The Secret Chord Read online

  But when I arrived in the antechamber, the attendant said the king had not retired. He could not tell me where he was. “When he comes in, tell him I would speak with him at his pleasure, no matter how late the hour,” I said. I took the long way back to my own quarters, wanting to bump into him, or to meet someone who might know where he was. But I could not stalk him all night long, so in the end I returned to my room and sat up, fully dressed, hoping for a summons. The candle guttered and I did not trouble to light another. My body ached from fatigue but my mind was restless. And then my boon companions, gut spasms and pounding head, arrived to join me in my vigil. For once, I welcomed them, these precursors of vision. The moon was full that night and bathed the room in a dim glow. But in the small hours it set, and the dark was so complete, my eyes might as well have been closed as open. I probed the dark, hoping that a sudden glare of vision would disrupt it. Throughout the night, my head throbbed and a weight of dread settled its great fist upon my heart. But no visions came. No bright shard of certainty arrived to tell me what I must do to help the king.

  I now know why sight failed me that night. I have lived long enough to see the pattern whose first stitch was placed in those late hours. But for many years, I wondered. If only vision had led me to the roof, to where he stood in the soft air under the luminous moon, what sin, what folly and pain, might then have been prevented. And yet, if vision had led me there, what greatness might have remained unmade, a design unrealized, a future lost. Decades have passed now, and still I do not know how to fashion my thought on this matter. Still it gnaws at me. At the time, as I lived it, I stumbled through what followed like a clear-sighted man whose eyes are suddenly clouded, afraid of the next obstacle that would rise up and trip me.

  • • •

  Once, I would have known exactly whom to go to with my concerns. I would have laid the tangled skein of my thoughts in the lap of Avigail, and together we would have unraveled it. Avigail befriended me when I joined David’s outlaws. David encouraged me to spend time with her—this was allowed as I was still young enough to have the liberty of the women’s tent. “You can learn from her,” he said. “She understands how to read men’s hearts.” And I did learn from her, most especially about him. She wanted me to understand him, and so she bared to me those private matters that men do not usually share one with another. “You are young to leave your mother,” she said. “I do not say I can take her place. No one can do that. But if you ever feel lonely here, if you need a woman’s care—” I remember my face reddening. She smiled kindly. “Do not look so dismayed. You’ll be a man soon enough. But for now, you cannot be always underfoot among the fighters. David will call for you often enough, be assured of it. He uses every tool that comes into his hand.”

  That night, as I sat in my room in the silent palace, waiting to be used again in his service, I remembered Avigail’s kindness to me in those outlaw days. I remembered how she had extended her long fingers and raised my chin so that I was obliged to look right into the deep green of her eyes. I was young then, and embarrassed by the intimacy of it. I am sure she knew that, but she wanted me to understand our kinship. “We are alike in some ways, you and I. We have each of us been sent to him, to help him according to our means.”

  At the time, boy that I was, I thought she spoke literally. Having no sons of Navaal, she had inherited a share of her former husband’s wealth, and had brought it to David on their marriage. I knew they were bedmates, of course, but as I had yet to feel any stirrings of desire, that part of their relationship was obscure to me. Now, in hindsight, knowing about David’s childhood, I can see more clearly and understand truths that eluded me then. The difference in their age meant that Avigail was more than a wife to David. She was like a sister and, in some measure, a mother also, giving him the affection that he had been severed from as an exiled child.

  Directly after he sacked my village, David struck camp. He had looted ten times the supplies he had asked for. That was the way of it in those years. A temporary camp or a hideout in a set of caves. If supplies were not forthcoming, a punitive raid to secure them, and then on the move again, to keep ahead of Shaul, who hunted him constantly. Barely a week passed without the arrival of some new recruit, anxious to join us. Shaul’s erratic behavior was driving many good men to desert him. Some who were in distress, and some who were burdened by debts and some who were generally discontented or dismayed by the direction of his leadership. Such men gathered to David, and our numbers swelled. Sometimes, David would have me by him when a new man found his way to us. He would greet each of them, offer them honey cakes or wine, and draw out their stories. He lent a sympathetic ear, and made them know that he thought them patriots, not traitors. Avigail would be there, too, always, serving the food, unnoticed by the strangers. But I noticed her, and I noticed she missed nothing.

  I was there one such evening, as she gathered the uneaten rinds and crusts from the meal David had shared with a man who had described himself as a trader from Shechem in the north, dealing in purple dye. As this was a risky trade, necessitating travel along the Derek Hayyam, the Way of the Sea, which passed through Plishtim territory, the man claimed also to be skilled with arms and had offered us his services as a fighter. When David asked why he had abandoned the dye trade, he said that the king’s steward had reneged on payments, a large sum. When he tried to bring the matter before Shaul in person, the king had refused to see him. On the steward’s word alone, the king banned him from doing further business with the court, which ruined him.

  It had been an amiable meal: the merchant was a good storyteller, and kept the company amused by tales from his journeys. But now that the man had retired, David reached an arm out and drew Avigail down to sit with him. “What did you think?” he asked her.

