Swordless David knelt beside the stream and gathered five smooth stones, drying and weighing each in his hand before he placed it in his pouch. Jagged stones would have been more wounding, but smooth ones were more predictable in their flight and, ultimately, more lethal.
“A slingshot!” cried Saul. “Why, that’s a child’s toy. You forget you’re no longer a shepherd boy.”
The Assyrians never fight without their slingers,“ David reminded the king. He was more knowledgeable about Assyrian armies than about his father’s herd. Also, Egyptian, Edomite, Ammonite, and Midianite, to say nothing of Philistine. ”Their missiles are nothing more than baked clay pellets, and yet they’re conquering the Babylonians. But river stones are harder and deadlier. We say in Bethlehem that a Benjamite can sling a stone at a hare and catch him as he jumps.“
Saul shrugged with weary resignation. “Well, then, fight your giant. I have no wish to watch the slaughter.” He turned and stalked toward his tent, to “cleanse his robe,” according to an old expression, of the ill-omened affair. Rizpah, with a wistful look at David and the ghost of a smile, followed her lord. Ahinoam remained with David.
“If your river stones fail,” she said, “use this. It is small but very hard. Such stones hold the Lady’s magic.” She gave him Jonathan’s bee-shaped tourmaline.
He fondled it carefully and“ judged its weight. Too light, he thought, but I must please her because she is sad, she and Jonathan. They expect me to die.
“And David, remember the sea.”
He did not question the cryptic advice, but knelt and kissed her hand. (Such small hands for one so ripe. Hands like butterflies. To press them would be to wound them. How white they are! Are they covered with magic dust like a butterfly wing?)
He rose and looked into her eyes and wanted to cry like a little boy and be held and comforted by this goddess, this queen, this woman who seemed to him the Great Mother, the universal comforter.
“Ask Jonathan to wish me well,” he said.
“May the Lady walk with both of you, and may the two of you soon walk together.” She smoothed his ruffled hair and the gesture seemed strangely poignant at such a time; a trifle yet touching. “I am going to watch your victory.”
“Nobody else is going to watch me,” he said. “They think I’m a mosquito attacking an elephant. Did you ever hear such a silence?”
“Look around you,” she said. “It is the silence of watchfulness.”
They might have been turned into salt, these Israelites, like Lot’s unfortunate wife. No one stirred a fire, no one ate, no one polished a blade or hammered a tent peg; the army physician had dropped his herbal bag; one-armed Caspir knelt beside his blanket and looked to Ahinoam with wordless and worshipful sympathy; and in that hushed expectancy David could read man’s eternal hope that, while kingdoms rise and fall, while chaos coalesces into gods and worlds, and then reclaims them, miracles remain, magic endures, sometimes the small prevail, the large are devoured by the dust and the worm.
Across the stream the Philistines watched him with an equal hush. A curious division showed in their shaven faces. Goliath fought in their place; Goliath could win the war for them. But they clearly despised the giant and admired the lad who dared to fight him. What had Ahinoam said? “The Philistines are not a wicked race. They are dreamers and artists who are forced to bear arms by ambitious lords.” If he were king, he would try to make peace with them. If he were king… It suddenly seemed to him that to be the king of Israel was the highest dream he could dream. Except to be loved by Jonathan. Thus did the several Davids war in the single boy.
He knelt and discarded his sandals-his tough feet, so he thought, needed no protection-and waded into the stream. But every nerve was sensitized to the point of pain. He felt the rocks like nettles… the chill of the water… a fish against his ankle. He stumbled and fell to his knees and the water slapped his face; rose and climbed the bank and stared at the staring faces of ten thousand men.
He stood in a meadow of chrysanthemums. Beyond him lay the flowerlike tents of the Philistines, their owners standing in groups to watch the fight, helmeted with their purple plumes, holding their iron-tipped spears; expectant of victory, but-hesitant? Doubting their own redoubtable champion? Remembering, perhaps, Jonathan at Michmash. Remembering certainly the wrath of Yahweh when they stole his Ark. Warriors, these men, but preferring peace. Seashore and sea-grapes… gardens where mulberry trees delighted the bee and the wasp… white palaces with crimson columns… dreamers and artists.
