The Source

by James A. Michener

  One of the warriors experienced in the swamp now took command, and the file of pilgrims threaded its way southward through the mysterious waters that had always been such a challenge to the adventuresome men of the district. Leading their horses along the solid footpaths they startled egrets and the striking purple herons. The marshes were alive with flowers, tulips and lupine and cyclamen and orchids, and the one that had always so delighted the children of Ma Coeur: the slender olive-green plant with brown stripes whose leaves looked like the heart of Jesus and whose canopy protected a little gray-green man. “Priest-in-his-pulpit,” the children called the plant, and it was young Volkmar’s favorite.

  At the far end of the swamp they regained firm ground and began their final march to Nazareth, but as they proceeded, the full richness of Galilee broke over them: bee eaters flashing through branches, olive trees shimmering in sunlight and red poppies marking their way like beacons. Let the storks head for Germany, Volkmar said to himself. What man would leave this paradise? And he determined to stay on his land.

  At Nazareth, which seemed a sturdy anchor of Christianity in a land already become infidel, Volkmar left the others and went alone to the grotto where the archangel Gabriel had announced to the Virgin that she was to become the Mother of Jesus. It was a portentous spot, more nearly a deep cave than a grotto, and its walls were damp. As Volkmar stood in the narrow space the actual presence of Mary and Gabriel was made manifest. It was for this that the Germans, the French and the English had fought: that the Christian world might come in peace to such sacred spots and worship; but after two hundred years of warfare a knight of Ma Coeur could come to this holiest of spots only on sufferance of a Mameluke slave. What had gone wrong? Why had the various Volkmars been unable to hold Nazareth, or the Baldwins, Jerusalem? Why should the scenes of our Lord’s passion be in infidel hands, lost forever to the Christians? He could not understand, and he lowered his strong head and whispered, “Mary, Mother of God, we have failed you. For some reason I cannot comprehend we have failed and soon we shall be driven away. Forgive us, Mary. We did not find the way.”

  For nearly an hour he remained alone in the sanctuary, then climbed gloom-ridden back to sunlight and told his son, “You must go down to see the spot where the Word became flesh,” and he spoke no more of that holy place.

  They rode then to Mont Thabor, where the appearance of Jesus had been transfigured from that of an ordinary mortal into the reality of a deity, and they stayed with the monks who ignored Mameluke threats and operated on top of the mountain; and next day they rode to the gentlest of the holy places, Cefrequinne, the Cana of Bible times, where a Muslim and his wife showed them the very cot on which Jesus had rested during the wedding feast. Young Volkmar asked in Arabic if he might lie on the Lord’s couch, and the Muslim replied, “For one coin anyone may lie on it,” and the boy did so. He also saw two of the six jars which had held the water which Christ had turned into wine, and touching their rough clay the boy experienced a historic sense of Jesus. “Are these the real jars?” he asked, clasping his fingers about the handle that Jesus might have used.

  “Yes,” the count said, and when the others were not looking he, too, grasped the heavy clay pots. This turning of water into wine had been the first miracle, the initial step taking a Nazarene carpenter to Calvary, and Volkmar heard the long-ago words which Wenzel had written of the first Volkmar: “For I was in Jerusalem on the morning I set out from Greiz.”

  What had been the deciding point in the Crusades? Volkmar wondered as he stood in the house at Cefrequinne. When had failure become inevitable? He supposed it must have been at some unrecorded date early in the 1100s, in the time of Volkmar II, when it became obvious that no great number of European settlers were going to make the long trip to Jerusalem. We never had enough people, the count mused. How often do we hear of this king or that whose wife died or whose sons wasted away with no one coming along to take their places? We were always so few … so few. In the rude hut where Jesus had begun his mystical life the names returned: Baldwin and Bohemond, Tancred and Lion Heart, and that false Reynald of Châtillon who had destroyed so much. “God! I would like to have that man’s throat between my hands right now!” Volkmar cried, and instantly he was ashamed of his passion in such a holy place, but the Muslim caretaker took no notice, and Volkmar muttered, “There are two things for which I respect our enemy Saladin. He destroyed nothing in our castle and he killed Reynald with his own hands.”

