The Secret Chord: A Novel (8 page)

“Shmuel gestured to David then, and the two of them walked out together, down the stairs, into the cold night. I do not know, to this day, what was said. But when they came in, Shmuel went straight to his rest and David allowed me to help him bathe and change into a clean night robe. We did not speak much, and nothing at all to the purpose of the strange events of the night. He answered me when I spoke to him, but he was off in the distance somewhere, far beyond my reach. I steered him to Raddai’s empty pallet, in the room where four of his brothers slept on, oblivious.

“In the morning, Shmuel and his servant left for Ramah, and David went back to the sheep, and it was as if the whole uncanny business had never taken place. I did not speak of it to my other sons, and when I asked Yishai if they knew what had occurred he said that if they did, they knew better than to own to it, and urged me to put it out of my mind also. He said that Shaul was still our king, and while that was so it did no good to speak, or even think, about David’s anointing.

“But of course, not a day passed when I did not think about it, and wonder. And then, soon enough, we were at war again with the Plishtim, and my older sons were called by General Avner to join the king, in battle, in the Wadi Elah . . .”

IV

H
er voice trailed off. She reached for her wine cup, but found it empty. She waved for Shammah’s girl, but there was no need. The girl had been tending to the making of a small cook fire and had set a large pot on a tripod of three stones. But as soon as she sensed her grandmother stir, she was at her elbow, filling our cups. She placed the pitcher, which was beaded with moisture in the afternoon heat, on the table between us. It had grown late as we talked. The twisted shadows of the citron boughs elongated in dark knots upon the ground. Nizevet put her cup down and lifted her hand to her brow.

“I have tired you,” I said. “I am sorry.”

“No, I am not tired. It is not that. It is just that it is difficult for me to speak of things that I have kept close to me for so long. I see you writing down my words, and I—and I—I feel such shame, such shame—”

I started to speak, to reassure her, but she hushed me with a wave of her hand. “I know my son has sanctioned this, for reasons that must seem wise to him. But the common people know his story so differently. Their story begins with that radiant boy who suddenly appeared from the hills. Do they need, I wonder, to know what came before?” She was not looking at me, but at her hands.

“That will rest with the king,” I said. “He will decide what will be recorded, and what will be left out.”

“Very well,” she said. Then she signaled again to the girl, and began to rise.

“Is that all?” I said, rather more sharply than I intended. “I was hoping you might go on.”

“Go on? Why should I go on? Shammah can better tell about the Wadi Elah. Shammah, and others who were there. My part in the story is of no significance beyond what I have told you. Be content.”

I stood then, and bowed. The girl came and gave Nizevet her arm. The two disappeared into the house and I was left alone to gather my writing materials. The girl returned to tend to the pot. Pungent aromas—onions, cumin, coriander—wafted from her pot. My mouth watered and I realized I was very hungry. Just before sunset a noisy pair of youths returned to the compound, herding their animals before them. The younger boy, who had been dozing in a corner, rushed to spread straw in the lower stable rooms, a chore I sensed should have been done sometime earlier.

The girl brought me a basket of flatbread, a tray heaped high with the fragrant, spiced grains, and a dish of yogurt to blend with it. It was clear I was not to dine with the rest of the family, as they had all withdrawn to an upstairs room in the larger of the three houses. I ate the food, glad of my solitude. My thoughts were occupied with the remarkable words that lay bound in my parchment, and with Nizevet’s parting advice. She was wise. It was best to speak only to those who were there when events unfolded. David’s life already was the stuff of wild elaborations. Men always make myths around their kings. I needed to be wary of such men.

When I had done with the food, the girl was there again, at my side, holding a bowl of rosewater so that I might wash my fingers. “If you are ready, I will show you to your place.” So I was to stay. I had not been sure if Shammah would offer me a roof, or whether I should have to bespeak some dubious shelter in the town.

“I think I will sit for a while,” I told her. And so I did, counting the stars as they twinkled alight until the sky was glittering. When a boy came with a torch to lead me to my room, it was very late. Shammah had not returned. A pale light was already seeping through the shutters when I woke from a restless sleep to hear him come in, drunk, stumbling and cursing. I heard the king’s name, and my own, interspersed with references to donkey’s balls and camel dung. I rolled over and went back to sleep, reasoning that it would be many hours before Shammah might be ready to speak with me.

