The Blessing Stone (15 page)

She drank some more, thought about it some more, and found herself suddenly of cheery disposition. Declaring the grape sludge drinkable, Talitha ordered the men to haul the heavy, swollen baskets back to their camp that was but part of a massive encampment of hundreds of tents and shelters on the plain surrounding the bubbling spring. By the time Talitha’s band arrived back with the baskets, numerous cook fires were sending smoke up to the stars, laughter and shouts were on the air, families were busy about the industry of life, and the people of the Gazelle Clan settled down to ponder the new mystery in their midst.

Sitting on a wide stool, elbows braced on monumental thighs, Talitha dipped a wooden cup into one of the baskets from the cave and drank again. While everyone watched and waited, she again smacked her lips and ran her tongue around her mouth. A strange taste, she thought, but palatable. There was none of the usual sweetness one found in grape juice, but rather a peculiar kind of dryness. Signaling to the others, they all dipped their wooden cups into the slush and all tasted, some hesitantly, some boldly. Lips smacked loudly, opinions flew around the circle, indecision drove the cups back into the juice again and again.

All agreed on one thing: they had no idea what they were drinking.

After a while, however, strange symptoms began to manifest themselves: slurred speech, staggered gait, hiccups, and outbursts of laughter for no apparent reason. Talitha became mildly alarmed. Had her people become possessed by evil spirits? There were her two brothers, holding on to each other as they stumbled about. And her sisters, one giggling, the other weeping. She herself felt strangely warm. When the normally reserved Janka broke wind, everyone roared with laughter. Enjoying this response, he did it again on purpose, and when everyone laughed helplessly at this funniest thing in their lives, he made rude sounds with his mouth until the whole group was rolling around clutching their stomachs. Talitha also laughed, but a fear nagged at the back of her mind. This was not how they ordinarily acted. What was possessing them? Unfortunately she couldn’t think clearly and as she drank more of the grape juice, forgot what it was she couldn’t think clearly about. And then when Janka, stodgy and solemn Keeper of the Goddess, suddenly grabbed her and started kissing her, instead of being outraged—Talitha certainly hadn’t signaled to him that she was interested in copulating with him—to her great surprise she giggled and happily lifted her skirt for him.

He finished quickly and soon rolled off to snore at her side. Talitha helped herself to more grape juice and realized in shock that her knees no longer gave her pain.

For months now her knees had been bothering her, the joints swelling to the point where she had to be carried everywhere. Even the short jaunt to the limestone cave had afflicted her with such pain that it had taken two strapping men to carry her back. But now, strangely, her knees not only felt perfectly fine, they felt like the knees of a young woman!

This both startled and cheered her—surely they were drinking a magical drink. A drink filled with the spirits of happiness and health. A blessing from the Goddess!

But as she drank more, instead of continuing to feel young and cheerful, she started to feel maudlin and after yet another fortifying drink, managed to get to her feet and stumble through other camps, tripping over people, nearly knocking a tent over until finally she staggered into Serophia’s compound where everyone fell into a shocked silence.

Talitha started weeping and beating her breast. “We are cousins, Serophia! We are kinswomen! We should love one another, not hate! I am at fault. I am so greedy and selfish.” She fell to her knees. “Can you forgive me, my dear cousin?”

Serophia was in such a state of shock that she could only stare with her mouth hanging open. Two of Talitha’s nephews, who had been out looking for her, came into the circle and, seeing their aunt in such a state, immediately took hold of her by the elbows, lifted her up and helped her out of the compound, Serophia and her kinsmen staring after.

By the time they reached Talitha’s tent she was incoherent—as were most of the other family members. When her nephews laid her down on her bedding skins, she immediately fell asleep, her loud snores filling the night.

The next morning it was a different story.

They all slowly started waking up to discover they felt absolutely terrible. Devils pounded their heads and churned their stomachs, evil spirits cramped their bowels and made them run with diarrhea. Their hands shook, their vision was blurred. Several declared they were on the verge of death. Mortification and embarrassment swept over them as they suddenly remembered antics from the night before. Worse, they were afflicted with memory loss.

When Talitha stumbled out of her tent, clutching her head, she squinted in the morning light to see Ari on his hands and knees, retching violently, Janka drinking from a water gourd as if all the rivers in the world could not quench his thirst, and absolutely everyone holding their heads and moaning. And several of the women were dismayed to find physical evidence of having engaged in sexual intercourse that they could not remember.

