The Blessing Stone by Barbara Wood Page B

words. While he did this, the women ate and drank their fill, for they would be fasting during the next cycle of the sun. Even the children must sit silently with their mothers, leaving the circle only to relieve themselves when their bladders were full. The silence was to be absolute and no one was to eat or drink, for if they did it would upset the spirit of the deceased and make it jealous. Everyone knew that ghosts were unhappy—after all, no one wanted to die. And so being unhappy, ghosts would want to make the living unhappy, too, and therefore haunt them. The purpose of silent-sitting was to convince the ghost that this place was boring, no food or drink or laughter here, hoping it would move on to seek better places.
    Bellek had covered the corpse with a gazelle-skin blanket, telling the others that it was to keep Alawa’s spirit from trying to possess one of them. But he had done it for another reason. No one but he had noticed the marks upon the old woman’s throat, and the look of fear that had frozen on her face at death—proof that Alawa had misinterpreted her dreams and had made a mistake about the hunters wanting the little boys to be sacrificed. Because how else could she have died of fright and strangulation if it hadn’t been the ghosts of the hunters creeping into her tent and killing her?
    Luckily, Alawa had not confided her plans to anyone else, and so Bellek kept the secret to himself. For as long as he was alive, the little boys—and himself—would be safe.
    After the grieving women had sat in a silent circle for one day and one night, their stomachs growling from hunger, their mouths dry with thirst, their joints aching from not moving, the children restless and irritable, they divided up Alawa’s possessions according to individual need, with the gazelle antlers going to Bellek, and, leaving her body where it lay, broke camp and resumed their trek north.
     
    The nights grew colder, the fog rolled in again and again, and the women of the Gazelle Clan, unfamiliar with autumn and its mists and not knowing that it would eventually give way to winter rain, believed they would be trapped in fog forever. They shivered in their flimsy shelters, got little sleep and found little warmth until finally one night they were awakened by a fierce storm that was unlike anything they had ever experienced—a tempest that roared from the west, shrieked down the nearby mountains and blasted the frail encampment with an icy breath and rain that fell like spears. The women fought the wind to keep their shelters, but the malevolent gale, howling like a beast in pain, snatched away the protective gazelle hides and carried them out over the turbulent lake. Trees and shrubs were uprooted, sodden branches flew by while the terrified women clutched one another and tried to protect the children.
    When it was over and daybreak exposed a devastated landscape, the women beheld a sight that struck them dumb: the mountains, once green, were now white.
    “What is it?” Keeka said, holding her little ones close as other women cried and wailed in fear. Laliari stared at the distant peaks and felt a cold lump form in her throat. What did the white mountains mean? Were the mountains now ghosts? Did it mean the world was coming to an end?
    Old Bellek, shivering with damp, his lips and fingers raw from the cold, looked mournfully out over the lake where the gazelle hides floated on the water. He wasn’t afraid of the white mountains—long ago, in his boyhood, he had heard tales of something called snow. The world wasn’t coming to an end, but the weather was changing. He decided that, for survival, the group must find sturdier shelter.
    He turned toward the west and contemplated the cliffs that rose like sheer walls from the undulating plane. The cliffs were gouged with caves. Bellek suspected that they might be warm and dry inside, but the old man was wary of caves. His people had never lived in them and certainly had never