Thomas Swann - How are the Mighty fallen

Jonathan laid a lightly restraining hand on David’s shoulder.

“Soon then?” The fingers were slender and supple. There were no calluses, yet the hand had held a sword which had smitten many Philistines and would, it was hoped, smite Goliath when the giant returned to the fray.

“Soon. Now you must go to your mother.”

He fled from Jonathan’s presence, but it was not easy to flee from his spirit…

He met his brothers where he had been appointed to guard their cloaks. Elihu grumbled. “Our brother is a better watcher of sheep than sheepskins.”

David was not in a mood for criticism. His brothers had neglected him when he arrived in the camp. Quite on his own he had become the king’s armorbearer, met a queen, and befriended a prince. Now he would repay them. Just as he never forgot a kindness, he never ignored a slight.

He said loftily, “The king has summoned me. I am going to become his armorbearer.”

The brothers stared after him in amazement as he strode toward Saul’s tent with the manly stride of a seasoned warrior. But the face of Saul, noble and fierce and yes, pitiable, loomed in his mind, and he felt the terrors of a bridegroom going to meet his betrothed’s father for the first time.

When he reached Saul’s tent, the occupants had departed to the sacred tree. Standing in the shadows, David heard Elim’s accusation of Jonathan and Saul’s judgment. If Nathan had not anticipated him, he would have offered himself as the scapegoat.

He heard Nathan’s anguished cry when the knife pierced his heart, but he felt much more keenly the knife of reproach in Jonathan. Because he did not dare to visit the grieving prince at such a time, he composed a psalm for him, and Jonathan was the speaker. The words seemed to come of themselves, and the shepherding lord was youthful in his thoughts and not a bearded Yahweh, a brother instead of a father:

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want He maketh me to lie down in green pastures… Yea though I walk through the Valley of the shadow of Death, I shall fear no evil For thou art with me…”

“David.”

“Has my song pleased you, Jonathan?”

“It has greatly eased my spirit. Does Yahweh sorrow for Nathan, do you think? With all the great heroes like Moses and Joshua, has he time to worry about a little armorbearer?”

“Yahweh or another,” said David, before he realized that he was speaking heresy. “It is always the smallest lamb who needs the most protection.”

“Perhaps the Lady of the Wild Things,” said Jonathan. He, too, then believed in other gods than Yahweh.

“Ashtoreth?”

“Ashtoreth is only one of her names. To my mother and me she is simply the Goddess or the Lady. Your song may have reached her ear, if not Yahweh’s.”

“But I wrote the song for you.”

“Did you, David? You promised me a song. I didn’t suspect how soon.”

“But you thought I would keep my promise?”

“I knew.”

“Can we talk together?” asked David, emboldened by Jonathan’s grief and the need to solace him. “I have only my cloak to offer you for a seat. Perhaps there is a corner in your father’s tent?”

“We can go to my tent.” Jonathan’s tent; the tent of mysteries. Few had entered that sacrosanct place, that haunt of creatures unimaginable: a bird of lapis lazuli that sang real words; a living bear whose fur was white like the snows on the summit of Mt. Hebron; and secret things. Forbidden things. Forbidding things?

“I don’t have many visitors.” Jonathan smiled. “I hope you’ll like my tent.”

“I want to see your bird-” David blinked and saw more than a bird. His brothers had led him to expect gigantic Baals and Ashtoreths with breasts as large as coconuts; censers burning with aphrodisiac myrrhs; naked maidens with carmine on their nipples. It was not that young, beardless Jonathan suggested such lecheries. But the brothers argued, “He is much too gentle for any man. No one can be so good. No one can be so chaste. Not even Samuel before his sons betrayed him and he became a sour old man. Not even Saul before he left his farm to become king and began his fits of madness. Jonathan hides his vices in his tent…” Needless to say, they and almost every other man in the camp admired his secrecy and envied him his supposed vices: men who were bored and homesick between battles and missed the chatter of their wives and sweethearts; grizzled fighting men bewitched by a youth they loved and followed but could not understand.

Indeed, the tent was miraculous, but its miracles were those of a child. Wind chimes shaped like little girls in bell-shaped skirts tinkled and danced in the breeze from the open flap. Coquina-colored boxes in many shapes and colors, like the blocks of a Cyclops’ child, twinkled on the floor. A box as high as your ankle for holding sandals. A box as high as your hip for a seat and pillowed with stuffed lions and deer. Jonathan, like a little boy who had found a treasure in the woods, and wished to show a friend, a rare butterfly or an orange mushroom, lifted the lid of a large circular box and proceeded to remove and open a smaller box, and so to the seventh and smallest, which held a big green bumblebee.

He handed the bee to David. “Watch out. He stings,” he said in an ominous voice.

David dropped the bee as if he had already been stung. Jonathan smiled and returned the bee to its nest of boxes. (But why does he never laugh!)

“He’s not real. He’s carved from a tourmaline. My mother says the dolphin folk carved him, before their arms became flippers.”

Miracle succeeded miracle. A wooden fennec, crudely but lovingly modeled from clay, stood on his head, and his feet held an oil lamp in the shape of a coconut. A terra-cotta hyena-a highly unpopular animal in Israel-sat on his haunches and begged a bunch of grapes from a wooden shepherd boy who looked disconcertingly like David. Live animals, too, frolicked among the boxes with the freedom of the woods: a gerbil, a hare, and yes, a small white bear who collided with his master and raised his snout for a pat of forgiveness. Jonathan stroked his fur.

“Go to David now. He’s my friend.”

The bear advanced upon David with a look which could only be called inscrutable.

“Is he going to bite me?” David asked. He was used to the large brown bears which sometimes threatened his flocks.

“Mylas likes you, and he doesn’t like many people. He’s very old, you see, and cantankerous, and wants to be left on his goatskin rug except when it’s time to eat. Or when I come from a battle and he licks my wounds and helps them to heal. He liked Nathan too, but you and Nathan are almost the only ones. He bites every woman except my mother. Once he tore off Michal’s robes and bit her on the backside.”

In spite of the reassurances, David did not expose his rear. “Where did you get him?” There were no white bears in Israel except Mylas. Had he come, like a phoenix, from the Woods Beyond the World?

“He came to me from the sea,” Jonathan said without explanation. “And as for my bird,” he added, unlocking an ivory cage and lifting its occupant of lapis lazuli, which he handed to David as if it were mere crude clay, “he’s for you.”

“For me?” David cried. “He’s a gift for a king!”

“Of course,” laughed Jonathan. (But he never laughs with his eyes.) “Why else would I give him to you? Keep him in the cage except when you want him to sing. No one will try to steal Mm. He’s bewitched against thieves. Hold him in your right hand. Caress his head-so-with your left hand.”

The bird began to sing, quietly at first, and with notes instead of words.

“It’s the music of Ophir,” said Jonathan. “Once a great queen of that land visited Philistia and loved a seren of Gath. At last she had to return to her own country. ‘My heart will break when you leave, like a piece of coral in a stormy sea,’ he said. But she answered him with a gift: ‘Wherever you go, my bird of lapis lazuli will speak for me, and you will be companioned.’ And he took the bird and was never without her.”