The Secret Chord: A Novel (39 page)

David walked out, holding himself very erect. I could see the lines of strain in his face, the effort each step cost him. He went to the gateway and called for his troops. And there he stood, for hour after hour, as the men filed by, taking time with each man who wanted a word with him. He did not hide his pain from them. He didn’t have to. Unlike Yoav, the common soldiers did not blame him for his excessive grief. They knew him. They knew his flaws. Indeed, I think they loved him all the more because he was flawed, as they were, and did not hide his passionate, blemished nature.

I did not go down with him, but stayed behind in the bedchamber with Yoav. I watched the high color of his anger drain away until he was the pale gray of mortar. I made a sign to clear the room and poured a cup of wine. I had to place it in his hand and curl his fingers around the stem of the goblet.

As soon as we were alone, the door closed, I spoke to him in a low voice. “This is not what it seems to be,” I said. “Don’t take it to heart.”

Yoav snapped out of his stunned trance and glared at me. “‘Don’t take it to heart’? Are you entirely witless? I have been relieved of my command—I, who saved his wretched life a dozen times, who have followed him, murdered for him. . . . ‘Don’t take it to heart’ when he replaces me with that traitor?”

“You must see that it’s a ploy,” I said. “He needs Amasa to bring the insurgents back to his side. He can’t return to the city if half the people are cowering, afraid of his wrath because they cheered for his traitor son. And he must also win back those who still are against him, willing to rise up for the next man who can rally Shaul’s loyalists. He has always been a fox, you know that. He’s using his grief for his son and his anger at you as a shield to hide his true intentions. He needs Amasa. For now. But not for long. Be patient. Bide your time. Eat your pride. When the kingdom is knit back into whole cloth, then you can avenge this slight. Think on it. You will see I’m right. You’re not your brothers. You’re not reckless like Asahel and Avishai. You never have been. The making of this kingdom is your work as much as the king’s. So don’t throw it away in a moment’s rage, no matter how justified.”

Yoav drained the cup and banged it down on the table. “You talk and you talk. And I never know what to make of your words. Do you
know
these things? Or are you playing me for some other purpose? If he’s a fox, what are you? Snake? Rat? You say you serve him, and yet you’ve let him walk into every kind of misery and disaster. I never know where I am with you. What you say could be solid gold or not worth a pitcher of piss. How’s a normal man to fathom you? I don’t even
know
you, after all these many years.”

I opened my hands at my sides. “All you say is true,” I said. “I am a breath, no more than the ever-turning wind. I can only ask you to believe that I serve the kingdom. This kingdom that you have done so much to make. You will do now what you must. But think on what I have said.” Then I left him there and went to find Shlomo. It was important to bring him with me, to stand behind the king, so that we would be there if he turned to look for us.

XXVII

D
avid seemed to take some sustenance from the outpouring of love that he felt from his fighters as they came to him one by one at the gate. In any case, he came to himself sufficiently to make the shrewd judgments that were required of him at that delicate time. We sat down in Mahanaim to bury the dead, mourn the fallen and bind the wounds of the injured. During that time, David sent emissaries to the city and to the provinces, offering pardons and allaying the fears of the rebels who had expected retribution. The elevation of Amasa served him well there. But Amasa wasn’t half the general—or the man—that Yoav was, and I felt in my bones that David must know that. One sign that he did: he redivided the army and distributed command. He left Ittai in full charge of his loyal Plishtim. Benaiah still had command of the other foreign forces including the king’s bodyguard. But most tellingly, Avishai retained command of his own company and was given his brother’s units also. So Amasa’s direct control of the forces was severely constrained.

The return to Ir David was accompanied by much celebration. We returned in a very different manner than we had left. David was escorted home by a contingent that included representatives of all the regions and tribes. There was music, of course, and dancing. All who came to the hall of audience seeking reconciliation were granted it. Even the life of Shimei, the kinsman of Shaul who had stoned David during his flight from the city, was spared. Avishai protested, of course, begging the king to let him dispatch the man, but the king rebuked him and said he would show mercy. By extending forgiveness even to such a one, David made sure that his message was clear. He was back on the throne as the king of all Israel.

