How are the Mighty fallen Read online

  The two were opposites in other ways: David, small and sinewy, a lion cub not quite grown; Jonathan, tall and slender as a papyrus stalk. She thought of one in terms of an animal the other a plant. One was created to fight, to wound, to defend; the other to fructify the mothering earth. When the cub had grown into a lion, he would be ruthless toward his enemies, of that she had no doubt Would he always sheathe his claws among his friends? He had obviously charmed Saul; her daughter Michal had talked about him incessantly for a week. He and Jonathan had yet to meet, but if Jonathan loved him, then he was meant to be loved. For Jonathan, who was greatly forgiving, was also greatly perceptive of faults in those he met and in himself, the one person he had not learned to forgive.

  Rizpah rose, smiled, and bowed. She was a dark-skinned Ammonite, her eyelids blackened with kohl, her arms ajingle with crude golden bracelets in the shape of serpents, too many of them, and too noisily jingling, her hair a flamboyant red from the dye of the henna plant. Neither beautiful nor, it seemed, intelligent, she possessed an ability which Ahinoam lacked: that of pleasing the king without appearing either subservient or assertive. Her entrance into a tent was a materialization instead of an intrusion. She was no more intrusive, in fact, than a three-legged stool, and far more comfortable. Ahinoam liked her for loving Saul.

  Saul embraced Ahinoam with sadly feeble arms. She felt him wince when she touched a recent wound. (Had I anointed him with myrrh and balsam, the wound would have started to heal.) His pointed black beard, sprinkled with gray, was sharp but not unpleasant against her cheek. With a bow to his king and a smile to Ahinoam, David left the tent His going seemed to quench a lamp. Still, she respected his sensitivity, so rare in one so young-seventeen, was it? — in leaving her to speak with her husband and soon, no doubt, her son. If only Rizpah had followed him! But the dark Ammonite returned to the mat of lionskin, her hair a garish tumult about her shoulders, and gazed at Saul with lovelorn eyes.

  Ahinoam ignored the platitudes which Israelite women, queens no less than commoners, were expected to shower like manna upon their men.

  “Where is my son?” she asked.

  “Well and safe. As you know he is always the last to leave the field of battle. He lingers to study the countryside and the enemies’ mistakes.”

  “And to find and tend the wounded, who are sometimes forgotten by the victors,” she reminded him.

  If David’s going had seemed to quench a lamp, Jonathan’s coming lit a candelabrum. Though doubtless wearier than any other man in camp, he laughed like a little boy at the sight of his mother and ran into her arms.

  Jonathan was a princely paradox. He fought like an ibex, swift and agile, and compensated in skill for what he lacked in strength, for he was slim and supple rather than heavily built like his brothers and father. But he fought for Israel and to please his father, not for the pleasure of battle, and he was happiest in Gibeah, where he planted trees and read scrolls and played the lyre and enjoyed his brothers and sisters almost as if they were his own children, and worshipped his mother.

  He was not attired for a royal court, even a court in a tent. There was sweat on his cheeks, dust on his garments, a scent of leather about him, and yet Ahinoam enfolded a wonder more rare to her than the gold and ivories of Ophir and held him in a long embrace. He was twenty and the idol of every virgin and most of the wives in Israel, but it was often said of him that he fled an amorous virgin faster than he pursued a Philistine.

  He turned to greet the king and, forgetting the usual courtesies, forgetting even to acknowledge Rizpah, started to talk with tremendous animation.

  “Father, I met your armorbearer, David, outside the tent. We only spoke a few words but he will make a great warrior, I think. He’s still a boy, but he could have held his own at Michmash. And before the battle, I heard him singing. The men say he softened Yahweh’s heart with his psalms and brought us victory.” Then, apparently realizing that praises of David were not likely to concern a worried mother or a weary father, he said to Ahinoam:

  “You have ridden in the sun, Mama. Your face is burned. You must put some balsam on it tonight. Still, the ruddiness becomes you.”

  “And your hair is so dusty that I could mistake you for a Hittite,” she teased. “When you left Gibeah it was yellow as a gosling.” Ashtoreth be praised, she thought. For once he has evaded his demon.

