by Ann Burton
“But this land belongs to my husband,” I made the excuse. “If there are killings and strife here, he must be told. He must do something about it.”
“Very well.” Leha looked from side to side. “Some say David is an outlaw, and his men are slaves, run away from their masters. Just as David runs from King Saul.” She made a quick gesture. “I do not think that, for David has always been a lawful man. Besides, they are too many. Would not four hundred slaves be hunted by their masters?”
I had to agree with her—no one would allow so many slaves the freedom to wander or form an army. It would incite other slaves to do the same. Was that what David had done, to make up this army? “Why does the king hunt him? Did he violate the law?”
“No one knows, but there are whispers about the king. They say the spirit of the Adonai has abandoned him from the time Samuel died. That his moods are frightening and change as the weather does. Yehud’s cousin Avril has been to court and seen the king with David.” She lowered her voice. “Avril says King Saul sometimes acted as if possessed by demons. In his darkest moods, the king would not be soothed by anything but David’s songs. Until he picked up and threw a spear at David one day, trying to kill him.”
I thought of what David had said at the spring. “Is the king truly hunting them now?”
Leha nodded. “It is why my uncle forbade us to have anything to do with David and the dal. He is a dangerous man, Abigail. King Saul commanded him to slay a hundred Philistines, to prove his loyalty. It is known throughout Judah that David slew two hundred and sent their heads to the king.”
Small wonder he slit the throat of the Philistine with such ease—he had much practice at killing. But he took no joy in it, and it was not an even fight, my heart argued. There were two of them, armed with knives, while he had but a staff.
“But if David is so loyal, why does King Saul yet hunt him and his men?” Even for a king obsessed with dark moods, it seemed unreasonable. “What does he think they will do?”
“We cannot know his thoughts.” Leha sighed. “But I think it is as Bethel and Malme are. Malme is not so bad as my aunt makes out, you know. A bit spoiled, but her heart is good. When Bethel looks at her, she sees Malme is young and beautiful and soon to be a new mother, and it tears at her heart.”
Because Bethel would never again be any of those things. “Jealousy.”
“Leha?” Bethel called.
The younger woman grimaced as she picked up the empty water jug. “I shall have to go to the spring later, I suppose. She will not wish me to leave now.”
I looked at the flap of the moon tent. I could stay in here and never face David, or I could help my friend and take the chance of seeing him.
A strangeness twisted in my heart, and I held out my hands. “Let me fetch it.”
The bodies of the two slain men had been removed, and the dal resumed their patrol as if nothing had happened. Indeed, there was no sign of what had occurred except for some scuff marks in the dirt at the center of camp. Perhaps David had instructed his men to remove all traces of the incident.
They could not do the same for the images I carried in my mind.
I did not speak to anyone as I left the camp, and I ignored the eyes that watched me go to the spring. No one came to stop me. Why should they? I was only a woman. A fearful, powerless woman who lived among strangers and had no means to protect herself, not even the presence of a caring husband.
I came through the gap and saw David sitting beside the water’s edge, his arms resting on his knees, his hands linked. He was staring at his reflection on the surface of the water.
I was not startled. Some part of me had known he would be waiting. My skin, perhaps. It had prickled all over with knowledge of him as soon as I entered the gap.
David stood. “Abigail.”
“I am only here for water.” I could not look into his eyes. I walked to the edge of the spring.
“You were watching me again.”
I caught my lip with my teeth and gave a single nod.
“I am sorry for that. Death is not for the eyes of women.”
“Women see death every day.” I thought of poor Malme, and the struggle she faced to birth her child. Would I have to watch her die, too? “We do not kill people, but we are the ones who must wash and wrap the bodies of the dead.” A harsh note entered my voice. “Will we have to do that for the men you slew?”
“We shall burn the bodies,” he said softly. “It is the custom of their people.”
Did he wish me to praise him for sparing us the funerary duty?
I bent to draw the water Leha needed. I felt awkward and uncomfortable, crouched as I was, for it was as if I made obeisance to him. I went still as David came down beside me.
“Abigail, will you never look upon me again?” He took the jug from my hands before I could fill it and set it aside.
“I dare not.” For my faithless heart wanted to do nothing more. “You are the melekh.” I said it as much to him as to myself.
A humble potter’s daughter had no business speaking to an anointed king.
“I am the same man I was when you saw me dance in the rain.”
I closed my eyes briefly. “That man was a shepherd who sang praise to the Adonai.” I looked at him. “You are David, slayer of giants and Philistines. A king to be.”
“They are all the same man.” A shadow of grief passed over his face. “And an outlaw as well.”
“I know.” When he reached out to me, I stood and stepped away. “Please, I do not know what to do, or to say. I have never seen a man slain. I have no knowledge of kings.”
“I am a shepherd, Abigail.” His hand fell to his side. “Now I must lead men, and protect Israel, but it is not so different. What the Adonai asks of me will not change who and what I am.”
I thought of the terrible blankness in his face as he fought the Philistines. “I was so afraid today,” I whispered.
