The armies of Philistia, disheartened but not destroyed, retired to their walled cities beside the Great Green Sea, Gaza, Askelon, and Ashedod, rather like a giant squid with injured tentacles withdrawing into a cave to recover its strength and tenacity. The might of Saul’s army-that is to say of Abner, Jonathan, David, and their rudely attired, ruggedly battling warriors-discouraged Israel’s neighbors from open war, and the young Israelite virgins, when they went to the wells to fill their pitchers, sang of their new hero:
“Saul has slain his thousands, David his ten thousands.”
If these exaggerated and heretical words came to the ears of the king, he did not acknowledge them, though David sensed an increasing suspicion in the king’s behavior toward him. When David had first appeared in the camp at Michmash, Saul had politely requested him to sing and play his lyre, praised his performance, and ordered a scribe to record the words on stone tablets or papyrus scrolls. Now, even if he closeted David from his men and, incidentally, the young virgins, he ordered him to play until David’s arms felt as heavy as copper and his mind was emptied of songs. Some of the time Saul was mired in madness or wearily climbing back to sanity, with little interest in ruling a kingdom which badly needed a ruler, or building an army which badly needed a commander to assist the aging Abner and the youthful Jonathan. He sighed and slept when Samuel denounced him and announced that Yahweh had withdrawn his favor, or when the people whispered that it was David, the slayer of Goliath, who would receive the anointing balm of royalty.
“Find that shepherd boy,” Saul would shout, whether at cockcrow time or lamplighting time, and then, with David kneeling before him, he would raise his hand to hush the chatter of Rizpah and Michal and order David to sing. It was a familiar sight to see Saul hunched on his throne of Lebanese cedar, in the thick-walled, turreted stronghold which served as both fort and palace at Gibeah, listening to psalms of thanksgiving or paeans of victory.
“Do you think,” asked David of Jonathan, going to meet their men, “that anyone suspects how it is with us?”
Jonathan smiled a slow, mischievous smile. “Who would dare to accuse the son of the king and the killer of Goliath?” Having faultlessly behaved for twenty years, he reveled in a sin for which at worst he might be stoned to death; at best, be exiled to the Desert of Sin. “We’re comrades in battle. We’re devoted friends. That’s the way we look to the people. My mother knows, of course, but not Rizpah, nor even Michal. Saul? He hardly seems to know we’re friends. To him, you’re still the lute player from Bethlehem. Why, he’s forgotten it was you who killed Goliath. In his ravings, he’s the hero of Elah.”
Jonathan… David loved to speak the name. It was charged both with wonder and familiarity, as wonderful as a phoenix, as familiar as a loaf of wheaten bread. Jonathan was no longer the stoically smiling, forever dutiful prince whom David had met at Michmash. His smile was not a concealment, it was a revelation, and laughter welled from his lips like water from the stone struck by Moses’ rod. Except for his skill in battle, he seemed younger than his years, but not in the sense that he had made of his tent a child’s playroom and retreated into its solitude as if he could arrest time. It was no longer as if he were escaping into the past, but bringing the past into the present; or rather, seeing the present with the wondering eyes of a child. He was young in enjoyment of the moment and expectation of the future. The alabaster statue was flushed with roseate flickerings of life. Saul and most of Israel, if they knew the truth, would say that it had cracked and stained. To David, it“-was infinitely more desirable for its humanizing imperfection.
Ahinoam too had enjoyed a change. She has forgotten the insult of her rejection, the people said, the women at their looms, the farmers tilling their fields with the plowshares which had been their weapons. Poised in midsummer, she has returned to spring, and where does she learn the happy airs she sings, those sweet, tinkling lines which end like bell notes, so different from the loose, free-swinging psalms of Israel? When she sang her “Hymn to Ashtoreth,” no one except for Samuel and the priests of Yahweh raised a protest:
I am the leaves green-tender on the vine,
The grapelets swelling into purple bait
To tempt the bee, that harvester of air.
