The Secret Chord (6 page)

“Don't,” I interjected. I couldn't help myself. No one spoke of the Lamp of Israel in such a way. But Shammah just glanced at me, sneering.

“‘Don't.'”
He pitched his voice into a high whine. “Don't what? Don't tell the truth? But you said you wanted the truth. I'm giving it to you.
Do
you want it or not? Well, then. Shut up and write.” He threw down the citron switch, rubbed his two flat, square thumbs into his eye sockets, inspected the thread of rheum he extracted and smeared it on his tunic. “So, there he is, big-mouthing, pointing over to where the Plishtim champion stood in the valley. ‘See how slow he is?' he was saying. ‘Did you see him stumble coming down the hill? All that armor is probably weighing him down. Yes, he's got the height, and he's well armed, but you could attack him from a distance, you don't have to meet him hand to hand, on his terms. If you don't give him a chance to even . . .' I cut him off there, grabbed him by the ear. I dragged him back to Eliav. I can still hear his whiny little voice—‘What have I done now? I was only asking.' But Eliav had his measure. He chided him for his black-hearted scheming and his pompous bragging and told him to get on home to his work. But it was too late. Someone had told Shaul about David's empty boasting, and a messenger came up to say David was wanted in the king's tent. Eliav thought it would teach David a lesson, and sent him off with a smirk.

“All right. I'll confess: We all of us wanted to see him put back in his place. And we all of us underestimated him. David saw his chance and he took it. I think he reckoned that he might not get another one, and that any risk was worth taking to change his miserable little life.”

Shammah stopped pacing and sat again, heavily, in the chair opposite me. He propped his elbows upon the table and let his chin rest on his hands. I looked up, waiting for him to continue, and found him
glaring back at me. I thought, for a moment, that his disgust for me, and for this undertaking, had mastered him, and that he was about to put an end to it. But the story he was telling seemed to have caught him up, despite himself.

“We all followed behind David to the king's tent. We thought it a great joke, and so at first did Shaul. When David repeated his boasting right to the king's own face, Shaul just laughed. How could a shepherd lad untrained to arms fight a professional soldier? Then David launched into a preposterous tale of how he'd slain a lion, grabbed it by the beard and wrenched a stolen sheep out of its jaws. Well, it was true he did have a lion skin, but I'd always assumed he found some dead beast and skinned it and made up all the rest. But it seemed that the king was taken in by the whole thing. David was certainly giving it all he had: ‘The Name saved me from the lion and he will save me from the man,' he said. I don't know if Shaul was already a bit touched, or if he was desperate, or if he just didn't give a shit what happened to my braggart brother. Maybe he thought, if the big man slays him, so what? The slaughter of an unknown shepherd boy would be no great loss to us and no great boast to him who slew him. But Shaul did offer my brother his own armor, so I suppose he thought the lad brave, at least. We had to stifle a laugh, I have to tell you, watching David try to walk in Shaul's breastplate, which hung down past his skinny knees. When he unstrapped the gear and set it aside, I thought he might use that as an excuse to back out, but no. He took up his shepherd's staff and went off to the wadi. He picked up a few stones, weighing them in his hand, looking for the densest ones, and skipped off with his leather sling in his hand. The king watched him go. He turned to his commander. ‘Whose son is that boy, Avner?' Avner shrugged. He said he had no idea. Eliav, Avinadav and I didn't speak up. We didn't claim our brother, because we were sure that when Goliath turned up, David would get himself smeared into the sand.

“So it went on as it usually did. The Plishtim archers lined up, and so did we, with the usual shield banging and insults. Goliath stepped
out and called for his man. And there goes little brother, prancing in and out of the line, brandishing his staff. When Goliath saw him, he threw back his massive head and laughed. Well, why wouldn't he? Does a gnat worry a bear? He yelled out to David, ‘Am I a dog that you come against me with sticks?' He'd only seen the staff, at that point. He hadn't noticed the sling. David ran forward, farther out of the line, but still well clear of spear distance. He loaded up a stone and let it fly. It missed, of course. He was too far back. The big man's voice got angrier then. ‘Come here!' he yelled. ‘I'll give your flesh to the birds of the sky and the beasts of the field!'

