Free The Secret Chord by Geraldine Brooks Page B

won you your life, and now look at you. The king’s prophet. A man to be reckoned with. Well, you might have suckered my brother but you don’t fool me. I thought you were a clever little fraud that day you saved your skin, and I think you’re a cunning charlatan now. But no one gives a shekel for what I think. I’m just the king’s old drunkard of a brother. So I keep my mouth shut and stay out of my son’s way so he can do what you’ve done, and be someone at court when Prince Amnon comes into his own.” He picked up the bread and gnawed at it.
    â€œI believe,” I said, “that we were discussing your brother at Wadi Elah. Not your opinion of me, or your ambitions for Yonadav.”
    He gave a dramatic sigh. “All right. Let’s get it done with, then.” He mimicked my haughty tone: “My brother at Wadi Elah. The mean little
mamzer
making his name. To be fair. He had reason to be the way he was. He had cause, ample cause, as a beaten mule has cause to be sour and malicious, just looking for the chance to land a kick. We—all of us—would’ve done anything to earn our father’s approval, and if he treated David like a mangy cur dog, then we would, too. We never showed that boy a cup of kindness. He had to use his wits to survive out there in the hills and he did, with no man’s hand to guide him. So when he came to the Wadi Elah, he swooped in like a buzzard, looking to feed himself on the misery of that battlefield. And what a ripe corpse he found there, and what a meal he made of it.”
    I scribbled furiously to get these words down, words as sour as the gall ink in which I wrote them. As frank as Nizevet had been, this was another kind of truth telling entirely. Shammah had been restless in his seat, shifting his great bulk, working the knot in 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.
    â€œI 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 fourteenthyear. 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.
    â€œBut 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