The Anointed

by Michael Arditti

  I obey, no longer Abigail but woman. Never, not even as the target of Nabal's most withering scorn, have I felt so distant from my husband. Yet to my wonderment, the Lord has given me the means to draw David closer. It appears that I have been wrong these last few months; I am no shrivelled wineskin but a fruitful vine. I shall say nothing until I am certain, not least because any announcement is bound to be coloured by the report that Joab brings back from Gath. David's worst fears have been realised: not only Saul but his sons – the young princes, Abinadab and Malchishua, and the eldest, Jonathan – have been killed. He betrays no emotion, not even when Joab describes the degradation of their bodies: their heads cut off and paraded through Philistia; their armour exhibited in the temple of Dagon; their corpses hung from the battlements of Beth-shan. He orders one of his men to bring him sackcloth and ashes, and ink and papyrus, and locks himself in his chamber, refusing all food and drink. Joab walks away in disgust, denouncing such grief as womanish. Ahinoam and I linger by the door, listening as his prayers and sobs are interspersed with fragmentary chants and gentle strumming. At nightfall, I venture to knock and, to my surprise, he lets me in, his pale face lit by a doleful smile.

  ‘I’ve written a lament for them all.’

  ‘Even Saul?’ I ask.

  ‘He was our first king, a great king... at first. And the twins. No two brothers were ever so close. I once had a sheep who gave birth to a lamb with two heads. As close as that.’

  ‘Surely it died?’

  ‘So have they. Too young to fulfil their promise: too young even to show it. And Jonathan... Jonathan. Never has there been a finer man! He was my sun, my moon, my stars, my everything.’

  ‘We’ll do our best to console you,’ I say, wondering if Joab were right and sorrow has unmanned him.

  ‘It can never be enough. My first love.’

  ‘Michal?’ I ask, perplexed.

  ‘No. No woman's love could compare with his. He was my other self, my better self. He made me my better self.’

  He sings me his lament. Although misery leaves him fumbling for both the words and the strings, it is the most heartfelt tribute I have ever heard. But when he repeats his assertion that Jonathan's love surpassed that of any woman, the image of Achish and his boy springs into my head, making me wish that he had phrased it better.

  The following morning he assembles the entire company in the forecourt. ‘Tomorrow we leave for Gath and then for Judah,’ he announces, to a chorus of cheers. ‘Saul is dead, but, although he was our enemy, he was our king. Jonathan is dead, and he was our friend throughout our adversity. I should have buried them both, but their bodies have been left, with those of the two young princes, as carrion on Philistine walls. So, instead, I honour them in song.’ He takes up his lyre and plays the lament exactly as he did for me. The ensuing silence suggests that the rest of his audience share my misgivings, until a loud burst of applause affirms their approval. He yields to their demands to sing it again and, by the fifth repetition, everyone, even the children lagging a phrase behind their parents, accompanies him. Their fervent endorsement of the brotherly love he extols puts my carnal imaginings to shame. ‘Let us never forget!’ he says, finally laying down his lyre. ‘Let us never forget!’ And I don’t know – I don’t know that he does himself – whether he's referring to the dead heroes or to the song.

  We spend the remainder of the day preparing for our departure, first to Gath to pledge allegiance to Achish, and then home. Joab, for whom a broken oath is of no more import than a broken bowl, itches to rebel as soon as we cross the border, but David is more circumspect. Abner, the great general, who survived the battle, has crowned Saul's youngest son, Ishbaal, king at Gibeah, setting up his capital at Mahanaim, east of the Jordan. According to David, Ishbaal is as unlike his brothers as a hyena to a pride of lions, but the Israelites have accepted him, thereby splitting the kingdom. Alone, the Judahites are too weak to fight the Philistines – not least after the loss of their finest soldiers – so David insists that we submit to them, until he either joins with Abner or else defeats him and claims the Israelite throne. The same messenger who brought the news of Abner informs us that a group of men from Jabesh in Gilead, a town which, in his youth, Saul saved from the Ammonites, has repaid the debt in an audacious raid on Beth-shan, rescuing the remains of the king and princes, burning them and burying the ashes in the sacred grove.

