The Blessing Stone (26 page)

He was stunned. Was that it? Everyone knew that moonflow was what the Goddess used to create babies. But what if the moonflow was like grape juice? For this was the essential miracle of life: the grapes did not ferment on the vine, nor did grape juice ferment when contained in a wooden cup. Grapes were grapes and juice was juice. It required the power of the Goddess in her cave to change it to wine.

But it requires men to carry the grape juice into the cave.

Avram stood as if thunderstruck. Turning his face to the breeze, he peered into the distance and saw on the rolling plain that surrounded the bubbling spring the new fields being plowed for planting. And he saw what he had not seen before: how the furrows in the ground resembled a woman’s private place. And then he pictured the seed being scattered by the hand of a man.

Did men and women together create life?

No,
he corrected himself.
It is the Goddess who creates life—that power is hers alone. But she takes from both male and female to form that new life.

He nearly fell beneath the weight of the revelation:
Wine is made the way babies are made, through the power of the Goddess. But just as grapes placed in the cave do not transform into a holy drink, but require the collaborative effort of man for them to become wine, then it follows that the moonflow on its own cannot become a child but requires the involvement of a man. And seeds scattered willy-nilly on unprepared ground are not as likely to sprout as those sown into plowed fields. Cave and field and woman: they are all Mother. They each bring forth life. But not on their own, each needs the contribution of a man.

And then came the most staggering realization of all: Marit, who had lain with no man in eleven years, was now pregnant.

Avram went to the shrine of the Goddess to seek her counsel. He prayed and silently asked,
Am I entertaining blasphemous thoughts?
But then he saw Reina and recalled how, long ago, he had looked on her with youthful lust, and he had asked himself then why the Goddess had created this confounding hunger between men and women. Because it seemed to him now, as it had seemed to him as a tormented youth, that intimacy between men and women wasn’t
all
pleasure, as Yubal would have had him believe. “The Goddess gave us this pleasure to help us forget our pain,” his
abba
had said long ago. But now it did not make sense to Avram. So often the pursuit of intimate pleasure was accompanied by pain and often followed by tragedy. Why then had the Goddess created this inescapable magnetism between men and women?

And then she spoke to him:
It is to ensure that life is created, Avram.

He began to tremble with excitement. His next question almost terrified him:
And so it
is
man and woman, male and female?
he asked of the statue with the meteorite heart.

As if in response, the blue crystal seemed to shimmer and shoot out points of light. Avram stared at the mystical stone and looked deeply into its heart, struggling to see an answer. And in the next instant his mind opened in a blinding epiphany: where he had once seen the milky essence at the crystal’s core as the perennial spring, he now recognized it as a man’s essence when he takes his pleasure with a woman.
The moonflow and man’s fluid, combining in the cave of the woman, for the Goddess to work her miracle.

Suddenly everything fell into place. As if he had observed the world through blurry eyes all of his life and suddenly his sight was sharpened. It all made sense, the entire wondrous miracle of it. Now he saw it everywhere he went: birds building nests together, male and female, to produce eggs and feed their young; fish swimming in the streams, the females to lay eggs, the males to swim over them and bless them with their procreative essence. He felt connected to all of humankind and all of nature in a way he never had before. No longer a bystander in creation but an integral part of it. He recalled what Marit had once said about being one link in a long chain. Now he was part of a chain as well, without whom subsequent links could not be connected to those preceding. Marit, pregnant—
with his child.

It was as if the sky had opened up. For all his life Avram had wondered
why,
and he had wanted to delve the mysteries of nature. As he looked around himself, suddenly everything made sense, suddenly he
understood
.

He went straight away to his tent where he prostrated himself before the avatars of the ancestors, and he spoke to Yubal, pouring out his heart and bearing his soul, declaring his love and reverence for the man, shedding tears of relief and joy as he called him
abba,
this time adding a new meaning to the word, for though it had always meant “master” or “steward of a house,” from now on it would also mean “father.”

Avram did not make public his new knowledge for he knew people would only laugh and declare that he had stared at the moon too long. But he did quietly advise Namir to take he-goats along with the females the next time he trapped a herd, and he remarked to Guri the lamp-maker that his plan to raise pigs was not an outlandish notion. He did tell Marit, however, the miraculous news, and she accepted it for it had come from the Goddess. Avram knew that, in time, as men raised donkeys and dogs, goats and pigs, they would make the same observations as he had, and reach the same conclusions.

