The Secret Chord: A Novel (11 page)

Some dozens of David’s men had brought their wives with them, and with them came a score or more of children. Daughters, of course, dwelt with their mothers in the tent. But there were sons also; infants mostly, and one or two beardless boys near to my own age. I did not become friends with them as I might have done in another season. I had moved on, and was a child no longer. So when I had liberty, I sat with Avigail, listening an ear to what she had to tell me, and watching for what could be imparted when no words were exchanged. A younger woman sat always by her, and she, too, was David’s wife. Ahinoam was a quiet, solid peasant girl from the Yezreel valley. She deferred to Avigail despite the precedence that by right was hers by earlier marriage. Ahinoam had little to say. I remember chiefly her placid, bovine beauty. David treated her with proper kindness, and had her often by him in the night. But by day, it was Avigail he wanted by his side.

I knew—everyone knew—that these camp marriages were shadowed by another, earlier match. David’s famous first wife, Mikhal, the daughter of King Shaul, was not with us. She had abetted David’s flight from her father, and in reprisal Shaul had married her off to another man. “Do not speak of it,” Avigail cautioned me. “It is a sore matter with David.” It was a measure of how easy I felt with her that I was able to ask if this grieved her, that he cared still for this lost wife. She smiled. “You are very young,” she said. “Too young, perhaps, to understand such things.” She looked down and studied her hands in her lap. “If there is a child of Shaul’s that excites jealousy in me,” she said softly, “it is not Mikhal.” She raised her chin and looked off into the distance. “No, not her. Not that poor girl.”

VI

A
few weeks after, I awoke suddenly from a dream—a confused dream peopled by strange beasts. I was at home again, in the hills of Ein Gedi, fighting off a lioness that had come for my goats. In the dream I was strangely strong, but just as I wrested the goat from the lion’s jaws, she changed shape into a she-bear, and her claws grasped me and held me against her pelt so that I could not breathe. I woke then, heart pounding, glad to find my face pressed only into a greasy scrap of sheepskin. I was lying in the dark, waiting for my heart to slow, listening to a light rain tapping on the earth beyond the cave mouth. I lay there, breathing the scent of damp stone and wet livestock as the men around me shifted and grunted in their sleep.

Then I became aware of another noise. The sucking sound of feet on wet earth. Someone was moving outside the cave entrance. I sat up, to listen more closely, and saw the shadow pass across the opening. There was always a watch set, so I was not at first uneasy. Men had to answer the call of nature, even at night. But these swift steps did not resemble the weary tread of a man making a drowsy path to the latrine. These steps were purposeful, and they were heading directly for David’s cave. I stood, cast my dark mantle over my head and stepped out into the rain.

I caught sight of him just as he reached the cave where David slept. He was tall and broad, and even in the dark I could see that he wore the garb of Shaul’s military. Killer. The hairs on my neck prickled with fear. The rational act would have been to cry out and rouse the guards—armed men who could actually be of use against a trained murderer. But I was far from rational thought. Some other faculty had me in hand, for I sprinted toward David’s cave, my bare feet sliding on the rain-slicked ground. As I reached the entrance, my gut clenched. The bigger man already had David in a wrestler’s lock, pinning him with one massive arm. Then the killer raised his other hand and grabbed a hank of David’s bright hair, pulling his head back to expose his neck. I expected the flash of a blade. As David groaned—a deep, animal sound—I opened my mouth to scream.

The cry died in my throat. The tall stranger had no dagger. As he drew David’s head toward him, he leaned forward, and the dark fall of his hair did not conceal the truth of this encounter. They kissed. There was violence in it, and power, like lightning reaching from sky to earth.

And this, as most of the world now knows, was the way of it between David and Yonatan. A love so strong that it flouted ancient rule, strained the bonds between father and son, and defied the will of a king. When I sat by David’s side as he fought through his grief to compose the lament—“The Song of the Bow,” which everyone now learns by heart as a matter of course—only then, I think, did I fully understand the power of the love they had, one for the other. And I knew what Avigail had known, what she had endured, and why she pitied Mikhal. But that night all I felt was confusion and embarrassment. I backed away from the cave and crept back to my bed, hoping that no one had seen me.

