The Secret Chord: A Novel (15 page)

I knew that she did not exaggerate. In my time, I have heard even travelers from the court of the pharaoh—men speaking in private, who had no need to offer flattery—say that in voice and in musicianship, David has no peer. To me, even now, after so many years of hearing him play almost every day, it remains a marvel, that a man can draw forth such sounds from a piece of wood and some strands of gut. His overlapping harmonies, the way the plucked strings swell and ebb, swell and ebb, and every minute, every instant, he is overlaying new, fresh melodies as the old harmonies linger and resonate. Not only the ears feel the pleasure of it. You feel the vibration on your skin. The hairs rise on your arms. The pulse, the breath, the very heartbeat. It’s a kind of sorcery, a possession of body and spirit. Yet a wholesome one. And there is one chord, one perfect assembly of notes that no other hand can play. The sound of it—pure, rinsing sound, void, so that your spirit seems to rush in to fill the space between the notes. So sublime that the priests asked David to offer it at the sacrifice . . . the music rising up to heaven with the sacred smoke. Every soul that hears it is refreshed and restored. So it was with Shaul.

I could see that Mikhal was remembering that music, the glorious shock of it, the first time. Her face was tilted upward, to catch a meager shaft of light as it struggled briefly through the narrow slit. David would have noticed that lovely face—a girl’s face, then—as he played the first time in court.

“I was scared for him, even though his singing and playing were so beautiful. Before he started to play, that first time, there had been tension in the hall. Everyone knew my father was cliff walking again. Well, that’s what I called it, when the madness came. He would be like a man staggering along the rim of an abyss—which was his rage—and when the edge gave way or he missed his step, he might clutch at anyone within reach and drag that person with him over the precipice. We all of us had learned that it was not safe to try to reason with him, or even to distract him. Such a person was the likeliest to be pulled down into the dark. So when he needed us most, we withdrew. The talk would die into an awkward silence and my father would be left alone to wallow in his own grim thoughts. So when David fetched that harp, I feared for him. I feared that in his attempt to soothe my father, he would become the target of his rage. Then, he started to play. You could feel the strain in the room ease. The brilliance of his music lifted everyone. But for my father it was much more than that. For him, the music worked like soothing ointment on an open wound, or the binding that sets a broken bone back into its proper place. David sang and played, and drew my father’s spirit away from that cliff edge. That’s why I began to love him.

“It was a different thing with Yonatan. He didn’t need a reason. He just loved. It was as if one soul had been sheared in half, breathed into two separate bodies and then cast adrift in the world, each half longing to find its other. That was how they came together, or so it seemed to me, young girl that I was. I think they became lovers the night after the battle of Wadi Elah. Even though their lives had been different in every respect, they could finish each other’s sentences, they knew each other’s thoughts. I had never seen my brother so light and so alive as he was after David came to us. And that fed my love, also. Because my brother had been sad and David made him happy. I’m not sure if you can imagine how hard Yonatan’s life was, bearing the brunt of my father’s fits, all the while trying to prop him up and provide the judgment and governance when the king wasn’t capable. It was a great burden for any man to bear, and Yonatan took it up when still little more than a boy in the world’s eyes. Until David came, Yonatan’s loyalty to my father was absolute, but he felt his duty to our people also, and holding the balance between the two almost crushed him.

“And yet despite all that, despite all his cares, he was good to me, when I was a girl, and good to my younger brothers, too. He was more like a father than my father could be. I don’t know how he did it, but he would find time to play with us, carving little toy horses out of olive wood, listening to our nonsense stories, teaching us songs.”

Her eyes came alive as she spoke. Her voice, too, had become lighter and more animated. Poor girl, I thought, to have so few and such brief moments of joy—slender planks to cling to in her shipwreck of a life.