  A true sadness came over Volkmar, and he sat upon the couch of Christ and lowered his head. How had men so essentially good in heart permitted catastrophes like Reynald and his kind? Than the saintly Louis, the French king in Acre, there could be no sweeter man; and the greatest of them all, Baldwin IV of Jerusalem, who, when his body was rotting away with leprosy and his eyes were blind and his feet gone, insisted still upon being carried into battle one last time against Saladin, whom he had defeated time after time.

  We rode out to battle in the desert [wrote the Volkmar who was to die at the Horns of Hattin] and the purple tent of Baldwin went with us; and when the enemy saw this tent once more on the march they fled, and when they were gone I went in to tell the leper king of his latest victory and he turned his sightless eyes upon me and thanked me and I drew away lest he hear my tears, for I had forgot that he was but a boy of twenty.

  Why had they gone, the great ones, leaving the lesser behind? Baldwin the Leper was one of the superb kings of the east, but he had died a boy, leaving a creature like Reynald of Châtillon to contest for his throne. We needed fresh blood from Europe, and it never came, Volkmar reflected. His own family had remained strong—eight Volkmars in a row, and his son seemed as promising as the others—but perhaps it was because they had often brought their wives from afar. His own countess had come from the noble family of Ascalon, but his mother had been raised in Sicily. If, after the First Crusade, we had never allowed another knight on this soil, Volkmar decided, but if we had brought instead farmers and shoemakers, we could have held the kingdom. In his gloominess an ironic thought came to him and he laughed, pressing his hands against the couch of Jesus: A better idea, each year we should have imported a dozen shiploads of French and German milkmaids, for the European men, unable to find wives of their own background, had married wantonly into the local population. Any girl who would step before the priest and allow herself to be baptized was termed a Christian …

  He stopped. His judgment was ungenerous, for it had been Taleb, wife to the first count and the worst kind of cynical convert to Christianity, who had really saved the principality for the Volkmars. Of this extraordinary woman her son had told the white-haired Wenzel of Trier:

  In the long years when I lay in the dungeon without seeing sunlight, two people came to mean the entire world to me—the jailer who brought my food, throwing it on the stone table without speaking—and my mother who slipped through the gates I know not how. Once I saw the jailer kissing her and perhaps that was the coin she used, but she came as often as she could escape Gunter’s detection and she talked with me. How simple that statement is, how much it signifies. She talked with me. Unlike my father and Gunter, she could read, and she told me of all that she had learned, and this I prized more than the bits of food she smuggled to me. And I remember that each time she sat with me she said three things: “I am not pregnant.” “Soon the brute must awaken to the true situation.” And, “Volkmar, you shall be the amir of this principality.” If it had not been for her, when I finally was taken from the dungeon I would have been an idiot.

  This second count later testified that during his long reign it was his mother who had advised him on how to deal with Arabs and on ways to enlarge the fief by invading lands loosely held by incompetents. Yet at her death she had outraged the kingdom by replying to the priest when he asked her if she was not happy that she had left off being a Muslim and become a Christian: “I was never either. Both ways are folly.” And in spite of the priest’s pleadings and those of he
r son, she died in this belief, so that no statue of her, nor any plaque, was permitted in the chapel of Ma Coeur.

  We never had enough people, Volkmar mourned in Cefrequinne as he visualized the map. We held the cities of the coast from Antioch to Ascalon, but the sources of real power, like Aleppo and Damascus, we left in the hands of the Turks. And now the Mameluke. And even with that condition facing us we still refused to do the two things necessary for our survival. We never became a sea power with ships of our own, for we depended upon the men of Venice and Genoa, who bled us white and betrayed us whenever it suited their interests. Nor did we achieve an alliance with the Arabs, binding their land to ours. So in the end Syria combined with Egypt and we were left an enclave on the edge of the sea. He reflected on the lost glories and concluded: We produced men of vision like Volkmar the Cypriot, but whenever they were about to effect some kind of compromise new fools landed from Europe to slay the Arabs and to destroy what the wise men were attempting.

