How are the Mighty fallen

by Thomas Burnett Swann

“ She played among the clouds.’

  “But the Sky God is not our friend. He loves the Cyclopes.’

  “ There was a time when he loved the Goddess too.’

  “And after the queen was tired of playing?’

  “ ‘She flew to the Celestial Vineyard, beyond the stars.’

  “And what is it like there, Mama?’

  “No one has ever returned to tell us except this very queen. She loved a drone who had lost his wings in a storm and could not ascend in the nuptial flight. It was she who died before him. But some of our people saw her when she returned to lift him into the heavens.

  “What is death?“ they cried.

  ”A place without Cyclopes, without earthquakes, where lovers are reunited with those they love at the time they loved the most.“

  “‘Our people carved her statue against oblivion.’”

  David sighed and clung to Jonathan’s hand. “It is a lovely tale. But I am a shepherd and not a drone. Where are my wings? And your are too small for flight.”

  “Perhaps the Goddess will help us.”

  David shook his head. “I am glad that you think her capable of every miracle, and mindful of every prayer.”

  “I don’t think, David, I hope, but what is life except a mosaic of hopes-of brightly colored stones-sard and onyx and beryl-which we polish daily and replace if they are lost? I only ask that you keep a stone in your heart And trust me to wait for you.”

  “And if I die first-?”

  “I shall be first-of that I am sure-for you have a kingdom to rule.”

  “I would like to be king,” said David. “I would like to be king and unite this poor broken country. Israel is like a lamb surrounded by wolves. She desperately needs a shepherd.”

  “I understand, David. It is what you want most in all the world.”

  “It is what I want next to you,” said David, surprised at the truth, for the thought of a throne was unspeakably dear to him. He laid his hand on Jonathan’s sun-wanned hair and felt its softness like the fleece of a lamb. “You are better than I. Gentle without being weak. But I do not think that you would be a happy king. You have never learned how to hate.”

  “I hate the evil in men, not the men themselves. But enough of such things. David, sing me another song. This time about yourself instead of me.”

  “There is an old folk song among the Israelites, a mirror to both of us. You have heard it many times.”

  “Sing it again.”

  “O that thou wert as my brother,

  That sucked the breasts of my mother!

  When I should find thee without

  I would kiss thee; yea, I should not be despised.

  I would lead thee, and bring thee into my mother’s house,

  Who would instruct me:

  I would cause thee to drink of spiced wine of the juice of my pomegranate. Set me as a seal upon thine heart, As a seal upon thine arm For love is strong as death; Jealousy is cruel as the grave: The coals thereof are coals of fire, Which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love’s fire…“

  “Tender comrade,” said Jonathan. “For this small moment, let us forget about thrones and exiles. We are larger than mortal things. You are the earth and I am the sea, devoted friends locked in eternal embrace.”

  “Then we must swear by blood.” David withdrew the dagger from his sash, a bronze blade with an onyx hilt. He wanted to drive it into his heart. Could Sheol be worse than a wilderness without Jonathan?

  “I will be first,” said Jonathan, as if he had guessed David’s wish. He slashed his arm below the sleeve of his tunic. Blood reddened his fingers.

  David recovered the knife and made a similar wound, and they mingled their blood in the ancient and irreversible rite which makes brothers of enemies and lovers of friends. They bound each other’s wounds, and exchanged their tunics- Jonathan’s green for David’s blue-and David said:

  “My friends shall be your friends, and my enemies shall be your enemies, and neither man nor woman, whether mother, father, brother, sister, wife, or child, shall come before you. Let Ashtoreth bear witness that we honor her above all other deities. Let Yahweh bear witness that we do not swear our love to spite him, but in spite of him. So said my ancestress Ruth, the woman of Moab: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will be buried: The Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.‘ "

  – David watched him depart among the flowers, and sometimes they hid him, and sometimes his golden head seemed a moving flower, and once he turned and called:

  “David.”

  “Yes, Jonathan?”

  “If I went with you-”

  “If you went with me-”

  “I would not be the Jonathan you love.”

