The Secret Chord (24 page)

T
hat day, I ceased to serve a king and began, instead, to serve a kingdom. Since my time in the desert, I understood that David's fate was out of my hands. He would have to live through the punishments he had earned, and nothing I could say or do for him could remove that burden. But neither was I Shmuel, withdrawing my love and guidance. As the Name still loved David, so did I, and I would be there at his side, to offer what solace I could, to make sure he made wise decisions despite the self-inflicted pain he had to suffer, and so to make sure the kingdom was protected and kept whole until Batsheva's son became king.

To do so, I understood that I would have to secure a place at the young prince's side. This would be delicate, as I had always gone out of my way to avoid any dealings with David's children. At first, it had been the normal disregard of a young man toward any infant not his own. I thought of children as women's business—nothing to do with me. Later, as the princes grew and the older ones began to attend on David at audiences and feasts, I noticed only that they were handsome and spoiled. Daniel, the second born, the son of Avigail, was the only one who carried out his minor duties—cup bearer, page—with any seriousness or dignity. But when Daniel died, it left the eldest, Amnon, as the unchallenged and feckless leader of a wild and headstrong band, fractious with one another and contemptuous toward everyone else.

Even in the ordinary course of things, David's heirs would have been fawned upon and flattered to a dangerous degree, with only their father in a position to set limits. But because David had received no love from his own father, he was determined to lavish it upon his sons. He poured it out with a wastrel's abandon, unwilling to exact any price or place any conditions. And as he did not restrain them, neither did the world. So I viewed them, I suppose, as spoiled nuisances. Then I went to the desert, and saw what they would become. After, I could not look them in the face, and made every excuse I could think of to evade their company. Now, suddenly, I would have to reverse myself.

I expected that at some point David would confide in me regarding Batsheva's condition, and I had carefully prepared what I proposed to say. But a month passed, then two, and nothing was said. David continued his public atonement in the matter of Uriah, and I suppose he felt uneasy raising with me anything connected with that business. I saw that I would have to change that, and make it clear that I now accepted his marriage and its issue. When I saw Batsheva, it was from a distance, walking with her women in the courtyard, or listening to music in the hall, and I could not tell if her condition was evident or not. But I had to think that her pregnancy must be patent by that time to David who, according to Muwat's informants, continued to lie with her almost every night.

Finally, I decided that if he would not speak, I would. I was in his private quarters with Yoav and some others of his inner circle. Earlier, there had been music and wine and much boisterous talk. This had waned now that the hour had grown late. Yoav had fallen asleep in his chair. I saw that David stifled a yawn. He made to rise, intending, I suppose, to dismiss us and retire. Before he could do so, I laid a hand on his arm. He gave another yawn and gazed at me sleepily.

“What now? It's late, and you have that goat track to navigate in the dark. Can't it wait till morning?”

I lowered my voice so that only he could hear me. “Why do you say nothing of the child Batsheva carries?”

He squirmed in his chair, suddenly quite awake.

“How do you know?” he said sharply.

I turned a hand and gave a slight shrug. “How not?”

“But you have said you don't see personal matters . . .”

Yoav stirred. I gestured to David to lower his voice. I dropped my own to a whisper. “I don't see personal matters that are without consequence. This . . . has consequence.”

“How so?” He looked alarmed. “You said the boy who died was payment of the blood debt. How is this one . . .”

I raised my hand. “Not in that way. I see nothing ill for this child.”

“Then what?”

I had the words all prepared, well rehearsed.

“Your sons. Yoav has had the training of the eldest—Amnon, Avshalom and Adoniyah—as his armor bearers; Aviathar has the younger boys, Yitraam and Shefatiah, as his acolytes. But Yoav and Aviathar have sons of their own. I have no sons. It's hard, to reach such an age as I am and have no one. No son to teach, no one to guide. You do not need another general, another priest. But whichever of your older sons becomes king, he will need someone like me, who can stand by him and speak truth. If I have served you, if I have been of value, this boy . . .”

He raised a hand and interrupted me. “You are saying that this child Batsheva carries will be a prophet? You have seen this?”

I was going to lie and say yes, I had seen it. I could not tell him the truth. To do so would raise alarm about the fates of his older sons—matters of which I could not speak. To serve him, I now had to mislead him. I had practiced how I would deceive him by describing a false vision. I intended to use a part of what I
had
seen—the city, grown great, spreading out across the seven hills, the shining temple columns, rising stone by stone on Har Moriah. But I thought to people the vision with a king, standing in shadow, his face unseen, his back toward me, listening raptly to his younger brother, whose boyish face was aflame with divine power . . .