“I came of age knowing Yonatan would protect me. He would make sure that Father made a good marriage for me, and wouldn’t merely use me as some token in a game of statecraft, or give me away in some mad fit. It was Yonatan who insisted that Father make the match for me with David, after Merav was married elsewhere. By then, of course, Father’s affection for David had waned. He had come to agree with my vain sister that David was not good enough. Or at least that’s what he told her, and she fed on the flattery. Father had begun to grow unpredictable in all matters, but most especially the matter of David. He would laud him one day and want him at his side. Another day, he would shun him, the suspicions eating at his addled mind. It took time, but Yonatan pressed the matter delicately enough, and so finally, our father gave way, or seemed to. He said that David could have me. But then he named my bride price: the foreskins of a hundred dead Plishtim.

“You remember, of course, that those were not the days of great battles with the Plishtim. They did not come against us in strength, but only harassed and raided our outer settlements. In such skirmishes, the enemy dead might number in the tens, never the hundreds. So Yonatan was dismayed. He knew what our father was about. It’s one thing to kill a man like the Gath champion in single combat, or lead a unit to drive back a party of border raiders. Another to go against a seasoned army, which was the only way David could meet this grisly dowry. Father thought he was being clever, sending David off to die while placing the bloodguilt on the Plishtim. Yonatan fretted that he, in pressing the case for the marriage, would become the unwitting agent of David’s death.

“But David laughed at Yonatan, and went off singing. He would do that, you know, sing as he marched. He said it kept the men in spirits. Yonatan and I kept vigil together, waiting for word. I was with Yonatan when the first messenger came, just a few days later, bearing news that David had set a trap for a Plishtim brigade just outside of Gaza, and killed at least the hundred required of him.

“My brother could not believe it. Gaza was a five-day march. My brother asked the messenger how such a thing could be possible—that David could have got his men to the outskirts of Gaza, done battle and sent word back to us, all in less than a week. The messenger replied that he had encouraged them to ‘move fast.’ My brother gave a great bark of a laugh at that. ‘Encouraged you to fly, you mean?’” The messenger had described it all. How David never tired. How, every hour or so, he would run down the column and then back up, to his place in the vanguard, having a word for every man. How he sang to them to keep their spirits high.

“My brother smiled as the messenger went on, his face glowing with affection, pride and relief that the deadly task was done and over. But when he asked the messenger when we should expect David’s return, he told us that he had pressed on, to continue the campaign with a raid on Ashdod. I couldn’t restrain myself at that. I was not supposed to speak, when my brother received dispatches, but I burst out: ‘You said he killed his hundred.’

“The messenger turned to me. ‘He told us that to be son-in-law of the great Shaul should not be bought so cheap as that. He wants to double the bride price.’

“Yonatan looked grave. ‘Wants to double it? That will be more than have fallen in all the skirmishes since the battle of Elah. He counts you quite a prize, sister.’ Yonatan glanced at me, and I felt coldness, as if he blamed me for David’s recklessness.

“Of course, my father had no choice but to let my marriage go ahead. It was hard on him, as he could not seem to be sour about such remarkable victories. But in the weeks of preparation for the marriage feast, you could feel the tension in him as he strove for the required good humor.”

She rose, and walked to the narrow window. A great sigh escaped her. But when she turned and sat down again, her face had lightened. A hint of a smile lifted the corners of her lips.

“I was so happy, the day of the wedding feast. David entered the hall and stood, singing to me of the bridegroom’s love for his bride. But even in my joy, I was not blind. I saw his gaze drift past me as he sang. I knew where he was looking. Yonatan sat right behind me on the dais. Yonatan had already given David everything he could: his royal clothes, his best weapons. Even, for a time, his place in our father’s affections. I was just one more gift, laid down upon the altar of that great love. And I was grateful. It was joy enough for me, to share David with my brother. I was glad I could be a bond between them.

“Those were the years when David could do no wrong as a fighter. Most young brides fret when their husbands go to fight, but I did not. I knew he would prevail, and he did. Every time the Plishtim tried to eat away at our borders, seizing our threshing floors, pasturing their cattle on our lands, David was able to beat them back. Yonatan had taught David everything he knew of weaponry and raiding tactics. David took those lessons and added to them his own gifts for strategy, his own way of leading from within, never seeming to command, just expecting the men to be there when he ran forward. Soon enough, they were two captains together, and then David eclipsed even Yonatan. The men loved him, even though he commanded some twice his years. It helped that he was brave. He never asked a man to do more than he did himself. He always put himself in the forefront—well, you know that—you fought with him. So I do not need to tell you these things, who saw it all, when I only learned of it from tales told at meat. But there were many such tales. Yonatan came often to our house, and I would be there as they went over every battle. My younger brothers looked up to David, too. They were his own age, and younger, but even those close to him in years were still far from earning their own command. They might have been jealous, but they weren’t. All of them worshipped Yonatan, of course, and took the lead from him in the deference they showed to David.

