Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“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 bund 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 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.