Not everyone was fooled, however. Achish’s chief generals, many of whom had fought David in the field, remained skeptical about his supposed new loyalty. When we mustered with them for what was to be a major assault on Shaul’s forces, they objected. Unwilling to go forward with dissent in the ranks, Achish ordered us back to Ziklag.
Before we arrived there, a sour stink of burning reached us. We could see, in the distance, a pall of smoke rising over the town. We increased our pace, and arrived to find the town gates unmanned. We ran through the streets toward the plume of smoke, which we soon realized marked the site of David’s fortress. The gates hung splintered on their hinges, and beyond the courtyard, the fort stood a smoldering ruin. David and his men ran heedlessly over the fallen timbers, calling the names of their wives and children. But no one answered.
Finally, Avishai beat down the shuttered door of a neighboring house and dragged out the reluctant householder. He was an old man. The young men of the town were all of them gone—they had mustered with us and were still on the march with Achish.
Avishai’s face was black with rage. “Who did this? Speak!”
“Amalekites. My lord, they came in force. We who are left could do nothing.”
It was a revenge raid. We had laid waste several of the Amalekites’ settlements. They had bided their time, waiting until, as they thought, all our fighters had gone to war. They had killed the guard on the gate and then marched out the women and children, bound one to another at the neck, before they set fire to the fort.
David, standing behind Avishai, fell to his knees. His hand scrambled in the dirt, piling it on his head. He was crushed by the knowledge that this is what his tactics—all that killing, all those women and children dead—had brought upon us. Get up, I willed him. This is not the time to let guilt or grief rout you. Yoav, who had been searching in the ruin, came running across the courtyard. He spoke all in a rush, giving voice to my own thoughts.
“The Amalekites think we are heading north; they will not expect us to pursue them. We have to take that advantage and go. Now. Before they rape and kill them all.”
But David did not get up. Instead, he fell prostrate in the dirt. I looked around at the faces, many of them also tear-streaked. But what I saw was not sympathy. It was anger. David had lost his wives, but they had lost their sons. At that moment, they did not want a leader in mourning: they wanted a cool-headed avenger.
I had not seen this before. David knew his men, knew their hearts, read their every mood. As the head and the hand work as one, so it had always been with David and his men. I often thought that he read them better than they read themselves. But there, in the square, as I blinked against the stinging embers and spat the dry ash from my mouth, I saw that the gift had deserted him.
One of the men picked up a rock from the ground. I have no idea what he intended, or even if he was aware, in his anger, that he had a stone in his fist. I waited for Yoav to restrain him, but he just stood there and locked eyes with the man, almost as though urging him on. Another then bent and took up a stone. Then a third. They began to advance upon David, crying out curses, as he lay oblivious, keening.
What madness was this? I stood at the edge of what was fast becoming a mob. Wifeless, childless, I was outside the frenzy. And then I took myself in hand. For what reason had I resolved to be celibate and barren if not this? To defend David from his own human entanglements, and the weakness they engendered. I pushed through the crowd, shoving aside men twice my size, until I stood between David and the sea of angry faces.
“Get back!” I bellowed. I had never heard my own voice so loud and resonant when not under the power of the Name. I drew my sword and swept it in front of me in a wide, glittering arc. My newfound ferocity must have worked on the men’s natural awe and wariness of me, because they did step back, muttering and cursing.
I knew I did not have long, but in that moment of their uncertainty, I took the risk and turned my back on them. I reached down and grabbed David by the shoulders of his tunic and pulled him up. He was a dead weight in my hands, but somehow I found the strength to bring him to his feet. I was actually shaking him. I saw his face, a mask of grief, re-forming itself into bafflement.
Then I bellowed again. It was still my own voice, alone. I spoke without power. But no one but me knew that.
Pursue! I cried. Pursue! For you shall overtake and you shall rescue!
David’s head snapped back as if I had struck him. The glazed look vanished from his eyes, as if his soul, departed, had reentered his body. He cried out and the men answered in a roar.
