After Abel and Other Stories (22 page)

That's where I first saw her. She came in with the other royal women—wives, daughters, and daughters-in-law—carrying jugs of wine and trays heavy with food. They wove between us, doing their duty as we did ours, each as out of reach as the stars in heaven. None of us dared speak to them. To look at them openly was
to court the king's displeasure. They were his women. We pretended, to the best of our ability, that they were spirits moving among us, magic winds that bore food and drink and then rushed back out, ruffling our hair as they passed.

Of course, we all looked anyway. Asking a roomful of boys not to notice the girls among them is like asking a tree not to grow or the rain not to fall. The trick was not to be caught. So we perfected the art of ducking our heads and looking out from beneath our hair, catching sight of what parts of them we could. Slender ankles and sandal-clad feet. The hems of dresses that swung around shapely calves. Brown arms as they lowered plates in front of us. And, in the quickest of glances, faces, necks, hair. They were as beautiful as they were untouchable. They made us moan with desire.

I didn't take any notice of Michel at first. She was still just a girl, nine or ten years old, with brown hair that swung against the middle of her back, and dark, serious eyes. If I looked at any of them, it was at her older sister, just as everyone else did. Merav was a great beauty, one of those girls who understood the power of her position as eldest daughter of the king from her earliest years. She was also bound by her father's expectations to stay away from his men, and yet she managed to gather all the boys' attention to her, to spread it behind her as she passed like a perfume she wasn't yet old enough to wear.

Michel didn't draw attention to herself. She carried cups and wine as duty demanded, but she had been overshadowed by her older sister and her brother, the crown prince, from the moment of her birth. Jonathan already sat next to the king each night, a young warrior in love with his own expanding possibilities. From where I sat among the men, it was clear how much easier it was to be heir to the throne than to be king. Saul was rarely anything other than sober, even in the rowdy company of his men, but Jonathan jumped into the camaraderie of army life from the first. About my age, he was like his father, taller and more handsome than the rest of us combined, but he had a loud, quick laugh and slapped the other boys on the back whether he knew our names or not.

Some of my brothers-in-arms took nothing but pride in what we did. They competed among themselves to see who could fight harder, feel less. I couldn't help but notice that the vows I had made—to swear off marriage and the comforts of a woman's embrace—so that I would be prepared to fight, to die if that's what it came to, were made in order to protect my king's right to surround himself with all these women. It's what a soldier does. He doesn't question. He does what he is told, then takes his wages and helps care for his family.

The king's women made a great show of ignoring us, but the capital was full of non-royal girls who were
happy to toss their hair for our benefit and smile at us as we passed through the city gates. As warriors, we walked as if we, and not the man we served, owned everything within our reach.

Within a few years, Michel had changed. Where Merav stayed small and lush in imitation of her mother, Michel shot up. Her shoulders broadened, her lips became—or so it seemed to me—more full. Most of the men still panted after her sister. They made up secret names for her so they could discuss her openly without anyone knowing. She became the topic of extended conversation, and no one the wiser that they spoke so freely about the king's daughter.

I didn't need any nicknames for Michel. The men around me would look at any young woman when she passed, including Michel, but she seemed not to notice. It became hard to tell if she didn't feel our eyes on her, or if she accepted our attention as what was naturally due to her. Looking around at these boys and men with whom I shared every moment of my life, I felt as if I was the only one who studied her, my eyes drawn to her as if of their own volition. I'm not sure she knew I existed. I lived with a constant fear that she would catch me staring, and held my head even lower. It wouldn't surprise me if she wouldn't even be able to recognize my face. I never gave her the chance to get a good look at it.

I had been away from the capital for some time when
I learned of her marriage. Of course, even in our small village, we had heard about David, the boy who came out of nowhere to become the nation's great hero, its latest savior. I'd seen him, too, on my trips to the capital with our family's wool and sheep. My father had always had a place of honor among the merchants at the back of the dining hall. Once he died, I took his seat. From there, I saw David. Short, slim, and burnished from a life in the sun, he walked with the assurance of a man twice his size. People wanted to be near him. When I served in the army, the greatest assignment had been to Saul's own troop. Now, the men fought to be chosen for David's.

Even the royal women, as bound by the king's decrees as every man in that room, couldn't hide the attention they paid to him. I had studied Michel with the intensity of a holy text for long enough to see how she noticed him too, and how she tried to hide it, just as I had done for so long when looking at her.

He accepted the adulation as if he was born to it. Only a few years younger than I am, and so unschooled in the way of war, and yet, each time I visited, he was more comfortable in the capital and the army.

Even after I was forced to leave the king's service, I still knew many of the warriors who served him and talked with them in the hours after the evening meal. Those who had been assigned to David's regiment
crowed about their prowess. The ones who marched with Saul or Abner grumbled about David. “His rise in the ranks has been suspiciously quick,” they complained to me. “I worked for years, and here he's mastered a sword in just months.” To top it all off, he played the lyre and sang. “It's as if,” they said, “a girl's fantasy has come to life to walk among us. He turns us invisible, not just within the palace, but in the whole city.” Girls still crowded the city gates to greet the soldiers, but they only wanted to catch sight of David, to dance and sing and make him take note of them.

When I heard that Saul had given Michel to David in marriage, my heart sank. I never really thought she would be mine, no matter what I had done in Saul's army. No matter my heroics, the loyalty I had paid so dearly for, I never rose beyond the rank of foot soldier. I was even relieved to return to Gallim when I did. I could take care of my mother, my brother, and sisters. I could hide there, too, so the world didn't need to know how much less of a man I was than when I had set out so many years before.

But Michel had been lodged in my mind for so long it was hard to let her image go, the tall, quiet specter that drifted through the dining hall and my dreams. It wasn't right to think about another man's wife, even if she was so far from my unremarkable life, and even if no one would ever know where my thoughts wandered
during those long afternoons in the hills.

