The Source: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  The present scion of this resourceful clan was the farmer Urbaal, thirty-six years old, lineal descendant of that great Ur whose family had started farming at Makor and who had erected in the high place the monolith which was to become the god El. Urbaal was a husky man, stout and strong as becomes a farmer, with big teeth that flashed when he smiled. Unlike others of his age, he was not bald nor was he inclined to fatness. In war he had proved himself a good soldier and in peace a productive farmer. He was gentle with his wives, boisterous with his children and kind to his slaves; and if he had wanted to be king or high priest, he could have been either, but his love was farming and women and the growth of things. But now he had a consuming worry, and as he hurried from his house to the high place where the monoliths stood facing the temple, his forehead was wrinkled and he thought: My well-being for the whole year depends on what I do right now.

  The street which led from Urbaal’s house did not march impressively from the main gate to the temple area; to do that would have required planning. Instead, it dodged and twisted in unforeseen ways like the hit-or-miss village footpath it had once been, and as the farmer passed along its inconvenient cobbles, citizens of the town nodded pleasantly; but he did not acknowledge them. His mind was preoccupied with serious matters, and when he reached the high place he proceeded gravely to the farthest monolith, the remnant that barely pushed its head through the earth, and bowed before it, kissing it many times and mumbling, “This year, great El, let it be me.” He then moved to each of the other three and uttered similar prayers: “Baal-of-the-Storm, this year let it be me. Baal-of-the-Waters, Baal-of-the-Sun, I have asked you for little.”

  He crossed the square and entered the cluttered shop of Heth, a Hittite who dealt in goods imported from many areas, and there he said to the bearded man who stood beside lengths of cloth, “This year I must be chosen. What shall I do?”

  “Why not consult the priests?” Heth evaded.

  “From them I’ve learned all I can,” Urbaal replied, pretending to inspect a large pottery jar brought down from Tyre.

  “All I can tell you,” Heth replied, “is to tend your groves.” He looked at the troubled man, then added slowly, “And buy for yourself the best Astarte you can find.”

  This was the kind of counsel Urbaal had sought. Turning from the pottery, he brought his face close to Heth’s and asked the bearded merchant, “Would that help?”

  “It’s how Amalek won last year,” the merchant assured him.

  “I already have three statues,” Urbaal protested.

  “With your trees? Is three enough? Really?” The wily trader stroked his beard and stared at the rich farmer.

  “I’ve wondered myself,” Urbaal confessed. He turned away from Heth and walked about the small shop mumbling to himself. Then, like a child pleading, he grasped Heth’s hand and asked, “Do you truthfully think it would help?”

  Heth said nothing, but from a corner he produced a small clay figure of a goddess. She was six inches high, nude, very feminine, with wide hips and hands cupped below circular breasts. She was erotic and plump, delightful to study and reassuring to have in one’s presence. The merchant was obviously proud of her and was bound to ask a good price.

  Urbaal looked at the statue with special concern. To him this was not a piece of cleverly molded clay, no abstract theological symbol. It was the veritable goddess Astarte who determined the fertility of land, of women, of olive trees. Without her help he was powerless. He could pray to Baal-of-the-Waters and to Baal-of-the-Sun, and they could send the right amounts of rain and warmth, but if Astarte frowned olives would not produce oil; and unless she smiled he could not win this year.

  He adored Astarte. Others feared her capriciousness—famine one year, abundance the next—but he had adapted himself to her arbitrary behavior. He worshiped her faithfully and in return she had been good to him, as she had been to his fathers before him. If the fields and the beehives of Urbaal prospered, even when others failed, it was because he and Astarte had reached an understanding.

  “The statue you sold me last year worked,” the farmer rationalized as he looked at the new goddess.

  “For three years you couldn’t get Timna pregnant,” Heth pointed out. “Then, with the proper statue …”

  “I’ll take it!” the farmer decided. “How much?”

  “Seven gurs of barley, seven of wheat,” Heth replied.

  Urbaal had known that the price would be steep, but now he did some calculations. “That’s more than fourteen gin of silver,” he said. “Last year it was only eight.”

  “It is fourteen,” Heth agreed, “but this Astarte is special. She wasn’t made by hand, like your others. They’ve found a new way in Akka, and it costs.”

  “I’ll take her,” Urbaal said, and he picked up the little goddess, put her to his lips, and went back across the plaza to where the monoliths stood.

  The secret of Urbaal’s success in farming lay in what he was now about to do. He knew that if Astarte was the goddess of fecundity, she must cherish the sexual act as the source of her power, so he never left his goddesses alone but saw to it that they were generously provided with male gods. Bearing his new goddess to the ancient monolith of El, he introduced her to the half-hidden one and whispered, “Tonight, great El, you can come to the house of Urbaal, where the goddess will be waiting.” He then took her to the other baals, holding her seductively against them, rubbing her body against theirs and whispering, “Tonight, when the moon goes down, come to the house of Urbaal, where Astarte will be waiting.”