I am the honied freight
Cradled in baskets by sun-coppered hands;
The wine press cornucopia-heaped with fruit,
The dancing feet that liberate the juice,
The piper with his flute…
“Well return to Elah and swim in the stream,” said David.
“And Mama will pack us a lunch of quinces and turtledove eggs.”
“And well sleep in your tree house.”
“With only the stars for company. The Giant Bear will watch over us and guard against ghouls and Liliths.”
They visited Elah, and Endor too, a town where witches pretended to be wives and plied the twin trades of sorcery and prostitution, and David’s family in Bethlehem, and the sacred stones of Gilgal, planted by Joshua, and David thought: The country is almost “Unified for the first time since the death of Joshua. A few more wars, a few more years, and Jonathan will sit on the throne, and I will lead his armies, and the ports of Phoenicia and Philistia will hold our round-bellied merchant ships and the pharaoh of Egypt will send us gaming boards of agate and onyx, and papyrus scrolls with the Book of the Dead inscribed in hieroglyphics which look like scarabs or lightning flashes.
David, now eighteen, had never remained in love for more than a month, nor met a girl whose company pleased him as much as her body. The pleasures of Jonathan, however, seemed to him both various and invariable. David loved him for his sculptured features, bronzed with the sun, and his unimaginably yellow hair, yellower than the bands on a bumblebee, and his eyes, which seemed to have borrowed their green from the seas at the edge of the world. He loved him too for the gentle but powerful sensuality which he had aroused in a youth accustomed to an unnatural asceticism.
But Jonathan’s beauty was not his chief attraction. He surprised and captivated David with a manner which was at once humility and awe. He treated a sphinx-moth, a goldfinch, a fox as if they were creatures of wonder, and even inanimate objects like stones or streams aroused him to praise. For example, he built a garden behind the palace in Gibeah, with little paths wandering among stone animals-bears, cheetahs, hyenas, fennecs, foxes-and clumps of oleander bushes and tamarisks tended as carefully as children, watered, trimmed and shaded from the withering sun.
“It’s for the Great Mother because she helped you against Goliath,” Jonathan explained. Israelites did not as a rule grow gardens for the sake of beauty. They had fought the barren land to eke a thin subsistence or fought ungenerous neighbors for a richer land, and to them a garden was meant to supply food. A tree should give fruit or shade. A stream should turn mill wheels or fill pitchers. It was the same practicality which had inspired the law against the Sin of Sodom. The Israelite elders, Jonathan explained, argued that a man’s love for a man was an affront to nature; a barrenness which would first limit the birth of children, then the number of soldiers, then Israel’s power to defend herself against her enemies. Like a garden of chrysanthemums, it produced no practical benefits; the elders therefore decreed that men should love only women and father many children.
“But Ashtoreth knows there will always be men to love women. If men love men, why not let them honor the Goddess in another way? Let them affirm the order and beauty-of her creation by a continual hymn of praise-your psalms, my garden, and most important, our love. To love means to link; to link means to express the continuity of life, the unity of existence.”
“Jonathan, you sound like a Philistine philosopher.” Jonathan laughed. “Truly, David? It’s the Lady who speaks through me, but she has had her say. Let’s continue our worship. You sing a song to her while I work in her garden.” And David sang:
“Listen! Ashtoreth is in the corn.
The lithe stalks bend beneath her subtle hands
And sigh to fill the furrows of her path.
Now still she stands,
Inviolate as stone…“
At first the garden looked strange and useless to him. A path ought to lead to a house or a road and not meander like an undecided snake. And rocks-who ever heard of piling them into animals-hyenas at that, which everybody except Jonathan disliked-and crouching them not among edible vegetables but inedible narcissi? (“Thou shalt make no graven image ”)
“We could at least grow some carrots,” said David. “A garden ought to be good for something.”
“But that’s the point.” Jonathan smiled. “It has no practical purpose. It simply is.”
David shook his head. “I feel as if I ought to be practicing with my bow.”
“Practicing, practical. We hear too much of those words. Here, hand me that stone.”
