How are the Mighty fallen Read online

  He said loftily, “The king has summoned me. I am going to become his armorbearer.”

  The brothers stared after him in amazement as he strode toward Saul’s tent with the manly stride of a seasoned warrior. But the face of Saul, noble and fierce and yes, pitiable, loomed in his mind, and he felt the terrors of a bridegroom going to meet his betrothed’s father for the first time.

  When he reached Saul’s tent, the occupants had departed to the sacred tree. Standing in the shadows, David heard Elim’s accusation of Jonathan and Saul’s judgment. If Nathan had not anticipated him, he would have offered himself as the scapegoat.

  He heard Nathan’s anguished cry when the knife pierced his heart, but he felt much more keenly the knife of reproach in Jonathan. Because he did not dare to visit the grieving prince at such a time, he composed a psalm for him, and Jonathan was the speaker. The words seemed to come of themselves, and the shepherding lord was youthful in his thoughts and not a bearded Yahweh, a brother instead of a father:

  “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want He maketh me to lie down in green pastures… Yea though I walk through the Valley of the shadow of Death, I shall fear no evil For thou art with me…”

  “David.”

  “Has my song pleased you, Jonathan?”

  “It has greatly eased my spirit. Does Yahweh sorrow for Nathan, do you think? With all the great heroes like Moses and Joshua, has he time to worry about a little armorbearer?”

  “Yahweh or another,” said David, before he realized that he was speaking heresy. “It is always the smallest lamb who needs the most protection.”

  “Perhaps the Lady of the Wild Things,” said Jonathan. He, too, then believed in other gods than Yahweh.

  “Ashtoreth?”

  “Ashtoreth is only one of her names. To my mother and me she is simply the Goddess or the Lady. Your song may have reached her ear, if not Yahweh’s.”

  “But I wrote the song for you.”

  “Did you, David? You promised me a song. I didn’t suspect how soon.”

  “But you thought I would keep my promise?”

  “I knew.”

  “Can we talk together?” asked David, emboldened by Jonathan’s grief and the need to solace him. “I have only my cloak to offer you for a seat. Perhaps there is a corner in your father’s tent?”

  “We can go to my tent.” Jonathan’s tent; the tent of mysteries. Few had entered that sacrosanct place, that haunt of creatures unimaginable: a bird of lapis lazuli that sang real words; a living bear whose fur was white like the snows on the summit of Mt. Hebron; and secret things. Forbidden things. Forbidding things?

  CHAPTER THREE

  “I don’t have many visitors.” Jonathan smiled. “I hope you’ll like my tent.”

  “I want to see your bird-” David blinked and saw more than a bird. His brothers had led him to expect gigantic Baals and Ashtoreths with breasts as large as coconuts; censers burning with aphrodisiac myrrhs; naked maidens with carmine on their nipples. It was not that young, beardless Jonathan suggested such lecheries. But the brothers argued, “He is much too gentle for any man. No one can be so good. No one can be so chaste. Not even Samuel before his sons betrayed him and he became a sour old man. Not even Saul before he left his farm to become king and began his fits of madness. Jonathan hides his vices in his tent…” Needless to say, they and almost every other man in the camp admired his secrecy and envied him his supposed vices: men who were bored and homesick between battles and missed the chatter of their wives and sweethearts; grizzled fighting men bewitched by a youth they loved and followed but could not understand.

  Indeed, the tent was miraculous, but its miracles were those of a child. Wind chimes shaped like little girls in bell-shaped skirts tinkled and danced in the breeze from the open flap. Coquina-colored boxes in many shapes and colors, like the blocks of a Cyclops’ child, twinkled on the floor. A box as high as your ankle for holding sandals. A box as high as your hip for a seat and pillowed with stuffed lions and deer. Jonathan, like a little boy who had found a treasure in the woods, and wished to show a friend, a rare butterfly or an orange mushroom, lifted the lid of a large circular box and proceeded to remove and open a smaller box, and so to the seventh and smallest, which held a big green bumblebee.

