The Secret Chord: A Novel (12 page)

Shaul scrambled to his feet, reaching in vain for his spear. He scanned the hillside, raising a trembling hand to shelter his eyes from the swiftly rising sun.

“Is that your voice, my son David?”

David stepped out from the shelter of the trees, so that Shaul might see him. “It is, my lord king.” There was a catch in his voice. That one word, “son,” had undone him. I saw that he struggled for self-mastery. Avishai moved forward, a soldier’s reflex, to shield him—he was a plain target, there on the hilltop, with a hundred trained spearmen, alarmed and confused, gazing up at him. But David extended a firm arm and pushed him back.

“Why does my lord continue to pursue his servant? What have I done? What wrong am I guilty of, that the king of Israel should come out to seek a single flea? Here is your spear, my king. Let one of your men come up here and get it. For the Name delivered you to me this night, yet I would not raise a hand against you. Just as I valued your life, so may the Name value mine, and may he rescue me from all this strife.”

Shaul cried out then. “I am in the wrong. I have been a fool. Come back, my son David . . .”

David’s hands clenched at his side. “He is calling me his son.” His voice sounded young and plaintive. I opened my mouth to say, “Go down to him. You wanted reconciliation, and now he offers it. Go down.” But the words that formed in my mind were not the words that uttered from my lips. I could not force the breath to shape itself into my thought. Instead, my tongue lapped helplessly—sibilant and fricative sounds made against my will, carrying another message entirely.

Flee this land. Or surely you will perish at his hands.

David looked from me to the king, anguish on his face. A soldier of Shaul’s guard was already climbing the hill, coming toward us to reclaim the king’s possessions. Avishai grasped David’s arm. “You brought the prophet with us,” he hissed urgently. “Heed him.” David raised the king’s spear then, and hurled it, so that it stuck the earth just ahead of the young soldier. He left the water jar where it lay on the ground. Then he turned and ran, and we followed.

By midmorning, we were on the road to the coast, leaving the lands of Yudah. Whether it was the words I had uttered, or the voice of his own heart, David made his decision. He could not put his trust in Shaul, unstable as he had become. That left us only one place to seek refuge where Shaul could not pursue us. We were on our way to Gath, to offer service to Achish, the Plishtim
seren
of that city and its surrounding territories, who had been our bane and enemy.

Many blamed us, in those days. Some blame us still. But those same words that had cost my father his life still ruled David’s actions:
Whatever it takes. What was necessary
.

And so we left the hill country, heading east into the flat lands of the Plishtim along the Great Sea. It was a weary, footsore journey. When I felt the hot sea breeze on my face, it recalled to me the briny scent of my childhood. My heart should have lifted, but instead a great gloom settled on me. No man—not even a hunted outlaw—walks willingly to become a vassal of his most bitter foe.

In return for David’s promise of service, the
seren
of Gath allowed us to settle in an old fortress within the town of Ziklag. David and those others with wives and families all lived there, while single men were billeted with Plishtim families nearby. Though we took most of our meals together at the fortress, I lodged at night in the home of a prosperous ironsmith who supplied most of the
seren
’s weaponry. It is a hard lesson, to accept refuge in the home of those you have been raised to despise. Yet the family I lodged with was kindly, and the other single men grudgingly admitted the same. Though they could have no cause to welcome us—unkempt strangers—they showed us no ill will. In time, I became ashamed of the baseless hatred I had harbored for these people.

I found it most difficult, at first, to live among idolators, averting my eyes from the strange bird-headed statues that seemed to stare from every crevice and nook. To be sure, many of our own people kept the old house idols, even as they were castigated for it by the priests. But our people, I think, kept them as sentimental decorations, mementos of a past time. Few really believed they held any power. The Plishtim, on the other hand, revered these things. I saw this reverence plain when I went to their temple. One time only. I made myself go there. A man like me, held safe in the fist of a jealous God, has nothing to fear from idols and should understand their power over his foes. Or so I told myself.

