How are the Mighty fallen

by Thomas Burnett Swann

  David donned his one good tunic, blue Egyptian linen embroidered with scarabs, and, at the insistence of his mother, ran a tortoiseshell comb through his red, unruly hair. He was not in the least aware of his appearance-the poppy-red hair which he and no one else in his family had inherited from Ruth, the woman of Moab; the small muscular body which made him the envy of every wrestler in Bethlehem; the eyes as blue as the waters of Lake Chinnereth. He was, in a popular phrase, “as handsome as Sin,” the Canaanite god of the moon, and as indifferent to his looks as he was fastidious in caring for his sheep, his sling, and his shepherd’s crook.

  When David arrived in camp with the cheeses and the almond cakes patiently prepared by his mother, he hoped for an enthusiastic welcome from his brothers, whom he loved, and perhaps-who could say? — a chance to enter the battle in spite of admonitions from a well-intentioned ass. After all, he had brought the sling with which he had killed a lion (small to be sure, but a killer of many sheep).

  But the brothers were less than cordial. “Must we play nursemaid to the runt even in camp?” hirsute Elihu had sighed. David, who hoped that he would grow as tall as Elihu, decided that he would grow like a trim cedar instead of a shaggy tamarisk tree.

  “Go about your business as usual, whatever that is,” he had answered, adding loftily, “I’m writing a new psalm.”

  “Write one about killing Goliath,” Ozem said dourly. “He’s down with a fever demon. You’ll know he’s risen when the earth starts to shake.”

  “I’ve heard he’s twelve feet tall-”

  “Nine.”

  “With legs like pillars in the temple Samson toppled.”

  “More like roof beams.”

  “And one big eye in the middle of his forehead.”

  “True enough.”

  “How is your tooth, Elihu?”

  “Hurts like Sheol.”

  Then, with neither thanks nor leavetaking, Elihu, Ozem, and Nethanel departed to play knucklebones with their friends.

  David did not intend to waste his visit to the camp by sitting on a pile of cloaks. Concluding that no one would care to steal such disreputable and odorous garments, he wandered among the men, carrying his lyre, his rarest possession, and explored the camp: the black sheepskin tents of Saul, Jonathan, Riapah, and Abner; the roofless encampments of the foot soldiers. In Israel, every able-bodied man was a soldier during the Philistine invasions, but the rest of the time he was a farmer, a shepherd, or an artisan. There were few Israelite merchants; commerce was left to the sea-roving Phoenicians or the desert-striding, camel-riding Bedouins, who numbered among them the Midianites and other tribes.

  “Get you home, son,” said a man with a white streak meandering through his black hair like a rivulet through a desert. He had the keen eyes of a shepherd and the air of a man who is his own best company. He looked as if he would like to be tending sheep on the slopes of Mt. Hebron. “The battle promises to go against us, and they threaten to split our forces in the hills of Ephraim and the Judah Valley. Three thousand chariots, our scouts report! And nobody knows how many foot soldiers. You know how the Philistines fight.” (Indeed, he knew how the Philistines fought; he had memorized every detail of every battle since the days of Joshua and Jericho.)

  “But you have Jonathan,” he said. Saul was a tolerable king, but he was aging and gray and given to moods which approached madness. Abner, the king’s cousin, was a great general, but he was nearly as old as Saul, that is to say fifty. It was going to be Jonathan’s battle. Three thousand chariots? Thus had Jonathan chosen a rocky terrain where the axles would crack on the rocks and the knives affixed to the wheels would blunt themselves on bindweed or thorny broom.

  “Ah, what can a boy do against a giant like Goliath?”

  “But Jonathan is not a boy!” (At twenty! Why, he was a mature young man and the captain of a thousand men! Old men liked to speak of anyone younger than themselves as “boys.”) “And I hear Goliath isn’t with the Philistines,” said David. “And his brothers”-for Goliath belonged to the family known as the Giants of Gath-“won’t fight without him.”