At last the wall was finished.

Everyone gathered to celebrate the dedication of the new tower, which they were going to call Jericho, which means “blessed by the moon.” Avram climbed the new stone stairway nearly twelve years to the day after he had climbed the wooden ladder of his father’s watchtower in the vineyard on a fateful dawn that seemed so long ago. Then, he had been a beardless boy, filled with uncertainty and lacking purpose, pulling himself up rung by rung, trying to make sense of a confusing world. Now he was a man, confident and purposeful, planting his feet firmly one after the other on the stone steps.

Among the proud onlookers was Marit, holding their child on her hip, a strapping boy of thirteen months. At her side was Dog, her belly swollen again, and flanked by a new generation of puppies. Avram had seen Dog’s first pups grow to maturity, and then romp and play and mount one another until the females were pregnant so that a third generation of domesticated dog was about to join the settlement. Namir was smiling in the sunshine, the fat and prosperous and very proud owner of a flourishing herd of goats, because he had taken Avram’s advice. Guri the lamp-maker was experimenting with pigs again, and the Onion Sisters were adding a duck pen to their plot of ground, discovering as Avram had discovered that there was a greater harmony in nature than they had previously thought, a wondrous interdependence that was like a beautiful, shimmering spider web, with animals and spirits and humans all connected in a sacred contract.

Avram reached the top of the tower, and when he emerged into the brilliant sunshine, a roar rose up from the crowd. The citizens of Jericho looked upon their achievement with great pride and feelings of security, for nowhere in the world were there walls such as these, walls that they knew no invaders could pull down. As he welcomed the deafening roar, feeling at peace and exonerated of his past sins, Avram allowed his thoughts to float away over the miles until they reached the People of the Reindeer—Frida, and the child she had been carrying when he left. His child.

Avram had left his blood up there in the frozen north, the bloodline of Talitha, the bloodline of Yubal, to be carried on by others, so many miles away.

Interim

Avram never understood why it was to him that the knowledge of fatherhood had been given. But the Goddess had her reasons and for the rest of his life he thanked her morning and night, his prayers full of praise for the Mother of all. In time, although not in Avram’s day or in the days of his sons and grandsons, the Mother of All would be joined by a Father of All, until someday, in the not too distant future, the Mother would be supplanted entirely by the Father.

Jericho prospered. Avram and Marit had more sons, Namir’s goat herd increased, more litters were born to Dog and to Dog’s puppies, Guri ceased being a lamp-maker and became a prosperous pig farmer. More crops were planted, wheat and corn, cotton and flax, more animals were domesticated and raised for their milk, eggs, and wool. With increased bounty and good luck, the people made sacrifice to the Goddess. Her shrine was enlarged and her priestesses grew in number. As the centuries passed, the wall gradually bore no more resemblance to the one engineered by Avram for, as it turned out, down through the ages the walls of Jericho would fall many times to be rebuilt again and again.

The manufacture of textiles came to Jericho, and the alphabet and writing. Two thousand years after Avram and Marit joined their ancestors, a man named Azizu was at his potter’s wheel and accidentally knocked it over. As he watched it spin away on its side, an idea came to him. It took many attempts and failures but Azizu succeeded in making two wheels roll on an axle, upon which he placed a cart. He could now transport ten times as much pottery as before, and he credited his inspiration to a visit to the shrine of the Goddess where he had kissed her blue-crystal heart for luck. Four thousand years after Hadadezer dazzled Avram with copper nuggets scooped out of a streambed, men were mining copper and tin and smelting them together to form bronze. A thousand years after that, men discovered iron and how to master it, and the world changed forever.

As populations increased, settlements became villages and villages became towns. Leaders rose from the masses and called themselves kings and queens to rule over others. Al-Iari’s power grew, her shrine became a tabernacle and then a temple with priests and priestesses. Her people called themselves Canaanites, and travelers from Babylon and Sumer recognized her as their own beloved Ishtar and Inanna. Alongside Baal, she was worshiped for her fertility, and though her countenance changed over the years and her statue replaced many times, the ancient blue crystal remained her heart.