•   •   •

The house stirred to life not long after. I dozed through the sounds of morning tasks, the animals being let out of their stalls, the men and boys leaving for pasture and field. When finally I rose, only two women were left in the courtyard, baking the day’s bread in the tannur. The one I had met the day before worked beside an older woman whom I assumed to be Shammah’s wife. She looked up for a moment from working dough, and nodded a brief acknowledgment before turning her attention to the bread. The girl peeled a hot round from the curved wall of the tannur and brought it to me, steaming, along with a handful of olives. I asked after Nizevet, as I did not see her in the courtyard. The girl replied that she was resting. She was very tired from the prior day’s long talk, the girl said, with an air of rebuke. By the time I had consumed my morning morsel, the women had finished the bread making and were preparing to milk the ewes and nannies pastured nearby. As they took up their bowls, I unrolled a hide to review what I had set down the day before.

The sun was high in the sky before Shammah came stomping across the courtyard. He snatched up a round of the fresh bread and threw himself down heavily into the chair opposite me, gnawing on it. He wiped his mouth with the back of a hand and fixed me with a glare of complete distaste. “I’ve never understood why my brother puts up with you,” he blurted. “The things you say to him. It’s a wonder he hasn’t put a spear right through you.”

There was no answer to this, so I gave none. I carefully rolled up the skin I had been reading and drew out a blank one. Shammah snorted. “So you wrung my mother out like a filthy rag and now you propose to begin on me, to see what more dirt you can squeeze?”

“Your brother . . .”

“Ah, yes, my brother wants it. My holy, miraculous, mighty brother, beloved of all—men, women—even Yah. He wants it. And he gets what he wants, always. Well, now you know that wasn’t always how it was. Until that old man and his oil pitcher showed up here, that boy knew his place—and a dung-spattered, dusty place it was.” He grinned to himself, a mean, private mirth. “I can still see the look on Eliav’s face—and Avinadav’s, for that matter . . .” He gave a throaty laugh, and then winced, and put a hand to his temple. The previous night’s excess was claiming its usual price.

“Well, none of us believed what the old man said. How could David, that worthless little turd—don’t look at me like that. It’s how we thought of him; I know she told you that. But I’ll bet she didn’t tell you that he well earned his reputation. No. I bet she told you he was her perfect darling. Well, he wasn’t perfect. He was a sly little shit. He’d learned to be. He knew how to keep an eye to the merest advantage and he did not scruple to take it, once it showed itself. He was like you in that way.” He scowled at me, malice in his face. His mouth twisted into a grin. “You forget. I was there that day he killed your father. I saw your wonderful piece of playacting. It was well done, I have to give you credit. I thought at the time, that boy’s got balls. How you came up with it—kingdom, crown, all that stuff—and had the front to put on that show with your father’s blood up to your ankles. It won you your life, and now look at you. The king’s prophet. A man to be reckoned with. Well, you might have suckered my brother but you don’t fool me. I thought you were a clever little fraud that day you saved your skin, and I think you’re a cunning charlatan now. But no one gives a shekel for what I think. I’m just the king’s old drunkard of a brother. So I keep my mouth shut and stay out of my son’s way so he can do what you’ve done, and be someone at court when Prince Amnon comes into his own.” He picked up the bread and gnawed at it.

“I believe,” I said, “that we were discussing your brother at Wadi Elah. Not your opinion of me, or your ambitions for Yonadav.”

He gave a dramatic sigh. “All right. Let’s get it done with, then.” He mimicked my haughty tone: “My brother at Wadi Elah. The mean little
mamzer
making his name. To be fair. He had reason to be the way he was. He had cause, ample cause, as a beaten mule has cause to be sour and malicious, just looking for the chance to land a kick. We—all of us—would’ve done anything to earn our father’s approval, and if he treated David like a mangy cur dog, then we would, too. We never showed that boy a cup of kindness. He had to use his wits to survive out there in the hills and he did, with no man’s hand to guide him. So when he came to the Wadi Elah, he swooped in like a buzzard, looking to feed himself on the misery of that battlefield. And what a ripe corpse he found there, and what a meal he made of it.”