  He handed the bee to David. “Watch out. He stings,” he said in an ominous voice.

  David dropped the bee as if he had already been stung. Jonathan smiled and returned the bee to its nest of boxes. (But why does he never laugh!)

  “He’s not real. He’s carved from a tourmaline. My mother says the dolphin folk carved him, before their arms became flippers.”

  Miracle succeeded miracle. A wooden fennec, crudely but lovingly modeled from clay, stood on his head, and his feet held an oil lamp in the shape of a coconut. A terra-cotta hyena-a highly unpopular animal in Israel-sat on his haunches and begged a bunch of grapes from a wooden shepherd boy who looked disconcertingly like David. Live animals, too, frolicked among the boxes with the freedom of the woods: a gerbil, a hare, and yes, a small white bear who collided with his master and raised his snout for a pat of forgiveness. Jonathan stroked his fur.

  “Go to David now. He’s my friend.”

  The bear advanced upon David with a look which could only be called inscrutable.

  “Is he going to bite me?” David asked. He was used to the large brown bears which sometimes threatened his flocks.

  “Mylas likes you, and he doesn’t like many people. He’s very old, you see, and cantankerous, and wants to be left on his goatskin rug except when it’s time to eat. Or when I come from a battle and he licks my wounds and helps them to heal. He liked Nathan too, but you and Nathan are almost the only ones. He bites every woman except my mother. Once he tore off Michal’s robes and bit her on the backside.”

  In spite of the reassurances, David did not expose his rear. “Where did you get him?” There were no white bears in Israel except Mylas. Had he come, like a phoenix, from the Woods Beyond the World?

  “He came to me from the sea,” Jonathan said without explanation. “And as for my bird,” he added, unlocking an ivory cage and lifting its occupant of lapis lazuli, which he handed to David as if it were mere crude clay, “he’s for you.”

  “For me?” David cried. “He’s a gift for a king!”

  “Of course,” laughed Jonathan. (But he never laughs with his eyes.) “Why else would I give him to you? Keep him in the cage except when you want him to sing. No one will try to steal Mm. He’s bewitched against thieves. Hold him in your right hand. Caress his head-so-with your left hand.”

  The bird began to sing, quietly at first, and with notes instead of words.

  “It’s the music of Ophir,” said Jonathan. “Once a great queen of that land visited Philistia and loved a seren of Gath. At last she had to return to her own country. ‘My heart will break when you leave, like a piece of coral in a stormy sea,’ he said. But she answered him with a gift: ‘Wherever you go, my bird of lapis lazuli will speak for me, and you will be companioned.’ And he took the bird and was never without her.”

  “How did you get him, Jonathan?” He liked to speak the name: Jonathan-“gift of the Lord” (or the Lady?).

  “I met the seren in battle, oh, long before Michmash. I was just a boy at the time. The seren was wounded but he could still have killed me, since I was also wounded and very weak. He was too kind, though. The Philistines aren’t a cruel race. We fight them because they keep us from the sea. The seren and I helped each other into his tent. ‘You remind me of my son,’ he said, ‘and I am going to let you live. But I have a wound which will be the death of me.’ He opened a casket of yellowing ivory-the old kind, very rare, from Ophir. ‘Here, take this bird and think of the man who loved you as a son, though he saw you only once. At the proper time you will understand.’”

  The quiet notes became words, and the words were an incantation.

  “Bird from the Wanderwoods,

  Transfixed in flight


  By lapis lazuli,

  Blue heron

  Climbing like my thought

  To bluer height,

  And open-mouthed in cry

  No bird

  Has heard,

  When you alight

  In that blue land,

  Will I,

  Will I?“

  Roughly David returned the bird to its cage. “It’s too much for you to give me,” he protested, though he could not explain his unease. The song had charmed him with its strange, bell-like endings. There were no rhymes in the songs of Israel. “What the heart gives is never too much.” “You never gave the bird to Nathan, did you?” “He would have liked a flute or a shepherd’s crook. I saved the bird for David, who perhaps can understand its song.”

  “But we only met today. I’m not even sure if I understand you.”