I did not sleep again that night, but tossed and turned, disturbed by what I had witnessed. I was still very young. Too young to understand the force of adult desire. I had only just felt the first brute stirrings of a boy’s simple lusts; the hot, shameful swelling that came unbidden and provoked a mocking ribaldry if noticed by the older men. Eavesdropping once, at home, when my father was entertaining wine merchants from the coast, I overheard some talk about the strange practices of the Sea Peoples. The trader claimed that some among them extolled the love between man and man, even going so far as to field warrior units of couples pledged to each other. The man was saying that the unit so formed was greatly feared, as the warriors fought not only for their own honor but also for the honor of their beloved. I hadn’t much credited any of this, placing it among other implausible travelers’ tales of sea monsters and cities of gold. In our tribe, such alliances were viewed as undesirable, even unclean, and those who indulged them did so in some secrecy. I fretted for David, lest others in the camp should awaken and learn the truth.

When Yoav rose before first light, I scrambled from my own bed of sheepskins and followed him. He stopped to make his water, and then headed right for the king’s cave. I cried out his name, and he turned.

“What?” he said impatiently.

“David,” I stammered. “He is . . . he is not . . . perhaps you shouldn’t . . .”

He raised a weary hand, as if to swat an irritating insect. “David’s not alone? Is that what you are trying to say?”

My face turned as hot as an ember, and I nodded, looking at the ground.

“Foolish boy. It’s the king’s son Yonatan. He sent word last eve that he would be here.” He grasped me by the shoulders and forced me to look him in the face. “Yonatan loves David. Every man in this camp knows that. More, he is loyal to him. How else do you think we elude Shaul’s relentless hunting, as large a band as we are now become? If Yonatan didn’t risk his neck to bring us word of the king’s spies, we would never be able to keep ahead of the pursuit. Get about your business, and think of this no more.”

Some months later, we were encamped on the table mountain at Horesh, in the wilderness of Ziph. Unknown to us, Shaul’s spies had tracked us there. Acting on that intelligence, Shaul himself saw an opportunity to entrap us at last, and he set out himself, leading a large force. Yonatan appeared in the camp just in time to warn us. I was with David when he arrived, and he did not send me away, but presented me. To my surprise, Yonatan embraced me, and thanked me for my service. The meeting was brief: the danger was imminent and we all had tasks to do to strike camp and move off swiftly before we became encircled on the mountain. Yonatan and David clasped each other in a farewell embrace, not caring that I stood there as witness. When they separated, Yonatan took David’s shoulders into his hands and held him at arm’s length. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “The hand of my father will never touch you. You are going to be king over Israel and I will be second to you, and even my father, Shaul, knows this is so.”

As he finished speaking, a shard of ice shivered through me. I was aware of a terrible voice.

Red runs the sword in the hand of Shaul. The blood is royal.

I saw their faces turned to me. I saw the avidity of David, the awe of Yonatan.

Yonatan! Why come ye not to aid your king? Why linger ye in Yavesh, sleeping in the tamarisk shade?

Then all the breath went out of me and I fell to my knees. I could not hold my head up. It hit the rock floor with a crack. They had to carry me on a litter, still unconscious, when we broke camp. When I awoke, Yonatan was long gone, and every wise man and priest in David’s band had been set to puzzling the meaning of my words.

He was waiting for me when I awoke, his face haggard. This time, he did not wipe my brow or offer a solicitous draft of water. He was pacing. In a low, affectless voice, he repeated to me the words as I had spoken them. Then he turned to me, glaring.

“What did you mean? Whose blood did you see on Shaul’s sword? Was it mine? Was it Yonatan’s?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know? You said the words. You must know.”

“It wasn’t me speaking.” I took a deep breath. Even that small effort made my head scream, and I winced.

David loomed over me, menacing. He kicked the earth, raising a spray of gravel. Then he picked up a rock from the floor of the cave. I flinched. His face registered my fear, and answered with a sneer of disgust. Then he turned and hurled the stone at the wall. “What good is it, then, this gift of yours? You speak—or words come—about those most dear to me—words of swords and blood. And yet no one can tell me what to make of them.” He clenched his fists and then opened them heavenward in a gesture of supplication. “Why?” It was almost a wail.