Talitha was both perplexed and frightened. How could they have all been so merry the night before, yet feel on the verge of death this morning? Clearly they had been possessed by spirits that had made them feel happy and joyous but then left them feeling sick and miserable afterward—evil trickster spirits!

Talitha herself had no memory of her visit to Serophia’s camp until she saw the shamefaced look on her two nephews, the only two who hadn’t drunk the grape juice the night before. As she was wondering why they wouldn’t meet her eye, and why they looked like naughty children about to suffer a whipping, it came back to her.
She had been on her knees begging Serophia’s forgiveness.

“By the breasts of the Goddess!” she shrieked. Had they all been possessed by evil spirits?

Nonetheless, Talitha did not want to give up the new drink altogether. After all, there
had
been the good cheer. She instructed the seers and Keeper of the Goddess to read the signs and omens, to meditate upon what had happened and to pray to the Goddess for guidance. And after a day of retreat and prayer, fasting and ingesting magic mushrooms, the clan’s prophets declared that the magic drink had been transformed by the Goddess and given to her chosen children as a special gift. After all, the seers and Keeper of the Goddess also remembered the good feelings of the night before. And so they approached the situation with care, regarding the transformed juice as a sacred drink, not to be taken lightly but with great solemnity.

Word spread throughout the vast encampment until everyone was talking about the magic grape juice. Talitha invited the heads of other clans to drink the juice and give their opinion. Serophia was pointedly not invited. They passed the bowl around and tasted the wine. They felt their veins run warm and their ears buzz pleasantly. The clan heads and seers conferred and discussed, drank more wine, and finally agreed that the enchanted juice was not a bad thing. After all, it made one cheerful, it drove away pain, and rewarded the imbiber with a peaceful sleep. In fact, it was clearly a holy drink, imbued with the spirit of life by the Goddess.

The Gazelle Clan wintered in the northern caves and the next spring arrived at the Gathering place before the other clans. They harvested the grapes and transported them straight away to the secret caves overlooking the dead sea. They waited a week and went back to taste the juice. But all they found were grapes. They waited another week, and still there was no magic juice. Finally Talitha declared that it must take a year for the transformation to take place, and so they stayed away from the cave, which they kept secret from the other clans, and when they returned the following summer, went straight to their secret cave where they tasted the juice with great apprehension. It had been transformed! This time Talitha shared the special drink with the other clans and accepted items in trade.

The fourth time the family visited the perennial spring, Talitha said that there was no point to going back to the caves for the winter when they could build sturdy shelters right here. Better to stay and guard the grapes, she reasoned, than to leave and risk other people taking them.

But their ancient tradition was:
what was, is; what is, will always be.
They made the annual north-south-north circuit simply because they always had. But now, just as Tall One had determined that, for survival, her people must leave, Talitha decided that her people must stay. It frightened them not to return to the caves for the winter but at the same time they discovered that they liked staying by the perennial spring. They also secretly feared that if they left they might not ever again taste of the magic drink. So Talitha sent a contingent up north to exhume their ancestors’ bones from the caves and bring them back for reburial. Her reasoning was: if the ancestors were buried here, then this was ancestral land.

So they built sturdy shelters and appointed themselves guardians of the cheerful vine and come next summer when the fruit ripened, Talitha led the family in the harvest, juice-making, and storage of the magic drink. Not knowing about the yeast that occurred naturally on the skins of the grapes, or its chemical action upon the sugar in the grape, turning it into alcohol, or that the process was called fermentation, they believed that it was the Goddess instilling the otherwise innocuous grape with properties that made men cheerful and women pregnant.

Talitha’s family monopolized the vines but happily traded the wine for goods the other clans had to offer. But while she excluded Serophia’s clan from this lively commerce, awarding herself a victory in her feud with her cousin, Talitha did not know that another secret discovery was taking place.

A second valuable crop grew naturally near the perennial spring, and every summer the clans helped themselves to as much of the barley as they needed, roasting the ears over their fires and eating the grains. Serophia decided that, in retaliation for Talitha’s victory, she would monopolize the barley crop, trading with others but withholding the grain from Talitha’s clan. She also decided that, like the Talitha bunch, her family would stay at the spring to ensure their ownership of the barley. But no sacred cave was involved; the harvested barley seeds were stored in baskets in one of Serophia’s tents, and measured out to be eaten or traded.

And so more years passed, with the Talitha clan trading wine for goods on one side of the spring, the Serophia clan bartering with barley grain on the other, until the Summer of the Rain when a second miracle occurred.