“At first, my father celebrated David’s victories just as we all did, basking in the reflected glory of his young captain. And then, he changed. Suddenly, my father had had enough of it. Finally, he saw.

“I was with my father, waiting for the returning fighters. David’s unit, victorious again. The women greeted him, as they always greeted the returning men, with their tambours and tambourines. One of them stepped out of the throng, and raised her voice—a good voice, clear and sweet, that carried—and she used the old words, the old poetry, where you sing of a thousand and ten thousand. Everyone’s heard the rhymes, sung for this or that. The first number, the smaller, in the first line, the next line the number grows. She started with the king’s name, naturally. One always starts with the king. She put David in the second line.”

Mikhal raised her voice and sang the familiar couplet:

“‘Shaul, Shaul has slain his thousands, and David, David his tens of thousands.’ Soon, all the women had picked up the chant. My father stood there, and the blood left his face. I knew what he was thinking. I looked up and grasped his hand. ‘It doesn’t mean anything, Father. It’s just an old rhyme.’ But he wasn’t listening to me. His face had turned to wood. He couldn’t be rational. He heard that stale old phrase—a phrase he’d heard a hundred times—and his madness made him take it as a personal insult, that the women believed David a greater warrior, a greater man, than he was. I saw him look at David with hatred. And then I saw him look at Yonatan, saw him suddenly recognize what had been apparent to everyone else for many months. Yonatan was deferring to David as if David were the prince. David, in turn, was treating my brother as a beloved lieutenant. My father finally saw his throne—his house—at risk. And he saw that Yonatan didn’t care. That Yonatan had willingly surrendered his birthright to this upstart. He saw truly, for once, despite the madness that so often distorted his sight. My brother had laid his life at David’s feet; his every action proclaimed this.

“David marched out again the next month in a sally against the Plishtim and was, as always, the most successful of my father’s officers. And every new victory drove my father deeper into his hate. He began to ask his closest aides to kill David. Then, mad as he was, he asked Yonatan to do it. A test of love, I suppose. And the greater love prevailed. Yonatan came to David right away to warn him. David made light of the threat. I suppose, having bathed in my father’s affection, he felt secure in it. Or perhaps he believed in the worth of his own deeds; that his success would save him. He was weighing the matter as a rational mind weighs it, and Yonatan could not bring him to see that our father’s mind no longer worked rationally. He grasped David by the arm and almost shook him. ‘Come tomorrow morning. We are hunting, my father and I. There is a ruined croft near the place. Hide there. When we come, I will speak with him about you and you can hear for yourself and judge if there is a threat or no.’

“So they went, and Yonatan talked with our father about David’s valor and good service. He begged him not to wrong a youth who had himself done no wrong. He warned that it would stain the kingship with bloodguilt. My father was himself that morning, and was able to hear Yonatan’s plea. He swore an oath that he would not put David to death. So, for a time, all seemed well enough. David served my father as before, as musician and as fighter, as the times required.

“And then—well, you know what happened. David was playing harp after the meat, as he always did when he was home from the field. My father had been brooding all day. He’d allowed his wine cup to be refilled many times. He was sitting quietly, listening to the music, or so it seemed. His eyes were closed; he seemed at peace. We were all of us relieved that the evil mood of the day seemed to have lifted from him. And then, from nowhere, he leaped up, grasped a spear from the hand of the door guard and threw it right at David. David tried to make light of it, in the moment and then later, with me, at home, when he showed me the slash in his sleeve where the spear point had gone through it and pierced the wall. ‘I told your father that if he disliked my singing, a simple “Enough!” would be sufficient next time.’