The Secret Chord: A Novel (28 page)

I said nothing. After a moment’s awkward silence, he turned to chattering again about his projects and his plans. Then, out of nowhere:

“So, I am doing all the talking. Tell me what happened to you. Did you see anything interesting out there, alone all that time?”

“Oh, many things,” I said. “Things that will be of use to you, no doubt, when the time is right. But I wasn’t always alone.” I thought of the crowds, the voices. “There was one man, victim of a grave injustice. I wanted to get your opinion on what should be done for him.”

“Tell me!” He leaned forward, attentive. He loved to play the judge.

“He was very poor. He had this one little ewe lamb—that was all. No flocks. He raised this lamb in his own hut, with his children. It would share his morsel of bread, even drink from his cup. You’ve never seen affection like that, between a man and a beast. He’d carry it around, nestled right up to his chest.”

“Did he so?” His face had softened. He had entered into the story wholeheartedly. “I did that once, when I was a shepherd, with an orphan ewe. Got very attached. I know what that’s like. Go on.”

“Then, one day, the richest man in the village, who has everything—flocks, herds—he gets a visitor, and instead of slaughtering one of his own beasts, he steals that poor man’s little ewe, slaughters it, and serves it to his guest.”

David threw aside the grape stalk in his hand. “That man deserves to die! Tell me his name! I’ll see to it that he pays for that lamb four times over, because he was greedy and had no pity.”

“His name?” I said quietly. “You really want to know who he is, that greedy, pitiless man? That man who had everything?”

“As the Name lives, so I do.”

“That man is you.”

He stood up, knocking the tray so that the grapes fell and rolled across the flagstones.

I stood, too, crushing the grapes under my feet. The red pulp oozed, like wounded flesh. I walked up to him until we were eye to eye. He returned my gaze, insolent. He intends to brazen this out, I thought. He thinks I’m chastising him for adultery. He doesn’t realize I know about the murder.

I spoke in a low voice. “You. Given everything. You are a hundredfold more guilty than the rich man you just condemned. You took more than a man’s wife from him. You took his very life.” His face changed in a second with the realization that I knew the full extent of his crimes.

I turned abruptly away and strode across the room to the alcove. I looked at the model pieces, the forest of towering columns, the sumptuously scrolled capitals. The arrogance of it nauseated me. I swept my hand across the table, knocking the pieces to the floor and grinding them under my heel. When I spoke again, it was not in my own voice, but the other one. This time, however, I could hear my own words. There was no blinding pain, just coldness as the brutal judgment sprang from my lips.

“The God of Israel says this:
You will never build the temple. You are stained body and soul from your bloodshed and your butchery. Therefore, that great and holy task is not for you. I anointed you king of Israel. I rescued you from the hand of Shaul. I gave you Israel and Yudah. If that were not enough, I would give you twice as much and more. Why, then, have you flouted my commandments? You put Uriah to the sword. You took his wife in adultery. Then know you this: The sword will never depart from your house. I will make a calamity against you within your own house. I will take your wives and give them to another man before your very eyes and he will sleep with your wives under this very sun. You acted in the dark, but this I will make happen in the broad light of day, in the sight of all Israel!”

There was a silence in the room so complete I could hear the hushed footfalls of a servant’s bare feet in the passageways and the clop of a donkey’s hooves passing in the street below. David stood motionless, flushed. His eyes glittered. His fists clenched at his side. He raised them, balled, the muscles of his forearms jumping. He will kill me now, I thought. Then he raised his hands to his head and dragged at his hair.

“I stand guilty before the Name.”

He dropped to his knees and bowed his head, covering it with his arms as if to fend off a blow. His body shook. He wept. I put my two hands out and pushed his arms away gently. I rested my two hands in the soft thicket of his hair. I felt a wave of love and pity for him as the knowledge of his future pain surged through me.

I thought of Moshe, speaking to our ancestors after he transmitted the law to them. “I have set both before you, the blessing and the curse,” he said. “Life and death. Therefore, choose life.”