  ‘Burning them?’ David asks. ‘Then how will they rest with the bones of their ancestors?’

  ‘The Jabeshites feared that the Philistines would pursue them and break into the tomb, my lord,’ the messenger replies.

  Conceding that it's the lesser outrage, David sends Abishai to Jabesh to honour the men's valour. The rest of us make our way to Gath, where David kneels in homage to Achish, who proclaims him as his vassal king. When we take our leave after a week of feasting, the queen draws me aside and without a word – not even one that I’ve taught her – hands me a tiny amulet of a baby astride a bull. She is the first to divine my secret and I am overwhelmed with gratitude, as much for the recognition as for the gift. Banishing the thought of our imminent revolt, I hug her before mounting one of the camels that Achish has provided for the journey. David's hope that they will transport us back to Judah twice as fast as the donkeys is confounded by my frequent need to rest. As he struggles to curb his impatience, I blame my frailty on the heat.

  The closer we draw to home, the more David worries about his reception. Although their recent defeat has removed the threat of armed confrontation, there will doubtless be Judahites who, oblivious of the Lord's plan, regard him as a traitor. Joab urges him to base himself in Bethlehem, in the bosom of his clan, but David, loath to appear partisan, favours Hebron, the burial place of Abraham, and the kingdom's holiest site since the sacking of Shiloh.

  ‘Hebron is a Calebite city,’ Joab says.

  ‘You forget that I’m the widow of the Calebite chief,’ I reply exultantly.

  The people of Hebron haven’t forgotten, waving palm fronds to greet me at the city gate and lining the streets, cheering my name. David, walking beside me, clasps my wrist as though angered by his subordination. When I try to break free, he tightens his grip, giving me the same strained smile that he does the crowd. He commandeers the largest house but, after the friction in Gath, he lodges only a few of his men within the city walls, dispatching the rest to neighbouring towns and villages. Losing no time, he summons the elders of every Judahite clan, feasting them royally for two days. On the third, he assembles them in the sanctuary, where, after Abiathar makes thanksgiving offerings for our safe return, he takes a horn of oil from the fold of his robe and holds it aloft.

  ‘This oil was given to me by the prophet Samuel who, seventeen years ago, anointed me king in my father's house.’ His brother Eliab, representing the absent Jesse, looks as shocked as everyone else. ‘Years later, I visited Samuel at Ramah, where he reaffirmed his – that's to say, the Lord's – choice. He was hoping for the chance to do so before you all, but he died that same day in my arms.’ I gasp, as his misty eyes attest to the power of his self-deception. ‘Just as Moses anointed Aaron and Samuel anointed Saul, so I take this sacred oil and anoint myself in the Lord's name.’

  I study the stunned faces of the elders, who assumed that they had been summoned to acclaim him king, only to find that, unlike Saul, he is dependent on no one's voice but the Lord's. It is his moment of triumph and, when he comes to me that night, I cap it with the news that I am bearing his child. He is dumbstruck, even when I add that I am in my fourth or fifth month, just one month later than Ahinoam. At first I suspect that he's aggrieved at being kept in ignorance, but his eyes well with tears, more legitimate than those in the sanctuary, when I explain that I have said nothing until now because of my past failures. I have never been able to carry a child for more than three months, but this one is different; this one is his. He plants a line of kisses across my belly as if to ease the child's passage into the world. I feel a
fluttering inside me like a bird in flight. Every limb, every bone, every muscle, every sinew, tingles with new life, as though I too am anointed by the Lord.

  THREE

  Michal

  Like any household slave, I had my price. David demanded that I return to him: not for love or in gratitude that I had betrayed my father to save his life, but because he’d won me with two hundred foreskins, the filthiest part of our enemy I wasn’t married; I was bought. The tips of two hundred penises! Although perhaps I should have considered myself fortunate? Most women were not deemed to be worth one.

