you, but dedication. You feel that you have inherited the mantle of Joshua and Gideon and must recapture the Ark of the Tabernacle and restore the glory of Israel. Thus your pride in Jonathan and thus, because you are human, your preference for a harlot over a queen, since the one time when you can be a simple man instead of Yahweh’s emissary is in the arms of Rizpah.
David’s brothers made fun of him when, as they said, he “caught a man in a tent” and evaluated him to the last precise detail of appearance and character. But David’s tents were carefully raised and staked.
“Jonathan will be honored by your song,” said the king.
“He is a great warrior, is he not?”
“The best in my army next to Abner.”
“I envy him then.”
“Don’t.”
The word was abrupt and unanswerable. The king, seeing David’s surprise, tried to explain his terse command.
“Great warriors may become great victims. The enemy seek them out in the press of battle. Jonathan is very young. If he should die, all of Israel would mourn him like a bereaved maiden.”
But David sensed another meaning behind the words. Jonathan unenviable? (7 will meet him and judge for myself if he is truly great and truly fortunate.) Leaving the tent when Ahinoam arrived to await her son, he encountered a young man with a dusty tunic and the face of a god.
Even through the dust, David discerned the torrent of golden hair, brighter than sunlight on a wave; the faintly slanted eyes, blue as the waters around the Misty Isles (so landlocked David imagined); the perfect lips, faintly pink like the lip of the conch shells used by the Philistines as horns to begin a charge. (Strange to think of him in terms of the sea, I have never been to the coast.)
He discerned too a surprising weakness in the famous young warrior. It was neither moral nor ethical; it was not a shifty eye or averted gaze. Rather, there was a fragility about him; he was like a purple murex with its delicate spines and its exquisite dyes. He is too beautiful, David decided. He has about him the transience of perfection. Being already perfect, he cannot be improved, he can only be broken.
“You are David,” said Jonathan. His smile would have warmed Goliath. “A demon of fever kept me in my tent before the battle. But I have heard of you.”
“How did you know me?”
“By your lyre, of course. But most of all by your face. Your red hair is the talk of the camp. It is like the hills of Judah at sunrise.” Israelite men, unlike the Philistines, did-not as a rule speak of masculine beauty; only of skill or courage or strength. “My father says you play like an angel. Won’t you stay now and play for me too?”
“No-no,” David faltered. “The queen, your mother, is waiting for you.” Never had he wanted so much to stay. Never had he wanted so much to flee. He is like Ahinoam, he thought, with one difference. She, though rejected, remains a queen in the citadel of her pride. He is without defenses in his gentleness. Thus, it is Jonathan who is the greater threat to me.
Jonathan laid a lightly restraining hand on David’s shoulder.
“Soon then?” The fingers were slender and supple. There were no calluses, yet the hand had held a sword which had smitten many Philistines and would, it was hoped, smite Goliath when the giant returned to the fray.
“Soon. Now you must go to your mother.”
He fled from Jonathan’s presence, but it was not easy to flee from his spirit…
He met his brothers where he had been appointed to guard their cloaks. Elihu grumbled. “Our brother is a better watcher of sheep than sheepskins.”
David was not in a mood for criticism. His brothers had neglected him when he arrived in the camp. Quite on his own he had become the king’s armorbearer, met a queen, and befriended a prince. Now he would repay them. Just as he never forgot a kindness, he never ignored a slight.
He said loftily, “The king has summoned me. I am going to become his armorbearer.”
The brothers stared after him in amazement as he strode toward Saul’s tent with the manly stride of a seasoned warrior. But the face of Saul, noble and fierce and yes, pitiable, loomed in his mind, and he felt the terrors of a bridegroom going to meet his betrothed’s father for the first time.
When he reached Saul’s tent, the occupants had departed to the sacred tree. Standing in the shadows, David heard Elim’s accusation of Jonathan and Saul’s judgment. If Nathan had not anticipated him, he would have offered himself as the scapegoat.
He heard Nathan’s anguished cry when the knife pierced his heart, but he felt much more keenly the knife of reproach in Jonathan. Because he did not dare to visit the grieving prince at such a time, he composed a psalm for him, and Jonathan was the speaker. The words seemed to come of themselves, and the shepherding lord was youthful in his thoughts and not a bearded Yahweh, a brother instead of a father:
“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want He maketh me to lie down in green pastures… Yea though I walk through the Valley of the shadow of Death, I shall fear no evil For thou art with me…”
“David.”
“Has my song pleased you, Jonathan?”
“It has greatly eased my spirit. Does Yahweh sorrow for Nathan, do you think? With all the great heroes like Moses and Joshua, has he time to worry about a little armorbearer?”
“Yahweh or another,” said David, before he realized that he was speaking heresy. “It is always the smallest lamb who needs the most protection.”
“Perhaps the Lady of the Wild Things,” said Jonathan. He, too, then believed in other gods than Yahweh.
“Ashtoreth?”
“Ashtoreth is only one of her names. To my mother and me she is simply the Goddess or the Lady. Your song may have reached her ear, if not Yahweh’s.”
“But I wrote the song for you.”
“Did you, David? You promised me a song. I didn’t suspect how soon.”
“But you thought I would keep my promise?”
“I knew.”
“Can we talk together?” asked David, emboldened by Jonathan’s grief and the need to solace him. “I have only my cloak to offer you for a seat. Perhaps there is a corner in your father’s tent?”
“We can go to my tent.” Jonathan’s tent; the tent of mysteries. Few had entered that sacrosanct place, that haunt of creatures unimaginable: a bird of lapis lazuli that sang real words; a living bear whose fur was white like the snows on the summit of Mt. Hebron; and secret things. Forbidden things. Forbidding things?
CHAPTER THREE
“I don’t have many visitors.” Jonathan smiled. “I hope you’ll like my tent.”
“I want to see your bird-” David blinked and saw more than a bird. His brothers had led him to expect gigantic Baals and Ashtoreths with breasts as large as coconuts; censers burning with aphrodisiac myrrhs; naked maidens with carmine on their nipples. It was not that young, beardless Jonathan suggested such lecheries. But the brothers argued, “He is much too gentle for any man. No one can be so good. No one can be so chaste. Not even Samuel before his sons betrayed him and he became a sour old man. Not even Saul before he left his farm to become king and began his fits of madness. Jonathan hides his vices in his tent…” Needless to say, they and almost every other man in the camp admired his secrecy and envied him his supposed vices: men who were bored and homesick between battles and missed the chatter of their wives and sweethearts; grizzled fighting men bewitched by a youth they loved and followed but could not understand.
Indeed, the tent was miraculous, but its miracles were those of a child. Wind chimes shaped like little girls in bell-shaped skirts tinkled and danced in the breeze from the open flap. Coquina-colored boxes in many shapes and colors, like the blocks of a Cyclops’ child, twinkled on the floor. A box as high as your ankle for holding sandals. A box as high as your hip for a seat and pillowed with stuffed lions and deer. Jonathan, like a little boy who had found