To my surprise, I found myself strangely moved by their rituals. Are we not all of us thankful for the soft, soaking rains that bring the harvest, and for the golden ears of ripening grain? We all fear the power of the lightning that rends the heavens. If they call these things Dagon or Baal, what of it?
Elohim hayyim,
our one living God, who knows all, must know that the thanks and the awe belong to him. Can it matter so much to him that some people need a statue in order to pray? These questions troubled my sleep. I did not visit their temple again.

My room in the ironsmith’s home was finer than any I had known, certainly better than the caves and tents of our fugitive years. The smith’s young wife was very beautiful, once one got used to the strange artifices that were the fashion among them. She did not hide her hair, for instance, but wore it in a most unnatural arrangement: a shoulder-length fall of tight, tiny braids. Her eyes she painted with heavy lines of kohl and she dyed her lips a distracting red. You could tell where she was by the strong, flowery perfume she wore.

The main room of the house was a columned salon built around a pebble hearth where the smith’s friends would gather for drinking parties. They preferred spirit liquor, which they drank in honor of their grain idol, Dagon. At first, I found the searing drink too harsh for the palate of a winemaker’s son. But in time I came to crave—and require—the oblivion it brought me.

For these were bitter seasons of lies and killing, by which we earned our ignominious keep. Shaul did not pursue us into the Plishtim lands. He did not have the means to engage Achish on his home ground. So, in return for our safe haven, David made many raids in the name of the Plishtim
seren
. The raids were brutal and served no high purpose other than to ingratiate us with Achish, who supposed that we raided our own people. But David was too shrewd—and too loyal—to do that. Instead, he plundered the outlying settlements of the Amalekites and the Geshurites and lied to Achish about where the loot came from.

These lies had a cascade of ill consequences. To conceal our duplicity, David commanded that we leave no one alive in the sacked villages to tell what we had done. These were ugly, cruel, asymmetric fights. We were well-armed and seasoned soldiers; the villagers were simple herdsmen and farmers, often defending themselves only with scythes and hoes.

On one searing day I fought beside David as he cut down a man who had confronted him bravely—the village headman, so it seemed. There was something in the decisive, almost casual way that David slew him, something in the way the man fell, his face registering surprise rather than fear or panic—and then I saw the boy, struggling in the grip of his howling mother. A boy of the age I had been when David took my father’s life with just the same detachment.

Bile rose in my throat. Despair, like a smothering fall of earth, crushed me. As David turned and moved toward the boy and his mother, I cried out.

“Don’t do it!”

David turned for a moment, his expression perplexed, but then he moved like a lynx and in two sword thrusts dispatched the woman and her child. He turned back to me and lifted his shoulders. “It was necessary. We can’t leave any alive. You know that.” And then he turned away, moving off in search of his next kill.

I stood there in the swirling dust, staring at the body of the boy. He’d fallen against his mother, his hand open on the dirt as if reaching for her face. The sobs that convulsed me were unstoppable, a spring in spate. I could barely breathe. These were the tears I’d never shed for my own father, the grief that vision’s fierce grip had torn away from me. I went and knelt by the boy, my hand on his head. Others of our band passed me. Some paused a moment to see if I was injured. After a summing look, they moved on to the chore of killing until everyone was dead.

It didn’t take long. It never did. I made no move to rise when David, the spoils loaded, gave the command to move out. It was Avishai who raised me up and set me on a plundered mule at the rear of the baggage train. When we arrived at my billet, the armorer’s servant waited, as always, with hot water, fresh clothing and a beautifully decorated pottery crater brimming with grain liquor.

I drank it down, and signaled for another. I drank that night till I lost myself, and with the Plishtim liquor, it did not take much. Soon, it became a habit. I would take a crater before we set out, to numb myself, and then on our return I would down as much as it took to secure oblivion. But the pain for my father’s death stayed raw, as if the calendar on my mourning had started on that day, in that foreigners’ village, far from my own home and kin.