  I received a message from Abner stating that, after six years of bitter fighting – fighting which in Manasseh we had been largely spared – he had negotiated a truce with David, whose principal demand was that I should be restored to him. Neither man wasted time ascribing it to sentiment, with Abner simply reporting David's claim to the woman for whom he had paid the brutal bride-price. As Paltiel read out his words, I was plunged into the world of intrigue, duplicity and coercion that I’d hoped I had escaped forever. I had supposed myself forgotten: that I had slipped into obscurity like the unnamed women in the ancestral stories that Samuel drummed into my brothers: Cain's wife and Noah's wife and Seth's and Enoch's daughters. Should David, surrounded by his new wives and concubines, chance to remember me, I never dreamt that he would want me back, since the prohibition against a man's remarrying his wife once she had been married to somebody else was greater even than that against a wife's remarrying while her husband lived. Yet, despite his professions of piety, he showed no more qualms about breaking the Law than my father. And Abner, to whom my feelings were as trifling as an enemy's pleas, endorsed his demand, ordering me to settle my affairs and prepare to leave for Hebron within the week.

  It was twelve years since I’d last seen David and seven since my father died on Mount Gilboa. We’d received conflicting reports of his death, but the one point on which all agreed was that he had fought valiantly in the thick of the battle, even after my three brothers perished. Towards dusk he was shot by a Philistine archer, after which the reports diverged, with some saying that the arrow lodged in his chest and others that it was a mere flesh-wound in his thigh. Likewise, some said that knowing the day was lost, he begged his armour-bearer to take his sword and stab him, and when he refused, he fell on it himself; others said that when he refused, Father appealed to the watching soldiers but only an Amalekite slave was willing to kill the anointed king. That same slave then took word of his death, along with his crown, to David who, according to further reports, slew him on the spot. Why? Was it from horror at my father's death or guilt at his own defection? Or was it, as some whispered, from fear that the Amalekite would reveal the truth: that Father had simply sought help to bind his wound and the slave, in David's service, had seized the opportunity to kill him?

  The fulsome elegy David composed for my father and Jonathan was a clever ploy to distance himself from the murder. It was recited the length and breadth of the land, even reaching us here in the far north. Stumbling on Paltiel's great-nephew, Jeriah, teaching it to Merab's son, Penuel, I ordered him to stop, shocking him by my vehemence, until Paltiel explained my relationship to the dead warriors, shocking him still more by the glimpse into my past. But it wasn’t grief at my father's and brother's deaths or even disgust at David's deviousness that roused me, so much as the evidence of his abiding love for Jonathan: that the pleasure I had seen them take in each other's body was no mere extension of the pleasure that they’d taken in each other's valour or swordsmanship but the expression of a passion far deeper than David had ever felt for me. Moreover, I was sickened by his attempt to portray it as a martial ideal: a love of comrades from which, unlike the love of women, they weren’t required to abstain on the eve of battle. I wondered what his men would have thought, as they performed their rites of purification, had they known that their generals were defiling themselves in their tent.

  Either the elegy, or the memory of his youthful victories, or the band of ruffians at his command, or his new wife Abigail's influence over the Calebites, or a combination of all four served to win round the Judahite elders and he was crowned at Hebron. Meanwhile, Abner crowned Ishbaal at Mahanaim so that, after their brief unity under my father, the tribes were once again divided. Without the Urim and Thummim, which were in David's possession, or any prophet to impart the will of the Lord, many Israelites expected Abner to claim the throne for himself. Not only was he our greatest general but, given Ishbaal's waywardness, he was by far the worthiest candidate from the house of Saul. He won further esteem by his readiness to place loyalty to his cousin above personal gain. I, however, knew him to be as cunning as David. By rejecting the trappings of power while enjoying its substance, he showed that his authority didn’t derive from kinship or election or even divine favour but rather from his own strength and sword.