Rain was rare enough in the Jordan River Valley, even more so during the summer, and so when a storm struck that sent a deluge upon the encampment that lasted for days, the miserable settlers discovered leaks in their tents they had never before had to contend with. Not only were bedding and clothing soaked, but rain filled the baskets of stored barley grain, ruining it.

Serophia, in her pride, would not have the baskets emptied. She kept the ruined grain supply a secret lest word got around to Talitha and gave her a reason to gloat. And then one day in the fall, a nephew remarked that the tent where the ruined barley was stored had a peculiar smell. Upon inspection, the family found the baskets swollen and distended and found inside, instead of the soaked barley seeds, a thick fluid that gave off a pungent aroma. Like Talitha, Serophia’s clan knew nothing about airborne yeast and its effect upon barley soaking in water and the resulting fermentation. All they knew was that the transformed drink made people feel exhilarated and blissful.

In time, Serophia’s descendants learned how to make beer on purpose and thus a new commerce was born.

Because the clans no longer roamed, the people discovered that they had extra time on their hands, and so they turned their time and energies to leisurely industry such as making jewelry, tools, musical instruments, and improving their methods of hide-tanning. Food became more sophisticated. Instead of eating wild wheat grains right off the ear, women found that grinding the grain between stones and cooking it with water made a nourishing gruel. One autumn day a woman named Fara was suddenly called away from her labors, and in her haste tipped the mixture of water and grain onto hot stones. When she returned she found a tastier treat than gruel, and one that stored well. And so a third family decided to make the perennial spring their permanent home, and they settled down to the lucrative industry of bread-making.

More families came, and once people started cultivating their own vegetables, which were watered by the bubbling spring, thus providing a ready food source, the people no longer found need to go roaming in search of fresh food. They began to erect permanent dwellings, and permanence meant that material wealth was no longer limited to what an individual could carry. Private mud-brick homes began to fill with personal goods and accumulations, baubles and trinkets, creating for the first time two new statuses of people: the rich and the poor.

And the Goddess, with her miraculous blue stone that turned grape juice into wine and barley into beer, became the focus of a new trend of prayers. No longer were there just prayers for the dead, fertility, and health, now there were prayers for rain to make the crops grow, prayers for an abundant harvest, prayers for more customers.

The poor prayed to become rich, and the rich prayed to become richer.

THE JORDAN RIVER VALLEY
10,000 Years Ago

For all Avram knew, the night could have been filled with portents and apparitions, comets and an eclipsing moon—a night ominous and frightful, heralding Doomsday and Armageddon. Or, it could have been a peaceful summer’s night. You would not know it by Avram—he was in a world of his own.

Such a dream he had had! Marit in his arms, luscious and supple, warm and giving, bending to him, lifting hips and lips to him. A dream so fueled with passion that even now, as he made his way through the vineyard in the cold light of dawn, Avram’s skin still burned with fever. As he scaled the wooden ladder of the lookout tower, hand over hand, loaves of barley bread swinging on a cord from one shoulder, a skin filled with diluted beer from the other—for Avram would spend the day in the tower, watching for marauders—he felt his arousal start anew. By the time he reached the top he had a full erection again. Avram had never been so in love, or so miserable, in his entire life.

He was all of sixteen years old.

The object of his love was a girl of fourteen with budding breasts and eyes like those of a gazelle. She was long limbed, graceful as the wind, sweet tempered, and kind. The object of his misery was the fact that Marit was of the House of Serophia while Avram was of the House of Talitha. Their families had been feuding for two centuries and the mutual hatred between them was legendary. If anyone knew of Avram’s secret love for the forbidden Marit, he would be publicly humiliated and cursed, beaten, locked up, and starved, maybe even castrated. At least in Avram’s young mind that was how he imagined his punishment would be.

But he could not stop thinking about the words his
abba,
Yubal, had spoken three years ago when Avram had started noticing changes in his own body. “Life is hard, lad. It’s a daily toil filled with pain and suffering. So the Goddess in her wisdom gave us the gift of pleasure to offset all that misery. She made it so that men and women can give pleasure to one another, to make them forget their unhappiness. Therefore when the urge comes upon you, lad, take your pleasure where you can, for it is what the Mother of us all wishes.”