David’s time of choice was behind him now, irrevocably. He would know both blessing and curse, each in the fullest possible measure. Everything had happened to him. Everything would happen to him. Every human joy. Every human sorrow.
Pay four times over
, he had said. In his own words. And so it would come to pass. For the one life he had taken, four of those he loved would be swept away from him in violent ruin.

“Listen to me.” The voice was my own. I placed my hand under his chin and raised his wet face. “These things I have foretold—they are not all of them to happen to you yet. You will go on, and become renowned, and do great things and take joy in them. Later, when you are old, you will pay in full. For now, this: the first price you will pay. The baby you will have—this
mamzer
you have made—he will not live. Prepare for that. The rest, put out of your mind. Be glad that the Name has remitted your sin and let you live to atone it.”

And atone he did. He gave himself fully to the penitent life, fasting, praying, confessing his wickedness and execrating himself in public. He became a better man in the small matters of his days, an even better, wiser king in the greater matters of state. As confession of his misdeeds made the crimes public knowledge, so also did word of my prophecy spread out, first through the city and then across the Land. Our people, who had once taken comfort in Natan’s oracle, now spoke instead, in hushed voices, of Natan’s curse. If people had been wary of me before, now their aversion became extreme. Common folk would cross the street to avoid me; women would draw their mantles across their faces and make the sign against the evil eye.

Only David still sought me out, heaping me with honors and attention. I was the first to hear his song of lamentation and prayerful contrition. For days, weeks, it was the only song that he would sing. I believe it was one of the finest he ever composed.

Purge me with hyssop till I am pure;

wash me till I am whiter than snow . . .

Hide your face from my sins;

blot out all my iniquities.

Fashion a pure heart for me . . .

Save me from bloodguilt . . .

You do not want me to bring sacrifices;

You do not desire burnt offerings;

You desire the sacrifice of a sorrowful spirit;

You will not despise

a crushed and contrite heart.

So he sang. And so, I suppose, he believed. And yet, as I had told him, Yah did demand a sacrifice of him. Bloodguilt demanded a blood price.

XIV

I
n winter, a few days after the child was born, the king sent for me. I stopped short at the door. Batsheva was there, the child nestled sleepily against her breast. I had not expected that.

She had her head down, her back half turned to me. But even from that partial view, I could see that she was, as David had said, a striking woman: creamy skin, a glossy fall of obsidian hair, which she wore unbound and uncovered. Even in her loose robe it was possible to discern long, slender legs, a supple rounding of hips, and generous breasts, against which the baby lay, his thick shock of hair bearing fiery witness to his paternity. When David presented her she looked up, and I took a step backward. Her eyes were unexpected: a luminous blue. Also shocking: despite her tall, full figure, the face that gazed up at me was the face of a child. She was very young.

Awkwardly, not knowing how else to greet her, I asked how she did.

Her voice, when she answered, was the breathy voice of a shy girl, barely audible. “Very well, I thank you. Far better than I have a right.” She gave a swift smile, very brief. But it was as if the sun had come out. A man might do a lot, I thought, to win that smile.

David cleared his throat. “It’s her first, you know. She never had one with . . . him. The midwives said they’d never seen a first come so easily. And I know it’s not just words. Ahinoam, Avigail, Maacah, Hagit, Eglah, Avital . . .” He counted them off on his fingers, the wives who had borne him children. “All of them, the first time, long labors. Days, sometimes. But Batsheva . . .” He looked at her and his face softened. “She turned to me at dawn and said she felt the first pain”—so she shared his bed, even in late pregnancy—“and by noontime they handed me my son.” He reached down for the boy. She settled the infant into his large hands, where the baby—a good size for a newborn—suddenly looked rather small. Batsheva’s eyes locked with David’s for an instant, in the uncomplicated bliss of new parenthood. But then she bit her bottom lip, and his face darkened.

