The Secret Chord: A Novel (10 page)

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.

Having had so little love from his own brothers, this adopted family was what he cherished, and they cherished him in return. But none came into this family without Avigail’s scrutiny. I never knew her to judge wrong. So I came to rely on her to teach me how to read men. And women also. I enjoyed the hours that I spent in the women’s tent. I liked the subtlety of the women’s way with one another, the veiled indirection of their talk. Most men, you needed only to look into their faces to know their mood, and generally their speech would be the first thought that came into their minds uttered out of their mouths. Women, whose very lives, sometimes, might depend upon concealing their true feelings, spoke a more artful language, more difficult to understand.

David set me to learn other skills, too, in those days of restless waiting. Arms, I had to learn, as did every man and boy. I practiced with Yoav’s younger brother, Avishai, who was just a few years my senior but already highly skilled in weaponry. At first, I was barely strong enough to pull a bowstring and clumsy at handling a blade. Lucky for me, Avishai was an enthusiastic and relentless trainer, hot-tempered, but good-humored, unlike his dour older brother, and he showed me how to make best use of my limited skills. I had no great talent in these things but I was young and healthy and growing into my height and, having seen my father slain before my eyes, I had an appetite to learn how to defend myself.

I had less appetite, at first, for the instruction of my other teacher. Seraiah was a slight youth who was not skilled to arms, but had worked as a scribe in Shaul’s service. David tasked Seraiah to teach me my letters. As a vintner’s son, I had not expected to need such learning, and unlike my schooling with weapons, at first I did not grasp the purpose in it. But David saw further than I did, and when I did not apply myself, he chided me. (He could not have known then that the best use of the skill would be the setting down of this—the chronicle of his life.) As I wanted his goodwill, I stopped resisting, and soon found that Seraiah, who loved his work, was a fine teacher. From him I came to understand that there was a great power in scratches upon skin or clay, from which one man might know the mind of another, even though distance or years divided them. He showed me that marks etched on a stone or inked upon a roll of hide could make a man live again, long after he had died. So for an hour or more each day I sat with him and drew figures in the dust, mouthing out the sounds that each scratch stood for, until one day the strange marks resolved themselves before my eyes. Before long, I could easily read any parchment or tablet that fell under my eyes, and make my own marks almost as skillfully as Seraiah.