Apparently Yubal was right, for it seemed to Avram that the citizens of the Place of the Perennial Spring were singularly concerned with pleasing the Goddess in that respect. The traditional pastime of the settlement was an endless circle of falling in love, setting up house, and breaking up. Sporting citizens, who always loved gossip, would sit over vats of beer and make wagers on how long a new pairing would last, or who was going to be seen creeping out of whose hut. Sometimes the breakup of a relationship was mutual, but more often it was one partner getting bored and moving on. That was when fights broke out, especially if one partner had moved in with another. Everyone still talked about the day Lea the midwife had caught Uriah the arrow-maker with one of the Onion Sisters. Lea had pulled the woman’s scalp right off her head and then had thrown scalding water on Uriah. The arrow-maker had fled the settlement never to return. But there were also those rare ones who stayed together for a lifetime—his own mother and his
abba
had been such an example—and that was how he saw it for himself and the delectable Marit: lovers for eternity.

As Avram stood beneath the shaded platform at the top of the tower—the grass canopy being vital for it was now summer and the days were growing hot—he tried to draw in deep breaths of chill morning air, hoping it would cool his ardor so that he could focus on the business of searching the hills and ravines for signs of raiders. He was determined to do a good job of it. The year before, when the raiders had come from the east, there had been no warning. His mother had been brutally slaughtered and his two sisters abducted. And so the tower had been built, and it was Avram’s job to sit up here as a guard against future attacks.

The raiders didn’t come every year, there was no predicting their attacks. A savage race, their land was on the other side of the eastern mountains and they lived by hunting and stealing. No one knew who they were or how they lived because no one had ever had the courage to follow them after a raid. But rumors flew. It was said the raiders ate rocks and drank sand, that they had no womenfolk of their own but perpetuated their race by kidnapping the women of other tribes. Their souls could leave their bodies while they slept. They were shape-shifters and often prowled among the people at the perennial spring disguised as crows and rats. They ate their dead.

And so vigilance was essential. But it wasn’t easy constantly scanning the horizon for raiders, or searching the rows of vines for thieves, especially as Avram could not take his mind off Marit and the delicious dream he had had the night before. Surely no man had ever been so afflicted with desire as he. Not even his
abba,
Yubal, who had wept openly when Avram’s mother had been killed, declaring her to be the only woman he ever had loved.

The boy squared his shoulders and began his vigil.

The sky was pinking up over the eastern mountains and the settlement called the Place of the Perennial Spring—and which lay half a day’s journey to the west of the river the people called Jordan, which meant “the descender,” for it flowed from north to south—was stirring awake in the early mist, cook fires smoking to life, aromas of baked bread and roasted meat filling the air, voices rising in anger, joy, surprise, and impatience. From where Avram stood he could see not only his
abba
’s vineyard and the barley fields of Serophia—and olive groves and pomegranate orchards and stands of date palms—he also had an excellent view of the central settlement, a vast encampment of some two thousand souls living in mud-brick houses, grass shelters, goat-hide tents, or just sleeping on the ground cocooned in furs with worldly possessions tucked beneath their heads.

While many people lived here permanently, some came yesterday and would be gone today, with others arriving today to be gone tomorrow. People came to the Place of the Perennial Spring to barter obsidian for salt, cowrie shells for linseed oil, green malachite for flax fiber, beer for wine, and meat for bread. At the center of this great beehive of humanity, with long irrigation channels radiating out like the legs of a spider, bubbled the perennial spring of sweet water, where even now, in the breaking light of day, girls and women dipped their baskets and gourds.

Avram sighed restlessly. All those females and not one of them was as beautiful or alluring as his beloved Marit.

Like most boys his age, Avram was not inexperienced when it came to sex. Although the sport consisted mostly of going into the hills with his friends to capture a wild ewe and take turns on her, he had engaged in some limited experimentation with girls. But with Marit, Avram had had no experience at all. They had not even, in all their years of living on adjoining properties, exchanged a single word. He was certain his grandmother would kill him if he even tried.

Avram wished he lived in the Old Days, which he imagined had been much better than today. He loved hearing the stories of the ancestors—not Talitha and Serophia, but the
very old
ancestors—when his people were nomads and had all lived together in one big tribe and men and women took their pleasure with whom they chose. But now they were no longer nomads traveling in great clans but instead small families that lived in one house on the same spot of ground and that somehow made people think that those who lived on one spot of ground were better than those who lived on another. “Yubal’s wine tastes like donkey piss,” Marit’s
abba,
Molok, was always declaring. “Molok’s beer was squeezed from the testicles of pigs,” Avram’s
abba,
Yubal, would counter. Not that the two men would voice these opinions to each other’s faces. Members of the Houses of Talitha and Serophia had not exchanged words in generations.

So one could count on it that never,
ever
would a boy from one house and a girl from the other find their way into each other’s arms.