  “He had very white hands,” she said. “I suppose a dye merchant need not handle his own product, and yet . . .” She let her voice trail off.

  “What else?”

  She tilted her head, considering. “He seemed a bit confused, for a dye merchant, between tekelet and argaman.”

  “What?” said David. “Is there a difference, then?”

  “Oh, yes,” Avigail replied. “One is a blue purple, the other a warmer, reddish purple. It’s true, the distinction can be difficult to make”—she smiled—“though not if you’re canny—one is much cheaper, and no capable wife in purse to afford the dye in the first place would let herself be misled. And if it is your trade and livelihood . . . and you say you sell to a king . . .”

  She always fashioned her words in that way, opening a question rather than giving a certain answer, so that David might feel that he had come to the truth himself.

  “Anything more?”

  She paused. “Well, he said he traveled often by the Derek Hayyam, but it was clear when he spoke that he did not recall that the highway turns inland in the Carmel mountains to cross the plain of Yezreel at Megiddo.”

  David frowned. “Spy, do you think?”

  “Perhaps not. Perhaps Shaul’s spy would be more careful. More likely a brigand with a disreputable past, who does not want to own to it.”

  “In any case, I will send him on his way in the morning. I’ll not take a chance on him.”

  Had it gone the other way, had Avigail found the man’s tale convincing, he would have been embraced on her word. There would be a celebration to seal his joining the band—singing and dancing, the sharing of stories. Such nights were full of music and mirth and good feeling. That was how David drew men to him and made them his. He never forgot a man’s story and could recall the names of his kin and all those who were dear to him, wept with him in loss, celebrated with him in joy. He learned which man enjoyed a ribald jest and which of them disapproved of bawdiness, and tailored his words accordingly. It was not that he played false in this. He had both elements in his nature, both the coarse and the refined. He could be a predator at noonday and a poet by dusk. A
nd he exercised uncommon tact with his men, meeting them where they stood, rather than demanding that they always be the ones accommodating themselves. I have learned over time that this quality is rare in any man, even more so in a leader.

  Those who knew or loved music found an instant bond with him. You cannot harmonize in song or play instruments together without listening one to the other, sensing when to be loud and when soft, when to take the lead and when to yield it. I think that few grasp the connection between waging war and making music, but in the long evenings, when the firelight flickered on the cave walls and the voices joined and rose with his, I learned the unity between the two.

  Having had so little love from his own brothers, this adopted family was what he cherished, and they cherished him in return. But none came into this family without Avigail’s scrutiny. I never knew her to judge wrong. So I came to rely on her to teach me how to read men. And women also. I enjoyed the hours that I spent in the women’s tent. I liked the subtlety of the women’s way with one another, the veiled indirection of their talk. Most men, you needed only to look into their faces to know their mood, and generally their speech would be the first thought that came into their minds uttered out of their mouths. Women, whose very lives, sometimes, might depend upon concealing their true feelings, spoke a more artful language, more difficult to understand.

  David set me to learn other skills, too, in those days of restless waiting. Arms, I had to learn, as did every man and boy. I practiced with Yoav’s younger brother, Avishai, who was just a few years my senior but already highly skilled in weaponry. At first, I was barely strong enough to pull a bowstring and clumsy at handling a blade. Lucky for me, Avishai was an enthusiastic and relentless trainer, hot-tempered, but good-humored, unlike his dour older brother, and he showed me how to make best use of my limited skills. I had no great talent in these things but I was young and healthy and growing into my height and, having seen my father slain before my eyes, I had an appetite to learn how to defend myself.

  I had less appetite, at first, for the instruction of my other teacher. Seraiah was a slight youth who was not skilled to arms, but had worked as a scribe in Shaul’s service. David tasked Seraiah to teach me my letters. As a vintner’s son, I had not expected to need such learning, and unlike my schooling with weapons, at first I did not grasp the purpose in it. But David saw further than I did, and when I did not apply myself, he chided me. (He could not have known then that the best use of the skill would be the setting down of this—the chronicle of his life.) As I wanted his goodwill, I stopped resisting, and soon found that Seraiah, who loved his work, was a fine teacher. From him I came to understand that there was a great power in scratches upon skin or clay, from which one man might know the mind of another, even though distance or years divided them. He showed me that marks etched on a stone or inked upon a roll of hide could make a man live again, long after he had died. So for an hour or more each day I sat with him and drew figures in the dust, mouthing out the sounds that each scratch stood for, until one day the strange marks resolved themselves before my eyes. Before long, I could easily read any parchment or tablet that fell under my eyes, and make my own marks almost as skillfully as Seraiah.

  Some dozens of David’s men had brought their wives with them, and with them came a score or more of children. Daughters, of course, dwelt with their mothers in the tent. But there were sons also; infants mostly, and one or two beardless boys near to my own age. I did not become friends with them as I might have done in another season. I had moved on, and was a child no longer. So when I had liberty, I sat with Avigail, listening an ear to what she had to tell me, and watching for what could be imparted when no words were exchanged. A younger woman sat always by her, and she, too, was David’s wife. Ahinoam was a quiet, solid peasant girl from the Yezreel valley. She deferred to Avigail despite the precedence that by right was hers by earlier marriage. Ahinoam had little to say. I remember chiefly her placid, bovine beauty. David treated her with proper kindness, and had her often by him in the night. But by day, it was Avigail he wanted by his side.

