For answer, Jonathan smiled and opened his arms, and David remembered watching Ahinoam, alone in a forest glade, open her arms to Ashtoreth and pray that the lovely and the loveless should find love. He entered Jonathan’s embrace and seemed at last to know the fullness of the sea, which had tantalized him with fitful flickers, an image, a scent, some words in a song; for he entered a world where dolphins snorted in leaping multitudes and Sirens combed their tresses with combs of coral; and then they were under the sea, he and Jonathan, and the leaves of the oak tree were fathoms of cushioning water, and they swam into a cave where clumsy, amiable crabs brought gifts of amber between their pincers and a friendly octopus arranged them a couch of seaweed and sea anemones.
Jonathan held him with a wild urgency, meeting mood for mood, making of touch a language more articulate than song, and in that ancient oak tree the eternal Ashtoreth was honored more richly than by prayer or sacrifice…
“Sleep now, Jonathan, and I'll keep watch.”
“ ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me…’ You wrote that, David, didn’t you?”
“Yes, Jonathan. In a way, I wrote it for you.” He had written a song which men would always sing, in the valley or on the mountaintop. He had fought and killed a giant. He had liked a hundred girls and he knew that he would love a score of women, a little, for a little while, and beget children beyond number, but that he would never love anyone, neither man nor woman, as he loved Jonathan…
“I will find you food while you sleep.”
“Don’t leave me, David.”
“Not until you sleep.”
David watched the golden lashes extinguish the green eyes, the perfect features lose their flush-it was like the extinguishing of a rare alabaster lamp from Egypt, and curiously painful to watch-and then he crept from the tree. He did not wish to return to the camp. He could not endure exchanging pleasantries with the soldiers or even encountering Ahinoam; and to meet Saul would remind him of Yahweh instead of Ashtoreth. Being a shepherd, however, he knew that the Vale of Elan, riotous with fruits and flowers ahead of their time, had been called the Garden of Eden. He stripped to his loincloth and made of his tunic a basket for carob nuts, black berries, and wild pears; he wrapped a honeycomb in the huge trumpetlike calyxes of the mulucella flowers; he cupped water in a scarlet buttercup; and returned three times to the tree to carry his banquet to Jonathan.
Jonathan awoke on David’s third ascent and ate as ravenously as if he had fought a battle. In spite of so rich a feast, following so long a fever, the wild honey forestalled a return of his nausea. They laughed and chattered without restraint: of little things and large things, of butterflies and eagles. Jonathan described his childhood on Crete, the war with the Cyclopes, the storm, and the swim to Philistia.
“I’m not surprised,” said David. “Everybody knows you came from Caphtor. I just didn’t know when or how.”
“And you don’t mind my wings?”
“Why should I? They’re as perfectly formed as a snow-flake.” “But they don’t do anything.”
“Neither does a luna moth, but we wouldn’t want to do without him, would we?”
“Did you really kill a lion with your bare hands, David?”
“Yes, but he wasn’t very big and he had a stomach ache.”
“How did you escape betrothal when you lay with a virgin at the age of twelve?”
“I told her a lion would get her if she told on me.”
Then it was David’s turn. “Where did you find your bear, Mylas?”
“The Philistines had trapped him on Crete and brought him to Gaza to show in a spectacle. My mother saw him in the eye of her mind and called him to me across the desert.”
“Did crossing the desert turn him white?”
“All of his race are white. I expect the sun bleached them a long time ago.”
“How old is your mother?”
“You might as well ask Samuel his age.”
“Are you ashamed any more?”
“Of what?” asked Jonathan, surprised.
“Loving me.”
“The sin of Sodom, you mean? No, I rather imagine the earthquake came on its own, not from Yahweh. It seems to me that prophets like Samuel get between us and the gods and warp our glimpse of the celestial faces. Even if Yahweh is angry, the worst he can do is change us into pillars of salt. Another thing. Samuel says that the Philistines are wicked idolaters. But in many ways they’re just like us. They’d rather be home by the sea than racing up and down the desert Before I got sick, I used to talk to an archer across the stream, and he said they disliked Goliath as much as we did. He ate up their best food and he had an odor and they were always having to supply him with women, some of whom he used up in a single night”
“You’ve changed your mind about a lot of things.”
“You’ve corrupted me.” Jonathan smiled.
“You’ve known me for less than a month!”
“Time is what happens to you. I would count you about ten years.”
“You look like a Philistine tree god,” David said, brushing a leaf from Jonathan’s hair.
“It’s better than looking like Yahweh, whatever he looks like. We aren’t supposed to make images of him, but I always picture him like Samuel, all beard and bones and chattering tongue.” He loosed the belt from his tunic, a band of leather inlaid with chips of turquoise. “Now I have a gift for you.”
“It’s a lovely gift,” said David. “But you’ve given me a tunic already, and what can I give you in return?”
“You Israelites.” Jonathan smiled. “You always think that one thing has to be paid for with another. An eye for an eye, a gift for a gift. But if you must give me something, let it be this: Let me always be first with you as long as we live.”
David laughed and hugged him against his breast “I'll promise more than that. Not even Sheol can separate us.”
“Whisper,” said Jonathan. “The wrong god may hear you.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
David, the slayer of Goliath, worked endlessly to increase his skill as a warrior. Jonathan taught him to use a spear and a sword; to feint, to wound, to kill. David, in turn, instructed Jonathan in the use of Assyrian slings. Hardened veterans, watching the Twin Archangels, as the youths had come to be called, unabashedly gathered stones in the streams and practiced against the fennecs and foxes of the desert, and no one thought to tease them for using “the toys of children.”
The armies of Philistia, disheartened but not destroyed, retired to their walled cities beside the Great Green Sea, Gaza, Askelon, and Ashedod, rather like a giant squid with injured tentacles withdrawing into a cave to recover its strength and tenacity. The might of Saul’s army-that is to say of Abner, Jonathan, David, and their rudely attired, ruggedly battling warriors-discouraged Israel’s neighbors from open war, and the young Israelite virgins, when they went to the wells to fill their pitchers, sang of their new hero:
“Saul has slain his thousands, David his ten thousands.”
If these exaggerated and heretical words came to the ears of the king, he did not acknowledge them, though David sensed an increasing suspicion in the king’s behavior toward him. When David had first appeared in the camp at Michmash, Saul had politely requested him to sing and play his lyre, praised his performance, and ordered a scribe to record the words on stone tablets or papyrus scrolls. Now, even if he closeted David from his men and, incidentally, the young virgins, he ordered him to play until David’s arms felt as heavy as copper and his mind was emptied of songs. Some of the time Saul was mired in madness or wearily climbing back to sanity, with little interest in ruling a kingdom which badly needed a ruler, or building an army which badly needed a commander to assist the aging Abner and the youthful Jonathan. He sighed and slept when Samuel denounced him and announced that Yahweh had withdrawn his favor, or when the people whispered that it was David, the slayer of Goliath, who would receive the anointing balm of royalty.