Enough of her morbid thoughts, enough of his apprehensive looks. She must break the mood.
“You look like a frightened fennec,‘ she teased. ”Your ears are quivering under that mass of golden hair.“
“One of those little foxlike creatures with the solemn faces and the big ears.” He smiled. “Yes, I expect I do. It’s so complicated, you see, this getting seduced. I must be a very difficult customer. Most men would have dragged you onto your couch and taken their pleasure at once.”
“Your heritage is against you,” she reminded him. “Too many drones, too few queens. For a thousand years the drones have made do with each other.”
“David had trouble with me too at first. I got sick. But later it was like entering the Celestial Vineyard.”
“You’ve been brought up on Israelite notions of sin.
They’re hard to forget. Every time the good wives of the town glare at me, I know I am thought a sinner. Yet they come to me for potions and philters and ask my advice about love. Are you feeling sick now?“
“No, David got me over that. It’s rather humorous when you stop to think about it-what men and women do together for pleasure. When I was a boy I watched a friend of my sister’s coupling with one of Saul’s soldiers. All those wiggling parts, the sighs, and the squeals! They were inexperienced and didn’t seem to know what went where. For both of them, it must have been like putting on a suit of armor for the first time. The Goddess, I think, has a sense of humor.”
“There ought to be laughter in love,” she agreed. “But there ought also to be wonder. How ever often I’ve lain with a man-and I choose my men, even as they choose me-I’ve never failed to give and to gain pleasure, and that, in this dusty, Goddess-forsaken country is something for which to be thankful.”
“I can’t get the two together. The wonder and the laughter. Except with David. With him, it’s hardly physical at all. I don’t even tell my body what to do. I transcend myself.”
“Have I plied you with sufficient beer to make you feel a trifle transcendent?” “I might have one more cup.”
“Something to lessen the ordeal, eh?” She began to exhale a subtle musk from her lungs.
His eyes grew kind and grave. “You think I don’t appreciate your beauty or that I find you too old for me. Neither is true. I never thought another woman could approach my mother in beauty, but you could pass for her sister, if your hair were blond. But the trouble is, I want to put you in a temple instead of onto a couch. As for age-well, I just don’t think about that. You may be two hundred-” “One hundred and sixty,” she said with affronted dignity. “-for all I care. The point is, you look about twenty-five. No, age isn’t the trouble. It’s the other. You remind me of my mother and the Goddess.”
“Come and lay your head in my lap and I will sing you a song.”
Jonathan dutifully obeyed and, scenting the musk, remarked that she smelled like the sea. “Flying foam and salty winds-like your house, but better.” She bent and kissed him on the cheek. He looked at her with unmitigated trust, confident that she would somehow sail him to the Scylla-guarded islands of love.
She began to sing. Perhaps the song was about herself and Jonathan.
The windflower and the wind
“The windflower loves the wind As an albatross the sea, A marigold the morning sun, And bergamot the bee.
The wind who spreads her bud With a roving, boyish gust And whispers her to sleep at night In a bed of pollen dust.
The windflower loves the wind, But does that wanderer care? However he may whisper love, His heart is made of air.“
Hardly had she ended the song than one of her presentiments came to her as vividly and suddenly as a flight of Harpies. Sometimes men visited her to seek the future and she had to tell them: “I see nothing. Trust to the Goddess.” At other times, the future would intrude upon the present, like a blood-red rain or a river overrunning its banks. She saw Jonathan in battle. The Israelites had been routed by Philistine chariots. Even now a Cyclops and his driver were bearing down on him in a huge chariot with armored sides and great iron wheels, which thundered and crackled over the pitted earth. The Cyclops was drawing his bow and glaring maliciously through his single eye. Was it true what they said in the market place: “Saul has forfeited Yahweh’s favor. He and his sons will meet in Sheol?”
“What is it?” he asked. “There are tears in your eyes. Have I hurt your feelings?”
