across this stream, equally matched and readier to exchange insults than spears. It was the return of Goliath, cured of fever, which had destroyed the balance.
She had visited Jonathan immediately on her arrival and found him feverish and incoherent in the grasp of demons, while the kind but inept physician bled him with leeches. She had instantly recognized the nature of his attackers. They were Bedouin ghosts to whom leeches were no more objectionable than gnats. They were not killers, these Bedouin dead, but troublemakers, jealous because they must dwell forever invisibly among those places where, in life, they had roistered and robbed and worshipped no gods except the moon and the stars.
She kissed Jonathan’s brow-how hot he felt! — and momentarily he recognized her.
“You should not be here, Mama. He’s here and I must fight him.”
For an instant she thought: He remembers Goliath from Crete. But no, he knew only what the men had told him about the foreign giant, engaged as a mercenary by the Philistines. Quickly she gave instructions for the preparation of a medicinal drink.
“Jonathan,” she said, pressing his damp hand. “Repeat these words after me.” His voice was hardly audible but hers was strong and clear; the star spirits would surely hear her and perhaps turn from the Bedouins.
“Chant the astral formulae; ‘Deneb and Aldebaron, Capricomus, Scorpio, Wheel in orange, wheel in blue, Whirl the stellar sorcery.’
Hail the crescent courtesan Climbing halls of indigo (Orange is her sickle shoe): ‘Wrest the lunar sorcery Onto them assaulting me.“
Unexpectedly he relaxed and smiled and pressed her hand. She lifted his head and forced him to drink a bitter concoction of sour wine, gall, myrrh, and opium which was poisonous to the demons. Shadowy figures like great bats flapped above his couch and passed immaterially through the roof of the tent. Thus, she eradicated his pain and fever but left him too weak to accept Goliath’s challenge.
Across the stream, Goliath boomed continual obscenities. “I will crush the tent of Saul beneath my fist. Hyenas will feast where I have walked. Gibeah will shudder at my approach. The queen of Israel will lose her gold.”
And what would he think of her “gold” after fifteen years, the last time he had seen her on Crete; the years when a small boy grew into a young man, a devoted husband clove to a painted whore? It was not vanity that reassured her, nor the bronze mirrors from Ophir, but the mirrors in men’s eyes. She had grown not old but ripe, as a green apple grows scarlet or amber or saffron. Her hair outshone the gold of the acacias, her body glowed beneath her encumbering robes as if she had bathed in pollen and drunk nectareous wines and become one with the various mosaic of the Goddess.
But what had beauty brought her except rejection and exile? If she had remained the favorite of Saul, she might have brought peace between Philistia and Israel. She might have convinced him that the Philistines were not the brutish and warlike people of popular fancy. The men were tall, beardless, and slender, the women fair of skin, with russet hair which they twisted above their heads in the shape of beehives or conch shells. Their villas beside the sea were little memories of their old Cretan palaces. They drank from cups as delicate as eggshell and painted with dolphins or starfish. They lifted food to their mouths with silver spoons instead of fingers. Ladies with lilac parasols walked to the goose-prowed ships to greet their returning husbands or watch the unloading of tin from the Misty Isles. True, their country was small and they must expand to survive, even as the Israelites, or go the way of the faded Hyksos, the fading Hittites. But Philistia with her ships and sailors and Israel with her robust farmers, united by treaty, could have founded colonies in foreign lands, or farmed their own lands with canals and aqueducts and tripled the produce.
She would have been stoned, however, if anyone had guessed that she admired the Philistines for their love of the sea and for the graces which go with such love, even as she admired the Israelites for their closeness to the earth and a ruggedness which approached grandeur.
But it was almost time for Jonathan to wake. I will carry him wine, she thought, in a minuscule amber cup like a bumblebee, and a loaf of bread, and a mouse’s portion of cheese. I will nourish him into health but prolong his recovery, so that another champion may challenge Goliath. Hastily she robed herself in a gown embroidered with green leaves and golden figs-Saul thought it rather shocking, Saul liked his women in grays or browns-and she did not take the time to don a headdress or veil or even to comb her hair, which fell about her shoulders in the manner of a young bride, nor to perfume herself with frankincense or nard. She was much too concerned about Jonathan.
