How old and worn he looked! Valor had gone from him with his armor; kingliness had departed with his crown, which lay on the floor like a child’s discarded toy. She could have eased his spirit with songs of the sea, even as David sang about shepherds and pastures. Her hands could magic the wrinkles from his brow. But he had discarded her from his bed and his confidence, and she had entered the tent only to wait for Jonathan.
Rizpah, the concubine, sat beside him on a lionskin rug where loaves of bread, wineskins, bunches of grapes awaited the lifting of the ban. A clothes chest, carved from the cedars of Lebanon, sat against the wall beside a couch with feet like the hooves of a deer. There were no chairs. There was, in fact, little to indicate that the tent housed a king instead of a roving Bedouin chieftain. Even Saul’s robe was unembellished, and its sleeves were faded and frayed. In the days of their love, she had sat at her loom for endless happy hours to weave him robes of Tyrian purple; to spin him cloaks as gossamer as the filaments of a silkworm’s cocoon. Once… once… But what was regret except the foolish indulgence of one without hope? And Ahinoam hoped for Jonathan: good things… many things… neither thrones nor powers but freedom from melancholy and a love which was stronger than death.
The king rose unsteadily to greet her. He was not intoxicated, he was exhausted. David moved to support him, a boy with the face of an angel and the body of that particular angel who had wrestled Jacob. He stared at Ahinoam with a fixedness which would have been rudeness had it not been so utterly reverent. Ahinoam had met him recently in Gibeah and heard him sing and play. She admired both his voice and his psalms and she thought him the comeliest lad after Jonathan in all of Israel.
The two were opposites in other ways: David, small and sinewy, a lion cub not quite grown; Jonathan, tall and slender as a papyrus stalk. She thought of one in terms of an animal the other a plant. One was created to fight, to wound, to defend; the other to fructify the mothering earth. When the cub had grown into a lion, he would be ruthless toward his enemies, of that she had no doubt Would he always sheathe his claws among his friends? He had obviously charmed Saul; her daughter Michal had talked about him incessantly for a week. He and Jonathan had yet to meet, but if Jonathan loved him, then he was meant to be loved. For Jonathan, who was greatly forgiving, was also greatly perceptive of faults in those he met and in himself, the one person he had not learned to forgive.
Rizpah rose, smiled, and bowed. She was a dark-skinned Ammonite, her eyelids blackened with kohl, her arms ajingle with crude golden bracelets in the shape of serpents, too many of them, and too noisily jingling, her hair a flamboyant red from the dye of the henna plant. Neither beautiful nor, it seemed, intelligent, she possessed an ability which Ahinoam lacked: that of pleasing the king without appearing either subservient or assertive. Her entrance into a tent was a materialization instead of an intrusion. She was no more intrusive, in fact, than a three- legged stool, and far more comfortable. Ahinoam liked her for loving Saul.
Saul embraced Ahinoam with sadly feeble arms. She felt him wince when she touched a recent wound. (Had I anointed him with myrrh and balsam, the wound would have started to heal.) His pointed black beard, sprinkled with gray, was sharp but not unpleasant against her cheek. With a bow to his king and a smile to Ahinoam, David left the tent His going seemed to quench a lamp. Still, she respected his sensitivity, so rare in one so young- seventeen, was it? — in leaving her to speak with her husband and soon, no doubt, her son. If only Rizpah had followed him! But the dark Ammonite returned to the mat of lionskin, her hair a garish tumult about her shoulders, and gazed at Saul with lovelorn eyes.
Ahinoam ignored the platitudes which Israelite women, queens no less than commoners, were expected to shower like manna upon their men.
“Where is my son?” she asked.
“Well and safe. As you know he is always the last to leave the field of battle. He lingers to study the countryside and the enemies’ mistakes.”
“And to find and tend the wounded, who are sometimes forgotten by the victors,” she reminded him.
If David’s going had seemed to quench a lamp, Jonathan’s coming lit a candelabrum. Though doubtless wearier than any other man in camp, he laughed like a little boy at the sight of his mother and ran into her arms.
