Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“You think he was not to blame?” he asked hopefully.

“I know he wasn’t. And you must also forget …”

“Don’t tell me to forget the priestess,” he begged.

Timna smiled. It was preposterous, and she knew it, for a wife to be consoling her husband over a temple prostitute, but she stifled her repugnance and reasoned, “Urbaal, if you love her so much, perhaps later on you’ll be chosen again to lie with her …”

“No! She will be brought to this house and she will be my wife.” He took Timna’s hands and insisted, “You’ll teach her to weave and sew cloth.”

“I will,” Timna promised. “But truly, husband, what chance is there?”

Vaguely he remembered that he had worked out a plan whereby it would be simple for him to fetch the girl, but he could not recall it now. “What must I do?” he asked like a child.

“You must forget the Astartes and remember your trees. Work in the fields, and before long our new son will be born and you can teach him to find the honeycombs.” He acknowledged the reason in her words and surrendered. “Let us go right now,” she whispered, “to the one god who matters—El—and pray to him that the fires in your heart may subside.”

Urbaal left his bed and she called two slaves to light the way with lamps, and when suspicious Matred cried out, “Who is opening the door?” she answered, “I, Timna, going to speak with the god El.” So saying, she led her husband into the starry night where the heavens dropped close upon the whitewashed roofs of Makor. As they passed the gate, guards came out to inspect the flickering lights and told her to pass on. Along the winding street, past the low houses in which the townsmen slept, she led her befuddled husband to the line of monoliths standing solemn in the night. Ignoring the three prominent menhirs she knelt before the ancient one, and Urbaal stood beside her as she prayed for his release from the angers that consumed him. Dimly he perceived what his wife was trying to do for him, and he caught a fleeting sense of El, standing alone without the encrustations of fiery pits and smiling Astartes and naked priestesses. A healing peace crept over his tormented mind.

Unfortunately, at this moment someone inside the temple moved with a lamp, and he cried, “It’s Libamah! Signaling to me.” His attention was drawn away from the god El and he was seized with an uncontrollable hunger for this priestess of love. He fled from his wife, who still knelt beside the monolith, and rushed to the temple, leaping over the steps where Libamah had danced and throwing himself against the doors until the priests, barely dressed, came out to summon Timna: “Take your crazy husband home.” And so she led him back to the rambling house by the gate and took him into his god-room, where he stared at the three grinning Astartes and huddled in a corner till dawn.

Timna went to her room and wondered what to do. She was convinced that she had done right in destroying the false Astartes, for obviously there must be one god, El, who controlled human affairs, and the others must be only interlopers trying to make man feel a little more secure. Real power they could not have, and she felt no remorse in having discarded four of them. But as she rubbed her tired face with a sweet oil which she kept in a small phial, she had to admit that she had not anticipated the derangement their loss would create in Urbaal, nor his obsessive hatred of Amalek as a result. For his present sickness she accepted responsibility, and it grieved her to think that if she had confessed her guilt at the beginning, none of this would have happened and Urbaal might have been able to forgive her. But she also realized that if she said anything now it might result in more harm than good.

Before she fell asleep she decided what to do. On the one hand she would watch over her husband through this difficult period, diverting him from his determination to hurt Amalek; and on the other she would begin bringing some order into his collapsing estate. After a short rest she rose and went down to the olive grove to see what work required doing, and found that the foreman had abandoned his booth by the oil press, leaving no one to attend either the press or the trees. She returned to town and spent some time rounding up Urbaal’s workmen, warning them that she was in command now and would halt their wages if they betrayed her sick husband; but as she finished instructing the last one she heard a riot in the streets and with apprehension ran toward Amalek’s house, where she found that Urbaal had broken into the herdsman’s home, demanding that his Astartes be returned to him.

Soldiers were required to bring him under control, and he would have been treated roughly had not Amalek, bewildered by the attack, protected his neighbor by saying, “He did no harm.” The soldiers hesitated, and Timna made their decision for them by saying, “I’ve come to take him home.” But when the soldiers were gone, Amalek shook Urbaal and said, “Old friend, come back to this world,” and under the patient ministrations of those who loved him the stupefied farmer lost his madness and began to know himself. He found it difficult to believe that he had tried to injure his neighbor Amalek and felt ashamed when it was explained that only the herdsman’s good nature had saved him. He studied Timna, pregnant and beautiful, and was able to recall the patience she had shown in trying to win him back to sanity. When the time came to go home Timna chose a path that would avoid the temple, but he guessed her strategy and remarked, “We can go past the temple now. I’ve forgotten her.” He insisted upon walking even to the monolith of El, where he gave thanks for his deliverance, and as he prayed Timna again reflected that if this town had not had its profusion of deities, its shocking rites that pulled the human mind this way and that, Urbaal would have remained the laughing, simple-hearted man who had begun as such an understanding husband. She was reluctant to think that the moral structure of a town could determine the kind of people who lived therein, but that appeared to be the case.

The days that followed were a kind of benediction to the faith Timna had shown. Urbaal returned to the winter prunings of his trees, and in the late afternoons when work was done, took his accustomed place in the rambling courtyard and talked with his children. He kept a set of dice with which he played a kind of backgammon with his slave girls, and he ordered some jars of good wine from the vintners, where great clay pots were sunk in earth to keep the liquid cool. He no longer worried about the big monoliths before the temple, but each day he walked among his fields, paying his respects to the petty baals who supervised his interests.

His strangest satisfaction, however, came from a quarter that he could not have foreseen: when word of his incompetence with the ritual prostitute had first spread through town it had caused him much embarrassment, but now he was able to look at himself as he was, and he laughed at the humiliating experience. He was a man of thirty-six, approaching old age, and he recognized that the wild excitement Libamah had caused was merely an attempt on his part to revitalize his memories. “Now I can leave her to Amalek,” he confided to Timna. “He’s six years younger than me.” He laughed at himself and in doing so paved the way for a return to the gaiety he had once known with his slave girls. His greatest love, however, was saved for Timna, who, as her child grew near her heart, became even lovelier than she had been on that first hot afternoon when she climbed the ramp leading to the zigzag gate. There she had met Urbaal, playing dice with the guards, and her happiness had begun. Now, when she saw her restored husband actually seek out Amalek to joke with him over the misunderstanding, she was reassured that she had behaved correctly throughout this difficult time.