  “I didn’t pause to bathe when I heard you were in the camp,” he continued. He was notorious for his baths. The men jested that he could not grow a beard because of the frequency with which he washed his face. Yet no one except his mother had ever seen him without his clothes, not even in the streams where the men stripped and swam and sang after a long march. It was said by some that he bore a terrible disfigurement across his back; by others that the mark was strange and beautiful, a link to his mother and her people on Crete or, in the language of Israel, Caphtor.

  “And you were hungry and knew a feast awaited you.” She smiled.“A good dinner is stiff competition even for a mother.”

  “I could eat a fatted calf, but it would taste better if I shared it with my mother.” There were few secrets, few evasions between them, except when he fled into the tabernacle of his spirit, where even his mother could never follow him. (It had been thus for almost half of his life. Once she had found him in tears. “Why do you weep, my son?” “Because I am like the sea.” “How do you mean?” “It tries to embrace the land, but the land hurls it back in broken waves.” He had fled from the room and left Ahinoam to interpret his answer.)

  “The sun is down,” said Saul. “It is time to break our fast.”

  Rizpah stirred from her amorous languor. Silently she moved between the guests and, with the help of flintstones, lit the wicks which floated in terra-cotta cruses of olive oil. The Philistines preferred candles, and those who had visited Askelon or Gaza spoke of palaces and temples where great candelabra hung from the ceilings like constellations and lit the painted images of Ashtoreth until her eyes seemed to glow like those of a cheetah. But Saul disdained luxury. He still knew the seasons better than the manners and appurtenances of a royal court.

  The flap of the tent rustled like the wings of an angry raven. The lamps flickered with a sudden guest of breeze and the aged priest Elim paused in the opening. For sheer perversity, he surpassed the petulant and senile Samuel. He loved to predict a plague or prophesy a drought.

  “There will be no feast,” he announced in tones intended to be funereal but, alas, as high and piping as a flute. “Someone has broken the king’s commandment Someone has drunk or eaten before sunset”

  Elim refused to move; obviously he hoped to arouse consternation. Unfortunately he was a fat little man, bald and big-eyed, who looked more like a Canaanite fertility god than a priest of Yahweh.

  Saul glared at him with his kingliest glare. “And may I ask how you. came to learn so dire a matter? Surely not from Samuel. He is bedridden with the ague in the Sanctuary at Nob.” Saul was known to dislike the prophet Samuel, who had anointed him king over Israel only to demean and heckle him throughout his reign, resenting, no doubt that his own sons, who were liars and lechers, did hot deserve the throne. When to make war, when to make peace, when to fast, when to avoid women: Samuel’s list of prohibitions was longer than that in the holy book of Leviticus.

  “Why, from the oracle, how else?” Elim said. The oracle at Michmash was an ancient terebinth tree whose branches were hung with silver bells which, before the coming of Yahweh, had been shaped like fishtailed gods or goddesses with swelling breasts. Now they were merely bells; nevertheless, they managed to speak to the satisfaction of the priests.

  “We shall go to this tree and hear for ourselves,” Saul announced. He was not at ease with his god and he could not risk offending a priest even a priest like Elim.

  They followed Saul from the tent Ahinoam leaning on Jonathan less for support than affection, since the mere sight of him, neither wounded nor melancholy, had rested her from her ride. He i
s pleased to see me, she thought, he is pleased at Israel’s victory. But the joy which radiates from his body — I feel it like the warmth from a brazier-why, one would think that an angel had talked to him!

  The oracular tree reminded Ahinoam of Samuel-old, brittle, skeletal, and lonely in its decay. It had died in a drought when the Philistines stole the Ark of the Tabernacle from Sblloh, but bells still hung on its ancient branches, metal fruit on moldering limbs. Silent at first, they began to speak with the rise of the evening breeze. Even Ahinoam could hear the unwonted harshness in their tone. Usually they sang like crickets, but now they croaked like frogs.

  Saul looked to Elim. “What do they say?” Deeply religious, he had not lost faith in Yahweh; rather, he feared that Yahweh had lost faith in him.

  “Let the king discover and punish the transgressor.”