“And then David stunned the lot of us. He always had that voice; you've heard it, you know what I mean. He called back, as clear as a trumpet: ‘You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of
Hashem tzva'ot
—the lord of armies, the God of the ranks of Israel, whom you have defied.' We were raised in an observant household—we kept the feasts, we did the sacrifices, you know that—but this kind of holy talk, well, not even our father went around spouting out that kind of thing. None of us knew where he came by that style of speech. It was a bit uncanny, to be truthful. I started to feel the hair rise . . .” Shammah's hand drifted to the back of his neck, remembering. His face had lost its scowl as the memories possessed him. For a few moments, it was as though he'd left me behind in the courtyard. He was no longer sitting there under the citron, conversing unwillingly with a man he disliked. He was far away, a youth in the Wadi Elah, watching with disbelief as his youngest brother rushed headlong toward his destiny.

“So then the Plishtim started in on their own man. Goading him. ‘Are you going to take that from a weedy boy?' He's getting taunted from both hills, and you can see he's getting more and more rattled. David slings another stone, and Goliath can feel the breeze as it passes. He dodges out of the way of it, and he's in all that armor, so he stumbles, and everyone laughs at him—his own and ours both. David's the only one not laughing. He's in some kind of a state,
trumpeting away. . . . ‘This very day the Name will deliver you into my hands'—and more of that style of thing—it just poured out of him—the kind of high-blown words your kind comes out with: ‘All the Earth shall know there is a God in Israel . . .' Not the kind of thing you expect out of the mouth of a shepherd boy. If the Plishtim had hurled his javelin right then, things might have gone otherwise, but he was still standing there, feet planted, baffled that this loudmouthed little nobody was making a fool of him. He turned around to curse at the men in his own ranks, to shut them up. That's what did him in, I'm sure of it. The stone from the sling was airborne by the time he looked back toward David, and when he did, it was too late to avoid it. And I have to credit it, David's aim—or his luck—was perfect. The stone hit right in the forehead”—Shammah raised a beefy hand and laid two fingers on his own brow just between his eyes—“right here, just a hair below the edge of his big bronze helmet. You felt it, even from far off. It was as if you heard it. Smack.”

He slapped his meaty hands together and tossed his head back, mimicking the instant of impact. “Rock. Bone. Crack. You should have seen his head snap. The helmet flew right off him. The big hulk dropped, just like that, right onto his knees. He groped for his sword. He couldn't see. The blood was pouring into his eyes—you've been to war, you know how scalp wounds bleed. And David hadn't stopped. Hadn't even checked his stride. He just kept sprinting forward after the stone, and the Plishtim archers are shooting, but missing him. And he cries out some other thing about
Hashem tzva'ot
being with us, and that's all it takes for our young hotheads to break ranks and charge in after him. I heard Avner trying to call them back, cussing and yelling, but it was no good, because they'd been spoiling for this fight for a long time.

“I ran myself then, following after David. I was catching up to him when he got Goliath. He grabbed the sword hilt right from under his hand. It was almost too heavy for him to lift. He staggered as he tried to raise it, and I thought he was finished. But he found his feet, and
grasped the sword, two-fisted, like an ax. He still could barely lift the thing, and it fell under its own weight. Right on that thick neck. Must've been sharp, that sword, because the head came off clean. David picked it up by the hair and held it up, so that everyone could see it. Our men took heart then, and plowed through the enemy. That's how battles turn. The Plishtim scattered and fled, and we pursued them all the way back to the gates of their town, Ekron. When we got back, we looted their abandoned camp.

“I heard later that David had walked right up to the king with the head still dripping in his hand. He told him his name and whose son he was. Avner wasn't happy. How would he be? He'd lost control of his men to this little nobody. But of course, he didn't stay a nobody. Yonatan was all over him, praising his guts and his leadership. And so began all that folly between the two of them. I think that very night, if I had to lay a bet on it. Well, you know what it's like, when you take your first man. You're ready for sex—or, maybe, you don't know.” He looked at me with a mixture of distaste and contempt. “Well, I can tell you this: a normal boy'll put it anywhere, after that first kill. Girl, hag, mule. And if a prince wants to suck your cock . . .”

He turned his head aside and spat into the dust.