  Crows screamed raucously into the sky behind him and David thought, Thus are the people Jonathan leaves with me. Except Abraham. Yes, even Michal. Then he was ashamed by so heartless a thought and the poet’s soul of him conjured a kinder image:

  Daisies are little folk, the shepherds and farmers. Sunflowers are princes and princesses who bend toward their father, the sun, their faces reflecting his light, but warmed no more by the sun above them than by the daisies at their feet.

  But the sun may hide behind clouds or even set, and the sunflowers break their stalks, the daisies be trampled by wolves, and one of them cry, “Where is our father, the sun?”

  – There were no sunflowers where David fled from Saul, the long, desperate flight which led him eventually to Achish and his Philistines and to the fortress city of Ziklag, where he must wait and watch while the people of his birth and the people who had sheltered him prepared for the ultimate war and the rising of a new sun.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  He looked as if he had climbed from Sheol. Muffled and stooped, he stumbled into the tent and she caught him in her arms; she, Rizpah, who had supplanted his queen. He did not tell her where he had been on this night before the battle; he did not need to tell her that he had visited the Witch of Endor in spite of his own edict and asked her the dreaded question: Will Israel crush Philistia at Mt. Gilboa?

  “Has my lord heard ill tidings?” she asked, skillfully removing his sandals and robe, easing him onto the couch, pouring a cup of pomegranate wine from a leather flagon. Stupid Rizpah; pathetic Rizpah; she laughed when she heard men speak of her in such terms. She-she with her spies, Elim and the rest-and not Ahinoam or Michal was the strongest woman in Israel. It was she who had urged the king to destroy David. It was she who had urged him to forgive and recall Jonathan, “lest he join David and alienate your people, for he is greatly loved.”

  “I have heard the mutterings of a foolish young woman,” said Saul, with the petulance of a child. “She conjures a ghost and calls him Samuel. And yet I removed my sandals and knelt before him like a simple shepherd, and trembled before his wrath!”

  “Did you not know his face?”

  “I saw a shrouded old man who, for all I knew, was the witch’s own grandfather, or the witch herself, deceiving my ears and my eyes with her black arts. I was right to banish such people. I will see to her after the battle.”

  She liked to see him angry and spirited, like the lion of Israel in the days of his pride, when emissaries from Egypt had knelt before him with gifts of ivory and gold, and the king of Tyre had sent him a hundred tunics of Tyrian purple for the officers of his growing army. But she was deeply troubled that he treated his visit to the Witch of Endor with suspicion and disdain. The Witch was neither a novice nor a charlatan. The people called her a sister to Ahinoam, for they greatly resembled each other except in the color of their hair and neither had aged perceptibly since they came to Israel from Caphtor. Samuel-and she did not doubt that Saul had truly seen him-must have foretold defeat. She felt as if a Lilith fumbled at her throat But she dared not reveal such forebodings to Saul. With Rizpah, concealment and dissimulation had become genius.

  “The Witch of Endor is a woman with a pretty face and dyed
hair and no more power than I to conjure the dead. Let my lord sleep and refresh himself for the battle tomorrow.”

  “Call Jonathan to me.”

  “Would you wake him so late, my lord?” She did not want to share her lover before the battle. She wanted to cradle him in her arms and possess him utterly, if perhaps for the last time. He was her Abraham, he was her Moses, yes, he was more to her than Yahweh or the gods of Ammon, and her devious and calculating mind, her aging body, served him with singlehearted devotion.

  “You know he never sleeps before a battle.

  The prince was quickly summoned and quick to appear.

  “My son,” Saul said, “I think the same demons are besetting both of us. Yet we shall need our strength tomorrow.‘

  “It will be as it has always been,” said Jonathan, beardless and young as when he had first met David, though his eyes had turned gray when David went into exile and people said of him, “The sea has gone out of his face.” But the wild chrysanthemums of Elah still burned in his hair.

  “But David was with us once. What if he comes against you in the battle tomorrow? For three years I pursued him in the Wilderness. For three more years he has served the Philistines.”

  “He will not fight against his own people.”

  “But if he should? You, you, Jonathan. If you should meet him in the fray, his arm upraised to strike you with his sword?”

  “Then I would kneel and receive his blow and bless him with my last breath.”

