How are the Mighty fallen Read online

  How are the Mighty fallen

  Thomas Burnett Swann

  Thomas Burnett Swann

  How are the Mighty fallen

  Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul.

  And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle.

  — The King James Bible

  Friendship is love without wings.

  — Lord Byron, quoting an unknown source

  CHAPTER ONE

  King Saul and his Desert Crawlers had met the Philistines at Michmash and routed the proudest army between Assyria and Egypt. The news had reached Ahinoam, Siren of Crete and Queen of Israel, as she traveled from the capital of Gibeah to the battle site. She approached the camp in a little ox-drawn cart with big wooden wheels which rumbled like a handmill grinding grain. (Horses were Hittite beasts, treacherous beasts, unfriendly to Israelites, untrainable, so it seemed to them. Camels belonged to the Midianites, as scrofulous as their masters. Oxen were slow but dependable.) Three attendants, an old woman, Naomi, who remembered Samson, and twin boys with little to remember but much to anticipate, accompanied her. All of them were much too tired to speak; it was hard even to walk, and from time to time Ahinoam had changed places with Naomi and allowed her to ride in the cart.

  Ahinoam was prepared to find a celebration; she found a pervasive and unexplainable gloom. It was not that the men resembled ragged farmers instead of rugged warriors. She was used to the simple goatskin tunics they wore into battle, the cowhide shields and the shepherd staffs metamorphosed into javelins; accustomed also to the odor of the farm, the dirt, leather, and dung. But dishevelment was not the same as defeat. In the days when Saul had smitten the besieging Ammonites and freed the city of Jabesh-Gilead, bone-weary men had raised their voices in psalms to the glory of Yahweh and Saul. Today, in spite of a greater victory, despair was as tangible in the air as the brackish winds from the Dead Sea.

  Rocks and rocky hillocks loomed at her oxcart like the formidable giants of Gath. In such terrain the Israelites had won their victory, but her cart was built for roads, her oxen could not climb mountains, and Ahinoam, increasingly impatient, hailed the nearest soldier for details of the battle.

  “We won a great triumph, my lady,” he sighed, limping from an old wound.

  “Why such a sigh, Caspir?” she asked, touching his shoulder with a slender, ringless hand. She knew every man in her husband’s army, his wife, and the number of his children. “At Ramah they said the Philistines had fled to Askelon in total rout.”

  “Our king has forbidden us to eat meat or drink wine under pain of death. The Philistine herds are fat for the slaughter. Their supply wagons would feed our whole army for a month. But we must touch nothing, neither honeyed wine nor spitted lamb.” Meat was a luxury in Israel. One of the rewards of victory was a celebration in which captured cattle-the Philistines had brought herds with the obvious intention of occupying the countryside-were slaughtered according to an ancient ritual and ravenously devoured on the battle site. “We fought valiantly for your husband, our king, but where is the man who doesn’t hope for a share in the spoils of battle? We don’t even dare to keep the little golden mice the Philistines dropped in their flight.” The mice were amulets to protect their carriers from boils and the plague.

  “Saul is in one of his dark moods?”

  “Not dark, exactly. Darkening, I would say. Samuel has been sending him messages, and it was doubtless Samuel who suggested the edict: ‘Let him who eats or drinks before nightfall be accursed by the Lord, and his curse shall be death.’ Thus did the king exhort his troops. But the words have the ring of the Prophet, don’t you think?”

  “A day is a long time for hungry men,” she said. “But the time will pass, and the feast will be better for being late.” Though a queen as well as a Siren before she had married Saul, she was used to this poor little desert kingdom without fixed boundaries, and many times she had fled with her household before the advance of Philistines, Ammonites, or Moabites and lived for weeks on lizards and manna. She could not understand how gloom could have pervaded an entire army because of a senseless but minor edict, a short privation.

  “Ah, my lady, that would be true if it were only a matter of fasting for a day. But Elim, the priest, slew three good men with his own hand. He caught them eating a bunch of grapes and smote them with the grape stains still on their lips. One was my cousin.”

  She shuddered and leaned for support against the cart The brutalities of this country would never cease to appall her, of Israel no less than of its enemies, of Saul no less than of his less enlightened generals. (And men equated Sirens with cannibalism!)

