The Secret Chord: A Novel by Geraldine Brooks Read Free Book Online Page A

closest in age, the kindest of them—ignored him. That was the best of the treatment he received at their hands. The older brothers put vinegar in his drink and gall in his food. They beat him and accused him of thefts for which he was blameless. No one knows these things that I am telling you. No one outside the family. And—before this odd command of his, if you had asked Shammah or any of the others, they would have denied it.”
    I had known her sons, most of them, but not well. None was close to the king, not one of them part of his inner circle. While she lived, his sister, Zeruiah, stood close in his affection and confidence, and her three sons, most especially Yoav, were prominent men. David’s brothers, by contrast, had enjoyed lesser places at court. Yet in all my time at the king’s side, there had been no hint of enmity. Nizevet seemed to read these thoughts as they passed through my mind. She smiled slightly.
    “No one wants to remember how it was. The king, perhaps, least of all. But I remember. How could I not? When he was barely six years old, his father ordered that he be sent away from the beit av —the family home—to tend the sheep up in the hills. He was to live in a little hut of stone and branches, and come home only to get supplies. It was to get him away from the house, you see, so that Yishai would not have to look upon him. And this, too: the hills were full of lions then—not like now, when one rarely hears of an attack. How was a six-year-old supposed to survive out there alone? I believe Yishai hoped for his death. I wept the day he left, the crook—too large for him—threaded over his narrow shoulders, his slender wrists draped over the cane. He had the cheeses, olives and dried grapes I had packed for him tied in a cloth on his back. He looked small, and helpless, and lonely. My heart ached over it. I was in agony for him. But now I think that it was a good thing he got away from his brothers’ persecutions and his father’s open hatred. Those years in the hills taught him many things. You could say that they made him the man he became. For better . . .” she paused and drew a deep breath. “And yes, perhaps, for worse. Should a mother say such a thing?” She gave a swift, wan smile. “‘Tell everything,’ so he said. And so. Everything.”
    As she spoke, my pen scritched across the parchment and my mind filled with memories of David at our first meeting on the high hills above my village. I imagined him as that small shepherd boy, living in the long silences broken only by the baaing of the ewes and the clatter of stones shifting as the herd moved over them. I imagined the sharp scent of thyme crushed under the hooves, and the calls of the little birds in the thorn bushes.
    He must have found ways to fill the long days and the silences. In those silences, perhaps, he discovered the consolations of music. I interrupted to ask her this, and she told how he fashioned his first harp. He had heard a harpist only once, when some itinerant musician had come to play in Beit Lehem. But out there in that hut, from ram’s horn and sinew, by trial and error, he fashioned a crude instrument of his own, and learned how to draw prodigious sound from it.
    He found his voice there, she said. There, where he could sing as loud and as long as he wanted with no one to complain of it.
    As I wrote down her words, it came to me that there was something else he must have found there. Something that a boy who lives all his life in a busy household or a crowded town might never find. He found the ability to hear. In those endless days and in the still nights, I believe he learned what it means to really listen, a skill I had seen him wield to great effect. Men love the sound of their own voices, and David knew how to let them speak. I had seen taciturn fighters and oily-tongued emissaries alike undone by David’s ability to draw them out. He was not afraid of silence, which most of us will rush to