The Source: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  “That’s sensible,” Gunter growled, licking his fingers. “Where’d you find Luke and his daughter?”

  “Here in Makor. They hid … in a cave, till you were gone.”

  Gunter bowed to the countess. “I’m glad you survived. To tell the truth,” he confessed, “if I were starting afresh I’d kill far fewer.” Uneasily he shifted his weight and leaned forward to face the father and daughter he might have slain that first day. “I learned my lesson in Jerusalem. We killed everyone in sight … Arabs … Jews … but the next day we found that half the dead were Christians just like ourselves. No one had told us. Have you heard about the way we took Jerusalem?”

  “Many times,” Volkmar said with disgust.

  “I explained that if we were doing it again … You know, brother …”

  “I am no longer your brother,” Volkmar answered quietly.

  “You are more,” Gunter replied, taking no offense. “You are my essential friend. I was about to say that after Jerusalem we discovered how rich we would have been had we kept the local people alive.” Here again he bowed to the countess and her father. “In Jerusalem, after the slaughter, we discovered vats of purple dye worth a hundred thousand bezants with no one left alive who knew how to use it. All the Jews were dead.”

  “Here we behaved differently,” Volkmar replied. “In the villages we killed no one, and now the farms are prosperous.”

  “I’m glad you kept them that way. I’ll need them in my fief.”

  “It will never be yours,” the older man said firmly.

  “It will,” Gunter responded without anger. “With my sword I have won it, and it is mine. You’re welcome here as long as you live, because I need your help. But when I have sons of my own they shall rule, and your boy Volkmar will have to find his life elsewhere.”

  The two German knights looked hard at each other, and thus began the test of wills, with Gunter asking bluntly, “Volkmar, why don’t you take your son and go back to Germany?”

  The question startled the old man, for in the years since his wife and daughter were taken from him at the battle of the wagons he had thought little of Germany. More than eight years had passed since he last saw the Rhine. His son Otto now ruled the city of Gretz, and Volkmar no longer considered himself a German. Pointing to the modest, yet convenient room in which the feast was being held he asked, “Who would leave this warm place for a cold castle in Gretz?” He indicated the good food that Luke had procured, the wine, the merchandise already pouring in from Damascus, and these things he compared with the manner in which German knights lived in their frugal, drafty castles along the Rhine. His wife Taleb wore silk and embroidered stuffs, whereas his first wife Matwilda had been happy to find coarse goods. In Makor he had gold and silver to replace the lead and brass of Germany. Through the ingenuity of Luke he had access to medicines unknown in Germany; in fact, he declared, “If I had lost my leg in Gretz, to be cared for by German doctors, I would now be dead. I have no desire to go back to that barbarous land.”

  “Then stay here and help me rule,” the younger knight urged.

  Thus Gunter moved permanently to Makor, and during his first week initiated changes of a spectacular nature, the most lasting of which was his decision to build on the crest of the mound a huge fortified castle: “Every man from Acre to Galilee will work sixteen days a month on this fortress till it’s finished. At the quarries we’ll need a thousand men. Permanently. To haul the rocks, five hundred horses.” While Volkmar tried to follow on a crutch that Luke had carved for him, Gunter strode forth to mark the limits of his castle, and the older man was astonished at the magnitude Gunter proposed.

  “It will be immense, because from it we shall rule an immense principality.” He began that day to use the word principality, for this was what he intended to carve for himself. Finally he returned to where Volkmar stood on his crutch and asked, “You’ve lived here for five years. Which part of town will be best for our castle?”

  Volkmar explained that the northwest segment, abutting the basilica, would be best, for from that spot one could both catch the cool evening breezes that came down the wadis and enjoy the sea beyond Acre, and for these reasons Gunter was tempted to build there, but in the end considerations of defense led him to select the rugged eastern end, for there the wadi to the north showed a more precipitous face. “Some day there’ll be a siege,” Gunter predicted, “and that gully could be what saves us.”

