Rise, p.24
Rise, page 24
part #1 of David Series
He belches.
“Who are you?” David says. “Where are you from?”
“I am an Egyptian. I am the slave of an Amalekite. My master abandoned me when I became ill three days ago. We raided the Negev of the Kerethites, some territory belonging to Judah and the Negev of Caleb. And we burned Ziklag.”
Abishai turns to David. “I thought you said the raiders were no more than a day’s journey?”
“Closer than that,” the Egyptian says. They’re not more than three or four miles from here. Drunk. Taking their pleasure.”
“Can you lead us down to them?”
“You are the one they call David?” the Egyptian asks.
“I am.”
“You are the one they say will be king of Israel.”
“I… am.”
“Swear to me before God that you will not kill me or hand me over to my master, and I will take you down to them.”
“I swear. Before God.”
The Egyptian leads them down a long slope, over a hill, down another slope, over another hill, and there, sprawled in the valley, drinking and eating, a thousand men debauch themselves. David feels the heat of violence rise in him and in his men.
“Steady,” Joab says.
Joab arranges the four hundred men into four parties, a hundred each, and positions them strategically: one party will drive the Amalekites into the arms—into the swords—of the other three.
It begins at dusk. It is fierce. The Amalekites are many, and even in their drunkenness—or maybe because of it—fight like dybbuks. When evening comes the next day, though, six hundred Amalekites lie, scattered or heaped, dead, and four hundred flee on camels.
Ahinoam and Abigail, and his son Amnon, run to him. Abigail holds their newborn son, Keliab. David folds Amnon under one arm, lifts Keliab in the other. The warmth of his children against him, the way their bodies relax into his, the way they trust his love for them, gives him joy and fear in equal measure.
“Are you… unharmed?” he asks the women.
“We are fine. They were sparing us for their chieftain’s pleasure. Some of the others are… they have suffered.”
David looks down at a dead Amalekite. He stands on his neck.
The men take everything back with them—all that belongs to them, all they had lost, and all the rest of the plunder. It is great abundance. As they climb back up the Besor Ravine, the two hundred men who stayed behind cheer.
“David has slain his ten thousand,” they begin to sing.
David laughs.
Then Bikri speaks, apparently for many. “These men abandoned us. They left us to do the bloody work. The dangerous work. They have no share in this plunder. They can take what belongs to them and leave.”
Joab again pulls his knife. David walks over to Bikri. He looks around, at everyone. Then he looks hard into Bikri’s eyes, his face inches away. David is shorter, slighter, but Bikri visibly wilts.
“No, my brother,” David says, quiet. Every man, all six hundred, holds his breath to try to hear him. “You must not do that with what the Lord has given us. He, not I, not anyone here, has protected us and delivered into our hands those who came against us. Who listens to what you have to say? The share of the man who stayed with the supplies is to be the same as that of him who went down to the battle. All will share alike. This is how we will live from now on. This is how it will be in my kingdom. All will share alike.”
“My lord,” Bikri says. He steps back, head bowed. “I apologize. Forgive me. I was wrong. I will never challenge your authority again.”
“Shalom, my brother,” David says.
* * *
That night in Ziklag, even among their burnt homes, they feast and dance and rejoice.
In the morning, David sends all his plunder to the elders in Judea, all the places where he and his men had roamed in their early days. To all the places they had taken provisions from, where the farmers lived who had given them stock and, as important, held their silence.
“What are you doing?” Ahinoam asks him. “We need that plunder. We need to rebuild our home. We need to rebuild Ziklag.”
“No,” David says. “I don’t think we do.”
972 bc
Man of Sorrows
David
I have heard men sing of the desert rapturously, as though lavishing blandishments on a lover. I have heard men curse it bitterly, as they might a belial. For me, the desert was taskmaster and teacher, in equal measure. It was brutal cruel, and bountiful wise. It wasted me. It tested me. It made me. I went into the desert one thing. I came out another.
You must remember, my brother, that time you found me in the desert, in the caves of Adullam, hidden in the radiant haze of the waste places. Even then, early in my flight, hunger had whittled me thin. Even then, danger, everywhere, had taught me to hold still as stone, stay sharp as thorn. I was watchful that way hawks are, wary the way conies are.
This was the quality King Achish saw in me, I think, liked in me, used in me. My usefulness to him was my wiliness. My treachery, my capacity to be more than one thing. The desert taught me that. And, strangely, the desert taught me also how to be only one thing. First it added shadows to me. Then it burned them all away.
That time you found me in Adullam, I wanted to tell you about the first time I went to Gath, to Achish. But we had such little time then, you and I, and everything was urgent. I regret now not telling you. It would have made you laugh, even then. I could have used that, your laughter. I could use it now.
When I went to Achish, fresh from Nob, fresh from your father’s court, I dragged there with me the sword of Goliath. If you asked me now what I was thinking, I would fall silent at the folly of it. Yet at the time it seemed destined. As though the sword dragged me, a stray mule I was harnessed to that was set on finding its way back to its master.
