How are the Mighty fallen

CHAPTER SIX

When David left the tent, his intention was clear: to fight Goliath. His expectation was equally clear: he would die in the fight. But Jonathan was sick, Saul was weak, Abner was old and inexpendable, and none of the stalwarts of Israel, the victors of Michmash, had offered to meet the giant. It was not only his size; it was not only his savagery. It was his single balefully glaring eye which leagued him, in the Israelite mind, with Lilith, Night Stalkers, Walk-Behinders, and other supernatural being spewed out/ of Sheol by Yah-weh’s wrath. Such beings were not the figments of superstition; one of David’s friends from Bethlehem had met a Lilith in a mountain cave and fled before she could lure and vampirize him; a couple from Gibeah had found a dwarf with horns in their baby’s crib.

“Yahweh preserve me,” he whispered, since Yahweh, whatever his limitations, was the lord of battles. Expressly against the god’s commandments, he had sometimes worshipped the silver-tongued Ashtoreth, but perhaps the god would forget his apostasy and use him as a means to save his chosen people (and David’s chosen person) from the Philistines.

Like all good shepherds, he was used to danger. He had fought with bears and lions, storms and floods, marauding Midianites on camels and local thieves on foot. Invariably he was terrified at first, since he lacked the blind, brute courage of his older and less intelligent brothers, but fear worked a curious chemistry in his body. He was young and middling in height, but now he felt as tall as Goliath. Furthermore, even though logic told him that the giant was unconquerable, he remembered that high-walled cities like Jericho had fallen to a motley band of wanderers out of the desert. It was as if his veins ran lava instead of blood.

Terror, then courage, then a cool and logical assessment of the problems at hand: such was the pattern in David; such his skill as a fighter. How could a boy fight a being twice his height, with bronze armor and iron weapons and a single-minded lust to kill and dismember? David himself owned neither weapons nor armor. He wore a tunic given to him by Jonathan, figured with bears and foxes, and the garment would bring him luck in the fight and companion him. But he must companion the tunic with suitable weapons.

“David,” Ahinoam called. He paused to marvel at the speed and grace with which she overtook him. He had never seen sweat on her face. He had never seen dirt on her hands. She could survive the discomfort of a day-long ride on a donkey’s back and look as if she were dressed to undress for a fertility rite. The scent of her was like sea spray and ambergris. Where other Israelite women, including Rizpah, muffled themselves in woolens against the heat and the heat of men’s desire, she walked in silken transparencies like the wings of a dragonfly.

“You’ll need weapons. Jonathan is sending you his armor by Saul.”

“But how did he know-how did you know I meant to fight Goliath?”

“I saw it in your face. So did Jonathan. Surely you know by now that we can look into your heart. Jonathan wanted to stop you, but Saul prevented him and posted a guard outside his tent.”

“Do you want to stop me?”

In the shadow of a tamarisk tree, her eyes looked gray and sad and ten thousand years too old for her bountiful body. As if she had seen the coming of the Sea Kings to Crete. The building of the great pyramids. The Hyksos invasion of Egypt…

She shook his hand. “David, David, you must see that Jonathan cannot fight. Or Saul. It has to be you. You have more power than you know.”

“You think I can kill Goliath?”

“The oracles are silent of bells. Even the gods, perhaps, are undecided. You see, my dear, you come from a land which worships Yahweh, but you fight a people who worship Ashtoreth. And I, even I, am sometimes divided between them, the Lady of the Wild Things and the Lord of the Mountain-tops. But I think that in all of Israel only you have a chance.”

“Why, my lady?”

“Because you are beautiful and the Great Mother deplores the broken bird, the drowned dolphin. Because you fight for Jonathan, who is dear to Israel, which is dear to Yahweh. Because, for what it is worth, I will fight with you in my heart.”

“The men say you brought green magic from Caphtor. The double magic of sea and forest.” (He started to add: “They also say that you once had wings.” But it would be like saying to one-armed Caspir, “They say that you once had another arm.”) “Is it true, my lady?”

“Magic is knowing the moods of the gods. Which to please and how. Perhaps I have magic with Ashtoreth. Her moods are like the tides or the phases of the moon. She is a goddess but also a woman; a woman but also a mother. Unpredictable but in the end compassionate. With Yahweh, who knows? Being a local god, he is readily offended. I will leave it to Saul to woo his favor.”

