How are the Mighty fallen

by Thomas Burnett Swann

  The shrill blast of a ram’s horn rebounded among the hills, and scarcely had it sunk into silence than the Israelite archers unloosed a barrage of arrows, which swished and shrilled in the air like deadly eagles. The Philistines raised their oval bronze shields against the assault. A few of the arrows struck below the shields at unprotected feet or at legs protected only by finely meshed greaves. There were cries of anger and pain and the crash of a chariot which had lost its horses. But the Israelites were not experienced archers; with their thin leather shields, they did not wait to receive a returning volley but turned and, quick as conies, scuttled among the hills. It was not a retreat, it was the traditional planned withdrawal, executed with a speed which in the past had never failed to surprise an army laden with armor and accustomed to set battles.

  “He has not lost his skill,” Rizpah cried. “Have you ever seen such speed?”

  “Rizpah,” Ahinoam gasped, pointing to the Philistine host.

  Two new champions had joined the enemy.

  They were taller by three heads than the tallest Philistines. Their armor was so prodigious that any- normal man would have stumbled beneath its weight The two brothers of Goliath, stricken by demons of fever before Michmash, indeed, later presumed dead, had reappeared to fight with the enemy.

  A voice like that of Baal, the Thunderer, broke the silence. “Israelites, where is your David with his slingshot now?”

  Rizpah, Ahinoam, Saul-none of the Israelites except possibly Jonathan knew the whereabouts of David, who had fled from Saul for three years in the wilderness and finally accepted Achish’s offer to rule Ziklag. He had steadfastly refused to fight against his own people. He had fought the Bedouins and kept them from harassing the caravans which plied between Egypt, Philistia, and Phoenicia. He had grown a beard as red and flamboyant as his hair and, when Saul announced that Michal was no longer David’s wife, promptly married a certain Abigail, a rich and beautiful widow whom poets likened to a vineyard ripe with grapes and wooed by bees. He was a hero to the Israelites because he had never raised his hand against the king who had tried to kill him. Not yet, because of Jonathan. Today, however, when Yahweh and Ashtoreth, it seemed, had joined battle, the god of mountain and sky, the goddess of earth and sea, would he fight for generous masters against an ungenerous king?

  The army of Israel paused in its flight to stare at these one-eyed ghosts of Goliath, no less tall and terrible, and doubtless remembered the shepherd boy who had killed the giant Everyone knew that, before his death, Samuel had anointed David king over Israel. Everyone knew that Saul had refused to sacrifice to Yahweh before the battle. Had Goliath’s brothers been sent to punish him?

  Rizpah shrieked and began to wave her arms at the distant figure of Saul. “Fly into the hills! There the giants will flounder among the rocks!”

  “Hush, Rizpah. He can’t hear you. Don’t you see what is happening? There, above us…?”

  High in the hills, a movement among the rocks, a man, men, advancing on silent feet; high in the hills which the legless Dagon had made his sea.

  “Our men, surely.”

  “No. Their helmets bear purple crests.” The Philistines never fought without their crests; such was their pride. Purple was Dagon color, murex color, sea color.

  The ridges of Gilboa were as warm with Philistines. Someone had shown them the secret passes into the hills which only “ignorant shepherds know.”

  Like a blacksmith holding a horseshoe between his tongs, they held the Israelites between the main army below them and the climbers above them. And the Israelites had not climbed high enough to escape the chariots, which clambered up the slopes like giant crabs: new chariots, wheels of iron instead of bronze, grinding wheels which stones could not break, but which broke men’s legs like enormous claws.

  Saul, beleaguered, fought like a wounded lion. Embattled Jonathan struggled to reach his side.

  “David has betrayed us,” said Rizpah dully. “He has shown the Philistines to the secret passes. He has murdered my lord.”

