Thomas Swann - How are the Mighty fallen

(“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.

David approached the entrance to Jonathan’s tent, waving the grisly relic of his triumph. He had forgotten to recover his sandals; his hair was a dusty whirlwind atop his head. His hands and arms dripped gore. Warriors clamored around him to beg for a lock of Goliath’s hair, or his spear, or his sword, or the red eye which, though embedded with Jonathan’s tourmaline, still glared wickedly from the severed head. His brothers chanted his name like a conjuration: “David, David, David…”

“It is Samson come again!”

“Beware of Delilahs, little brother!”

“You’ve put them to route, the whole idolatrous army! They’re not even taking their tents.”

Why, even the king was clapping him on the shoulder and shouting, “Armorbearer no more! I’ll make you the captain of a thousand men. The youngest in all of Israel!”

“Jonathan,” he cried, exploding into the tent without even answering Saul. “You won’t have to fight Goliath!” I am drunk, he thought, of pomegranate wine. I have taken a virgin or worshipped the Lady at one of her harvest festivals. Now is the triumph of triumphs. Now I have come to Jonathan to give him the victory, for he has fought with me and through me, and he is truly the victor.

Jonathan raised his head and stared at him with blank, unblinking eyes. He parted his lips as if he wished to speak, but succumbed to a wave of nausea, repeated and sudden; he retched and gasped and crouched like a sick old man.

Yahweh preserve me, thought David. Insensitive brat that I am, I have brought a Cyclops’ head to an ailing prince who despises war and refuses to kill a bee. He backed out of the tent and heaved the head into the groping hands of the soldiers. They would doubtless impale it on a stake and parade it up and down the stream before the few Philistines who had not yet fled toward the sea.

He waded into the stream and, using sand from the bank, carefully washed the blood from his arms and hands. Fortunately, his tunic, the gift from Jonathan, was free of blood. Cleansed of gore if not of grime, he returned to the prince’s tent with hesitant steps.

Ahinoam and Saul had joined their son. “You are not to blame,” she whispered to David. “Whatever demons torture him now, you will know how to exorcise them.”

She looked as young as her daughter Michal, but her wise sad eyes bespoke another age and other lands; poets had sung her, kings had loved her to their destruction. (“Pomegranates are my lady’s breasts, a hyacinth her hair…” He would write a psalm to her; he too would have loved her except for Jonathan.)

“Come, Saul. Leave them together. Too many people will weary Jonathan. It is David’s right to be with him now.” “If David could play a psalm of victory…” “Another time.” She led him from the tent.

David sat on the edge of Jonathan’s couch and tried to ignore the babble of voices beyond the goatskin walls.

“Still angry with me, little friend?”

Jonathan was taller by hah0 a head than David, but David sometimes thought of him as a little boy: his tent, for example, with the carved animals and the painted blocks. It was. almost as if, obeying his father and becoming a fine warrior even though he hated to fight, he had resolutely held to a part of his life when he had been neither warrior nor hero but simply a child with toys.

Jonathan shook his head. “I was never angry with you.” The yellow hair, uncombed for days, tumbled over his eyes and gave him the look of his own rumpled bear.

David took his hand. “I shouldn’t have shown you the head. It’s no wonder it made you sick.”

“I’ve been fighting for my father since I was fourteen. I’m used to such sights.”

“Then why were you sick?” demanded David. He was learning to exercise subtlety with Saul, but Jonathan and Ahinoam could read his heart He must not evade them, though Jonathan evaded him. He must ask whatever questions troubled his heart, and Jonathan troubled him more than Goliath.

“Because you might have been killed. Because you had saved my life.”

“Do you mean you feel you owe me a debt of gratitude, and that’s a burden to you?” He knew that among the Midianites and certain other peoples a man whose life had been saved became the servant of his savior.

“It wasn’t that I felt a debt. I don’t know what I felt.”

“You were angry with me even before I fought Goliath, weren’t you?” David asked, trying to follow the intricacies of Jonathan’s heart. It was a heart whose innocence was baffling and labyrinthine. “I didn’t know why, but I knew you were. Maybe you got sick because you were ashamed of yourself for not having had a reason. When I brought you the head, it wasn’t that I shocked you, it was that you knew I was-I was — ” eloquent David struggled for words-“not somebody to be angry with.”

“Oh, David, you don’t understand at all.”

He placed his hands on Jonathan’s shoulders and wondered if he should shake him or hug him. “One thing I do under-stand is that you would have killed Goliath for me if I had been sick.”