But soon enough I realized my peril. I looked for a way of escape. Then I saw it, clear as a dove descending. Maybe this was the way our forefathers saw angels, bright and huge, stepping from nowhere into daylight. I saw, clearly, that I was to play the meshuga. To dance wild. To slaver, and gibber, and scrabble, and grunt, to fling myself this way and that. Powerful warriors leapt from me as though fleeing a lunging cobra.
Only years later did I find why my behavior brought such deep and immediate change over Achish. His wife and his daughter both suffered the madness. They descended to their own realm of shades, and there roamed and howled. Achish beheld madness daily, intimately. My playing at it sprung on him a trap whose noose already gripped him tight, and not riches or armies or spells could loose it, day or night. He was a man of sorrows, familiar with suffering.
Jonathan, perhaps my antics would not have made you laugh. Maybe they would have made you weep. I thought for years that I was the only one who suffered at the hands of your father’s madness. I know now that you beheld it daily, intimately. I know now that you too were a man of sorrows. That your suffering was its own desert. Its own exile.
Much later, I returned to Achish. Your father, your father’s madness, drove me into his arms. Without a word, he trusted me. He knew I knew.
We shared in the fellowship of his suffering.
At the end, your father’s madness, his suffering, drove him to a ghostwife. Did you know? I heard about it long after, from one of Saul’s servants who became one of mine. Your father was ghostly pale himself, and gaunt as bones, his voice like winter wind on dead leaves. Yahweh would speak to him no longer, not through priest, nor oracle, nor the heavens, nor any earthly thing. The silence was living death. So he sought a witch in En-dor—my servant says she was piteous as a wounded bird—to conjure the old se’er Samuel from his dusty grave. Whether trick or no, she did it. Your father believed it, anyhow, speaking to the shadows the way any man speaks to another, though sheer cold terror had come over him. He departed more bereft than he came.
I am not sure why I am telling you this. Only, it is a grief beyond measure, the silence of God.
972 bc
Waiting
Michal
Darkness was my only companion.
But still I waited. I know I told you otherwise, that I had stopped waiting. But you cannot understand the hold he has on people. Or perhaps you can. Isn’t that why you’re here?
Despite myself, I waited. Everything in me was taken captive by him. Anger, sorrow, self-pity—all fueled it equally. The slightest thing—a scent, a snatch of song, a voice at a certain timbre, the rhythm of someone’s footfall in the outer court, the movement of a shadow across the gap beneath my door—anything pulled me sudden and sharp to a place I resolved many times not to go. I would be having a good day of forgetting, and then some memory would fling me headlong into a wilderness of loneliness, and everything in me was plundered all over again.
David, he was good at plundering.
Perhaps since our mother Eve, women have loved men to their own ruin. Our desire is for them, but they rule over us.
I forgot to tell you, my brother Jonathan saw him once in the desert. This was early on in David’s exile, when he was still in the Judean wilderness. Jonathan found him in that wasteland—he was always good at finding David. They spent an entire evening together. He told me in confidence not long after it happened.
“How is he? How does he look? What did you talk about?”
“He is tired, Michal. He is thin. But he will be fine. He asks about our father. He asks about Israel’s troops. He speaks mostly about God. He prays like a child and a sage and a lunatic all at once. It astounds me. God almost seems to stand in the room when he prays. He will be fine.”
“But what did he say?”
“I think I told you, Michal.”
I did not ask if he asked of me. He did not, that was clear enough, but I feared knowing it for certain. And what would it mean, if he hadn’t? I like to think that we hold in silence the thoughts we hold closest.
But this is utter nonsense. He never spoke of me because he never thought of me.
I resolved never to speak of him again. It was all I could do to spite him. But it didn’t help. He was always crowding me. If I spoke of textile, I pictured what he wore. If I spoke of war, I pictured him in battle. If I spoke of weather, I saw him soaked in rain or radiant in daybreak. He was like a broken tip of knife blade closed in my flesh, aching with every shift in weather.
My father gave me to another man, Paltiel. A good man. But he was no David. For which I thanked God and cursed him. I pitied my good husband, my dear stupid Paltiel: to have a wife he loved who waited for another, and then, done with waiting, replaced it with something that love could never grow in.
Darkness was my only companion.
1011 bc
Lament
David
After their evening of revelry in Ziklag, deep silence falls. They clean the mess of the Amalekite raid with funereal slowness. They speak only in whispers and nods.
Everyone knows what it means that Achish sent David away. They know that if Philistia triumphs against Israel in the battle that rages on Mount Gilboa, the other rulers of Philistia and the commanders of their armies will come for David and his men. And if Israel triumphs, the Philistines will take out their vengeance on David and his men. And if that doesn’t happen, Saul will be emboldened to cross the border and come for David, and all who follow him.
So it is a death watch.