  “David or another, and he has murdered my son.” Ahinoam had seen the Cyclops’ arrow in Jonathan’s breast.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The lost battle reechoed in his brain: the brazen chariots as they stormed the slopes, the bladed wheels as they slashed the wild grasses and the legs of men; the eagle-shrill of arrows; the lightning of spears. Gilboa had come to life and treacherously devoured his mountain-dwelling people. The cruel and unrelenting sun had sparkled the blotches of blood on the plain, and he, David, the exile of Israel, had watched his people routed and overrun; Jonathan felled with an arrow, Saul as he fell on his sword.

  After dark, when the slopes lay hushed with their burden of death, he had dared the lions and hyenas in search of life; in search of Jonathan or Jonathan’s body. He was not surprised when a hooded figure approached him across the field.

  He knew the queen behind the faltering gait, the hidden face. The sweetness of her in the midst of death affronted his nostrils; finally she groped for words.

  “David, my son, they have taken the bodies of Saul and Jonathan and his brothers from the field. I could not stop them.”

  He fell to his knees with inarticulate grief. He raised his face to the blank and unresponsive moon, to the heedless mountain, and sobbed a lament for his own comfort and for the unlamented dead. He wanted to stop his ears and hide from Ahinoam as from a demented leper. Life in a field of death was doubly cruel. She had no right to glitter even in the dark, unsmashed beauty amid the ruins.

  “You saw the battle?” he said at last.

  “I waited with Rizpah on a neighboring crag. I watched them die, Saul and his sons. Jonathan too, the princeliest of them all. We returned to the camp. We fled with the slaves and servants when the Philistines overran us. Rizpah was captured. I hid in a cave with a fox which never moved but stared at me with terrible eyes, the eyes of death. It was your anguish which called to me across the night and I came-not to succor you, for what have I left to give? — but to share, I think, the burden of grief. Perhaps divided it will be endurable. David, my son, was it you who showed the Philistines the secret passes behind Gilboa?”

  Sadly he shook his head. “It was not by choice. The Philistines were kind to me, and Achish became my friend. We talked of ships and voyages and the Island of Green Magic, your home. We talked of inconsequential things, never of war. He did not ask me to betray my own people. But once I told him of hunting a lion on the slopes of Gilboa. How I had climbed a secret path which the shepherds knew and surprised the beast in his lair. Achish remembered, and thus only did I betray my people.”

  “I believe you, David. You are not to blame for Gilboa, nor even Saul and his madness. It was Yahweh, I think, who forsook his people. And how could the Lady help them? Sometimes they pray to her, but the Philistines build her temples and honor her priests. I believe that she stood apart and wept for both of the armies, but more for Israel. But now we must find the bodies and bury them with proper rites or they will be homeless ghosts throughout eternity.”

  “Is Ashtoreth so cruel?”

  “It is Yahweh who rules the dead of Israel, though he has lost the living.”

  “Isn't he satisfied with the blood he has wrought?” “Sometimes the gods obey a law beyond themselves, the Mother of the Mother, the Father of the Father. Sometimes it is we ourselves who bring on our heads the whirlwind we call the gods. The beauty of Israel is slain upon its high places. That is what history will say, and that is all.”

  He did not like speech at such a time. Silence was harsh; speech was intolerable. He must act upon her words. “How shall we know where the Philistines have taken them?” “Alecto, the Siren, will know. We are close to Endor. We shall seek her now.”

  “But you are a Siren, Ahinoam. Where are your powers?” “I put them from me when I married Saul, or hid them and let them die. Some remained. I can speak to the living without speech and hear the unspoken language of their hearts. I can call to
a bird on the wing or summon a dolphin out of the deeps. But the dead are beyond me.”

  He walked in a dream and Ahinoam walked beside him, the queen of unshed tears. She looked at him searchingly and gave him her hand for support (it was he, not she, who staggered, like one with the gift of tongues).

  “David, it is I who have brought you grief. It was I who sent you to Jonathan. How could I not have guessed that he would encircle you in his doom? For he was too beautiful to live in this world of toiling shadows.”