David obeyed with a wistful smile. “Do you know,” he said, “that you are as stubborn as I am? I’m going to call you the lovable tyrant. What’s more, in a strange kind of way, we have changed places with each other.”
“No,” said Jonathan. “Our souls have knit, that’s all.”
Soon David was helping to build an elephant, a beast which neither he nor Jonathan had ever seen but which they had heard described by an Egyptian traveler who had seen the descendants of the elephants imported from Nubia by the boy-pharaoh Pepi.
“The snout’s too long,” said David with finality.
“It’s supposed to be long enough for him to dash water over his back.”
“This way he will trip over it or snare it in thickets. And whoever heard of such ears? They look like oversized parasols. Does he raise them over his head to keep out the sun?”
“Everything ought to be big except his eyes. The ears are for swatting flies.”
“He’s as uncouth as a camel,” muttered David, who, like most Israelites, ranked camels and dogs-the first intractable, the second verminous-among the lowest animals and infinitely below asses and oxen.
“Not uncouth, just different,” said Jonathan. “Am I uncouth because of my wings?”
The finished elephant sported a long snout and preternaturally large ears.
Sometimes Michal helped them in the garden. A woman’s tasks-weaving, drying flax on the flat-roofed palace-did not interest her. She respected their frequent need for solitude and sensed, too, when they would like her company. She offered good advice about the garden, whose purpose-or purposelessness-she understood more quickly than David. She discussed the rumor that the Philistines were building bronze chariots in their foundries near Gaza. She openly admired David’s ruddy looks, and yet looked up to Jonathan as the ideal against whom she must measure even David. All in all she was frequently welcome, and David admired her trim runner’s body, resembling that of her brother, and the sun-bronzed skin, almost honey-colored, which would have made carmine or kohl an affront to her face. David suspected that he would have fallen in love with her had it not been for Jonathan. Though her beauty to that of Jonathan and Ahinoam was the Nile compared to the Great Green Sea, and though she lacked their command of magic and the magic of their persons, she was frank, open, and highly companionable, and she made no secret of loving David, whom she called the Red Warrior because of his hair.
One afternoon, when the sun was a pleasant prickle instead of a blaze, they showed her the stone elephant.
“His snout is too long,” she pronounced.
Before Jonathan could defend his creation, a shadow fell across their path. Saul had approached on soundless sandals and paused, unspeaking, to watch the work in the garden. David smiled at him and tried to assess his mood. For the moment, he seemed both sane and amiable, the father and not the madman. It was his curse that a simple farmer had multiplied into many selves, and he could not make them work in unison; he was now one person, now another, and the two, the three, the four were distinct personalities, and one of them at least was distinctly dangerous. David likened him to a cart drawn by wild asses, each pulling in a different direction notwithstanding the frantic instructions of the driver.
“It’s good to see my children at play,” he beamed. “We’ve had enough of war.” In the bright afternoon light, he looked bent and gray-if not old in years like Samuel, he was old in burdens-but he had gained weight at Gibeah and people whispered that he was a better king when he delivered judgments for his subjects, sentencing thieves, condemning usurers, than when he had sat for a month with his army at Elah facing Goliath and the Philistines across the stream.
He opened his arms to Michal and kissed her undisciplined hair.
“Michal, my heart, I have always said that you could choose your own husband. Am I right in thinking that you have made your choice?”
Michal blushed and began to stammer. “Father, I have made no choice. I liked Agag, but Samuel slew him.”
He turned to David. “And what have you to say, my boy?”
David did not need to deliberate his answer. Michal loved him, of that he was sure, and she would, he hoped, become a biddable bride who, underestimating its power and overlooking its passion, would not object to his friendship with Jonathan. Furthermore, it was good to be captain over a thousand men in time of war, but now, in peace, he had no official duties except as lutist to the king.
“I have long aspired to your radiant daughter’s hand,” said David, who knew that Saul, having once been an unlettered farmer, delighted in courtly speeches. “But who am I, a simple shepherd from Benjamin, to join the noble House of Kish?”