  That strength had waned and that sword had buckled during the lengthy war with Judah. David, eager to unite the kingdom that he himself had sundered, launched repeated raids against the northern tribes, at times leading his men in person but more often ceding command to Joab, once Abner's armour-bearer and now his fiercest foe. After six years, the conflict remained inconclusive, but it was clear, even to those of us far from the field of battle, that the Judahites had the upper hand. As ever, David attributed his success to the Lord, but he might equally have cited Dagon, since his Philistine allies had invaded Ephraim, forcing Abner to fight on two fronts. In his message to me, Abner claimed that both he and his army were exhausted by the relentless bloodshed, and I realised with a start that the man who, from my earliest childhood, had seemed as ageless as the hills of Judah, must now be seventy-five. Paltiel, who had seen him at the council of elders, maintained that he was as robust as ever and the real reason he wanted peace was his breach with Ishbaal. With touching if misplaced gallantry, he refused to elaborate, so, when he retired to bed, even more distressed by Abner's message than I was, I sought out his nephew, Teman, who had accompanied him to the council and was happy to tell me what he knew.

  ‘We were summoned to discuss the conduct of the war. Some voices, especially from Benjamin and Ephraim urged the king to sue for peace.’

  ‘So Ishbaal couldn’t even count on the backing of his own tribe?’

  ‘They’d borne the brunt of the fighting. At that point – only a few months ago – Abner was keen to prolong the hostilities. He insisted that our forces were larger, stronger and better equipped.’

  And Ishbaal?’

  ‘He barely seemed to follow the arguments. When he was called on to speak, he looked as if he were about to be chastised. He mumbled a few words of support for Abner and dried up.’

  ‘That's my brother!’

  Abner's scorn for him was palpable. But, while he deferred to him in public, we heard that things were very different when they were alone. Matters came to a head over a woman... Rizpah.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I thought you’d know.’ He floundered. ‘Ishbaal brought her with him from Gibeah.’

  ‘The concubine?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My father's concubine?’

  ‘I think so.’ He blushed.

  I hadn’t spared her a thought in years: Rizpah, whose sole purpose in life was to sow discord. The knowledge that Ishbaal had taken her with him was doubly painful when he’d fled so quickly that he’d had to leave Mother behind: Mother, whom he had vowed to defend; Mother, who had defended him throughout his childhood when the rest of us – here, I had to plead guilty – despised and derided him.

  ‘She and her two sons live with the king.’

  ‘She has sons? What about their father?’

  ‘I understood... I may have misunderstood.’ His embarrassment spread to his feet, which he shuffled. ‘I understood that they were your father's sons.’

  I started to gasp and struggled to still my breath. Did this explain Ishbaal's silence? We hadn’t seen each other since I mar
ried Paltiel and, while a part of me was grateful for his neglect, another part was offended that, with our brothers and sister dead, he had made no attempt to reach out to me. But then why contact a sister who would revive memories of his boyhood humiliation, when he had two half-brothers whose tainted blood made them consummate flatterers?

  ‘How old are they?’

  ‘I don’t know; I only saw them briefly. At a guess about nineteen and twenty. They weren’t at the council.’

  ‘I should hope not!’

  ‘But when Abner's on campaign, they’re the king's chief advisers.’

  ‘Don’t you mean lackeys?’

  ‘They seemed pleasant enough... not at all conceited. Some of the household say that, without them, the king would never attend to any business at all.’

  ‘It's all for show,’ I replied, irritated by Teman's fairmindedness and unwilling to allow Rizpah's sons a shred of integrity. Even if I were wrong and they were worthy sons of my father, there was no excuse for their mother's behaviour. Whatever his faults, Father had been a great king, whereas Ishbaal was as spineless as the slimy creatures that the twins used to slip inside his loincloth. To have transferred her affections to him so readily exposed not only her innate immodesty but that her sole concern was the dubious honour of sharing a king's bed.

  ‘So Abner demanded that Ishbaal send Rizpah away?’ I asked, relieved that, despite his overtures to David, he respected the proprieties. ‘Was he trying to erase the stain on my father's memory?’

  ‘I think he wanted her for himself.’

  ‘Abner?’

  ‘Rumours ran rife at the council, and I’ve heard more since we returned.’