Goliath, guarded by his armorbearer, pretended to drowse beneath a terebinth tree. His jaw hung slack; his head lolled on his shoulder; he looked more absurd than threatening.
But the single eye fluttered and watched…
“All right, Big Mouth,” David shouted. “You’ve got your champion.”
Goliath stared first at David and then over his head, probably taking the boy for an armorbearer to a seasoned warrior, Abner or even Saul.
“Get up, One Eye, or I'll smite you where you sit!”
Goliath recognized his adversary and began to laugh. His laughter resembled the yelp of hyenas around a corpse.
“Am I a dog that you come to me with a sling? Cursed be your Yahweh that he can’t find a champion more worthy of me. I will give your flesh to the vultures and the lions.”
“You’ve cursed the wrong god,” cried David, secretly wishing that the giant had cursed the Lady and alerted her to the plight of a shepherd boy. “It was Yahweh who sent a pestilence on the Philistines when they stole his Ark. And who do you think it was who opened the Red Sea and-” what was another miracle to dismay a giant? — “afflicted Pharaoh with a thousand boils?”
Goliath yawned and scratched his back against the tree. “Come closer, mosquito. I can hardly hear you buzz.” He was still out of David’s range, and the closer David approached him, the hillier grew the ground, the harder to climb and cast with accuracy.
“Like Sheol I’ll come to you!” cried David. “I won’t take another step till you leave your tree.”
Ahinoam’s voice rang silkenly over the stream to Goliath. “I have heard,” she said, “that your mother was a Gorgon and your father a squid instead of a god. The combination is unfortunate, to say the least. You win your battles by ugliness, not by prowess. Like a Gorgon’s head, the sight of you turns men to stone. Or perhaps your odor overpowers their senses. Once you threatened to break the back of my son Jonathan. Now you threaten his friend David. Either rise and meet him or skulk away to your brothers in high-walled Gath.”
Goliath erupted to his feet A confusion of flesh and armor became a single and formidable being. The absurdity became a killer. He wore a brass helmet and a coat of mail; the staff of his iron-tipped spear was as large as a weaver’s beam. Six hundred shekels it must have weighed. His striding feet were an earthquake, the terebinth tree shed leaves on the jungle of his hair. He smelled like a beached and rotting whale. Even David, whose nostrils were used to sheep dung and the blood of slaughtered lambs, choked and held his breath.
Goliath seized his shield from his armorbearer and shoved the boy to the ground.
“Be quicker, brat,” he snarled.
Indeed, the “brat” was too slow. Goliath had come within range of David’s sling; he did not have time to raise his shield. By now David had obliterated all distractions, sounds, sights, and scents from his mind. His body obeyed him instantly and automatically; his sling whistled in an arc beside him, he twisted his wrist with the delicacy and deftness of a cutpurse; the stone wooshed through the air… fast… straight… and struck the giant directly above his eye.
Such a shot would have crushed the skull of a normal man. Goliath touched his head, more in surprise than pain. He had not expected the blow. The mosquito had a sting. He had taken the stone a hundred paces from David; he came at the boy like a wind devil out of the hills.
David’s arm became a continuous arc; stone followed stone, only to strike the impenet
rable shield and fall uselessly to the ground. Four shots; four useless hits; and the giant engulfed him like a tidal wave, snatched his stream-wet arm but slipped and caught him by the edge of his tunic; flung him into the air like a bit of flotsam, a lost and battered oar.
He could have killed me at once with his spear, thought David. He wishes to play with me. I am the minnow to his shark. At least I shall nip his fins before he devours me.
(“And David… remember the sea…”)
He who had never swum except in rivers, never in the salty expanses of the Great Green Sea, remembered that the sea supports as well as drowns and gave himself willingly to the currents of the air. I am a dolphin, he thought A tarpon… a flying fish… the young Dagon, swift to ride the waves. And when I alight on the ground I will not be tense and broken but ready to rise again and climb, if necessary, the buoyant air.