  “It was a harsh edict,” she confessed. “I grieve for your cousin, Caspir. Saul is much changed these days.” All of Israel knew of her shame and how she had been replaced in her husband’s bed by the painted concubine, Rizpah. They also knew of the madness which grew in Saul like a black desert lichen and of the young shepherd, David, who sang to him in his rages or stupors and brought him a measure of peace.

  Saul had not expected her to come to his camp at Michmash. He still recognized her as his queen, both in private and before his people, but for five years she had remained, a virtual recluse, in his fortified house at Gibeah. Her daughters, Michal and Merab, and her sons, Ish-Bosheth, Machishua, and Ahinidab, and whenever his father allowed him to leave the army, her oldest son, Jonathan, had kept her company, though the memory of giant wings, a sunken palace of amber and coral, fields of yellow gagea spread like a golden fleece, were a jagged shard in her heart. Now it was Rizpah, the concubine, whose tent, emblazoned with jackals after the custom of her land, was pitched beside that of Saul, and Rizpah’s laughter which bubbled like the Jordan as it left the Sea of Chinnereth. But Ahinoam had come to Michmash net to visit Saul, she had come to visit Jonathan. He too had his bouts with a demon.

  He was a great hero to his people, however, and, so Ahinoam learned from Caspir, he had never been more heroic than against the Philistines in the recent battle. Caspir had obviously memorized the tale.

  “Under cover of darkness and accompanied only by his devoted armorbearer Nathan, Jonathan scaled the heights of Michmash held by the enemy. Remembering Gideon, he and Nathan broke pitchers, flourished torches, set fire to the parched undergrowth, and sowed such confusion among the enemy that they fell to fighting among themselves, and the rest of us-outnumbered and armorless-climbed the hill and easily put them to rout.”

  “Ah,” she sighed. “Then he is safe. If only-”

  If only Jonathan rejoiced in victory. How well she knew that he preferred a hoe to a spear, a harp to a sword! After every battle, a sorrow of cruel and penetrating clarity descended upon him, and he lamented the friends he had lost, the enemies he had slain and for whom he seemed to grieve almost as much as for his countrymen, and sighed, “All men are equal in Sheol-shadows who mingle with shadows but cannot speak.”

  She had come to solace him in his grief, and she earnestly hoped to exorcise his demon.

  The soldiers in the camp, as always, greeted her with a fervor which never failed to pulse in her blood and quicken the remnants of wings at her shoulder blades to a semblance of flight. It was not merely that she was a queen and a woman among a host whose king did not allow harlots and wives to follow his army and pleasure his men after battle. It was not merely that, in spite of her hundred years-a secret withheld from everyone, including Saul and Jonathan — she was incontestably the fairest woman in Israel. She did not need or wish to flaunt her face or exploit her body. She walked as artlessly as a maiden balancing a jar of water on
her head. She laughed like a young girl who has been betrothed to the boy she loves instead of the old man with many herds. Israelite men-and most of them were natural poets, in spite of their rough ways-liked to speak of Ahinoam in terms of bees and honey. Her backswept hair was yellower than the bands of a bumblebee. She was redolent of myrrh and pollen and, like the bees which help to pollinate the flowers, she was one of nature’s handmaidens. Finally, like every true queen, she possessed a sting. When Saul replaced her with Rizpah in his heart and in his bed, he looked as if he had met and barely survived a lion, and his tent collapsed on a ruin of mats, pitchers, and weapons, while Ahinoam, her robes in perfect array, departed with the poise and circumstance of a visiting queen from Sheba. Furthermore he found no sympathy among his people, and Rizpah, the first time she visited the well at Gibeah without attendants, was pelted with stones by the women of the town.

  Why had Saul forsaken her? She could only conclude that the same qualities which had once fascinated him now made her an object of awe and terror. As a youth, he had listened with pride and wonder to her tales of Crete, the island of sunken palaces; desired her body, winged and alien, to the neglect of his people and the dismay of Samuel, the Prophet. Now, aging and graying, while she remained agelessly young, he preferred familiarity and comfort to passion. Furthermore, he often complained that she had no sense of guilt, and sin-ridden Saul, forever reminded of his transgressions by the ubiquitous Samuel, could not forgive her when she said, “What makes men happy is good. Your god has not given you laws, he has shackled you with them.” She who at first had ensorceled Saul had ended by losing him to a frumpish and loving whore.

