In a casual summer tunic, or, better yet, no tunic at all, King David strolled his high apartment, tuning his lyre, composing stopping-points to the settling night of a busy day. A flourish birthed a flourish, the summer flowers closing their heads in sleep, drunk on their long day’s sun. To the south, far to the south, perpetual war with the gaudy Hittites, their torchlit camps brindling the wheat fields like a pox. And to the waterless east, closer in according to his commanders’ brightly-colored maps, perpetual war of a smaller kind. Bands of Philistines, still crying out for the return of their stolen lands. God had been the robber, laughed David, so take your tears and empty hands to him! Indefatigable was the word but clumsy the execution and just that morning news of another ambush foiled, Absalom’s smart cavalry rolling them neatly up, returning to Jerusalem with five bags of fly-blown heads, camels loaded with lifted scalps and severed hands.
David stood and watched the shapes the breeze made in the curtains. Wine-colored, sky-colored, flesh-colored. Smoke from the braziered flames slipped in and out the entry-ways and the tall curtains moved like women in a trance, imagined hips and shoulders slowly lifting and falling. Women in a trance, yes. Or women being lazily made love to.
David plucked a high-noted threesome, mimicking the start and spasm of the flames, the orange, red, and white strands shivering upwards in a tripling braid. The hills of the dark city humped purple against the black sky. Stars clustered over Jordan, floated tinier than fleas above Assyria. The breeze brought with it nighttime smells, of oranges and wine, humid and cool. Close up against his palace, the roofs of the neighboring palaces were laked with moonlight, shadows painted in their angles and curves, straightening or swelling to the patient eye. Flames popped in a nearby grate and a quick whisper shyed itself behind him. He spun with a shepherd’s unforgotten stealth and caught a glimpse of slave girls on the balcony, servants’ profiles and a look, a half-smile as they passed. He knew them both and of the two, the older, slimmer one was well acquainted with her naked king. Two nights ago, most recently, and a favorite of the past winter.
The king resumed his naked stroll and fingered a slow monotonous melody by which to still his thoughts. The girl had cried the first time he’d filled her, and soundlessly, hot tears gushing from beneath her tight-shut, long-lashed lids. He’d had her on an urge and instantly, standing her against the nearest wall, one arm around her waist for traction. The next time he’d allowed her a moment to prepare herself, pointing to a scribe’s vacant bench and instructing her to lift her skirt and lie back. A second bout of tears, as he remembered, and a soft whimper, something like a rusted hinge, which spurred him till he spilled inside her, stroking her wet cheek with a complacent hand. She trembled under him and he wondered at it. And although he didn’t care he asked her, king to slave, why she wept upon possession. Fear? Modesty? Nerves? He smiled to show himself mortal and she shook her head, briskly, no each time. What then? She murmured, so low he had to put his ear to her very lips. A murmured, soft, and single word. Pain.
The word puzzled him, darkened his mood, his bland beauty like a gay sun hooded by a passing cloud. He withdrew from inside her, dismissed her with a gesture, and stood alone and pensive while his violet pulse shrank down to mossy satisfaction. Pain was the thing he dealt his enemies, pleasure his people, so where did this slave girl fall, who was neither?
The king was not a cruel man (ask any priest, any odd shepherd boy, any woman he had showered with gifts before or after lying with her). The thought flew away, a crane above the reed-choked shallows. David was a bird at music, a lion at war, a bull at love. He could no sooner ignore the pleadings of his hard cock than leave a melody hanging, some pagan insult unanswered. He would not change. He would sing, and fight, and fuck, and do penance later, with the smoke of dead animals, a wig of ashes, a noisy dirge, a poem or two.
