David wished for his harp, but the Goddess whispered a song about the sea and, of course, about Jonathan, and his voice was sweet and unfaltering:
“I saw him rising from the sea, Dagon with starfish tangled in his hair And eyes like chrysolites.
‘Come play with me, come play with me,’ he called,
‘And we will gather conchs and cockleshells!’
But liquid fields are cold;
The shark, I thought,
Will cast strange shadows at my feet
Tomorrow,‘ I said,
Tomorrow we will gather cockleshells.‘
And Dagon laughed,
Slipping with dolphin-ease between the waves.
I saw the foam possess his tangled hair.
But first he said:
‘Does dust know how to play?’“
“I was the speaker, wasn’t I?” said Jonathan. “And of course you were Dagon. But he’s the national god of the Philistines, and some of his images are gross and ugly, with a scaly fish’s tail. That’s not you at all.”
“That’s not the Dagon I mean. There’s a young Dagon, too, who likes to play with the dolphins.”
“On Caphtor we called him Palaemon. But how do you know so much about the sea?”
“I expect Ashtoreth put the thoughts in my brain.”
“Ashtoreth or my mother.”
“Sometimes I think they are one and the same. Both of them helped me in my fight against Goliath.”
“I know. David, why do you always sing about me?”
“Because I love you.”
He had never said such words, not to the comeliest virgin he had ever kissed, not even to his mother. Now he had said them to a man, though one of the gods they worshipped had presumably destroyed Sodom because its men did not always love its women. He felt as if he should blush with shame or explain that he meant only that he loved Jonathan like a brother. But he felt more pride than shame, and he did not love Jonathan like a brother.
(His father had once accused him of lacking a sense of sin. “Where would Abraham have been if he hadn’t repented his sins?” Jesse had asked in one of his more asinine moods. David had answered without hesitation. “A prince of Egypt with twenty concubines and a golden calf in his garden.”)
Now it was Jonathan’s turn to touch instead of talk; he touched David’s cheek with a tentative hand. A butterfly hand? No, there was nothing feminine in his touch. It did not seem to David that only then did they embrace as more than friends; it seemed to him that there had never been a time when they were less than lovers. Arm in arm they had crossed impassable deserts; side by side they had sailed impossible seas, farther than Sheba or Punt; beyond the edge of the world! Other lands had known them; in other times they had loved and shared the throne; the high-breasted Lady of Crete, twining snakes in her hands, had smiled beneficence on them; they were as young and as old as the pyramids.
“I know a secret place,” said Jonathan. “Not like here, in the middle of an army.‘
“Is it far?”
“As far as Ophir. As close as today.”
“Are you strong enough?”
“You will be my wings.”
“I am taking the prince for a walk,” he said to the guard outside the tent. “He must recover his strength. He can hardly stand by himself.”
The guard, a young farmer with thick, callused hands, looked at David with adoration-the killer of Goliath! — and at Jonathan with admiration-the prince of Israeli David liked him for liking Jonathan.
“No danger now,” the guard cried. “Not a Philistine in sight! Take good care of the prince, though, David. Goliath’s brothers may come this way.”
They followed the wildly meandering course of the stream. Oleanders, clustered with red blossoms, dipped their tapering fingerlike leaves into the water.
“Are we like that?” Jonathan asked his friend.
“Like what?”
“Oleanders. The leaves are smooth and straight, but the sap is poisonous.”
For answer, David led him away from the stream and into a meadow of wild flowers and totter grass.
Jonathan fell to his knees and touched the earth in silent communication with her green children. “On Crete,” he said, “the gods used to dance in dells like this, till they fled to the sky or under the sea.”
Plucking an armful of yellow parsley flowers like little shields, David handed them to Jonathan.
“You’re like these.”
“Frail, do you mean?”
“Modest, valorous, and beautiful! Except your hair makes them pale in comparison.”