  So northeast of the basilica he staked out an enormous castle, and when Luke saw that one third of the town’s houses stood in the marked-off area he protested, but Gunter said simply, “Tear them down,” and it was done.

  From having besieged nearly thirty fortifications—Nicaea, Antioch, Jerusalem, Ascalon, the names were like dreams, with Greek fire pouring down upon his shoulders and he loading the mangonels with the chopped-off heads of Turkish prisoners to be lobbed inside to taunt the defenders—from such experiences Gunter knew how a castle should be built. No square corners would be allowed, no neatly squared-off towers, for those he had found susceptible to assault. “With a battering ram you can always knock out the corner stones,” he explained to Luke, “but with a rounded tower where do you start your attack?” He also insisted that throughout the castle each rock be fitted snugly to the next, so that grapples could find no purchase to support scaling ladders. Each wall was sloped and situated so that all parts could be protected by interlocking arrow fire from two towers. “And the bottom of each wall,” he explained, “must slope sharply outward … at this angle … so that when a rock is dropped from the battlements it will ricochet sharply forward, crushing any men trying to hide under protecting cover.”

  For two years, 1104 through 1105, Gunter worked feverishly to complete his masterpiece, and as it drew to a conclusion workmen began to look forward to the time when they could once more turn their attention to their fields, but he forestalled this by announcing that now the real work would begin, a massive wall, twenty feet thick, around the entire crown of the hill. “These farmers should go home to their families,” Volkmar protested, but the younger knight growled that if the town was not fortified the day would come when nobody in the area would have families to go home to, and he began those enormous constructions which converted the long-feeble Makor—for the thousand years since Vespasian it had known no wall—into the archetype of a Crusader town, with the castle, the basilica and the mosque all neatly tucked inside gigantic fortifications.

  The new Crusader walls, of course, had to stand well inside the lines followed by the earlier Canaanite and Jewish walls, for as the mound had risen in height its available building area was constantly constricted and was now much smaller than before, so that when the giant walls were completed a new pattern of life had to develop. Inside the cramped town no more than three hundred peasants could now live, for the castle and the religious buildings usurped most of the free space, but since the fortified town brought peace to the area, more than fifteen hundred villagers and farmers could live in security outside the walls, knowing that in time of trouble they could retreat to safety within the battlements.

  When the work was completed Gunter found comfort in the brooding power of the mound, but Volkmar, hobbling one day to the olive grove so that he might see the turrets soaring aloft like insolent challenges to the countryside, became depressed and reasoned with himself: We’ve used the farmers for two years and have built only a prison. We’ve buried ourselves in a tomb of stone. Cut ourselves off from the people who will have to support us if we’re to live. And he saw the castle and the walled town not as a haven of security but as a monstrous error that would confine and crush the Crusade, and on his crutches he limped back to remonstrate with Gunter, who was even then causing fresh towers to be erected along the northern wall which overlooked the wadi. “The castle’s finished,” Volkmar said, “so there’s nothing to do about it. And you’ve walled in the town, so that’s done too. But what plans do you now have for bringing the countrysi
de into the heart of your structure?”

  Gunter looked at his former brother-in-law as if the cripple were mad. “Countryside?” he laughed. “We take refuge behind these walls and we let the countryside do what it will. This is a cruel land and will always be. Down that road from Damascus the countryside will come against us some day. Or invaders will come at us along this road from the sea. Or up through the olive grove from Egypt. The countryside? Let it try to get at us!” And in a frenzy he acted like an enemy trying to scale the great walls of Makor, and he clawed at the rocks with his fingernails, but he and Luke had set the stones so cunningly one upon the other that his fingers could find no purchase and his hands slid from the wall.

  “To hell with the countryside!” he shouted. “When they’re swarming down here my men will be up there pouring oil on them. We’ll crush the countryside if it tries to attack this wall.” And he stood back to admire the faultless rocks, but Volkmar was still held captive by the sensation that these were the walls of a mighty prison into which the Crusaders had willfully built themselves.

