Джеймс Миченер - The Source

For her part, she recognized the sturdy farmer merely as an average man, more tender than most who had tried to make love with her, and certainly more honest than her father. One morning she said casually, “I admire you because you are not vain of yourself, nor too exalted in your opinions, nor overly bothered with mean thoughts.” The words excited him and he began wondering; he laughed noisily at her stories and was not offended when she pulled gray hairs from his head or mimicked the manner in which he had leaped onto the steps to take her; at the moments when she made believe she was Urbaal she became an awkward, likable farmer, and he conceived the idea that she was acting so because she desired him, an impression that was fortified by her ardent passion in love-making. Could the priests have spied into the sacred room during the hours that Libamah and Urbaal occupied it, they would have been distressed, for here there was no lofty sense of ritual, no male principle fructifying the handmaiden of Astarte; here were merely two uncomplicated human beings who enjoyed each other and who laughed a good deal while doing so. When the day of parting came, it was understandable that Urbaal could not accept it as final, for under the auspices of the goddess of love he had fallen in love, and when he kissed the enchanting girl good-bye he surprised her by making a dramatic promise, delivered in quivering voice, “You are to be mine.”

More from amusement than from passion she asked, “How?” and he did not understand that she was mocking him.

“I don’t know,” he said gravely. “But I’ll think of something.”

At the exit from the love-room the priests handed back his clothes, and as he put on his linen breeches, woolen shirt tied at the waist, and sandals, he scarcely knew what he was doing, for tall Libamah stood naked in his imagination and he could not dismiss her, nor could he reply when townsmen in the square asked with envy, “Did you get her with child?”

Refusing to share in the ribaldry customary at such times, he walked in a kind of daze through the streets until a loud-mouthed shepherd cried, “Five months from now at the new year I’ll be sleeping between those long brown legs.” Urbaal whipped about and would have struck the man for his insolence except that the stupid, lascivious face made striking inappropriate. Urbaal managed a sickly laugh, but as he approached his house he met his friend Amalek, tall and bronzed from his life with the cattle, and it was then that he began to conceive his powerful jealousy.

What if this one should want to lie with her? he thought to himself. And unfortunately Amalek said half-jokingly, “We haven’t seen you for seven days.” There was no clever reply that Urbaal could think of. He couldn’t joke; he couldn’t show how deeply the week had affected him; and he dared not show his newly born jealousy. Dumbly he looked at the sunburned herdsman and passed on.

At home he paused in the courtyard to greet his wives and to play with his many children. A slave girl brought a jug of freshly pressed pomegranate juice and a set of clay cups made in Akka, so that in spite of his agitation he experienced a moment of quiet satisfaction in being home again with his noisy family. Tomorrow he would go down to the fields and report to the baal of his olive grove, to the deities of the honeycomb, the olive press and the wheat fields his gratification for the boon they had delivered to him. In that relaxed moment he would have been judged the leading citizen of Makor, at peace with his gods, respected by his neighbors and loved by his wives, his slaves and his children. But when he passed into his god-room to drink wine before Astarte in thanks for the crucial aid she had given him in his sexual triumph, he was gripped with cold fear. His goddesses had vanished. Rushing back to the courtyard he cried, “What happened?”

“To what?” Timna asked quietly, masking the fact that she had been awaiting this critical moment.

“The goddesses. They’ve gone.”

“No!” Matred cried. Followed by Timna she hurried to the room and promptly returned, anxiety showing in her dark face.

Urbaal fell onto the hard-earth bench that ran along two sides of the courtyard, showing a degree of fear Timna had not anticipated. “What could have happened?” he asked. In bewilderment he pushed away the food offered by the slaves.

“Even the four stones are gone,” Matred whispered.

Urbaal drew back from his women, and asked, “Has anyone been here who might want to hurt me?”

“No,” Matred said.

His face tensed. He had hoped that the goddesses had been stolen, for this would mean that they had left against their will; if they had fled of their own accord it could mean only that Astarte was displeased over something; his olive trees would wither and the press would yield no oil. He was so frightened at this prospect that Timna realized she should explain that she had destroyed the statues and there was no mystery. But intending to help her husband she temporized: “On the day of the burning we returned to find the door ajar.” She knew this was true, because she had left it so when running out to bury the Astartes.

“Yes!” Matred remembered. “When you took the priestess into the love-room, Urbaal, we stayed to hear the music. Later I found Timna and when we reached home the gate stood open.”

Eagerly Urbaal interrogated the slaves, and they also recollected. “We discussed it at the time,” one of them said. But who could the thief have been? Urbaal drew farther away and sat with his arms clasping his knees against his body, suspiciously reviewing a list of his enemies, until his nascent jealousy proposed one. “Amalek!” he cried. “When I met him today he was very shifty.” It had been the other way around; he had been the shifty one, not Amalek.

Then Timna, deploring the fear that had captured her silly husband, tried to comfort him by adding a lie that she would often regret: “I believe it must have been Amalek. He was jealous that you won the tall girl.”

Eagerly Urbaal accepted the solution: “That thief!” And since be could now believe that an ordinary enemy had stolen his goddesses instead of their having deserted him, he felt a burden of fear dissolve. It was with actual relief that he ran from the house and went to the shop of bearded Heth, where he refused to answer the Hittite’s questions about Libamah but did buy three new Astartes, which he installed on the shelf of his god-room. He then went out into the fields to find for his goddesses the phallic rocks they merited.

Through his olive grove he wandered, inspecting stones and pausing to worship his comforting baals, but when at the oil press he whispered, “Thank you for winning me Libamah,” the mention of her name reminded him how vulnerable he had become; for as he walked among the trees he saw her moving ahead of him, her sinuous form emerging from their twisted trunks. Through the shimmering leaves her voice called to him, joyously and with a promise of sex. When bees hummed in the autumn grass he heard her chuckling laughter and was reminded of how permanent his hunger for her had become.

Then, as he crossed the road in search of a third stone in the shape that goddesses preferred, he happened to come upon Amalek tending his cattle, and the tall herdsman had the bad fortune—in view of its consequences it might almost be termed fatal—to ask casually, “What are you doing, Urbaal? Finding stones for your new goddesses?”

How could Amalek have known that Urbaal had new goddesses? The olive grower looked at his recent competitor suspiciously, placed his hands behind his back and asked, “How do you know what I’m doing?”

“If I’d won the tall one,” Amalek said generously, “I’d buy some new Astartes.”