Others have written of that pursuit, of how David ran us till we dropped, all the way from Ziklag to Wadi Besor. A third of us, too spent to continue, we left behind there. The rest of us went on, rallied by David’s will and my words. With luck, or divine guidance, we stumbled upon a half-dead Egyptian slave who had fallen ill and been left to die by his Amalekite master. We gave the man food and water, and he gave up the Amalekite position in return for his freedom. David pressed on through the night to mount a surprise raid at dawn.
I have already set down the details of some of the most notorious things we did. But at this skirmish we excelled ourselves in our brutality. Half crazed with grief and exhaustion, those whose wives and children had been taken fell on their enemies with a red frenzy. Corpses were hacked apart, severed heads kicked from man to man till the faces were mashed like ground meat. It took very little time. Any who stayed alive long enough to witness what became of the fallen turned and fled into the wild. We did not pursue them. David walked through the piles of defaced corpses, kicking aside body parts, his boots red to the calf, until he came to where the women and children were penned, roped together like beasts and lashed to pickets. He went to Avigail first, and slit the rope that bound her. Then he fell to his knees, his arms around her thighs, weeping. He was sticky with blood and brain matter but she did not regard it. Avigail wrapped her hands in his hair, raised him up and embraced him. Then she took his knife and severed the bonds on Ahinoam, who was tied up beside her. She took David’s hand and placed it on Ahinoam’s swollen belly. His face moved through a spectrum of expressions, from confusion to realization to joy. Ahinoam was carrying David’s firstborn son, Amnon. He had had more to lose that day than he had even imagined. David drew Ahinoam into a grateful embrace. But when he drew back, I saw the bloody handprint on her robe, and I knew it for what it was. An ominous anointing.
VII
All these memories unspooled that night, as I sat my lonely vigil in David’s house, in the city that now bore his name, the years of exile far behind us. I did not often choose to recall those ugly, bitter times. But remembering Avigail and yearning for her counsel had brought those months vividly before me. Had she lived, even now, when David’s household boasted the loveliest and highest-born women of a half dozen nations, I believe he would have continued to rely on her affection and her wisdom. When she died, David mourned her fasting. But he sang for her no such gorgeous lament as he composed for Yonatan.
• • •
I did not even doze throughout the night, which is just as well. Who knows what dreams might come in such a state, poised on the edge of vision, yet unable to push through the reeking mire of doubt. Outside, dawn was still distant, but finally the blackness of full night began to lift so that I could make out, once again, the shape of the pitcher upon the table, the smooth expanse of my undisturbed sleeping couch. I rose from my chair, walked to the window and opened the shutters on the ebbing darkness. Muwat, on his low pallet in the alcove, stirred and uttered an involuntary groan. I heard him shuffling to the ewer, and water splashing into the basin. As he handed me the linen cloths, he stifled a yawn. I pressed the cold fabric to my face. My body ached, joint and sinew. I let my head drop to one shoulder and then the other, loosening the cables that knotted about my neck. Muwat shambled out, heading for the kitchens to await the first
bread. I did not bother to tell him that I would not be able to eat it. The dread that bored a pit in my belly would not permit it.
I would go to the king as soon as I decently could. My chamber’s window faced east. I stood there, gazing out toward the dark mass of the Har HaZeitim, the Mount of Olives, willing the sun to scale its curve. Finally, a sliver of light spilled over the brow of the mount and reached swiftly across the Wadi Kidron, wakening a rooster to crow to the dawn. I watched the shaft finger its way up the walls of the outer houses, crawling inch by inch across the rough mud, making a swift sprint across a flat roof, illuminating a servant emptying a pan of fouled water into the street below. Layer by layer, the light rose through the levels of the town, the winding streets and angled houses, until finally it leaped the gap between the citadel and the king’s house and lapped against the ashlars at the base of the wall against which I leaned my exhausted body. I shook myself, straightened, pulled a mantle around my shoulders and went out.
