Thomas Swann - How are the Mighty fallen

“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.“