How are the Mighty fallen

by Thomas Burnett Swann

  And what would he think of her “gold” after fifteen years, the last time he had seen her on Crete; the years when a small boy grew into a young man, a devoted husband clove to a painted whore? It was not vanity that reassured her, nor the bronze mirrors from Ophir, but the mirrors in men’s eyes. She had grown not old but ripe, as a green apple grows scarlet or amber or saffron. Her hair outshone the gold of the acacias, her body glowed beneath her encumbering robes as if she had bathed in pollen and drunk nectareous wines and become one with the various mosaic of the Goddess.

  But what had beauty brought her except rejection and exile? If she had remained the favorite of Saul, she might have brought peace between Philistia and Israel. She might have convinced him that the Philistines were not the brutish and warlike people of popular fancy. The men were tall, beardless, and slender, the women fair of skin, with russet hair which they twisted above their heads in the shape of beehives or conch shells. Their villas beside the sea were little memories of their old Cretan palaces. They drank from cups as delicate as eggshell and painted with dolphins or starfish. They lifted food to their mouths with silver spoons instead of fingers. Ladies with lilac parasols walked to the goose-prowed ships to greet their returning husbands or watch the unloading of tin from the Misty Isles. True, their country was small and they must expand to survive, even as the Israelites, or go the way of the faded Hyksos, the fading Hittites. But Philistia with her ships and sailors and Israel with her robust farmers, united by treaty, could have founded colonies in foreign lands, or farmed their own lands with canals and aqueducts and tripled the produce.

  She would have been stoned, however, if anyone had guessed that she admired the Philistines for their love of the sea and for the graces which go with such love, even as she admired the Israelites for their closeness to the earth and a ruggedness which approached grandeur.

  But it was almost time for Jonathan to wake. I will carry him wine, she thought, in a minuscule amber cup like a bumblebee, and a loaf of bread, and a mouse’s portion of cheese. I will nourish him into health but prolong his recovery, so that another champion may challenge Goliath. Hastily she robed herself in a gown embroidered with green leaves and golden figs-Saul thought it rather shocking, Saul liked his women in grays or browns-and she did not take the time to don a headdress or veil or even to comb her hair, which fell about her shoulders in the manner of a young bride, nor to perfume herself with frankincense or nard. She was much too concerned about Jonathan.

  She stepped from twilight into the fresh spring morning. The Philistine tents were clearly visible across the stream. She gasped at the sheer number of them, like so many rainbow poppies in an unplowed field. She had to remind herself that they harbored death. The warriors were moving freely among their tents. Clean-shaven and armorless, they looked to her more like boys at play than warriors ready for battle. Unlike the Israelites, who learned to fight before they learned (if ever) to read and farmed when they did not fight, the Philistines fought by decree, not choice, until they were twenty-five, and then, unless they felt a special affinity for war and conquest, devoted their lives to voyages of exploration and trade or to the arts and the crafts which they had brought from Crete. They were slender Jonathans, not husky Davids, and it was hard to hate them when she heard the jokes which they exchanged with the Israelites whom they were soon to fight or drove their lean bronze chariots between their tents like boys preparing for a race.

  For once, however, they had chosen the battle ground. For once the Israelites could not escape into craggy passes and lie in wait for an armor-burdened enemy to lumber after them.

  “We must not fight at Elan,” Abner had pleaded with Saul.

  “The Lord, not the Philistines, has chosen the place,” Samuel had answered. “He will raise up a champion among you.” Samuel, however, had carefully avoided the field, complaining of an ague. It was often said of him that his advice had wings but his body preferred a nest.

  Nevertheless, the Philistines had hesitated to cross the stream and attack the Israelites, such was the reputation of Saul and Jonathan and Abner, and the fact that the Israelites now had the weapons and armor captured at Michmash. Then, in a space of three days, Jonathan had caught a fever, Saul had succumbed to his demon of madness, and Samuel’s prophecy had been ironically fulfilled: the Philistines, not the Israelites, had raised a champion. Goliath had joined their army.

