Thomas Swann - How are the Mighty fallen

“That’s the danger. To quote a Siren philosopher who has often been plagiarized, Too much drink excites desire but limits performance.‘”

“Oh,” he said with disappointment. “Some more raisin cake then.”

“Why don’t you remove your robe? You look as if you were dressed against a winter night in the hinterlands of Assyria. Allow me to be your blanket,”

He visibly winced at the offer.

“Jonathan, my sweet, is my body so repellent to you?”

“Oh, no,” he cried. “You’re a real Eve! It was what you said about being a blanket.”

“David said the same thing?”

“Yes,” he sighed.

“And said it better. Then I shall be a light linen coverlet Different, you see. Not his competitor but his ally.” She left the room and returned in a gossamer robe beneath which the splendors of her body showed with misty allurement, the painted nipples, the navel inset with a malachite, the long, powerful, yet feminine legs which had once propelled her through the sea with the speed of a flying fish. Total nudity could only alarm Jonathan; an intimation, she hoped, would excite him.

He sat uneasily in his loincloth beside a brazier. The firelight flickered over his honey-colored skin. How young and unblemished he looked to her! Did he understand, had his mother told him, that the life of a Siren, a drone no less than a queen, might outlast a civilization? That splendid David might wrinkle into winter while Jonathan walked in the summer of youth? And yet there was something about him which suggested a short life, a look not so much of fragility as of mortality. Perhaps, after all, mortal David would outlive him to rule a kingdom.

Enough of her morbid thoughts, enough of his apprehensive looks. She must break the mood.

“You look like a frightened fennec,‘ she teased. ”Your ears are quivering under that mass of golden hair.“

“One of those little foxlike creatures with the solemn faces and the big ears.” He smiled. “Yes, I expect I do. It’s so complicated, you see, this getting seduced. I must be a very difficult customer. Most men would have dragged you onto your couch and taken their pleasure at once.”

“Your heritage is against you,” she reminded him. “Too many drones, too few queens. For a thousand years the drones have made do with each other.”

“David had trouble with me too at first. I got sick. But later it was like entering the Celestial Vineyard.”

“You’ve been brought up on Israelite notions of sin.

They’re hard to forget. Every time the good wives of the town glare at me, I know I am thought a sinner. Yet they come to me for potions and philters and ask my advice about love. Are you feeling sick now?“

“No, David got me over that. It’s rather humorous when you stop to think about it-what men and women do together for pleasure. When I was a boy I watched a friend of my sister’s coupling with one of Saul’s soldiers. All those wiggling parts, the sighs, and the squeals! They were inexperienced and didn’t seem to know what went where. For both of them, it must have been like putting on a suit of armor for the first time. The Goddess, I think, has a sense of humor.”

“There ought to be laughter in love,” she agreed. “But there ought also to be wonder. How ever often I’ve lain with a man-and I choose my men, even as they choose me-I’ve never failed to give and to gain pleasure, and that, in this dusty, Goddess-forsaken country is something for which to be thankful.”

“I can’t get the two together. The wonder and the laughter. Except with David. With him, it’s hardly physical at all. I don’t even tell my body what to do. I transcend myself.”

“Have I plied you with sufficient beer to make you feel a trifle transcendent?” “I might have one more cup.”

“Something to lessen the ordeal, eh?” She began to exhale a subtle musk from her lungs.

His eyes grew kind and grave. “You think I don’t appreciate your beauty or that I find you too old for me. Neither is true. I never thought another woman could approach my mother in beauty, but you could pass for her sister, if your hair were blond. But the trouble is, I want to put you in a temple instead of onto a couch. As for age-well, I just don’t think about that. You may be two hundred-” “One hundred and sixty,” she said with affronted dignity. “-for all I care. The point is, you look about twenty-five. No, age isn’t the trouble. It’s the other. You remind me of my mother and the Goddess.”

“Come and lay your head in my lap and I will sing you a song.”

Jonathan dutifully obeyed and, scenting the musk, remarked that she smelled like the sea. “Flying foam and salty winds-like your house, but better.” She bent and kissed him on the cheek. He looked at her with unmitigated trust, confident that she would somehow sail him to the Scylla-guarded islands of love.

She began to sing. Perhaps the song was about herself and Jonathan.

The windflower and the wind

“The windflower loves the wind As an albatross the sea, A marigold the morning sun, And bergamot the bee.

The wind who spreads her bud With a roving, boyish gust And whispers her to sleep at night In a bed of pollen dust.

The windflower loves the wind, But does that wanderer care? However he may whisper love, His heart is made of air.“

Hardly had she ended the song than one of her presentiments came to her as vividly and suddenly as a flight of Harpies. Sometimes men visited her to seek the future and she had to tell them: “I see nothing. Trust to the Goddess.” At other times, the future would intrude upon the present, like a blood-red rain or a river overrunning its banks. She saw Jonathan in battle. The Israelites had been routed by Philistine chariots. Even now a Cyclops and his driver were bearing down on him in a huge chariot with armored sides and great iron wheels, which thundered and crackled over the pitted earth. The Cyclops was drawing his bow and glaring maliciously through his single eye. Was it true what they said in the market place: “Saul has forfeited Yahweh’s favor. He and his sons will meet in Sheol?”

“What is it?” he asked. “There are tears in your eyes. Have I hurt your feelings?”

“Not you, my dear. A vision I had, that’s all. These fancies come to me at times. Memories of the happy days on Crete.”

She had found the one way to win him as a lover. She had made him pity her. He kissed her on the mouth, and then he took her with a tenderness like the descent of a god.

The next morning she returned the shekels with which he had paid for the night “You didn’t buy my love,” she said. “I gave it to you.”

“Perhaps,” he said, “if it were not for David-”

“Ah, but there is David.”

“Yes, there is.” He smiled radiantly as if it were he who was contemplating a god. The loss of him was like a fisherman’s hook in her heart.

“Still, for a little while, you loved me too. It wasn’t that you subtracted from the love you bore David. Rather you added to it. Remember me, Jonathan.”

“As long as I live,” he promised and held her in a chaste goodbye.

She drew away from him before she had to say: “You may forget me very quickly then. But I will bear your son.”

Saul had settled his family in the palace at Gibeah, which, in spite of its formidable walls and turrets, remained a place in which to live from day to day as well as take refuge from invaders; to mingle in the throne room where Saul delivered judgments and righted wrongs or to seek solitude in the upper chambers with only the mice for company. The marriage of David, slayer of Goliath, to Michal, the favorite daughter of the king, delighted a country wearily accustomed to war. Ahinoam, guiding Rizpah, arranged a wedding feast to shame a pharoah and then withdrew with her attendant, Naomi, to a vineyard and cottage beyond the town, a gift from Saul, in self-imposed exile. As for Michal, her beauty had bloomed like a rose of Sharon. The lithe young warrior maid had spent the days before her marriage at her loom to weave a wedding gown and, rapt in her dream of David, had scarcely noticed how much she owed to Abinoam’s careful instruction: its veil, its trim of Egyptian antelope fur, its embroidered design of swallows encircling a field of saffron grain.