liked their chief, who stared at me as if he were trying to guess the features beneath my veil. I lifted the veil to drink from the well and gave him a generous look. “By Yahweh,” he gasped. “It’s Eve out of paradise!” He walked toward me with purposeful steps. Boldly I met his gaze. A simple man but brave; a man to trust Of course it was Saul.
Her story ended, Ahinoam stared impatiently at her son and waited for him to speak. Have I eased his heart, she wondered, or tortured him with another guilt?
“Did you tell him who we were?” he asked finally. “Or did you give him the potion like Alecto?” Even as the lamplight flickered across his high cheekbones, his faintly slanted eyes, an inner radiance equalled the reflected light of the lamp. It was the bright and wounding light of innocence.
“I told him. After I had won his heart.”
“What did he say?”
“He was too besotted with me for reproaches. I knew that he was horrified-a woman with wings, a Siren! — but fascinated too. He asked me only this: that I should marry him but give you another draught of Alecto’s drink. He wanted you to think him your father-he liked you at once, it seems.
We never spoke of the matter again, not even when I bore him, from time to time, the eggs which hatched to become your brothers and sisters. All of them were human in every way, neither wings, nor webs, nor troubling memories, nor eyes and ears in their brains. They know the legend, of course, that you and I are from Crete. But they know better than to ask questions.“
“Who was my real father?”
“A drone named Meleagros. It was he who gave you the green of your eyes. I loved him more than Saul.”
“But how did Saul explain us to his friends?”
“He said that I was a widow from Ophir and you were my son. The Midianites had stolen us from our house. But we had escaped in the desert and found our way to Endor and the well-and him. No one believed him, I think. But Saul was a king. Who were his men to deny his tale? Except in the whispers which have encompassed the land, and made us, you and me, an intriguing legend which even Samuel does not dare to attack.”
“And you never knew if Myiskos and Hylas were dead?”
“No one has ever survived Goliath’s blows.”
“But they died together, didn’t they? That is something, at least.”
“Yes, and perhaps we will meet them in the Celestial Vineyard.”
“Not Sheol?”
“Not that gray anonymity. Sheol is for the wingless.”
The veins stood blue and prominent on his clenched fist “You think I am like them, don’t you?”
“I don’t know. If you are, I am not ashamed. In the eyes of the Goddess, the only sin is unloving.”
“I loved Nathan, the shepherd. But he was a brother to me, or so I thought.”
“Who can say that any love between the young is entirely of the flesh or apart from the flesh?”
“The sins of Sodom-”
“Sodom was neither better nor worse than any other city in this desert land-Israelite or Canaanite. An earthquake destroyed it, not the hand of Yahweh.”
“It may be true,” he said. “But there won’t be any more shepherds for me.”
“Won’t there, my dear?”
CHAPTER FIVE
The recent victory at Michmash belonged to the scribes. The routed Philistines had returned to ravage the land, and Goliath was now their champion in the Vale of Elah.
Most of the night he had ranged the opposite bank of the stream which divided the two armies and, prodigiously drunk on Philistine beer, hurled obscenities and thick-tongued defiance. He did not know of Ahinoam’s presence among the Israelites. If it were not for Jonathan’s fever-Jonathan whom she had come to nurse-she would have fled on foot or by ass at sunrise and closeted herself in the fortified house at Gibeah. Fear of his lust was a dryness in her throat, like a breath of scorching sand from a sirocco. But he threatened more than her person; he threatened to lose her the trust of the Israelites. Rumors that she had been a queen in Caphtor, the sometime home of the Philistines, had failed to harm her, for her loyalty to Israel was beyond question. But the knowledge that she was a Siren would enrage and terrify a people who believed that women with wings, unlike men and angels, were descended from the cruel and seductive Lilith. She could imagine Samuel inveighing against her: “A witch, a temptress, abhorrent to Yahweh! Stone her before she ensorcels more than the king…” If only they knew how she loathed the beast Goliath! How once, as a girl, she had met him in a forest on Crete and… (Ashtoreth, spare me from memories, she prayed. But Ashtoreth had other concerns)… oak trees grew tall around her, and sunlight dappled her tunic of ibex fur.
– She had found him kneeling beside a stream and studying his image in the clear water. He was so repulsive-indeed, he shuddered at his reflected self-that she wanted to touch and reassure him. His people were newcomers to the island. They had come on a huge raft with a sail-a dozen of them — and no one knew at the time their homeland or customs or gods.
“Are you afraid of me too?” he asked. “Everyone else is.”
“Bears can be big but they don’t frighten me.”
“Come and show me your necklace. I never saw such lovely stones.”
“Amber,” she said. “Alecto, the Siren, gathered the bits on the floor of the sea. The tears of the Nereids.”
His huge hands tentatively moved toward her-she did not run-to fondle the beads. How gentle, she thought His hand is as big as a shield but his touch is butterfly-soft.
“Now you are my prisoner,” he smiled, cupping her between his hands. “I will build a house for you in the woods and keep away the wolves and the Night Stalkers.”
“And I will cook you tunny and sea-grapes,” she laughed, for she was a child at the time and fond of games, “and keep your house as clean as a beaver’s lodge!”
Finally she saw the evil behind his eyes. It was rather like looking into a sea cave and finding, deep in the shadows, a malevolent shark.
“But first I must get my robes and my comb and another pair of sandals. You don’t want a slattern to keep your house!”
The odor of him was rank in her nostrils.
“Honey Hair.” The fixed and frozen smile became a leer. “I’ve heard them call you that. Come with me now. You won’t need robes with me.” The shark had emerged from his cave.
She uttered a sweet piercing cry which echoed through the trees and over the beach and under the sea like the song of a nameless bird. He threw her to the ground and spread her arms and her cry became a scream… It was the Artori who saved her. The forest suddenly bristled with living bushes, and bushes became bears, and the bears snapped at his heels until he fled among the trees.
“Honey Hair, one day I will crush your petals and drink your nectar!”
Would he recognize her and remember his boast?
– She dozed briefly and then stirred into consciousness; the rough animal-hide walls materialized around her. The smell of goatskin permeated the air; the couch was hard and pillow-less; there was sand in her hair from the journey which she had made without preparation and without attendants on the back of an ass. Almost instantly, however, she dismiss such minor hardships from her mind…
“Jonathan is ill,” the runner had said.
“I know my way to the camp,” she had answered. “Stay here and rest in Gibeah until you recover your strength.”
The Vale of Elah was not a desert like Michmash but a valley of palm trees and acacias and a stream of pure melted snow from the mountains. For more than a month the Israelites and the Philistines had faced each other
