THE STORY OF DAVID part one
David dipped his rag into the special polish and applied it to the mail in his lap. He rubbed the silver polish evenly on the surface of the mail, its links clinking as he did. After using up the polish he scooped up, he dipped in the rag again and applied it to other parts of the chain mail.
Polishing mail was tricky work, as David had learned sometime ago. How long had it been? He paused his work as he tried to remember. A week? Most surely a week, just a few days more or less. He smiled and shook his head, returning to his polishing.
Polishing mail was harder than polishing, say, a breastplate, as he had learned that week or so ago, mostly because of all those links. You had to polish every inch of them, and do both the front and the back. A breastplate didn't need polish on the back, just the front. But polish only the front of a shirt of mail, and the unpolished links would show from the front. It made mail look...wrong, imperfect.
And this wasn't just any mail, this was the King's mail. It couldn't, couldn't be imperfect.
It was still hard for David to believe where he was. The king's palace. It had been hard for him to recall how long he had been here, mostly because the past week had stretched on for what seemed like a year. Time had seemed to slow, probably to allow him relish every moment of living the life every other young man in Israel dreamed of living.
He still remembered it like it was yesterday. No, not yesterday. The events that had taken place a week ago were as fresh as if they had occured just this past hour.
He had been in the fields not too far from their home, tending to the sheep as usual. He had just finished seeing to the needs of he latest sheep in the flock that were with young and had gone to sit under the shade of a tree, his back resting against the tree's trunk, watching the sheep graze, their mouths moving from side to side as they chewed contentedly.
He had brought his small wooden harp along to while away the time. He was working on a new tune he wanted to play at their family dinner that night. David had been plucking randomly on the harp's strings, his eyes closed, perfectly at peace, as he always was whenever he was working on a new song. Letting the breeze sweeping through the open fields rustle the grass and wash over him, letting the bleats of the flock guide him into that place, that special place where the notes of the tune he wanted to create would move from his mind seamlessly through his body and guide the pluckings of his fingers.
The first few notes had been right there, hovering on the edge of his mind...and then someone had tapped him on the shoulder, shattering his concentration like the time the shaving mirror he borrowed from his father had fallen and broken into a hundred little shards.
He opened his eyes to see Eliezer, his immediate elder brother.
“What...what is the matter?” he asked, unbelieving. Eliezer merely looked at him as if he had two heads.
“What are you closing your eyes for?” he asked.
“And what are you doing here?” David shot back.
“Father sent me to call you,” Eliezer had said. “He says you are to come home right this instant.”
“But... ” David said, looking at the sheep and back at his brother, “but what about them? Who will look after them?”
“Surely the flock can wait for a minute or two while your father requests you to come back home.”
David dropped the harp on the ground next to him.
“And what is father calling me for?” he'd asked.
“You ask too many questions, David,” Eliezer snapped. “Come home and see.”
David frowned. He didn't like the way his brothers treated him like a child, just because he was the youngest in the family. But he had a beard, and they tended to forget that he watched over his father's flock all by himself, that he had broken family record... the entire Israel's record, in fact, when he killed a lion and a bear.
He stole another glance at the flock, then picked his outer garment up from under the harp and went home with his brother. And he had seen.
He had seen a queer sight indeed. Inside he house, all his brothers had been seated on the floor, along with their father, and perhaps the most surprising of all, Prophet Samuel. Prophet Samuel who served Jehovah and King Saul at Gilgal.
A fatherly smile had split the old man's long white beard as he entered, and Eliab, the firstborn, jumped to his feet.
“Wait,” he said. “Him? Him? But Prophet Samuel, surely you are mistaken.”
Prophet Samuel, still smiling, looked at Eliab and the rest of the famiy.
“There is no mistake, Eliab, son of Jesse, for here stands the one whom Jehovah has chosen to be king over Israel.”
That was when David became sure he was the butt of a practical joke. He looked at his father.
“Father, what is happening?” But his father had been too awestruck to reply. The faces of his seven brothers had been a mixture of surprise, anger and envy. The only one who saw fit to give him a reassuring smile was Shammah, who, of all his brothers, was the only one who seemed to think he amounted to anything.
David turned to the prophet again.
“Prophet Samuel? Me, King?”
But the prophet, all serious-faced, the smile gone now, beckoned him to come, and right there in the middle of all his family, annointed him with oil as the next king of Israel. Sometime after that, King Saul had invited him to live with the royal family at the palace.
And thus had begun the life that David now lived, the life the last son of Jesse from the small town of Bethlehem would for a very long time after be remembered for.
Coming back from his trip down memory lane, David took a square of shining leather and vigorously rubbed the surface of the chain mail, making sure the links sparkled silver. Properly shined mail wouldn't stain the leather its wearer had undernearth.
“My lord,” the manservant said. How he had gotten from the door all the way up here without him knowing, David had no idea. He bowed very low and tried to take the shirt of mail out of his hands at the same time. “You are a guest of the king. Please, do not soil yourself by doing the work meant for the king's servants.”
David yanked the mail out of his hand and sent him back to his post just inside the door of the armory with and impatient flick of his arm.
King Saul had appointed him armour bearer, and no matter how many times this persistent manservant tried to argue that he was only supposed to bear the armour, being the king's armour-bearer meant taking care of anything that concerned the king's armour, in David's opinion.
“It pleases me to do the work of the king's servants,” he called, “for I myself am a servant of the king.”
The armoury was a large hall with a stone roof supported by four pillars. Different parts of armour and weaponry lined the walls and the racks arranged on different sides of the room. Racks of spears with polished wooden shafts and glinting steel tips, breastplates of copper and steel and brass and silver, shields both square and round, plain swords in their painted wooden sheaths, and many more.
Mounted on the wall at the end of the hall, just behind David on the raised platform where he sat were the king's armour. One set was copper, copper mail David had polished till the links shone like gold with silver breastplate and silver gauntlets and silver helmet and silver shin protectors. The other set was silver and copper like he first, only opposite: silver mail burnished to a high sheen, copper breastplate, gauntlets, helmet and shin protectors. Each made, as the king's grizzled armorer had told him, so both copper and silver could stand out everytime the King went to war.
The king's sword hung on the wall too, a longsword with jewel-encrusted hilt, and beside it a four-cornered shield so large it had to be carried by a shield bearer.
David heard footsteps. He kept the mail beside him and looked at the door of the armoury. A girl, another servant, had entered into the armoury. She whispered into the manservant's ear. Beyond them, outside the door, David could see the men who stood guard at both sides of the doorpost.
He didn't know the manservant's name, but he knew the maidservant was called Leah. She finally stopped whispering and looked up the hall at him. They held each other's gaze for a second, everything else blurring away as he stared into her big brown eyes. Just for a second, before Leah looked away and hurried out the door. David smiled. He felt a kind of connection whenever he looked at Leah, and from the way she jumped whenever their eyes met he knew she felt it too.
His thoughts were distracted from the pretty maidservant by the manservant walking toward him. His expression was urgent, and David could tell that something was wrong.
“What is the matter?” he asked.
“It's the king, my lord,” the manservant said, wringing his hands. “He has fallen into one of his unfabourable moods again. He requires your presence urgently, my lord.”
David jumped to his and hurriedly hung the polished chain mail on the wall behind him. He walked down the large hall, leaving the manservant to clean up the bowl and the other utensils on the floor.
This was the main reason why the king had called him to his palace in the first place. Rumor had it that a bad spirit had descended upon King Saul, and he frequently flew into rages the manservant aptly called “unfavourable moods.” In a way, David was the king's physician.
The king required his medicine.
The king required David's music.

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