The yellow flowers were mirrored in Jonathan’s eyes, stars in green firmaments. He was more than human, of course. Perhaps he was an angel or a star god. But now he had come to earth, and it was the proof of his power that he should deserve but never demand worship.
Jonathan cradled the flowers in his arms. “We must give them to the stream. It’s been a kind stream to make this vale so fruitful for us. Not even Goliath could spoil it.” It seemed as if the flowers, spun in the clear waters, were speaking to the stream, and the stream was rumbling an answer about his journey from the mountains which he loved for their snow and into the lowlands which he loved because they frolicked with chrysanthemums and anemones, poppies, and purple catchflies; about David and Jonathan and how he loved them too because they had given him flowers, when other men drank him or washed in him and never thought of a gift.
“Here,” said Jonathan, pausing and pointing excitedly to an oak tree which had probably been old when Abraham was young. Unlike the terebinth oracle, however, this tree luxuriated with fresh green foliage and offered the cumbers notches up the trunk and into the green fastnesses, which twinkled with sunlit sparrows building nests. David loved them because, in spite of their tiny, colorless bodies, they were ready to fight an eagle or a wolf. They, too, must face their Goliaths.
It was rare to find so enormous a growth in Israel, where shrubs passed for trees and whose deserts outnumbered its forests.
“You won’t make it up the trunk,” said David. “You’ve been sick and there’s nothing in your stomach.”
“I will if you give me a push. I had a lot of practice when I was a boy. My parents would come here to Elah in the spring-we brought a tent to sleep in-but Michal and I built a house in this tree. I must have been ten at the time.” He paused and said with surprise, “I was happy then. It was before Rizpah came.” He looked searchingly into David’s face. “It’s come back, you know.”
“What, Jonathan?”
“Feeling ten and happy.”
“Those things never go away. They just hide until somebody uncovers them.” David himself had been a happy boy and a happy, if sometimes restless, youth. He had liked his brothers; he had loved his parents, however foolish their ways; and always, among the solitary hills, he could compose a psalm or plan a battle. Still, he knew how it must have been for Jonathan, who had to be a prince and command a thousand men and please a well-intentioned but misunderstanding father whom he truly loved and, worst of all, endure his mother’s shame and recognize Rizpah in her place at court.
“Ten was hidden in me all this time, till you uncovered it, like a toy-like a clay cart pulled by a donkey-which a child played with before the Flood.”
“Climb,” said David, pushing him up the trunk, “well uncover it together,” and soon they were in the house, which Jonathan and Michal had built to withstand many weathers: round-built, constructed of limb and clay laboriously carried from the ground, with large windows, so that the wind could sweep through them without wrecking the walls. The thatched roof had departed with forgotten winters, but the single room had held tenaciously to its furnishings: a portable hearth, a three-legged stool, a drinking cup with a handle like a snake.
“The couch is gone,” said Jonathan as if he were lamenting a lost friend. “Its feet were the paws of a bear. I carved them myself from cedar wood.”
“But the floor is a cou
ch; it’s soft with leaves.”
“We used to play that we were king and queen,” said Jonathan, “and this was our summer palace, where we got away from the cares of the capital. The sparrows were our subjects. You see, they’re still here. Do you like sparrows, David?”
“Better than phoenixes!”
“So do I. Their feathers are dull and their voices plain, but they generally find something to sing about.”
“They’re just talking, Jonathan,” said David, the musician, “but I expect they find a lot of interesting things to say.” A sudden sadness chilled him like the trickle of air from a deep well. Happiness is a sparrow, he thought, tenacious but brief and frail. He knew that his future would shrill with clashing eagles, with too many loves and loyalties and treacheries, and that he would never again be a simple shepherd or an armor-bearer who could climb a tree with Jonathan.
“You’ll be a king one day, Jonathan. And doubtless you’ll marry a princess from Egypt and forget all about me.”
“You know I will never marry, David.”
“Why not? It’ll be a marriage of state. You don’t have to love the princess. You want a son, don’t you?”
