The Source: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  “They’re hot-tempered,” the murderer said. “If they could catch me now, they’d kill me. In three days they’ll see how foolish this is and go home.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “They saw their brother cut me. I think they may even be pleased that I found sanctuary. Gives them the excuse they need.”

  The governor was surprised at the cynical realism of the exhausted man, and with some doubts stationed four guards at the temple, charging them with the preservation of the fugitive’s life so long as he could grasp even one horn of the altar. This was a custom which the Hebrews of the desert had had to adopt when they moved into settled land, for blood feuds had ravaged the tribes, continuing through generations and causing the loss of many men who were needed as herdsmen and husbands. Moses himself had proposed a system whereby cities of refuge would be established to which accidental murderers could flee, achieving sanctuary merely by entering the city gates, but nothing had so far been accomplished in this respect. In the meantime, in any town, refuge was assured those who succeeded in grasping the horns of the altar, as Gershom now did.

  “Feed him,” the governor directed the guards, and he was about to consult with the brothers concerning the fugitive’s story when shouts came from the northern wall of the town, and excited figures started running toward the governmental quarters. “What’s happened?” the governor called, and the messengers turned in their running to cry, “The tunnels have met!”

  He hurried to the main shaft, at whose base he heard the shouting of the slaves, and excited hands wanted to lead him down the steep stairs so that he might see the penetration, but he was satisfied with their report. After a while Meshab the Moabite climbed out, exulting, and the governor greeted him as an equal. “Hoopoe told me that when this happened you would be a freedman,” the governor said.

  “I am.”

  “Are you returning to Moab?”

  “I promised Hoopoe I’d help round out the tunnel.”

  “That will please him. How did the two ends meet?”

  Using his forefingers Meshab started with his elbows wide apart and slowly brought the fingertips toward each other. Even without words the gesture was dramatic, and the governor could sense the blind probing that had been involved. “At this point we could each hear the other side, and Hoopoe’s tunnel was slightly off line, but right in elevation. Mine was a little high.” He brought his fingertips together, not perfectly but showing his tunnel a little high and Hoopoe’s skewed to the north. Only a quarter of the two faces had met, and the nearness of the miss demonstrated what a miracle had occurred.

  “We were fortunate,” the governor said, appreciating the drama.

  “Hoopoe did it,” the Moabite replied, and the governor realized that this was not flattery.

  “What do we do next?” he asked. During the months when it looked as if the project might fail he had shown no interest in the slaves burrowing under his town, but now that success was assured he was clever enough to see that it could be used to bring him to the attention of Jerusalem. Henceforth it would be “our tunnel.”

  “The rest is easy,” the Moabite said, but before he could explain, Hoopoe came through the postern gate, dirty and happy, and Meshab deserted the governor, running to Hoopoe and embracing him as a brother, after which the governor called in to Hoopoe’s house, “Kerith, come and greet the victor!” She appeared in a shimmering blue robe which her husband had brought her from Accho, which it had reached by boat from Greece, and as a pendant she wore the braided glass rope. She understood the happiness of the two men and kissed her husband warmly, whereupon he directed her, “You must also kiss my brother Meshab, who is today a freedman.” Gravely Kerith kissed the former slave, and he had to bite his lip to keep his face from trembling, or perhaps even from showing tears. He grasped the hands of his two good friends and said, “You are indeed of my family.”

  To Hoopoe the governor said, “Tomorrow we start paying him a salary,” but to Meshab he said, “Why not accept circumcision and become one of us?” As the governor spoke he gestured toward the temple with his right hand, and to those who were watching, the movement was a subtle invitation, for his hand indicated the many different peoples who had come to make up the Hebrew population of Makor: the men from Cyprus, who had accepted circumcision in order to marry local girls; the Hittites, who had made a secure place for themselves after years of slavery; the Babylonian refugees; the clever Egyptians, who had stayed behind with local families when their empire crumbled; the dark-skinned Africans and the red-headed Edomites. All were now legally Hebrews and there was no reason why a Moabite should not join them.

  Affected by the moment, Meshab took the governor’s hand and kissed it. “I have seen the greatness of Yahweh, but I am a man of Baal.”

  “You could be both,” the governor reminded him, pointing out that foreign wives of the royal family were not only permitted to retain their ancient gods but were encouraged to do so. “Jerusalem contains many private temples to Egyptian and Philistine gods, and you could have the same here.” He indicated the mountain and concluded, “Baal will remain there for you.”

  Meshab bowed his head and looked at the ground. “I belong to Baal of the Moabites,” he insisted, and the governor tried no more to contest his dedication. As Kerith watched with admiration he congratulated Meshab on his freedom and departed, pausing to look again at the three grim-faced men who stood guard at the temple, waiting till the murderer tried to escape. It was not necessary, the governor thought, to post his soldiers to protect the temple where the man had taken sanctuary, for this sacred privilege had not been violated in hundreds of years; there was little likelihood that the brothers would want to set an ugly precedent and the governor was satisfied that after a few days of waiting, which blood-feuds required, they would, as the murdered man had predicted, climb on their donkeys and go home.