“I know. I would you not have seen it. But know I am not a monster—”
“No.” My fingertips rested against his lips. I looked all over his face, memorizing every line, every color of him. “I was afraid for you. That I would see you slain by those men, with nothing I could do to save you. How could you be so reckless? To give them knives, to fight them both at once?” My voice grew choked. “Don’t you understand? I was not afraid of you, but for you. The Adonai forgive me, but I was glad when you killed them.”
My own words shamed me to my bones, and I burst into tears.
“Shhh.” His arms came up around me, and he held me tenderly.
When I could control my emotions, I pulled back and dashed the tears from my face. “I must go,” I said, blindly reaching for the jug.
“Wait.” His palm cradled my damp cheek as he made me look at him. “In this moment, I could compose a thousand songs about the beauty of your eyes.”
“They are not beautiful.” I sniffed. “They are red and swollen.”
“So they are, and still they haunt my dreams.”
He dreamed of me. No, no, he could not. Kings did not dream of common maidens.
“I came to tell you that my men and I must leave here when the sheep are driven to Maon for shearing.” His thumb traced my bottom lip. “Abigail, when we go, will you come with me?”
Go with him? The heat ebbed from my limbs as quickly as he had awoken it with his touch. By asking me to go with him, David was inviting me to be his lover, perhaps even his wife.
Yet I was already married.
Everyone knew the law over the respectability of women. A man might take more than one wife, but a woman could not have more than one husband. A married woman could not take any man other than her husband as her lover.
Any woman who did not follow the law was an adulteress, and as such sacrificed all she had brought to the marriage to her husband, as well as what she had gained from him.
Such as a debt she had married him to pay, or a debt he had been forced to pay for her.
/> “I cannot.” I moved away. “You know nothing of me.”
His mouth curved. “I know that you are my little dove of peace. I would spend a thousand nights in your gentle arms.”
This had to end. “We will never spend a single night together. David, I am not free. I belong to another man. I am married.”
“What?”
I met his bewildered gaze. “I am Abigail of Carmel, wife of Nabal. My husband owns the flocks you have been guarding, and this land you and your men patrol. He is master of these people, and me.”
David said nothing for a long time. He stared down at me, and anger made his eyes into black fire.
At last he asked, his voice strained, “Why did you not say before?”
“Before.” I stared at him. “You speak of the time when we first met here, and you did not tell me who you were?”
The side of his mouth made a bitter curl. “I was wrong. You have the eyes of a dove and the heart of a lioness.”
“I am neither bird nor beast. I am the wife of another man, and you are an outlaw king. We must never see each other again.” I drew the water Leha needed and tucked the jug against my hip. “Farewell, Melekh David.”
He did not stop me. He seized me. Water from the jug splashed over the rim and splashed down the front of my khiton. He moved as lightning struck, and that as much as the cold wetness startled a cry from me.
David took the jug from my hands.
“Please, Melekh, I—” I gasped as he tipped the jug and poured the rest of the water down the front of me. “What have you done?”
“No more than you have done to me. I want you to know this fire you have built inside me, Abigail.” He tugged me against the front of his body and held me fast. “It burns without cease.” He pressed my hand under his, so that my fingers were spread over the beating of his heart. “Can you feel the heat of it?”
I felt wet and frightened. “I have done nothing to you. Please, release me.”
“But you have.” He dropped to his knees and rubbed his cheeks and nose against the wet cloth clinging to my belly. “The sight of you captures my eyes. You distract me from my purpose. You make me yearn for nothing but you.”
My hands came up on their own accord and touched his head. “David.” His name could be the only thing I said for the rest of my life and I would be content. “David, you must not do this. I am married to another man.” And in that moment, I hated Nabal with every part of my being. “Even were I not, I am but the daughter of a poor man. I have no family and no royal blood, no nahalah. I can give you nothing.”
“I know what you did for Yehud and his family. How you brought food for them so they would not suffer. You would save them and let me go hungry.” He looked up at me. “I starve for you, Abigail. For the love of the Adonai, feed me.”
I should have pushed him aside. Even if he was a king to be, he had no right to touch me like this. But his hands were on my hips, and his hair in my hands, and I could not breathe anymore for wanting him.
“Yes.” Slowly he rose, making a path up the wet cloth of my khiton with his mouth. His face and chest were wet as he straightened, and the sun glinted on the droplets beading his thick dark lashes.
Was he weeping for me? If he was, it would tear my heart in two. “I beg you leave me go.”
“I can kill giants and cross mountains, little dove, but I cannot stop touching you.” His hands moved over me, caressing my shoulders, pressing the soaked fabric over my breasts. “I know we cannot be together. I know.” He looked down at my body, outlined as it was by my wet khiton. “But if I am to burn, I would you give me one last sip from your fountain. If I am to die of hunger, let me taste you before I wither away to bone.”
He was not withering. Desire made his male part thick and hard where he pressed it against the curve of my belly. The words spilling from his lips were beautiful and thrilling, like those of his songs, but I understood what he was asking. He desired me. He wanted to put himself inside me. He wanted to lie with me and give me his child.
Desire was a terrible thing. I knew, for I had burned and starved for him. As I did now.