“Do you think he will listen?” Supported by Rizpah, Saul had overtaken them. “I have it from Samuel himself that Yahweh has gone from me.” He turned to address David. “My son, your music has brought me peace. I do not ask that you give your life as well.”

His great height and immensely broad shoulders bespoke a time when he had been king in truth, though fevers and madness had wracked him to a shell which even his robes could not conceal. He was old, proud, dying Jerusalem, gray of wall and tower, haggard from many winters, a ghost instead of a presence, but still defended by the Jebusites.

“For a long time I kept my father’s sheep,” said David. “Once a lion came after them and carried off a lamb. I went after him and smote him and delivered it out of his mouth, and I caught him by the beard and slew him.”

Saul shook his head. “Your confidence is admirable, but Goliath could kill a dozen lions.”

“The Lord that delivered me out of the paws of the lion will deliver me from Goliath.” The words did not come easily to him; though born of that pious tribe, the Benjamites, he did not understand his god. But he wished to give Saul a reason to let him fight.

“Go then and the Lord be with you. But first we must find you some armor.” He signaled to the guard in front of Jonathan’s tent: “Bring my son’s armor and weapons. All of it so that David may take a choice.”

Sword, helmet of brass, and coat of mail: how could he bear such weight and wield such a weapon, he who had always fought with his hands or at most with a staff?

“They won’t fit him, Saul,” said Ahinoam. “Jonathan is taller and slimmer.”

“What do you know of such things?” Saul asked wearily.

“Was I not with you at Jabesh-Gilead?”

(She is robed in chrysanthemums. Daisies spring when she walks and caresses the earth. And yet she speaks like a warrior…)

Saul gave a little sigh. “Yes, Ahinoam. You were with me then, and now.” He moved as if to touch and perhaps embrace her but, remembering Rizpah, dropped his arms to his side.

(He is still in love with her, but Rizpah is comfortable, and the old need comfort more than passion. It is hard for advancing age to confront eternal youth.)

“I’ve never worn armor before,” said David. He lifted the sword and wished for a shepherd’s staff. (“When I am well, I will teach you to use a sword,” Jonathan had said. “When I am well…”). “No, my lord, I must fight him without armor.”

Saul spoke with puzzlement “But these things belong to Jonathan. The best in Israel next to mine.”

“I would feel as if I were walking on the bottom of the sea. Goliath would trample me into the ground and hang Jonathan’s armor, together with my head, on the walls of Beth-Shan.”

“What do you know about the sea?” The question was almost an accusation.. “Only what I have dreamed. I have never seen the sea.”

Ahinoam took Saul’s hand. “Dreams are often warnings. Trust him, my dear.” Saul removed his hand and pain, like a seagull’s shadow, fleetingly crossed her face. Thus did goddesses grieve beneath their masks.

Rizpah, standing apart from them, smiled her human and pathetic smile. “My father was once a shepherd. He was also a fearsome fighter. Let David do as he chooses, my lord.”

“How do you want to fight him?” Saul demanded.

“The only way I know.” He returned the armor to Saul. “Please tell Jonathan that he has honored me with his offer. I will bring him the head of Goliath.”

Ahinoam embraced him as if he were Jonathan. “My second son, come back to me in triumph.”

“I love your son,” he said. “It’s only for him and you that I can do this thing.”

“And for you, we say, ‘In the midst of battle, remember the sea.’”

Rizpah shyly patted his shoulder; her hand was plump and heavily jeweled with rings of gold and garnet; her robe a garish mingling of red and orange. Beside Ahinoam she looked like a painted and aging whore instead of a king’s concubine; pathetic and therefore lovable.

“My son, may Yahweh go with you,” said Saul, an old man remembering youth. “Now I must get my sling.”

– He went to look for his brothers and found them chatting with a young Philistine across the stream. After a month of waiting to join battle, a camaraderie had grown between the two armies, and, enjoying the benefits of a common language, Philistine chattered with Israelite about the respective merits of Yahweh and Ashtoreth; the hills and the sea coast; sleeping under the sky or under a tent.

“We worship Ashtoreth too,” Eliab was saying, “so long as Samuel isn’t around.”

“You don’t know how to worship her properly,” said a Philistine youth. “You keep your robes on.”

“We have heard that your priests and priestesses disrobe and couple before your very eyes,” Eliab said, with the look of a hungry man.

“And we participate. Men and women, men and men, women and women. Take your pick, so long as you lie with someone you truly love. Why do you think our fields are fertile in spite of the winds from the sea? Because we please Ashtoreth, that’s why.”