He fell in a clump of wild chrysanthemums. The flowers softened his fall; relaxed and agile, he felt as if he had floated to the bottom of the sea. He felt an overwhelming urge to dream among the chrysanthemums. Sea anemones… blue currents laving his tired limbs… dolphins to ease and protect him.
Goliath jolted him put of his deadly lassitude. Here was the shark. Here was the killer. He must get to his feet and search for other stones. He had turned the air into sea and softened his fall, but he must not drown.
Goliath raised his foot. He is going to fulfill his threat. He is going to trample me. 1 can roll. I can rise, but where can I flee to escape his crushing boot? Before he had fought the lion, he had dreaded to lose the light of the sun, the embrace of virgins, the power of music, the solitary hill beneath the harvest moon. He had grieved until wrath had made him strong. Now, he was more than a sweet-singing shepherd boy, he was armorbearer to Saul, friend to the son of Saul. Jona than, Jonathan, must I await you in Sheol, where dust mingles with dust and shadows may meet but never touch?
Why did the raised boot not complete its descent? Why did the monster freeze in his final, fatal blow? Why did confusion, yes, and even fear wrinkle the glaring eye? (Jonathan’s tent… the shifting shapes in his arms… the sheep… the Nereid… the green magic of Caphtor… and the exquisite gift of time…) They have lent me their magic, he thought, Ahinoam and Jonathan. Their metamorphoses. I am changing before Goliath’s eye. Who can say what horror he sees in my place? What does he fear the most? The sight of his own face. He sees me as his own reflection in a stream. “I will not die!” The words were a trumpet call. He fitted his last stone, Jonathan’s tourmaline, into his sling and somehow, propped on his other arm, flung the stone awkwardly upward and toward the bewildered eye.
I have missed, he thought, or done him no harm with so light a shot. He stands above me frozen like an Assyrian statue. Stone; stony and heartless. No welt has appeared on his brow. His boot will complete its descent and grind me into the flowers. The earth exulted with Goliath’s fall.
CHAPTER SEVEN
David approached the entrance to Jonathan’s tent, waving the grisly relic of his triumph. He had forgotten to recover his sandals; his hair was a dusty whirlwind atop his head. His hands and arms dripped gore. Warriors clamored around him to beg for a lock of Goliath’s hair, or his spear, or his sword, or the red eye which, though embedded with Jonathan’s tourmaline, still glared wickedly from the severed head. His brothers chanted his name like a conjuration: “David, David, David…”
“It is Samson come again!”
“Beware of Delilahs, little brother!”
“You’ve put them to route, the whole idolatrous army! They’re not even taking their tents.”
Why, even the king was clapping him on the shoulder and shouting, “Armorbearer no more! I’ll make you the captain of a thousand men. The youngest in all of Israel!”
“Jonathan,” he cried, exploding into the tent without even answering Saul. “You won’t have to fight Goliath!” I am drunk, he thought, of pomegranate wine. I have taken a virgin or worshipped the Lady at one of her harvest festivals. Now is the triumph of triumphs. Now I have come to Jonathan to give him the victory, for he has fought with me and through me, and he is truly the victor.
Jonathan raised his head and stared at him with blank, unblinking eyes. He parted his lips as if he wished to speak, but succumbed to a wave of nausea, repeated and sudden; he retched and gasped and crouched like a sick old man.
Yahweh preserve me, thought David. Insensitive brat that I am, I have brought a Cyclops’ head to an ailing prince who despises war and refuses to kill a bee. He backed out of the tent and heaved the head into the groping hands of the soldiers. They would doubtless impale it on a stake and parade it up and down the stream before the few Philistines who had not yet fled toward the sea.
He waded into the stream and, using sand from the bank, carefully washed the blood from his arms and hands. Fortunately, his tunic, the gift from Jonathan, was free of blood. Cleansed of gore if not of grime, he returned to the prince’s tent with hesitant steps.