I scribbled furiously to get these words down, words as sour as the gall ink in which I wrote them. As frank as Nizevet had been, this was another kind of truth telling entirely. Shammah had been restless in his seat, shifting his great bulk, working the knot in his shoulders. He got up and began to pace, wearing the same track in the yard that I had noted the day before. He pulled down a switch from the citron bough and beat it against his thigh as he walked.

“I suppose you have some picture in your mind of how it was that day. Who doesn’t? The cloth of that story is threadbare with the telling. It has been an amusement to me, who was there, to have it told to me fashioned thus and so, restitched until I do not know that the events described are the ones I stood and watched with my own good eyes. Every time I hear it, the Plishtim champion has grown a cubit in height and my heroic little brother has lost a year in age. After all this time, I think I can see him as you see him on that day. You see a shining boy, don’t you? Here he comes, dancing out of the ranks of common men. What a beautiful, brave boy you see. You can own to it. You are not alone. That is what everyone thinks. Well, for one thing, he was scarcely a boy. My brother had reached his fourteenth year. There were many of his age already in the ranks, battle tested, counted as men. And he’d grown as a cactus grows, bitter and prickly and tough enough to survive what came his way.

“But my brother has fed the other legend. Indeed, by feeding it in others, I think he has grown it within himself. Even he probably now believes the story of the glowing, blessed boy and the hideous, looming giant. Not true. That gloss and polish all came to him later, after Shaul and Yonatan took him up and made much of him. Gave him, to be frank, the love that we—his own family—had held back from him. Shaul’s court was nothing much, in those days. No singing men and women, none of the finery that David fills his hall with these days. Shaul’s was a simple chieftain’s headquarters. Nothing more. There was none of this prideful pomp then. Most of the time he held counsel under a tree, like a soldier. But for a love-starved urchin from a mud-daubed sheepfold, Shaul’s so-called court was the garden of paradise and, thanks to Yonatan’s folly and excess, David flourished there. And was corrupted there, too. Oh, don’t you give me that look. Not you. I’ve heard you say worse, and to his face. . . .

“In any case, there we were, our ragtag troops up on one hill and their forces across the valley on the other. Everyone makes out it was a massive standoff—two great armies—but that’s not true. Never happened. It was just another skirmish in a long, boring season of skirmishes. They were always at us in fighting season, trying to pick off a village here, a hamlet there. Steal the livestock, disrupt the harvest. They were good at it, and they had better arms than we did. It had been going on for months, and we were all of us done in. Seemed like neither side wanted to sound the battle horns. And Shaul was canny, in those days. He knew that a standoff served us just as well as a victory. If the Plishtim fighters were pinned down in Wadi Elah, then they weren’t running about the Shefala looting crops and raiding cattle. I think it suited him just fine to sit out the season until the villagers got their harvests in. Then the weather would change and we could all go home.

“But then they started taunting us with their champion from Gath. He was big; I’ll give you that. And armed better than any of us. Better than Shaul. Better than anyone we’d ever seen, at that time. Not the usual Plishtim stuff, either—more the kind of thing that came from the island peoples far to the west. He had an odd-looking foreigner’s bronze helmet and scale armor—I remember that, because it was uncommon then—and a great bronze breastplate and greaves. His spear was as big as a weaver’s bar with a massive iron point set to it. There was a curved sword as well.

“I’ll own to it, when he’d come down into the valley and yell his taunts, none of us felt like stepping forward to fight him. ‘Get me a man!’ he’d yell. And then he’d laugh when no one came forward. The trouble was this: any man who had a chance to defeat him was too valuable a man to lose. Shaul would not let Yonatan go, and his other sons, the younger princes, weren’t up to it. Nor would he allow Avner to meet the challenge, and rightly so, because the defeat of such a one—the crown prince or the general—would have taken heart from the men and fed the battle lust of the enemy. But some of the hot young asses in the ranks grumbled about it, especially after the wineskin had been passed a few times. They didn’t like it, that Shaul just sat there and took the insults. They’d talk big at night. But I didn’t see them so brave come the morning.