“We can’t even enjoy a woman in private-not even a wife — for three days before a battle. And as for a man lying with a man, why, Yahweh would smite them both with a thunderbolt or turn them to pillars of salt!”

The Philistine grinned and clapped a passing friend on the back. “He sounds nice a grouchy old god. He’d do a lot of smiting in Philistia. Sin and retribution and pride. We don’t think about such things. Yahweh says don’t. The Lady says do. I expect she will give us the victory, what with Goliath on our side.”

“He smells. Even across the stream.”

“And steals and rapes. But he sleeps a lot. And he’s better than a hundred chariots. And you without a champion to go up against him.”

“No,” said David quietly.

“David!” Eliab cried. They had not even met since David became the king’s armorbearer, and the big brother was no longer the big man of the family.

“No what?”

No. We’re no longer without a champion. I am going to fight Goliath.“

Eliab and Ozem and Nethanel-and the Philistine across the stream-looked at David as if they did not know whether to greet him as a hero or a fool. In Bethlehem, as the youngest member of the family, he had been a shepherd when his brothers went to war. Now, by the grace of Yahweh, he was the king’s armorbearer; and furthermore, in place of Jonathan, he was preparing to fight Goliath. David was tempted to swagger and play the hero, but a fight in behalf of Jonathan was not an occasion for pride.

“I’ve come for my sling,” he said.

The three brothers gaped at him as if they had not heard his request. Finally Eliab said:

“You may use my sword.” It was his one precious possession.

David shook his head. Then, impulsively, he hugged his brothers in turn and was deeply touched to find tears on Eliab’s face, and to hear Nethanel stifle a sob. None of Jesse’s sons could read or write except David; they were fighters and herdsmen, with neither learning nor wisdom nor wit But they were good young men, devout in their worship of Yahweh, and sometimes David envied their simplicity.

They stared after him and shook their heads as he walked toward Jonathan’s tent.

He found the prince on his couch, flushed with the remnants of fever and drenched with sweat. David sat beside him and pushed him gently onto his back. Jonathan had the body of a runner, not a wrestler; smooth and slim instead of knotted with muscles. His face showed lines of pain, but he was singularly beautiful even in his illness; inhumanly beautiful, like his mother.

“You’re going to fight him?‘

“Yes.”

“I should be the one.

“And so you will, Jonathan. You will fight through me.”

Quite unintentionally, and so quickly that Jonathan could neither respond nor refuse, he bent and kissed the fevered cheek. He rose and fled from the tent, without looking behind him till Jonathan called his name, once, softly.

“David.”

The word would be his armor.

When he returned to Saul and Ahinoam, he was still wearing Jonathan’s tunic, with two additions-a small sack suspended from his shoulder and a sling in his hand. The usual Israelite sling was no more than two narrow strips of leather sewn together at one end into a small pouch for holding a stone. One end the slinger held; the other he tied to his wrist; and he flung the stone with sufficient force to stop a bear or a lion but not a giant David wisely preferred an Assyrian sling, a gift from a cousin who had fought as a mercenary for the Wolves of the North. Both sturdier and deadlier than the Israelite sling, it was a single strip attached to a leather cup. He would hold the strip toward the middle, whirl the sling, and then, with a slight twist of the wrist, release the stone with the speed, force, and accuracy of long and intensive practice. Such a missile could not pierce armor, but it could strike the forehead, the forearm, the ankle below the greaves, and wound or even kill. In Assyria, so he was told, it was the usual practice to wound and then, with the foe either limping in pain or stretched on the ground, make the kill with a sword.

Swordless David knelt beside the stream and gathered five smooth stones, drying and weighing each in his hand before he placed it in his pouch. Jagged stones would have been more wounding, but smooth ones were more predictable in their flight and, ultimately, more lethal.

“A slingshot!” cried Saul. “Why, that’s a child’s toy. You forget you’re no longer a shepherd boy.”

The Assyrians never fight without their slingers,“ David reminded the king. He was more knowledgeable about Assyrian armies than about his father’s herd. Also, Egyptian, Edomite, Ammonite, and Midianite, to say nothing of Philistine. ”Their missiles are nothing more than baked clay pellets, and yet they’re conquering the Babylonians. But river stones are harder and deadlier. We say in Bethlehem that a Benjamite can sling a stone at a hare and catch him as he jumps.“

Saul shrugged with weary resignation. “Well, then, fight your giant. I have no wish to watch the slaughter.” He turned and stalked toward his tent, to “cleanse his robe,” according to an old expression, of the ill-omened affair. Rizpah, with a wistful look at David and the ghost of a smile, followed her lord. Ahinoam remained with David.