Ahinoam and Saul had joined their son. “You are not to blame,” she whispered to David. “Whatever demons torture him now, you will know how to exorcise them.”
She looked as young as her daughter Michal, but her wise sad eyes bespoke another age and other lands; poets had sung her, kings had loved her to their destruction. (“Pomegranates are my lady’s breasts, a hyacinth her hair…” He would write a psalm to her; he too would have loved her except for Jonathan.)
“Come, Saul. Leave them together. Too many people will weary Jonathan. It is David’s right to be with him now.” “If David could play a psalm of victory…” “Another time.” She led him from the tent.
David sat on the edge of Jonathan’s couch and tried to ignore the babble of voices beyond the goatskin walls.
“Still angry with me, little friend?”
Jonathan was taller by hah0 a head than David, but David sometimes thought of him as a little boy: his tent, for example, with the carved animals and the painted blocks. It was. almost as if, obeying his father and becoming a fine warrior even though he hated to fight, he had resolutely held to a part of his life when he had been neither warrior nor hero but simply a child with toys.
Jonathan shook his head. “I was never angry with you.” The yellow hair, uncombed for days, tumbled over his eyes and gave him the look of his own rumpled bear.
David took his hand. “I shouldn’t have shown you the head. It’s no wonder it made you sick.”
“I’ve been fighting for my father since I was fourteen. I’m used to such sights.”
“Then why were you sick?” demanded David. He was learning to exercise subtlety with Saul, but Jonathan and Ahinoam could read his heart He must not evade them, though Jonathan evaded him. He must ask whatever questions troubled his heart, and Jonathan troubled him more than Goliath.
“Because you might have been killed. Because you had saved my life.”
“Do you mean you feel you owe me a debt of gratitude, and that’s a burden to you?” He knew that among the Midianites and certain other peoples a man whose life had been saved became the servant of his savior.
“It wasn’t that I felt a debt. I don’t know what I felt.”
“You were angry with me even before I fought Goliath, weren’t you?” David asked, trying to follow the intricacies of Jonathan’s heart. It was a heart whose innocence was baffling and labyrinthine. “I didn’t know why, but I knew you were. Maybe you got sick because you were ashamed of yourself for not having had a reason. When I brought you the head, it wasn’t that I shocked you, it was that you knew I was-I was — ” eloquent David struggled for words-“not somebody to be angry with.”
“Oh, David, you don’t understand at all.”
He placed his hands on Jonathan’s shoulders and wondered if he should shake him or hug him. “One thing I do under-stand is that you would have killed Goliath for me if I had been sick.”
“I would have died for you,” said Jonathan. “And given up my hope of the Celestial V
ineyard.”
David hugged him against his breast. Whatever shadows had fallen between them dissipated like the darkness in a tent at sunrise. But the prince felt frail and chilled, though the tent was warm from the midday sun.
“Shall I get you a robe?” asked David.
“No, not yet. You be my blanket. Will you sing to me?”
“I can’t sing and be a blanket at the same time.” He did not want to sing; he wanted to warm the prince with his love,
“Sing first and then-”
“About what?”
“Your songs are usually about the valleys and the pastures of Israel. Can you sing about the sea?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen it and I didn’t think you had either. The Philistines have always been in the way.”
“I've seen it,” said Jonathan. “Many times. Perhaps Ashtoreth will put the words into your mouth. You know, she is the guardian of sailors as well as lovers. Poseidon raises the waves and she becalms them.”
“But our god is Yahweh.”
“Oh, him. He’s all very well in a battle. But not in a-in the kind of song I want to hear.” It was arrant heresy, the prince of Israel scorning the national god of the Israelites, but David was neither surprised nor shocked. Only the very young or the very old of Israel singlemindedly worshipped Yahweh. David’s own pantheon included the Israelite Yahweh, whom he invoked to protect his flocks, the Philistine Ashtoreth, whom he entreated to send him comely and compliant maidens, and the Midianite Sin, who, though a moon god, seemed to be good for luck in general. He excluded the fat old Baals who clamored for sacrifices of cattle to plumpen their bellies.
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