The Secret Chord by Geraldine Brooks Page B

practiced with Yoav’s younger brother, Avishai, who was just a few years my senior but already highly skilled in weaponry. At first, I was barely strong enough to pull a bowstring and clumsy at handling a blade. Lucky for me, Avishai was an enthusiastic and relentless trainer, hot-tempered, but good-humored, unlike his dour older brother, and he showed me how to make best use of my limited skills. I had no great talent in these things but I was young and healthy and growing into my height and, having seen my father slain before my eyes, I had an appetite to learn how to defend myself.
    I had less appetite, at first, for the instruction of my other teacher. Seraiah was a slight youth who was not skilled to arms, but had worked as a scribe in Shaul’s service. David tasked Seraiah to teach memy letters. As a vintner’s son, I had not expected to need such learning, and unlike my schooling with weapons, at first I did not grasp the purpose in it. But David saw further than I did, and when I did not apply myself, he chided me. (He could not have known then that the best use of the skill would be the setting down of this—the chronicle of his life.) As I wanted his goodwill, I stopped resisting, and soon found that Seraiah, who loved his work, was a fine teacher. From him I came to understand that there was a great power in scratches upon skin or clay, from which one man might know the mind of another, even though distance or years divided them. He showed me that marks etched on a stone or inked upon a roll of hide could make a man live again, long after he had died. So for an hour or more each day I sat with him and drew figures in the dust, mouthing out the sounds that each scratch stood for, until one day the strange marks resolved themselves before my eyes. Before long, I could easily read any parchment or tablet that fell under my eyes, and make my own marks almost as skillfully as Seraiah.
    Some dozens of David’s men had brought their wives with them, and with them came a score or more of children. Daughters, of course, dwelt with their mothers in the tent. But there were sons also; infants mostly, and one or two beardless boys near to my own age. I did not become friends with them as I might have done in another season. I had moved on, and was a child no longer. So when I had liberty, I sat with Avigail, listening an ear to what she had to tell me, and watching for what could be imparted when no words were exchanged. A younger woman sat always by her, and she, too, was David’s wife. Ahinoam was a quiet, solid peasant girl from the Yezreel valley. She deferred to Avigail despite the precedence that by right was hers by earlier marriage. Ahinoam had little to say. I remember chiefly her placid, bovine beauty. David treated her with proper kindness, and had her often by him in the night. But by day, it was Avigail he wanted by his side.
    I knew—everyone knew—that these camp marriages were shadowed by another, earlier match. David’s famous first wife, Mikhal, thedaughter of King Shaul, was not with us. She had abetted David’s flight from her father, and in reprisal Shaul had married her off to another man. “Do not speak of it,” Avigail cautioned me. “It is a sore matter with David.” It was a measure of how easy I felt with her that I was able to ask if this grieved her, that he cared still for this lost wife. She smiled. “You are very young,” she said. “Too young, perhaps, to understand such things.” She looked down and studied her hands in her lap. “If there is a child of Shaul’s that excites jealousy in me,” she said softly, “it is not Mikhal.” She raised her chin and looked off into the distance. “No, not her. Not that poor girl.”

VI
    A few weeks after, I awoke suddenly from a dream—a confused dream peopled by strange beasts. I was at home again, in the hills of Ein Gedi, fighting off a lioness that