Goliath yawned and scratched his back against the tree. “Come closer, mosquito. I can hardly hear you buzz.” He was still out of David’s range, and the closer David approached him, the hillier grew the ground, the harder to climb and cast with accuracy.
“Like Sheol I’ll come to you!” cried David. “I won’t take another step till you leave your tree.”
Ahinoam’s voice rang silkenly over the stream to Goliath. “I have heard,” she said, “that your mother was a Gorgon and your father a squid instead of a god. The combination is unfortunate, to say the least. You win your battles by ugliness, not by prowess. Like a Gorgon’s head, the sight of you turns men to stone. Or perhaps your odor overpowers their senses. Once you threatened to break the back of my son Jonathan. Now you threaten his friend David. Either rise and meet him or skulk away to your brothers in high-walled Gath.”
Goliath erupted to his feet A confusion of flesh and armor became a single and formidable being. The absurdity became a killer. He wore a brass helmet and a coat of mail; the staff of his iron-tipped spear was as large as a weaver’s beam. Six hundred shekels it must have weighed. His striding feet were an earthquake, the terebinth tree shed leaves on the jungle of his hair. He smelled like a beached and rotting whale. Even David, whose nostrils were used to sheep dung and the blood of slaughtered lambs, choked and held his breath.
Goliath seized his shield from his armorbearer and shoved the boy to the ground.
“Be quicker, brat,” he snarled.
Indeed, the “brat” was too slow. Goliath had come within range of David’s sling; he did not have time to raise his shield. By now David had obliterated all distractions, sounds, sights, and scents from his mind. His body obeyed him instantly and automatically; his sling whistled in an arc beside him, he twisted his wrist with the delicacy and deftness of a cutpurse; the stone wooshed through the air… fast… straight… and struck the giant directly above his eye.
Such a shot would have crushed the skull of a normal man. Goliath touched his head, more in surprise than pain. He had not expected the blow. The mosquito had a sting. He had taken the stone a hundred paces from David; he came at the boy like a wind devil out of the hills.
David’s arm became a continuous arc; stone followed stone, only to strike the impenetrable shield and fall uselessly to the ground. Four shots; four useless hits; and the giant engulfed him like a tidal wave, snatched his stream-wet arm but slipped and caught him by the edge of his tunic; flung him into the air like a bit of flotsam, a lost and battered oar.
He could have killed me at once with his spear, thought David. He wishes to play with me. I am the minnow to his shark. At least I shall nip his fins before he devours me.
(“And David… remember the sea…”)
He who had never swum except in rivers, never in the salty expanses of the Great Green Sea, remembered that the sea supports as well as drowns and gave himself willingly to the currents of the air. I am a dolphin, he thought A tarpon… a flying fish… the young Dagon, swift to ride the waves. And when I alight on the ground I will not be tense and broken but ready to rise again and climb, if necessary, the buoyant air.
He fell in a clump of wild chrysanthemums. The flowers softened his fall; relaxed and agile, he felt as if he had floated to the bottom of the sea. He felt an overwhelming urge to dream among the chrysanthemums. Sea anemones… blue currents laving his tired limbs… dolphins to ease and protect him.
Goliath jolted him put of his deadly lassitude. Here was the shark. Here was the killer. He must get to his feet and search for other stones. He had turned the air into sea and softened his fall, but he must not drown.
Goliath raised his foot. He is going to fulfill his threat. He is going to trample me. 1 can roll. I can rise, but where can I flee to escape his crushing boot? Before he had fought the lion, he had dreaded to lose the light of the sun, the embrace of virgins, the power of music, the solitary hill beneath the harvest moon. He had grieved until wrath had made him strong. Now, he was more than a sweet-singing shepherd boy, he was armorbearer to Saul, friend to the son of Saul. Jona than, Jonathan, must I await you in Sheol, where dust mingles with dust and shadows may meet but never touch?
Why did the raised boot not complete its descent? Why did the monster freeze in his final, fatal blow? Why did confusion, yes, and even fear wrinkle the glaring eye? (Jonathan’s tent… the shifting shapes in his arms… the sheep… the Nereid… the green magic of Caphtor… and the exquisite gift of time…) They have lent me their magic, he thought, Ahinoam and Jonathan. Their metamorphoses. I am changing before Goliath’s eye. Who can say what horror he sees in my place? What does he fear the most? The sight of his own face. He sees me as his own reflection in a stream. “I will not die!” The words were a trumpet call. He fitted his last stone, Jonathan’s tourmaline, into his sling and somehow, propped on his other arm, flung the stone awkwardly upward and toward the bewildered eye.
I have missed, he thought, or done him no harm with so light a shot. He stands above me frozen like an Assyrian statue. Stone; stony and heartless. No welt has appeared on his brow. His boot will complete its descent and grind me into the flowers. The earth exulted with Goliath’s fall.
CHAPTER SEVEN
David approached the entrance to Jonathan’s tent, waving the grisly relic of his triumph. He had forgotten to recover his sandals; his hair was a dusty whirlwind atop his head. His hands and arms dripped gore. Warriors clamored around him to beg for a lock of Goliath’s hair, or his spear, or his sword, or the red eye which, though embedded with Jonathan’s tourmaline, still glared wickedly from the severed head. His brothers chanted his name like a conjuration: “David, David, David…”
“It is Samson come again!”
“Beware of Delilahs, little brother!”
“You’ve put them to route, the whole idolatrous army! They’re not even taking their tents.”
Why, even the king was clapping him on the shoulder and shouting, “Armorbearer no more! I’ll make you the captain of a thousand men. The youngest in all of Israel!”
“Jonathan,” he cried, exploding into the tent without even answering Saul. “You won’t have to fight Goliath!” I am drunk, he thought, of pomegranate wine. I have taken a virgin or worshipped the Lady at one of her harvest festivals. Now is the triumph of triumphs. Now I have come to Jonathan to give him the victory, for he has fought with me and through me, and he is truly the victor.
Jonathan raised his head and stared at him with blank, unblinking eyes. He parted his lips as if he wished to speak, but succumbed to a wave of nausea, repeated and sudden; he retched and gasped and crouched like a sick old man.
Yahweh preserve me, thought David. Insensitive brat that I am, I have brought a Cyclops’ head to an ailing prince who despises war and refuses to kill a bee. He backed out of the tent and heaved the head into the groping hands of the soldiers. They would doubtless impale it on a stake and parade it up and down the stream before the few Philistines who had not yet fled toward the sea.
He waded into the stream and, using sand from the bank, carefully washed the blood from his arms and hands. Fortunately, his tunic, the gift from Jonathan, was free of blood. Cleansed of gore if not of grime, he returned to the prince’s tent with hesitant steps.
Ahinoam and Saul had joined their son. “You are not to blame,” she whispered to David. “Whatever demons torture him now, you will know how to exorcise them.”
She looked as young as her daughter Michal, but her wise sad eyes bespoke another age and other lands; poets had sung her, kings had loved her to their destruction. (“Pomegranates are my lady’s breasts, a hyacinth her hair…” He would write a psalm to her; he too would have loved her except for Jonathan.)