“I don’t know,” I said. And tears rolled down my cheeks. In my weak state, I was powerless to stop them. I hated this feeling, that I was disappointing him. His question—What good is it?—seared me. Why had I left behind my family and come into his service if I could not serve him at his need?

“Get up,” he said harshly. I rose, unsteady, to my feet. “I’m tired of being the hunted one. Tonight, I will hunt, and you will hunt with me. After dark, be ready.”

I had no idea what he meant. I dressed warmly; the night was cold. Every movement cost me. I was tired beyond fatigue. I tried to hold my head still, as every movement sent pain pulsing through my jaw and brow as if my head were crunched in a vise. As I waited, the pain slowly ebbed, until I could drift into a fitful doze that must have turned to a deep sleep. When I woke, David’s nephew Avishai, my weapons master, was shaking me. “Come,” he said. “It’s time.” To my surprise, there were no others: just David, Avishai and me, moving through the dark, and at speed, across the table-topped hill. I felt empty and light, and to my surprise was able to keep the pace. On the other side of the hill, I knew, lay the track to the village of Yeshimon. “Where are we going?” I said, but Avishai hushed me with an urgent gesture. When we reached the cliff edge, the dark was graying into the approaching dawn. Below us, at the base of the hill, lay a military encampment, more than a hundred soldiers, all of them fast asleep. I peered through the half-light, looking for a picket line, for sentries on watch, but I could see none. Where were they? Was it a trap?

David and Avishai moved swift and low, running between bushes. I followed, moving when they moved, stopping when they stopped. When we reached cover, I bent double, retching noiselessly, dry heaves that made the sweat bead on my brow. David stood, listening, waiting to see if any of the sleeping men stirred. Then we moved again, silent and swift, until we were right in among the sleeping forms. My heart was bursting in my chest from fear and exertion. We picked our way through that large force, men prone, men supine, men curled in their cloaks like infants. They lay as if in the grip of some powerful drug, and we moved through them with no more trace than a shadow, or a breeze. And then suddenly David was standing over a large man. He lay sprawled out in a dead sleep, his spear stuck in the ground at his head. A purple cloak covered his body. Although he was an older man his face, even slack-jawed in sleep, was handsome, his beard still full, fair and unsilvered. David looked down, his face a mask, unreadable. Avishai crept up beside him.
His
face I could read quite plainly. It was lit with the nervous triumph of a hunter who has cornered his prey at last. I knew then that the tall man must be Shaul, our king. Our foe. I began to tremble, violently. All the more so when Avishai spoke. His voice was an urgent whisper, brimming with anger and hate.

“Let me run him through right here and now, pin his carcass to the dirt.” His eyes glittered. “I won’t have to strike twice.” But David shook his head. “No one can lay hands on the anointed.”

I spoke then.
He will go down to battle and perish.

David clapped a hand over my mouth. The voice of prophecy did not whisper. Yet none of the sleepers had stirred. Under his breath, David repeated to me what I had said. He gave me a hard look. “Nothing more?” I shook my head. Then he turned back to Avishai. “Take Shaul’s spear. And give me that water jar also. Let’s go.”

I still, to this day, do not know how we got in and out of that camp unseen. How it was that I spoke prophecy aloud across the body of the sleeping king and yet did not wake him, and all those trained soldiers slept on as if drugged, or enchanted.

We climbed back up the hill and waited for the sunrise. We had a perfect view of the camp, and of the king where he lay sleeping. As the sky lightened, David pointed out Avner, the famous general, asleep in a sitting position, weathered and craggy as the rock that supported him. As the first rays struck the hilltop above us, David raised his powerful voice and shouted.

“Avner!”

The general sprang up with the reflexes of a seasoned fighter, grabbing his spear and his sword in a single fluid motion. “Who dares to raise his voice?” he cried.

David’s reply dripped with a silky sarcasm. “There’s no one like you in Israel.” He tossed his head, and dropped the unctuous tone. His next words were loud and harsh: “Why don’t you keep watch over your king? Look around! Where is the king’s spear? Where’s his water jar? You know it was right by his head.”