His rough hands eased my khiton from my shoulders. To my shame, I remembered that I wore no shift under it. The wet wool clung, and he could not slip it down any farther than my breasts.
“Help me,” he murmured against my brow. “I must see you. I must.”
I shook my head, but my back touched stone, and he lifted me off my feet and stepped between my legs, so that I straddled him.
“You cannot deny me.”
I did not wish to. I wanted him. I wanted to be naked with him. As if we were in one of my dreams, my hands lifted again, and I bared my breasts to his gaze. “No,” I said, my voice breaking, “I shall not deny you.”
David gave me more beautiful words, poetry murmured upon my skin as he nuzzled and kissed my breasts. His touch spread the fire through my body. Our lower halves were so tightly pressed together that they wrung the water from my khiton to drip in steady streams. I heard as if from a distance the pattering of the water and the rasp of his beard as he suckled me.
What an eager child passion was, to nurse so strongly.
The stone at my back became prickly grass, and David’s arms my bed. The weight of him atop me was heavy, almost to where I could not draw a breath, but then he shifted. His mouth traced my brows, the length of my nose, my lips. I clung to him, dizzy and bewildered by the heaviness of my limbs and the deep, hollow ache between my legs.
Someone said something, and David lifted his head to look around. I went still.
“Abigail?” It was one of the children from camp, Yehud’s youngest son, a boy of five. “Are you hurt? Why does Melekh David hold you down so?”
David rolled over and stood, helping me to my feet and hiding me behind him so I could straighten my garments. He gazed down at the boy. “Men do not hurt women. We protect them.”
Yehud’s son gave him a solemn nod.
He placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Abigail needs a man to protect her as she walks back to camp. Will you do this for me?”
“I shall, Melekh David.” The boy threw his shoulders back and imitated his father’s stern glare. “No one will harm Abigail while I am with her.”
“Good.” David came to me and before I could speak and brushed his mouth over mine. “Look after her well, boy. She is a good wife.”
CHAPTER
15
Malme’s labor continued through the night and into the next morning. Leha and I spelled each other, but I could not snatch more than a few moments of sleep. I felt my mouth still damp with his kiss, my body still warm from his touch, and my heart became like a stone in my breast.
If this was what it meant to find a dream, then I did not wish to dream, ever again.
As dawn came, the young mother’s battle to bring forth her child turned worrisome. Bloody fluid trickled from between her legs, and her skin turned cold and clammy. The pains that had caused her to moan and complain now wracked her body with agony.
Leha drew me aside. “I cannot feel the baby’s head. I think it may be turned the wrong way.” She glanced over at Bethel, who had not risen from her mat. “My aunt is not well enough to attend her, and none of the other women know what to do.”
“Can we send for a midwife?”
She shook her head. “The journey takes a day, and by the time she comes I fear it will be too late to save them.”
“Why are you two standing here gossiping?”
We both turned toward the familiar, complaining voice, and watched as a bedraggled Keseke hobbled over to us, supporting her weight with a stick stripped of bark.
She looked from Leha to me. “What do you here? There is a baby to be born. Tell me what you have done, and how she does.”
Leha hesitated, and then told Keseke everything that had happened through the night. “Have you ever seen such a birth?”
“I had two of my own try to come out that way.�
�� She noticed my stare. “I was not always a servant. My children died with my husband, of the spotted sickness.”
I wanted to touch her arm and tell her how sorry I was, but I was still too angry with her. “How fortunate that you decided to come back.”
“You may take up your stick and beat me later, Mistress,” she advised me. “For now, I shall go to Malme and see what can be done.”
I insisted she wash first, which she did without complaint, and I watched her carefully. If she tried to hurt anyone, I would be the one to stop her.
Malme’s entire body dripped with sweat, but she could no longer be roused from her stupor. Keseke eased down beside her and used her hands to check the position of the child.
“It is as you said,” she told Leha. “The baby’s feet have already emerged. It is lucky that I have small hands. You will have to hold her down for me. This will hurt her and make her cry out.”
Leha and I took position on either side of Malme, while Keseke knelt and pushed her hand into the young woman’s body. Malme reacted with a terrible scream and writhed under our hold.
“Keep her still!” Keseke snapped.
I held on and prayed.
It seemed to take forever, and Malme screamed several times. Then her entire body went rigid, and Keseke eased her hand back.
“Now push,” she told Malme. “Push!”
Malme’s exhausted face turned bright red. A gush of blood and fluid came, and then I saw a round head. Malme screamed one final time, and the baby seemed to pop out of her body like the clay seal from a bottle of fermenting wine.
“Here now,” Keseke said, holding the squirming little baby over his mother’s belly, “you have a fine son.”
A firstborn son was something to celebrate, and the men preceded to do just that. The younger wives joined them, but the older women, Leha, and I stayed with Malme and her baby. The new mother stopped bleeding as soon as the baby was put to her breast, and she drifted into a healing sleep, still cradling her new son.
“He is a greedy one,” Leha said, gently turning the baby to suckle at his sleeping mother’s other breast. “Big and healthy, too. It is almost as if he grew fat while his mother grew thin.”