But those lies died on my lips. “No,” I said, “I have not seen it.” I felt a great upwelling of emotion. I had not, until that moment, felt the lack of a son. But now, having fabricated it, I did feel it—a great void, a sense of loss. Nothing I could have feigned would have moved David more. He stood, raised me from my chair and embraced me. “If the child is a boy, then he will be in your charge. I appoint you, Natan, to be his teacher.”

Y
ou could say he found his own way to me. That is how it would have seemed, to any who did not know better. A psalmist might fashion it otherwise. Such a one would say he was carried to me on the wings of an eagle.

There had been a great storm in the night, lashing rains and high winds such as we rarely see in these hills. In the morning, the winds had died, but the rain continued to fall steadily, filling the dry wadis till they brimmed, spilling between the rocks in swift freshets. It was a day to be spent indoors, by the fire with the shutters closed. Not a day to expect guests.

Muwat, who was cleaning my armor—which was, happily, tarnished from disuse—flinched in surprise at the heavy rapping on the outer gate. He flung a shawl over his head and went out.

The boy did not wait to be announced, but burst in, wet through, his attendant—a tall, thin Mitzrayimite—hunched sodden and miserable behind him. He did not offer an introduction or a greeting, but simply held out his two cupped hands and parted his thumbs to show me the egg cradled carefully in his palms.

“I found this. Just at the bottom of that cliff-footed ridge, over there to the east, where the elah trees grow.” His wet face was flushed, the blue eyes—deep blue like his mother's—sparkling with excitement and urgency. “My mother says you know almost everything—she told me you are to be my teacher when I'm old enough. I'm five now—I'll be six in the month of vine pruning, and my mother says I'm to come to you then. But I told Hophra we had to come today,
because I want to know what to do with this. I would have climbed up and put it back in the nest, but Hophra wouldn't let me. He said the rock is too slippery in the rain. I think it must be an eagle's egg. It was a very big nest—you could just make out the edge of it.”

“It
is
an eagle's nest,” I said, struggling to retain my composure. I had awaited this day for a long time. Now my head was light with joy and excitement. I took a deep breath, trying to sound calm. “There is a pair that returns to that ridge every year. Come here, where it's warm, get dry and we'll decide what to do about this egg.”

He stood patiently while Hophra toweled off his rain-slicked hair. He politely accepted a bowl of warmed broth, then we sat by the fire and I read to him from a scroll that gave an account of the ways of eagles. “Since we can't be sure when this egg was laid, we don't know when it will hatch,” I said. “Also, it may have been addled in the fall. But since we can't return it to the nest, the best thing you can do is build something like a nest—soft and warm. Then wait. If it does hatch, and you feed it, it will attach itself to you. It will be yours, if you want it.”

“I do!” he said, his face lit with pleasure. But then he frowned. “I can't take it home. My older brothers, they're not very nice to animals. Especially if they see that it's something I care about. They'll smash it on the stones, just for sport.”

“Then leave it here. You can come every day, if you like, and see how it does.”

“I would like that, very much, if they'll let me.”

“I'm sure they will let you. But I will speak to them, if you think it will help.”

•   •   •

And so it began. Without ceremony, without even an introduction, he became part of my life. Indeed, he became its whole purpose. Every day, I looked forward to the sound of his small, enthusiastic fist knocking on the outer door. I had to discipline myself not to wait for him, staring out the window, watching the path like some lovesick
swain. She had named him Shlomo, from the word for peace,
shalom,
but also from the word that in some uses means “replacement,” because he was the child she hoped would bring consolation after bereavement.

I grew to adore that intense little face, the way his brow would crinkle before he asked a question. And such questions, from the mouth of a child. “All streams flow into the sea,” he said. “Yet the sea is never full. How is that?” Or, “The sun rises and the sun sets, and glides back to where it rises. How does it make that journey?” These were the questions of a curious intelligence and I did my best to answer them, drawing on scrolls from Mitzrayim and the teachings of astronomers from Ur. But sometimes his face would crease and the question would be one so profound that one could hardly credit that it issued from the mind of a small boy. “Men are born and they die, but the earth remains forever. Why, then, do we set such store on our short lives? Can they matter so much as we think they do?” In such cases, I blundered on as best I could, praying for inspiration, terrified that a weak answer or, worse, a platitude would shake his trust and draw him away from me. But that did not happen. To my joy, he seemed to look forward to our time together as much as I did.