  When Ahinoam arrived at Michmash, she had ridden for two days between hills whose only color was lent to them by the sun, a stain like the raw purple of an open wound; whose only vegetation was the lowly broomweed; whose only animals were gerbils and vipers. Water was powerless to quench her thirst, tincture of opium failed to ease her fatigue, though as always she looked like a queen. Blue starfish hung from her ears and dust of lapis lazuli twinkled in her sunbright hair. Her arms were discreetly covered to her wrists in accordance with local custom, but her silken sleeves were embroidered with blue sea shekels which Saul had mistaken for flattened loaves of bread! (Saul had never visited her lost island and her sunken palace, and only once had he seen the sea.) Her tiny feet, graced with sandals of ibex leather, looked as if they might flicker to magic pipes in the woods Beyond the World.

  She refused, however, the usual adornments of wealthy Israelite women: the hennaed hair and fingernails, the ball perfumed with stacte and onychy between her breasts, the kohl for her eyes and the carmine for her lips. The faint coralline blush of her cheeks owed nothing to the cosmetic palette, and when she entered a camp she might have been an earthly incarnation of Ashtoreth. The wounded forgot their wounds; the hungry forgot their hunger; the prudish forgot that unescorted queens should at least wear veils when they visited armies.

  “Honey Hair!” they called to her. “Honey Hair has come to heal us.”

  But where was Jonathan? Surely he had heard of her arrival in the camp. Quietly she moved among the wounded, whose cloaks must serve them as beds by night and garments by day. A physician, a harried little man named Anub, whose only badge of office was the herbal bag he wore at his side, hurried from blanket to blanket and consoled the dying with sincere but inadequate words. “Opium will ease your pain.” “Your brother escaped injury.”

  “The wound will cleanse itself with the flow of blood.” In the old days Saul had permitted Ahinoam to join Anub and to heal his men with her simples and herbs and her Cretan incantations which sounded like the ringing of bells in a Philistine temple. But she was too successful even for a queen. The men began to ask: Is she truly from Caphtor, the island of green magic, the original homeland of the Philistines? Is she truly a sorceress? A goddess? A demon? Saul had hurried to banish sorcerers and witches from his land and forbidden Ahinoam to visit his men after battle.

  He could hardly condemn her now, however, for seeking news of her son.

  “The Queen Ahinoam honors us with her presence. Rebecca and Ruth would have paled beside her beauty.” Thus the physician greeted her even while plying his trade. Anub had lost a hand in the siege of Jabesh-Gilead, but his remaining hand had smitten a hundred foes and healed a thousand Israelites, and he often boasted that Yahweh had spared him to the glory of Ahinoam, whom, like uncountable other soldiers, he quietly and hopelessly loved.

  “I had hoped to be greeted by my son Jonathan,” she said. Her heart beat as anxiously as a hare in a wicker cage. “Though it is very good to see my dear friend Anub, whose words gladden my heart.” She might have crowned him, so eagerly did he clasp and kiss her hand.

  “Your son Jonathan has won a singular victory.” “Why is he not in the camp to greet his mother?” He is wounded, she thought. Perhaps he is dead. Anub is afraid to tell me.

  “Jonathan lingers among the rocks to see that no enemies remain to trouble us by night And to tend the wounded who may have been overlooked when our soldiers returned to camp. His armorbearer, Nathan, is with him.”

  “Then Jonathan is in safe hands. Nathan would rather die than risk his master’s life. Ask your men to raise a tent for me, Anub. After you have seen to the wounded.” She turned to the boys who attended her, identical twins whose big heads gave them a humorous and faintly leonine aspect “Will you share a corner of my tent?”

  “If you please, my lady,” one of the boys said-which boy she was never entirely sure-“we would rather sleep with the soldiers.” It had not been easy for them, she knew, big boys and brothers, but not yet old enough for the army, to enter the camp in the company of a woman driving an oxcart.

