“I love my mother and my sisters. I loved an old woman who used to make my tunics for me. And there was a little girl in Gibeah who brought me a bunch of daisies before every battle. Both of them died of the White Sickness.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Never,” sighed Jonathan. “My mother says that the highest love is a circle, not a crescent. The crescent moon- friendship or love for family-is pure and silvery. But the full moon is orange and abundant and includes all the lesser loves in its circumference.” He paused. “I’ve never known a full moon myself.” He placed a hand on David’s shoulder, like a little bird-perhaps a sparrow-which the least movement would frighten into flight. “Seek your full moon, David. Leave the crescents to me.” He spoke like an old man, with resignation if not bitterness. Did all warriors talk so sadly before or after a battle? Perhaps the death of Nathan accounted for his gloom.
He took Jonathan’s hand and pressed it against his cheek. He was a boy who liked to touch the things he loved, to feel their textures and their emanations, whether they were objects or people, a wooden slingshot or a friend’s hand. The fact that the hand belonged to a prince did not disturb him in the least.
“Your friend died quickly-and he died for you. It was a good death for him, I think. He chose to take your place because he loved you.”
“I envy him,” said Jonathan.
David stared at Jonathan with disbelief: the slender body, swift and deadly in battle and yet, in his tent, as vulnerable as the bird in the ivory cage. He looked at the sad and perfect smile, like the smile of a sculptured young god who appeared to have known all loves or, being a god and therefore beyond men, no loves.
It was wrong, it was terribly wrong for such a man to be sad! Impulsively he enfolded Jonathan in his arms, as if the prince were a lost sheep he had rescued from the wolves, and felt the frantic beating of his heart. He felt too the soft projections from his shoulder blades, almost like rudimentary wings. Was Jonathan a changeling?
Somehow he jarred the bird of lapis lazuli into his song, and the song, after all, was a spell.
“When you alight In that blue land, Will I, Will I?”
Indeed, the prince he held in his arms had suddenly become a sheep which bleated and licked his face! Before he could drop the beast, he held a girl with yellow hair and the tail of a fish and laughter which sang like the surf in the wind. If he dropped her, she had no legs to break her fall.
It was a smiling Jonathan who wriggled out of his arms and stood in front of him on two distinctly human legs.
“You-you are a necromancer,” David blurted. “But your father has banished such men from the land.”
“I don’t turn into sheep before my father.”
“Or fish-tailed girls who look like female Dagons?”
“Nereids, you mean. I don’t really turn into anything. I just make you think I do.”
“You have bewitched me. My brain is befuddled. I can hardly stand.”
“Then I will help you to find Abner. He will give you a place to sleep.”
“But we’ve just begun to talk,” David cried. He did not want to leave such magic, however unsettling to him, a shepherd whose friends talked of nothing more magical than the number of sheep in a herd. He did not want to leave a prince and a magician for the cold company of his brothers.
“I am tired,” said Jonathan distantly. Laughter had left him, and left him, it seemed, indifferent “Perhaps you can find your way alone. Your dizziness will soon pass. It was wrong of me to tease you.”
“Couldn’t I-couldn’t I stay here with you?”
“It is not allowed. You are my father’s armorbearer, not mine.”
“Good night, Jonathan.” He would speak the precious name. He would rouse the prince from his unaccountable indifference and recall the happy child.
“Good night, David. Don’t forget your bird.”
“I don’t want him,” said David stubbornly. “I only wanted him because he was a gift from you, and now you’re sending me away.”
“David, my brother…”
As unexpectedly as a desert mirage, Michal appeared in the tent. David had met her with Saul and Rizpah. Being the daughter of a man who was both a king and a general, she was used to the ways of men; she was a bold and blithe-hearted girl, ready with a jest, quick with a knife, but neither brazen nor coarse. She lacked the gold of Jonathan and Ahinoam; she did not make you think of a honeycomb or a lark or a cornucopia. But she was the young green buds on the terebinth tree in spring. She was both the loveliest and the liveliest girl David had ever met. Once-yesterday in fact — he would have liked to kiss her and he had dreamed of taking her in a plowed field.
Now he resented her intrusion.
“David,” she urged him. “Stay and break bread with my brother and me.”
Around her neck she wore an image of Ashtoreth. Not the swollen-bellied mother of the Canaanites, but the slender lady of the Philistines, the lady of love who placed not a single prohibition on lovers, either of age or sex, except that they love with their bodies as well as their hearts, their hearts as well as their bodies. According to an old Philistine philosopher, “The body is the temple of the heart. How shall we reach the sacred image unless we enter the gates?”
Forgetting that she was a princess of Israel, forgetting even to nod, he brushed past her and fled toward the tent of Saul. In the shadow of another tent, he saw the figure of Ahinoam, hushed and amber in the light of many fires. She scarcely moved her lips and yet he knew that she was smiling to him.
He knew also with surprise but without shame that it was Ashtoreth, not Yahweh, who had been with Jonathan and him in the tent.
She stood in the opening to Jonathan’s tent and softly called his name.
“Come in, Mother,” he answered in a faint voice. He rose from his couch, only to slump on a mat of reeds and, like a little Bedouin boy, fling his arms around his knees. He refused to look at her, but stared at the far wall of the tent, black goatskin above a cedar clothes chest, as if he could find an answer in its shaggy night.
Ahinoam knelt beside him and placed an arm on his back; smelled the scent of him, the fragrance of grass and leather; yearned to hold him and rout the demon of melancholy which, after Nathan’s death (and David’s visit?), had returned to torture him.
“Half the women of Israel are in love with you,” she said. “The other half want to be your sister or your mother.”
“And I must wed and produce a male child to inherit the throne. Father has told me as much a hundred times.”
“You must do what is in your heart. If you do not choose to wed-”
“ I chose to die in place of Nathan, my friend, but little good it did me.”
“Let me tell you a story.”
“Stories are for children.” He looked like a frightened child.
“What about this one? You are not Saul’s son.”
“Not Saul’s son…?”
She could read his thoughts: Not the son of a marauding desert chieftain who believes that to rule means to conquer cities or to take a concubine and father stalwart sons…
“Whose then?”
“You are twenty but you haven't a beard.”
“I don’t want a beard. It would be dangerous in battle. An enemy could seize it and cut my throat.”
“Other Israelite boys grow beards long before they are twenty.”
“It will come in time.” He shrugged. “What has that to do with my father?”
“Look at my back.” She bared her shoulders and stood in the light of a large lamp, a cruse of oil with seven wicks like the tongues of salamanders.
“Wings,” he gasped. “Like mine.”
“Did you ever wonder how you got them?”
He struggled to speak his thoughts. “When I was a small child, you taught me never to show them. A deformity, I thought. Or worse, the work of a demon. I supposed the others would kill me if they knew. Samuel would hack me to pieces as he did King Agag and then blame Yahweh.”