On the evening of the third day, a man approaches the village. He comes slow to the top of the hill. He stops, he wavers. And then he runs toward them in a lopsided gait. A wound in his leg bends him forward at the waist, and to compensate he flails and jerks his right arm, wings and bobs his head. He looks like a chicken trying to outrun a fox. Some of the men laugh, some make cruel remarks. They compare him to the effigies on the walls of Jebus, compare him to Saul in one of his fits of torment.
David raises a hand to silence them.
The man arrives panting like a dog and throws himself at David’s feet. The whole village presses near to watch, to listen.
“Where have you come from?” David asks.
“I have escaped from the Israelite camp.”
“What happened?”
“The men fled from the battle. Many of them fell and died. And Saul and his son Jonathan are dead.”
David turns cold.
“Stand up, man,” he says to the messenger.
The man stands quickly, nimbly. There is a jauntiness now in his movements.
“How do you know that Saul and his son Jonathan are dead?”
“I happened to be on Mount Gilboa, and there was Saul, leaning on his spear, with the chariots and their drivers in hot pursuit. When he turned around and saw me, he called out to me, and I said, ‘What can I do?’ He asked me, ‘Who are you?’ ‘An Amalekite,’ I answered. Then he said to me, ‘Stand here by me and kill me! I’m in the throes of death, but I’m still alive.’ So I stood beside him and I killed him, because I knew that after he had fallen he could not survive. And I took the crown that was on his head and the band on his arm and have brought them here to my lord.”
David looks down at these. Unmistakably Saul’s. David grabs his own shirt, and in one wrenching motion, tears it hem to collar. He throws his head back and looses a wail. All his men, stunned for a moment, do likewise.
David remembers the last time he saw Saul. The Lord’s anointed looked small and old, standing at the foot of a mountain, squinting up into the sunlight. Come back, David my son, he called out, plaintive, his voice strained with grief. He must have believed himself what he said. Everything in David yearned to go back. To be the son. But he wrestled down the yearning, pummeled it with cynicism, throttled it with all the ruthlessness the desert had taught him.
“Here is the king’s spear,” David said, holding it aloft.
Saul’s gasp was like a crack opening in the earth. David knew he was bereft without his spear.
But now here is the king’s crown, plucked from his greying dying head. His spear had not saved him.
David now thinks of the last time he saw Jonathan. His face was drawn and sad. He spoke of the future, of their future together. But the way he spoke, the way he looked, he must have known that David’s future did not include him.
The Amalekite looks bored, amused, impatient.
“You are an Amalekite?” David says.
“As I said.”
“Why were you not afraid to lift your hand to destroy the Lord’s anointed?”
The man’s hint of a smile, almost a smirk, disappears.
“My Lord, that man was a clear goner. There was no getting out of his situation in a single piece. And you know yourself what kinda people them Philistines is, what they do to the likes of a king like your Saul. I was only doing what mercy called for. What the king his very self insisted on. Who am I to defy a king? The king?”
David calls Uriah.
“Your blood be on your own head. Your own mouth testified against you when you said, ‘I killed the Lord’s anointed.’ Uriah, strike him down!”
The Amalekite’s eyes flash with hatred. He reaches for his own sword. But Uriah lays him out with a single blow, hews him open sternum to belly.
Two men drag this body away, leaving a shallow gouge in the dust. The lamenting for Saul and Jonathan starts with fresh force. David calls for Ahinoam to bring his harp. In a soft tentative voice, he sings:
A gazelle lies slain on your heights, Israel.
How the mighty have fallen!
Tell it not in Gath,
proclaim it not in the streets of Ashkelon,
lest the daughters of the Philistines be glad,
lest the daughters of the uncircumcised rejoice.
Mountains of Gilboa,
may you have neither dew nor rain,
may no showers fall on your terraced fields.
For there the shield of the mighty was despised,
the shield of Saul—no longer rubbed with oil.
From the blood of the slain,
from the flesh of the mighty,
the bow of Jonathan did not turn back,
the sword of Saul did not return unsatisfied.
Saul and Jonathan—
in life they were loved and admired,
and in death they were not parted.
They were swifter than eagles,
they were stronger than lions.
Daughters of Israel,
weep for Saul,
who clothed you in scarlet and finery,
who adorned your garments with ornaments of gold.
How the mighty have fallen in battle!
Jonathan lies slain on your heights.
I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother;
you were very dear to me.
Your love for me was wonderful,
more wonderful than that of women.
How the mighty have fallen!
The weapons of war have perished!
* * *
Later, David approaches Joab.
“Joab.”
“David.”
“The men call me my lord.”
Joab meets this blank-faced.
“I will be king soon.”
“Well, congratulations. Good for you.”
“And perhaps good for you. You have served a king before. And well. The Lord’s anointed. You know the cost of that, the weight of that. The honor of that. You know what is required of you.”
“I do.”
“I am going to make you my general. You will be commander over my armies. And you will be my chief bodyguard.”
