The Secret Chord Read Online Free Page A

gift, I have had to forgo much that makes a man in full. I know now that this sacrifice has left me blind to certain things. I can see what others cannot see, but sometimes I miss what is apparent to the dimmest simpleton.
    At the time, I was caught up in the project, and interested in the names upon the list. One was unknown to me, and yet it was the very first he had set down. Seraiah the scribe had underscored it heavily,and written a note:
The king says, This one, before all others.
The next name,
Shammah,
I knew well enough. Shammah was one of David’s older brothers. There had been seven of them, but Shammah was the last still living. He had been with us in the outlaw years, when Shaul the king turned on David and sought his death. There had been little love lost between David and his brothers. But Shaul’s hatred of David had spread like a stain upon his close kin. They had been obliged to go into hiding with him in those years, because the alternative was imprisonment or execution. Now Shammah kept a household on the outskirts of Beit Lehem and administered that settlement in the king’s name. According to the tablet, the unfamiliar name,
Nizevet bat Adael,
was a woman who was part of Shammah’s household.
    It was too late that day to set out, so I sent word to the stable to bespeak a mule for the following morning, and to the kitchens for provision. I left at first light.

II
    T here was a time, not long since, when no man would have traveled alone on the road from Yebus, as Ir David was then named, to Beit Lehem. It is easy enough to forget how it was in the Land, now that the trade roads are in good repair, the borders mostly respected and the bandits under the foot of the king’s forces. Of course, he understood very well what was necessary when he came to power because he had spent so many years himself as a bandit and a marauder, living on fines exacted from unlucky travelers and swift attacks on ill-defended villages like my own.
    I was ten when I first saw him. My father hated idleness, so when the pressing was done and before the time for pruning, he would send me with the goats to find better grazing beside the streams that cut a path through the mountains rising steep above our village. I did not mind this. I liked to be off by myself, away from the eyes of adults who always had some task or errand to demand of an unoccupied child. In those sun-blasted hills, I could lie prone on a rock and scan the bright hillside, doing little but casting a stone from time to time to redirect a goat that wandered too far from the flock. A boy could let his thoughts unspool in those idle hours, dreaming of a hundred things, or of nothing. Sometimes, through the dense air that hung like mist over the Salty Sea, I would gaze across at the bare hills of Moav, and wonder if there was a boy like me lazing by a spring, and what his life was like, and what his thoughts were. But that day, the heatdefeated me. I lay there and felt it press down upon me, like a great furred beast, smothering even the desire for thought. I fell into a heavy doze. The sting of a pebble roused me.
    â€œBetter wake up, little shepherd, or your flock will be halfway to Beersheva.” The voice, amused, came from above and behind me. I scrambled to my feet and turned, blinking. He was on the next ridge, the sun behind him, its rays dancing like flames in his bright hair. He jumped lightly from the ledge and moved toward me. I raised my hand to shade my eyes and saw that he was a young man, perhaps twenty, and armed. Dismay must have shown in my face. My fear was not caused by his short sword or his bow. It was the thought that I might have lost the flock. To lose even one goat was a whipping offense.
    He smiled, reached out a hand and tousled my hair as an affectionate older brother might have done. “Well met, little shepherd. Good thing I found you. When your flock wandered into my camp, yonder, the men started sharpening