  Holding the little goddess tenderly in his cupped hands, he bowed to the four monoliths and started homeward, but as he did so, along the porch of the temple there passed a tall girl of sixteen wearing rough-spun robes and golden sandals. She was slender, and with each step her long bare legs broke through the garments; her black hair, which fell below her shoulders, moved in the sunlight. Her face had an extraordinary beauty: dark, widely placed eyes, long straight nose, high cheekbones and silken skin. She walked with conscious grace and was aware of the effect she created on men, for that was her purpose.

  Ever since her arrival in Makor, a slave captured during a raid to the north, Urbaal had been fascinated by her. He saw her striding through his dreams. She was in his olive groves when he inspected them, and when the girls of Makor trampled his grapes she was among them, the red juice staining her long legs. Even when the farmer’s second wife, Timna, had had her child, Urbaal could think only of the tall slave, and it was she who had driven him to purchase his fourth Astarte. Clutching the goddess closer to his heart, he watched the girl until she disappeared into another part of the temple, a man wholly captive to urges that seemed about to consume him. Bringing the clay goddess to his lips, he kissed her and whispered, “Astarte! My fields must produce. Help me! Help me!”

  He waited in the shadows for some time, hoping that the tall slave might return, but when she did not he wandered disconsolately back to the main gate, a complicated zigzag affair with towers from which archers looked down into a maze of twists and turns. Long ago the town of Makor had learned that if its gate were wide and forthright, opening directly into the heart of the town, any enemy who succeeded in rushing that gate found himself comfortably inside the town, which he could then despoil. The entrance to Makor provided no such opportunity; as soon as a would-be invader passed through the main gate he had to make a sharp turn to the left, and before he could gain speed an equally sharp turn to the right, all in such tight compass that he stood exposed to the spears and arrows of the defenders who crouched above him. It was in the tangle of wall thus produced that Urbaal had his home, and it was almost as convoluted as the gate.

  In the center stood an odd-shaped courtyard which served as the heart of the house, with wings radiating out in various directions. In the arm nearest the gate lived his two wives and their five children: four from his first wife, a recent boy from his second. In the opposite wing clustered the granaries, the wine
pots, kitchens and rooms for his slaves, including two attractive girls who had already given him a series of children in whom he found delight. Some twenty people lived in the house of Urbaal, a center of vitality and love, and they kept it a noisy place. Peasants preferred working for this gusty man to serving in fields belonging to the temple, because although they had to work harder for Urbaal than they did for the priests, they loved him as a peasant like themselves. He ate in gulps, guzzled wine and loved to stand with them in the fields, sweat rolling down from his jug-shaped chest.

  He now entered this sprawling house, passing through the courtyard, and proceeded at once to the richly adorned god-room where he kept his three Astartes on a small shelf, each accompanied by a length of stone representing one of the monoliths in the high place. His fourth Astarte he placed in position, adjusting her carefully to her new surroundings, then taking from a hidden place a piece of basalt stone which he had been saving for this purpose. It was obviously phallic, a mighty manly symbol, and he tucked it close to his goddess, whispering, “Tonight when the moon goes down, Baal-of-the-Storm will come to lie with you.” He had found that if he kept his goddesses happy they would reciprocate, but now his need was both urgent and specific, and he wished his new patroness to understand the proposed bargain: “Enjoy yourself tonight and every night. All I ask is that when the measuring comes, let it be me.”

  He was interrupted by the arrival of his second wife, Timna, who normally would not enter his god-room, but who now appeared in some distress. She was the stately kind of wife that men for the past eight thousand years have represented in their statues—motherly, considerate and understanding. Her dark eyes were distended with fright and before she spoke Urbaal could guess what had happened. Some years before he had seen this same terrified look in his first wife’s eyes, when she, too, had been unable to face reality. It was the weakness of women to look so, and Urbaal prepared himself for tears. “What is it?” he asked gently.

  Timna was an unusual girl who had come from Akka with her father on a trading visit, and she had won Urbaal’s respect for the congenial manner in which she had adjusted to Matred, his domineering first wife. Instead of fighting, Timna had insisted upon a house of love—which was the more credit to her in that for the first three years of her life with Urbaal she had been childless and the target of contempt from Matred, but with the recent arrival of her first son a more harmonious balance had been achieved. As a mother she could demand respect from Matred, but now, her composure fled, she told her husband, “The priest of Melak was here.”

  This was what Urbaal had expected. It was bound to come and he wished he knew something that would console his gentle wife, but he had learned that in these matters nothing could be done. “We’ll have other children,” he promised. She started to weep and a clever lie sprang to his mind. “Timna,” he whispered seductively, “look at what I’ve just bought you. A new Astarte.” She looked at the smiling goddess, so bursting with fertility, and covered her face.

  “Could we run away?” she pleaded.

  “Timna!” The idea was blasphemous, for Urbaal was definitely a part of the land … this land … these olive trees by the well.

  “I will not surrender my son,” she persisted.

  “We all do,” he reasoned gently, and he pulled her to his couch, from which she could see the reassuring Astartes who promised her fertility for years to come. Placing his arm about her he tried to add his personal reassurance, telling her of how Matred had found courage to face the same problem. “At first she nearly perished with grief,” he confided, and Timna wondered how that austere woman had found a way to show grief. “But later she had four other children, and one night she confessed to me, ‘We did the right thing.’ You’ll have others playing about your knees, and you’ll feel the same way.”

