“I said nothing, I swear. Not a word.”
“You could have said No!”
“Hell, how could I? The boy was just about to go fight the Philistine, and he needed to hold on to some hope, some delicious memory, which is when he mentioned you—”
“But daddy,” she might say, leaning into the throne, her lips puckered to kiss his hand, “David is cute, but you and I, we know one thing: he comes from a long line of nobodies!”
“So do I.”
“Which is all the more reason to find me a better suitor, one who comes recommended, with certified nobility!”
“You’re right. But now it’s too late. The boy knows you’re promised to him. I’ve given my word already—”
“No, not really,” she might say, “what you’ve given him is your silence.”
“For a king, that’s just as binding,” I hope he would say.
I erase the image of Merav from my mind, because I trust she would come around, sooner or later, to embrace me. I can hardly believe my good fortune! What luck, what happiness! The king’s silence is his seal of approval. I have been accepted into the royal family. If I live, I will be known across the land as the husband of a princess. As such I will have no legacy of my own.
What was I thinking? I mean, why should I marry her? Merav is lovely, but this ill-conceived union with her may block my path to power. Granted, it may give me the dubious honor of becoming a royal nobody. Is that all there is, for me?
I know I will have to think long and hard about this. But I have no time to think, not right now.
*
The king peers into my eyes.
“You don’t look so good,” he says.
To my amazement Saul has removed his armor, and with his own hands he is fitting it now across my chest. It is a great honor, to be sure. I have never heard of such a thing happening to any other commoner. It makes me wonder what goes on in his mind. Somehow I doubt he would shed a tear over losing his court jester. Would he?
Is he moved, suddenly, to pity, seeing me on my way out there, to face the Philistine all by myself? Does he think of me—in his heart of hearts—as family, already? Does he regard me as a son, someone he adores even better than his own? Why else would he want to protect me? Why would he shield me in such an unusual way? I have heard of giving someone the shirt off your back—but never did I imagine giving someone your armor.
“Put your arm through,” the king instructs me. “Turn around. Stand still, now.”
To which I say, “I’m trying. Really, I’m doing my best.”
The thing is in place, and now it weighs me down. I glance at the inscription, right down here on this metallic surface, which is bathed in morning light. Every letter is brightly aglow. Even upside down, I know what it says: The House of Kish. This inscription makes me realize one thing: if I live, my identity would be taken away, my actions—ignored. They would go unrecorded in the hands of the historians in his court.
After all, they are in his employ. Alas, to them I am no one special, nothing but a foot soldier. My moment of bravery—and my entire life, even the fact of my existence—would melt away, they would dissolve into his. A nameless husband of his daughter, that would be me.
Which in a way, may bring me a step closer to him. In time—if each and every one of a long list of his heirs meets with some trouble—I may be in grasp of his crown.
If I live.
“Come on! Let’s go,” he says.
I snap out of my thoughts. “Go where?”
In place of an answer he asks, “Want a ride?”
At that, his stallion shakes its head vigorously and gives a snort of disgust.
“There, there,” mutters the king, patting its mane fondly as if the two of them have a secret understanding between them. He checks its girth so it is not too loose and not too snug for riding. Then he gives me a hint, Mount it.
“Who, me?”
“Yes, you!”
With that, Saul thrusts a helmet into my hands. It is a thing of beauty, not one of those makeshift pots which our soldiers bang into shape, somehow, to fit their heads—but a real contraption, complete with a nose guard and with eye slits. It is made of copper, because unlike the Philistine blacksmiths, ours have not yet learned the secret of mixing it with tin, to attain the hardness of bronze. Having been exposed to air, this armor is tarnished red. I bend into it and at once, a metallic smell hits me. My head is swallowed whole inside the thing.
The world goes dark, until I find a couple of blurry lights seeping in from the top of the helmet. With great effort I wiggle my head, banging it here and there against the inner surface. At last I manage to position my eyes under its slits, more or less. I mean, more less than more. The world has brightened—but now, in a full light, it seems a bit crooked.
I can barely see him.
“Well?” says his voice out there, sounding as if it is coming from an echo’s echo. “Straighten up already!”
Somehow I manage to do it.
“It’s heavy,” I complain.
“Deal with it,” counters the king. “What I wear is much heavier. Don’t envy me the crown.”
With a hard pull he fastens my chinstrap, then peers into my eye slits with a sharp look, as if he could read my mind even through this mask.
“Prepare yourself,” he says.
“I’m ready,” say I.
To which he raises an eyebrow, “Are you?”
It is then that I start to sweat under the metallic surface. I tell myself that it must be because of the sun, which is starting to rise, starting to sizzle overhead.
The king steps back from me. He holds onto the right stirrup of the stallion, and tells me to place my foot onto the left one. I lean in, placing my weight into it.
“Swing your right leg up, up and over,” he instructs me. When I nearly tip over the horse's back, he adds, “Careful! Don’t kick it with your toe!”
I try to lower myself into the saddle—but in spite of my repeated attempts, the weight of the armor makes me unbalanced.