“Not you, my dear. A vision I had, that’s all. These fancies come to me at times. Memories of the happy days on Crete.”
She had found the one way to win him as a lover. She had made him pity her. He kissed her on the mouth, and then he took her with a tenderness like the descent of a god.
The next morning she returned the shekels with which he had paid for the night “You didn’t buy my love,” she said. “I gave it to you.”
“Perhaps,” he said, “if it were not for David-”
“Ah, but there is David.”
“Yes, there is.” He smiled radiantly as if it were he who was contemplating a god. The loss of him was like a fisherman’s hook in her heart.
“Still, for a little while, you loved me too. It wasn’t that you subtracted from the love you bore David. Rather you added to it. Remember me, Jonathan.”
“As long as I live,” he promised and held her in a chaste goodbye.
She drew away from him before she had to say: “You may forget me very quickly then. But I will bear your son.”
CHAPTER TEN
Saul had settled his family in the palace at Gibeah, which, in spite of its formidable walls and turrets, remained a place in which to live from day to day as well as take refuge from invaders; to mingle in the throne room where Saul delivered judgments and righted wrongs or to seek solitude in the upper chambers with only the mice for company. The marriage of David, slayer of Goliath, to Michal, the favorite daughter of the king, delighted a country wearily accustomed to war. Ahinoam, guiding Rizpah, arranged a wedding feast to shame a pharoah and then withdrew with her attendant, Naomi, to a vineyard and cottage beyond the town, a gift from Saul, in self-imposed exile. As for Michal, her beauty had bloomed like a rose of Sharon. The lithe young warrior maid had spent the days before her marriage at her loom to weave a wedding gown and, rapt in her dream of David, had scarcely noticed how much she owed to Abinoam’s careful instruction: its veil, its trim of Egyptian antelope fur, its embroidered design of swallows encircling a field of saffron grain.
David too had reason to rejoice. Had he not, a shepherd from little Bethlehem, accomplished a miraculous friendship and a royal marriage? But there was a locust in his manna. He had wounded Jonathan. The prince’s smile was frequent but forced, and his gaiety seemed to come from a skin of wine. When David and Michal walked in the garden, Jonathan fled from the palace to visit his mother. When David played his lyre before the king, Jonathan pleaded weariness and withdrew to his silent room on the second floor and communed with Mylas, the bear. Michal, though inexperienced, was a passionate and desirable bride. But David, the bridegroom, was more dutiful than desiring. To the man accustomed to gold, can silver suffice? Is water the equal of wine?
After a week of marriage, David was a thirsty man. He was also a troubled man when he surprised Jonathan leaving the palace as unobtrusively as a servant who has stolen a casket of gems.
“My mother is alone in her new house,” said Jonathan with a look of heartbroken resolution. He carried a leather bag and a bowl for feeding his bear. “I’m going to visit her.”
“But you visit her almost every day as it is. And Naomi sleeps there at night.”
“This time I’m going to stay. Besides, Naomi is deaf.‘
“When will I see you?” cried David.
“I'll come back for Mylas.”
That’s not what I mean.“
Jonathan said without reproach, “David, you chose.”
“But you knew how it would be. It’s only for a little while that we can’t
be alone together. Hush now. Here’s Michal.”
She had not overheard them. “Jonathan, my dear, where are you going?”
David answered for him. “He is going to visit your mother and then go hunting for that lion the shepherds have been complaining about. It’s killed a hundred sheep. Dearest one, I would like to go with him. It isn’t fit than Ahinoam should be forgotten in our happiness or that Jonathan should risk his life without his brother beside him. Remember, I have much experience with lions.”
Michal sighed and enfolded David in a warm embrace.
“You’re right, my love. Men need other men for company at times. A man wearies if he lounges about a palace with the womenfolk. Visit my mother and then go on your hunt Jonathan misses your company. Next to me, he loves you best.”