And so she had lived, protected and adored, for thousands of generations from the time of Laliari and Zant. And then invaders came from the valley of the Nile led by a ferocious conquering pharaoh named Amenhotep who brought back not only human captives but captured gods and goddesses as well. Among them was the patron Goddess of Jericho, who was housed temporarily and out of respect in the shrine of a lesser Egyptian goddess, where her crystalline heart caught the eye of an adulterous queen.

When the queen was laid to rest in a tomb splendid beyond imagining (due to the guilty conscience of the king who had poisoned her) the blue crystal went with her, and there queen and crystal slept in a dark, airless world, anonymous and forgotten for a thousand years until tomb-robbers, drunk on beer, smelling of urine and covered in fleabites, smashed their way into the tomb and brought the ancient blue stone back out into the light of day. The teardrop of sky-hued meteorite changed hands over a succession of years as it was bought, sold, stolen, fought over, and gambled away until it wound up in Alexandria, in the possession of an important Roman official who had the stone set in a beautiful gold necklace for his wife.

He intended the gift to be a punishment.

ROME
64
C.E.

Lady Amelia’s prayer was a desperate one.

Please let the child be healthy.

The shrine of the household gods held several Roman deities, therefore Lady Amelia had her pick of some of the most powerful in the pantheon. But since the circumstances called for the special intercession of a goddess who empathized with a mother’s plea, Lady Amelia had chosen one whom people called Blessed Virgin (because she had conceived a child without assistance from a man), a goddess who had known suffering when her son was hung on a tree to die, to descend to the underworld and to rise resurrected. Therefore it was to this compassionate mother, the Queen of Heaven, to whom Lady Amelia now made her plea. “Please let the child be without blemish or flaw. Let my daughter’s husband find favor with it and accept it into the family.”

Her whispered words died in the morning silence. Died because there was no meaning behind them, no faith. Her prayer was a sham, lip service to a piece of marble. Lady Amelia was going through the motions of piety because it was expected of her; as a model Roman matron she always did the right thing, always kept up appearances. But in her heart she was completely without faith. How could a woman believe in goddesses when men had the right to dispose of women’s babies?

Her prayer finished, she crossed herself, touching shoulders, forehead and breast because she had once been a follower of Hermes, the ancient savior-god known as the Word Made Flesh. The signing of the cross was from years of habit. Lady Amelia no longer believed in its power. She remembered a time when prayers were a comfort, when the gods were a comfort. But now the gods were gone and there was no comfort in the world.

Cries suddenly filled the house, echoing off walls and columns and statuary. Her daughter had been in labor for a day and a half and the midwives were beginning to despair.

Lady Amelia turned away from Blessed Virgin Juno, mother of the savior-god Mars, and delivered herself into the shaded colonnade that enclosed the villa’s interior garden where a fountain splashed sweetly on this warm spring day. Lady Amelia did not bother to visit the shrine of the ancestors. She hadn’t prayed to them in years. Without gods there could be no afterlife and without an afterlife the ancestors could not exist.

She slipped silently past the atrium where young men were playing dice and laughing, unconcerned about the screams that tore the morning peace. They were Amelia’s three sons and two sons-in-law, as well as close friends of the youth whose child was struggling to come into the world. As she passed the open doorway she saw her daughter’s husband, a young father-to-be reclining at his ease, drinking wine and rolling dice as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

Perhaps he hasn’t,
she thought in uncharacteristic rancor. Childbirth was the concern of women alone.

A thought flew like a shadow across Amelia’s mind, swift and dark like a raven:
We women carry children inside our bodies, we feed them with our breath and our blood, our beating hearts pump life into them, and for nearly ten months the child and the mother are one. And then come the birth pains, the tearing of the flesh and rush of blood, the agony of pushing the new life out into the world. However, for you, young father, there is no pain, no blood. A moment of pleasure and nine months later you drink wine and roll dice and decide the fate of the newborn.

Amelia experienced a pang of resentment. Not just toward her son-in-law but toward all men who decided life and death as blithely as if it were the toss of dice. She had not always felt this way. There was a time when Amelia, wife of the powerful and noble Cornelius Gaius Vitellius, had believed in the gods and had thought life was good, that
men
were good. But all joy and faith had been extinguished the day death had been chosen over life.

