by Barbara Wood
He found her stirring a pot of gruel over her fire, adding herbs by the pinch. Her hair was gray now, but carefully combed and braided. She no longer wore a dress of fine linen; stained doeskin covered her thin frame. She looked tired, defeated. Avram was suddenly at a loss. He had come to her for comfort and guidance, to have his world set right again. But the priestess looked more in need of succor than himself. He didn’t know what to say, so he shuffled his feet to announce his presence.
She looked up. Her eyes widened. “Yubal!”
“Be calmed, Lady Priestess,” he said quickly, “I am not Yubal, I am not a ghost. I am Avram.”
“Avram?” She picked up a lamp and brought it closer to him. In the light he saw the dark circles under her eyes, the age that the past ten years had placed upon her, and the hollows in her cheeks. It alarmed him. Even the priestess was not immune to the bad luck of this place.
Her eyes filled with tears as she inspected every inch of his face, taking in his long braided hair, his man’s beard, even the gray at his temples, though he was not yet thirty. Her eyes seemed to feast on him as they took in his broad shoulders and thick chest, then they returned to his face, lingered for a moment on the curious tattoo, and she smiled. The smile softened her features and made her look younger. “Yes, it is Avram. I see that now. But how like Yubal you are! I heard that the caravan had arrived, but no one told me that you had arrived with it. Come, we must drink and reminisce, and thank the Goddess for your safe return.”
She didn’t ask him why he went away or where he had been or why he had come back. It was as if all curiosity was gone from her. Or perhaps, he thought, ten years of hardship had taught her to accept and no longer to question. She had no wine to offer, and the beer was diluted and flat, but he accepted it with gratitude and sat with her beside a smoky brazier, for the winter night was growing cold.
Reina drank, and it shocked him that she did not first pour out a libation for the Goddess. “It is good to see you again, Avram,” she said warmly. “Seeing you is like having Yubal back. I was in love with him, you know.”
This caught him off guard. “I did not know.”
“It was my secret. But although I never took pleasure with him, the desire was there in my heart, and so I think the Goddess punished me for breaking my vow of chastity. When the raiders attacked and brutally used me, it killed within me all desire for Yubal or for any man, and taught me that pleasure between men and women is not pleasure but pain.”
He looked into his wooden cup, at the meager ration of beer with debris floating on its surface, and felt his heart tumble within his chest. “I am so sorry,” he whispered, feeling as bereft as the wastelands of Bodolf’s people. “How did such bad luck come to our people?”
She shook her head. “I do not know, or even when it began. Perhaps it started with something small, maybe someone stepped on someone else’s shadow, or a servant girl broke a pot, or an ancestor was insulted.”
“I ran away,” he said.
She nodded, her eyes fixed on the small flame of the oil lamp.
“I saw something that I mistook for something else and like a coward—”
Reina held up a hand hardened with calluses. “What is in the past is gone. And tomorrow may never come. So we must live for this moment, Avram.”
“I came seeking forgiveness.”
“I have none to give.”
“I meant from the Goddess.”
She gave him a startled look. “Did you not know? The Goddess has abandoned us.” She spoke simply and without rancor, as if all rage had been drained from her. This alarmed him more than if she had vented her fury at him as Marit had done.
And suddenly he realized the magnitude of his transgression. The bad luck of this place had not been brought on by a broken pot or an aggrieved ancestor. It was his fault. Avram, son of Chanah, of the bloodline of Talitha. He had caused this calamity. “Great Goddess,” he murmured, as the terrible picture unfolded before him: his misjudgment of Yubal and Marit, his stealing of the crystal, and his cowardly flight to the north.
Drawing the phylactery out from under his tunic, he pulled it open and spilled the blue stone into his hand. He held it out to Reina, the crystal catching lamplight and shooting it back like stars.
She gasped. “You brought the Goddess home!”
“No,” he said. “She brought me home. You must show the stone to the people so that they know the Goddess has returned to them.”
She wept for a moment, her face buried in her hands, her thin shoulders shaking. Then she composed herself and took the stone from him, gently, as if it were eggshell fragile. “I shall not tell them yet. For there are those who will remember that the stone disappeared the same night you disappeared, and will calculate that it came back the same day you returned. I shall plan a special moment and reveal the miracle to them in a way that casts no suspicion upon you. I will build her a bigger shrine, a new one, better than the old. I will throw a huge feast and let the people know that the Goddess has returned to them.”
Avram said, “I thought I had returned with new wisdom, for I have seen the world and the people in it. But I discover that I have no wisdom at all and that I am as wretched as I was when the feather-workers took me north. All this bad luck happened because of me. What must I do to atone and bring good luck to our people once again?”
She laid a hand on his arm. “Have you paid your respects to Yubal since your return? You must do so, Avram. Honor him at once, and pray to him. Yubal was wise. He will show you the way. And,” she added with a tremulous voice, “bless you for bringing the spirit of the Goddess back, for now she will bring prosperity to her children.”
As he started to leave, he paused and said, “Marit is without children. Can you help her?”