  “Jonathan was my god,” he said. “Not Yahweh, nor Ashtoreth. He was the bread which I broke at the festival, he was the vintage rich from the treading feet. Would you have wished me godless and songless? All of the days of my life, though I move as a ghost, I will move in grace because I loved him.

  They came at last to Endor and found the house of Alecto, the sun-dried bricks with the spindly wooden staircase climbing to the roof. David pounded her door with impatient fists.

  When Alecto opened the door, she was garbed in simple green homespun and wearing a single small tourmaline on her smallest finger. She had not aged, but she had grieved; her sea-green eyes were dim with tears.

  “Ahinoam and David,” she said. “I have been expecting you. Come quickly into the house. There are still Philistines in the town.”

  Net entwining shells; couch made of oars; the figurehead of a ship: Here were the voyages which he might have taken with Jonathan. (“You may voyage to foreign lands in search of apes and ivory, frankincense and nard…”)

  He must speak or weep. “They say you can raise the dead. Is it true, Alecto, Siren and Witch of Endor?”

  “Men call me a witch because I tell them the truth. Yes, I can raise the dead. The ghosts of Sheol, for they are restless beings, shadows and therefore lonely. I raised the spirit of Samuel before the battle. But the happy spirits of the Celestial Vineyard will not-cannot-answer me.‘

  “Can you summon my friend Jonathan?”

  “He was a loving boy. He may have attained the Celestial Vineyard.”

  “His wings were too small, I think. Will you call to him?”

  Alecto’s eyes held conquests and civilizations, burning towers and ravished princesses; the wrath of kings and the infidelity of queens whose beauty had kindled wars. He did not find, in her the civilizing compassion of Ahinoam. The elemental moods of the sea still strove in her; its sudden fury and halcyon calm, the laughter of dolphins, the sinister scything of sharks. Only the Goddess could command her. Only to those she liked would she be kind. Perhaps she approved him; perhaps she accepted him for Ahinoam’s sake.

  “Mama, who are these men?”

  A small child, asleep and unnoticed in a bed of tortoise-shell, had awakened to peer at them with sleepy eyes. A spray of garlic hung above his bed to protect him from Walk-Behinders and other demons, who might wish to steal him and leave a changeling in his place, for he was a radiant child, with eyes like the sea at the edge of the world and hair as yellow as corn.

  “They are my friends,” she said. “They were your father’s friends.”

  Ahinoam looked at David with disbelief. “I did not know. For once I did not read his heart.”

  “He did not know himself. It is Jonathan’s child, however. We came here together once.”

  “And he loved me,” Alecto said, “for the little space of a night. But the night was a tender moon and a field of chrysanthemums.”

  “I am glad,” said Ahinoam. “He has left a part of himself in a world diminished by his departure.” She bent to lift the child from his bed.

  “Please,” said Alecto. “The Philistines sacked the village before you came. They did not hurt me, nor steal my things, because they knew me to be a Siren. But they frightened Mephibosheth. He fled to his couch, but fell and hurt his knee. You must not touch him except to kiss his cheek.”

  “You mustn’t fear the Philistines, Mephibosheth,” said David. “They are my friends and I will protect you from them.”

  “And Walk-Behinders. What about them?”

  ‘1 killed a giant with a sling, and he was fiercer than any demon there is!“

  “My father is not coming back, is he? Mama told me a long time ago.”

  “A month ago,” she whispered. “It seems an eternity to him. He thinks his father is a great king in a distant kingdom who cannot leave his people.”

  “And so he would have been,” said David. “Come now, Alecto. Let us speak to him.”

  She will garb herself in the habiliments of a seeress, he thought, the hood and the black robe. She will fall to her knees or sacrifice a goat.

  But she had no need for such empty trappings; she, a Siren.

  “Sit here beside me on the couch and hold my hands,” she said, a beautiful maiden with arms which were whiter than the whitest lamb. Whether the room grew dark, he did not know. Rather it seemed to him that he was taken to a place of darkness where the voice of Alecto-he could not see her face-rang like a bell on a distant buoy.

