Free The Blessing Stone by Barbara Wood

She must not think of him. It was bad luck to think of the dead.
    The invasion had caught them by surprise. Laliari and her people had been going about their daily life in the river valley they had inhabited for countless generations when strangers from the west had suddenly appeared across the grassy plains, hundreds and thousands of them, saying that their land inland was drying up and becoming a desert. They had explained their plight while greedily eyeing the grassy expanses on either side of Laliari’s river, the grazing herds, the plentiful fish and bird life. A bounty of food. But they had wanted it all for themselves. The ensuing territorial dispute had been long and bitter, with the stronger and more numerous newcomers driving Laliari’s clan northward, forcing them to flee with their possessions on their backs—the massive elephant bones that formed the framework of their moveable tents, and the hides that stretched over the bones to make the tent walls. When the clan reached the delta where the river branched, they had encountered more people, much like themselves, but unwilling to share their food sources. And so another bloody battle over land and food had taken place, resulting in Laliari’s people being pushed out again, this time eastward.
    What had started as a large exodus of several hundred people had by then been reduced to a band of eighty-nine, with the women, children, and elderly going ahead while the men stayed at the rear to protect them from the pursuing delta-dwellers. They had come to a vast expanse of boggy marsh and reeds and had started across. Just as the women made it to the other side, they turned in time to see a monstrous wall of water come rushing from out of nowhere, a swift deluge racing across the vast marshland as it swallowed up the unsuspecting men who were halfway across.
    The women, on their high ground, had stared in shock as they watched the hunters vanish in an instant beneath the turbulent water, arms and legs tumbling like fragile sticks, the men’s cries silenced as water filled their lungs. And then the flood had grown calm and the women, not knowing that this marshy expanse was subjected to the vagaries of neap tides and spring tides—making it a swampland part of the time, an inundation at others—believed themselves to be standing at the edge of a newly formed sea.
    Dazed and in shock, they had turned northward, following the eastern edge of the new sea until they had come to an even larger body of water—wider than their own river at its widest point, wider than the new sea covering the marshland of reeds and the bodies of their men. In fact, this vast sea went on to the horizon and the women could see neither land nor trees on the other side. It was also their first time seeing breakers and they screamed in fright at the water rolling toward them in huge waves, crashing on the beach, retreating, only to roll forward again, like an animal trying to attack them. Although they had found bountiful food here in the tide pools—limpets, periwinkles, and mussels—the women had turned and fled, moving inland away from the sea that would one day be called Mediterranean, and crossed a hostile wilderness until they came to a mist-filled river valley that bore little resemblance to their own.
    Here, cut off from their ancestral land, from their men and everything they knew, their search for a new home had begun—a ragtag wandering band of nineteen women, two elders, and twenty-two babies and children.
    As they trekked through yet another fog-shrouded dawn, having spent another moonless night in fear, the women kept hopeful watch for signs of their clan spirit, the gazelle. They had not sighted one since leaving their river valley. What if there were no gazelles in this strange land? Would the clan die without its spirit? Laliari, trudging along with her kinswomen through the unfamiliar valley, was haunted by an even more frightening thought: that there were worse things