“You may use my sword.” It was his one precious possession.
David shook his head. Then, impulsively, he hugged his brothers in turn and was deeply touched to find tears on Eliab’s face, and to hear Nethanel stifle a sob. None of Jesse’s sons could read or write except David; they were fighters and herdsmen, with neither learning nor wisdom nor wit But they were good young men, devout in their worship of Yahweh, and sometimes David envied their simplicity.
They stared after him and shook their heads as he walked toward Jonathan’s tent.
He found the prince on his couch, flushed with the remnants of fever and drenched with sweat. David sat beside him and pushed him gently onto his back. Jonathan had the body of a runner, not a wrestler; smooth and slim instead of knotted with muscles. His face showed lines of pain, but he was singularly beautiful even in his illness; inhumanly beautiful, like his mother.
“You’re going to fight him?‘
“Yes.”
“I should be the one.
“And so you will, Jonathan. You will fight through me.”
Quite unintentionally, and so quickly that Jonathan could neither respond nor refuse, he bent and kissed the fevered cheek. He rose and fled from the tent, without looking behind him till Jonathan called his name, once, softly.
“David.”
The word would be his armor.
When he returned to Saul and Ahinoam, he was still wearing Jonathan’s tunic, with two additions-a small sack suspended from his shoulder and a sling in his hand. The usual Israelite sling was no more than two narrow strips of leather sewn together at one end into a small pouch for holding a stone. One end the slinger held; the other he tied to his wrist; and he flung the stone with sufficient force to stop a bear or a lion but not a giant David wisely preferred an Assyrian sling, a gift from a cousin who had fought as a mercenary for the Wolves of the North. Both sturdier and deadlier than the Israelite sling, it was a single strip attached to a leather cup. He would hold the strip toward the middle, whirl the sling, and then, with a slight twist of the wrist, release the stone with the speed, force, and accuracy of long and intensive practice. Such a missile could not pierce armor, but it could strike the forehead, the forearm, the ankle below the greaves, and wound or even kill. In Assyria, so he was told, it was the usual practice to wound and then, with the foe either limping in pain or stretched on the ground, make the kill with a sword.
Swordless David knelt beside the stream and gathered five smooth stones, drying and weighing each in his hand before he placed it in his pouch. Jagged stones would have been more wounding, but smooth ones were more predictable in their flight and, ultimately, more lethal.
“A slingshot!” cried Saul. “Why, that’s a child’s toy. You forget you’re no longer a shepherd boy.”
The Assyrians never fight without their slingers,“ David reminded the king. He was more knowledgeable about Assyrian armies than about his father’s herd. Also, Egyptian, Edomite, Ammonite, and Midianite, to say nothing of Philistine. ”Their missiles are nothing more than baked clay pellets, and yet they’re conquering the Babylonians. But river stones are harder and deadlier. We say in Bethlehem that a Benjamite can sling a stone at a hare and catch him as he jumps.“
Saul shrugged with weary resignation. “Well, then, fight your giant. I have no wish to watch the slaughter.” He turned and stalked toward his tent, to “cleanse his robe,” according to an old expression, of the ill-omened affair. Rizpah, with a wistful look at David and the ghost of a smile, followed her lord. Ahinoam remained with David.
“If your river stones fail,” she said, “use this. It is small but very hard. Such stones hold the Lady’s magic.” She gave him Jonathan’s bee-shaped tourmaline.
He fondled it carefully and“ judged its weight. Too light, he thought, but I must please her because she is sad, she and Jonathan. They expect me to die.
“And David, remember the sea.”
He did not question the cryptic advice, but knelt and kissed her hand. (Such small hands for one so ripe. Hands like butterflies. To press them would be to wound them. How white they are! Are they covered with magic dust like a butterfly wing?)
He rose and looked into her eyes and wanted to cry like a little boy and be held and comforted by this goddess, this queen, this woman who seemed to him the Great Mother, the universal comforter.
“Ask Jonathan to wish me well,” he said.
“May the Lady walk with both of you, and may the two of you soon walk together.” She smoothed his ruffled hair and the gesture seemed strangely poignant at such a time; a trifle yet touching. “I am going to watch your victory.”
“Nobody else is going to watch me,” he said. “They think I’m a mosquito attacking an elephant. Did you ever hear such a silence?”
“Look around you,” she said. “It is the silence of watchfulness.”
They might have been turned into salt, these Israelites, like Lot’s unfortunate wife. No one stirred a fire, no one ate, no one polished a blade or hammered a tent peg; the army physician had dropped his herbal bag; one-armed Caspir knelt beside his blanket and looked to Ahinoam with wordless and worshipful sympathy; and in that hushed expectancy David could read man’s eternal hope that, while kingdoms rise and fall, while chaos coalesces into gods and worlds, and then reclaims them, miracles remain, magic endures, sometimes the small prevail, the large are devoured by the dust and the worm.
Across the stream the Philistines watched him with an equal hush. A curious division showed in their shaven faces. Goliath fought in their place; Goliath could win the war for them. But they clearly despised the giant and admired the lad who dared to fight him. What had Ahinoam said? “The Philistines are not a wicked race. They are dreamers and artists who are forced to bear arms by ambitious lords.” If he were king, he would try to make peace with them. If he were king… It suddenly seemed to him that to be the king of Israel was the highest dream he could dream. Except to be loved by Jonathan. Thus did the several Davids war in the single boy.
He knelt and discarded his sandals-his tough feet, so he thought, needed no protection-and waded into the stream. But every nerve was sensitized to the point of pain. He felt the rocks like nettles… the chill of the water… a fish against his ankle. He stumbled and fell to his knees and the water slapped his face; rose and climbed the bank and stared at the staring faces of ten thousand men.
He stood in a meadow of chrysanthemums. Beyond him lay the flowerlike tents of the Philistines, their owners standing in groups to watch the fight, helmeted with their purple plumes, holding their iron-tipped spears; expectant of victory, but-hesitant? Doubting their own redoubtable champion? Remembering, perhaps, Jonathan at Michmash. Remembering certainly the wrath of Yahweh when they stole his Ark. Warriors, these men, but preferring peace. Seashore and sea-grapes… gardens where mulberry trees delighted the bee and the wasp… white palaces with crimson columns… dreamers and artists.
Goliath, guarded by his armorbearer, pretended to drowse beneath a terebinth tree. His jaw hung slack; his head lolled on his shoulder; he looked more absurd than threatening.
But the single eye fluttered and watched…
“All right, Big Mouth,” David shouted. “You’ve got your champion.”
Goliath stared first at David and then over his head, probably taking the boy for an armorbearer to a seasoned warrior, Abner or even Saul.
“Get up, One Eye, or I'll smite you where you sit!”
Goliath recognized his adversary and began to laugh. His laughter resembled the yelp of hyenas around a corpse.
“Am I a dog that you come to me with a sling? Cursed be your Yahweh that he can’t find a champion more worthy of me. I will give your flesh to the vultures and the lions.”
“You’ve cursed the wrong god,” cried David, secretly wishing that the giant had cursed the Lady and alerted her to the plight of a shepherd boy. “It was Yahweh who sent a pestilence on the Philistines when they stole his Ark. And who do you think it was who opened the Red Sea and-” what was another miracle to dismay a giant? — “afflicted Pharaoh with a thousand boils?”