The Secret Chord (32 page)

“Not at first,” I agreed. “But you will live to see with your own eyes the beginning of the greatness you have created.”

“With your help, Natan. With your help.” He put his trembling hand on my head, and gave me his blessing. I felt a surge of power pass through him into me, and I knew that the Name was still with him, animating his soul, even as his body failed.

There was a knock on the door then, Benaiah's aide telling me that all were assembled. “They wait only for you, to start out for the Gihon spring.”

I clasped David's hand, feeling the bones move under the loose flesh. “Rest now,” I said. “Rest, and listen. May what you hear make you glad.” I stood, and signed to Batsheva. She came and knelt in my place, running her hand tenderly through the strands of David's faded hair.

Outside, a crowd was already gathering, word running in whispers and cries through the streets of the city. The king's bodyguard had formed up in ranks, the sunlight flaring off their polished armor and their bright painted shields, their banners snapping in the light breeze. Zadok was there, in his priestly robes, his acolyte holding aloft the great chased horn of sacred oil that resided in the tent of the ark. In the midst of it all, Shlomo, clad in brilliant white linen, gleamed. He was already mounted on David's mule. They had caparisoned her richly in ceremonial cloths and combed her mane till it rippled. She held her proud head high.

We took our places, Zadok on one side of Shlomo and I on the other. Benaiah gave the order and we marched, the soldiers' feet on the stones beating a celebratory tattoo. By the time we reached Gihon, the crowd was enormous. I looked up at the high walls that surrounded the pool of the spring. People stood four and five deep on the ramparts.

Shlomo dismounted, and I led him to the spring. “Behold,” I cried, “Shlomo, son of David, whom the king himself chose this day, by the will of the Name, to succeed him, and sit upon his throne, so that he can see with his own eyes the new king, and may the Name exalt him and make him even more renowned.”

Then Zadok stepped forward, and when he raised the horn, a deep hush fell on the crowd. He tilted the vessel, letting the holy oil fall in a sinuous golden thread from the mouth of the horn to the glossy head bowed before him.

Then Shlomo stood, his face, ecstatic, lifted up to the sunshine. The silence erupted. A cry went up, “Long live the king!” And then the shofars sounded, echoing off the walls until it seemed as if the whole city, even its earth, stone and mortar, cried out in joy.

Over in Enrogel, Yoav paused, a juicy lamb shank halfway to his mouth. He turned his head sharply in the direction of the clamor. “Why is the city in such an uproar?” There were flutes now joining in the mix, cymbals and drums, and cheers turning to voices raised in song, as the anointed king made his way back up through the streets to the throne room. Yoav threw down his uneaten meat and pushed his way through the crowd to Adoniyah, who was also on his feet, staring blankly back toward the city.

There, in the palace, in the king's bedchamber, David heaved himself upright as he heard the cries of acclamation, the blasts of the shofars. He reached for Batsheva, drew her close and kissed her. Then he lay back on the soft bank of pillows that Avishag had arranged to cradle his wasted body. As sometimes happened, there was a moment of respite from the storm of tremors. The ague stilled. David lay quietly, listening.

This is what he heard: All the musicians he had brought to the city. All the singing men and women. All the children who had grown up with instruments in their hands and songs on their lips. His own music. His gift to the people now returned to him in magnificent abundance. He had made of his city an accidental choir, an unintended orchestra. The surge of sound rose and swelled. Then, for a long moment, all the notes came together, all the music of the heavens and the earth, combining at last into one sustained, sublime, entirely glorious chord.

David is the first man in literature whose story is told in detail from early childhood to extreme old age. Some scholars have called this biography the oldest piece of history writing, predating Herodotus by at least half a millennium. Outside of the pages of the Bible, however, David has left little trace. A single engraving uncovered at Tel Dan mentions his house. Some buildings of the Second Iron Age period might have been associated with a leader of his stature. But I tend to agree with Duff Cooper, who concluded that David must have actually existed, for no people would invent such a flawed figure for a national hero.

Of the innumerable studies and analyses of David, my personal favorites are Robert Pinksy's classic monograph
The Life of David
(Schocken) and David Wolpe's recent study,
David: The Divided Heart
(Yale). Both of these arresting accounts accept David's character in all its dazzling contradictions rather than feeling the necessity, common in other biographies, of all-out veneration or execration.

I relied heavily on three other reference works:
The Jewish Study Bible
(Oxford),
City of David: The Story of Ancient Jerusalem
by Ahron Horovitz (Lambda) and
Life in Biblical Israel
by Philip J. King and Lawrence E. Stager.

My rabbi, Caryn Broitman, offered many valuable insights. I am grateful to Richard North Patterson and Bob Tyler of the Cohen Group for introducing me to Dr. Joseph Draznin, who gave me the
benefit of his strategic thinking as to how David and Yoav might have managed their assault on Yebus.

My younger son, Bizu Horwitz, was a marvelous research assistant during our trip to Israel, playing the agile young David to my weary Shaul as he sprinted ahead of me up rocky hills behind Ein Gedi.

I am blessed with remarkable publishing teams, especially in the United States and Australia, and I would like to especially thank Paul Slovak, editor extraordinaire, and my agent and friend Kris Dahl.

I'm thankful to my early readers Darleen Bungey, Elinor and Tony Horwitz, Christine Farmer and Laure Sudreau-Rippe. But most especially, as always, the incomparable and indispensable Graham Thorburn.

In 2005, my nine-year-old son made the unusual decision to learn the harp, which started me reflecting on that other long-ago boy-harpist. At his bar mitzvah five years later, he played an arrangement of Leonard Cohen's classic “Hallelujah.” So it is to Nathaniel that I owe both the inspiration for this book and the idea for its title.

West Tisbury, March
2015

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