  She listened attentively, but in the end whimpered, “I cannot.”

  He was tempted to show his irritation, but she was so gentle that he did not. Instead he reasoned, “It is to Melak that we look for protection. Great El is necessary, and we cherish him, but in war only Melak is our protector.”

  “Why must he be so cruel?” Timna pleaded.

  “He does much for us,” Urbaal explained, “and all he asks in return … our first-born sons.” To the farmer this was persuasive logic, and he started to leave for his olive fields, but Timna held his hands, pleading, until he felt that he must shock her into reality. “As long as Makor has existed,” he said harshly, “we have delivered to Melak our first-born sons. Matred did so. The slave girls did so. And you shall, too.” He left the room, but as he passed the courtyard he saw his latest son, six months old, gurgling in the shadows of the courtyard, and he experienced a paralyzing regret which he had been afraid to share with Timna, but she had followed him from the room and from the doorway saw his involuntary gesture of grief. She thought: Three times he has surrendered his first-born sons—Matred’s and the slave girls’. His pain is greater than mine but he dares not show it.

  Timna was right. Her simple-minded husband was enmeshed in the contradictions that perplexed the men of that age, the conflict between death and life—Melak demanding death while Astarte bestowed life—and he fled from the house of gaiety where his slave girls were singing with the children, and stamped through the gate, seeking solace in his olive grove. As he walked among those lovely gray-green trees whose leaves swirled upward in varied patterns, turning new faces to the sun and shimmering like jewels, he tried to counteract death by conjuring a vision of the seductive slave girl he had watched at the temple; and he recalled the first day he had seen her. The warriors of Makor had marched out on a minor raid of no consequence, one little town pestering another, and he had not bothered to go along, but when the troops returned he had come out of his house to greet them. They had come singing through the zigzag gate and among their prisoners was this enchanting girl, then only fifteen and not a resident of the town the troops had fought against, but a slave who had been captured by that town from some site farther north. Since no specific soldier had captured her, she was claimed by the priests, who saw in her a symbol which they could manipulate for profit to the town. They had sequestered her, allowing her to be seen only infrequently, and had let it be known that she was reserved for a solemn purpose. Their plan had worked. The men of Makor were excited by her presence and were tending their fields and olive presses as never before. Now her tantalizing vision moved with Urbaal as he inspected his trees.

  By habit he went first to the center of his grove, where a rounded stone, scarcely six inches higher than the earth, served as the home of the baal who commanded the olive trees. Paying his obeisance to the god, Urbaal summoned his foreman, who ran up sweating. “Still a good crop?” the farmer asked.

  “Look,” the foreman said. He led Urbaal to an area of sloping rock where an ancient machine produced much of Makor’s wealth. At the highest level a deep square pit some ten feet on the side had been hacked into the solid rock. It had required both tools and patience to dig so deep a hole, but the use to which it was put required inventive genius. Rising from the middle of this first pit stood a wooden table with a high rim inside which the oily fruit of pitted olives was piled; fastened into a hole in the northern face of the pit was the butt end of a stout pole, free to move up and down with considerable leverage. Over the rimmed table fitted a heavy square of wood which pressed down to squeeze the olives and extract the oil, and it was against this pressing board that the pole was brought down with considerable force. Then, because men were scarce at Makor and could not stand hour after hour merely pulling down a pole, huge stones were provided to be hung by slings on the far end of the pole so as to keep the pressure constant day and night. It was one of the world’s first complicated machines, and it worked.

  But part of its ingenuity lay in the fact that below the first pit lay a second, and below it a third. Through the solid rock connecting the various levels, some skilled workman had driven a small hole, so that by gr
avity the olive oil from the pressing pit could filter down into the second and then into the third, losing its sediment and impurities on the way. The entire process represented a sophisticated system that would hardly be improved upon in the next four thousand years. Urbaal, dipping his finger into the bottom pit, tasted the results and told his foreman, “Good.”

  “This time you’re sure to win,” the foreman winked.

  Then Urbaal exposed the fear that disturbed him. “How’s Amalek doing with his cows?”

  “They say very good,” the foreman replied.

  “He always does,” Urbaal said, not trying to hide his worry.

  The foreman moved closer. “We could turn some dogs loose among his calves.”

  Urbaal shook his head. “We don’t need such tricks, but in case he’s thinking the same way, I hope you’re guarding the pits.”

  The foreman pointed to a booth which he had recently constructed, four poles stuck in earth supporting a platform two feet off the ground, roofed over with a canopy of branches. “From now till the end of harvest I’m sleeping in the booth,” the foreman said, and after praying to the baal of the oil pits Urbaal left the grove with a feeling of confidence; but as he returned through the zigzag gate he passed the one man who could destroy that feeling, the herdsman Amalek, a strong, wiry man taller and younger than himself, with huge muscles on the back of his legs and a confident, sunburned grin marking his amiable face. He was no mean opponent, for once before he had won and apparently intended doing so again. He greeted Urbaal with a friendly wave and left the town with long swinging strides.