Which is not to say there was peace in the waning years of his reign. Our strife-prone people are quick to fan grievance, to take sides and to foment revolt. But David’s hand was steady in those final years, his judgments cool and measured. It was as if the shortening length of his days and the toll of his illness made him more aware of the limits to his strength. And having less, he spent more wisely. By paying attention to small grievances, he acted to make sure they did not fester into major enmities. If the underlying demand was reasonable, the older David was more likely to accede to it. But conversely, the older David was less likely to overlook any small act that presaged rebellion. If news came to his ears that someone was fomenting schism, that man would be eliminated with dispatch.

During the months after the return to the city, David drew Adoniyah close, thinking to test his mettle now that he was no longer thoroughly overshadowed by his fierce older brothers. It was clear that Adoniyah expected this, and he preened under the king’s attention. But it became painfully clear that Adoniyah’s abilities were modest, his nature incurious and his understanding limited. In a very short while, David became impatient with this, and stopped including him in the most important councils, finding it easier to get things done with those who knew his mind.

Rather than seeing this as a slight, Adoniyah took it as license to resume his dissipated occupations. He did make a stab of emulating Avshalom, if not in ability, then in excess, providing himself with merkavot and horses, hiring outrunners, and generally assuming the trappings of a young man who expects to be king. David, typically, only shrugged indulgently at the folly of it when it was brought to his notice.

Avshalom had gained much from his mother—the sense of destiny that derived from her lineage, and the polish and entitlement that came with being the son of a favorite wife herself born royal. Adoniyah had none of these advantages. His own mother, Hagit, had been one of the minor political marriages of the precarious early years in Hevron. She was never a favorite. Once David got a son on her, his interest waned. The king rarely sent for her and, as a boy will, Adoniyah keenly felt the slight. It was, I think, a bitter little seed that he watered over time with envy.

Avshalom had possessed other qualities Adoniyah lacked, in addition to the advantage of his birth. Avshalom had been willing to do the work of winning men’s hearts, and had an inborn understanding of what it took to do that. Adoniyah had no such qualities. Vain and feckless, he cultivated only such people who were sycophants and opportunists. There were always plenty of those, ready to fawn on a young man who stands in line for a crown. Some of Avshalom’s followers fell into Adoniyah’s circle, seeking the superficial glamour it offered. None of this was surprising.

What did surprise me was Yoav. It became clear, in a very short time, that Yoav had become Adoniyah’s chief supporter. Yoav blamed me for his estrangement from the king. So he was not inclined to support Shlomo, seeing him as my creature, no matter what his merits. I suppose he transferred his loyalty to the one among David’s sons he deemed likeliest, in return for that loyalty, to restore him to his accustomed full command. I began to take note, and to be on guard when I perceived this.

I made sure to let David know of it. I was well aware that he would never again love Yoav. But I sensed that he missed his abilities. And I also sensed he was looking for a way to be rid of Amasa. It was in the midst of a trivial attempt at insurgency among a Benyaminite faction that Yoav found his moment, and David allowed him to seize it. A disgruntled Benyaminite named Sheva had tried to rally supporters and David, acting at the first sign of dissent, dispatched Amasa to deal with it. When Amasa blundered and let Sheva and his rebellious faction give him the slip, David turned to Avishai to take command of the pursuit and set matters to rights. Yoav rode out with his brother. They caught up with Amasa’s troops by the great stone of Givon. Yoav dismounted to greet Amasa, coming up to him as he might have approached one of his brothers, drawing him close with his right arm. Amasa never saw the unsheathed knife in his left hand.

It was a reprise of the killing of Avner. But this time, David did not mourn or curse. The king chose to see the matter as Yoav exacting an overzealous punishment for Amasa’s dereliction of duty. It helped that Yoav went on to make an end of that rebel without damage to the town in which the scoundrel had taken refuge. In a gesture that recalled Avigail to me, a woman of the town bravely came out to Yoav and begged him to spare her community. Yoav agreed. If they surrendered Sheva, he said, there would be no fighting. That night, a party of townsfolk cornered Sheva, cut off his head, and threw it over the wall to Yoav.

