“David and Jonathan are building a garden,” she had said at a carefully chosen time, when Saul was taking his ease from the midday heat in an upper chamber of his palace. She knelt beside his couch, fanning him with a fan of ivory and peacock feathers.
“A garden?” asked Saul with interest, no doubt remembering his youth. “A good thing indeed. We have need of fruits and vegetables for the palace.”
“Indeed. And their friendship is beautiful to watch as they work together. David, I think, will always serve you because of his love for Jonathan. Why, even now I have seen them pause in their work and whisper together and kiss on the lips like a man and a maid, though which was the maid I cannot say-they are both such valiant warriors-and crown each other with flowers.”
Thus had she planted the oleander seeds of suspicion: forbidden love and treason against the throne. Thus had she separated Jonathan from his father and rid the court of David.
But now she must send her beloved into battle, a tired old man, white of beard like Abraham, gaunt and guilty like Jonah fleeing the Lord, more dear to her than in his lordly prime. He had pitched his camp in the lower hills of Gilboa, above and to the side of the plain where the armies would meet. He had left a sufficient guard- except in the case of total rout-and Rizpah was not afraid for her life. She did not want to live if Saul should die, but she wanted desperately for him to live and return to his farm with her for their final years.
She watched the Israelites march from the camp in their tattered, deadly ranks-this man armored, that man clad in a goatskin, this man carrying a spear, that man a staff. Foot soldiers, climbers, leapers, archers, stingers… the roughest, most ill-equipped army between Egypt and Assyria, the only large army without chariots, and till now the most feared. Its departure seemed to Rizpah like the receding of a great tide (though she had never seen the sea), and she earnestly prayed to Yahweh and the Ammonite Baal for its return.
Ahinoam took her hand. “Let us go forth to watch our lord smite the foe.”
To watch your precious Jonathan, Rizpah thought. What do you care for Saul, you brazen witch! But she did not remove the unwelcome hand. She envied Ahinoam: her beauty, her grace, the power she held over Saul, and because to the country Ahinoam remained the Queen while she, Rizpah, was a bedraggled whore who had stolen the Queen’s bed. But it was well to maintain a pretense of friendliness, since Saul in his way still loved his queen. She pressed Ahinoam’s hand. The small perfect fingers as always made her feel plain and clumsy and old, but she would not have traded Saul for Ahinoam’s beauty, no, not even for Jonathan as a son.
They found a vantage point atop a crag-weeds to prickle their knees through their woolen robes and a frightened cony to keep them company-and watched the Israelites not so much arrayed as scattered across the plain, awaiting the attack. The Philistine army advanced in a movement called the Bladed Square. First the swordsmen, each carrying two spears and a short sword of lethal iron. Then the archers, who fired their arrows over the heads of the swordsmen. Then a second row of swordsmen to protect the archers when they had exhausted their quivers. Finally the ox-drawn wagons which would fall to the Israelites in case of defeat. They lumbered into battle because they contained supplies and physicians and, more important, massive images of the fish-tailed Dagon, the luck of the army, as the Ark of the Tabernacle had been the luck of the Israelites before its capture by the Philistines. Chariots and horsemen rode beside the square to prevent a flanking attack. Such an army was almost impervious on a flat terrain, for every chariot contained a driver and a swordsman, protected by an armored cowl, and battle knives had been affixed to the wheels to mutilate foot soldiers who attacked the charioteers and tried to drag them from their chariots.
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.