  When the defenses were completed, the finest south of Antioch, Gunter should have relaxed but he could not, for one nagging fact kept him awake at night, and this he could not dispel. The fundamental weakness we haven’t solved, he reflected continuously. We’ve no water. Of course, he had done all possible to minimize this fault, causing deep cisterns to be dug and lining them with rock and plaster until they were watertight, then directing every roof to carry a channel which threw its rainfall into these deep reservoirs, but that fatal year could come when drought and siege would be allies, forcing surrender from within. One day Gunter spoke of this to Luke, who now supervised all operations, and the Christian convert said, “Sir Gunter, when I was hiding in the cave … from you …” The two friends nodded. “I had the feeling that I might be in a shaft leading to a well.”

  Gunter’s breath caught. If there were a secure supply of water … within the castle. “Where is this cave?”

  “It was filled in when we paved the floor,” Luke explained, pointing to a room in the castle living quarters.

  Gunter was about to strike his lieutenant, but stayed his hand. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I could not visualize this final plan,” Luke said.

  “Get me twenty of your best men,” Gunter commanded, and that day he began ripping up the paving stones which had been laid in place only a few weeks before. His miners went down for ten feet, then fifteen, then twenty, and Luke became uneasy; but at last they came to squared-off rocks that had not been placed in position by accident but according to design: they had reached the wall of the ancient shaft built by Hoopoe more than two thousand years before. As soon as Gunter edged his way down to this rock work, and saw for himself its excellence, he recognized what his men had found, but in order to make sure, he had them dig their way around all four sides of the long-vanished shaft, and when it was exposed he saw evidence of the concentric stairways and knew that if he dug straight down through the accumulated rubble he must find water.

  All available men were put to the job of cleaning out the abandoned shaft, and when they had excavated it for more than a hundred feet straight down, with Gunter impatient but never wavering in his conviction that water was at hand, they came to the solid rock bottom and found nothing. The disappointment embittered Gunter and he descended into the shaft, hammering on the massive rocky base with his bare hands, bellowing, “Where in God’s name is the water?” but finding only dust.

  He came out of the barren hole and brooded for some days about the ill chance that had led him on this fruitless chase, and it so happened that these were days of drought, when there should have been rain but wasn’t, and he became frantic with apprehensive visions of the future when such a drought would coincide with an Arab attack and he would stand helpless and dying of thirst inside the walls. He raved at Volkmar, “How could a well dry up when it once flowed?” And he made his brother-in-law descend the steps on his crutches to where the shaft began, so that Volkmar could see for himself that Gunter’s original idea had not been crazy, and it was a chance remark that Volkmar happened to make that solved the mystery. Looking at the grooved stairs that lined the shaft he said, “They were worn down by thousands upon thousands of bare feet.”

  “What’s that?” Gunter cried in the darkness.

  “Look. Where the feet of women wore down the stones.”

  The idea fascinated Gunter, and for more than a week he was haunted by the vision of an endless chain of barefooted women descending to the bottom of the shaft, bearing water jugs … “Where would so many have stood?” he asked himself, and then one night he screamed, “They weren’t going down the shaft at all. They were going to something!”

  In a frenzy he had himself let down to the solid rock of the bottom, where he watched in his imagination as the monotonous line of women filed past him, heading somewhere. He scratched at the walls, trying in vain to ascertain where they had gone, but he found no clue. He signaled to the men aloft to haul him out, and he walked the streets of Makor, followed by the barefooted ghosts. Once he stopped sharp and turned on them. “Where did you go?” he railed—at Kerith the devout Jewess who had gone down those steps to admire her husband’s work, at Gomer who in those depths had spoken directly to God—“Where did you vanish to?” he screamed at the phantoms, but they waited silently behind him.