  In the days that followed, the presence of the fugitive in the temple became a matter of general interest, for it had been a generation since a murderer had sought sanctuary in this town, and children begged their mothers to be allowed to take him his food. Of course, the Levites, those assigned to tend the temple, were required to provide him with water and privy accommodations, which they did by means of clay pots, but townspeople were responsible for the feeding, and so a stream of children filed in and out bearing gifts. And when the prisoner had eaten, the children stayed to hear him tune his lyre and lean against a wall and sing old songs of the mountains and new ones that he had composed while tending sheep in the valleys:

  “I shall sing a new song to Yahweh,

  A song of the hills,

  From whence comes my redemption,

  From whence comes my salvation

  And my sustenance.”

  The children were surprised that from his slight body could come so strong a voice and they brought their parents to hear him, and the older people noticed what the children had not: that no matter how impassioned the man’s songs became, he always kept himself in position to grasp the altar horns should the watchers suddenly burst into the temple to catch him unawares. He was wise to take this precaution, for often one of the brothers would push open the door with his sword to ascertain where Gershom might be at that moment.

  On the third day it fell on the house of Hoopoe to feed the murderer, and since Hoopoe was occupied at the tunnel Kerith gathered together some food and took the pots herself to the temple, where she heard for the first time the sweet singer of the hills. He was seated in the shadows, his dirty, sand-stained sheepskin about him and his matted beard hiding his thin face. His lyre was tuned and he was strumming it for some children, so that when she entered he did not see her but continued singing idly, and she remained by the door waiting both with food and the exciting news that would set him free. And as he sang she listened:

  “Yahweh is my abode forever,

  His palace is the firmament,

  The pathway of the heavens.

 
; He is the joy of morning

  And the consolation of the rising moon.

  Him I worship with song

  And the cry of seven strings,

  For he is my salvation and the song of my heart.”

  When he finished with the latter phrase he drifted his fingers across the strings and smiled at the children crowding in upon him, but as he did so he saw Kerith standing by the door, and as they stared at each other he plucked the strings with one finger. He did not stop playing but he did stop singing so that he might watch her as she came across the temple to bring him her gift of food, and as she approached him she said, “They have gone away.”

  “The three?” he asked.

  “They have gone,” she assured him, and he played a joyous song.

  This was the month of Bul—when wheat was harvested for sale to the groats maker and grapes were hauled to the vintner—and Hoopoe and Meshab spent many hours in the earth, spurring the slaves to complete the routing out of the little tunnels into one large one ten feet high by six feet across. The original joining had produced a common hole less than two feet high by one across, and at the meeting point the planners had put their men to work excavating the first full-size cross section, calculating in the abstract how the enlarged hole must stand so as to provide when extended an even rate of fall from the bottom of the shaft to the level of the well, and they had done their calculations so neatly that when the dimensions of the first ten-by-six cut were extended in each direction the finished tunnel would be uniform, of predetermined incline and with no marks remaining to show where the join had been made or where Hoopoe had lost his bearings for a while. Only the two friends could appreciate what a marvel of accuracy the Makor water tunnel was.

  As the two men worked, during the last part of the third year, Hoopoe’s wife Kerith had many occasions to hear the stranger Gershom sing his plaintive songs of the shepherd’s country and his exultant accounts of Yahweh’s triumphs. When the necessity for his staying close to the horns of the altar passed, he found a job with a man who kept a shop across from the temple, where surplus wool was bought for shipment to Accho, and he became a popular figure with younger people, sitting in the wintry sunlight before the temple and singing to them. There was a wine shop next door where olive oil was also sold, and it was frequently filled with yellow-stained workers from the dye vats, men who enjoyed hearing Gershom sing of ways of life they had not known:

  “Yahweh is my protector when the serpent strikes,

  Yea, my shield in time of anguish.

  He saves the lamb in the thorn,

  Yea, the bullock struck with pain,

  Yahweh is my food, my wine, my meat in the desert,

  Yea, my sustenance in the lonely places,

  My joy when I am alone in the night.

  He is my song, my cry of thanks,

  My exultation at the rising of the sun.”

  Gershom himself could not have known that this ancient song had originally been sung by Canaanites more than a thousand years before, when they accorded their baals the same attributes that he now gave Yahweh, but the song as Gershom had modified it was a true hymn of praise to whatever god guided the movement of the heavens and the sure return of the seasons, bringing with them the blessings that men require.

  Often, as Gershom sang outside the wine shop, Kerith came for wine or olive oil—a task which she had formerly assigned her slave girls—and she listened with increasing pleasure to the singing of the fugitive. His name, she learned, meant “a stranger among us,” and the brothers of the slain man had told the people of Makor that the story of the murder was not quite so simple as Gershom had represented it. They explained that he had arrived in their village without a genealogy but had talked himself into marriage with the daughter of a man whose sheep he had subsequently stolen. The wound across his neck had not come from their murdered brother; his father-in-law had slashed him while trying to regain his stolen sheep. As for the murder, without reason Gershom had ambushed their brother at dusk. “How did he become an outcast in the first place?” the people of Makor asked, and the brothers replied, “Of his past we know nothing.”