Jonathan was a princely paradox. He fought like an ibex, swift and agile, and compensated in skill for what he lacked in strength, for he was slim and supple rather than heavily built like his brothers and father. But he fought for Israel and to please his father, not for the pleasure of battle, and he was happiest in Gibeah, where he planted trees and read scrolls and played the lyre and enjoyed his brothers and sisters almost as if they were his own children, and worshipped his mother.
He was not attired for a royal court, even a court in a tent. There was sweat on his cheeks, dust on his garments, a scent of leather about him, and yet Ahinoam enfolded a wonder more rare to her than the gold and ivories of Ophir and held him in a long embrace. He was twenty and the idol of every virgin and most of the wives in Israel, but it was often said of him that he fled an amorous virgin faster than he pursued a Philistine.
He turned to greet the king and, forgetting the usual courtesies, forgetting even to acknowledge Rizpah, started to talk with tremendous animation.
“Father, I met your armorbearer, David, outside the tent. We only spoke a few words but he will make a great warrior, I think. He’s still a boy, but he could have held his own at Michmash. And before the battle, I heard him singing. The men say he softened Yahweh’s heart with his psalms and brought us victory.” Then, apparently realizing that praises of David were not likely to concern a worried mother or a weary father, he said to Ahinoam:
“You have ridden in the sun, Mama. Your face is burned. You must put some balsam on it tonight. Still, the ruddiness becomes you.”
“And your hair is so dusty that I could mistake you for a Hittite,” she teased. “When you left Gibeah it was yellow as a gosling.” Ashtoreth be praised, she thought. For once he has evaded his demon.
“I didn’t pause to bathe when I heard you were in the camp,” he continued. He was notorious for his baths. The men jested that he could not grow a beard because of the frequency with which he washed his face. Yet no one except his mother had ever seen him without his clothes, not even in the streams where the men stripped and swam and sang after a long march. It was said by some that he bore a terrible disfigurement across his back; by others that the mark was strange and beautiful, a link to his mother and her people on Crete or, in the language of Israel, Caphtor.
“And you were hungry and knew a feast awaited you.” She smiled.“A good dinner is stiff competition even for a mother.”
“I could eat a fatted calf, but it would taste better if I shared it with my mother.” There were few secrets, few evasions between them, except when he fled into the tabernacle of his spirit, where even his mother could never follow him. (It had been thus for almost half of his life. Once she had found him in tears. “Why do you weep, my son?” “Because I am like the sea.” “How do you mean?” “It tries to embrace the land, but the land hurls it back in broken waves.” He had fled from the room and left Ahinoam to interpret his answer.)
“The sun is down,” said Saul. “It is time to break our fast.”
Rizpah stirred from her amorous languor. Silently she moved between the guests and, with the help of flintstones, lit the wicks which floated in terra-cotta cruses of olive oil. The Philistines preferred candles, and those who had visited Askelon or Gaza spoke of palaces and temples where great candelabra hung from the ceilings like constellations and lit the painted images of Ashtoreth until her eyes seemed to glow like those of a cheetah. But Saul disdained luxury. He still knew the seasons better than the manners and appurtenances of a royal court.
The flap of the tent rustled like the wings of an angry raven. The lamps flickered with a sudden guest of breeze and the aged priest Elim paused in the opening. For sheer perversity, he surpassed the petulant and senile Samuel. He loved to predict a plague or prophesy a drought.
“There will be no feast,” he announced in tones intended to be funereal but, alas, as high and piping as a flute. “Someone has broken the king’s commandment Someone has drunk or eaten before sunset”
Elim refused to move; obviously he hoped to arouse consternation. Unfortunately he was a fat little man, bald and big-eyed, who looked more like a Canaanite fertility god than a priest of Yahweh.
Saul glared at him with his kingliest glare. “And may I ask how you. came to learn so dire a matter? Surely not from Samuel. He is bedridden with the ague in the Sanctuary at Nob.” Saul was known to dislike the prophet Samuel, who had anointed him king over Israel only to demean and heckle him throughout his reign, resenting, no doubt that his own sons, who were liars and lechers, did hot deserve the throne. When to make war, when to make peace, when to fast, when to avoid women: Samuel’s list of prohibitions was longer than that in the holy book of Leviticus.
