Rise by Mark Buchanan

Author:Mark Buchanan [Buchanan, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: biblical fiction
ISBN: 9781777127800
Publisher: M.A. Buchanan Inc.
Published: 2020-03-30T22:00:00+00:00

* * *

He wakes in darkness.

My God, my God. Why have you forsaken me?

He wonders if he is on Sheol12? The pain in his feet brings him to himself. And it is cold, and Sheol is constant burning. The desert in daytime weaves fire into stone and air, but at night it laces ice into everything. The iciness jerks him into full alertness. He stands, and the agony in his feet shoots up through his legs. He steadies himself. He listens. He can hear the movement of a large animal close by. It hasn’t caught his scent, or else it wouldn’t move so clumsily, so noisily. He feels for his dagger, in case. And then he remembers Goliath’s sword. A steely confidence sheaths his nerves.

He sits again, to take stock. Best not to travel yet. The darkness is more treachery than cloak. He’ll start an hour before daybreak, when the wild things return to their lairs, when a paleness hovers above the earth. It will be easy to see but hard to be seen. He’ll move south, deeper into desert. He’ll stay high until he becomes too visible, then move down into canyons and wadis, picking a desultory course that will slow him but make him harder to track.

Saul has three fine trackers. He’ll use them all. He’ll play them off against each other, exploit their thin-veiled rivalries and jealousies to heighten the urgency, to increase the odds. David has used all three men and knows what they’re capable of: each could find a gnat in a bog. The smallest detail—a disturbance of sand, a thread on a thorn, a crumble of food, a burnt stick, the scent of lingering charcoal, the testimony of a nomad—is to them a scroll they can read as sure and knowing as a priest reads the law. It’s as if the earth is a map that every footfall inks. It’s as if he’s marked his trail for them deliberately.

But this is his advantage: he’ll play it against them. He knows how they work. He has watched them many times and learned their trade by proxy. He knows what throws them too. He knows what misleads.

But this is their advantage: they know he knows this. So David must be extra careful. He must sometimes do what they think he won’t do and sometimes do what they think he will. He must mix folly with shrewdness, add cunning to naivete and naivete to cunning, until they themselves get lost in the labyrinth of their own guessing and second-guessing. He must leave clues that aren’t clues and conceal clues that are. He must get them arguing: he went this way, no that way, no he’s hiding over there, no he’s circled back behind us.

While he thinks this, he makes an unguent from the stalk of a desert plant, one he made often to rub the wounds of his sheep. He kneads it into his sores, and it kisses his feet with coolness. He works the rest of the unguent into pieces of cloth he’s torn from the bundle of food.

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