Thomas Swann - How are the Mighty fallen

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.