“If your river stones fail,” she said, “use this. It is small but very hard. Such stones hold the Lady’s magic.” She gave him Jonathan’s bee-shaped tourmaline.

He fondled it carefully and“ judged its weight. Too light, he thought, but I must please her because she is sad, she and Jonathan. They expect me to die.

“And David, remember the sea.”

He did not question the cryptic advice, but knelt and kissed her hand. (Such small hands for one so ripe. Hands like butterflies. To press them would be to wound them. How white they are! Are they covered with magic dust like a butterfly wing?)

He rose and looked into her eyes and wanted to cry like a little boy and be held and comforted by this goddess, this queen, this woman who seemed to him the Great Mother, the universal comforter.

“Ask Jonathan to wish me well,” he said.

“May the Lady walk with both of you, and may the two of you soon walk together.” She smoothed his ruffled hair and the gesture seemed strangely poignant at such a time; a trifle yet touching. “I am going to watch your victory.”

“Nobody else is going to watch me,” he said. “They think I’m a mosquito attacking an elephant. Did you ever hear such a silence?”

“Look around you,” she said. “It is the silence of watchfulness.”

They might have been turned into salt, these Israelites, like Lot’s unfortunate wife. No one stirred a fire, no one ate, no one polished a blade or hammered a tent peg; the army physician had dropped his herbal bag; one-armed Caspir knelt beside his blanket and looked to Ahinoam with wordless and worshipful sympathy; and in that hushed expectancy David could read man’s eternal hope that, while kingdoms rise and fall, while chaos coalesces into gods and worlds, and then reclaims them, miracles remain, magic endures, sometimes the small prevail, the large are devoured by the dust and the worm.

Across the stream the Philistines watched him with an equal hush. A curious division showed in their shaven faces. Goliath fought in their place; Goliath could win the war for them. But they clearly despised the giant and admired the lad who dared to fight him. What had Ahinoam said? “The Philistines are not a wicked race. They are dreamers and artists who are forced to bear arms by ambitious lords.” If he were king, he would try to make peace with them. If he were king… It suddenly seemed to him that to be the king of Israel was the highest dream he could dream. Except to be loved by Jonathan. Thus did the several Davids war in the single boy.

He knelt and discarded his sandals-his tough feet, so he thought, needed no protection-and waded into the stream. But every nerve was sensitized to the point of pain. He felt the rocks like nettles… the chill of the water… a fish against his ankle. He stumbled and fell to his knees and the water slapped his face; rose and climbed the bank and stared at the staring faces of ten thousand men.

He stood in a meadow of chrysanthemums. Beyond him lay the flowerlike tents of the Philistines, their owners standing in groups to watch the fight, helmeted with their purple plumes, holding their iron-tipped spears; expectant of victory, but-hesitant? Doubting their own redoubtable champion? Remembering, perhaps, Jonathan at Michmash. Remembering certainly the wrath of Yahweh when they stole his Ark. Warriors, these men, but preferring peace. Seashore and sea-grapes… gardens where mulberry trees delighted the bee and the wasp… white palaces with crimson columns… dreamers and artists.

Goliath, guarded by his armorbearer, pretended to drowse beneath a terebinth tree. His jaw hung slack; his head lolled on his shoulder; he looked more absurd than threatening.

But the single eye fluttered and watched…

“All right, Big Mouth,” David shouted. “You’ve got your champion.”

Goliath stared first at David and then over his head, probably taking the boy for an armorbearer to a seasoned warrior, Abner or even Saul.

“Get up, One Eye, or I'll smite you where you sit!”

Goliath recognized his adversary and began to laugh. His laughter resembled the yelp of hyenas around a corpse.

“Am I a dog that you come to me with a sling? Cursed be your Yahweh that he can’t find a champion more worthy of me. I will give your flesh to the vultures and the lions.”

“You’ve cursed the wrong god,” cried David, secretly wishing that the giant had cursed the Lady and alerted her to the plight of a shepherd boy. “It was Yahweh who sent a pestilence on the Philistines when they stole his Ark. And who do you think it was who opened the Red Sea and-” what was another miracle to dismay a giant? — “afflicted Pharaoh with a thousand boils?”

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.