The Secret Chord: A Novel (33 page)

“It’s been very difficult, between David and Maacah, these last several weeks. Of course, in her grief, she first asked him for the prescribed penalty. Anyone could have told her that was a mistake. A public execution?” Batsheva gave a little half-laugh, signaling disdain. “You know what the king is like when it comes to his sons. I don’t say he wasn’t angry with Amnon. Of course he was. He was enraged. He blamed himself. He said his own lust and incontinence had set a poor example for his sons. He prayed, constantly, for Tamar, for Amnon, asking the Name to soften Amnon’s heart and set his feet on a righteous path. But again, you know what he’s like. Feelings and prayers are one thing, action another. He’s stubborn about what he wants to see and what he doesn’t. He didn’t even say good-bye to Tamar, you know, before she left in the caravan to Avshalom’s farm at Baal-hazor. That poor girl. She asked to see him, begged for it. But he put her off, on one pretext or another. Couldn’t even bring himself to say farewell. Just cut her off, and you know how he used to dote on her. I’m sure it’s because he couldn’t bear to witness her disfigurement, to face the evidence of what Amnon did. It’s as if as long as he doesn’t see it, it can’t be. He became enraged with Maacah then, because she’d suggested executing Amnon. He dismissed her and wouldn’t see her. I do not think he has seen her still. She came to me, finally, and asked me to intercede with him—it cost her a lot, I think, to seek my help.”

“And did you help her?”

“Oh, yes. I tried. I feel for her—and for her daughter.”

“Of course you do,” I said. “You, of all people, know what it is to—”

She cut me off. “Don’t, please. I don’t think of it anymore. It’s not fruitful. No one of us can change the past, least of all someone like me, who had no power to alter the events even as they were happening.” She closed her eyes for a moment and tilted her lovely head back, a grimace of remembered pain passing across her brow. “But now,” she said, leaning forward, “I
do
have some power, and I have some choices. And I choose to look ahead, not back, and be as good a wife as I can be. In any case, these two”—she faltered, looking, I think, for a word that was not “rapes” or “crimes,” and chose in the end to leave a blank space in her sentence—“mine and Tamar’s—they are not comparable. I was not a virgin. He was not my brother.”

I inclined my head. “As you say.”

Shlomo had sent the eagle airborne again, and her eyes traced its graceful swerves across the sky. “He’s using you as a shield—I suppose you know that?”

“How so?”

“He says that if the Name wanted Amnon punished, he would have heard of it from you before now.”

I winced. Of course he would take my silence as assent. How could he know the real cause? “Well,” I said, “if it will please you for me to see her, that is enough reason to do it.”

She smiled. “Good, then, I will arrange for her to join us next time you come to me.”

•   •   •

I barely knew Maacah. Her father, Talmai, the king of Geshur, was the first leader on our borders to seek peace with us, and David was glad to secure the north and seal the treaty with the marriage, especially once he saw the princess. He set her up in a queenly state, as befit her rank, with her own house and her familiar Geshurite attendants. I saw her, therefore, only when she came to the palace for high state functions, and I never had occasion to speak to her directly. It was remarked that David spent a good deal of time at the house of Maacah, especially in the early years of the marriage, when their children were young. Avshalom and Tamar had always seemed to occupy an especially high place in his affections.

We met in Batsheva’s rooms. Maacah declined to sit, which meant that I could not do so, either. She held herself as straight as a spar, her head very erect and her long neck collared with beads of polished ebony. Her silken gown also was black. She stood with her fingers laced in front of her.

“They say you are the king’s conscience.” Her voice was as thick as cream, with the strong accents of her northern childhood. I inclined my head. I had no better answer.

“All those years ago, when my father told me he had made this match for me, I was afraid. I did not want to leave behind my people and my gods, familiar gods that I knew by name, that I could see and touch and worship in the high places. I was afraid of your god, this god whose name I may not even say, whose image I may not even see. But my father said it would be all right, for though this Name had no face, it had a voice, and spoke through a prophet, who was fearless, and told the king if he did good or ill.”

Her gaze, as she said this, was lacerating. It could have etched a stela. I found myself looking away from her, studying the floor mosaic.

“But now I know this is not true. You say that your Name gave you laws, which you keep in your ark and proclaim as holy. And now one of those laws, one of the heaviest of those laws, has been broken. Yet the king does nothing, and the Voice of the Name is silent. How can this be?”