  “That’s true. Even giants are subject to the demons of fever, and when one of them is sick, the others panic and refuse to leave their tents. But the Philistine necromancers will doubtless exorcise the demons and he will be right out there with the chariots. If not in this battle, then the next.” (There was always a next battle. It seemed to David that Israel was engaged not in many little wars as the scribes recorded on their scrolls of parchment, but in a large and continuous war which moved from place to place and changed its name but not its, nature. It was much the same if they were fighting the Philistines or the Edomites or the Moabites. They fought to unite the Twelve Tribes of Israel, to secure the caravan routes which passed through their territory, and to gain access to the sea. Now if he were king…)

  “It will take more than Jonathan, Yahweh help the boy, to save us.”

  David withdrew as courteously as possible from this uncongenial conversation. He did not like to hear his hero regarded as less than heroic. He found a smooth black stone for a seat-perhaps it had once been an altar, though the Egyptians used such stones to make iron-and began to compose a psalm about Jonathan meeting a lion. He drew upon his own experience, but he made Jonathan’s beast a great ravening brute with yellow teeth and slavering jaws; a worthy foe for a great hero; and ended by becoming so enthralled with his tale, which was both martial and bloodthirsty, that he failed to notice the small crowd which had gathered around him. When he finished his psalm-still unpolished, of course — there was uninhibited applause from a dozen listeners. Israelites loved music. They entered a battle to the blast of a ram’s horn; they had toppled the walls of Jericho with trumpet blasts; they danced ecstatic dances to flutes when the spirit of Yahweh descended upon them; and those who forgot their own religion often participated in the fertility rites of the Canaanites-the people who had ruled the country before the explosive arrival of the Israelites-and danced until the fever in their blood drove them to lie with strange women or, a particular abomination in Yahweh’s eyes, with beardless youths as pretty as girls.

  The next man who approached David was entirely gray, but he did not seem any particular age, even to a youth of seventeen. He seemed somehow beyond age, disease, death. He stood as straight as a shepherd’s staff and his eyes were clear and blue and penetrating and his tunic was spotless and neatly spun of Egyptian flax. At first David mistook him for Saul, whom he had never seen close at hand (he never saw anybody important in Bethlehem).

  Instinctively he fell to his knees. The man smiled; it was a kindly smile. There was a sadness about him, as if he had loved the wrong woman; David imagined him being scorned by a haughty Egyptian princess and sorrowing for her until he died. It did not occur to him that the man might simply be a farmer-turned-soldier like Saul who hated to kill.

  “Stand up, boy. I’m not Saul, I’m Abner, the king’s cousin. But I’ve come from Saul, who would like to hear you play. He caught some snatches of your song-something about a lion, was it? — and he wished for more.”

  “But I’m only a shepherd,” David cried. “How can I play for a king?”

  “You are a shepherd, it may be, but you are also a musician with a rare gift. The king is-how shall I say? — troubled. You might ease his spirit.‘

  David was, distinctly disappointed with Saul’s tent Somehow he had expected to find that the black sheepskin walls concealed the riches of an Egyptian palace, with naked temptresses languishing on marble couches, and a soft fountain spraying the air with myrrh, and trophies of battle, a human head on a stake, perhaps, beside the door. But it was, after all, only a warrior’s tent and one which was furnished with a sparseness amounting to asceticism. A tired old man, clad in a gray robe without adornments, reclined on a wooden couch with no cushions, and a woman, painted but not provocative, bovine in fact, lounged at his feet. Saul’s wife, of course, was neither in the camp nor in the tent Since Rizpah
had replaced her in Saul’s affections, she had remained in the town of Gibeah, the capital, revered by her people even while she was rejected by her husband. At David’s entrance, Saul lifted his head and said, both lucidly and kindly, “You’re the young musician I heard. Will you play for me?” Then his head, with its sharp pointed beard, sank onto his chest and cobwebs seemed to pass over his eyes. He looked like a man exhausted with fever.

  David looked at Abner. “What shall I play, my lord?”

  “You may dispense with the ‘lord,’” Abner said. “Play something about Yahweh and his forgiveness. The king has great fear of his god.”