“Twins,” said Jonathan. “With red hair. But wanting isn’t enough. At least I have my little brother, Ishbaal. Saul ignores him, so I have a chance to act like a father. Do you have to marry?” The question held its own wistful answer. An unmarried adult Israelite was as rare as manna after the hot melting sun of noon.
“I expect I shall. But it will have nothing to do with what I feel for you.”
“Then you should marry my sister Michal. She’s already in love with you, and she could help you with my father. He never seems to get angry with her. What’s more you could make her happy. You wouldn’t want my other sister, Merab. She’s a scold.”
“I don’t want to marry anyone for a long time,” said David.
Jonathan took his hand and spread the fingers-the large strong fingers of a shepherd-and smiled as he looked into the palm. “You had better start soon. If I’m counting right, I see nine wives and eighteen concubines in your future.” He turned suddenly serious. “And I think I see an army… a war… and a throne.”
“And you’re with me?”
“Part of the way. Then we’re separated. Then-I don't know.”
“You see death, don't you?” David persisted.
“Not yours, David. I see many years for you.”
“Yours then?”
“Who believes in palmistry anyway, except the Babylonians?”
“And the Babylonians are being swallowed up by the Assyrians, who don’t believe in anything.” He patted Jonathan’s shoulder. “Rest now,” he said. “Lie down on the leaves. I think you’ll find them more comfortable than your lost couch.”
Jonathan obeyed the command, but with, a curious resignation, like a soldier going to a war from which he will never return. He looked at David with wide, solemn eyes.
David knelt beside him and kissed his cheek.
“It is the sin of Sodom,” said Jonathan, still as a fallen image.
“Who says such a ridiculous thing?”
“My father. Samuel. Everybody except my mother and you.”
“And who do you love best in the world?”
“You first. Then my mother.”
“Well then, listen to us. A sin is when you hurt people. Are you afraid I’m going to hurt you?”
“I could never be afraid of you, David. It seemed I was always afraid until you came, though I couldn’t admit it At Micnmash when Nathan and I attacked the Philistines, I was terrified, but I had to be strong for him. And because of my father.”
“And I was terrified of Goliath. It was that single eye, I think. It never bunked. It just stared and stared and almost hypnotized me. What is courage without fear? It’s nothing but foolhardiness. We’re not fools, either of us.”
For answer, Jonathan smiled and opened his arms, and David remembered watching Ahinoam, alone in a forest glade, open her arms to Ashtoreth and pray that the lovely and the loveless should find love. He entered Jonathan’s embrace and seemed at last to know the fullness of the sea, which had tantalized him with fitful flickers, an image, a scent, some words in a song; for he entered a world where dolphins snorted in leaping multitudes and Sirens combed their tresses with combs of coral; and then they were under the sea, he and Jonathan, and the leaves of the oak tree were fathoms of cushioning water, and they swam into a cave where clumsy, amiable crabs brought gifts of amber between their pincers and a friendly octopus arranged them a couch of seaweed and sea anemones.
Jonathan held him with a wild urgency, meeting mood for mood, making of touch a language more articulate than song, and in that ancient oak tree the eternal Ashtoreth was honored more richly than by prayer or sacrifice…
“Sleep now, Jonathan, and I'll keep watch.”
“ ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me…’ You wrote that, David, didn’t you?”
“Yes, Jonathan. In a way, I wrote it for you.” He had written a song which men would always sing, in the valley or on the mountaintop. He had fought and killed a giant. He had liked a hundred girls and he knew that he would love a score of women, a little, for a little while, and beget children beyond number, but that he would never love anyone, neither man nor woman, as he loved Jonathan…
“I will find you food while you sleep.”
“Don’t leave me, David.”
“Not until you sleep.”