  He snapped his fingers and the Muslim caretaker hurried over. Volkmar apologized: “I was thinking …” and the Muslim shrugged his shoulders. There’s the contradiction! Volkmar thought as the man left. And I never perceived it before. We needed the settlers from Europe … couldn’t exist without them. But all we got were warriors determined to kill the very friends we had to depend on for survival. Ah, well. He sighed ruefully and assembled his men for the ride to the Sea of Galilee; but as they saddled up he said, “We are thirteen—the number of those who dined at our Lord’s Last Supper.”

  He was unaware, at that moment, of the contradiction in which he was caught, for on leaving Cefrequinne he and his men knelt in reverence to that hallowed spot, not realizing that the true Cana of Christ’s miracle lay seven miles northwest at a site now remembered only by coyotes. In the year 326, when Saint Helena, the mother of Constantine, had come this way identifying the scenes of Christ’s life, even the name of Cana had been locally forgotten, and in answer to her inquiries helpful peasants of Nazareth had shown her a mud-walled village, saying, “This is Cana,” and Cana it had henceforth been. The Lord’s couch, the water jugs, were the inventions of Muslims who collected pilgrims’ coins thereby. In many similar externals the Crusaders had been deceived by the Holy Land and had failed to grasp the realities that confronted them, but in their dedication to a religious principle they had not wavered, and when these men now prayed in the false Cana, they prayed to a real Saviour.

  They rose and for some hours traveled eastward through the fallow countryside, and wherever the earth was exposed it looked damp and dark, the kind that grows its weight in food. The trail was still marked with flowers: the purple thistle and the yellow daisy and that blue five-petaled beauty which winked with pollened eyes as men rode by. It was a land of exquisite loveliness, well suited for the birthplace of a Saviour, and then the men riding ahead cried, “The lake!” and all spurred their horses, and the knights in armor paused in wonder at the beauty of the scene below.

  It was the Sea of Galilee, now known by its Latin name, Mare Tyberiadis, sunk in its deep depression among surrounding hills whose red and brown coloring played across the surface of the water, so that sometimes the lake was its own blue—a deep, pulsating blue of vivid quality which made the heart cry out with joy—while at other times it was red or brown or, where the trees were, green. But always its colors were in motion, a living, twisting kaleidoscope, as marvelous a body of water as there was on earth.

  “This is the lake of Jesus,” Volkmar explained, as his son gazed down upon the water on which the Lord had walked. “To the north is Capharnaum, where we shall travel later. The city with the castle is Tabarie. Years ago it belonged to your uncle’s family, but now it’s Mameluke.” And the men rested their horses for a long time, surveying the incomparable scene which for so many years had been denied them because of Turkish conquest.

  Young Volkmar was eager to ride down to Tabarie, for the walled city was inviting, but his father indicated that they must postpone that visit for a while and ride to the north in the direction of a strange hill composed of two projections. “The Horns of Hattin,” the count said, “and I would our house had never heard the name.” His knights crossed themselves, for of the twelve men riding that day from Ma Coeur, each had lost an ancestor at the great battle and some, like Volkmar, had lost four: great-great-uncles and great-great-grandfathers and men who, had they lived, might have held the kingdom together.

  “It was in July, 1187, more than a hundred years ago,” Volkmar explained. “Saladin was in Tabarie with all the water and wall he needed. At Ma Coeur were the king and the greatest knights of the day, and in our hall the argument began. What would you have done, Volkmar? You’re safe inside your castle. You have thousands of strong men and more than enough armor. You have water at hand and food. To defeat you, Saladin must leave his walls and his water, march up this hill, come far across the plains we’ve just traveled and then try to fight you in your own castle. What would you do?”

  “I’d get lots of food inside the walls and wait,” the boy answered.