  She turned to Anub. “They will be safe?”

  “Quite. This isn’t a Canaanite camp, you know.”

  She dismissed the boys with one of those totally artless smiles which turned men’s heads from other women, including their wives, and turned them to sins for which their jealous Yahweh might conceivably strike them with thunderbolts. Too young to respond as men, however, they withdrew with the deference which they might have shown to their mother. She resisted the urge to hug them against her breast and whisper such intimate words as a mother might speak to her sons.

  Returning to Anub, Ahinoam said: “The women of Rizpah will fetch water for me.”

  “My lady, there are no streams at Michmash.”

  “Ah, this bleak and forlorn land! At least at Gibeah there are canals and vineyards. At least along the banks of the Jordan there are tamarisks and oleanders.”

  “But Jonathan found us water all the same,” he continued, grinning and waving the stump of his arm. He spoke the name as worshipfully as one might have said “Michael, the Archangel.” “Remembering Moses, no doubt, he smote a rock with his staff and out gushed water!” It was not a miracle. The porous limestone rocks of the area often concealed water. But to thirsty men in awe of Jonathan, the feat must have seemed miraculous. “We shall heat it in copper cauldrons that my lady may have a bath.”

  “And Naomi and I will lay a feast for my son.”

  “Rizpah’s women will wait upon you.”

  “I will look to him myself. I have brought delicacies for him-leeks and onions, figs and manna cakes-and I would give him a quiet place to feast and to rest.”

  “Ah, my lady, he will feast indeed. None of us has eaten since sunrise. But the ban will be lifted with lamplighting time.”

  “First, I will see my husband. Has he retired to his tent?”

  “With his new armorbearer, David. The boy is playing one of those old melodies from our wilderness wanderings.”

  If not Rizpah, then, it was David who comforted her husband, the young shepherd who could coax a lyre into music as sweet as the fabled glass chimes of Ophir. Even now she could hear the plangent melody issuing from Saul’s tent. No matter. The music eased his spirit and she was pleased for him. Jealousy fell from her like an o
utworn cloak. Momentarily she remembered the old lost magic (so many magics, so long ago; but Saul was the last-except for Jonathan, who could never be lost to her).

  “Send a man to announce my arrival, will you Anub?”

  Saul received her with embarrassment but also with undeniable pleasure. She saw herself reflected in his eyes as that golden, lyre-tongued Lilith who had shared the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, and she smiled an inward, ironic smile because it was Eve, the wife and mother, she wished to be to him and not Lilith, the temptress. How old and worn he looked! Valor had gone from him with his armor; kingliness had departed with his crown, which lay on the floor like a child’s discarded toy. She could have eased his spirit with songs of the sea, even as David sang about shepherds and pastures. Her hands could magic the wrinkles from his brow. But he had discarded her from his bed and his confidence, and she had entered the tent only to wait for Jonathan.

  Rizpah, the concubine, sat beside him on a lionskin rug where loaves of bread, wineskins, bunches of grapes awaited the lifting of the ban. A clothes chest, carved from the cedars of Lebanon, sat against the wall beside a couch with feet like the hooves of a deer. There were no chairs. There was, in fact, little to indicate that the tent housed a king instead of a roving Bedouin chieftain. Even Saul’s robe was unembellished, and its sleeves were faded and frayed. In the days of their love, she had sat at her loom for endless happy hours to weave him robes of Tyrian purple; to spin him cloaks as gossamer as the filaments of a silkworm’s cocoon. Once… once… But what was regret except the foolish indulgence of one without hope? And Ahinoam hoped for Jonathan: good things… many things… neither thrones nor powers but freedom from melancholy and a love which was stronger than death.

  The king rose unsteadily to greet her. He was not intoxicated, he was exhausted. David moved to support him, a boy with the face of an angel and the body of that particular angel who had wrestled Jacob. He stared at Ahinoam with a fixedness which would have been rudeness had it not been so utterly reverent. Ahinoam had met him recently in Gibeah and heard him sing and play. She admired both his voice and his psalms and she thought him the comeliest lad after Jonathan in all of Israel.