  I knew—everyone knew—that these camp marriages were shadowed by another, earlier match. David’s famous first wife, Mikhal, the daughter of King Shaul, was not with us. She had abetted David’s flight from her father, and in reprisal Shaul had married her off to another man. “Do not speak of it,” Avigail cautioned me. “It is a sore matter with David.” It was a measure of how easy I felt with her that I was able to ask if this grieved her, that he cared still for this lost wife. She smiled. “You are very young,” she said. “Too young, perhaps, to understand such things.” She looked down and studied her hands in her lap. “If there is a child of Shaul’s that excites jealousy in me,” she said softly, “it is not Mikhal.” She raised her chin and looked off into the distance. “No, not her. Not that poor girl.”

  VI

  A few weeks after, I awoke suddenly from a dream—a confused dream peopled by strange beasts. I was at home again, in the hills of Ein Gedi, fighting off a lioness that had come for my goats. In the dream I was strangely strong, but just as I wrested the goat from the lion’s jaws, she changed shape into a she-bear, and her claws grasped me and held me against her pelt so that I could not breathe. I woke then, heart pounding, glad to find my face pressed only into a greasy scrap of sheepskin. I was lying in the dark, waiting for my heart to slow, listening to a light rain tapping on the earth beyond the cave mouth. I lay there, breathing the scent of damp stone and wet livestock as the men around me shifted and grunted in their sleep.

  Then I became aware of another noise. The sucking sound of feet on wet earth. Someone was moving outside the cave entrance. I sat up, to listen more closely, and saw the shadow pass across the opening. There was always a watch set, so I was not at first uneasy. Men had to answer the call of nature, even at night. But these swift steps did not resemble the weary tread of a man making a drowsy path to the latrine. These steps were purposeful, and they were heading directly for David’s cave. I stood, cast my dark mantle over my head and stepped out into the rain.

  I caught sight of him just as he reached the cave where David slept. He was tall and broad, and even in the dark I could see that he wore the garb of Shaul’s military. Killer. The hairs on my neck prickled with fear. The rational act would have been to cry out and rouse the guards—armed men who could actually be of use against a trained murderer. But I was far from rational thought. Some other faculty had me in hand, for I sprinted toward David’s cave, my bare feet sliding on the rain-slicked ground. As I reached the entrance, my gut clenched. The bigger man already had David in a wrestler’s lock, pinning him with one massive arm. Then the killer raised his other hand and grabbed a hank of David’s bright hair, pulling his head back to expose his neck. I expected the flash of a blade. As David groaned—a deep, animal sound—I opened my mouth to scream.

  The cry died in my throat. The tall stranger had no dagger. As he drew David’s head toward him, he leaned forward, and the dark fall of his hair did not conceal the truth of this encounter. They kissed. There was violence in it, and power, like lightning reaching from sky to earth.

  And this, as most of the world now knows, was the way of it between David and Yonatan. A love so strong that it flouted ancient rule, strained the bonds between father and son, and defied the will of a king. When I sat by David’s side as he fought through his grief to compose the lament—“The Song of the Bow,” which everyone now learns by heart as a matter of course—only then, I think, did I fully understand the power of the love they had, one for the other. And I knew what Avigail had known, what she had endured, and why she pitied Mikhal. But that night all I felt was confusion and embarrassment. I backed away from the cave and crept back to my bed, hoping that no one had seen me.

  I did not sleep again that night, but tossed and turned, disturbed by what I had witnessed. I was still very young. Too young to understand the force of adult desire. I had only just felt
the first brute stirrings of a boy’s simple lusts; the hot, shameful swelling that came unbidden and provoked a mocking ribaldry if noticed by the older men. Eavesdropping once, at home, when my father was entertaining wine merchants from the coast, I overheard some talk about the strange practices of the Sea Peoples. The trader claimed that some among them extolled the love between man and man, even going so far as to field warrior units of couples pledged to each other. The man was saying that the unit so formed was greatly feared, as the warriors fought not only for their own honor but also for the honor of their beloved. I hadn’t much credited any of this, placing it among other implausible travelers’ tales of sea monsters and cities of gold. In our tribe, such alliances were viewed as undesirable, even unclean, and those who indulged them did so in some secrecy. I fretted for David, lest others in the camp should awaken and learn the truth.

  When Yoav rose before first light, I scrambled from my own bed of sheepskins and followed him. He stopped to make his water, and then headed right for the king’s cave. I cried out his name, and he turned.

  “What?” he said impatiently.

  “David,” I stammered. “He is . . . he is not . . . perhaps you shouldn’t . . .”

  He raised a weary hand, as if to swat an irritating insect. “David’s not alone? Is that what you are trying to say?”

  My face turned as hot as an ember, and I nodded, looking at the ground.