  “Once in a dream, I saw a boy with red hair and big, strong fingers which could coax magic out of a lyre-or choke a lion. We walked together in a field of chrysanthemums, and he understood my heart.”

  “Do you have second sight?” asked David, puzzling over the dream.

  “Sometimes,” smiled Jonathan. “My mother has it more often.”

  “They say,” David ventured, “they say that your mother is a sorceress or a goddess and she came from Caphtor, the Island of Green Magic.”

  “I don't know,” said Jonathan. “I truly don’t know what I am or where my mother came from. Does it matter?”

  “It makes me afraid of her.”

  “And me?”

  “A little at first. Not now.” It was Jonathan’s power to make the wonderful familiar or, just as effortlessly, the familiar wonderful. He was not like those witches and sorcerers who frightened or threatened you with their magic; he was not even like his mother, who seemed to have no enemies, but also no intimacies except with Jonathan.

  “I was afraid of you too, David. Afraid for you to read my soul and perhaps turn away from me. You see, there is so little time. At night I seem to hear the thunder of chariots and feel the terrible grinding of their wheels.”

  “But you are the son of the anointed king!”

  “Am I, David? And does that mean that I will one day rule in Israel?”

  “Yes, and in Philistia as well, perhaps.”

  “Some men are meant to rule kingdoms. Others-”

  “To what?”

  To love.“

  “And you've loved, haven’t you, Jonathan?”

  “Not as I would choose.”

  “Why, half the women of Israel-wives included-would lie with you.”

  Jonathan’s eyes did not waver. “I do not want to lie with the women of Israel or any other land.”

  “Not even the virgins with breasts like pomegranates?”

  “Least of all the virgins.”

  The thought unsettled David: that any young man would avoid a beautiful virgin except out of fear of her father! How would Jonathan get an heir to the throne and perpetuate Saul’s line?

  “You’re afraid of being unclean in the eyes of Yahweh? But he only requires that a man keep himself from women before battle.”

  “I do fear him,” Jonathan admitted, “but not for the reason you think.”

  “And you’ve never lain with a girl?”.

  “Never.”

  “Or loved one?”

  “I love my mother and my sisters. I loved an old woman who used to make my tunics for me. And there was a little girl in Gibeah who brought me a bunch of daisies before every battle. Both of them died of the White Sickness.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Never,” sighed Jonathan. “My mother says that the highest love is a circle, not a crescent. The crescent moon- friendship or love for family-is pure and silvery. But the full moon is orange and abundant and includes all the lesser loves in its circumference.” He paused. “I’ve never known a full moon myself.” He placed a hand on David’s shoulder, like a little bird-perhaps a sparrow-which the least movement would frighten into flight. “Seek your full moon, David. Leave the crescents to me.” He spoke like an old man, with resignation if not bitterness. Did all warriors talk so sadly before or after a battle? Perhaps the death of Nathan accounted for his gloom.

  He took Jonathan’s hand and pressed it against his cheek. He was a boy who liked to touch the things he loved, to feel their textures and their emanations, whether they were objects or people, a wooden slingshot or a friend’s hand. The fact that the hand belonged to a prince did not disturb him in the least.

  “Your friend died quickly-and he died for you. It was a good death for him, I think. He chose to take your place because he loved you.”

  “I envy him,” said Jonathan.

  David stared at Jonathan with disbelief: the slender body, swift and deadly in battle and yet, in his tent, as vulnerable as the bird in the ivory cage. He looked at the sad and perfect smile, like the smile of a sculptured young god who appeared to have known all loves or, being a god and therefore beyond men, no loves.

  It was wrong, it was terribly wrong for such a man to be sad! Impulsively he enfolded Jonathan in his arms, as if the prince were a lost sheep he had rescued from the wolves, and felt the frantic beating of his heart. He felt too the soft projections from his shoulder blades, almost like rudimentary wings. Was Jonathan a changeling?

  Somehow he jarred the bird of lapis lazuli into his song, and the song, after all, was a spell.

