The Source: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  The drawbridge of the castle was lowered, the iron gates were swung open, creaking in sunlight, and the entourage spurred their horses across the moat and down into the mud-walled town, past the Catholic church of Rome, past the Maronite church of Syria, and up to the old Byzantine basilica called Sancta Magdalena, at which pilgrims had been halting for nine hundred years, seeking blessing before they headed east to the Sea of Galilee on a visit to the scenes of Christ’s ministry. Resting their horses by the entrance the knights dismounted and made their way into the darkened chapels, where they knelt and asked blessing on their venture. A faltering priest in ragged vestments mumbled Greek words over their bared heads, and they crossed themselves, returning to their horses and the lovely green countryside of the principality of the counts of Gretz.

  How beautiful it was, how achingly beautiful to the senses was Galilee that spring morning. The forests of cedar and pine had not yet been completely chopped away; olive orchards and the far vineyards still flourished; fields produced rich harvests of wheat and oats and barley, while small plots were kept aside for sesame, from which sweet candy was made for children. And at every fifth or sixth mile some new village of Volkmar’s fief would appear, each with its ninety-six Muslims and four Christians working together. It was a land, Volkmar thought as he surveyed it for what he sensed might be the last time, which truly flowed with milk and honey, and he was depressed to think that no way could be devised for holding on to it. As a descendant of the Family of Ur, Volkmar loved the land not only because it was his principality, but also because it was a good and beautiful thing of itself. It was worth preserving in its richness, and he knew that when the Mamelukes captured such land they took no pains to keep it productive. They killed the farmers, chopped down trees, destroyed the irrigation and abandoned the valleys to the Bedouins and goats. It would be cruel to see these fields laid waste, Volkmar reflected.

  As the pilgrims headed toward Nazareth the count explained to his son, “The secret of wealth is to have many people working, but in the old days we did not understand this, so we slaughtered all who lived on the land because they were of a different religion. But we quickly learned that in doing so we were killing ourselves, and the land lay idle until we could find hands to till it. Our first count was among the earliest to discover this truth, and that was why through the years our family prospered whilst others did not.”

  “Is that why we were able to build the castle?” the boy asked.

  “Well,” his father hedged. He thought: In his own time the boy can read what Wenzel of Trier wrote and it would be difficult to explain now, but to his own memory the words of the old chronicler came back with all the muted force that had accompanied them when he had first read them:

  And after the death of my Lord Volkmar, rest his Christian soul, unforeseen events took place in the castle of Makor. Sir Gunter of Cologne quickly took my Lady Taleb to wife but placed her son, Volkmar, in a prison, where the boy had little food and no sunlight and where none instructed him, and there the boy languished for seven years. For Gunter announced that he would have his own son who would inherit the principality, but when the lady became not pregnant, the knight swore at her in my presence and shouted, “Damn thee, thy womb swelled for him.” And one night at a banquet he roared to all that he would lie on his wife every night for a year until she bore him a son, and from her end of the table she said quietly that since she had already proved that she could have a child, and had done so, the matter must rest with him, and at his discomfiture we all roared. So Gunter found many women and lay with them, one after another, but none bore him a son and he was past forty years of age, and he saw that he was not to have a child and that when he died the only person to inherit his fields and his castle would be the boy who lay in prison, so the prisoner was brought forth, eleven years of age of which seven had been lived in darkness, and now my Lord Gunter turned to this child as if he were his own precious son and taught him all he knew of warfare and of defending castles and of governing peasants so that their yield would be improved. He required me to teach the boy Latin and Greek and the boy’s grandfather, Luke the Bailiff, perfected him in Arabic and Turkish, so that when the boy was sixteen Gunter contracted a marriage for him with the noble family of Edessa and the old knight was impatient, walking up and down the battlements, until the princess bore a son, for then my Lord Gunter cried, “Now, by God, you are worthy to own this land,” and it was this Volkmar who extended the boundaries.

  They camped that first night on the edge of the swamp that filled the middle areas between Ma Coeur and Nazareth, and in the morning one of the guards wakened the sleepers with the cry, “The storks are rising!” The pilgrims rushed to view one of the memorable sights of Galilee: five storks from a large flock that had been resting near the swamp during their migration north had found a current of hot air rising from the land, and these five had already entered it and were being carried speedily aloft without using their wings at all. Their huge black bodies were canted upward and their white wings were extended motionless to their fullest extent, so that the rising air swept them aloft in wide spirals. Their pink bills were thrust straight forward and their long reddish legs trailed after them like rudders.

  Those storks remaining on the ground understood from the manner in which their fellows soared into the air that an upward current had been found, and with awkward, lumbering jumps they loped across the meadows and projected themselves, wings outspread, into the column of rising air, allowing it to loft them far into the sky toward those highest currents along which they would migrate to Europe. When Volkmar and his son hurried into the morning sunlight they could see a mysterious pillar of more than a hundred storks, apparently motionless yet rising upward, one above the other, until the topmost ones were lost in the sky, and Volkmar quoted from Jeremiah, who had once watched these birds rising over the Galilee: “ ‘Yea, the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times.’ ”

  “It’s an omen for us,” one of the knights avowed, for as the birds soared aloft, wings and necks and legs extended, they formed a series of supernatural crosses reaching from earth to heaven.

  “An omen of good!” other warriors echoed, and all bared their heads and crossed themselves, but Volkmar, watching the topmost storks start flapping their giant wings as they left the rising current, said to himself: No omen, but a warning. They are flying to Germany and soon they will nest in the chimneys of Gretz. The storks had been sent to warn Volkmar and his family to leave the Galilee and go back to Germany. For many days his thoughts would be tormented by that column of majestic crosses, motionless in the sky.

  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 i
n 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 Gretz.”

  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 her 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 rue
fully 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.