  Though her own camp was stirring around her and men were beginning to stare, Ahinoam paused and remembered the place, the Vale of Elah, and drank her surroundings as one might drink red wine. Groves of light, feathery acacias, half bush, half tree, flaunted their puffy balls of yellow flowers and made her think of tiny suns in a green firmament Almond trees vied with acacias and, though their pink and white blossoms had briefly bloomed and died, their burgeoning green leaves made her wonder why the tree was called “the hair of the old”; it should be “the hair of the Dryads.”

  Male francolins whirled in black and white above her head and the females, sober in brown or gray, resembled Israelite women, who lived to serve their men and served them staunchly and without complaint. The stream, swollen with melting snow from the mountains to the east, bounded and tumbled between black, water-rounded rocks, and occasional fish-she did not know their name, but she knew that they carried their young in their mouths-glinted silverly near the surface and tempted warriors to become fishermen. Wistfully she remembered Crete. Here, as there, the Goddess bedecked herself in Joseph-coated colors and pleaded for peace instead of war.

  She passed the tent of Rizpah and felt a warmth of pity for the woman who had risked Saul’s rage and Goliath’s rape to stay in the camp, and now, in the opening to her tent, smiled dimly and nodded to Ahinoam. Her eyes were red, her cheeks were streaked with kohl. She did not look as if she had slept for several nights.

  “How is it with Saul?” Ahinoam asked.

  “His demon has fled before David’s harp. Now he must face Goliath.”

  “He will be too weak. He must find a champion to fight in his place. But not Jonathan.”

  Ahinoam walked boldly among the soldiers. She liked to water them in the first light of dawn. Men of all ages, men of all trades, bricklayers, shepherds, farmers, potters, millers, many untrained, most of them following Saul in his endless wars less out of hatred for the Philistines, whom they scarcely understood, than out of loyalty to Saul, who fought because Samuel commanded him to destroy the “pagan idolaters” and because, though born a farmer, he had become at last a fighter who knew no other art.

  She liked to help the men prepare their breakfasts, for fighters needed more than the usual bread and cheese of farmers, and they fed on the countryside-the quail and the wild goats and the scaly fish (and hungered after the fish without scales and the wild boars which their religion forbade them to eat). She mended a goatskin tunic, she asked a bearded old patriarch who had been a friend of Samson about his great-grandchildren, and since Saul was not at hand to accuse her of sorcery, she healed a young man of the White Sickness with a simple laying on of hands.

  The men, she knew, regarded her as an earthly Ashtoreth and paused in their tasks to watch her and wonder if, like the Lady, she had known a thousand lovers before she came to this land where women were stoned if they took a single lover. She smiled and nodded and asked about this man’s child, that man’s wound, and spoke of Israel and her victories under Saul. Not since Deborah, the Judge, had a woman evoked such adoration from an army.

  “My lady, Goliath has returned. You must flee to Gibeah.” It was Caspir, the limping soldier from Michmash.

  “I trust our men to rid us once and for all of that scourge.”

  He shook his head. “Saul is unwell. He is not the hero of Jabesh-Gilead. Will my lady share my breakfast with me? I netted a quail last night.”

  “No, Caspir, I am not hungry. But you are gracious to ask me.” (Quail turned her stomach; like the Lady of the Wild Things, she loved birds and animals far too much to eat
them and lived entirely on vegetables; she was not in the least like Alecto!) “Here, your fire is going out. Arrange the sticks so-in a little pyramid…”

  A stench of sour wine and excrement drifted to her across the stream. She had forgotten how silently Goliath and his people could move in spite of their size. She forced herself to turn and confront him, the single red eye, the red patches of hair which bristled through his breastplate and greaves and crested purple helmet and reminded her of a huge, two-legged wolf in armor.

  “The Queen of Honey has grown more delectable,” he said. “But the grape unplucked is devoured by birds or shrivels into a raisin.”

  The Israelites had begun to gather around her in a defensive circle. She suddenly realized that their wish to protect her was not unmixed with suspicion. She, the legendary queen from Caphtor, so the giant implied, had known him before she came to Israel. Had she lain with him?

