– She had found him kneeling beside a stream and studying his image in the clear water. He was so repulsive-indeed, he shuddered at his reflected self-that she wanted to touch and reassure him. His people were newcomers to the island. They had come on a huge raft with a sail-a dozen of them — and no one knew at the time their homeland or customs or gods.
“Are you afraid of me too?” he asked. “Everyone else is.”
“Bears can be big but they don’t frighten me.”
“Come and show me your necklace. I never saw such lovely stones.”
“Amber,” she said. “Alecto, the Siren, gathered the bits on the floor of the sea. The tears of the Nereids.”
His huge hands tentatively moved toward her-she did not run-to fondle the beads. How gentle, she thought His hand is as big as a shield but his touch is butterfly-soft.
“Now you are my prisoner,” he smiled, cupping her between his hands. “I will build a house for you in the woods and keep away the wolves and the Night Stalkers.”
“And I will cook you tunny and sea-grapes,” she laughed, for she was a child at the time and fond of games, “and keep your house as clean as a beaver’s lodge!”
Finally she saw the evil behind his eyes. It was rather like looking into a sea cave and finding, deep in the shadows, a malevolent shark.
“But first I must get my robes and my comb and another pair of sandals. You don’t want a slattern to keep your house!”
The odor of him was rank in her nostrils.
“Honey Hair.” The fixed and frozen smile became a leer. “I’ve heard them call you that. Come with me now. You won’t need robes with me.” The shark had emerged from his cave.
She uttered a sweet piercing cry which echoed through the trees and over the beach and under the sea like the song of a nameless bird. He threw her to the ground and spread her arms and her cry became a scream… It was the Artori who saved her. The forest suddenly bristled with living bushes, and bushes became bears, and the bears snapped at his heels until he fled among the trees.
“Honey Hair, one day I will crush your petals and drink your nectar!”
Would he recognize her and remember his boast?
– She dozed briefly and then stirred into consciousness; the rough animal-hide walls materialized around her. The smell of goatskin permeated the air; the couch was hard and pillow-less; there was sand in her hair from the journey which she had made without preparation and without attendants on the back of an ass. Almost instantly, however, she dismiss such minor hardships from her mind…
“Jonathan is ill,” the runner had said.
“I know my way to the camp,” she had answered. “Stay here and rest in Gibeah until you recover your strength.”
The Vale of Elah was not a desert like Michmash but a valley of palm trees and acacias and a stream of pure melted snow from the mountains. For more than a month the Israelites and the Philistines had faced each other across this stream, equally matched and readier to exchange insults than spears. It was the return of Goliath, cured of fever, which had destroyed the balance.
She had visited Jonathan immediately on her arrival and found him feverish and incoherent in the grasp of demons, while the kind but inept physician bled him with leeches. She had instantly recognized the nature of his attackers. They were Bedouin ghosts to whom leeches were no more objectionable than gnats. They were not killers, these Bedouin dead, but troublemakers, jealous because they must dwell forever invisibly among those places where, in life, they had roistered and robbed and worshipped no gods except the moon and the stars.
She kissed Jonathan’s brow-how hot he felt! — and momentarily he recognized her.
“You should not be here, Mama. He’s here and I must fight him.”
For an instant she thought: He remembers Goliath from Crete. But no, he knew only what the men had told him about the foreign giant, engaged as a mercenary by the Philistines. Quickly she gave instructions for the preparation of a medicinal drink.
“Jonathan,” she said, pressing his damp hand. “Repeat these words after me.” His voice was hardly audible but hers was strong and clear; the star spirits would surely hear her and perhaps turn from the Bedouins.
“Chant the astral formulae; ‘Deneb and Aldebaron, Capricomus, Scorpio, Wheel in orange, wheel in blue, Whirl the stellar sorcery.’
Hail the crescent courtesan Climbing halls of indigo (Orange is her sickle shoe): ‘Wrest the lunar sorcery Onto them assaulting me.“
Unexpectedly he relaxed and smiled and pressed her hand. She lifted his head and forced him to drink a bitter concoction of sour wine, gall, myrrh, and opium which was poisonous to the demons. Shadowy figures like great bats flapped above his couch and passed immaterially through the roof of the tent. Thus, she eradicated his pain and fever but left him too weak to accept Goliath’s challenge.
Across the stream, Goliath boomed continual obscenities. “I will crush the tent of Saul beneath my fist. Hyenas will feast where I have walked. Gibeah will shudder at my approach. The queen of Israel will lose her gold.”
And what would he think of her “gold” after fifteen years, the last time he had seen her on Crete; the years when a small boy grew into a young man, a devoted husband clove to a painted whore? It was not vanity that reassured her, nor the bronze mirrors from Ophir, but the mirrors in men’s eyes. She had grown not old but ripe, as a green apple grows scarlet or amber or saffron. Her hair outshone the gold of the acacias, her body glowed beneath her encumbering robes as if she had bathed in pollen and drunk nectareous wines and become one with the various mosaic of the Goddess.
But what had beauty brought her except rejection and exile? If she had remained the favorite of Saul, she might have brought peace between Philistia and Israel. She might have convinced him that the Philistines were not the brutish and warlike people of popular fancy. The men were tall, beardless, and slender, the women fair of skin, with russet hair which they twisted above their heads in the shape of beehives or conch shells. Their villas beside the sea were little memories of their old Cretan palaces. They drank from cups as delicate as eggshell and painted with dolphins or starfish. They lifted food to their mouths with silver spoons instead of fingers. Ladies with lilac parasols walked to the goose-prowed ships to greet their returning husbands or watch the unloading of tin from the Misty Isles. True, their country was small and they must expand to survive, even as the Israelites, or go the way of the faded Hyksos, the fading Hittites. But Philistia with her ships and sailors and Israel with her robust farmers, united by treaty, could have founded colonies in foreign lands, or farmed their own lands with canals and aqueducts and tripled the produce.
She would have been stoned, however, if anyone had guessed that she admired the Philistines for their love of the sea and for the graces which go with such love, even as she admired the Israelites for their closeness to the earth and a ruggedness which approached grandeur.
But it was almost time for Jonathan to wake. I will carry him wine, she thought, in a minuscule amber cup like a bumblebee, and a loaf of bread, and a mouse’s portion of cheese. I will nourish him into health but prolong his recovery, so that another champion may challenge Goliath. Hastily she robed herself in a gown embroidered with green leaves and golden figs-Saul thought it rather shocking, Saul liked his women in grays or browns-and she did not take the time to don a headdress or veil or even to comb her hair, which fell about her shoulders in the manner of a young bride, nor to perfume herself with frankincense or nard. She was much too concerned about Jonathan.