She stepped from twilight into the fresh spring morning. The Philistine tents were clearly visible across the stream. She gasped at the sheer number of them, like so many rainbow poppies in an unplowed field. She had to remind herself that they harbored death. The warriors were moving freely among their tents. Clean-shaven and armorless, they looked to her more like boys at play than warriors ready for battle. Unlike the Israelites, who learned to fight before they learned (if ever) to read and farmed when they did not fight, the Philistines fought by decree, not choice, until they were twenty-five, and then, unless they felt a special affinity for war and conquest, devoted their lives to voyages of exploration and trade or to the arts and the crafts which they had brought from Crete. They were slender Jonathans, not husky Davids, and it was hard to hate them when she heard the jokes which they exchanged with the Israelites whom they were soon to fight or drove their lean bronze chariots between their tents like boys preparing for a race.
For once, however, they had chosen the battle ground. For once the Israelites could not escape into craggy passes and lie in wait for an armor-burdened enemy to lumber after them.
“We must not fight at Elan,” Abner had pleaded with Saul.
“The Lord, not the Philistines, has chosen the place,” Samuel had answered. “He will raise up a champion among you.” Samuel, however, had carefully avoided the field, complaining of an ague. It was often said of him that his advice had wings but his body preferred a nest.
Nevertheless, the Philistines had hesitated to cross the stream and attack the Israelites, such was the reputation of Saul and Jonathan and Abner, and the fact that the Israelites now had the weapons and armor captured at Michmash. Then, in a space of three days, Jonathan had caught a fever, Saul had succumbed to his demon of madness, and Samuel’s prophecy had been ironically fulfilled: the Philistines, not the Israelites, had raised a champion. Goliath had joined their army.
Though her own camp was stirring around her and men were beginning to stare, Ahinoam paused and remembered the place, the Vale of Elah, and drank her surroundings as one might drink red wine. Groves of light, feathery acacias, half bush, half tree, flaunted their puffy balls of yellow flowers and made her think of tiny suns in a green firmament Almond trees vied with acacias and, though their pink and white blossoms had briefly bloomed and died, their burgeoning green leaves made her wonder why the tree was called “the hair of the old”; it should be “the hair of the Dryads.”
Male francolins whirled in black and white above her head and the females, sober in brown or gray, resembled Israelite women, who lived to serve their men and served them staunchly and without complaint. The stream, swollen with melting snow from the mountains to the east, bounded and tumbled between black, water- rounded rocks, and occasional fish-she did not know their name, but she knew that they carried their young in their mouths-glinted silverly near the surface and tempted warriors to become fishermen. Wistfully she remembered Crete. Here, as there, the Goddess bedecked herself in Joseph-coated colors and pleaded for peace instead of war.
She passed the tent of Rizpah and felt a warmth of pity for the woman who had risked Saul’s rage and Goliath’s rape to stay in the camp, and now, in the opening to her tent, smiled dimly and nodded to Ahinoam. Her eyes were red, her cheeks were streaked with kohl. She did not look as if she had slept for several nights.
“How is it with Saul?” Ahinoam asked.
“His demon has fled before David’s harp. Now he must face Goliath.”
“He will be too weak. He must find a champion to fight in his place. But not Jonathan.”
Ahinoam walked boldly among the soldiers. She liked to water them in the first light of dawn. Men of all ages, men of all trades, bricklayers, shepherds, farmers, potters, millers, many untrained, most of them following Saul in his endless wars less out of hatred for the Philistines, whom they scarcely understood, than out of loyalty to Saul, who fought because Samuel commanded him to destroy the “pagan idolaters” and because, though born a farmer, he had become at last a fighter who knew no other art.
She liked to help the men prepare their breakfasts, for fighters needed more than the usual bread and cheese of farmers, and they fed on the countryside-the quail and the wild goats and the scaly fish (and hungered after the