  “He told us he was of the family of Levi,” a boy said. But the brothers shrugged their shoulders. “Maybe,” they said.

  At first Kerith wondered what the truth might be, but when the people of Makor began to accept him, she ignored his shadowy antecedents and began listening to his songs, and one day when she heard him outside the wine shop singing to a group of children, his song was such a devout cry of thanksgiving that she was held captive, as if the stranger were grasping not the horn of the altar but the hem of her gown:

  “Thorns clutched at my ankles,

  Yea, rocks bruised my heel,

  But Yahweh watched my progress from on high.

  He guided my steps and I came to cool waters.

  Men pursued me through the night,

  Yea, on donkeys and camels they pursued me

  And I was afraid.

  But Yahweh saw me dying in the dark places,

  In the lonely place he saw me

  And with his love he led me to his altar.”

  It was a song which assumed a personal relationship with Yahweh, who stood forth as the culmination of all preceding gods. Its words had a special effect upon Kerith, for they constituted a logical extension of the ideals her father had taught her as a child. In Gershom’s songs Yahweh not only controlled the heavens of heaven, he also had time to watch with pity a man whose ankle was pierced by thorns; and this dual capacity was critical, for although Kerith had never felt the need of Baal, she did realize that Yahweh had not brought her the close personal consolation that her neighbors had found in Baal. Now Gershom was stating that Yahweh was the kind of god she had longed for: he was at hand and could be known. It was this lyric rapture that had up to now been missing in the religion of the Hebrews, as practiced in Makor, and it was the revelation of this new Yahweh, disclosed through the agency of an uncertain stranger, that struck her with disrupting force.

  Her visits to the wine shop grew more frequent, until it became apparent even to the loungers from the dye vats that she was buying more olive oil than the demands of her simple kitchen would have dictated. She lingered by the entrance to the shop, staring at the man with the seven-stringed lyre, and many in Makor began to speculate that she had fallen in love with the stranger, and before long Meshab the Moabite heard the gossip.

  He went straight to Hoopoe, finding him in a section of the tunnel where the diggers were striking hard rock. It was in the month of Abib, when men were harvesting barley for shipment to Accho, where it would be brewed into beer, that Meshab said, “Hoopoe, your wife is running like a lamb toward a cliff.”

  The fat little engineer sat down. “What’s happened?” he asked.

  “She’s fallen in love with Gershom.”

  “Is he the man who plays the kinnor?”

  Meshab looked with pity at his friend. “You must be the only man in Makor who doesn’t know who he is. And Kerith is in love with him.”

  Hoopoe swallowed, then licked his lips. “Where …”

  The noise in the tunnel was too great for conversation, so the Moabite led Hoopoe back to the bottom of the main shaft, where in the coolness of the shadows he said, “When you were in Accho buying the iron I had a chance to know Kerith. She’s a good woman, like my wife before she was killed. But she’s hungry … the uncertainties …”

  Hoopoe became excited. “I know exactly what you mean,” he said reassuringly, as if it were Meshab who should be worried. “Kerith’s always dreamed of going to Jerusalem. She says she’d be happier there. And I have the most exciting news.” He was nervous with pleasure and cautioned, “You mustn’t tell anyone. I haven’t even told Kerith, because I didn’t want her to become overhopeful.” He dropped his voice to a happy whisper. “But King David is going to visit the tunnel. He’s heard about it even in Jerusalem.” The little engineer looked about and confided, “O
f course he’ll ask me to go up to Jerusalem with him.”

  The Moabite shook his head in pity. “You’re placing all your hopes in that?” he asked.

  “Oh yes! And then Kerith will be contented. In Jerusalem, that is.”

  “Dear friend, her trouble is now. In the wine shop … now.”

  “I’m sure it’s exaggerated,” Hoopoe replied.

  Meshab felt that he must stun his friend into reality, so he said bluntly, “Three years ago, when General Amram came here …”

  “Now, now! Don’t say anything against General Amram,” Hoopoe warned. “After all, it was thanks to him that you’re now a freedman.”

  Meshab was about to speak further when it occurred to him, for some reason he could not have explained, that Hoopoe had known about General Amram’s dalliance with his wife, and that the little engineer had been so determined to keep working at some new job after the walls were finished that he didn’t really care what yoke he would have to bear to win the next authorization. If Kerith could obtain his permission only by being congenial with the general, if that was the way it had to be achieved, there was nothing Hoopoe could do to alter the facts. Meshab looked at his friend and wondered if Hoopoe had gone willingly on those afternoon excursions which the general had invented.

  To his surprise, Hoopoe volunteered the answer. “Did you think that I didn’t know that General Amram was trying to make a fool of me? ‘Go here, Hoopoe. Go there, Hoopoe.’ And did you think that when I went on his meaningless missions my wife was giving herself to him? Have you known Kerith so long without discovering that she is a woman of great purity?” Sorely wounded by Meshab’s conversation, he turned away but immediately came back to grab Meshab’s arm, saying with disdain, “On the day Amram reached Makor he had one thing I wanted, this tunnel, and I got it. I had one thing he wanted, but he never came close to winning her. That year who was the foolish man?” And Meshab said no more.