Avram didn’t think it was fair. The rivalry belonged to the ancestors, not to him. The ancestors had had their day and their say. Now it was Avram’s time. He fantasized about running away with Marit (once he figured out a way to talk to her first), taking her far from his vineyard and her barley field, far from the tents and huts and mud-brick houses, exploring the world together. For Avram had been born a dreamer and a quester, his soul restless, his mind forever questioning and wondering why. In another age he would have been an astronomer or an explorer, an inventor or a scholar. But telescopes and ships, metallurgy and the alphabet, even the wheel and domesticated animals were things as yet undreamed of.

Untying a loaf of flat barley bread, he broke off a piece and as he chewed, turned his eyes to the cluster of humble mud-brick dwellings that crouched at the edge of the Serophia barley field—the threshing hut, the shed where vats of barley grains fermented into beer, and the private house where Marit’s family lived—and he released a sigh filled with longing, his ardor all the more acute because he had no idea how Marit felt about
him.

He thought at times that he had caught her watching him. Just a few weeks ago, at the festival of the Spring Equinox, she had suddenly looked away and a flush had appeared on her cheeks. Was it a good-luck sign? Did that mean she shared his sentiment? If only he knew!

As the sun continued to break over the distant mountains, Avram scanned the settlement for Marit—he would consider a glimpse of her at this early hour a good-luck sign, which meant the rest of his day would go well. But all he saw were fat Cochava chasing after her children with a stick; two brick-makers locked in a loud argument over a vat of beer (apparently they had not stopped drinking all night); Enoch the tooth-puller and Lea the midwife engaged in hurried copulation against a tree. Across the way, he saw Dagan the fisherman scrambling miserably out of Mahalia’s hut, his possessions flying after him as if flung by an angry hand inside. Last month Dagan had been living with Ziva, and the month before that, Anath. Avram wondered what it was about Dagan that made women get tired of him so quickly and throw him out. Poor Dagan—without a woman and her hearth, how was a man to live?

Then Avram saw a sight that made him laugh out loud. Here came crazy Namir with another of his goat experiments! Two years ago Namir had hit upon the notion that instead of chasing after goats in the hills, killing what was needed and then returning to the settlement, it would be a lot less work if he brought live goats home, kept them in a pen, and slaughtered them for food or traded them as needed. So he and his nephews had gone into the hills and trapped as many goats as they could. But since they wanted the herd to perpetuate itself, they took only she-goats, leaving behind the males. But after a year, the she-goats stopped producing young and the last of the little herd was eaten or traded away. While his neighbors laughed, Namir vowed to make his plan work. “After all,” he told his friends over vats of beer, “goat herds perpetuate in the hills, why not in my pen?” So he went out again and trapped she-goats, bringing them back to his pen with its fences made of sticks, branches, and brush. This time, none of the goats produced young and in no time the captive herd was eaten or sold. So here he was again, determined to maintain a herd of goats, leading his embarrassed nephews through the awakening settlement as they carried squirming and bleating she-goats tied to long poles. Avram could just see through the gathering smoke, four men sitting under an arbor sharing a vat of beer, shouting insults at Namir and making bets on how long
this
captive herd would last.

It seemed to Avram that everyone in the settlement had a scheme, and not all as ludicrous as Namir’s. He remembered when everyone had laughed at another man, Yasap, who had arrived ten years ago and planted fields of flowers. The people had laughed because what use were flowers? They stopped laughing when the bees found the fields and Yasap kept hives and collected honey. For the first time in memory, people had sugar all year round, and so great in demand was the sweet treat that Yasap was now the third richest man in the settlement.

More and more people, coming to the Place of the Perennial Spring for the first time, looked around and saw opportunities for an easier life, built shelters and went roaming no more. People with special skills traded their services for food, clothing, and jewelry: barbers and tattooists, soothsayers and star-readers, bone-carvers and stone-polishers, fishermen and tanners, midwives and healers, trappers and hunters. All came, most stayed.

If
I
were free and on my own,
Avram thought,
I would not try to think of ways to stay here. I would pack bread and beer, take up my spear and see what was on the other side of the mountains.

Hearing high pitched shouts, he looked down and saw his little brothers running up and down the rows of vines, chasing the birds away. Aged thirteen, eleven, and ten, the boys loved the vineyard and had made it their world. Come the harvest next week they would pull their weight alongside adult men in filling baskets with ripe fruit, and later when all the grapes were gathered, the boys’ little feet would work hard in the winepress mashing the grapes into juice.