Why had Saul forsaken her? She could only conclude that the same qualities which had once fascinated him now made her an object of awe and terror. As a youth, he had listened with pride and wonder to her tales of Crete, the island of sunken palaces; desired her body, winged and alien, to the neglect of his people and the dismay of Samuel, the Prophet. Now, aging and graying, while she remained agelessly young, he preferred familiarity and comfort to passion. Furthermore, he often complained that she had no sense of guilt, and sin-ridden Saul, forever reminded of his transgressions by the ubiquitous Samuel, could not forgive her when she said, “What makes men happy is good. Your god has not given you laws, he has shackled you with them.” She who at first had ensorceled Saul had ended by losing him to a frumpish and loving whore.
When Ahinoam arrived at Michmash, she had ridden for two days between hills whose only color was lent to them by the sun, a stain like the raw purple of an open wound; whose only vegetation was the lowly broomweed; whose only animals were gerbils and vipers. Water was powerless to quench her thirst, tincture of opium failed to ease her fatigue, though as always she looked like a queen. Blue starfish hung from her ears and dust of lapis lazuli twinkled in her sunbright hair. Her arms were discreetly covered to her wrists in accordance with local custom, but her silken sleeves were embroidered with blue sea shekels which Saul had mistaken for flattened loaves of bread! (Saul had never visited her lost island and her sunken palace, and only once had he seen the sea.) Her tiny feet, graced with sandals of ibex leather, looked as if they might flicker to magic pipes in the woods Beyond the World.
She refused, however, the usual adornments of wealthy Israelite women: the hennaed hair and fingernails, the ball perfumed with stacte and onychy between her breasts, the kohl for her eyes and the carmine for her lips. The faint coralline blush of her cheeks owed nothing to the cosmetic palette, and when she entered a camp she might have been an earthly incarnation of Ashtoreth. The wounded forgot their wounds; the hungry forgot their hunger; the prudish forgot that unescorted queens should at least wear veils when they visited armies.
“Honey Hair!” they called to her. “Honey Hair has come to heal us.”
But where was Jonathan? Surely he had heard of her arrival in the camp. Quietly she moved among the wounded, whose cloaks must serve them as beds by night and garments by day. A physician, a harried little man named Anub, whose only badge of office was the herbal bag he wore at his side, hurried from blanket to blanket and consoled the dying with sincere but inadequate words. “Opium will ease your pain.” “Your brother escaped injury.”
“The wound will cleanse itself with the flow of blood.” In the old days Saul had permitted Ahinoam to join Anub and to heal his men with her simples and herbs and her Cretan incantations which sounded like the ringing of bells in a Philistine temple. But she was too successful even for a queen. The men began to ask: Is she truly from Caphtor, the island of green magic, the original homeland of the Philistines? Is she truly a sorceress? A goddess? A demon? Saul had hurried to banish sorcerers and witches from his land and forbidden Ahinoam to visit his men after battle.
He could hardly condemn her now, however, for seeking news of her son.
“The Queen Ahinoam honors us with her presence. Rebecca and Ruth would have paled beside her beauty.” Thus the physician greeted her even while plying his trade. Anub had lost a hand in the siege of Jabesh-Gilead, but his remaining hand had smitten a hundred foes and healed a thousand Israelites, and he often boasted that Yahweh had spared him to the glory of Ahinoam, whom, like uncountable other soldiers, he quietly and hopelessly loved.
“I had hoped to be greeted by my son Jonathan,” she said. Her heart beat as anxiously as a hare in a wicker cage. “Though it is very good to see my dear friend Anub, whose words gladden my heart.” She might have crowned him, so eagerly did he clasp and kiss her hand.
“Your son Jonathan has won a singular victory.” “Why is he not in the camp to greet his mother?” He is wounded, she thought. Perhaps he is dead. Anub is afraid to tell me.
“Jonathan lingers among the rocks to see that no enemies remain to trouble us by night And to tend the wounded who may have been overlooked when our soldiers returned to camp. His armorbearer, Nathan, is with him.”
“Then Jonathan is in safe hands. Nathan would rather die than risk his master’s life. Ask your men to raise a tent for me, Anub. After you have seen to the wounded.” She turned to the boys who attended her, identical twins whose big heads gave them a humorous and faintly leonine aspect “Will you share a corner of my tent?”
“If you please, my lady,” one of the boys said-which boy she was never entirely sure-“we would rather sleep with the soldiers.” It had not been easy for them, she knew, big boys and brothers, but not yet old enough for the army, to enter the camp in the company of a woman driving an oxcart.
She turned to Anub. “They will be safe?”
“Quite. This isn’t a Canaanite camp, you know.”
She dismissed the boys with one of those totally artless smiles which turned men’s heads from other women, including their wives, and turned them to sins for which their jealous Yahweh might conceivably strike them with thunderbolts. Too young to respond as men, however, they withdrew with the deference which they might have shown to their mother. She resisted the urge to hug them against her breast and whisper such intimate words as a mother might speak to her sons.
Returning to Anub, Ahinoam said: “The women of Rizpah will fetch water for me.”
“My lady, there are no streams at Michmash.”
“Ah, this bleak and forlorn land! At least at Gibeah there are canals and vineyards. At least along the banks of the Jordan there are tamarisks and oleanders.”
“But Jonathan found us water all the same,” he continued, grinning and waving the stump of his arm. He spoke the name as worshipfully as one might have said “Michael, the Archangel.” “Remembering Moses, no doubt, he smote a rock with his staff and out gushed water!” It was not a miracle. The porous limestone rocks of the area often concealed water. But to thirsty men in awe of Jonathan, the feat must have seemed miraculous. “We shall heat it in copper cauldrons that my lady may have a bath.”
“And Naomi and I will lay a feast for my son.”
“Rizpah’s women will wait upon you.”
“I will look to him myself. I have brought delicacies for him-leeks and onions, figs and manna cakes-and I would give him a quiet place to feast and to rest.”
“Ah, my lady, he will feast indeed. None of us has eaten since sunrise. But the ban will be lifted with lamplighting time.”
“First, I will see my husband. Has he retired to his tent?”
“With his new armorbearer, David. The boy is playing one of those old melodies from our wilderness wanderings.”