“I will not speak of that. But there it was. The days of humble sheepherding were over. Yonatan wouldn't let him go home, and David surely wasn't clamoring to get back there. Next thing we knew, he's the king's armor bearer. And then someone mentioned that he played the harp. Shaul took to having him play anytime an evil mood seized him, and they say the music brought him relief, for a time. But I don't know much about all that. David had a gut full of malice toward us, and made sure we were not asked to Shaul's court. Well, it was no more than our due, I suppose. Later, when Shaul turned on him and made us all outlaws, it was a different story. We had no choice but to join forces with him or be cut down. My brothers and I went on the run with him; he arranged refuge for my mother and father off in Moav, across the Yarden, under the protection of the king there. Well,
you know all that. You were with us soon enough. In the end, he saw to it that we survived, and we've all made shift to get along with each other through the years since. I don't say he hasn't been generous. Since he came to his throne he's made sure all of us got back what we'd lost on his account, and plenty more, too. But there. I'm sick of talking about him and I'm as parched as the dirt.”

He called out for water and the boy came running. He did not wait for the boy to pour, but snatched the pitcher and lifted it, letting the cool water run into his mouth and down his chin. When his thirst was slaked he upended the pitcher and let the water spill over his head, then he shook himself like a dog. He laid his hands flat upon the table and pushed himself up. “Get this man his mule,” he ordered the boy, and turned away. I had been dismissed.

I
t was an easy ride back in the cool of the evening. The mule was willing and sure-footed, so I sat her at my ease as the stones exhaled the day's heat and the soft cloak of the sky changed its hues from golden to pink to royal purple. It was late when I finally had to put some leg on her, to urge her up the last steep approach to the town gate. The moon had risen full, bathing the white stones in a cool, pearly luster. The gate was closed of course, and when one of the younger sentries challenged me, I heard his senior officer upbraid him in a low hiss: “Fool! Can't you see it's the prophet? Let him pass.”

The metal of the bolts groaned, and in the dancing light of cressets I saw the youth's hand tremble as he held the heavy gate. I have never become used to it: the awe that common men have for my kind. I suppose it is because I feel no more than a common man myself. Even less, perhaps. No more than a tool in the hand of an unseen craftsman, something to be used as needed and then cast casually aside.

But I have come to accept this fearfulness and distance. My own slave, a Hittite boy named Muwat, in my service a full two years, still looks at me sideways. He is a capable youth, nonetheless, skilled not only in meeting my simple needs but also in reading the temper of the household. I have found that the common people, and even, on occasion, those who should know better, such as the king, nurse strange ideas about me. They do not understand that I am given to see only those matters that roil the heavens. They expect me to know
everything. Muwat keeps me in credit in this way, his ears open to the gossip in the slaves' quarters, the stables and the kitchen, where one who knows how to listen can learn a great deal. Most useful of all, because he saw service as a child in the eastern kingdoms, he grew up among eunuchs and does not share the common aversion of most of our young men toward these unfortunates. He has befriended one or two, so from time to time I can learn from him even those private matters that pass in the women's quarters. As tired as I was that night, I could sense, as Muwat came and went with my bathing water and my bed robe, that he had news for me. He was a timid boy who had come to me from a hard service with a master who did not invite familiarity. I had learned that I would have to tease out his confidences. So when I was clean and robed and he had brought me some bread and dates and a cup of watered wine, I inclined my head toward a stool in the corner. “Sit, Muwat. Pour a drink for yourself and tell me what I need to know this night.”

He sat, his eyes locked on the floor and his foot tapping nervously. He had not fetched himself a cup, so I got up and got one for him. At this, he shot me a look of confusion from under his long-lashed eyelids. “Come now, Muwat. We are alone here. There is no need to stand on ceremony with me.” Still, he didn't speak. “What is it? Does it concern the king?” At this, he nodded.

“Well, perhaps. That is, they say so . . .”

“Who says so? What do they say?”

“They say the king is not himself—well, you know that, of course. But since you left him, the morning before the last, he has not slept. The servants of his bedchamber say he does not come to rest, but paces the corridors. Last night, he visited the concubines and asked for this one and then another and finally a third. But Gholagha—you know him, I think?—he's the youngest of the eunuchs—reports that he sent each one of them back without . . . well . . . you know . . .” He was blushing now, the flush a spreading stain under his fine skin. He had not lifted his cup, so I pushed it toward him. He took a long
swallow. David had always been a sensualist. In the outlaw years, he'd made do with two wives. Ahinoam he'd taken because he was urgent to get an heir and she was a sturdy, uncomplaining girl who could bear the hardships of the outlaw life, and then Avigail, who was a love match. In Hevron, he'd added others. Most of them, like the Princess Maacah of Geshur, for well-founded diplomatic reasons, to seal an alliance, secure a border or bind a tribe. It was only after Avigail's death that he had, in my view, abandoned continence and embraced excess, adding and subtracting concubines simply because he could, to satiate the lusts of a day or a week.