“She came to me and we tried, year after year. I gave her amulets and potions, prayers, and spells. I gave her placenta to eat and smoke to inhale. But month after month her moonflow appears.” Reina held the blue crystal to her breast and her smile shone as it had done in the old days. “But perhaps now there is hope, for Marit is yet in childbearing years.”
Avram returned to his brothers’ tent and found the ancestral niche where the small statues of the ancestors lived. The one for Yubal was in the shape of a wolf and Avram remembered the wolf’s fang Yubal had given him. He said now to his revered abba, “In all those days and nights of my westward flight, as I traversed foreign and hostile places, I thought it was the spirit of the wolf that was protecting me. But now I know it was you, Abba, walking with me, guiding me, keeping me safe.” He picked up the tiny stone wolf and kissed it.
“I vow, Abba, upon your spirit and the spirits of our ancestors that I shall reverse the bad luck I have brought upon our people.”
He had a dream in which Yubal spoke to him. Yubal was holding the blue stone of the Goddess and saying, “You must build defenses for the settlement. A wall and a tower.”
“I shall get to work cutting trees,” Avram responded in his dream.
“Not trees. The defenses must not be made of wood for wood can burn.”
“Mud-brick, then. I shall get to work at once.”
But Yubal shook his head. “Mud-brick dissolves in the rain.” He handed the blue stone to Avram. “This is how you must build. The walls must be as durable as the heart of the Goddess.”
When Avram woke, he knew what he had to do.
Breakfasting on bread and beer, he dressed in his fur leggings and boots, but left himself naked from the waist up. Then, before the sun had broken over the eastern cliffs, he took Hadadezer’s donkeys and went up into the nearby hills. As the sky clouded and a cold wind blew, Avram labored all through the day. He dug into the earth with his bare hands and hauled out rocks and stones of such a weight that they made him puff with exertion. Hour after hour he laboriously unearthed stones and loaded them into the panniers on the donkeys, and when he returned to the settlement he went straight to the bubbling spring and emptied the panniers onto th
e ground. Then, without a word to the puzzled bystanders, he turned around and went back into the hills.
Back and forth he went, toiling beneath the gray sky, going wordlessly about his labor as he brought rocks and stones to the place near the spring while the citizens gathered and watched. He toiled until well past sunset, saying not a word to anyone, leading the donkeys out of the settlement, and returning with rocks and stones. His only companion was Dog, who trotted faithfully at his side.
That night Avram fell into bed exhausted, slept only a little, then roused himself before dawn to feed the animals, stroking them and whispering into their ears, and then he led them back into the hills.
More people gathered to watch this perplexing activity. Someone dragged a vat of beer to the spot and sold straws. Men began to wager on what Avram’s insane project was. A pile of stones beside the bubbling well. Had he gone mad?
When they finally started calling out to him, asking what he was about, Avram did not respond. His face was set in a look of grim determination. And when he paused, it was only to dip his hands into the spring’s runoff, for his palms were raw and bleeding. When Caleb and his other brothers arrived, Avram would not speak to them. Only when the wall and tower were finished would he be forgiven his sins.
He worked to the point of exhaustion, never resting, barely eating, until he finally collapsed by the spring, beside his mountain of stones.
Bystanders were afraid to touch him for they thought he was possessed. When Marit came running and saw him lying unconscious in the dirt, she spat at them and said, “Have you no pride? Have you no honor? You do not move to help your friend?”
Caleb appeared and helped her to carry Avram back to her tent where he was laid on her bed, in the women’s half of the shelter. Her brothers, who had come in from the barley field for their noon meal, looked at their old rival with contempt, but a ferocious look from their sister silenced them. “Take your bread and get back to work,” she said, and they obeyed, for Marit had been the head of their family ever since their mother died and Molok had gone simple in the head.
Marit bathed Avram’s hands and applied a healing salve, then wrapped them in strips of linen. She wiped his face and washed his chest and limbs, and as she did so her tears fell onto his bare skin. She swore at him and told him that he had looked at the moon too long, but his body was wasted and his skin was gray, and she knew that demons had driven him to dig up rocks in the hills. Dog curled up at his feet and Marit couldn’t get the animal to move.
When Avram woke, Marit was stroking his forehead and saying, “Avram, I cannot begin to understand what has happened to all of us, or why the Goddess chooses the fates for us that she does. I am only a simple woman. But I am certain of one thing: my love for you.” She stretched out alongside him and Avram weakly took her into his arms. Already he felt the good luck returning.
The next morning he wakened to the sounds of cheering. “What is going on?”
Marit was combing out her hair and braiding it. She smiled at him and looked almost young again. “Reina says the heart of the Goddess has returned.” And she went into his arms, to express her joy.
When he was strong enough, Avram returned to his task of collecting stones for the wall and tower, and Marit joined him, carrying two baskets. By noon, Caleb and the two other brothers had joined them. And still the citizens watched.
The third day Namir arrived with a basket, and four of his nephews. By nightfall the mound of rocks was most impressive.