  He then did what perplexed men had done in Makor throughout the millennia: he climbed to the top of the half-built wall and surveyed the setting of Makor itself. In the west he could see the fires of Acre and beyond it the moon-glistening sea of grandeur; to the south were the olive trees and the unseen swamps; and to the north, where the hills came down like invading ranks, only to be halted by the deep wadi … He stopped. He wondered if that wadi had anything to do with the water. “Why did they dig the shaft so deep?” he asked, but the facts before him were not yet clear, and in despair he knelt upon the walls and prayed, “Almighty God, where have You hidden the water?” He became angry as he called the words and beat the cold stones with his hands. In the end he shouted defiantly, “God! God! Where did you hide the water? I need it now!” And because God does not necessarily prefer soft men who chant in basilicas, moonlight shone in the wadi and Gunter leaped to his feet like a man whose bed has caught fire, and he shouted, “They dug so deep because the water’s out there!”

  In the pre-dawn he rushed back to the shaft and summoned Luke, bawling at him, “I know where the water is!” And he took five good diggers down with him and tried to calculate where north lay, and by luck he came close, and in that direction he caused his men to dig. All day they worked, with him goading them at their elbows, and fresh teams were brought down, with men hauling baskets of rubble aloft; and after night had fallen a Greek workman plunged his shovel through a soft layer of dust and struck nothing. Like a madman Gunter dashed at the hole and with a small taper looked ahead, and saw the long-vanished David Tunnel dug by Hoopoe and his Moabite slave. Disregarding the possibility of accident or surprise he dashed along the tunnel, silent for so many centuries, until he saw the walls of the far end looming up to halt him, and at their base he found the ancient well.

  When he returned to the castle that night he was in no way exultant, for although he knew that now his castle and his town were secure against even the strongest enemy, his descent into darkness and his close brush with God reminded him of how transient life was and forced him to consider the future. When Luke came to congratulate him he found not a roistering German knight but a man much humbled, who said softly, “It’s time I found a wife.”

  That night Luke waited till Count Volkmar, who insisted upon remaining in his original quarters, had gone to bed, and then the bailiff called softly to his daughter Taleb, asking her to talk with him, and looking down at the floor he said to her, “Sir Gunter speaks of taking a wife.” Silence … “Today I examined my Lord Volkmar’s leg. It will never heal.” Silence … “He cannot liv
e long.”

  “Each morning he has a fever,” Taleb reported.

  Luke felt it necessary to speak with great bluntness. “I’ve been wondering about Sir Gunter. Have you not thought it strange that he sleeps with so many women … he has a harem … Egyptians and that whore from Acre. But I’ve never heard that any of his women became pregnant.”

  The two Christians looked at each other for some moments, after which Luke continued, “I’ve come to the conclusion that Sir Gunter couldn’t have sons … even if he wanted them.”

  Taleb placed her folded hands on the table before her father and said, “You must not forget that young Volkmar is your grandson … as well as my son.” Silence … “What is it that you are proposing?”

  Luke swallowed. “For the next two or three weeks Gunter will remain preoccupied with cleaning out his well. But when that is done he shall have to turn to other matters.” Silence … “If I were you, I would place myself so that when he turns you are plainly visible.” From the bedroom Volkmar called for his wife; he was having trouble with his leg and wanted her to fetch his crutch.

  In the next days Taleb bint Raya, the twenty-two-year-old Christian convert, found numerous occasions to inspect the water system and the new castle. When a caravan of merchants came in from Damascus and Gunter decided to christen his great dining hall, which in succeeding centuries pilgrims to the Holy Land would characterize as the most beautiful room in the east, Taleb volunteered to serve as hostess, and she sat between the two German knights as the boar and venison were served along with the spiced wines, the dates, the honey and the exotic vegetables. At the height of the feast Gunter cried out to the Damascenes, “You men travel a lot. I’ve been thinking of getting married. Tell me, are those Armenian princesses from Edessa as pretty as they say?”

  A merchant replied, “Your Baldwin married one, and when I saw them in Edessa she seemed a fine lady.”

  “They are Christians,” Volkmar observed.