“Today, they say, he has been sharp with everyone who has come near to him. He did no work and received no one—he would not even give an audience to Yoav's messenger from the battlefield. And in the kitchen they say he sent back all his food uneaten. As a result, the hands have had a miserable day of it, the chief cook all out of temper and looking for someone to blame.”

I raked a hand through my hair. David's appetites—bedchamber and table—were well-known. As was his hunger for the merest scrap of news from any fighting when he had not been in the heat of it. Also, he was famed for his zealous attentiveness to governance. This kind of disengagement from life was unlike him, and worrisome. As tired as I was, I told Muwat to bring me a fresh tunic. I would go to the king's quarters. I would use the pretense of carrying greetings from Nizevet, even though no such message had in fact been sent. And even if he would not see me, I thought I might learn something of use there.

But when I arrived in the antechamber, the attendant said the king had not retired. He could not tell me where he was. “When he comes in, tell him I would speak with him at his pleasure, no matter how late the hour,” I said. I took the long way back to my own quarters, wanting to bump into him, or to meet someone who might know where he was. But I could not stalk him all night long, so in the end I returned to my room and sat up, fully dressed, hoping for a summons. The candle guttered and I did not trouble to light another. My body ached
from fatigue but my mind was restless. And then my boon companions, gut spasms and pounding head, arrived to join me in my vigil. For once, I welcomed them, these precursors of vision. The moon was full that night and bathed the room in a dim glow. But in the small hours it set, and the dark was so complete, my eyes might as well have been closed as open. I probed the dark, hoping that a sudden glare of vision would disrupt it. Throughout the night, my head throbbed and a weight of dread settled its great fist upon my heart. But no visions came. No bright shard of certainty arrived to tell me what I must do to help the king.

I now know why sight failed me that night. I have lived long enough to see the pattern whose first stitch was placed in those late hours. But for many years, I wondered. If only vision had led me to the roof, to where he stood in the soft air under the luminous moon, what sin, what folly and pain, might then have been prevented. And yet, if vision
had
led me there, what greatness might have remained unmade, a design unrealized, a future lost. Decades have passed now, and still I do not know how to fashion my thought on this matter. Still it gnaws at me. At the time, as I lived it, I stumbled through what followed like a clear-sighted man whose eyes are suddenly clouded, afraid of the next obstacle that would rise up and trip me.

•   •   •

Once, I would have known exactly whom to go to with my concerns. I would have laid the tangled skein of my thoughts in the lap of Avigail, and together we would have unraveled it. Avigail befriended me when I joined David's outlaws. David encouraged me to spend time with her—this was allowed as I was still young enough to have the liberty of the women's tent. “You can learn from her,” he said. “She understands how to read men's hearts.” And I did learn from her, most especially about him. She wanted me to understand him, and so she bared to me those private matters that men do not usually share one with another. “You are young to leave your mother,” she said. “I do not say I can take her place. No one can do that. But if you ever
feel lonely here, if you need a woman's care—” I remember my face reddening. She smiled kindly. “Do not look so dismayed. You'll be a man soon enough. But for now, you cannot be always underfoot among the fighters. David will call for you often enough, be assured of it. He uses every tool that comes into his hand.”

That night, as I sat in my room in the silent palace, waiting to be used again in his service, I remembered Avigail's kindness to me in those outlaw days. I remembered how she had extended her long fingers and raised my chin so that I was obliged to look right into the deep green of her eyes. I was young then, and embarrassed by the intimacy of it. I am sure she knew that, but she wanted me to understand our kinship. “We are alike in some ways, you and I. We have each of us been sent to him, to help him according to our means.”

