Free The Secret Chord: A Novel by Geraldine Brooks Page B

his shoulders. He got up and began to pace, wearing the same track in the yard that I had noted the day before. He pulled down a switch from the citron bough and beat it against his thigh as he walked.
    “I suppose you have some picture in your mind of how it was that day. Who doesn’t? The cloth of that story is threadbare with the telling. It has been an amusement to me, who was there, to have it told to me fashioned thus and so, restitched until I do not know that the events described are the ones I stood and watched with my own good eyes. Every time I hear it, the Plishtim champion has grown a cubit in height and my heroic little brother has lost a year in age. After all this time, I think I can see him as you see him on that day. You see a shining boy, don’t you? Here he comes, dancing out of the ranks of common men. What a beautiful, brave boy you see. You can own to it. You are not alone. That is what everyone thinks. Well, for one thing, he was scarcely a boy. My brother had reached his fourteenth year. There were many of his age already in the ranks, battle tested, counted as men. And he’d grown as a cactus grows, bitter and prickly and tough enough to survive what came his way.
    “But my brother has fed the other legend. Indeed, by feeding it in others, I think he has grown it within himself. Even he probably now believes the story of the glowing, blessed boy and the hideous, looming giant. Not true. That gloss and polish all came to him later, after Shaul and Yonatan took him up and made much of him. Gave him, to be frank, the love that we—his own family—had held back from him. Shaul’s court was nothing much, in those days. No singing men and women, none of the finery that David fills his hall with these days. Shaul’s was a simple chieftain’s headquarters. Nothing more. There was none of this prideful pomp then. Most of the time he held counsel under a tree, like a soldier. But for a love-starved urchin from a mud-daubed sheepfold, Shaul’s so-called court was the garden of paradise and, thanks to Yonatan’s folly and excess, David flourished there. And was corrupted there, too. Oh, don’t you give me that look. Not you. I’ve heard you say worse, and to his face. . . .
    “In any case, there we were, our ragtag troops up on one hill and their forces across the valley on the other. Everyone makes out it was a massive standoff—two great armies—but that’s not true. Never happened. It was just another skirmish in a long, boring season of skirmishes. They were always at us in fighting season, trying to pick off a village here, a hamlet there. Steal the livestock, disrupt the harvest. They were good at it, and they had better arms than we did. It had been going on for months, and we were all of us done in. Seemed like neither side wanted to sound the battle horns. And Shaul was canny, in those days. He knew that a standoff served us just as well as a victory. If the Plishtim fighters were pinned down in Wadi Elah, then they weren’t running about the Shefala looting crops and raiding cattle. I think it suited him just fine to sit out the season until the villagers got their harvests in. Then the weather would change and we could all go home.
    “But then they started taunting us with their champion from Gath. He was big; I’ll give you that. And armed better than any of us. Better than Shaul. Better than anyone we’d ever seen, at that time. Not the usual Plishtim stuff, either—more the kind of thing that came from the island peoples far to the west. He had an odd-looking foreigner’s bronze helmet and scale armor—I remember that, because it was uncommon then—and a great bronze breastplate and greaves. His spear was as big as a weaver’s bar with a massive iron point set to it. There was a curved sword as well.
    “I’ll own to it, when he’d come down into the valley and yell his taunts, none of us felt like stepping forward to fight him. ‘Get me a man!’ he’d yell. And