And so I put her out of my mind, focused on mastering my father's trade, found good husbands for my sisters, and continued to make the trip through the mountains to the capital every season to buy and sell. Each time I went, the soldiers seemed to grow younger, the king older. Where once I was like them, now my clothes and skin never shed the smell of livestock. And there was David, going from one success to another, his days of shepherding flocks, the wind his only companion, long gone. It was impossible not to see how we had traded places. David, the warrior—more famous and beloved than I could ever hope to be—surrounded by adoring underlings. Me, just a rustic goatherd and sheepshearer growing more and more reserved with people as time wore on. I had grown used to the company of my animals, who never had much to say.

But there was a kinship between the two of us, even if only I realized it. I recognized the shepherd he used to be. The quiet assurance that made others want to fill his silences with chatter was familiar to me. Even in those early years, it was clear he was a born leader, the kind of man who knows how to hold his confidences, allow others to foist their ideas and beliefs onto him just enough to make each think that he, not David, had thought up all those notions and plans.

It was an interesting vantage, the back of the dining
room that used to be so familiar to me. Once I had sat at the king's own table every night. Now I saw David's advance only when I came to the capital, my mind focused on the business of pleasing my customers, particularly the king, who made a point of repaying the sacrifice I had made by buying what I had to sell. It was impossible to miss how David seemed to grow in the months of my absence, but no one present at the beginning would have imagined how high he had set his sights. Looking back, the signs were all there from the start. Only Saul saw it, and no one believed him, not even his children.

What could not escape my notice was how changed Saul was, his hair still thick but graying, the skin of his face tightening over his broad cheekbones. There was a wariness in his eyes that was new, too. I didn't pay as much attention as I should have. I may have cast her from my mind, but it was Michel who still held my attention when she passed through the room. Marriage suited her. She had never been like Merav, who wore her marriage to one of Saul's top generals like a crown of victory. Michel just seemed deeply satisfied, as if she had found the answer to a question that had been plaguing her. She seemed even more out of reach than ever, having crossed into a life I thought was closed to me forever.

Not a year later, when I returned to the capital, everything had changed. As usual, I brought a caravan of
donkeys weighed down with jugs of oil pressed from our olive groves, pelts and bags of wool, and the best sheep my herds had produced. The market under the walls was as busy as ever. Coins passed into and out of my hand as they always did, but the city was different. Women and girls who had sung and run through the narrow alleys in the past, walked slowly and spoke in hushed tones. When I took my place for dinner, I noticed how stale and motionless the air seemed to have become.

Except for right around Saul, which crackled with his anger. Abner, still at his side, whispered in his ear every few minutes, trying, I could see, to calm him, to soothe his temper. The men in the dining hall, from the oldest and most distinguished to the freshest recruits who still felt the excitement of being in the presence of the king and all the powerful men of Israel, sat like stone altars, barely daring to move. Jonathan, always full of loud joviality, seemed sullen and distracted, his handsome face uncharacteristically anxious. David was nowhere to be seen.

When the women brought the food, I noticed that Michel was absent, too. I couldn't inquire about her, of course, but I trusted everything would become clear eventually. People like to talk in the capital. If you are a man willing to listen, you will hear everything before long. It would have to wait until after what proved to
be a silent, tense meal. Until Saul's rage boiled over and he rose as quickly as a man half his age and snatched a spear out of the grip of one of his guards. Abner grabbed at Saul's hand, but it was too late. The king had already flung it at Jonathan, missing his head by inches and lodging it in the wall behind the startled young man.

Jonathan jumped up. His eyes jerked in his head, words desperate to escape his mouth. He swallowed them quickly. A crown prince knows better than anyone when to hold his tongue around the king.

Saul didn't exercise such restraint. “You idiot,” he said. “Would you choose him over me? He will take everything from you!”

“He won't, Father,” Jonathan said in as calm a voice as a man with a spear stuck in the wall behind him can muster. “We all love and revere only you.”

The room cleared quickly, everyone concerned and embarrassed at having seen the king's loss of control. As we filed out, I caught sight of Saul sitting as if depleted in his chair. Abner and Jonathan loomed above him.

Outside, the men exploded with talk. “David is gone,” one of my long-known contacts told me. “Saul tried to kill him.” Another added, “He threw a spear at David just as he did tonight. What's more, Jonathan and Michel are suspected of treason for helping him escape.”

Something had shifted in the months since I had
last passed this way. Saul had always had one eye trained on the many men who would try to usurp his throne. The kingdom was full of ambitious men who would name themselves leader. He had swatted each away in turn. This time, he felt a threat rising within his own home. Saul had dropped any pretense of love for David. He regarded David as a threat, a danger to everyone, most of all to himself.

“Michel hasn't been seen outside the women's house in weeks.” The men around me had so much information. They detailed the political maneuvering of the kingdom in minute detail, but not one of them could tell me what had become of her beyond that bare fact.

Only I would learn the truth. That very night, Saul summoned me to his room. I didn't even know he was aware of my presence in the capital. I had only seen him once since I'd arrived, and that was at dinner a few hours earlier when he had been distracted by dramas in which I was not a player. I should have known better. Never underestimate the king. I had lived by that mantra while a soldier. Civilian life had caused me to forget.

At first, I thought he was alone, but the room was dark. A single torch lit the entire space. As the shadows settled themselves, I could distinguish the outlines of a chair, armor propped up against the back wall. Even in the half-light, I could make out the braid of my wool woven into the wall hangings. The silhouette of a
person, crouched as if ready to bolt, revealed itself against the walls. My heart leapt and shrank at once. I had never been this close to Michel before.