“Sure thing,” I mumble, and flop heavily.
“There,” he steadies the horse. “Would you believe it? At last, you’re in the saddle.”
“Am I?”
A bit shaken I look down at him, which is a new angle for me. I half-expect him to hand over the reins. Instead, he keeps holding them out of my reach, in his fist.
Wading on foot through puddles and mud, the king starts leading his stallion, and me on its back, towards the path going down into the valley. With every step I can spot how his crown—so close at hand, at this moment—is dancing on his head.
On our way we pass by a group of our soldiers. They are breaking bread. By its shape I recognize it: this is my mother’s signature loaf, which I have carried here earlier, and handed over to my brothers.
Startled, they snap to attention at the sight of the king. Perhaps they are wondering about his companion. Who, they ask each other, is this mysterious stranger, riding so magnificently upon his stallion, with a shining armor and a hidden face?
In a blink I spot my brother among them. He seems a bit confused.
“Eliab,” I cry out.
Yet, no one can guess that it has been a cry, because my voice comes out muffled.
With a big show of servitude, he bows deeply before me, before the king, before me again, scraping the ground each and every time.
By the expression on his face, he seems not recognize who I am, perhaps because of my ridiculous mask. But the sight of my clothes, peeking out under the bottom of the armor, must be familiar to him, and for some reason, it gives him the shivers. His jaw drops, bread crumbs and all, and he claps a hand over it. His eyes are bulging with dread.
I sit stiff, caged in copper. I cannot signal to him, cannot even keep my eye slits on him, as the horse carries me forward. But this I know: Eliab is in shock—and burning here, in this metallic furnace, so am I. Somehow I know what he must be thinking at this moment.<
br />
As a matter of habit, everyone here carries a bag full of loot, some of which has been lifted from the corpses of the enemy, and some—from the corpses of our own. Everyone here finds it justified, or at least necessary, to enjoy the plunder, and to accept the gifts of luck. Why? Because life is short, tough, and uncertain. So after every battle, they mend ill-fitting shirts, coats, and shoes that used to belong to others. They stuff their pockets full with coins inherited from the dead, which they, the dead, had inherited from others.
Eliab has survived numerous skirmishes, and he brags, from time to time, about his collection of the spoils of war. Naturally, the clothes I am wearing on my back make him jump to the wrong conclusion.
I hear his tearful voice from behind.
“I’ll be damned,” he wails in astonishment. “The little rascal’s gone! Oh David, David... Why, why did you have to be such a smart ass, why did you dare come here, to the front... You should’ve stayed with mom...”
And before I can think of a way to let him know I am still here, in the realm of the living, he goes on to moan, “Now it’s all my fault! What the hell shall I do, what shall I tell her?”
I wish I could shout back, What’s the difference? No matter what you say, she’ll kill you anyway!
But I keep my silence, not only because my voice would be muffled if I try to make a sound—but because he is right. Who knows if I am going to survive this day. Perhaps, looking at the masked stranger riding down that path, he had a premonition of what is about to happen, of my death waiting patiently to receive me.
I can feel its presence down there, under the mist covering the bottom of the valley.
My brother is out of earshot by now. No longer can I hear him. By and by a big distance has opened between us. Here starts a slippery, steep descent. Going down the path—first around this twist, then another—I get a closer and more detailed view of the Philistine camp. And I hear clearly, descending into this amphitheater, the sound of the multitudes.
And just here ahead of me, Saul struggles to find a firm foothold. The crown has been slipping from his head, so now he has removed it, to prevent the thing from tipping accidentally and slipping off him into the mud. I find his bare head quite amusing, especially the bald spot surrounded by the henna-died ringlets of hair. I am glad that he cannot see the expression on my face.
“What’s that? Did you say something?” he asks, with that sharp perception that is granted, by a divine power, only to madmen.
“No,” say I.
“Oh,” he utters. “I hear things, sometimes. Must’ve been mistaken, then.”
With each step down into depth of the abyss, the skylines of both sides of the valley grow higher and higher, farther and farther from us. Tipped by a golden lining of sunlight, they seem to soar over our heads.
Wishing I could snap out of this tight clasp of metal, I cling to the neck of the stallion. If only I could feel its mane blowing across my chin, mouth, and cheeks... If only I could distract myself—even for a second—from this plunge, which leads me into the unknown...
All of a sudden, the king stumbles over something.
By the sound, which rises to a quiver in the air, I know instantly what it is. Saul casts a look over his shoulder to read my face—but the helmet, which has masked my smile a moment ago, now masks my sudden pang of recognition, of sorrow.
“Oh hell! It’s broken,” he says, picking the thing up, the thing that used to be my lyre.
“No wonder,” I retort, letting him hear the note of blame in my voice. “With all due respect, this is your doing... You’ve flung it out, with full force, from my hands.”
A bit slyly, he goes, “So? You think you’ll need it?”
And I say, “You better take good care of it. This lyre, what remains of it, is the best of me. It’s my music.”
I know he can hear the tremble in my voice, because he holds back from answering.