  “When you alight In that blue land, Will I, Will I?”

  Indeed, the prince he held in his arms had suddenly become a sheep which bleated and licked his face! Before he could drop the beast, he held a girl with yellow hair and the tail of a fish and laughter which sang like the surf in the wind. If he dropped her, she had no legs to break her fall.

  It was a smiling Jonathan who wriggled out of his arms and stood in front of him on two distinctly human legs.

  “You-you are a necromancer,” David blurted. “But your father has banished such men from the land.”

  “I don’t turn into sheep before my father.”

  “Or fish-tailed girls who look like female Dagons?”

  “Nereids, you mean. I don’t really turn into anything. I just make you think I do.”

  “You have bewitched me. My brain is befuddled. I can hardly stand.”

  “Then I will help you to find Abner. He will give you a place to sleep.”

  “But we’ve just begun to talk,” David cried. He did not want to leave such magic, however unsettling to him, a shepherd whose friends talked of nothing more magical than the number of sheep in a herd. He did not want to leave a prince and a magician for the cold company of his brothers.

  “I am tired,” said Jonathan distantly. Laughter had left him, and left him, it seemed, indifferent “Perhaps you can find your way alone. Your dizziness will soon pass. It was wrong of me to tease you.”

  “Couldn’t I-couldn’t I stay here with you?”

  “It is not allowed. You are my father’s armorbearer, not mine.”

  “Good night, Jonathan.” He would speak the precious name. He would rouse the prince from his unaccountable indifference and recall the happy child.

  “Good night, David. Don’t forget your bird.”

  “I don’t want him,” said David stubbornly. “I only wanted him because he was a gift from you, and now you’re sending me away.”

  “David, my brother…”

  As unexpectedly as a desert mirage, Michal appeared in the tent. David had met her with Saul and Rizpah. Being the daughter of a man who was both a king and a general, she was used to the ways of men; she was a bold and blithe-hearted girl, ready with a jest, quick with a knife, but neither brazen nor coarse. She lacked the gold of Jonathan and Ahinoam; she did not make you think of a honeycomb or a lark or a cornucopia. But she was the young green buds on the terebinth tree in spring. She was both the loveliest and the liveliest girl David had ever met. Once-yesterday in fact — he would have liked to kiss her and he ha
d dreamed of taking her in a plowed field.

  Now he resented her intrusion.

  “David,” she urged him. “Stay and break bread with my brother and me.”

  Around her neck she wore an image of Ashtoreth. Not the swollen-bellied mother of the Canaanites, but the slender lady of the Philistines, the lady of love who placed not a single prohibition on lovers, either of age or sex, except that they love with their bodies as well as their hearts, their hearts as well as their bodies. According to an old Philistine philosopher, “The body is the temple of the heart. How shall we reach the sacred image unless we enter the gates?”

  Forgetting that she was a princess of Israel, forgetting even to nod, he brushed past her and fled toward the tent of Saul. In the shadow of another tent, he saw the figure of Ahinoam, hushed and amber in the light of many fires. She scarcely moved her lips and yet he knew that she was smiling to him.

  He knew also with surprise but without shame that it was Ashtoreth, not Yahweh, who had been with Jonathan and him in the tent.

  She stood in the opening to Jonathan’s tent and softly called his name.

  “Come in, Mother,” he answered in a faint voice. He rose from his couch, only to slump on a mat of reeds and, like a little Bedouin boy, fling his arms around his knees. He refused to look at her, but stared at the far wall of the tent, black goatskin above a cedar clothes chest, as if he could find an answer in its shaggy night.

  Ahinoam knelt beside him and placed an arm on his back; smelled the scent of him, the fragrance of grass and leather; yearned to hold him and rout the demon of melancholy which, after Nathan’s death (and David’s visit?), had returned to torture him.

  “Half the women of Israel are in love with you,” she said. “The other half want to be your sister or your mother.”

  “And I must wed and produce a male child to inherit the throne. Father has told me as much a hundred times.”

  “You must do what is in your heart. If you do not choose to wed-”