  “Step back from the stream, my lady,” warned Caspir. “You are within range of his spear.”

  She was less afraid of his spear than his revelations. More legends, more whispers. (“Not only does she come from Caphtor, she knows Goliath…”)

  Let there be no mistake. She called in a voice as sweet and poisonous as oleander, “The Giant of Caphtor has grown more hideous with the years. His eye is as large as a squid’s and his honeyed words are spoken with a thick and drunken tongue.” Inwardly she shuddered lest he speak of her hidden wings. Still, she did not turn from his stare.

  He laughed, “The better to see you with,” and moved down the stream opposite the Israelite campfires and resumed the boast she had heard in the night:

  “Choose a man for yourselves, and let him come down to me. If he is able to fight with me and kill me, then we will be your servants; but if I prevail against him and kill him, then you shall be our servants and serve us.”

  Himself beyond range of Israelite spears, he lifted his own spear-tipped with deadly iron like a battering ram-and hurled it across the stream. It lodged in the back of an Israelite, who had stooped to gather manna from a tamarisk bush. The spear was attached to a cord; before the others could reach and free their friend, Goliath yanked the cord, spear, and body through the stream and onto his own bank. Then, with a look so diabolical that it would have frozen a Night Stalker, he seized the corpse in his hands and tore the head from the trunk.

  “Thus for Saul and Jonathan and the other mosquitoes of Israel,” he boasted. “If you do not accept my challenge, I will leap this little rivulet you call a river and swat your king with my fist and crush his son with my boot and take his queen for my pleasure.”

  He laughed again and, having repeated his boast, knelt to drink from a quiet pond, protected from the mainstream by a ridge of stone and tree stumps. Ahinoam witnessed a curious sight, unnoticed, apparently, by the men. Momentarily Goliath saw his reflection in the pond. He shuddered and quickly stirred the waters to break the liquid mirror. He is appalled by his own ugliness, she recalled, and recalled, too, the tale that the Goddess had quarreled with the first Cyclopes because they had felled her trees and murdered her animals, and she had laid a curse of ugliness upon them: “You who see with two eyes and see no beauty in all of my creation, shall see with one eye, and ugliness shall stalk you to the end of your graceless days, and you shall be ugly even to each other and yourselves.” And the Cyclopes, who had been like bad, undisciplined children, now became ruthless and crafty adults who warred with all other peoples, smashing what was built, crushing what was grown, cultivating oaths as poets cultivate epithets. There was even a poem among Ahinoam’s people:

  Dialogue

  “Cyclops,

  Red and squid-eyed,‘

  Why do you plunder ships?

  “Because, kneeling to drink, I meet Myself.”

  Understanding could be a curse for Ahinoam. To surmise people’s secrets meant to pity their pain. But she did not pity Goliath, she hardened her heart against him for the sake of Jonathan.

  She turned quickly to leave the stream.

  Goliath called after her, “I will come for you, Honey Hair.” No one had called her Honey Hair since she had left her hive. Now the name seemed a desecration.

  She turned and shouted back to him. “If my son were well-”

  “Ah, he must be a young man now. And comely like his mother. I will enjoy breaking his back.”

  He wrenched a tree from the ground and cast it into the stream. It seemed to please him to see the yellow flowers disintegrating in the frolicsome current.

  “Water is for bathing as well as drinking. Or perhaps your odor is your deadliest weapon,” she said and, with dignity as well as courage, turned her back on him and walked to Jonathan’s tent.

  She was shocked to see him standing without support in the door to the tent. His face was pale and thin from the weight he had lost. He looked like a slender figurine of alabaster, woundingly beautiful, pathetically breakable. He was Jonathan, the dreamer, instead of Jonathan, the warrior. He was Jonathan, the boy who had fled to his tree house when his father had scolded him for reading a scroll instead of practicing with his bow. It came to her like the slap of a wave that she who had lost a hundred lovers to hush-winged death, that she who had lost a country and found a kingdom only to lose its king, could not endure the loss of Jonathan.

  “Jonathan, you should never have left your couch!” she cried.