  Saul sighed and the years seemed to rest on his shoulders like a mantle of snow. Was this the ardent man she had loved at the well in Endor, he who had left his fields to raise the siege of Jabesh-Gilead and unite a divided country? It sometimes seemed to her that except for leading an army, which, with the help of Jonathan and an able cousin named Abner, he did with a skill amounting to genius, he hardly possessed the energy to sigh. It was her one satisfaction that he could no longer be an impassioned lover to Rizpah.

  “Whoever has broken my commandment must die,” Saul said, like a priest reciting a ritual. “Is it a servant among the baggage train?”

  Again, the croak of the bells, a medley of fat warty toads.

  “A warrior?”

  A listening silence fell upon the camp, and not only around the tree. Ahinoam saw that the warriors camped among the neighboring trees were watching the priest as raptly as the king and his retinue. They were starved in the midst of plenty. Their fires blazed readily to receive the calf or the lamb.

  Their wineskins bulged with the juice of the grape and the pomegranate.

  “One of my warriors?”

  The tree resounded like the trumpet blast of an attacking army.

  “But I have three thousand men! How shall I know the transgressor?”

  “Let the king look to himself and his own family.” Elim could not conceal his glee. He was known to resent Jonathan, Abner, Michal-all of those close to the king except Rizpah, with whom he liked to converse about the price of grain or a sickness among the herds.

  A soldier and in the king’s family… Only Jonathan of Saul’s four sons had fought in the battle of Michmash. The other three sons, mere boys and much too young to fight, had remained in Gibeah.

  “Jonathan, my son-” It was more a protestation than an accusation. Then, to Elim with growing wrath: “Do you dare to accuse my own firstborn?”

  Saul’s rages, which often preceded his madness, were the terror of Israel. He was known to hurl spears or demolish a tent or a room. Elim’s confidence forsook him. He shrank like a threatened spider.

  “The tree, not I, accuses.”

  “Perhaps I am guilty,” said Jonathan. “I was not in the camp when my father delivered his edict. I have eaten no meat and drunk no liquid except water. But in the forest beside the desert-”

  “What has my son eaten besides meat?”

  “In the forest I came on a nest of bees. I ate of the honeycomb.”

  Everyone knew that Jonathan was loved by the bees. Often they led him to their hives and spun joyously when he partook of their wealth. It was whispered that Ahinoam had brought him, as a small child, from the island of Crete, where the bees built nests in the eaves of the ruined palaces, and the old demigods, the men with the legs of sheep, the women who lived in trees, danced by the light of the harvest moon and coupled to the piping of flutes and the clashing of cymbals. (It was whispered that he was not Saul’s son.)

  Saul’s voice went dead, like a discarded lyre. “It was enough. Jonathan must die.”

  The words were hushed but irrevocable; at first they stunned instead of infuriated Ahinoam. Kings did not sentence their sons to death for eating a honeycomb.

  “Then I must die.”

  “Die?” she cried. “What nonsense is this you speak, my son?”

  “The sentence is Yahweh’s,” said Elim.

  Anger flared in Ahinoam like a signal torch; against both of her men, the father too quick to condemn, the son too quick to accept.

  She addressed Saul so clearly and contemptuously that most of the camp overheard her.

  “Then you must also kill your queen. She has no wish to remain the wife of a king who would sacrifice his own son.”

  Even doting Rizpah protested the sentence. A foreigner like Ahinoam, she could not conceive the strength of an Israelite’s oath to his god. “Surely my lord would not slay his firstborn and his finest warrior!”

  “Abraham would have slain Isaac if the Lord had not stayed his hand,” Saul’s face was white and expressionless. It seemed to be hewn from the hard and savage hills which overlooked the Dead Sea like skulls. Even as she despised him, Ahinoam felt his pain and pitied him for his perplexity. He was a man with too many loves: his farm, his country, Yahweh, Rizpah, Jonathan, Michal… When they warred with each other, they weakened his will and allowed the demon of madness to enter his mouth and lurk in his brain, an invisible parasite.

