Джеймс Миченер - The Source

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 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.