The Blessing Stone (5 page)

Together they stared at the transparent stone. Unaware of the curative powers of the digitalis in the plant, they believed it was the water in the stone that had saved her.

When they caught up with the Family at dawn, the others looked up from their foraging with mild curiosity, Tall One and Old Mother having already begun to recede from their memories. By gestures and limited words, Old Mother explained how the water-stone had brought her back from death and when Tall One passed the stone around to the thirsty members, they took turns sucking on it until they salivated. For a while, thirst was slaked and, for a while, everyone looked on Tall One with wonder and a little fear.

She came upon the stranger by accident. She had been scavenging in the tall foliage that fringed the western lake for salamander eggs when she heard him at the water’s edge. She had never seen him before—a tall youth with broad shoulders and muscular thighs—and as she spied on him she wondered where he had come from.

The Family had arrived at the lake the day before to find the water covered with ash and all the fish dead and rotting. Foraging for turtle and reptile eggs had proven fruitless, and the vegetation along the shore was so choked with volcanic ash that roots had come up black and inedible. Bird life had left so there were no nests filled with the good eating of crane and pelican eggs. There was only a small flock of ducks struggling for survival among the withered cattails and reeds. All able-bodied family members had dispersed in a wide area in search of food while the elderly and children remained at a camp on a rocky ledge that was relatively safe from predators. Tall One had spotted a small group of zebras kneeling at the water’s edge, trying to drink through the ash, when she had espied the young stranger. He was doing a puzzling thing.

While holding a long strip of animal sinew, looped and fitted with a stone, with his other hand he tossed a pebble onto the water, causing the mallards to suddenly take flight. Then the stranger swung the sinew over his head and let loose the stone. Before Tall One’s astonished eyes, the stone shot through the air and hit one of the ducks, causing it to plummet. The youth splashed out into the shallow water and retrieved the dead bird.

Tall One gasped.

The stranger stopped. He turned in her direction and peered intently at the wall of grasses until Tall One, inexplicably emboldened, stepped out.

She felt bold because she was wearing the powerful water-stone on a grass string around her neck. It lay between her breasts like a giant drop of water, its cloudy center, formed three million years ago when cosmic diamond-dust had melded with earth quartz, shimmering like a heart.

She and the stranger regarded each other warily.

His appearance was slightly different from that of the Family: his nose a different shape, his jaw stronger, his eyes an intriguing moss color. But his hair, like that of Tall One’s family, was long and tangled and matted with red mud, but he had decorated it with bits of shell and stone, which Tall One thought very fetching. Most intriguing about him was the collection of ostrich eggs that hung about his waist on a belt of woven reeds. The eggs had holes in them and the holes were plugged with mud.

Although their languages were dissimilar, the young male was able to explain that his name was Thorn and that he had come from another family across the plain, in a valley Tall One had never seen. Through gestures and sounds, he told Tall One how he had come to be named Thorn.

As he hopped around howling in mock pain, mimicking his accident as he massaged his buttocks where many thorns had imbedded themselves, Tall One quickly grasped that he had gotten his name when he had fallen into a thorn bush. She laughed hysterically, and when he was finished, pleased by her laughter, he held out the dead bird to her.

She grew somber. A memory suddenly darkened her mind: long ago, before Lion was the leader, before the leader named River even, when Tall One had been very small, two strangers coming into the camp. They had come from over the ridge, where the Family had never gone. All were wary at first, and then the new males had been accepted into the group. But then something had happened—a fight. Tall One remembered the blood, and the Family’s leader lying dismembered in the grass. One of the two strangers had taken his place and the Family followed him after that.

Was this stranger going to kill Lion and become the new leader?

While she watched him in silent curiosity, Thorn caught a few more ducks with his sling and rocks, and together they took them back to Tall One’s camp.

The Family shouted with delight over the fowl, for they hadn’t tasted flesh in days, and then they turned their curiosity to the newcomer. Children peered shyly from behind their mothers’ legs while older girls eyed him boldly. Honey-Finder reached down and tickled Thorn’s genitals, but he jumped back, laughing, his eyes on Tall One. When Lion gestured to the ostrich eggs around the stranger’s waist, Thorn untied one and offered it to him. Lion puzzled over the plugged hole, figured it out, then dipped his finger in the hole and was stunned to find water inside instead of yolk. Thorn demonstrated by up-ending the egg and letting water dribble into his mouth. Then he gave the egg to Lion to drink. The Family was astounded. What sort of bird laid eggs with water inside? But Tall One understood: Thorn had put the water in the empty eggshells. From there she drew an even more startling conclusion, one that she had no words for and was only a struggling idea in her mind:
Thorn carried water with him against future thirst
.

They threw the ducks onto the fire, singeing off the feathers and partially cooking the flesh, and the Family enjoyed a feast that night, ending it by merrily throwing bones at one another. Old Mother happily sucked on duck marrow and gulped down the fresh water from the ostrich eggs. All the females in the group eyed the new young male, whose antics and strength aroused them. And even the males, for a while, were happy to welcome the intruder into their midst.

The Family stayed by the lake, feasting on Thorn’s ducks for as long as they lasted. Thorn didn’t sit by the fire as the other males did, chipping stone tools and fashioning spears. There was a restlessness in him, and a need for attention. To Tall One he seemed like a big child, eager to make others laugh with his capers. Before their mildly curious eyes he gamboled and romped, jumped and mimed, for no apparent reason. But after a few nights of this, with Tall One being the first to understand what he was about, the Family began to grasp that there was meaning to the newcomer’s shenanigans.

He was telling stories.