David watched the golden lashes extinguish the green eyes, the perfect features lose their flush-it was like the extinguishing of a rare alabaster lamp from Egypt, and curiously painful to watch-and then he crept from the tree. He did not wish to return to the camp. He could not endure exchanging pleasantries with the soldiers or even encountering Ahinoam; and to meet Saul would remind him of Yahweh instead of Ashtoreth. Being a shepherd, however, he knew that the Vale of Elan, riotous with fruits and flowers ahead of their time, had been called the Garden of Eden. He stripped to his loincloth and made of his tunic a basket for carob nuts, black berries, and wild pears; he wrapped a honeycomb in the huge trumpetlike calyxes of the mulucella flowers; he cupped water in a scarlet buttercup; and returned three times to the tree to carry his banquet to Jonathan.
Jonathan awoke on David’s third ascent and ate as ravenously as if he had fought a battle. In spite of so rich a feast, following so long a fever, the wild honey forestalled a return of his nausea. They laughed and chattered without restraint: of little things and large things, of butterflies and eagles. Jonathan described his childhood on Crete, the war with the Cyclopes, the storm, and the swim to Philistia.
“I’m not surprised,” said David. “Everybody knows you came from Caphtor. I just didn’t know when or how.”
“And you don’t mind my wings?”
“Why should I? They’re as perfectly formed as a snow-flake.” “But they don’t do anything.”
“Neither does a luna moth, but we wouldn’t want to do without him, would we?”
“Did you really kill a lion with your bare hands, David?”
“Yes, but he wasn’t very big and he had a stomach ache.”
“How did you escape betrothal when you lay with a virgin at the age of twelve?”
“I told her a lion would get her if she told on me.”
Then it was David’s turn. “Where did you find your bear, Mylas?”
“The Philistines had trapped him on Crete and brought him to Gaza to show in a spectacle. My mother saw him in the eye of her mind and called him to me across the desert.”
“Did crossing the desert turn him white?”
“All of his race are white. I expect the sun bleached them a long time ago.”
“How old is your mother?”
“You might as well ask Samuel his age.”
“Are you ashamed any more?”
“Of what?” asked Jonathan, surprised.
<
br /> “Loving me.”
“The sin of Sodom, you mean? No, I rather imagine the earthquake came on its own, not from Yahweh. It seems to me that prophets like Samuel get between us and the gods and warp our glimpse of the celestial faces. Even if Yahweh is angry, the worst he can do is change us into pillars of salt. Another thing. Samuel says that the Philistines are wicked idolaters. But in many ways they’re just like us. They’d rather be home by the sea than racing up and down the desert Before I got sick, I used to talk to an archer across the stream, and he said they disliked Goliath as much as we did. He ate up their best food and he had an odor and they were always having to supply him with women, some of whom he used up in a single night”
“You’ve changed your mind about a lot of things.”
“You’ve corrupted me.” Jonathan smiled.
“You’ve known me for less than a month!”
“Time is what happens to you. I would count you about ten years.”
“You look like a Philistine tree god,” David said, brushing a leaf from Jonathan’s hair.
“It’s better than looking like Yahweh, whatever he looks like. We aren’t supposed to make images of him, but I always picture him like Samuel, all beard and bones and chattering tongue.” He loosed the belt from his tunic, a band of leather inlaid with chips of turquoise. “Now I have a gift for you.”
“It’s a lovely gift,” said David. “But you’ve given me a tunic already, and what can I give you in return?”
“You Israelites.” Jonathan smiled. “You always think that one thing has to be paid for with another. An eye for an eye, a gift for a gift. But if you must give me something, let it be this: Let me always be first with you as long as we live.”
David laughed and hugged him against his breast “I'll promise more than that. Not even Sheol can separate us.”
“Whisper,” said Jonathan. “The wrong god may hear you.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
David, the slayer of Goliath, worked endlessly to increase his skill as a warrior. Jonathan taught him to use a spear and a sword; to feint, to wound, to kill. David, in turn, instructed Jonathan in the use of Assyrian slings. Hardened veterans, watching the Twin Archangels, as the youths had come to be called, unabashedly gathered stones in the streams and practiced against the fennecs and foxes of the desert, and no one thought to tease them for using “the toys of children.”
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