Jonathan brightened like a child with his first goatcart and kissed his sister tenderly on the ear. “We shall bring you the skin to make a rug.”
Refusing armorbearers, they began their journey on foot before sunrise and walked in the rare communion of silence.
Finally Jonathan turned to him and smiled in the old gentle way. “Be patient with me, my brother. For a little while I was first. Second is not yet enough.”
“Michal is second,” said David without hesitation. “How she would grieve if she knew the truth! How much I like her, how little I love her. Every morning she looks at me as if I were going to battle and might not return. Once I mistook her for you and almost called your name.” “Do you think she guesses how it is with us?” “No,” said David. “If we were Philistines, perhaps. But in Israel it is almost unthinkable that a shepherd should prefer a prince to a princess. She takes us only for friends, and so do the people.”
Jonathan smiled with mischief and squeezed David’s hand. “It is fun to sin with you, David. After all, I am a Cretan drone, not an Israelite. How can I love against the custom of my race?” It was his one failure in conscience.
“We love as we must,” said David, pleased to have cured his friend of guilt.
They stripped to swim in a stream and lay on its banks to dry. Jonathan did not try to conceal his wings, small, golden, and perfect, like slender flames at his back. He resembled a fallen angel who did not lament the loss of the sky. Their fingers touched and passion flared between them.
“I don’t want to die,” David cried with a vehemence close to rage. “To to a shadow in Sheol-is it not a terrible thing?” “All men die, people like us first of all. The little folk sometimes hide in their hovels for many years. But death seeks out the palaces and the princes with cruel thoroughness. We have to go somewhere after death. My mother speaks of the Celestial Vineyard, but I was reared as an Israelite like you, and wherever you go I want to follow-or lead.”
David shuddered at the prospect of Sheol. “I expect we shall be poor company for each other. But shadows can meet even if they can’t speak.”
“I don’t like shadows,” said Jonathan. “I don’t like the night. Perhaps we can somehow climb to the Vineyard.”
“Your mother says it’s beyond the clouds and the stars and the reach of the Sky God. Do you think your poor little wings could lift you so high? And what about me who have none at all?”
They did not hear the approach of Philistine soldiers. Abruptly a voice said, more with amusement than threat:
“David, son of Jesse, and Jonathan, son of Saul. I see that it is Ashtoreth you serve now instead of Yahweh.”
The young men jumped to their feet. They were surrounded by soldiers who looked less ominous than curious. They pointed at Jonathan’s wings and one of them whispered to his mate, “From Caphtor, I warrant. A Siren’s son.”
A man of middle years, dressed in a purple tunic and a white sash, with a large amethyst ring on his middle finger, confronted them with a smile.
“Is it my Lord Achish of Gath I address?” Jonathan asked. They had met from a distance in battle but never crossed swords.
“It is he.”
Achish was seren of Gath, a man more renowned for his strategy than his sword, more at ease in a palace beside the sea than on a foreign battlefield. He looked like a bard and, in fact, was said to have written an epic about the earthquake which had sent his people on their wanderings to Crete and then to Philistia. It was impossible to guess his age. His hair was gray, but there were no lines to mar his shaved, sun-bronzed face. He smelled of myrrh; his blue tunic was unblemished and unwrinkled even on this hot and dusty day. He would have looked at home on the deck of a ship or ruling an island humped like a giant turtle and murmurous with Tritons. David liked him.
He stared at Jonathan’s wings with admiration. “I had guessed that the prince of Israel belonged to the Old Ones. His mother’s beauty, to say nothing of his own, is fabled even in Philistia, and my great-grandfather knew such beings — Sirens are you called? — on Caphtor. Sometimes we even glimpse them on the coast of Philistia.‘
“Are we your prisoners?” Jonathan asked. “If you wish to take me because I am, as you say, a Siren, I will yield to you. But I must beg you to release my friend. He need not suffer because of me.”