  “Great God!” the count cried, smiting his mailed chest. “A child understands. But what did the fools around the king propose? That we leave our tight castles. That we leave our water supplies and our food, and that in the middle of summer we put on our coats of mail and march here to fight Saladin on ground of his own choosing.”

  “That’s what we did,” one of the knights muttered, surveying the improbable battlefield.

  “The men of Volkmar pleaded against the folly,” the count recalled. “Our grand hall echoed with their arguments, but after they had explained how easy it would be for Saladin if we left our castle and fought him here at Hattin, Reynald of Châtillon …” The Count of Ma Coeur looked away and muttered, “May God damn his infamous soul. May God curse him afresh in hell.” He took his son’s hands and said gently, “Next morning when Volkmar IV and his son rode to battle they told their wives that they would not be coming back.” The gloomy descendants of that day looked at the Horns and were mute.

  “Did they fight here?” the boy asked, for he had grown to like the gently falling field, with its protecting Horns and fine view of the lake below.

  “I suppose you’d call it a fight. Twenty thousand Crusaders left Ma Coeur on July 3, the hottest day of the year, and in full armor—much heavier than we wear today—marched without finding water to this spot, where Saladin had more than a hundred thousand men waiting. We had one thousand horsemen. He had twenty thousand. On the final night before the battle our men were dying of thirst … there was a well over there, but they didn’t find it … the moon shone on the lake and they could see the water. It sent them mad, and Saladin knew it, so he set those fields on fire and sparks and smoke blew across our people, and at dawn he began to tighten the net. It was the worst battle that men have ever fought in this land. Cruel … cruel.”

  “Why did our side do such a thing?” the boy inquired.

  “Because it was the turn of stupid men to lead us,” Volkmar replied. “We lost Tabarie and the Galilee and Jerusalem and Ma Coeur, and even St. Jean d’Acre.” He turned away from the others and stared at the hills. “We lost so much,” he muttered to himself. “Later on we won back Ma Coeur and Acre but Jerusalem was gone forever, and now the twilight deepens.” He began to hum a chant from the Catholic liturgy Tenebrae factae sunt, “The shadows are falling.”

  Behind him he heard the knights explaining to his son, “Count Volkmar broke through the ring of iron and died leading his men toward the lake. They reached here,” and the men showed young Volkmar where his ancestor had fallen.

  “Was his son with him?” the boy inquired.

  “Of course,” the knights answered, “Volkmars always seek the enemy,” and the company saddled again and resumed their march to Tabarie, where the Mameluke guards were astonished to see them riding like ghosts out of the hills in which their ancestors had perished, so that an alarm was sounded and the governor himse
lf, a Mameluke with fierce mustaches, left the fort and came to the gate, where he inspected the order from Damascus and allowed the pilgrims entrance.

  It was an inviting little city they had come to, close-walled on three sides and with the lake on the fourth. Since Galilee stood far below sea level the air was heavy and hot, but the cool breeze from the lake was welcome and the food was excellent. The Arabs who inhabited the town—there were not more than six Mamelukes and a hundred Turks—were hospitable, and all were eager to hear news of Acre and Nazareth.

  The warriors laid aside their armor and lounged in comfortable chairs beside the lake, drinking beverages which the garrison supplied, after which the Mameluke governor, pressing down his mustaches, proposed that all go down the road to the hot baths which had made the city famous in Roman days, and for the first time young Volkmar saw springs gushing from the ground bringing water far too hot to touch. The dusty men indulged themselves in the humid rooms and felt the tedium of the saddle seep away in the heat. Then they dressed and rode back to the city, Count Volkmar experiencing pangs of regret when he thought: Once it was ours. Once a prince lived here and gathered fees from lands ten miles away. To come to Tabarie in winter and take the baths, that was the best that Galilee offered.

  He thanked the Mameluke officer for his courtesy and the former slave bowed, and as he did so Volkmar cried to his son, “Look! Look! There’s a Jew.” And for the first time in his life the boy saw a Jew.

  “A few returned from the lands of the Frank,” the Mameluke explained, studying the stranger as if he were a new kind of horse, useful but not customary.