At the time, boy that I was, I thought she spoke literally. Having no sons of Navaal, she had inherited a share of her former husband's wealth, and had brought it to David on their marriage. I knew they were bedmates, of course, but as I had yet to feel any stirrings of desire, that part of their relationship was obscure to me. Now, in hindsight, knowing about David's childhood, I can see more clearly and understand truths that eluded me then. The difference in their age meant that Avigail was more than a wife to David. She was like a sister and, in some measure, a mother also, giving him the affection that he had been severed from as an exiled child.

Directly after he sacked my village, David struck camp. He had looted ten times the supplies he had asked for. That was the way of it in those years. A temporary camp or a hideout in a set of caves. If supplies were not forthcoming, a punitive raid to secure them, and then on the move again, to keep ahead of Shaul, who hunted him constantly. Barely a week passed without the arrival of some new recruit, anxious to join us. Shaul's erratic behavior was driving many good men to desert him. Some who were in distress, and some who were burdened by debts and some who were generally discontented or dismayed by the direction of his leadership. Such men gathered to
David, and our numbers swelled. Sometimes, David would have me by him when a new man found his way to us. He would greet each of them, offer them honey cakes or wine, and draw out their stories. He lent a sympathetic ear, and made them know that he thought them patriots, not traitors. Avigail would be there, too, always, serving the food, unnoticed by the strangers. But I noticed her, and I noticed she missed nothing.

I was there one such evening, as she gathered the uneaten rinds and crusts from the meal David had shared with a man who had described himself as a trader from Shechem in the north, dealing in purple dye. As this was a risky trade, necessitating travel along the Derek Hayyam, the Way of the Sea, which passed through Plishtim territory, the man claimed also to be skilled with arms and had offered us his services as a fighter. When David asked why he had abandoned the dye trade, he said that the king's steward had reneged on payments, a large sum. When he tried to bring the matter before Shaul in person, the king had refused to see him. On the steward's word alone, the king banned him from doing further business with the court, which ruined him.

It had been an amiable meal: the merchant was a good storyteller, and kept the company amused by tales from his journeys. But now that the man had retired, David reached an arm out and drew Avigail down to sit with him. “What did you think?” he asked her.

“He had very white hands,” she said. “I suppose a dye merchant need not handle his own product, and yet . . .” She let her voice trail off.

“What else?”

She tilted her head, considering. “He seemed a bit confused, for a dye merchant, between
tekelet
and
argaman.”

“What?” said David. “Is there a difference, then?”

“Oh, yes,” Avigail replied. “One is a blue purple, the other a warmer, reddish purple. It's true, the distinction can be difficult to make”—she smiled—“though not if you're canny—one is much
cheaper, and no capable wife in purse to afford the dye in the first place would let herself be misled. And if it is your trade and livelihood . . . and you say you sell to a king . . .”

She always fashioned her words in that way, opening a question rather than giving a certain answer, so that David might feel that he had come to the truth himself.

“Anything more?”

She paused. “Well, he said he traveled often by the Derek Hayyam, but it was clear when he spoke that he did not recall that the highway turns inland in the Carmel mountains to cross the plain of Yezreel at Megiddo.”

David frowned. “Spy, do you think?”

“Perhaps not. Perhaps Shaul's spy would be more careful. More likely a brigand with a disreputable past, who does not want to own to it.”

“In any case, I will send him on his way in the morning. I'll not take a chance on him.”

Had it gone the other way, had Avigail found the man's tale convincing, he would have been embraced on her word. There would be a celebration to seal his joining the band—singing and dancing, the sharing of stories. Such nights were full of music and mirth and good feeling. That was how David drew men to him and made them his. He never forgot a man's story and could recall the names of his kin and all those who were dear to him, wept with him in loss, celebrated with him in joy. He learned which man enjoyed a ribald jest and which of them disapproved of bawdiness, and tailored his words accordingly. It was not that he played false in this. He had both elements in his nature, both the coarse and the refined. He could be a predator at noonday and a poet by dusk. And he exercised uncommon tact with his men, meeting them where they stood, rather than demanding that they always be the ones accommodating themselves. I have learned over time that this quality is rare in any man, even more so in a leader.

Those who knew or loved music found an instant bond with him. You cannot harmonize in song or play instruments together without listening one to the other, sensing when to be loud and when soft, when to take the lead and when to yield it. I think that few grasp the connection between waging war and making music, but in the long evenings, when the firelight flickered on the cave walls and the voices joined and rose with his, I learned the unity between the two.