“I know that you—” I was stammering, my words stalled in my mouth. The Voice of the Name, she called me, yet my own voice was a rasp, a broken reed, rattling helplessly in the breeze. I reached for water, and tried to speak again. But my tongue would not shape itself to the words that formed in my mind. Then I felt the stab of pain, the blackness descending. And new words filled my mouth and issued forth, loud and resonant.
Who are you to question the Name’s anointed? Justice comes when
I
ordain it, on the hot wind and the raging tide, when the mountains tremble and the earth opens to swallow all who offend me.
I had raised both my arms and stepped toward Maacah. I stood towering over her. She folded in on herself, reeling away. As the fit passed, I dropped my arms and stepped back, pressing the heels of my hands into my eyes to stop the blinding pain.

Batsheva had never heard me speak as a prophet before, and her eyes were wide. She looked between Maacah and me, unsure what to do. I was doubled up with pain by then, so she moved tentatively toward me, signaling to her attendant, who was cowering. “Bring Natan a chair!” she cried. “Can you not see he is ill?” Maacah, her face white, tottered toward the door, urgent to get away from me. “Maacah,” I said gently, and my voice was my own again. She halted and turned. Her bearing was not regal now, but cringing and fearful.

“What I said. It means that the crime against Tamar
will
be punished, but it is not in David’s hands.” She looked at me blankly. I lifted my hands in a gesture of helplessness. I could not speak more plainly.
Pay him back four times over
, so David had said, in his own harsh judgment of the man who stole the ewe lamb. “The king, too, is awaiting punishment. The matters are linked. I can say no more. But you will have your justice. Just not yet. Take comfort in that, if you can.”

XX

T
he barley ripened and was harvested twice in that time of waiting. I gave myself over in those two years to what shards of happiness I could unearth when I pushed dread of the future away. There were some golden days, when the work of making and mending went on, when music filled the king’s halls, and when the city seemed bathed in a kind of radiance.

We made many new alliances at that time, and fought no wars. A few border skirmishes, merely, put down with little loss of life. Because of this, Shlomo was allowed to follow his own inclinations in a fashion that would not have been possible for the Hevron princes raised in time of war. Shlomo showed little interest in the business of killing. He was lithe and quick handed with a sword, accurate with a bow, and got through his necessary lessons with good grace and efficient dispatch, and did not seek to push his skills past a necessary level of proficiency.

But if soldiering did not interest him, the soldiers themselves were another matter. He loved to sit with the men and draw out their firsthand stories of past campaigns. After, he would come to me and ask all kinds of questions about the larger matters at stake in the battles they’d described. He was fascinated by strategy and was able to grasp how an engagement had looked from the point of view of the common fighter as well as from the vantage of the commanders. Even taciturn Yoav opened up under the youth’s polite yet persistent need to know every detail—why he had used this tactic in a particular campaign and not in another, what qualities he looked for in promoting a man from the ranks, when to sit down in a siege and when to press an attack. I would find the two of them deep in these discussions, a sand map drawn in the dust at their feet. Later, Shlomo would come to me with some detail of a battle that he had learned from Yoav, and we would compare it with what was known of famous battles in the past. When he found that this or that king or general had used similar tactics, he would derive immense satisfaction. “Everything that happened has already happened, if you look hard enough and far enough back in time,” he opined one day. “With enough study, one should be able to have the means at hand to win any battle and outwit any foe. It seems to me that there is nothing new under the sun.” But then he paused, and looked out across the groves to the city beyond. “What would be new, of course, would be an end to all this fighting. That would be a good time to be alive.”

Before very long, the boy’s agile mind outstripped my own, and with David’s permission I called on specialists to tutor him. We engaged distinguished magi from the east and learned Ethiops from the south. Architects from Tyre and Mitzrayim, poets and bards from the islands of the Sea People, astronomers from the Two Rivers, snake charmers, horse tamers, even wise women and herbalists—whatever it took to feed his insatiable intellectual appetite.

At my urging, David allowed him to take his place beside his older brothers in the hall of audience a full three years earlier than any other had been given such a privilege. Toward the closing of his tenth year, in that sudden way that male children sometimes will, between the waxing and waning of a single moon, he began to transform from boy to man. Out of rounded softness, a strong face emerged, cheekbones high and fine like his mother’s, framed by a defined brow and a severe jawline. It was an arresting face, not perhaps as classically handsome as Avshalom’s, but lit by an intelligent gaze. He had been an elegant child and seemed to be slipping gracefully into his larger frame.