I had barely taken a score of steps when Muwat rounded the corner, the bread platter in his hand and his eyes, almost as wide as the platter, staring wildly from his head. “Thank you, Muwat, but I won’t—”
I was about to say I would not be taking anything to eat when he, most uncharacteristically, cut me off. He laid a tentative hand on the sleeve of my robe, and inclined his head back along the passageway in the direction of our room.
“So?” I said softly. Then in case we were overheard: “I think I will take a morsel, after all.”
Inside the room, I closed the door. Muwat set the platter down. “You know that the king is not alone.” It was a statement, delivered with the air that had become familiar to me: the ordinary man’s assumption that as a prophet I knew everything. “You’re aware that there is a woman with him.”
Well, I thought, one didn’t need to be a prophet to know that. And this hardly seemed cause for such a concerned expression as my servant now wore. I felt relief, in fact, that the king was acting more like his normal self.
“What of it?” I said, smiling. “When is there not a woman with the king?”
“It is not a woman of the household. It is the wife of Uriah.”
“Uriah?”
Muwat nodded, looking surprised at my astonishment, and at the same time a little bit gratified that he had been able to tell me something I did not in fact know.
“Not Uriah the Hittite captain?”
Muwat nodded again. I breathed in sharply. What madness was this? Uriah was one of David’s principal fighters, loyal and brave, known for his discipline and honor. He had gone to the siege with Yoav, leading his own company. I sat down. So this was the cause of my unease. David had his appetites, as I have said, but this kind of incontinent behavior was most unlike him. He did not abuse his power in this way. His bonds with his men were bonds of real love, of friendship and devotion. He was more apt to reward a good soldier like Uriah with the honor of a virgin from his own household than to cuckold him.
“Speak of this to no one,” I said. Muwat gave me a look, which I deserved, telling me he was not such a dullard as to need that instruction. “Send to Yohoshaphat and ask him if I might have the morning’s first audience—or the first after any urgent military matters have been dealt with.” He turned to go, but I stopped him. “No. Forget that, Muwat. Better to go instead to the youth who attends the king’s bedchamber, and see if you can get him to tell you when the king is again alone.” It would be preferable, I thought, if I could confront him on this matter in his chamber, before the press of people crowded us. Even if he cleared the hall, and we met there with no other present, ears would be everywhere, and tongues wagging about what might or might not have passed between the king and his seer. Muwat nodded. He was a subtle youth; he understood these things. He went out, and I paced. This matter would need to be covered up, and swiftly. It was the kind of thing that corrodes, like a drop of lye fallen upon linen. You don’t see the effect at first, but in time the fibers weaken and fray, a hole widens, and the garment is spoiled. Only if the drop is washed away directly can the damage be gainsaid.
The sun had not traveled much higher in the sky when Muwat returned to tell me that the woman had been escorted from the palace, swathed from head to foot in mantle and veils. I went then and ascended to the king’s chambers on the upper floor. The guard on the stair did not stop me and the chamber attendant looked only mildly vexed that I should ask to see the king at such an early hour. The rules that bound others in the king’s house were understood not to apply to me.
He was standing by the window as I entered, just as he had been two days earlier. But this time, the face that turned to me was glowing and relaxed. “You’re abroad early,” he said. “Do you have news for me of my mother? How does she?”
“Your mother is in good health. Your brother, as ever, drinks too much. It was an interesting visit; we can speak of it later, if you like. But that is not why I am here.” I tilted my head in the direction of the chamber attendants.
He raised a brow, but said nothing, and gave the sign to dismiss them. When the door closed, he passed to the table where a pitcher was set. “Have some laban,” he said, pouring me a cup. “It is very good now. The goats like this season’s grasses.” I shook my head. Just the sight of the creamy liquid oozing into the cup aggravated my nausea. He shrugged, downing the laban in greedy gulps and wiping his mouth as unselfconsciously as a boy.
He was still smiling when he spoke again. “So what does bring you here, if you have no news and you will not take a morning morsel?” The amber eyes were fixed on me, wary now, despite the smile.
