David seized Jonathan’s hand. “Why do you want to fight Goliath? You haven’t a chance against him! Probably nobody in Israel has. It would settle nothing anyway, even if you killed him. Goliath’s boast that he would let us depart is meaningless. He’s not a seren, just a hired mercenary. The Philistines pay him with gold and women to fight for them. We would still have to fight Philistia.”
“If I slew him, the Philistines might lose heart. Remember at Michmash how they panicked when Nathan and I pretended to be an army and took them by surprise in the night?”
“But you couldn’t slay him.”
“David, I have to fight Goliath. He’s always been evil and he threatens my mother.”
“You’re speaking of fever dreams,” said Ahinoam hastily, preferring that even David should not know the truths which she had told her son. “They are often lies.”
“I’m not talking about a dream,” said Jonathan, forgetting the reticence of half his life, forgetting the Israelite view of people with wings. “It’s what you-”
Fortunately, Saul and Abner interrupted Jonathan’s confession. Saul, though pale and gaunt, had temporarily mastered his demon and resumed control of the army.
‘I am pleased to see my son improving so rapidly,“ he said. ”Our young David here is good for him, it seems. And you, Ahinoam. You too have helped to make him well.“
“But not well enough to fight Goliath.”
“Has my queen become my general?” he asked with gentle irony. He knew that she was intimately familiar with all of his battles, and he sometimes resented the fact that a woman who looked like one of the old Cretan queens languishing in a garden of blue lotuses should have a warrior’s-indeed a general’s-knowledge of war. Still, he sometimes forgot his resentment and addressed her as an equal.
“Your queen is whatever you choose,” she said.
“The men are deserting by the hundred. They can face Philistines but not this hired horror.”
Ahinoam shuddered. “I know. Someone must fight him, and soon.”
“I will fight him,” said Abner. She liked the man; loved him, in fact, as one might love a father or an uncle. When Saul was mad, Abner commanded the army with quiet and self-effacing skill. When Saul was well, Abner advised him in such a way that every decision seemed to belong to the king. Israel could not afford to lose such a man.
“How many times must I forbid you from such a folly?” said Saul. “Israel loves you as a second king, and I-” confession did not come easily to him-“I depend on your counsel and love you more than my brothers.”
Jonathan pressed his father’s hand. “The demons of fever are no respecters of war. First Goliath, then me. But I am much, much better, Father. Soon I can face Goliath.”
‘The demons have blessed you,“ said Saul. ”Otherwise, not I nor all of my army could have kept you from battling that giant“
“You think I would lose?”
“He could lift you over his head with one hand and toss you across the stream. Even in my youth I doubt that I could have slain him. Do you want to join Nathan in Sheol?”
“At least I would have good company,‘ said Jonathan with surprising bitterness.
“Such words are not worthy of the man who will succeed me as king of Israel. You should turn your thoughts to the mountains and not the Underworld.”
“Forgive me, my father. The fever has left me with a sharp tongue. I am sorry that you and my friend David should hear-”
“He has gone,” said Ahinoam quietly.
“Where?” asked Saul with surprise. Musicians and armor-bearers did not as a rule leave his presence without permission.
“To meet Goliath, where else?”
Alone, in a ring of acacia trees, Ahinoam prayed to the Goddess:
“Lady of the Wild Things,
Harken to my prayer…
Send death to the deadly,
Love to the lovely and loveless.
I, Ahinoam, queen over Israel,
Though an exile from my husband’s tent,
An affront to your fecundity,
Offer to you
My youth,
My beauty,
My life.
I, Honey Hair,
Sometime queen of green magic,
Offer to you
My sweet and eternal hope
Of the Celestial Vineyard.“
CHAPTER SIX
When David left the tent, his intention was clear: to fight Goliath. His expectation was equally clear: he would die in the fight. But Jonathan was sick, Saul was weak, Abner was old and inexpendable, and none of the stalwarts of Israel, the victors of Michmash, had offered to meet the giant. It was not only his size; it was not only his savagery. It was his single balefully glaring eye which leagued him, in the Israelite mind, with Lilith, Night Stalkers, Walk-Behinders, and other supernatural being spewed out/ of Sheol by Yah-weh’s wrath. Such beings were not the figments of superstition; one of David’s friends from Bethlehem had met a Lilith in a mountain cave and fled before she could lure and vampirize him; a couple from Gibeah had found a dwarf with horns in their baby’s crib.
“Yahweh preserve me,” he whispered, since Yahweh, whatever his limitations, was the lord of battles. Expressly against the god’s commandments, he had sometimes worshipped the silver-tongued Ashtoreth, but perhaps the god would forget his apostasy and use him as a means to save his chosen people (and David’s chosen person) from the Philistines.
Like all good shepherds, he was used to danger. He had fought with bears and lions, storms and floods, marauding Midianites on camels and local thieves on foot. Invariably he was terrified at first, since he lacked the blind, brute courage of his older and less intelligent brothers, but fear worked a curious chemistry in his body. He was young and middling in height, but now he felt as tall as Goliath. Furthermore, even though logic told him that the giant was unconquerable, he remembered that high-walled cities like Jericho had fallen to a motley band of wanderers out of the desert. It was as if his veins ran lava instead of blood.
Terror, then courage, then a cool and logical assessment of the problems at hand: such was the pattern in David; such his skill as a fighter. How could a boy fight a being twice his height, with bronze armor and iron weapons and a single-minded lust to kill and dismember? David himself owned neither weapons nor armor. He wore a tunic given to him by Jonathan, figured with bears and foxes, and the garment would bring him luck in the fight and companion him. But he must companion the tunic with suitable weapons.
“David,” Ahinoam called. He paused to marvel at the speed and grace with which she overtook him. He had never seen sweat on her face. He had never seen dirt on her hands. She could survive the discomfort of a day-long ride on a donkey’s back and look as if she were dressed to undress for a fertility rite. The scent of her was like sea spray and ambergris. Where other Israelite women, including Rizpah, muffled themselves in woolens against the heat and the heat of men’s desire, she walked in silken transparencies like the wings of a dragonfly.
“You’ll need weapons. Jonathan is sending you his armor by Saul.”
“But how did he know-how did you know I meant to fight Goliath?”
“I saw it in your face. So did Jonathan. Surely you know by now that we can look into your heart. Jonathan wanted to stop you, but Saul prevented him and posted a guard outside his tent.”
“Do you want to stop me?”
In the shadow of a tamarisk tree, her eyes looked gray and sad and ten thousand years too old for her bountiful body. As if she had seen the coming of the Sea Kings to Crete. The building of the great pyramids. The Hyksos invasion of Egypt…
She shook his hand. “David, David, you must see that Jonathan cannot fight. Or Saul. It has to be you. You have more power than you know.”