  “Play something about Yahweh,” Rizpah echoed, with the look of a ruminating cow. “Saul feels he has disappointed his god. He has not been harsh enough toward the enemies of Israel.”

  David and the entire country knew that when Saul was bidden by Samuel to smite the Amalekites and spare neither man nor woman nor child, he spared King Agag and it remained for Samuel to execute the Lord’s command.

  Such a stupid woman, thought David. How could Saul choose her above Ahinoam? Once only had he seen the queen and thought her carven from gold, so still and perfect she seemed, and yet with the heart of a woman, for he had seen her weep. (A boy with his herds, he had seen a tall, beautiful lady walking in the hills near Bethlehem. He had taken her for a goddess and feared to show his face. It was after Saul had sent her from his bed.)

  David played a psalm which he had learned in his childhood. He played well because he pitied the king:

  “Like as a father pitieth his children,

  So the Lord pitieth them that fear him.

  For he knoweth our frame;

  He remembereth that we are dust.

  As for man, his days are as grass;

  As a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.

  For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone;

  And the place thereof shall know it no more…“

  At first there was no response from anyone in the tent. He looked around him with sudden panic; he felt as if a lion, unseen but sensed, were poised to spring upon his flocks. How had a lowly shepherd from Bethlehem presumed to play for the king of Israel? It was then that Rizpah began to weep and Saul raised his head. The king stared fixedly at David through eyes no longer clouded; indeed, they had become judging, calculating, concluding. He was a basically simple man, David decided, forced by the duties of kingship into complexities which would baffle the wisest of pharaohs. He must lead an army; he must rule a court; he must pacify the Lord and try to placate Samuel. Now, thought David, humble beneath the cool appraising stare, he must even judge a shepherd’s performance with a lyre.

  “You must play for me again,” said the king.

  “I have to return to my father tomorrow,” said David. “He sent me here to bring some cakes and cheeses to my brothers.”

  “Your father, you say? Jesse of Bethlehem, is he not? I know him well. A good and loyal subject who has sent me three of his sons. Can he not spare a fourth to please his king?”

  David reconsidered the invitation. “I have four other brothers at home, and a sister to help my mother.” The chance to hurl a spear as well as play the lyre was irresistible. “It may be-”

  “Consider it settled,” said the king. He smiled, and the perfect white teeth looked strangely young in the scarred and aging face. The pointed beard usually gave him a fearsome aspect, but now he appeared indulgent, Yahweh after he had fashioned the earth and taken his ease on the Seventh Day.

  “He is too young to fight,” Abner said firmly.

  “I have need of an armorbearer. Let him first learn his duties in the camp. Only then shall he go into battle. Meanwhile, he can play his lyre for me in the evenings.”

  Rizpah smiled winningly-her mouth was large and her teeth were blackened from chewing betel nuts-and she offered David a tarnished silver bracelet which she stripped from her wrist. There were no coins in Israel; business transactions were made on the basis of produce, copper ingots called shekels, or bracelets of metal and stones. In short, she was paying him for a performance.

  David shook his head. “I did not play for hire.”

  Abner smiled and clapped him on the back. “Rizpah intended a gift, not a payment. But young boys, especially armorbearers to kings, need tunics and sandals more than bracelets.” He ushered him from the tent. “Later we will find you a corner to sleep in. And fresh garments. Go now and get your things. You have pleased the king greatly. But always remember. His moods are as changeable as the desert-and as dangerous.”

  “I’m not afraid. Will I get to meet Jonathan?”

  “Jonathan is often with his father. He will no doubt help to instruct you in your duties.”

  “I would like that,” David said.

  “Would you?” said Abner, musing. “Jonathan has need of friends.”

  “But he can have any friend he chooses. He’s the hero of Israel!”

  “It is very lonely to be a hero, especially at the age of twenty. He needs someone who will talk to him and not up to him.”