The egg he had rescued hatched—as I knew it would, since I had seen the eaglet in the vision. It was a ball of dandelion fluff with a vociferous call and a tremendous appetite. Shlomo was immensely tender and patient with it, shredding the flesh of river fish, feeding it strand by strand, laughing when he couldn't keep pace with the hatchling's noisy demands. The bird's growth was so rapid it seemed to change appearance every day.

“You know the eagle is called king of the sky,” I said. “Why do you think that's so?” We talked about the eagle's keen eyes, and how a king also must be visionary, looking beyond the surface of things; how its speed and strength surpassed other birds, just as a king must hope to surpass his subjects. We talked about its ability to find prey, and how a king also must be a provider for his people.

And then, unexpectedly: “An eagle is ruthless and takes whatever he wants,” he said. “Kings do that, too.” He ran a finger gently over the eaglet's downy head. It closed its eyes and stretched its neck with pleasure. “My brother Amnon told me that my father took my mother that way.”

I regarded him gravely. His small brow was drawn tight and his face had a haunted look.

“Your brother should know better than to speak of such things,” I said.

“Oh, he'll say anything. And not just to me. It gives him joy, to upset people. He's always goading Adoniyah, and he
hates
Avshalom. The only one he's nice to is Tamar—well, everyone's nice to her, she's kind. But Avshalom—he's Tamar's full brother, you know, they have the same mother, Maacah. Anyway, Avshalom hates Amnon to be with Tamar. He told her serving women that Amnon's not allowed to see her in private anymore. There was a big fight about it.”

I closed my eyes and drew a deep breath. I felt the blood draining from my face.

“Are you all right? Should I tell Hophra to bring you something? Should I get Muwat?”

“No,” I said, forcing a smile. “It's nothing. Just a headache. It will pass.”

It was natural, of course, for Shlomo to speak of his brothers. I told myself that I would have to harden myself to it. Still, the words went through me like spears and I had to struggle to keep my composure and focus on our lesson.

Shlomo, of course, wasn't the only source of gossip about the older princes. In the city, it was hard to escape whispers of their outrages—which were numerous—and their enmities, which were life threatening. They had grown like wild thorns, tearing at everything they touched.

David, who so often saw so clearly, who weighed men to a fine grain, was utterly blind to the failings of the men he begat. I had been by his side often enough through the boys' youth when word came to
him that one or other of the princes had abused his slave, insulted an elder or mistreated his mount. David would laugh and shrug it off, and mock the complainant, inferring that he lacked the canniness or the authority to deal with childish pranks. Then it would be seen, in subtle ways, that the king's affection for such a person had waned. He would be seated at the rear of the hall at feasts, or perhaps no invitation to the feast would be forthcoming. Courtiers who cared for their position noted this. Soon enough, the boys' outrages went unremarked and unpunished. By the time they were nearing manhood, what had been mischief had become malevolence.

If the seed was unpromising, and the proper husbandry missing, then the ground also was to blame for their ungirt growth. These older boys were the children of the red years, suckled into first awareness as David was consolidating his power. In those days, cruelty was a constant.

Amnon was thirteen, and serving as Yoav's armor bearer, when we measured out the Moavites and slew them by the span. I remember his face—still then the soft-cheeked face of a boy, not yet firmed into maturity. In that stinking field, rancid with fear-sweat and excrement, amid the screams of the dying and the pleas of the condemned, he was laughing. Laughing at a Moavite, prodding him with his foot as he lay on the ground, curled up like a snail, trying to shrink his body so as to evade the deadly quota. “That one!” he called out. “Don't miss him—he's within the measure.”

Yoav, who was doing the killing with pale face and compressed lips, glared at him. Like all honorable warriors, killing in hot battle was one thing, butchering unarmed prisoners quite another. I could see that he was about to reprove the boy. But the rebuke died on his lips. Even he, the boy's kinsman and his general, had learned that Amnon was above chastisement.

It did not help that they were good-looking children, all of them products of beautiful mothers. Amnon had the dark, sloe-eyed sensuousness of Ahinoam transformed, in male form, into a solid build,
with sleepy, thick-lashed eyes and a full-lipped mouth. Avshalom, on the other hand, had his mother's flawless, regal beauty, but instead of her pale coloring he had his father's vivid radiance. He was tall and slender, with a thick fall of glossy red-gold hair, of which he was rather vain. Adoniyah, son of Hagit, Avital's boy Shefatiah and Eglah's son Yitraam looked the most like brothers, sharing a dark-haired, olive-skinned attractiveness. The Hevron princes, as these youths born in that city were collectively known, attended morning audience from the time they turned thirteen. David hoped that they would acquire some understanding of statecraft. They were an impressive sight, ranged behind their father's throne. To those who did not know their nature, it seemed that David was fortunate to have such fine-looking offspring.