A day not unlike today.

Her path was blocked suddenly by an elderly man. The Bird Reader, whom she had hired to interpret the signs. The old Greek plied a lucrative trade because Romans were a superstitious people, always watching for signs and omens, reading meaning into every cloud and thunderclap. For a Roman the day could not begin without first determining if it was an auspicious day for conducting business, for getting married, for making fish sauce. And of all the instruments of augury, from knucklebones to tea leaves, the flight of birds was the most important—even the word “auspicious” was derived from
auspicium,
which meant the divination of flights of birds.

“I have read the auspices, Lady,” the Bird Reader began. “I see a man. His arms are opened wide, ready to embrace you.”

“Me? Surely you mean my daughter. Or her newborn.”

“The signs were very clear. A man is coming into
your
life, Lady, and he is holding his arms out in welcome.”

The only man she could think of was her husband, Cornelius, due back from Egypt any day. But that wasn’t possible. He hadn’t opened his arms to her in years.

“What do the birds say of my daughter?”

The soothsayer shrugged—a quick gesture—and held out his hand for payment. “They say nothing of her, Lady, only of you.”

Amelia gave the man a gold coin and hurried along the colonnade to the bedchamber where her daughter was laboring to bring new life into the world.

Lady Amelia had taken every precaution to ensure the success of this pregnancy, her youngest daughter’s first. As soon as Cornelia had announced she was with child, Amelia had insisted she come and stay at home during the pregnancy, home in this case being the country villa where the patrician Vitellius family had produced wine and olives for generations. Amelia would have preferred their house in the city, but whenever her husband Cornelius was away, as he was now on a trip to Egypt, he insisted she and the household retire to the country. Only Amelia knew his secret reason for this unbending rule. Only Amelia knew that it was a form of punishment.

She went into the bedchamber that was crowded with midwives and their assistants, Cornelia’s aunts and female cousins, her older sister and two sisters-in-law, and the astrologer who sat in the corner with his charts and instruments, ready to record the moment of the child’s birth. Following a very old tradition among aristocratic families, Amelia’s daughter had been named after her father, hence Cornelia (just as their eldest son was Cornelius), which sometimes led to confusion. Amelia would have liked to name her daughter after herself, but it wasn’t done.

Amelia’s heart went out to Cornelia who, at seventeen, was the same age she herself had been when she had given birth to
her
first child, a son who would now be twenty-six had he lived. Amelia’s second pregnancy had ended in miscarriage, but her third pregnancy, when she was twenty-one, had resulted in her eldest son, Cornelius, twenty-two years old and studying the law in the hopes of following in his father’s illustrious footsteps. Amelia had been pregnant seven times after that: one that had given her twins, now twenty years old, the one producing Cornelia, two producing babies that died in infancy, the one that had given them Gaius, their thirteen-year-old son, another ending in miscarriage, and the final pregnancy, six years ago when Amelia was thirty-seven, the pregnancy that had altered her life and her universe forever.

She went to her daughter’s bedside and, looking down in sympathy and concern, placed her hand on Cornelia’s feverish forehead in a sincere wish that she could take her pain upon herself.

The young woman pushed her mother’s hand away. “Where is Papa?” she said fretfully. “I want Papa.”

Amelia felt a stab of pain. Cornelia had not finally agreed to stay at the country villa because she wanted to be with her mother but because she had wanted to be there when her father returned from Egypt. “I sent word to Ostia,” Amelia said. “As soon as his ship arrives, he will be told.”

Cornelia turned away from her mother and lifted up her hands to her sister and sisters-in-law. The other young women crowded around until Amelia was pushed out of the circle. She did not protest. Lady Amelia had been pushed out of the family’s circle years ago, when grief had driven her to commit an unforgivable act. Little girls that had once worshipped her and followed her around like sunbeams, had turned their backs on a woman they decided was no longer worthy of their love.

Yes!
she wanted to cry, as she had wanted to cry for the past six years.
I committed adultery. I sought comfort in another man’s arms. But it was not for need of sex or love—I was driven to him out of grief because my baby was born lame and my husband threw it away!