“Say no more. Your great-grandfather Boaz was a man of means and generosity. Though he married the foreign Ruth, he quickly won her to Yahweh. You yourself have proven to be a splendid warrior and a loyal subject Does the choice please you, Michal?”
“Oh, yes, yes, may Ashtoreth be blessed!”
Saul shook his head with mock severity. “It was not Ashtoreth who delivered us from the Philistines.”
“But it is she who understands a maiden’s heart.” Everyone knew that Michal’s room held a shrine of Ashtoreth or images of the Goddess. Yahweh was a man’s god. The women of Israel, though they followed his commandments and observed his festivals, sometimes gave their hearts to the Goddess, who was courtesan, wife, and mother.
“Perhaps you are right. At any rate we shall celebrate your betrothal as soon as you like.”
“Soon?” asked Michal to David, no longer the boyish companion to her brother and his friend, but a soft young virgin enraptured with her first love.
“Soon.” David smiled. “Jonathan, aren’t you going to congratulate us?”
“May Yahweh look kindly on your union and bring you many sons,” said Jonathan, turning his back to smooth a stone in the elephant’s side.
“Come now, my daughter, leave our young men to their elephantine labors and walk to the palace with me. We must tell Rizpah our news. Ahinoam too. She will know how to manage a betrothal feast in the grand manner. In my own youth, we shared a fatted calf, exchanged vows, and that was that. But now I suppose there must be bridal gowns and processions by torchlight and-well, we shall leave the arrangements to Ahinoam, who has a gift for such niceties.”
David and Jonathan remained with the elephant, David bemused by his sudden rise in fortune. To become the husband of the king’s favorite daughter! To become Jonathan’s brother-in-law!
Jonathan kicked the leg of his elephant and the whole outlandish beast, oversized ears, longish snout, and diminutive eyes, crumbled to their feet in a cloud of dust.
“Jonathan, what’s the matter?”
Jonathan’s eyes were full of tears. “I hate peace,” he said. “People get married in peaceful times and bear children. In war we could be together always.”
“It’s war you hate, not peace. You've always said so. And you knew I would marry one day. You even suggested Michal, because you love both of us.”
“Better Michal than Merab,” he sighed. “I didn’t think you would marry her so soon, thou
gh. I was vain, wasn’t I? To think I could keep you making gardens or throwing spears with me when you might be lying with Michal and producing the next heir to the throne.”
Ashtoreth had gone out of David’s day. Till now, the prospect of marriage had not meant a broken bond between him and Jonathan, but a bond which made him irrevocably Jonathan’s brother. His flexible conscience allowed him to marry a girl and remain her brother’s lover. A man’s duty to a woman, he reasoned, was to father her children and provide for their safety and security. He was obliged to esteem her but not to love her.
“Jonathan,” he cried. “Michal is a waterhole in the desert, but you are the Promised Land! Could she ever come before you?”
“Of course you must marry,” Jonathan sighed. ‘And Michal will make you a faithful and loving wife. And I'll be your friend forever, even if I have to make elephants by myself.“
“But you’ll marry too, Jonathan, one of these days, and your son will be heir to the throne, not mine.”
Jonathan shook his head. “I suppose I could marry. I like women. I like to talk to them. Their small talk puts me at ease, and I don’t have to think about things like battles and sieges and armor. As for Michal and my mother, I love both of them very much, and I even love Merab when she’s scolding me. And I would rather worship Ashtoreth than Yahweh. But I just don’t think I want to marry. You can’t be quiet with a woman. They expect sweet talk most of the time. If they wear a new robe and you forget to mention it, you get a cold supper without wine. And they’re always after you to have babies, and more babies, and they never leave you alone with your friends. The only exceptions I know are my mother and, I hope, Michal.”
“You might experiment before you decide against marriage,” David suggested. “Not a virgin, Yahweh forbid, because then you would have to marry her. I was thinking of a harlot, though Saul has driven them out of Gibeah.”
How are the Mighty fallen Page 11