“What do you think you are doing with the wife of Uriah?”
There was a flash of anger. “That is an impertinent question, even from you.” He put down the cup with a thump. “I might have known better than to expect some privacy in my bed—in my bed!—with a seer underfoot. Don’t trouble yourself. It was an impulse of a moment and it’s done with. Nothing will come of it. She is discreet. She has to be—she has most to lose in this, after all. Uriah will never know of it. But Natan—it was an uncanny thing—” His face softened, and his tone also. He was no longer curt and flip, but distant, almost dreamy. “I saw her quite by chance. I couldn’t sleep. You know how I’ve been since the troops left. I was up on the roof, pacing, trying to quiet my mind, and there she was, on the roof of her own house—you know the one?—she and her maid. The maid was helping her to bathe. Oh, I know. I should have looked away as soon as I saw that she was undressing. I swear, I didn’t know who she was, or I would have done so. You will say I should have resisted the temptation, no matter who she was. But I couldn’t. The night before, I hadn’t been able . . . with a girl . . . it doesn’t happen to me like that, and it had been eating at me. What was I, if I couldn’t fight and I couldn’t fuck? Then I looked at her, and I felt alive—I felt like myself—for the first time since the troops left. There was something about the moonlight on her shoulders, the tumble of her hair . . .” His long fingers caressed the air, describing a picture in his mind, and he smiled. “I tell you, even you, Natan, for all your iron discipline—even you would have been overthrown.”
Unlikely, I wanted to say. But I did not. “What’s done is done, but I must tell you I think it most unwise. What makes you sure Uriah will not hear of this? Word reached me as swift as the deed. No, not in that way. Be assured, my visions do not reach into your bedchamber. I learned of it by normal human means. Servants’ gossip.” I did not tell him of my nightlong watch, the foreboding of some wretched, unclean thing. I tried to steady my breath. “Presumably you sent a servant to fetch her, so that is one mouth that must stay silent. The palace guards had to admit her, and to do that they would need to know who she was. Your chamber attendants—two? Three? They must be silent. So, let us tally it: so far, we have eight or ten or a dozen of us who know. Her maidservant, also. The porter at her house. So. How quickly we arrive
at near to a score. What makes you think so many tongues will remain still? And if news comes to Uriah, what damage might it do, and he a loyal fighter, loved by his men. You do not need to risk such an enemy for the sake of a moment’s spasm.”
“And you, Natan, do not need to be such a sanctimonious doomsayer. This is not a matter of high policy of the kind that concerns you. I needed it, and it was good. If you had a woman yourself from time to time you might know—” And then his tone changed. He rubbed a hand across his head and dropped his gaze like a chastened boy. “I’m sorry. I know you live as you do for my sake. I should be thanking you for the sacrifice, not goading you.” I lifted a hand, waving this off.
“There can be no talk of sorry between you and me. I do not measure my words to you—indeed, I cannot. And I have no right or desire for you to weigh yours. Remember: I am eved hamalek, a man at your service, always.” I allowed myself a small smile then. “Even if sometimes you’d rather I wasn’t.”
His face lightened. He stepped toward me and clapped me on the shoulder. “Truly, I don’t think you need to concern yourself with this. I sent her off with a gift and I will not see her again. Yes, I sinned. I know you consider yourself the custodian of my character. But really, Natan, do you think Yah will punish me more than he will punish the hundred other men who committed adultery last night within a cock’s crow of these walls?”
“You are not ‘a hundred other men.’ As you well know.” That was all I said. I bowed then, and asked leave to go. He dismissed me with a wave of his hand. His good humor had been disrupted, but not much. As I closed the door I could hear him humming. By the time I reached the stair he was in full-throated song.
What he said was probably true. His servants loved him; they were handpicked, well treated and loyal. One could only hope hers were not similarly loyal to her husband, but would protect her secret, even if they did so only to guard Uriah from the pain of the insult to his honor. She, certainly, was hardly likely to tell her warrior husband that his king had whored her.