  “Lady of the Wild Things, Lady of Love,” Alecto whispered, “grieve for a grieving mother and a friend who was more than a brother. Make of their grief a monument to love and raise the spirit of Jonathan, prince of Israel, from the netherland which is Sheol.”

  He had waited before a battle with fear upon him. He had waited before he met Goliath with a horror of timelessness, with the feeling that Joshua had stopped the sun and every water clock had ceased to drip. It was worse in this land with no name. He will not come. The old magic is dead. No more does Ahinoam swim in the Great Green Sea nor Alecto sit on the rocks and comb her labyrinthine hair, nor Jonathan ride the dolphins. No more does the terebinth tree enfold its house as if it were a nest against the storm. Like a plague of darkness, the time of the Cyclops has fallen upon the land, and where is Joshua to recover the sun?

  Mephibosheth took his hand and said in a small, brave voice, “I came too, David.” He limped in a linen robe which fell to his feet, hiding his wounded knee, and each little foot thrust back and forth, back and forth, like the feelers of a snail. In his free hand, he carried a lamp like an opening chrysanthemum.

  “Mama told you she would try to call my father. I heard her. I wasn’t asleep at all. I want to see him too.”

  “But how can we find him, Mephibosheth?” David cried, clasping the child’s hand.

  “I will call his name. Maybe he will hear us. Papa, it is I, Mephibosheth, and David, your friend. Help us to find you, for we have lost our way!”

  In a place without stars, in a place without name, Jonathan came to them out of the white dusk, parting the mist as one parts the flaps to a tent. An arrow clutched at his chest and blood cobwebbed his face.

  “Jonathan, my brother, can you hear me?”

  “I can hear you, David, but I cannot see your face.

  “Your son is with me. It was he who called to you.”

  “Is it well with you, my son?”

  “Yes, Papa, so long as you speak to me.”

  “David is your father now. Look after him as if he were me. He is sometimes sad and you must be like a cricket on his hearth, singing a merry tune to make him laugh.”

  “I will do that, Papa.”

  “What is this place?” David asked.

  “No-Land, wherever that may be. Yahweh has not forgiven my love for you. He has barred me from Sheol.”

  David grasped for his hand and his fingers closed on air.

  “Perhaps the Goddess will help you reach the Vineyard.”

  Jonathan’s smile, ineffably sweet, unspeakably sad, was like a stone from a sling in David’s breast “My wings are memories. How shall they lift me out of this well of night? Even the air is a wet embrace.”

  “Ashtoreth,” David pleaded, lifting his arms toward a sky which he could not see. “At least let us touch him, Mephibosheth and me!”

  Momentarily the shadow held shape and substance, the dear configurations of the beloved, and David grasped his arm.

  “David, David, I
can see you at last and feel the warmth of your hand. And you, my son. My two blankets against the cold. David, it was a happy time we had together at Elan and Gibeah.”

  “It was not enough,” shouted David. “What is a world without Jonathan?”

  “The world must be ruled. Who but my friend, anointed by Samuel, shall rally the scattered armies of Israel?”

  Form melted into mist, mist eddied into white and estranging dark.

  “Jonathan, wait for me. How shall I find you again?”

  “Recover my body and that of my father and brothers from the temple to Dagon at Beth-Shan and give us decent burial. Perhaps you will find a sign…”

  – He sat on a couch between the two women, in the cramped room, in the cramped world. Mephibosheth lay in his bed looking at them with large green eyes.

  “I saw him,” said Ahinoam. “He smiled and spoke and reached out his hand to me. But I could not even touch him. And you, David?”

  “Mephibosheth was with me. Even Yahweh has no quarrel with a child. Both of us held him for a little moment. Alecto, can you raise him again?”

  Sadly she shook her head. “It is not possible. Now you must let him rest. Sleep is the only blessing left to him.”