Achish smiled. “You have heard that in Philistia we keep the Old Ones in pools or cages and show them to the multitudes. It is one of the lies told about us in Israel. No, Jonathan, you and your friend are safe from us, and for other reasons as well. Philistia is not yet ready to resume her war with Israel. We do not like to fight. We will not fight until we know that we will win, and if we could find another homeland! — an island with neither earthquakes nor invaders- we would sail away from your bleak little country forever. But I have this to say to you, David and Jonathan. You serve an old, mad king who would kill the both of you-yes, you too, Jonathan-if he knew the nature of your love. In Philistia, however, the Goddess’ own son is the patron of male lovers. Come then and stay with us in our land. We will give you a walled city, Ziklag, and you shall help us to fight against the roving Amalekites who harass our borders and graze their camels among our vines. In peaceful times, you may visit the sea and inspect our ships and-who can say? — voyage to foreign lands in search of apes and ivory, frankincense and nard. We do not ask that you march against your own people when Philistia and Israel resume their war. Only that you do not fight with the Israelites against the Philistines.”
David studied this enemy who offered to be a friend. “You could have killed us while we talked. In spite of the reasons you give, you do not really need to offer us asylum.”
Achish smiled. “If I had killed you in each other’s arms, I would have angered the Goddess and her son, who have not been unkind to me in the past When I was young-how many lifetimes ago? — I had a friend like you. He died in a skirmish with Israelites, smitten, no doubt, by your forbidding Yahweh. But I have a long memory. My heart is a temple wherein I keep his image, perfect and immortal, like green marble. Could I murder my friend for a second time? Go now. We have killed the lion which was raiding your flocks. We heard about him from a shepherd boy and about the princes who hunted him, and I came hunting you. Invent a story for your bloodthirsty Saul. The beast had sprung at Jonathan’s throat and you, David, leapt on its back and broke its neck with your bare hands. You Israelites, so direct and practical in other ways, love such stories and never question their truth. Your famous Samson was a simple-minded rustic who lay with a painted whore. But your poets have changed him into a national hero who loved a woman with the face of a goddess. I ask only that you do not tell Saul about the Philistines wandering in his borders. Have I your word?“
“You have my word,” said David.
“And mine,” said Jonathan.
“Come then, both of you, and let us embrace as friends. The gray hair, the red and the gold.”
“The Goddess was truly with us,” David said, when the last Philistine was a stir of wind and the susurration of dust.
“I wish,” said Jonathan, “that we could have gone with him. We could still overtake him if we ran.”
“There would
come a time when we might have to fight our own people, in spite of his promises. He speaks only for Gath. There are four other serens.”
“We could have seen the sea together.‘
But Samuel had mentioned a throne…
“Perhaps when our armies drive to the sea. Now we must return to Gibeah.”
– Before they returned to the palace, they visited Ahinoam’s cottage. She, the great queen, more beautiful than Ruth among the sheaves, was tending violets beside her door. She rose and smiled and held them in a single long embrace.
“Is it well with you, my sons?”
“We miss you, Mama. You must be lonely here.”
“Saul invited me to stay in the palace. I asked for this house because of Rizpah. Sometimes I pity her. She fears that Saul will return to me and I wished to set her at ease. Yes, it is well with me, if David and Jonathan are friends.”
“We are sometimes together,” said Jonathan, “but in the palace-”
“Ah, my son. The nights are long for the lover without his love. But you can endure the cold chaste stars if morning brings sun and David.”
“I could almost wish for war,‘ said Jonathan, the peaceable. ”Then we could share the same tent and fight as one.“
“No, my dear. The Goddess designs our lives. She helps us to grow our crops, to build our houses, to make of the forest a friend. Yahweh disrupts her plans with his petty wars and his jealous concern for one small nation. Do not tempt Sheol”
Rizpah smiled like a child and patted David’s cheek. Michal examined his arms for claw marks and marveled at how he had killed the lion and saved her brother.
“Samson from the wars!” she cried. “But I am a poor Delilah.”
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