Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“All I can tell you,” Heth replied, “is to tend your groves.” He looked at the troubled man, then added slowly, “And buy for yourself the best Astarte you can find.”

This was the kind of counsel Urbaal had sought. Turning from the pottery, he brought his face close to Heth’s and asked the bearded merchant, “Would that help?”

“It’s how Amalek won last year,” the merchant assured him.

“I already have three statues,” Urbaal protested.

“With your trees? Is three enough? Really?” The wily trader stroked his beard and stared at the rich farmer.

“I’ve wondered myself,” Urbaal confessed. He turned away from Heth and walked about the small shop mumbling to himself. Then, like a child pleading, he grasped Heth’s hand and asked, “Do you truthfully think it would help?”

Heth said nothing, but from a corner he produced a small clay figure of a goddess. She was six inches high, nude, very feminine, with wide hips and hands cupped below circular breasts. She was erotic and plump, delightful to study and reassuring to have in one’s presence. The merchant was obviously proud of her and was bound to ask a good price.

Urbaal looked at the statue with special concern. To him this was not a piece of cleverly molded clay, no abstract theological symbol. It was the veritable goddess Astarte who determined the fertility of land, of women, of olive trees. Without her help he was powerless. He could pray to Baal-of-the-Waters and to Baal-of-the-Sun, and they could send the right amounts of rain and warmth, but if Astarte frowned olives would not produce oil; and unless she smiled he could not win this year.

He adored Astarte. Others feared her capriciousness—famine one year, abundance the next—but he had adapted himself to her arbitrary behavior. He worshiped her faithfully and in return she had been good to him, as she had been to his fathers before him. If the fields and the beehives of Urbaal prospered, even when others failed, it was because he and Astarte had reached an understanding.

“The statue you sold me last year worked,” the farmer rationalized as he looked at the new goddess.

“For three years you couldn’t get Timna pregnant,” Heth pointed out. “Then, with the proper statue …”

“I’ll take it!” the farmer decided. “How much?”

“Seven gurs of barley, seven of wheat,” Heth replied.

Urbaal had known that the price would be steep, but now he did some calculations. “That’s more than fourteen gin of silver,” he said. “Last year it was only eight.”

“It is fourteen,” Heth agreed, “but this Astarte is special. She wasn’t made by hand, like your others. They’ve found a new way in Akka, and it costs.”

“I’ll take her,” Urbaal said, and he picked up the little goddess, put her to his lips, and went back across the plaza to where the monoliths stood.

The secret of Urbaal’s success in farming lay in what he was now about to do. He knew that if Astarte was the goddess of fecundity, she must cherish the sexual act as the source of her power, so he never left his goddesses alone but saw to it that they were generously provided with male gods. Bearing his new goddess to the ancient monolith of El, he introduced her to the half-hidden one and whispered, “Tonight, great El, you can come to the house of Urbaal, where the goddess will be waiting.” He then took her to the other baals, holding her seductively against them, rubbing her body against theirs and whispering, “Tonight, when the moon goes down, come to the house of Urbaal, where Astarte will be waiting.”

Holding the little goddess tenderly in his cupped hands, he bowed to the four monoliths and started homeward, but as he did so, along the porch of the temple there passed a tall girl of sixteen wearing rough-spun robes and golden sandals. She was slender, and with each step her long bare legs broke through the garments; her black hair, which fell below her shoulders, moved in the sunlight. Her face had an extraordinary beauty: dark, widely placed eyes, long straight nose, high cheekbones and silken skin. She walked with conscious grace and was aware of the effect she created on men, for that was her purpose.

Ever since her arrival in Makor, a slave captured during a raid to the north, Urbaal had been fascinated by her. He saw her striding through his dreams. She was in his olive groves when he inspected them, and when the girls of Makor trampled his grapes she was among them, the red juice staining her long legs. Even when the farmer’s second wife, Timna, had had her child, Urbaal could think only of the tall slave, and it was she who had driven him to purchase his fourth Astarte. Clutching the goddess closer to his heart, he watched the girl until she disappeared into another part of the temple, a man wholly captive to urges that seemed about to consume him. Bringing the clay goddess to his lips, he kissed her and whispered, “Astarte! My fields must produce. Help me! Help me!”

He waited in the shadows for some time, hoping that the tall slave might return, but when she did not he wandered disconsolately back to the main gate, a complicated zigzag affair with towers from which archers looked down into a maze of twists and turns. Long ago the town of Makor had learned that if its gate were wide and forthright, opening directly into the heart of the town, any enemy who succeeded in rushing that gate found himself comfortably inside the town, which he could then despoil. The entrance to Makor provided no such opportunity; as soon as a would-be invader passed through the main gate he had to make a sharp turn to the left, and before he could gain speed an equally sharp turn to the right, all in such tight compass that he stood exposed to the spears and arrows of the defenders who crouched above him. It was in the tangle of wall thus produced that Urbaal had his home, and it was almost as convoluted as the gate.

In the center stood an odd-shaped courtyard which served as the heart of the house, with wings radiating out in various directions. In the arm nearest the gate lived his two wives and their five children: four from his first wife, a recent boy from his second. In the opposite wing clustered the granaries, the wine pots, kitchens and rooms for his slaves, including two attractive girls who had already given him a series of children in whom he found delight. Some twenty people lived in the house of Urbaal, a center of vitality and love, and they kept it a noisy place. Peasants preferred working for this gusty man to serving in fields belonging to the temple, because although they had to work harder for Urbaal than they did for the priests, they loved him as a peasant like themselves. He ate in gulps, guzzled wine and loved to stand with them in the fields, sweat rolling down from his jug-shaped chest.

He now entered this sprawling house, passing through the courtyard, and proceeded at once to the richly adorned god-room where he kept his three Astartes on a small shelf, each accompanied by a length of stone representing one of the monoliths in the high place. His fourth Astarte he placed in position, adjusting her carefully to her new surroundings, then taking from a hidden place a piece of basalt stone which he had been saving for this purpose. It was obviously phallic, a mighty manly symbol, and he tucked it close to his goddess, whispering, “Tonight when the moon goes down, Baal-of-the-Storm will come to lie with you.” He had found that if he kept his goddesses happy they would reciprocate, but now his need was both urgent and specific, and he wished his new patroness to understand the proposed bargain: “Enjoy yourself tonight and every night. All I ask is that when the measuring comes, let it be me.”

He was interrupted by the arrival of his second wife, Timna, who normally would not enter his god-room, but who now appeared in some distress. She was the stately kind of wife that men for the past eight thousand years have represented in their statues—motherly, considerate and understanding. Her dark eyes were distended with fright and before she spoke Urbaal could guess what had happened. Some years before he had seen this same terrified look in his first wife’s eyes, when she, too, had been unable to face reality. It was the weakness of women to look so, and Urbaal prepared himself for tears. “What is it?” he asked gently.