She stepped from twilight into the fresh spring morning. The Philistine tents were clearly visible across the stream. She gasped at the sheer number of them, like so many rainbow poppies in an unplowed field. She had to remind herself that they harbored death. The warriors were moving freely among their tents. Clean-shaven and armorless, they looked to her more like boys at play than warriors ready for battle. Unlike the Israelites, who learned to fight before they learned (if ever) to read and farmed when they did not fight, the Philistines fought by decree, not choice, until they were twenty-five, and then, unless they felt a special affinity for war and conquest, devoted their lives to voyages of exploration and trade or to the arts and the crafts which they had brought from Crete. They were slender Jonathans, not husky Davids, and it was hard to hate them when she heard the jokes which they exchanged with the Israelites whom they were soon to fight or drove their lean bronze chariots between their tents like boys preparing for a race.
For once, however, they had chosen the battle ground. For once the Israelites could not escape into craggy passes and lie in wait for an armor-burdened enemy to lumber after them.
“We must not fight at Elan,” Abner had pleaded with Saul.
“The Lord, not the Philistines, has chosen the place,” Samuel had answered. “He will raise up a champion among you.” Samuel, however, had carefully avoided the field, complaining of an ague. It was often said of him that his advice had wings but his body preferred a nest.
Nevertheless, the Philistines had hesitated to cross the stream and attack the Israelites, such was the reputation of Saul and Jonathan and Abner, and the fact that the Israelites now had the weapons and armor captured at Michmash. Then, in a space of three days, Jonathan had caught a fever, Saul had succumbed to his demon of madness, and Samuel’s prophecy had been ironically fulfilled: the Philistines, not the Israelites, had raised a champion. Goliath had joined their army.
Though her own camp was stirring around her and men were beginning to stare, Ahinoam paused and remembered the place, the Vale of Elah, and drank her surroundings as one might drink red wine. Groves of light, feathery acacias, half bush, half tree, flaunted their puffy balls of yellow flowers and made her think of tiny suns in a green firmament Almond trees vied with acacias and, though their pink and white blossoms had briefly bloomed and died, their burgeoning green leaves made her wonder why the tree was called “the hair of the old”; it should be “the hair of the Dryads.”
Male francolins whirled in black and white above her head and the females, sober in brown or gray, resembled Israelite women, who lived to serve their men and served them staunchly and without complaint. The stream, swollen with melting snow from the mountains to the east, bounded and tumbled between black, water-rounded rocks, and occasional fish-she did not know their name, but she knew that they carried their young in their mouths-glinted silverly near the surface and tempted warriors to become fishermen. Wistfully she remembered Crete. Here, as there, the Goddess bedecked herself in Joseph-coated colors and pleaded for peace instead of war.
She passed the tent of Rizpah and felt a warmth of pity for the woman who had risked Saul’s rage and Goliath’s rape to stay in the camp, and now, in the opening to her tent, smiled dimly and nodded to Ahinoam. Her eyes were red, her cheeks were streaked with kohl. She did not look as if she had slept for several nights.
“How is it with Saul?” Ahinoam asked.
“His demon has fled before David’s harp. Now he must face Goliath.”
“He will be too weak. He must find a champion to fight in his place. But not Jonathan.”
Ahinoam walked boldly among the soldiers. She liked to water them in the first light of dawn. Men of all ages, men of all trades, bricklayers, shepherds, farmers, potters, millers, many untrained, most of them following Saul in his endless wars less out of hatred for the Philistines, whom they scarcely understood, than out of loyalty to Saul, who fought because Samuel commanded him to destroy the “pagan idolaters” and because, though born a farmer, he had become at last a fighter who knew no other art.
She liked to help the men prepare their breakfasts, for fighters needed more than the usual bread and cheese of farmers, and they fed on the countryside-the quail and the wild goats and the scaly fish (and hungered after the fish without scales and the wild boars which their religion forbade them to eat). She mended a goatskin tunic, she asked a bearded old patriarch who had been a friend of Samson about his great-grandchildren, and since Saul was not at hand to accuse her of sorcery, she healed a young man of the White Sickness with a simple laying on of hands.
The men, she knew, regarded her as an earthly Ashtoreth and paused in their tasks to watch her and wonder if, like the Lady, she had known a thousand lovers before she came to this land where women were stoned if they took a single lover. She smiled and nodded and asked about this man’s child, that man’s wound, and spoke of Israel and her victories under Saul. Not since Deborah, the Judge, had a woman evoked such adoration from an army.
“My lady, Goliath has returned. You must flee to Gibeah.” It was Caspir, the limping soldier from Michmash.
“I trust our men to rid us once and for all of that scourge.”
He shook his head. “Saul is unwell. He is not the hero of Jabesh-Gilead. Will my lady share my breakfast with me? I netted a quail last night.”
“No, Caspir, I am not hungry. But you are gracious to ask me.” (Quail turned her stomach; like the Lady of the Wild Things, she loved birds and animals far too much to eat them and lived entirely on vegetables; she was not in the least like Alecto!) “Here, your fire is going out. Arrange the sticks so-in a little pyramid…”
A stench of sour wine and excrement drifted to her across the stream. She had forgotten how silently Goliath and his people could move in spite of their size. She forced herself to turn and confront him, the single red eye, the red patches of hair which bristled through his breastplate and greaves and crested purple helmet and reminded her of a huge, two-legged wolf in armor.
“The Queen of Honey has grown more delectable,” he said. “But the grape unplucked is devoured by birds or shrivels into a raisin.”
The Israelites had begun to gather around her in a defensive circle. She suddenly realized that their wish to protect her was not unmixed with suspicion. She, the legendary queen from Caphtor, so the giant implied, had known him before she came to Israel. Had she lain with him?
“Step back from the stream, my lady,” warned Caspir. “You are within range of his spear.”
She was less afraid of his spear than his revelations. More legends, more whispers. (“Not only does she come from Caphtor, she knows Goliath…”)
Let there be no mistake. She called in a voice as sweet and poisonous as oleander, “The Giant of Caphtor has grown more hideous with the years. His eye is as large as a squid’s and his honeyed words are spoken with a thick and drunken tongue.” Inwardly she shuddered lest he speak of her hidden wings. Still, she did not turn from his stare.
He laughed, “The better to see you with,” and moved down the stream opposite the Israelite campfires and resumed the boast she had heard in the night:
“Choose a man for yourselves, and let him come down to me. If he is able to fight with me and kill me, then we will be your servants; but if I prevail against him and kill him, then you shall be our servants and serve us.”
Himself beyond range of Israelite spears, he lifted his own spear-tipped with deadly iron like a battering ram-and hurled it across the stream. It lodged in the back of an Israelite, who had stooped to gather manna from a tamarisk bush. The spear was attached to a cord; before the others could reach and free their friend, Goliath yanked the cord, spear, and body through the stream and onto his own bank. Then, with a look so diabolical that it would have frozen a Night Stalker, he seized the corpse in his hands and tore the head from the trunk.