The Secret Chord: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

fear the blood-flecked murderer who stood before him.
    “Did you not hear me, little shepherd? Did I not say I would kill all of his kin that can piss against a wall?”
    Yoav lifted his spear, but I just stood there. David raised his hand wearily. “The boy’s simple,” he muttered. “Let him be.” He shrugged and turned aside.
    Then I spoke. Later, others had to tell me what I said. I knew that my lips and tongue were moving, but I could not hear my own words because my head was ringing like a stone under the blows of an iron mallet, blows that beat the blood behind my eyes. I stood there, in the crimson-misted ruins of my own life, and the words poured out. Through the red blur, I saw the faces of his fighters distort with wonder. Yoav lowered his weapon and gaped. David’s own face creased, confused. Then it changed. His look became greedy. He spoke, but I could not make out his words through the thunder in my head. I saw him reach out to me, and then I fell.
    When I came to myself, I was in his tent. The woman Avigail was leaning over me, swabbing my forehead with a cool cloth. David himself was sitting on the edge of my pallet. When he saw my eyes flicker, he nodded to Avigail, who went to the water jar and filled a cup. He reached and took it from her, caressing her hand as he did so, and offering her thanks even for so small a task. Even in my pain, I noted it. My father had never treated my mother with such distinction. David helped me into a sitting position, and then raised the cup to my lips. At first, I recoiled from his touch, but he clasped my shoulder with a gentle authority. “Drink,” he said. When the water touched my lips, I realized I was parched. “Slowly,” he cautioned, taking back the cup and setting it down.
    He had washed off my father’s blood and was wearing a fresh tunic of fine wool. To my complete astonishment, he grasped the neck of that tunic and rent it. He stood then and walked to the fire pit, stooped for a handful of cold ashes, and rubbed them into his bright hair. “I want you to understand. I regret these deaths. I mourn your kin. But what I did was necessary. These men—my fighters and their families—have put their trust in me. I have to do whatever it takes to sustain them. Know that I did not kill your father and your uncle for a few bushels of dates. I killed your father because if his refusal of my request had been allowed to stand, word of it would have spread, and I would not be able to feed my people—people who have risked everything for me. I can’t allow that. It’s the bargain I have made. They would die for me, so I must live for them. And kill for them, when I have to. Your uncle I had to kill to forestall blood vengeance. For that reason I should have killed you, too. You know that. But here you are. You will see how it is, now that you are one of us.”
    And I did see. And heard, and smelled. In my dreams, even now, I hear the screams of the enemy’s stumbling warhorses, after he ordered their tendons cut. I smell the reek from the leaking bowels of the terrified Moavite captives, lined up in rows upon the ground as David’s men ran the measuring cord alongside their squirming bodies, measuring life as one might measure out cloth, marking out a quantity to live and sentencing those beyond the cord’s end to be butchered where they lay.
    Whatever it takes. What was necessary .
    These words might well have been the graven mottoes of his house. What was necessary, and no more. He spared a hundred of the Aramean horses—they are the ones that pull our merkavot today. He spared what he deemed to be a safe number of the Moavites, who pay tribute to us now and trouble us in war no longer. And he spared me, also, to be the pebble in his sandal and the goad in his hide. For he took me into his service that day and since then I have rarely left his side.
    It might seem strange, that a boy would so easily desert all that he knew to serve his father’s