  – Thus David became Saul’s armorbearer, but before he had learned to fight, the battle of Michmash was fought and won by Jonathan’s stratagem and Abner’s strength and only a lack of supply wagons and chariots prevented the Israelites from pursuing their foe to the sea. After the battle, David cleaned the iron-tipped spears of the king and his son. The metal was new to Israel, but the two spears had been captured from the Philistines.

  “Enough of that,” said the king. “A child can clean a spear. Only David sings like Gabriel.”

  He sang the psalm which he had written for Jonathan, and Saul seemed immensely pleased to hear his son applauded as the hero of such an adventure. Even as he sang, David attempted to further understand his king: You would rather be flailing wheat on your boyhood farm than ruling a court. It is neither pride nor vanity which drives you, but dedication. You feel that you have inherited the mantle of Joshua and Gideon and must recapture the Ark of the Tabernacle and restore the glory of Israel. Thus your pride in Jonathan and thus, because you are human, your preference for a harlot over a queen, since the one time when you can be a simple man instead of Yahweh’s emissary is in the arms of Rizpah.

  David’s brothers made fun of him when, as they said, he “caught a man in a tent” and evaluated him to the last precise detail of appearance and character. But David’s tents were carefully raised and staked.

  “Jonathan will be honored by your song,” said the king.

  “He is a great warrior, is he not?”

  “The best in my army next to Abner.”

  “I envy him then.”

  “Don’t.”

  The word was abrupt and unanswerable. The king, seeing David’s surprise, tried to explain his terse command.

  “Great warriors may become great victims. The enemy seek them out in the press of battle. Jonathan is very young. If he should die, all of Israel would mourn him like a bereaved maiden.”

  But David sensed another meaning behind the words. Jonathan unenviable? (7 will meet him and judge for myself if he is truly great and truly fortunate.) Leaving the tent when Ahinoam arrived to await her son, he encountered a young man with a dusty tunic and the face of a god.

  Even through the dust, David discerned the torrent of golden hair, brighter than sunlight on a wave; the faintly slanted eyes, blue as the waters around the Misty Isles (so landlocked David imagined); the perfect lips, faintly pink like the lip of the conch shells used by the Philistines as horns to begin a charge. (Strange to think of him in terms of the sea, I have never been to the coast.)

  He discerned too a surprising weakness in the famous young warrior. It was neither moral nor ethical; it was not a shifty eye or averted gaze. Rather, there was a fragility about him; he was like a purple murex with its delicate spines and its exquisite dyes. He is too beautiful, David decided. He has about him the transience of perfection. Being already perfect, he cannot be improved, he can only
be broken.

  “You are David,” said Jonathan. His smile would have warmed Goliath. “A demon of fever kept me in my tent before the battle. But I have heard of you.”

  “How did you know me?”

  “By your lyre, of course. But most of all by your face. Your red hair is the talk of the camp. It is like the hills of Judah at sunrise.” Israelite men, unlike the Philistines, did-not as a rule speak of masculine beauty; only of skill or courage or strength. “My father says you play like an angel. Won’t you stay now and play for me too?”

  “No-no,” David faltered. “The queen, your mother, is waiting for you.” Never had he wanted so much to stay. Never had he wanted so much to flee. He is like Ahinoam, he thought, with one difference. She, though rejected, remains a queen in the citadel of her pride. He is without defenses in his gentleness. Thus, it is Jonathan who is the greater threat to me.

  Jonathan laid a lightly restraining hand on David’s shoulder.

  “Soon then?” The fingers were slender and supple. There were no calluses, yet the hand had held a sword which had smitten many Philistines and would, it was hoped, smite Goliath when the giant returned to the fray.

  “Soon. Now you must go to your mother.”

  He fled from Jonathan’s presence, but it was not easy to flee from his spirit…

  He met his brothers where he had been appointed to guard their cloaks. Elihu grumbled. “Our brother is a better watcher of sheep than sheepskins.”

  David was not in a mood for criticism. His brothers had neglected him when he arrived in the camp. Quite on his own he had become the king’s armorbearer, met a queen, and befriended a prince. Now he would repay them. Just as he never forgot a kindness, he never ignored a slight.