Free Queenmaker by India Edghill Page B

and some of the trouble left his eyes. He kissed me back warmly. “David will be glad of it, Michal. He never wished to hurt you, that I know. Please Yahweh, this senseless war will soon be over, and we will all be friends again.”
    “Yes,” I said, and knew we both were thinking of what David had once told us. The oil was on his head as well as on Saul’s. There could not be two kings in the land.
    But this was a thing neither of us wished to say.
     
     
    From that day I lived quietly in my husband’s house in the valley of Gallim. Time flowed by, the days all smooth as pebbles in a stream-bed, as sweet to me as apples in wine. My father had cast me out, my first husband had abandoned me. My second husband cherished me, and kept me close, and I loved him for it.
    Men might fight and die; it was far now from me and mine.
    We heard that David took service with King Achish of Philistia,
who gave him lands in Ziklag. Then it was said that David’s men raided for the Philistines in Yahweh’s name, and all men looked on this with wonder and horror. To me it was more that Phaltiel’s youngest son Caleb learned to call me ‘Mother’, and more still that the name came easily to his tongue.
    Men said that my father Saul grew ever stranger, until no man dared cross him. They said Saul’s army spent itself chasing David’s men through the wastelands, until Saul’s soldiers grumbled and began to desert. In Phaltiel’s house we dressed Miriam for her wedding, and the folds of her veil, and how her bracelets settled upon her round arms, were matters real and urgent.
    David’s songs were sung from Dan to Beersheba; no one else had his easy way with words. All men said so, and all women too. A harper had only to say a new tune was from David’s lips to be sure of a warm welcome and a good meal at least. There were many new songs to sing in those days—and as Phaltiel once said, perhaps some of them indeed were David’s.
    I heard that David had married again—and again. I told the teller of the tale that I wished David joy. “Only think of roaming the hills with so many wives! David is a hero indeed!” I laughed, and meant it. David’s wives were nothing to me now. I was Phaltiel’s s wife; that was enough.
    Even when I heard that David had married another king’s daughter I only marveled as any might that David the rebel had wed Princess Maachah, freely given by her father Talmai, King of Geshur. It was another and clearer sign that David’s star rose ever higher.
    And because I was happy with my husband and my lot, I did not even wonder that David now took so many wives into his life of strife and danger, when once he would not risk even one. Those who live content do not ask such questions, even when they should. And I was full content.
    I do not say I was happy and heedless as I had been with David, for he had made time shine like glass at noon. But I was content—and useful, which I learned to value more. With Miriam
gone the household was mine to order as I thought fit, and to do so gave me more pleasure than I had expected to find in such work.
    I had the raising of young Caleb as well; he was a good boy, and caused me little grief, for I was still young enough only to think it a good joke when he danced upon the rooftops after wild rock doves, or came home well-bitten by a fox-cub he had somehow caught in the fields.
    “But Mother, it followed me home!” He was panting and dirty and clinging tight to the small furious thing he had wrapped in his tunic for safekeeping. The cub growled and sank sharp white teeth into Caleb’s thumb; Caleb yelped, the maids shrieked, and I laughed until tears dropped off my cheeks to make holes in the dust.
    “You may keep it if it will stay of its own wish,” I said at last. Released, the fox-cub ran off as if its tail were afire. I laughed again, and this time the maids laughed with me. Caleb stopped sulking when I recklessly promised him a spotted hound puppy in the