hers, she felt her heart jump in a way it had never done before, like a gazelle within her breast—joyous, happy, leaping with life.

  But then she was immediately sad, for she remembered his loneliness.

  Every day Laliari would watch Zant leave the cave, spear and ax in hand, and disappear into the rain. He would return a long time later, always with a kill, but cold and shivering, saying nothing, stripping the hide off the animal and throwing the meat on the fire. She would watch him crouch down and stare into the flames, a look of forlorn sadness on his face, and she would wonder about him. Why did he stay? Why didn’t he leave? Once in a while he would look up, as if he sensed her watching him, their eyes would meet, and Laliari would feel something—she didn’t know what—take place in the warm, smoky confines of the cave. After a while Zant would bring the cooked meat to her and Bellek. He would make sure they both ate before he himself ate any of it even though it was his kill. And while she ate, she felt his eyes on her, eyes filled with loneliness, questioning, yearning.

  They spent their days in search of food, their evenings in awkward communication, their nights in restless sleep. Neither possessed the words to describe what was happening, neither could explain the alien emotions that had them in a grip. Laliari and Zant took care of Bellek, nursing him back to health, but both sensed something else happening in the cave, something taking shape, like a ghost, but not unfriendly, perhaps like the ghost of fire, because each felt a heat rising within them. Laliari wondered how Zant’s people took pleasure, and Zant wondered how the men and women of her people came together. Unknown taboos stood between them, and the fear of breaking them.

  When Laliari suddenly left the cave one day, taking her possessions and some food with her, murmuring words of reassurance to the old man, Zant understood. The women in his own clan practiced segregation during their moonflow.

  When she returned to the cave five days later, Zant showed her a sight so astonishing that it opened her mind and explained so many things.

  The rain had abated and the sun shone through the broken clouds. Making sure that Bellek was warm and comfortable, Zant took Laliari by the hand and led her from the cave and up a narrow trail that went to the tops of the cliffs. There, standing at the top of the world beneath a sky that went on forever, Laliari felt the wind invade her spirit and lift it to great heights. Below, she saw the rolling plains and hills, now starting to shade with the green of spring, and in the distance the immense freshwater lake where her people were camped. Laliari had never stood so high, had never had such a view of the world.

  But this was not the sight that was to explain so many things. Zant wordlessly led her across the flat mesa toward its far, sharp edge. It terrified her to come to such an abrupt and precipitous drop, but Zant held her arm and smiled encouragingly. She moved to the edge and, terrified that the wind was going to carry her away, looked down.

  There, she saw something that stopped the breath in her chest.

  Below them, rising from the bottom of a deep ravine, was a mountain of horse carcasses. Whole animals, with only their bellies slit open, the skins and bones and tails left intact. The stench was dizzying for the carcasses were rotting. Through Zant’s gesturing and miming, the horrific picture started to form in Laliari’s mind: Zant and his people had driven this herd to its destruction. It was how they hunted. She remembered the mountain of antelope carcasses she and her kinswomen had come upon weeks ago, how they had wondered why the animals had galloped off the steep cliff to their doom. Now she understood that they had been driven by humans bent on slaughter.

  But, she realized in dawning horror, they had used only a small part of the animals. As Zant spoke with his awkward words and clumsy gestures, Laliari envisioned the carnage: Zant’s people cutting open the bellies of the beasts, many of them still alive, and crawling inside to pull out the tender organs, feasting on beating hearts and steaming livers, painting themselves with blood, empowering themselves with the spirit of the horse.

  Laliari was at first horrified at the waste. Her own people would have made use of every organ and sinew, even the horse’s manes. But then she saw that the most horrendous taboo had been broken: the majority of these animals were females. When her clan hunted, they only went after males, since males, unable to bear young, weren’t needed for the survival of a herd. To kill females meant kil
ling their future offspring and ultimately killing off the herd entirely. As she looked in dismay at the wasteful slaughter—some of the horses had been pregnant—she realized that her people had encountered no horses during their trek from the Reed Sea. Were these the last of them?

  She turned to the man who both excited and mystified her, and now horrified and repulsed her, as he had done the night they first met. A man who could lay such a gentle touch on the festering wound of a frail old man, yet who could drive hundreds of horses to a useless death and think nothing of the waste of it. As he continued to talk, gesturing northward with his gnarled hand, thumping his chest, exhibiting pride and bravado, but his eyes betraying the stark loneliness that had dogged him these weeks, revelation like a dawn broke in her mind: that Zant wasn’t the last of his kind after all. His people, having overkilled in this valley, were now forced to move northward in search of more herds. They were the Wolf Clan, he explained, and so they were following the wolf packs tracking the herds. His people were camped just a few days’ journey northward, past the lake and into the mountains, where they waited for him.

  Finally Bellek was healed and Zant declared that it was time for him to move on. He gathered his possessions and they began a sad goodbye. Now was the time of permissible touching, for they were parting.

  “Lali,” he said in such a forlorn way that it moved her heart, and his rough fingertips on her cheeks sent waves of heat through her body. She covered the hand with her own and pressed it to her face, turning her head so that her lips met the calloused palm in a long, painful kiss.

  Beneath his heavy brows, tears shimmered in blue eyes. He spoke her name again, but no sound came out. Emotions without name, feelings without definition flooded her. Nothing had touched her this way before—not Doron’s first embrace, nor witnessing his death. This dark and perplexing stranger from another world had found places deep within her that she never knew existed, and wakened a new spirit, one that hungered and burned and believed it would die without Zant.