It became clear soon enough that all the older boys had inherited their father's sexual appetite, and were precocious, but Amnon was insatiable. Whores and slaves, boys, girls—he had them all, his urges indiscriminate. It was unsafe for a serving girl to pass him in the hallway. He would throw her, face against the wall, and take her in a moment's spasm, or he would indulge in days-long orgies organized by his reprobate cousin Yonadav. David's only answer to any of this was to give the older boys their own households, where they could pursue dissolute behavior out of his direct line of sight.

I was exceedingly glad when they moved out of the palace and I did not have to risk encountering them at every turn. Shlomo seemed pleased, too. He became noticeably less tense and excitable in his manner, more willing to make use of the abundance of scrolls in the king's library on the days when the weather was unfavorable. But on fine days, Shlomo preferred to be outside. Most mornings, we would meet at my house, and then walk, his eagle, fledged, swooping away to hunt, and then returning to perch nearby and feast on her prey.
Shlomo loved the natural world and was fiercely curious as to the ways of even the smallest insect. He would run on ahead of me up the slopes and screes, then turn and pause on a flat piece of rock, spinning around with his arms out, embracing the world. “My eye never has enough of seeing nor my ears enough of hearing,” he exclaimed one day, and I drew him close and hugged him, caught up in this small boy's lust for life, his joy in the world and everything in it. Nothing that lived was beneath his notice. We made a great study of ants, for example, and I found that atop his fascination for the habits of the tiny creatures, he had an appetite for moral instruction and philosophical reasoning.

I was sitting perched on a rock while he, prone in the dirt, watched an ants' nest, fascinated by the size of the burdens the tiny creatures carried, their tenacity to surmount any obstacle. After an hour or so, he turned his bright face to me. “They don't have any overseers, or generals giving orders, and yet they do their work. Do you suppose it might be possible for a nation to be like that, everyone working willingly for the common good?”

“Most successful nations have been built on the backs of slaves and forced labor,” I said, considering. I took nothing he said lightly, because he seemed so hungry for answers.

“But on the battlefield I have seen men sacrifice themselves for one another. A leader who inspires people can get them to give more than they know they have. But there are few such leaders. But why only on the battlefield?” he interjected. “All wars end, and then that which was broken must be remade. It's a waste, I think. All our best men strive to be captains and generals, because their leaders reward those skills. But perhaps there are other skills, other men, who can think of ways
not
to fight. Perthaps a real leader would find those men, and train them, just like an army trains . . .” He trailed off, thoughtful. I sat there, breathless, forcing myself to credit that such thoughts could issue from the mind of a mere boy. But then I gathered myself, and led
him to what followed: a consideration of the leaders in our own history.

It was natural, from there, to turn to the leaders in our own history. Of Moshe, the reluctant insurgent, and Yehoshua, the brilliant warrior. Of the judges who ruled with wisdom and forbearance in the years when our people were suspicious of kings. Shlomo, with his ability to piece together shards of this discussion and that one, advanced the supposition that our reluctance to be ruled by a king had come about because of our long suffering under the pharaohs, and had waned as memories of enslavement faded. It was a wise insight, and it led on naturally to a study of Ramses, the great builder, ruthless enough to order the slaying of the children of his Ivrim slaves. Shlomo plunged wholeheartedly into the grief of our ancestors, imagining their powerlessness as their baby boys were seized and murdered. But then he surprised me by switching his perspective, struggling to see the matter through Pharaoh's eyes. “If you are king, you must act against what threatens your people. Ramses feared the Ivrim would grow numerous and rebel. Of course, that was because he mistreated them. It's obvious what he should have done. Mitzrayim is a rich country. He could have afforded to treat them fairly. If men work hard, they should be rewarded, even if they
are
slaves. Then they have less cause to rebel. That's what I meant, before, about finding ways
not
to have war and break everything to pieces. Imagine how rich Mitzrayim would be now if we'd never left, if Ramses had made us part of his nation. If I were king, I'd . . .” He trailed off, lifting his chin and staring ahead. “But I won't be king, of course.”