The next morning, Avram awoke to find men and boys already at work going steadily in and out of the settlement, dropping stones and returning to the hills. The sight of the blue crystal in the breast of the Goddess had heartened the citizens at the perennial spring and given them new hope.
Avram ordered a trench to be dug, which would be the foundation for the wall. The women took part in this, tucking the hems of their skirts into their belts and bending over with digging sticks and baskets. As the trench carved a huge perimeter around the well, men quickly decided that they wished their homes to be within the wall, and so the industry of brick-making was commenced until the entire settlement was alive with the business of rebuilding itself, the power of the Goddess in them once again. They toiled through the winter and spring, with boys in temporary wooden watchtowers keeping a lookout for marauders. And the first layer of stones went up.
In the meantime, Avram had hired men to patrol the vineyards in return for wine. His brothers brought the vines back to life and now they were flourishing and producing fruit. Other citizens joined in helping to keep the vineyard healthy, they weeded and pruned, fertilized and watered, for everyone craved wine, and they set upon any grape-thief with sticks and clubs.
And then two miracles occurred for which Avram was not prepared.
The first occurred after Dog disappeared one afternoon. It worried Avram for days until one morning she materialized at his door, her coat covered with the nettles found in the nearby hills, and fell down exhausted at his feet. After a passage of time, Avram noticed her belly start to swell, and when she gave birth to a litter of pups, he knew that a new population had taken up residence at the Place of the Perennial Spring.
Then the second miracle happened. “I am pregnant,” Marit said with such wonder in her tone that one would have thought she had looked upon the very face of the Goddess.
It was indeed a miracle, a sign that the Goddess had brought her blessings back to her people. But as Avram made tender love to Marit that night, he was aware of something at the back of his mind, like a transparent butterfly, annoying and teasing, but he could not catch it.
That summer, as more layers were added to the perimeter wall, and mud-brick houses were being erected within the circle, and a sturdy stone tower began to rise beneath stonemasons’ hands, Avram’s vineyard produced a bountiful crop, and everyone took time off from building to trample the grapes in the winepress.
Reina and the Goddess led the procession to the sacred cave, and as they approached, a wind came up, soft and lulling, sweet-scented and fresh. Avram paused to look out over the plain that stretched to the dead sea, and he had the odd sensation that someone with perfumed breath was breathing on him. His hair and beard stirred in the summer breeze, and then sunlight shot off the dead sea in spears of golden light. The day took on a surreal air. Suddenly he heard the heavy droning of insects, colors stood out brighter than before, as if the nature all about him were trying to tell him something.
He brought the procession to a halt at the base of the cliffs and squinted up to the shadowed opening of the cave. It struck him again as it had struck generations before him how like a womb it was. And into the womb of the Earth Mother the grape juice would be carried and placed on carved-out shelves, there to stay safely in the dark while the Goddess worked her magical transformation and imbued the juice with life, turning it into wine.
As Avram stared at the cave, the transparent butterfly returned to the edges of his mind, to flit about with maddening elusiveness: it was a thought waiting to be formed, an idea on the verge of being known. But hard as he tried to grasp it, it would not come to him.
After the wineskins had been placed in the cave, everyone returned to the settlement to continue working on the walls and mud-brick houses. But Avram’s mind was distracted. He helped with the mixing of straw into mud for the bricks, inspected the progress of the stone wall, and labored with other men to set the inner stairway of the new tower, but always part of his mind continued to chase the will-o’-the-wisp that had taken up residence in his mind.
Then one evening as he sat beneath a bower and drank beer while Marit mashed chickpeas and onions for their supper, his eyes fell upon Dog nursing her pups. And something struck him that he had not noticed before: that four of her puppies were white like herself, but two were gray like the wild wolves in the nearby hills.
Avram wondered for the first time how she had gotten pregnant. Dog came from a land far from the moon’s sovereignty. S
he came from the territory of the reindeer god. Did the reindeer god’s fertility power extend this far? Moreover, how had the spirit of the wolf entered Dog’s womb?
Avram’s mood waxed philosophical as he looked at Marit, far along in her pregnancy, and asked himself, What is it that creates life? Bodolf and his people believed it was the spirit of the reindeer. Hadadezer believed in the spirit of the bull. And the people of the Perennial Spring knew that it was the moon that created life. But could there possibly be a broader, more pervasive power than reindeer, bulls, and local moons? He thought again of the wine cave and the grape juice lying in fecund darkness, being transformed from juice to wine, being given “life” by the Goddess. And once again the elusive thought, that teasing butterfly, refused to be captured.
Over the next weeks, Avram found himself taking long walks in meadows and deserted canyons, to be alone with himself and his elusory thoughts. At night he tossed and turned in strange dreams involving Bodolf and Eskil, Yubal and himself, Hadadezer and the sons of the woman with whom he had lived for many years. When Avram awoke, the meanings of the dreams escaped him until one autumn afternoon, as he was impelled to separate himself once again from the company of men, with only Dog trotting faithfully at his heels, Avram came to a pond. He squatted and looked in, and saw Yubal looking up. It was then that the meaning of the dreams came to him: the younger men resembled their elders.