  Saul looked at him with a long, pitying look. There had been a time when he would have shrieked in rage or hurled a spear. Now he said without bitterness:

  “If we win the battle, perhaps you will tell me about David, whom you love above your father and your king. I have loved two women. One brought me pain, one brought me peace. I regret neither. I loved David too as a son. And you most of all. But the love between men which passes friendship-‘

  “It cannot be told,” said Jonathan. “Except that it isn’t a sin to those who so love. It came into the world, I think, when the Lady first walked among men. ‘Let there be love, she said. She did not say, ’Let there be love only between a man and a maid or a son and his father.‘”

  “Ah, the Goddess. I have served only Yahweh, but he has forsaken me. Perhaps I have judged her ill, and those are wise who have served her as well as a god.”

  “David and I, my father.”

  “Perhaps David will come back to us.

  “You would call him back?” cried Jonathan. “You would forgive him, Father? He was never disloyal to you.”

  “It is almost light,” said Rizpah. “And David, I think, will indeed be with those who march against us tomorrow.”

  – Gilboa, though often called a mount, was a ridge of limestone hills instead of a single peak; hills like those where Saul and his army, for twenty years, had outfought the Philistines, leaping from crag to crag like wild ibexes, laughing at the heavy armor which encumbered the enemy and the stones which splintered the spokes in their chariot wheels. Now, for the first time, the five great Philistine cities had met as one nation and assembled the largest army ever to march against Israel, with numberless chariots hammered of bronze and iron and armor no sword could pierce. Saul and Jonathan silently surveyed the tents which empurpled the plain like deadly mushrooms; turned and faced each other; and embraced as father and son for the first time in many years.

  “I know why David loves you,” Saul said, and the words were like hemlock poured into Rizpah’s ear; she was no longer first. “You are one of those golden angels which Yahweh sent to Abraham to tell him that Sarah at ninety would bear him another child. You fight for me and Israel. And yet you would rather build gardens with David. Or stand on the shores of the Great Green Sea and count the dolphins. And who can say you are wrong? I only know that I have greatly wronged you, whom I love the best.” Then in turn he embraced his younger sons, Ahinidab and Machishua, beardless youths who had never fought a war; strong with a plow, clumsy with a spear. But, being ignorant of Philistines, they were eager to fight. Rizpah, momentarily ignored (how often ignored!), stood behind them when Ahinoam, their mother, came from her tent to embrace them and cling lovingly to Jonathan. Ahinoam did not know of Saul’s visit to the Witch of Endor, but she turned to Saul and said:

  “The Philistines have surely learned our ways by now. I fear for you, my lord. I think you should scout the hills behind you.”

  It was such a remark as Rizpah would never have made to Saul. A woman advising a king before a battle!

  Saul frowned and said, “I have set men to guard the principal passes into the hills. Only ignorant shepherds know the bypaths.”

  “Yahweh go with you then.‘ She did not mention the Lady, nor did she remind him that he had failed to sacrifice to any god; that he had been estranged from Yahweh since the death of Samuel.

  He looked at her with sudden tenderness. “And the Lady as well?”

  “The Lady as well. Even Yahweh acknowledges her power. Or why do his priests so often revile her?”

  “You can never forget her, can you? Nor the island of the sunken palaces.”

  He kissed her tenderly on the mouth. He accepts defeat, thought Rizpah. Otherwise, he would not debase me before his discarded queen.

  “If only you had been less beautiful! If only a little gray had sprinkled your hair! It is not easy to grow old in the company of a goddess. Why, to look at you makes me wish I were still that bold young man beside the well in Endor!“ Then, remembering Rizpah and drawing her to his side, he said, ”Come, my sons. It is time to march. Rizpah will send us on our way.“

  Thus he returned to being a king and a general of twenty years, except that now he was old and tired and would rather return to his farm than lead an outnumbered army against a foe he could no longer hate. He is not mad, thought Rizpah. He will not forget his commands or sulk in his tent; he is resigned. David is not with him. All that I wanted I won, but at what a cost! I wanted Saul and took him from Ahinoam. I envied David’s power and drove him into flight. Yet here today, I must confront myself and my chosen fate: fruition or drought; the delectable figs of Sharon or the wizened apples of the Dead Sea Valley.