Perhaps it was the dulling liquor that explains why, for all the injustices I witnessed—and, yes, had a part in—my inner voice never spoke up again against any of it. Not the old woman burned alive in her hut. Not the infant, dead with one of our warrior’s boot prints mashed into his tender flesh. Sometimes, I would kneel in the blood and the smoke, exhausted and retching, hoping that the cramp in my gut was a prelude to vision. Hoping that the roar of heaven would issue from my mouth and decry what we had done, that divine wrath would cleave me apart and leave me there among the dismembered dead. But it never happened. It seemed that
Hashem tzva’ot
—the lord of armies—tolerated this butchery.
Whatever it takes. What was necessary
. I had no visions at all during that time, and I had begun to doubt my own oracle. I could not see any road ahead that would lead David from this shameful exile to the mighty throne and the glorious destiny I had foretold for him.

When David brought the spoil—the herds and trade goods we plundered—to Achish, he would tell the king that we had raided our own tribes in the Negev. In secret, though, he sent a portion of the spoil back to Yudah, to those he knew to be friends, to elders whose goodwill he hoped to earn and to all those places where our band had roamed and been furnished with supplies. Such was his cunning, and by year’s end, Achish trusted him. As far as he knew, David’s rift with his own people was total, and he had aroused their hatred. Achish believed that David would be his vassal forever.

Not everyone was fooled, however. Achish’s chief generals, many of whom had fought David in the field, remained skeptical about his supposed new loyalty. When we mustered with them for what was to be a major assault on Shaul’s forces, they objected. Unwilling to go forward with dissent in the ranks, Achish ordered us back to Ziklag.

Before we arrived there, a sour stink of burning reached us. We could see, in the distance, a pall of smoke rising over the town. We increased our pace, and arrived to find the town gates unmanned. We ran through the streets toward the plume of smoke, which we soon realized marked the site of David’s fortress. The gates hung splintered on their hinges, and beyond the courtyard, the fort stood a smoldering ruin. David and his men ran heedlessly over the fallen timbers, calling the names of their wives and children. But no one answered.

Finally, Avishai beat down the shuttered door of a neighboring house and dragged out the reluctant householder. He was an old man. The young men of the town were all of them gone—they had mustered with us and were still on the march with Achish.

Avishai’s face was black with rage. “Who did this? Speak!”

“Amalekites. My lord, they came in force. We who are left could do nothing.”

It was a revenge raid. We had laid waste several of the Amalekites’ settlements. They had bided their time, waiting until, as they thought, all our fighters had gone to war. They had killed the guard on the gate and then marched out the women and children, bound one to another at the neck, before they set fire to the fort.

David, standing behind Avishai, fell to his knees. His hand scrambled in the dirt, piling it on his head. He was crushed by the knowledge that this is what his tactics—all that killing, all those women and children dead—had brought upon us. Get up, I willed him. This is not the time to let guilt or grief rout you. Yoav, who had been searching in the ruin, came running across the courtyard. He spoke all in a rush, giving voice to my own thoughts.

“The Amalekites think we are heading north; they will not expect us to pursue them. We have to take that advantage and go. Now. Before they rape and kill them all.”

But David did not get up. Instead, he fell prostrate in the dirt. I looked around at the faces, many of them also tear-streaked. But what I saw was not sympathy. It was anger. David had lost his wives, but they had lost their sons. At that moment, they did not want a leader in mourning: they wanted a cool-headed avenger.

I had not seen this before. David knew his men, knew their hearts, read their every mood. As the head and the hand work as one, so it had always been with David and his men. I often thought that he read them better than they read themselves. But there, in the square, as I blinked against the stinging embers and spat the dry ash from my mouth, I saw that the gift had deserted him.

One of the men picked up a rock from the ground. I have no idea what he intended, or even if he was aware, in his anger, that he had a stone in his fist. I waited for Yoav to restrain him, but he just stood there and locked eyes with the man, almost as though urging him on. Another then bent and took up a stone. Then a third. They began to advance upon David, crying out curses, as he lay oblivious, keening.

What madness was this? I stood at the edge of what was fast becoming a mob. Wifeless, childless, I was outside the frenzy. And then I took myself in hand. For what reason had I resolved to be celibate and barren if not this? To defend David from his own human entanglements, and the weakness they engendered. I pushed through the crowd, shoving aside men twice my size, until I stood between David and the sea of angry faces.