He would come to me after he had attended David, avid to discuss his father’s judgments, turning every matter this way and that, revisiting what had been said, recasting the arguments that had been brought before the king so as to put them more persuasively. He never shrank from his own well-founded opinion, but he would become wistful if he reached a different conclusion from his father as to how a matter should have been judged.

And within a year or two, those instances increased. There was a shadow on those sunlit days: David was beginning to show his age. A moment of inattention here, an inability to recall a fact there. Sometimes, a drawn look around the mouth and eyes, or listlessness when audiences dragged on too long. David’s voice—his beautiful voice—became hoarse when he was fatigued. His skin, too, had lost its healthy glow and taken on a dry, papery sallowness. Most obvious of all the changes: his hair—that bright, thick mane—had begun to fade and thin.

All this was plain enough to me, who had known him so long, and to Shlomo, because he was preternaturally observant. But it took Yoav, as blunt as ever, to put it in words. “He’s starting to look like a cur with mange,” he remarked to me, leaning across the table at the feast of the new moon. I’d seen it, too; David had raked his hand absently through his hair, and a tangle of strands had come away in his fingers.

I shrugged. “He’s not young; you can’t expect him to keep his hair forever.”

Yoav cut me off. “It’s not about hair. There’s something wrong with him. He’s tired all the time. He—who never needed rest. And look at him—wearing that heavy cloak, in this weather.”

As he spoke I saw David rise in his place to give the salutation. It was the sign for the feast to end. We all stood, the benches scraping across the stone flags. But Avshalom stepped forward and raised a hand. “Father, if I may, before you retire. . . . As you know, it’s shearing season at the lands you granted to me in Baal-hazor. We expect a record wool clip this year, and I have promised my people a feast. It’s beautiful there in this season, and I would be honored for you to see my improvements to the farm, to see what I’ve done with your generous gift. Will you do me the honor of feasting with me? You—and my brothers.” He turned then, and bowed to Amnon. “All my brothers.”

Everyone in the hall drew a breath. It was the first time Avshalom had exchanged so much as a look with Amnon in two long years. Amnon, who had been drinking heavily, did not have the wit to arrange his face. He stared at Avshalom, slack-jawed.

David glanced from one to the other of his sons, beaming. He rose and stepped down from the dais, walking toward Avshalom with his arms open for an embrace. He held him close for a long moment, and when he drew back, there was a look of such love in his eyes that I had to glance away from the intimacy of it.

“Avshalom, my son.” His voice was quavering with emotion. “My son, Avshalom.” He raised a hand to his eyes, struggling to compose himself. “It pleases me that you have been diligent in improving the lands I gave you. But it pleases me even more that you make this invitation.” He turned and let his gaze rest on Amnon for a few moments. “But I have affairs to attend to, and I can’t travel unless half the court comes with me. I do not want to tax your resources with such a crowd.”

“Father, it would not tax me at all. We have tents, the weather is mild—”

David raised a hand. “You go with your brothers—” He glanced again at Amnon. “All your brothers. Have a young man’s party. It will be better so, without the burden of a king and his retinue and all that must attend it.”

The king left the hall, and the feast broke up then, unevenly, as feasts always do. Those still engrossed in their wine-fueled conversations stood in little clots here and there, making a final point, sharing a last joke, while the bored, the weary and the trysting lovers, relieved to be released, made quick exits toward their longed-for beds. Only two sat unmoving in their places. One was Amnon. His face was like a wax tablet, written, erased, rewritten. You could read everything there: fear, then relief; confusion, then anger. You could see him working it through: Sincere act of reconciliation? One-upmanship in the battle for their father’s regard? Deadly trap? If the latter, how to escape it, now that the king had given his permission—indeed, his full-hearted blessing—on the invitation. I saw Yonadav making his way across the hall to Amnon—he had been seated with his father, Shammah, several tables distant. He bent down, and spoke into Amnon’s ear. Amnon turned to him, remonstrating, but Yonadav masked the moment with a boisterous laugh, clasping Amnon’s hand as he raised it to expostulate, drawing him up off the bench and into his chest in a backslapping show of good humor. It was well done, and Amnon had presence of mind enough to yield to it. As they passed my table on the way out of the hall, Amnon held his lips in a rictus that could pass for a smile.