  The day she had first met Saul, when he had come to her, an aging harlot in newly conquered Ammon, she had stared at him, straight and kingly then but starting to gray, and thought: It is not a queen he needs. He is tired of Ahinoam’s beauty, her mind, her pride. It is comfort he needs, a hood instead of a crown; gray robes instead of purple; and I will command the highest arts of my trade into winning his love.

  “My lord Saul is weary,” she had said. “Let me anoint his feet with the balm of Gilead…” And she had loved him to her triumph and now, at the last, to her despair.

  And what of David? At first she had liked the boy. He won victories for Israel. He was quick, kind, and intelligent. He sang for Saul and treated her like a queen instead of a concubine. But then the maidens sang at the wells, “Saul has slain his thousands. David his ten thousands.” She felt the scorpion sting of jealousy. Saul was her lover, Saul was her lord. Surpassed by a shepherd from little Bethlehem? Why, the boy would demand the throne!

  “David and Jonathan are building a garden,” she had said at a carefully chosen time, when Saul was taking his ease from the midday heat in an upper chamber of his palace. She knelt beside his couch, fanning him with a fan of ivory and peacock feathers.

  “A garden?” asked Saul with interest, no doubt remembering his youth. “A good thing indeed. We have need of fruits and vegetables for the palace.”

  “Indeed. And their friendship is beautiful to watch as they work together. David, I think, will always serve you because of his love for Jonathan. Why, even now I have seen them pause in their work and whisper together and kiss on the lips like a man and a maid, though which was the maid I cannot say-they are both such valiant warriors-and crown each other with flowers.”

  Thus had she planted the oleander seeds of suspicion: forbidden lov
e and treason against the throne. Thus had she separated Jonathan from his father and rid the court of David.

  But now she must send her beloved into battle, a tired old man, white of beard like Abraham, gaunt and guilty like Jonah fleeing the Lord, more dear to her than in his lordly prime. He had pitched his camp in the lower hills of Gilboa, above and to the side of the plain where the armies would meet. He had left a sufficient guard-except in the case of total rout-and Rizpah was not afraid for her life. She did not want to live if Saul should die, but she wanted desperately for him to live and return to his farm with her for their final years.

  She watched the Israelites march from the camp in their tattered, deadly ranks-this man armored, that man clad in a goatskin, this man carrying a spear, that man a staff. Foot soldiers, climbers, leapers, archers, stingers… the roughest, most ill-equipped army between Egypt and Assyria, the only large army without chariots, and till now the most feared. Its departure seemed to Rizpah like the receding of a great tide (though she had never seen the sea), and she earnestly prayed to Yahweh and the Ammonite Baal for its return.

  Ahinoam took her hand. “Let us go forth to watch our lord smite the foe.”

  To watch your precious Jonathan, Rizpah thought. What do you care for Saul, you brazen witch! But she did not remove the unwelcome hand. She envied Ahinoam: her beauty, her grace, the power she held over Saul, and because to the country Ahinoam remained the Queen while she, Rizpah, was a bedraggled whore who had stolen the Queen’s bed. But it was well to maintain a pretense of friendliness, since Saul in his way still loved his queen. She pressed Ahinoam’s hand. The small perfect fingers as always made her feel plain and clumsy and old, but she would not have traded Saul for Ahinoam’s beauty, no, not even for Jonathan as a son.

  They found a vantage point atop a crag-weeds to prickle their knees through their woolen robes and a frightened cony to keep them company-and watched the Israelites not so much arrayed as scattered across the plain, awaiting the attack. The Philistine army advanced in a movement called the Bladed Square. First the swordsmen, each carrying two spears and a short sword of lethal iron. Then the archers, who fired their arrows over the heads of the swordsmen. Then a second row of swordsmen to protect the archers when they had exhausted their quivers. Finally the ox-drawn wagons which would fall to the Israelites in case of defeat. They lumbered into battle because they contained supplies and physicians and, more important, massive images of the fish-tailed Dagon, the luck of the army, as the Ark of the Tabernacle had been the luck of the Israelites before its capture by the Philistines. Chariots and horsemen rode beside the square to prevent a flanking attack. Such an army was almost impervious on a flat terrain, for every chariot contained a driver and a swordsman, protected by an armored cowl, and battle knives had been affixed to the wheels to mutilate foot soldiers who attacked the charioteers and tried to drag them from their chariots.