But the cry went unspoken, as it always did—no one cared why Amelia had slept with another man, only that she
had
—and she clasped her hands tightly as she watched the midwife at her work. The woman had lubricated the birth canal with goose grease, and still the baby would not come, so now she drew a long white feather from her bag, climbed onto the bed to straddle the laboring mother, and proceeded to tease Cornelia’s nose into a sneeze.

Lady Amelia closed her eyes as a painful memory flashed in her mind. Her own labor during the birth of her last child, the baby Cornelius had refused to acknowledge, ordering a servant to take it, only minutes old, to a rubbish heap to be left exposed. Amelia had never even seen the child. It had been taken straight from her womb to Cornelius, who had taken one look at the crooked foot and declared the child unfit. Amelia had spent the years since trying to understand what she had done to cause it, for surely she must blame herself. How else to explain the baby’s malformed foot? With a grief-filled heart she had relived the months of the pregnancy over and over, trying to discover the one mistake, the one slip she had made that had caused the deformity. And then it had come to her: the day she had been sitting in the garden of their city house. She had been reading a book of poetry and had not felt the butterfly land on her foot. It was only when she glanced down that she had seen it, and because she had been so entranced by its proximity and its beauty, and its apparent lack of fear—for it had lingered there, glorious in the sunshine, fluttering its fragile wings—she had not shooed it away. How long the butterfly had rested on her foot she did not know, but clearly it had been enough to leave a mark on the baby that had been taking shape in her womb at that moment, for three months later the child was born with a twisted foot, marking it for disposal on a waste heap.

This was why Lady Amelia had been so protective of her daughter these past months, reading the auspices several times a day, watching for signs, being careful not to break any taboos or to bring bad luck into the house. When a black cat had appeared in the garden, she had had it destroyed at once. But a stray white cat had been brought in and pampered for good luck. Lady Amelia could not bear to have her daughter go through the agony she herself had gone through with that last, lost child.

Since the feather had not produced results, the midwife dug again into her bag and brought out a measure of pepper that she emptied into her hand. Bringing it up to Cornelia’s nose, she said, “Inhale deeply.” The girl did and produced such a forceful sneeze that the baby was pushed down and the assistant cried, “There is the head!”

Moments later, the infant slithered onto the waiting blanket. While the midwife tied and severed the umbilical cord, Lady Amelia stood apprehensively at the bedside.

“Is it a boy?” Cornelia asked breathlessly. “Is he perfect?”

But Amelia would say nothing. The baby having been born, the matter was now out of the hands of women. What happened next was up to her daughter’s husband. If he rejected the child, then it was best Cornelia knew nothing about it, for it would be taken from the house and laid on a rubbish heap to be exposed to the elements.

As soon as the midwife bundled the newborn in a blanket, Lady Amelia took it from her and, cradling the child gently, hurried from the room. Behind her, Amelia heard Cornelia asking the midwife if it was a boy or a girl. But the woman, from experience, wisely kept silent. The less a mother knew of her baby the better, just in case.

Lady Amelia entered the atrium and immediately had the attention of the young men gathered there: her eldest son, Cornelius, who already had two small children of his own; her next son, twin to Amelia’s twenty-year-old daughter; her youngest son, only thirteen; the young husband of her twenty-year-old daughter; male cousins and close friends; and finally Cornelia’s husband, nineteen years old, drawing himself tall and proud, aware of the solemnity of the ancient tradition he was about to follow and the gravity of his next actions.

She laid the baby at his feet and stepped back. No one moved or breathed as he bent to part the blanket to see the child’s sex. If it was a girl, and she had no flaws, he would acknowledge the child as his and then leave it for slaves to take to a wet nurse, as custom dictated. But if it was a boy, and unflawed, he was to lift it up and declare it his son in front of family and friends.

The moment stretched. Amelia was nearly sick with fear.
Six years ago, Cornelius parting the blanket, seeing that the baby was a girl, and then seeing the crooked foot that would make her lame for life. Turning his back. Gesturing angrily to the slave that whisked the infant away like so much spilled garbage. And Cornelia, only eleven years old, rushing into the bedchamber, saying, “Mama, Papa has ordered the baby thrown away! Was it a monster?”