He summoned the slave girl once a day for a month. And whether pinned beneath him on a heap of quilts, or bent over an imitation Chaldean couch, his sweat dripping like beads of oil on her clenched and marble-smooth buttocks, or tiptoe in a clutch of curtains, his knees chuffing swift between her own, she was a marvel of naked design. What other purpose had his Lord God had in mind for her when molding those limbs than that she should be the vessel of a man’s enjoyment? So why the tears? The grim little song of a rusted hinge? For a run of thirty breakfasts King David spent himself in his slave girl. And each night, posting or at rest between the thighs of his favorite concubines, he riddled with himself such strange variety of response. His solitary question had not been repeated and his other women teased him his favoring this crippled perfect pet.
–Something less than a divine mystery, My Lord. You hurt her. That’s all. For you are, My Lord, a vigorous and mighty etcetera, and she is a small thing, a quasi-child still.
He nodded, immune to irony from the mouths of his servants.
Among themselves, in whispers, as he sprawled in their midst, drunk, drained, and hard asleep, his female menu shared their war stories, from dog-paddle to pearl-dive. They scoffed the exception of this girl’s lachrymal fuckings, recalling their own tears and their Master’s equestrian indifference. Tears of exhaustion when he spread them open like double-jointed Egyptian dolls, tears of jealousy when they were made a quartet’s laggard least, tears of boredom when he left them spatter-bottomed in his drench, forbidding them sleep and reaching for his lyre and its endless alphabet.
But king or not, he was a magpie, and they wagered in their penthouse stable how long before another pair of sparkling eyes, or wet-lipped mouth, or gauze-scarved asymmetrical breasts would catch his eye.
King David strolled the circuit of his balconies, lyre sounding in his arms like a lost lamb found and comforted. His inner eye meandered like a clear stream, bubbling among hills grown fat on peace, isolated within the shelter of his embrace. The moon seemed swollen on its rippled sheet of shot black silk, face white as winter breath and flawed to a jeweler’s envy. A billowed curtain brushed his flank and shoulder, the breeze pricked up his nipples as he walked. He wanted laughter rather than tears, and desire hovered between the image of a cup of wine and some new slave’s undiscovered warmth, sun-dark thighs parting beneath him. What of that younger one, companion to his familiar mystery? Where had she got to? Near enough, should he decide upon an early breakfast. The younger was the more voluptuous of the pair, hips round as a dancer’s, high plump breasts he could imagine nestling a spray of Judean grapes, held in place for his mouth’s roaming greed. The king’s cock lurched up, playing an invisible scale in the air, and plucked the lyre’s lowest string with a dumb sound.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Bathsheeba ascended the cool dark steps from her bedroom to the moonbright roof and her waiting bath, water jasmine-scented and lightly rippling, the green-tiled tub folding the hue from emerald to chai. Her girls attended her with lotions and combs, seashell razors for her armpits and honey-colored bush. While one girl undid the clasps of her gold-meshed girdle the other shook loose her mistress’ heavy auburn hair and bound it atop her head with copper clips, half of twelve for so much hair. The girls chirped like little birds about her and she smiled fondly at them, half-listening and half a wide world away. She stepped into the tub and settled slowly, languidly back, her neck against the marble lip, face tilted up to the great and alien moon. A sponge the size of a small loaf floated within reach and she batted it gently away across the rocking surface. She looked down at her body, wavering in the water’s miniature tides, made ghostly in the white light. Your skin is paradise, her husband always said, his rough soldier’s hands made tender with love, his muscles straining as he entered her, bringing his face near hers to catch upon his lips her gasps of pleasure. She would be beautiful for him when he returned from the council with his fellow generals, would bring him wine and sweet cakes and when he was full let her robe fall to her waist and offer him the tips of her breasts to suckle, her jasmine-scented nipples like cherries on his wine-dark tongue.
Far away across the roof the girls giggled and chirped, sitting with their skirts gathered up and their feet wide apart, playing jacks and laughing when they caught each other cheating. Bathsheeba heard an owl’s warning from the garden beside the house, and then a sudden hoot above her head, wide-winged shadow across the face of the moon. Somewhere behind her a sound like a lyre, one note, two notes, quiet and yet sure of itself, like a cat creeping to its dove.