Джеймс Миченер - The Source

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 countryside 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.