Goliath as much as we did. He ate up their best food and he had an odor and they were always having to supply him with women, some of whom he used up in a single night”
“You’ve changed your mind about a lot of things.”
“You’ve corrupted me.” Jonathan smiled.
“You’ve known me for less than a month!”
“Time is what happens to you. I would count you about ten years.”
“You look like a Philistine tree god,” David said, brushing a leaf from Jonathan’s hair.
“It’s better than looking like Yahweh, whatever he looks like. We aren’t supposed to make images of him, but I always picture him like Samuel, all beard and bones and chattering tongue.” He loosed the belt from his tunic, a band of leather inlaid with chips of turquoise. “Now I have a gift for you.”
“It’s a lovely gift,” said David. “But you’ve given me a tunic already, and what can I give you in return?”
“You Israelites.” Jonathan smiled. “You always think that one thing has to be paid for with another. An eye for an eye, a gift for a gift. But if you must give me something, let it be this: Let me always be first with you as long as we live.”
David laughed and hugged him against his breast “I'll promise more than that. Not even Sheol can separate us.”
“Whisper,” said Jonathan. “The wrong god may hear you.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
David, the slayer of Goliath, worked endlessly to increase his skill as a warrior. Jonathan taught him to use a spear and a sword; to feint, to wound, to kill. David, in turn, instructed Jonathan in the use of Assyrian slings. Hardened veterans, watching the Twin Archangels, as the youths had come to be called, unabashedly gathered stones in the streams and practiced against the fennecs and foxes of the desert, and no one thought to tease them for using “the toys of children.”
The armies of Philistia, disheartened but not destroyed, retired to their walled cities beside the Great Green Sea, Gaza, Askelon, and Ashedod, rather like a giant squid with injured tentacles withdrawing into a cave to recover its strength and tenacity. The might of Saul’s army-that is to say of Abner, Jonathan, David, and their rudely attired, ruggedly battling warriors-discouraged Israel’s neighbors from open war, and the young Israelite virgins, when they went to the wells to fill their pitchers, sang of their new hero:
“Saul has slain his thousands, David his ten thousands.”
If these exaggerated and heretical words came to the ears of the king, he did not acknowledge them, though David sensed an increasing suspicion in the king’s behavior toward him. When David had first appeared in the camp at Michmash, Saul had politely requested him to sing and play his lyre, praised his performance, and ordered a scribe to record the words on stone tablets or papyrus scrolls. Now, even if he closeted David from his men and, incidentally, the young virgins, he ordered him to play until David’s arms felt as heavy as copper and his mind was emptied of songs. Some of the time Saul was mired in madness or wearily climbing back to sanity, with little interest in ruling a kingdom which badly needed a ruler, or building an army which badly needed a commander to assist the aging Abner and the youthful Jonathan. He sighed and slept when Samuel denounced him and announced that Yahweh had withdrawn his favor, or when the people whispered that it was David, the slayer of Goliath, who would receive the anointing balm of royalty.
“Find that shepherd boy,” Saul would shout, whether at cockcrow time or lamplighting time, and then, with David kneeling before him, he would raise his hand to hush the chatter of Rizpah and Michal and order David to sing. It was a familiar sight to see Saul hunched on his throne of Lebanese cedar, in the thick-walled, turreted stronghold which served as both fort and palace at Gibeah, listening to psalms of thanksgiving or paeans of victory.
“Do you think,” asked David of Jonathan, going to meet their men, “that anyone suspects how it is with us?”
Jonathan smiled a slow, mischievous smile. “Who would dare to accuse the son of the king and the killer of Goliath?” Having faultlessly behaved for twenty years, he reveled in a sin for which at worst he might be stoned to death; at best, be exiled to the Desert of Sin. “We’re comrades in battle. We’re devoted friends. That’s the way we look to the people. My mother knows, of course, but not Rizpah, nor even Michal. Saul? He hardly seems to know we’re friends. To him, you’re still the lute player from Bethlehem. Why, he’s forgotten it was you who killed Goliath. In his ravings, he’s the hero of Elah.”
Jonathan… David loved to speak the name. It was charged both with wonder and familiarity, as wonderful as a phoenix, as familiar as a loaf of wheaten bread. Jonathan was no longer the stoically smiling, forever dutiful prince whom David had met at Michmash. His smile was not a concealment, it was a revelation, and laughter welled from his lips like water from the stone struck by Moses’ rod. Except for his skill in battle, he seemed younger than his years, but not in the sense that he had made of his tent a child’s playroom and retreated into its solitude as if he could arrest time. It was no longer as if he were escaping into the past, but bringing the past into the present; or rather, seeing the present with the wondering eyes of a child. He was young in enjoyment of the moment and expectation of the future. The alabaster statue was flushed with roseate flickerings of life. Saul and most of Israel, if they knew the truth, would say that it had cracked and stained. To David, it“-was infinitely more desirable for its humanizing imperfection.
Ahinoam too had enjoyed a change. She has forgotten the insult of her rejection, the people said, the women at their looms, the farmers tilling their fields with the plowshares which had been their weapons. Poised in midsummer, she has returned to spring, and where does she learn the happy airs she sings, those sweet, tinkling lines which end like bell notes, so different from the loose, free-swinging psalms of Israel? When she sang her “Hymn to Ashtoreth,” no one except for Samuel and the priests of Yahweh raised a protest:
I am the leaves green-tender on the vine,
The grapelets swelling into purple bait
To tempt the bee, that harvester of air.
I am the honied freight
Cradled in baskets by sun-coppered hands;
The wine press cornucopia-heaped with fruit,
The dancing feet that liberate the juice,
The piper with his flute…
“Well return to Elah and swim in the stream,” said David.
“And Mama will pack us a lunch of quinces and turtledove eggs.”
“And well sleep in your tree house.”
“With only the stars for company. The Giant Bear will watch over us and guard against ghouls and Liliths.”
They visited Elah, and Endor too, a town where witches pretended to be wives and plied the twin trades of sorcery and prostitution, and David’s family in Bethlehem, and the sacred stones of Gilgal, planted by Joshua, and David thought: The country is almost “Unified for the first time since the death of Joshua. A few more wars, a few more years, and Jonathan will sit on the throne, and I will lead his armies, and the ports of Phoenicia and Philistia will hold our round-bellied merchant ships and the pharaoh of Egypt will send us gaming boards of agate and onyx, and papyrus scrolls with the Book of the Dead inscribed in hieroglyphics which look like scarabs or lightning flashes.
David, now eighteen, had never remained in love for more than a month, nor met a girl whose company pleased him as much as her body. The pleasures of Jonathan, however, seemed to him both various and invariable. David loved him for his sculptured features, bronzed with the sun, and his unimaginably yellow hair, yellower than the bands on a bumblebee, and his eyes, which seemed to have borrowed their green from the seas at the edge of the world. He loved him too for the gentle but powerful sensuality which he had aroused in a youth accustomed to an unnatural asceticism.
But Jonathan’s beauty was not his chief attraction. He surprised and captivated David with a manner which was at once humility and awe. He treated a sphinx-moth, a goldfinch, a fox as if they were creatures of wonder, and