Audiences in a future age would call him a ham, but Tall One’s family was held in thrall by his theatrics. Entertainment was unknown to them, and the recounting of past events even more alien. But as they began to understand his gestures and sounds and facial expressions, they began to see the stories emerge. They were simple tales, tiny dramas in which Thorn acted out a hunt with the people victoriously carrying a giraffe haunch back to the camp, or a near-drowning in which a child was saved, or a fierce struggle with a crocodile, resulting in death. Thorn soon had Tall One’s family laughing and slapping their thighs, or crying and wiping tears from their cheeks, or gasping in fear or grunting in wonder. Food might be scarce on this lake abandoned by other animals, and the water might be foul and brackish, killing even the resident fish, but Thorn made the humans forget their thirst and hunger as he told over and over again the comical story of how he got his name. They never tired of seeing him fall into the “thorn bush” and suffer the thorns being plucked out of his buttocks.

And then one night he astounded them further by suddenly transforming himself into someone else.

He got up from his place by the fire and began to shuffle around the circle in a strange manner—his left arm curled up to his chest, his left leg dragging behind. At the first they gave him puzzled looks, and then they gasped. He looked just like Scorpion! Suddenly terrified, they looked around to see if Scorpion was still there—had he somehow taken possession of Thorn’s body? But there he was, looking at the newcomer in shock. Scorpion’s left side had been growing increasingly numb, rendering his left arm and leg almost useless.

And then, before their startled eyes, Thorn jumped into another stance, swaying his hips and pantomiming stuffing his face with food. Honey-Finder!

Nostril shouted out in anger and fear, but some of the children were laughing. And then when Thorn tugged at his long matted hair until it stood out, and walked with small mincing steps—and everyone instantly recognized Baby—others began to laugh.

Soon he had everyone howling with hysterics and it became a game. He would shamble along, examine a stick, and everyone would shout, “Snail!” He would scratch his back up and down on a tree and everyone would call out, “Lump!” And when he lifted a small boy onto his back, hooking the child’s arms under his chin and the boy’s legs around his waist in imitation of the putrid hide Lion wore, everyone clutched their stomachs and shrieked with laughter.

Thorn was happy to make them laugh. This family was not unlike his own: they foraged for the same food, followed ancient paths, lived by the same structure. Females and children grouped together, the males in their own separate group, and yet all strived for the survival of the Family. The females engaged in the same grooming and child-rearing sessions while the males whittled spears and cut hand axes from stones. Anger was swift to rise and quickly died. There were the familiar jealousies and envy, friendships and enemies. Old Mother reminded him of Willow in his family, with her bandy legs and withered breasts and toothless gumming of her food. Nostril and Lump reminded him of his siblings, and how he had romped with them when they were young.

And then there was Tall One.

She was different from the others, not just taller but also wiser. He saw how somberly she would observe the smoking mountain on the horizon, how her brow would furrow at the sight of the black clouds billowing across the sky. He himself had observed the same phenomenon and found it troubling. But more than Tall One’s intelligence was Thorn drawn to her strong body, her long limbs and firm stride. He liked the way she laughed, and how she treated the weaker females with fairness and always made sure everyone had something to eat. She made him remember the females in his own family, a memory that was rapidly growing dim.

Thorn didn’t know why he had left his family. One morning an inexplicable restlessness had come over him. He had gathered his hand ax and his club and had left. Other males before him had done the same: his mother’s brother, Short Arm, and Thorn’s older brother, One Ear. Not all males left Thorn’s family. Most stayed. But the wanderlust gripped a few in each generation, and when they went away they never came back.

Thorn had walked away from his sleeping family with vague images in his mind: of the female who had given him life, of his female siblings. Now, as he looked at this tall alluring female, he was not aware that the shortage of willing females in his family had been at the root of his departure, that he had left out of instinct, just as other young males from other human groups had from time to time over the generations joined his own family. Thorn hadn’t said good-bye. In time, his family will have forgotten him just as, in time, Thorn would forget them.

The lake finally became so polluted that the last of the ducks disappeared, forcing the Family to move on.

Conditions worsened. They started coming upon dead animals and although at first it meant feasts of meat for the Family, as they continued their westward trek and found more and more dead eland and wildebeest, elephant and rhino—hundreds and thousands of stinking carcasses, the air thick with the stench of rotting flesh and clouds of black flies—the flesh by now was too putrid for the humans to eat.

Tall One realized that the herd animals were dying because the vegetation was covered with ash and cinders. Only the scavengers were eating well, the jackals, hyenas, and vultures, all growing fat. She and Thorn were in agreement that there was a connection between the volcano and the animals dying. But Lion insisted that the Family keep moving westward to find water and food.

With each passing day, the water sources became increasingly foul. Food grew scarce as small animals had vanished and plants were buried in soot. The sky grew darker and the ground rumbled with increasing frequency. Each sunset Tall One would watch the smoking mountain with dismay and understand clearer than ever that Lion was leading them into danger.

Mothers’ milk dried up and infants perished. After carrying her dead baby for days, Weasel finally sat down beside a towering termite hill that days ago would have provided a feast for the Family but that was now inexplicably devoid of termites, and she bent her head over her baby and stayed there while the Family moved on.

One night Tall One tossed in restless sleep, her dreams visited by the smile and comic antics of Thorn. She stirred in a heat she had never felt before, and a longing that was like hunger yet it was not food she desired. She awoke to the lone howl of a distant dog, and then she saw a silhouette moving through the sleeping camp. She recognized Thorn and wondered what he was doing. Perhaps just to relieve himself. Perhaps he would come to her nest-bed. But Thorn crept straight through the camp, past the periphery and out onto the open plain. Tall One followed, but only as far as the protective torches and acacia-branch fence, where Snail and Scorpion sat sentry. She waited for Thorn to return. By dawn he had not come back and the Family had to move on.

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.