Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“The three?” he asked.

“They have gone,” she assured him, and he played a joyous song.

This was the month of Bui—when wheat was harvested for sale to the groats maker and grapes were hauled to the vintner—and Hoopoe and Meshab spent many hours in the earth, spurring the slaves to complete the routing out of the little tunnels into one large one ten feet high by six feet across. The original joining had produced a common hole less than two feet high by one across, and at the meeting point the planners had put their men to work excavating the first full-size cross section, calculating in the abstract how the enlarged hole must stand so as to provide when extended an even rate of fall from the bottom of the shaft to the level of the well, and they had done their calculations so neatly that when the dimensions of the first ten-by-six cut were extended in each direction the finished tunnel would be uniform, of predetermined incline and with no marks remaining to show where the join had been made or where Hoopoe had lost his bearings for a while. Only the two friends could appreciate what a marvel of accuracy the Makor water tunnel was.

As the two men worked, during the last part of the third year, Hoopoe’s wife Kerith had many occasions to hear the stranger Gershom sing his plaintive songs of the shepherd’s country and his exultant accounts of Yahweh’s triumphs. When the necessity for his staying close to the horns of the altar passed, he found a job with a man who kept a shop across from the temple, where surplus wool was bought for shipment to Aecho, and he became a popular figure with younger people, sitting in the wintry sunlight before the temple and singing to them. There was a wine shop next door where olive oil was also sold, and it was frequently filled with yellow-stained workers from the dye vats, men who enjoyed hearing Gershom sing of ways of life they had not known:“Yahweh is my protector when the serpent strikes,

Yea, my shield in time of anguish.

He saves the lamb in the thorn,

Yea, the bullock struck with pain,

Yahweh is my food, my wine, my meat in the desert,

Yea, my sustenance in the lonely places,

My joy when I am alone in the night.

He is my song, my cry of thanks,

My exultation at the rising of the sun.”

Gershom himself could not have known that this ancient song had originally been sung by Canaanites more than a thousand years before, when they accorded their baals the same attributes that he now gave Yahweh, but the song as Gershom had modified it was a true hymn of praise to whatever god guided the movement of the heavens and the sure return of the seasons, bringing with them the blessings that men require.

Often, as Gershom sang outside the wine shop, Kerith came for wine or olive oil—a task which she had formerly assigned her slave girls—and she listened with increasing pleasure to the singing of the fugitive. His name, she learned, meant “a stranger among us,” and the brothers of the slain man had told the people of Makor that the story of the murder was not quite so simple as Gershom had represented it. They explained that he had arrived in their village without a genealogy but had talked himself into marriage with the daughter of a man whose sheep he had subsequently stolen. The wound across his neck had not come from their murdered brother; his father-in-law had slashed him while trying to regain his stolen sheep. As for the murder, without reason Gershom had ambushed their brother at dusk. “How did he become an outcast in the first place?” the people of Makor asked, and the brothers replied, “Of his past we know nothing.”

“He told us he was of the family of Levi,” a boy said. But the brothers shrugged their shoulders. “Maybe,” they said.

At first Kerith wondered what the truth might be, but when the people of Makor began to accept him, she ignored his shadowy antecedents and began listening to his songs, and one day when she heard him outside the wine shop singing to a group of children, his song was such a devout cry of thanksgiving that she was held captive, as if the stranger were grasping not the horn of the altar but the hem of her gown: “Thorns clutched at my ankles,

Yea, rocks bruised my heel,

But Yahweh watched my progress from on high.

He guided my steps and I came to cool waters.

Men pursued me through the night,

Yea, on donkeys and camels they pursued me

And I was afraid.

But Yahweh saw me dying in the dark places,

In the lonely place he saw me

And with his love he led me to his altar.”

It was a song which assumed a personal relationship with Yahweh, who stood forth as the culmination of all preceding gods. Its words had a special effect upon Kerith, for they constituted a logical extension of the ideals her father had taught her as a child. In Gershom’s songs Yahweh not only controlled the heavens of heaven, he also had time to watch with pity a man whose ankle was pierced by thorns; and this dual capacity was critical, for although Kerith had never felt the need of Baal, she did realize that Yahweh had not brought her the close personal consolation that her neighbors had found in Baal. Now Gershom was stating that Yahweh was the kind of god she had longed for: he was at hand and could be known. It was this lyric rapture that had up to now been missing in the religion of the Hebrews, as practiced in Makor, and it was the revelation of this new Yahweh, disclosed through the agency of an uncertain stranger, that struck her with disrupting force.

Her visits to the wine shop grew more frequent, until it became apparent even to the loungers from the dye vats that she was buying more olive oil than the demands of her simple kitchen would have dictated. She lingered by the entrance to the shop, staring at the man with the seven-stringed lyre, and many in Makor began to speculate that she had fallen in love with the stranger, and before long Meshab the Moabite heard the gossip.

He went straight to Hoopoe, finding him in a section of the tunnel where the diggers were striking hard rock. It was in the month of Abib, when men were harvesting barley for shipment to Aecho, where it would be brewed into beer, that Meshab said, “Hoopoe, your wife is running like a lamb toward a cliff.”

The fat little engineer sat down. “What’s happened?” he asked.

“She’s fallen in love with Gershom.”

“Is he the man who plays the kinnor?”

Meshab looked with pity at his friend. “You must be the only man in Makor who doesn’t know who he is. And Kerith is in love with him.”

Hoopoe swallowed, then licked his lips. “Where …”

The noise in the tunnel was too great for conversation, so the Moabite led Hoopoe back to the bottom of the main shaft, where in the coolness of the shadows he said, “When you were in Aecho buying the iron I had a chance to know Kerith. She’s a good woman, like my wife before she was killed. But she’s hungry … the uncertainties …”

Hoopoe became excited. “I know exactly what you mean,” he said reassuringly, as if it were Meshab who should be worried. “Kerith’s always dreamed of going to Jerusalem. She says she’d be happier there. And I have the most exciting news.” He was nervous with pleasure and cautioned, “You mustn’t tell anyone. I haven’t even told Kerith, because I didn’t want her to become overhopeful.” He dropped his voice to a happy whisper. “But King David is going to visit the tunnel. He’s heard about it even in Jerusalem.” The little engineer looked about and confided, “Of course he’ll ask me to go up to Jerusalem with him.”

The Moabite shook his head in pity. “You’re placing all your hopes in that?” he asked.

“Oh yes! And then Kerith will be contented. In Jerusalem, that is.”