  “That monster woke me with his threats. Just a few more days and I'll be well enough to fight him.”

  He swayed in the door and she reached to steady him. “Not if you rise too soon.”

  “Walk with me then,” he said. “It will help me regain my strength.” He put his arm around her shoulders-she felt his thinness and thought of savory broths to plumpen him-and they began a slow inspection of the camp. The soldiers cheered when they saw him on his feet, and she heard them whisper among themselves.

  “It’s her healing magic again. Twas a fierce demon he fought.”

  “Without her he’d be dead.”

  “Soon hell fight Goliath.”

  “You hear what they say?” he asked.

  “Ignore them,” she said with surprising vehemence. MH you were as strong as Saul in his prime, you still couldn’t match that beast.“

  He looked like a little boy who had stubbed his toe. “You’re not a warrior, Mama. Why do you think so little of my skill? I wouldn’t let him touch me. He has the strength but I have the speed.”

  “He is swifter than you think. Remember, I knew him on Crete.”

  “But now he’s old, and maybe tired like Father. 1

  “If you fight him, he will win.”

  He shook his head. “Now you’re being a sphinx. The men know you came from Crete, but what must I say when they ask me other questions? You have told me that you are a Siren. But how can you hear the sound which has not been made and see the sight which has not been seen? How can you look so young that you drive the Israelite matrons to dye their hair with henna, and the virgins to practice your walk and your voice and your enigmatic smile? Why do you keep such secrets from your own son?”

  “My dear,” she sighed, her hair a burst of sunflowers, her skin the pink flawless texture of the daffodils along the Philistine coast; an old woman who looked eternally young; a woman who would trade her youth to recover an old love. “We must each have secrets, you and I. Mine are those of age, yours of youth.”

  “Secrets are for strangers,” he said. “But you are my mother.”

  “All men and women are strangers. Sometimes I think that the Celestial Vineyard is the place where strangeness falls away from us and we accept each other as we are, without the need to condemn or idealize.

  “Must we wait so long?”

  “Here’s David,” she cried with relief. “Hell take you back to your tent.”

  “I want you to take me,” Jonathan said stubbornly. But already David had joined them and encircled Jonathan’s shoulder with a powerful arm. ‹

  “I can walk a
lone,” Jonathan protested.

  “Hold still or you’ll fall,” said David. “I don't care if you are a prince. You’re going to do what I say.”

  Covertly Ahinoam watched them as they accompanied her to the tent and observed the constraint which had come between them. She was neither misled nor displeased. She knew that unreasoning anger is often the other face of love.

  “Stay with him,” said Ahinoam, once in the tent. “I’ll mix his drink. We don’t want the fever to return. The demons are probably still in the vale.”

  David settled Jonathan on his couch, propped his head on a cushion, and summoned Mylas from his rug.

  “Come and comfort your master,” he said and, obeyed by the bear, he sat on the edge of the couch while Jonathan, silent, stroked Mylas’ fur and tried to avoid David’s look. Ahinoam smiled-how this boy took command with stubborn Jonathan! — and left the tent to prepare her son’s potion from an herbal bag she had brought on her journey.

  When she returned, David rose as if to leave her with Jonathan. “He wants to sleep, I think.”

  “He will sleep better with you in his tent.”

  “Will you, Jonathan?”

  Jonathan was slow to answer. “Yes, David. If you sing to me first.”

  “I haven’t a lyre with me. Shall I fetch one?”

  “No. Just sing.”

  David sang with a rough, halting tenderness, and Ahinoam guessed that he was composing the song expressly for Jonathan.

  Ihis

  — Ihis,

  Amber and alabaster:

  In the green caverns of papyrus,

  He cannot hear the dahabeah’s prow

  Sunder the Nile,

  Nor the winds from Karnak,

  Freighted with sand and incense. But the caverns speak With little myriad voices: Scarab, lizard, and dragonfly Eddying pollen among the lotuses.

  What need has the amber bird For winds and rivers?“

  Jonathan smiled and touched David on the shoulder. “Sometimes I don’t understand your songs, but they ease my spirit.”