“Come, Saul. Leave them together. Too many people will weary Jonathan. It is David’s right to be with him now.” “If David could play a psalm of victory…” “Another time.” She led him from the tent.
David sat on the edge of Jonathan’s couch and tried to ignore the babble of voices beyond the goatskin walls.
“Still angry with me, little friend?”
Jonathan was taller by hah0 a head than David, but David sometimes thought of him as a little boy: his tent, for example, with the carved animals and the painted blocks. It was. almost as if, obeying his father and becoming a fine warrior even though he hated to fight, he had resolutely held to a part of his life when he had been neither warrior nor hero but simply a child with toys.
Jonathan shook his head. “I was never angry with you.” The yellow hair, uncombed for days, tumbled over his eyes and gave him the look of his own rumpled bear.
David took his hand. “I shouldn’t have shown you the head. It’s no wonder it made you sick.”
“I’ve been fighting for my father since I was fourteen. I’m used to such sights.”
“Then why were you sick?” demanded David. He was learning to exercise subtlety with Saul, but Jonathan and Ahinoam could read his heart He must not evade them, though Jonathan evaded him. He must ask whatever questions troubled his heart, and Jonathan troubled him more than Goliath.
“Because you might have been killed. Because you had saved my life.”
“Do you mean you feel you owe me a debt of gratitude, and that’s a burden to you?” He knew that among the Midianites and certain other peoples a man whose life had been saved became the servant of his savior.
“It wasn’t that I felt a debt. I don’t know what I felt.”
“You were angry with me even before I fought Goliath, weren’t you?” David asked, trying to follow the intricacies of Jonathan’s heart. It was a heart whose innocence was baffling and labyrinthine. “I didn’t know why, but I knew you were. Maybe you got sick because you were ashamed of yourself for not having had a reason. When I brought you the head, it wasn’t that I shocked you, it was that you knew I was-I was — ” eloquent David struggled for words-“not somebody to be angry with.”
“Oh, David, you don’t understand at all.”
He placed his hands on Jonathan’s shoulders and wondered if he should shake him or hug him. “One thing I do under-stand is that you would have killed Goliath for me if I had been sick.”
“I would have died for you,” said Jonathan. “And given up my hope of the Celestial Vineyard.”
David hugged him against his breast. Whatever shadows had fallen between them dissipated like the darkness in a tent at sunrise. But the prince felt frail and chilled, though the tent was warm from the midday sun.
“Shall I get you a robe?” asked David.
“No, not yet. You be my blanket. Will you sing to me?”
“I can’t sing and be a blanket at the same time.” He did not want to sing; he wanted to warm the prince with his love,
“Sing first and then-”
“About what?”
“Your songs are usually about the valleys and the pastures of Israel. Can you sing about the sea?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen it and I didn’t think you had either. The Philistines have always been in the way.”
“I've seen it,” said Jonathan. “Many times. Perhaps Ashtoreth will put the words into your mouth. You know, she is the guardian of sailors as well as lovers. Poseidon raises the waves and she becalms them.”
“But our god is Yahweh.”
“Oh, him. He’s all very well in a battle. But not in a-in the kind of song I want to hear.” It was arrant heresy, the prince of Israel scorning the national god of the Israelites, but David was neither surprised nor shocked. Only the very young or the very old of Israel singlemindedly worshipped Yahweh. David’s own pantheon included the Israelite Yahweh, whom he invoked to protect his flocks, the Philistine Ashtoreth, whom he entreated to send him comely and compliant maidens, and the Midianite Sin, who, though a moon god, seemed to be good for luck in general. He excluded the fat old Baals who clamored for sacrifices of cattle to plumpen their bellies.
David wished for his harp, but the Goddess whispered a song about the sea and, of course, about Jonathan, and his voice was sweet and unfaltering:
“I saw him rising from the sea, Dagon with starfish tangled in his hair And eyes like chrysolites.
‘Come play with me, come play with me,’ he called,
‘And we will gather conchs and cockleshells!’
But liquid fields are cold;
The shark, I thought,
Will cast strange shadows at my feet
Tomorrow,‘ I said,
Tomorrow we will gather cockleshells.‘
And Dagon laughed,
Slipping with dolphin-ease between the waves.
I saw the foam possess his tangled hair.
But first he said:
‘Does dust know how to play?’“
“I was the speaker, wasn’t I?” said Jonathan. “And of course you were Dagon. But he’s the national god of the Philistines, and some of his images are gross and ugly, with a scaly fish’s tail. That’s not you at all.”
“That’s not the Dagon I mean. There’s a young Dagon, too, who likes to play with the dolphins.”
“On Caphtor we called him Palaemon. But how do you know so much about the sea?”
“I expect Ashtoreth put the thoughts in my brain.”
“Ashtoreth or my mother.”
“Sometimes I think they are one and the same. Both of them helped me in my fight against Goliath.”
“I know. David, why do you always sing about me?”
“Because I love you.”
He had never said such words, not to the comeliest virgin he had ever kissed, not even to his mother. Now he had said them to a man, though one of the gods they worshipped had presumably destroyed Sodom because its men did not always love its women. He felt as if he should blush with shame or explain that he meant only that he loved Jonathan like a brother. But he felt more pride than shame, and he did not love Jonathan like a brother.
(His father had once accused him of lacking a sense of sin. “Where would Abraham have been if he hadn’t repented his sins?” Jesse had asked in one of his more asinine moods. David had answered without hesitation. “A prince of Egypt with twenty concubines and a golden calf in his garden.”)
Now it was Jonathan’s turn to touch instead of talk; he touched David’s cheek with a tentative hand. A butterfly hand? No, there was nothing feminine in his touch. It did not seem to David that only then did they embrace as more than friends; it seemed to him that there had never been a time when they were less than lovers. Arm in arm they had crossed impassable deserts; side by side they had sailed impossible seas, farther than Sheba or Punt; beyond the edge of the world! Other lands had known them; in other times they had loved and shared the throne; the high-breasted Lady of Crete, twining snakes in her hands, had smiled beneficence on them; they were as young and as old as the pyramids.
“I know a secret place,” said Jonathan. “Not like here, in the middle of an army.‘
“Is it far?”
“As far as Ophir. As close as today.”
“Are you strong enough?”
“You will be my wings.”
“I am taking the prince for a walk,” he said to the guard outside the tent. “He must recover his strength. He can hardly stand by himself.”
The guard, a young farmer with thick, callused hands, looked at David with adoration-the killer of Goliath! — and at Jonathan with admiration-the prince of Israeli David liked him for liking Jonathan.
“No danger now,” the guard cried. “Not a Philistine in sight! Take good care of the prince, though, David. Goliath’s brothers may come this way.”
They followed the wildly meandering course of the stream. Oleanders, clustered with red blossoms, dipped their tapering fingerlike leaves into the water.