Thomas Swann - How are the Mighty fallen

“I hate the evil in men, not the men themselves. But enough of such things. David, sing me another song. This time about yourself instead of me.”

“There is an old folk song among the Israelites, a mirror to both of us. You have heard it many times.”

“Sing it again.”

“O that thou wert as my brother,

That sucked the breasts of my mother!

When I should find thee without

I would kiss thee; yea, I should not be despised.

I would lead thee, and bring thee into my mother’s house,

Who would instruct me:

I would cause thee to drink of spiced wine of the juice of my pomegranate. Set me as a seal upon thine heart, As a seal upon thine arm For love is strong as death; Jealousy is cruel as the grave: The coals thereof are coals of fire, Which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love’s fire…“

“Tender comrade,” said Jonathan. “For this small moment, let us forget about thrones and exiles. We are larger than mortal things. You are the earth and I am the sea, devoted friends locked in eternal embrace.”

“Then we must swear by blood.” David withdrew the dagger from his sash, a bronze blade with an onyx hilt. He wanted to drive it into his heart. Could Sheol be worse than a wilderness without Jonathan?

“I will be first,” said Jonathan, as if he had guessed David’s wish. He slashed his arm below the sleeve of his tunic. Blood reddened his fingers.

David recovered the knife and made a similar wound, and they mingled their blood in the ancient and irreversible rite which makes brothers of enemies and lovers of friends. They bound each other’s wounds, and exchanged their tunics- Jonathan’s green for David’s blue-and David said:

“My friends shall be your friends, and my enemies shall be your enemies, and neither man nor woman, whether mother, father, brother, sister, wife, or child, shall come before you. Let Ashtoreth bear witness that we honor her above all other deities. Let Yahweh bear witness that we do not swear our love to spite him, but in spite of him. So said my ancestress Ruth, the woman of Moab: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will be buried: The Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.‘ "

– David watched him depart among the flowers, and sometimes they hid him, and sometimes his golden head seemed a moving flower, and once he turned and called:

“David.”

“Yes, Jonathan?”

“If I went with you-”

“If you went with me-”

“I would not be the Jonathan you love.”

Crows screamed raucously into the sky behind him and David thought, Thus are the people Jonathan leaves with me. Except Abraham. Yes, even Michal. Then he was ashamed by so heartless a thought and the poet’s soul of him conjured a kinder image:

Daisies are little folk, the shepherds and farmers. Sunflowers are princes and princesses who bend toward their father, the sun, their faces reflecting his light, but warmed no more by the sun above them than by the daisies at their feet.

But the sun may hide behind clouds or even set, and the sunflowers break their stalks, the daisies be trampled by wolves, and one of them cry, “Where is our father, the sun?”

– There were no sunflowers where David fled from Saul, the long, desperate flight which led him eventually to Achish and his Philistines and to the fortress city of Ziklag, where he must wait and watch while the people of his birth and the people who had sheltered him prepared for the ultimate war and the rising of a new sun.

He looked as if he had climbed from Sheol. Muffled and stooped, he stumbled into the tent and she caught him in her arms; she, Rizpah, who had supplanted his queen. He did not tell her where he had been on this night before the battle; he did not need to tell her that he had visited the Witch of Endor in spite of his own edict and asked her the dreaded question: Will Israel crush Philistia at Mt. Gilboa?

“Has my lord heard ill tidings?” she asked, skillfully removing his sandals and robe, easing him onto the couch, pouring a cup of pomegranate wine from a leather flagon. Stupid Rizpah; pathetic Rizpah; she laughed when she heard men speak of her in such terms. She-she with her spies, Elim and the rest-and not Ahinoam or Michal was the strongest woman in Israel. It was she who had urged the king to destroy David. It was she who had urged him to forgive and recall Jonathan, “lest he join David and alienate your people, for he is greatly loved.”

“I have heard the mutterings of a foolish young woman,” said Saul, with the petulance of a child. “She conjures a ghost and calls him Samuel. And yet I removed my sandals and knelt before him like a simple shepherd, and trembled before his wrath!”

“Did you not know his face?”

“I saw a shrouded old man who, for all I knew, was the witch’s own grandfather, or the witch herself, deceiving my ears and my eyes with her black arts. I was right to banish such people. I will see to her after the battle.”

She liked to see him angry and spirited, like the lion of Israel in the days of his pride, when emissaries from Egypt had knelt before him with gifts of ivory and gold, and the king of Tyre had sent him a hundred tunics of Tyrian purple for the officers of his growing army. But she was deeply troubled that he treated his visit to the Witch of Endor with suspicion and disdain. The Witch was neither a novice nor a charlatan. The people called her a sister to Ahinoam, for they greatly resembled each other except in the color of their hair and neither had aged perceptibly since they came to Israel from Caphtor. Samuel-and she did not doubt that Saul had truly seen him-must have foretold defeat. She felt as if a Lilith fumbled at her throat But she dared not reveal such forebodings to Saul. With Rizpah, concealment and dissimulation had become genius.

“The Witch of Endor is a woman with a pretty face and dyed hair and no more power than I to conjure the dead. Let my lord sleep and refresh himself for the battle tomorrow.”

“Call Jonathan to me.”

“Would you wake him so late, my lord?” She did not want to share her lover before the battle. She wanted to cradle him in her arms and possess him utterly, if perhaps for the last time. He was her Abraham, he was her Moses, yes, he was more to her than Yahweh or the gods of Ammon, and her devious and calculating mind, her aging body, served him with singlehearted devotion.

“You know he never sleeps before a battle.

The prince was quickly summoned and quick to appear.

“My son,” Saul said, “I think the same demons are besetting both of us. Yet we shall need our strength tomorrow.‘

“It will be as it has always been,” said Jonathan, beardless and young as when he had first met David, though his eyes had turned gray when David went into exile and people said of him, “The sea has gone out of his face.” But the wild chrysanthemums of Elah still burned in his hair.

“But David was with us once. What if he comes against you in the battle tomorrow? For three years I pursued him in the Wilderness. For three more years he has served the Philistines.”

“He will not fight against his own people.”

“But if he should? You, you, Jonathan. If you should meet him in the fray, his arm upraised to strike you with his sword?”

“Then I would kneel and receive his blow and bless him with my last breath.”

Saul looked at him with a long, pitying look. There had been a time when he would have shrieked in rage or hurled a spear. Now he said without bitterness:

“If we win the battle, perhaps you will tell me about David, whom you love above your father and your king. I have loved two women. One brought me pain, one brought me peace. I regret neither. I loved David too as a son. And you most of all. But the love between men which passes friendship-‘