  “The Lord has demanded a sacrifice,” a voice said so softly that its very softness compelled like wrath or indignation. “Let me die in Jonathan’s place. I am only his armor-bearer. In the heat of summer, when our swords are turned again into plowshares, I till the fields beside my brothers or tread the grapes. I have seven brothers. I will be no loss to Israel. Only to my mother and perhaps-perhaps-to Jonathan, who has treated me always like a brother. Jonathan whom I 1-love.” The boy stumbled over his words. He was not used to speaking to his king.

  More than a king had heard him. The host of Israel, the men around the campfires, the guards patrolling the camp, shouted their indignation:

  “Accept Nathan, spare Jonathan!

  “It is Yahweh’s will, or why did he walk with Jonathan oh the slopes of Michmash?”

  Saul looked doubtfully to Elim. “Is such a thing possible?”

  “The Lord has been known to accept a scapegoat.”

  Jonathan’s face was fixed with resolution. “It is I who have offended Yahweh. It is I who must suffer the punishment Not my friend, who has loved me well and saved me from Philistine arrows and the bite of vipers.”

  “Enough of this, Elim. Ask the oracle if Yahweh will accept a substitute,” demanded Saul.

  The wind sang sulkily through the branches, the bells cooed like a flock of turtledoves, as if the tree remembered a greener time, a youth when she wore a mantle of fine-spun leaves instead of metal bells and received the rain like the sweet embrace of love.

  “So be it,” said Elim, grimacing disappointment. “Let Nathan die in place of Jonathan.”

  “It shall be done,” said Saul. Large tears welled in his eyes; tears of gratitude.

  Everyone looked to Nathan. A plump-cheeked boy with a slow, drawling voice, he was neither bright nor brave. But he was Jonathan’s friend, and Jonathan hugged him with a desperate tenderness.

  It was Saul who separated the youths. “It is time, my son,” he said to Nathan.

  Jonathan thrust himself between Nathan and Saul. “You are not to have him,” he said to his father in a low but deadly voice. “He is my friend.”

  “Would you question the ways of Yahweh?”

  “Yes, my father, I question his ways. Or rather, the manner in which you interpret them. I would worship a pitying Brother or Mother instead of a heartless Father who hurls thunderbolts to vent his displeasure and kills young boys for the mistakes of their masters.”

  “You’re speaking like a Canaanite,” said Saul with dignity but without reproof. Then, to his men, “Proceed with the sacrifice.”

  Six men struggled to keep Jonathan from his friend.

  No men were needed to lead Nathan to the bloodstained stone beneath the tre
e or tell him where to lay his head or comfort him when Elim raised his knife. The boy spoke a single word:

  “Jonathan.”

  Ahinoam looked into her son’s face to seek the predictable pain for the loss of a friend. She was not prepared for the intensity of what she saw: anguish for the loss of a beloved.

  Far away, at the far edge of the camp, a lyre trembled across the demon-haunted labyrinths of the night, and a single voice, yearningly sweet, a boy’s voice, rose in a psalm of hope:

  “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

  I will fear no evil:

  For thou art with me;

  Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

  The Lord is my shepherd:

  I shall not want.

  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:

  He leadeth me beside the still waters…“

  CHAPTER TWO

  Before the battle of Michmash, David had visited the Israelite camp to bring food to his brothers, Ozem, Nethanel, and Elihu, who had fought with Saul for more than three years. At seventeen, he was forbidden by his oversolicitous father Jesse, familiarly known as the Ass of Bethlehem, to remain with his older brothers and fight the Philistines, though he had fought both the wolves and the lions which had harassed his flock.

  “Linger in the camp only long enough to exchange tidings with your brothers,” Jesse had said, sweetly adamant. “Elihu had a toothache when he left home and your mother is much concerned. Then return to your flocks. The battle promises ill for Israel.”

  In spite of the difficult walk, David did not protest; ho happened to like asses. Furthermore, he would glimpse Saul’s army and foresee the impending battle with a vision akin to genius. The rocky terrain would help the Israelites; warriors in sheepskin tunics could clamber among the rocks like desert mice; warriors riding in chariots or walking in heavy armor would long for the flat terrain beside the Great Green Sea. Finally, heroic Jonathan was the captain of a thousand men. David had never met him; once he had glimpsed him, the swiftest runner in Israel, from a great distance and thought: If Yahweh were such as Jonathan, I would become his priest.