“We—I—asked you to come because I wanted you to see him.” He held out the infant. “See how healthy he is. I—we—we wonder if what . . . you’ve said, at times, that these prophecies of yours don’t always lend themselves to straightforward interpretation. That you see a part, maybe, but not the whole.”

“Yes.” I nodded. “That was how it used to be.” Before the desert visions made everything clear to me.

“What I am asking—what we are asking—is this: Is it certain this boy will die? Is there any room, in what you saw, what you were shown, to give us hope?”

I looked from one to the other of them. Their eyes—dark amber, deep blue—were trained on me like archers’ eyes, taking aim at some truth they imagined I held in my heart. I studied the baby in David’s hands. Pink-skinned, perfect, his small fists punching the air. I closed my eyes. His arms fell flaccid, spilling out of David’s grip. The tiny fists uncurled, the fingers limp, motionless. His skin gray as mortar. Crusts of dried mucus sealed his nostrils, eyelids.

“No hope.”

Batsheva gave a cry and raised her fist to her mouth. David sucked in a breath and clutched the infant to his heart.

“You will not have long to wait. It will be soon.”

The fever rose the following night. It burned him alive for six days. All through that time, David fasted, lying out in the open, on the cold winter ground.

Courtiers, those who cared for him, came to me, begging me to go to him, to tell him to eat and to take shelter, lest he, too, sicken and die. I did not go, knowing it was fruitless. Yoav did try to reason with him, as did Zadok and Aviathar. But he would not listen.

When the baby died on the seventh day, no one dared to bring him word, worried that he might do something mad and terrible, so great had been his grief during the illness. They were standing there, off at a distance from where he lay, debating it, when I arrived. I don’t know if he overheard, or whether my presence was enough to open his eyes to the truth.

He ran a dry tongue over cracked lips. “Is the child dead?” he rasped.

“Yes.”

He took a deep breath, and before he had exhaled he was on his feet. “Draw me a bath!” His servants looked at one another, confused. “Now!” he said, brushing the dirt off himself and walking toward the bathhouse. They scurried after him. After bathing, he called for oils to anoint himself, put on fresh linens and went to the tent of the ark, where he prostrated himself. Then he came back to his house and called for Batsheva, I suppose to console her. Later, he ordered a large meal, to which he invited his close counselors.

Yoav sat across from him, clearly perplexed. Finally, he blurted it out, in his blunt soldier’s way. “I don’t understand you,” he said. “When the child was alive you fasted and wept. Now he’s dead, you dry your eyes and feast.” David put down his chicken leg and wiped his mouth. He spoke with the weary air of a man obliged to explain the obvious. “When the child was alive, I thought, Who knows? The Name might have pity on me, so I fasted and prayed that my son might live. Now he’s dead, why should I fast? Can fasting bring him back again?” His eyes filled. “I shall go to him, but he shall never come back to me.”

He sent then to have his six living children brought before him, to bring him comfort. The boys were Amnon, Avshalom, Adoniyah, Shefatiah and Yitraam, and his only daughter, full sister to Avshalom, Tamar. I rose and left the room before they arrived. I could not look at them.

I decided, that night, to leave David’s household. I knew too much of what was coming to remain there. I asked if I might take rooms outside the palace, and be at his service at need. So he gave me this house across the wadi, nestled in its old groves of olives and almond. He wanted to raze it and build me something grander, with dressed stone and cedar left over from the materials the king of Tyre had sent him. But I said no. As soon as I walked into these plain rooms, I knew that no new house could suit me better. I knew that the large shutters would keep the rooms cool in the heat of summer and let the sun spill in to warm the whitewashed walls in winter. When Muwat flung open the shutters for the first time, the sun flared on the pink flagstones, worn to a soft sheen by generations of feet. It splashed upward, so that I blinked in the glare. When I opened my eyes, I saw him; dark-haired, bright-eyed, the beautiful boy with the grave, thoughtful face. The promise. The reason.