David made public his gladness that the town had been spared and praised Yoav for his management of the incident, using it as the occasion to give Yoav back his place at the head of the armies. But it was not the full command he had once enjoyed. David left in place the division of authority that he had created under Amasa, which meant that Yoav had no direct command of Ittai’s forces or, more significantly, Benaiah’s. This chafed at Yoav. It proved that the wall raised by the killing of Avshalom still stood between him and David. In some measure Yoav continued to blame me for that, as if I could somehow have forestalled the events that had caused this estrangement. For myself, I did not care. Yoav and I had never liked each other, not from that first moment in the hallway of my father’s house. At best, we had been civil, and managed to work together for the same ends. But now those ends diverged.

XXVIII

I
have been allowed to see many things. But one thing I had not seen. I did not know David’s end. I had imagined it, many times. How not? When Shaul chased us through the dry hills, or the Plishtim arrows darkened the sky above our heads, or the scalding oil, intended for him, showered from the ramparts to splatter and blister my own shoulders, death had been a breath away. When I stood between him and his own enraged, grief-maddened warriors, or we struggled for our footing in the rushing waters of the Yarden, the shadow of death lay heavy upon him. Everything in our entwined lives had prepared me to witness a violent death. But a silent, stalking death, creeping in on the footpads of age and illness: that, I had not foreseen.

I could never have conjured a vision of David as he finally became: a husk of a man, shivering under a mountain of bedclothes. Because he had been so strong, the illness was slow to truly claim him. But at seventy, he finally seemed spent. His body lost all capacity to warm itself. The constant shivering was like a wracking palsy that exhausted him until he could not rise from his bed. And his mind, also exhausted, seemed to wander, so that it was hard to get him to attend to matters that required his word.

As his condition grew worse, Batsheva defied all household protocol to remain at his side, night and day, seeing to his comfort in any way she could. I think everyone, with the possible exception of the dazed and baffled king, knew exactly why she was there. But if her motive was to buy time for Shlomo, David benefited greatly from the ardency of her care.

Adoniyah, still the presumptive heir to the throne, tried his best to thwart her in this. It was not fitting, he claimed, for the king’s wife to be ever present. Even in his depleted state, the king received his ministers and his generals when he was able to do so; these men should not have to wait about in an anteroom, kicking their heels, while a mere woman decreed who might come in or when they must go out.

Adoniyah had never liked Batsheva, jealous of her place in the king’s affections while his own mother remained unloved. But he played his hand too soon, when David still had the strength to resist him. David ignored Adoniyah’s protests and instructed his bodyguard, under command of Benaiah, to admit Batsheva without restriction, and to rely on her word as to which others might come or go. Unsurprisingly, Shlomo was often in attendance, whereas when Adoniyah or any others among the princes tried to see their father, it often happened that he was sleeping.

Although David had showed little outward concern, I think the knowledge of the tacit alliance between Adoniyah and the unforgiven Yoav weighed heavily on his mind. And Adoniyah’s behavior, when he was admitted to see his father, did not help his cause. Each time, he looked his father over with a kind of hunger in his face, as a greedy man might examine a fatling lamb, anxious for the day of slaughter. He did not tap his foot, but one had the sense that he wished to, so impatient was he for this death. David, as frail as he was, sensed this, and was curt with Adoniyah, feigning greater fatigue than he in fact felt, so as to have the young man gone in the shortest possible time.

Batsheva, during these days, wore herself to a nub ensuring the best possible care for David. She searched out healers and herbalists, anyone who could bring a moment of ease. The best of these proved to be a young woman from Shunem, barely more than a girl, who had a prodigious knowledge of plants. This, so she said, had been passed down from mother to daughter in her family over many generations. She knew how to infuse warmed oils with peppercorns, mustard seeds and other heat-giving plants, and applied these unguents with slow, soothing strokes, pressing and releasing David’s poor wasted flesh as she hummed low incantations in some forgotten, ancient tongue. She ordered bowls of steaming water, constantly replenished, that she infused with crushed aromatics. These gave the bedchamber a clean and wholesome scent, recalling the honey fragrances of springtime meadows and the bracing tang of cut hay in fresh-mown fields. Whether it was the herbs, the healing touch (she was skillful, and seemed to know every sinew of the body) or merely the presence of a lovely young girl (she also was very beautiful), David seemed to rally from these treatments. And so, at Batsheva’s insistence, the girl, Avishag, became David’s chief nurse and most constant servant. I noticed that Adoniyah had no issues with
her
presence in the room when he came to visit his father. In fact, his eyes were more often on her, as she organized and prepared her remedies, than on his father.