“Dead or alive,” I promise, “I’ll be back to take it from your hand.”
And with a shudder, he whispers, “I know you will.”
*
The quiver in the air has subsided. Caught in my ear is a new note, this one rolling down and over all the way from the other side of the valley. At the sound of it something comes over the stallion. It rises in fright upon its hind legs, which gives the extra bit of encouragement I need to dismount it. I do so in a hurry, with an incredible leap, landing smack into a puddle with a big splash.
The king wipes the mud from his cloak. He is biting his lips, biting them hard so as not to say a thing, not to express any anger, because he knows he might regret it, later. To him I am a dead man already.
Again, the sound.
I blurt out, “What was that?”
And he says, “This is how it begins. The same thing, every damn morning.”
Which tells me nothing. So I turn my eye slits away from him, and bring the sight, somehow, into view and into focus. There, opposite us, at the top of the other side of the valley, glittering in the sun, stands an armor.
It is made of metal plates, joined together in a flexible manner, so that despite its weight, some agility would be still possible in battle. This manner was invented, so I hear, by Philistine blacksmiths. Everyone knows they are superior to ours.
The armor is capped by a helmet—but unlike mine, his is made of bronze. Slung between his shoulders is a sharp javelin, and the shaft of his spear seems as big as a weaver’s beam.
He stands there motionless for a moment. His presence dominates the entire landscape that lies below his feet. No need for Saul to tell me who this is. Goliath of Gath.
The Making of History
Chapter 8
What lurks in the heart of a doomed man? What is the last thought to cross his mind? I have often wondered about it, and now that I am about to face Goliath, now that I have awakened to a sense of my mortality, I think I know the answer, which is really a question: what would be left of me? I mean, in the days, years, and generations to come, long after I am gone, how would my story be told?
I imagine that starting tomorrow, our court historians would compete to outdo each other. They would try to shed the most dramatic light on this story, which is yet to happen right here, right now in the Valley of Elah. No doubt they would pile it on. The scribes would jot down such exaggerations, scribble them with such flowery, overblown, fanciful words as would make any normal person blush in shame.
Can you blame them? They would have to visit the site, study every aspect of its geography and topography, and understand the military implications these might bear upon the battle. They would have to interview witnesses, and validate the reliability of their sources.
The historians would then have to narrow down conflicting accounts of this event, come up with a unified version, and make sure it gets a stamp of approval from the royal official, the one who reports directly to the throne—or else, who knows? They may be sent to spend the rest of their lives in prison, or worse, they might be tortured. Either way, the offensive version would be stricken off from the books.
Reading the scriptures back in the court I noticed, from time to time, double and triple takes on the same event, which made me wonder: which version was the official one, and which—the truth?
And why would the facts keep coming back to haunt us? Does truth possess some magic power, like a bad coin? And for the historians who dared record it, how dearly did they pay for their courage? What is the cost of candor?
“Tell us everything about the Philistine,” the royal official would instruct them. “Make sure to describe the weight of equipment, and his height.”
“Sure, no problem,” the historians would say, with a tone of uneasy obedience. After which they would turn around, and ask the survivors of the battle, “Tell us everything about the Philistine, so we may know it as well as you do.”
I peer across the valley at Goliath, and can already imagine the papyrus unfurling and the ink flowing, one line after anot
her across its surface.
His equipment? The scribes would estimate his armor to weigh five thousand shekels of bronze, or more, and the head of his spear—six hundred shekels of iron, or more. There would be no need to place these objects on a scale, because putting these numbers in writing fixes them forever. Magically, it makes them precise beyond measure.
His height? One historian would write that he stood four cubits and a span, the next one would increase it, on a whim, to six cubits and a span, or more, which seems inflated to me, because to my surprise, my own impression of Goliath is quite different.
*
Perhaps the distance between us, I mean, the way distance shrinks things and wraps them safely away, convinces me somehow that he is smaller than I have previously expected. From where I stand, I give him no more than three cubits, tops.
And there, in front of him, bent over under the burden of a large shield, walks his arms bearer, a Philistine boy.
Now the boy hands him some object, which I cannot quite figure out at first. A Trumpet? A Bullhorn, perhaps?
No matter. Goliath shoves the thing aside. He has no use for it. He fills his lungs with air, after which he give a blood curdling howl, which he follows with more of the same.
At once, echoes are howling wildly every which way around us, which scares even the boldest birds, the birds of prey. With a powerful explosion, sooty black plumage beats the air, and it is flickering all around us.
Vultures spread their broad wings and shoot up from the bottom of the valley, where until now they have been tending to their own business, pecking at the carcasses of the fallen. Up they soar, up and away, and at once, echoes of flapping and fluttering suck the air around us.
Goliath goes on howling at great length. Alas, he has neglected to bring a translator with him, to get the particulars of his message across. I can barely understand him, not only because of these foreign cackles in his language—but because of the stupid helmet I wear, which presses against my ears.
Rise to Power (The David Chronicles) (Volume 1) Page 6