Now, please, this story is completely and absolutely based on the Bible. By all means, check the Bible account if you want to be sure. Part one of this story is already on my timeline. Feel free to read.
THE STORY OF DAVID part two
David gace the reins a little tug, urging the old mule on faster. The animal barely increased its pace, its rump swaying from side to side as it pulled the cart down the stony path.
He wiped the sweat from his face with the back of his hand, keeping his hold on the reins with the other. The noonday sun was blazing hot in the middle of the sky, and its heat literally stung his exposed skin. He was home from King Saul's service. He had been at home since throughout the week on the instruction of the king so he could tend to his father's flock. Now he was in break from that too.
He was supposed to be at the palace now, since he had stayed at home most of last week and just gone back for a few days, but King Saul had other pressing matters aside from listening to the tunes of his harp. The Philistines had come to attack Israel, and the King and his army had drawn up in battle formation against them in the Valley of Elah. The Israelite army was encamped between Socoh and Azekah, cities belonging to Judah.
David had a little skill at arms, the little bits and pieces he had picked up about the use of sword and spear while watching the soldiers at practice in their barracks. But he wasn't going to war. David was a pro with stone and sling, and a smile came to his face when he remembered the countless pidgeons he had brought home for the family to roast and eat. But he wasn't warrior material. Not yet, at least. And he was young. Too young to serve in the king's army.
But his family had representation in the army. His three eldest brothers: tall, strapping Eliab, soft-spoken Aminadab, equally tall but lanky, and David's favourite of all his brothers, Shammah. Bulky and short, unlike the first two, with a gruff voice and loud, barking laugh that David could swear he had heard once while tending to the sheep all the way from their house. Grown men, all.
And that was why David was here, on the road to Socoh and Azekah, sweating at the front of this wooden cart and bearing the full brunt of the blazing sun. His father had loaded him down with an ephah measure of roasted grain and ten loaves of bread, supplies for his brothers in the camp near the battle line at the Valley of Elah.
And there was something else in there too. David turned around to look into the cart, and he saw it and remembered. Ten portions of cheese, freshly made from cow's milk just yesterday, for the chief of the thousand of the king's army.
David's rear was already starting to cramp from sitting on the hard wood for too long, and he shifted uncomfortably on the bench, trying to make the numbness he felt there a little better. There were trees on the sides of the path, an for a moment he considered taking another break to rest himself. But no. He couldn't, not when he was this close to the camp. Just another hour or two and he would be there.
He felt sweat trickle down the side of his face, and he wiped it away again. There was the sound of voices behind him, and he turned to see two men talking and laughing. They both had their outer garments on their shoulders. Hired help. Plough workers, from the build of them. They were walking at a leisurely pace, and one of them waved to him as they passed. David waved back. They walked past his cart at the same leisurely pace, lengthening the distance between them and him.
They were on foot, and David was on this old, sorry, sodden...
He gave the mule's rear a lick with his palm in his anger, and the bony beast shook his head and snorted and ran a few paces, before settling right back into its slow trot.
One of the men turned back, the same one who had waved to him.
“Easy on the beast, boy,”he called. “The poor thing is too slow, but he will give out if you overburden him.”
David nodded wearily and settled his back on the edge of the cart. The man was right. The worst thing would be for the mule to give out. He doubted if he could even carry a whole ephah of roasted grain for half a league. He resigned himself to the blazing sun and the cramps in his rear.
David tried to take his mind off his situation by thinking about the good memories he had in the palace of the king. Most of them had to do with food, actually. The king and his household consumed more bread, milk and cheese in each meal than his family did each week. And there were always platters of whole roast lamb with an apple in its mouth. Either that or a side of roast bull, sometimes fried deep in oil.
David almost always had his stomach full these days, but that didn't mean he didn't enjoy bread and meat or just plain roast grain at home wiith his family. His brothers treated him like a child, but having seven older brothers meant that mealtimes were always loud and lively.
And what young man didn't have good memories with a girl he liked?
It was nearly impossible for Leah and himself to see each other during the day: he was in the king's court, while she worked in the kitchens, but they usually got together at night. Leah was a gentle woman, and she usually asked him questions about his family. And about his annointing. David told her the only thing he knew about that, which was that he didn't fully understand.
And Leah enjoyed listening to him play the harp. He had many songs he composed while tending sheep, and she enjoyed each and every one. Her favourites were "Sleep Well, Sweet Maiden," which actually made her drowsy when he played it, and "Little Dancing Sheep," whose inspiration he came by when once, for some reason, a lamb of the flock began dancing to a funky tune he was playing. Leah laughed to near tears whenever he played that one.
If only she knew that his inspiration for "Sleep Well, Sweet Maiden" had been none other that she herself.
Leah always said his harp made her sleep easy. Not only the king found peace in his harp, it seemed. He thought about the both of them, sometimes. They could get married when he was older, perhaps. Him a last son from a lowly family, and she a humble maidservant. They were a perfect match for each other.
David was distracted from his memories by the sight of the watchtower of Azekah and the guards standing watch on its parapet. The city was off to the west, and just beside its wall, out on the open field, were the tents. The city of Azekah was built up on the mountain, and the tents sloped gently downward, toward the valley. Across it, far in the distance, were the other mountains. Socoh was supposed to be somewhere to the east, though it wasn't visible from where he was.
David urged his mule right though the broad way cutting through the tents, and he could tell as he passed the neat, orderly rows that no one was here. There was only an eerie silence. That was when David heard it. A sound like a thunderclap. He listened, and he heard it again. And again. Boom-boom boom-boom. He stood up on the bench, and he saw rows upon rows of spears, bobbing up and down with the steps of the men who held them.
The Israelite army was marching to war.
David soon saw the baggage attendant.
“Hold it,”the man said.“Who goes there?”
“David, son of Jesse, of the king's court,”he said hurriedly.
“The cart?”he asked.
“Supplies. For my brothers.”
The man nodded and came up and took the reins, leading the mule toward the baggage tent. David jumped down off the cart and took off through the streets of the tent city.
“Where are you going, boy?”he heard the attendant shout.
“Coming,”he called back as he ran.
David ran on through the alleys of the drab brown military tent-settlements, following the slope of the mountain. He passed a street at whose far left end he saw a beautiful, sprawling tent he assumed would be the king's. He noticed the guards manning the perimeter of the huge tent out of the corner of his eye. One of the guard looked at him as he ran past. Definitely the king's.
He soon crossed the last line of tents and came face to face with a stone wall about three cubits high. Not a wall of hewn stones held together with mortar like the city walls off to the west, but a wall of stones piled atop each other, stretching across the tentline to east and west. Most likely a point of cover for archers, David thought, though there were no archers in sight. He hopped the wall and continued running.
The slope of the mountain was steeper once past the wall. And the thunderclaps were louder now. Much louder. The stretch of ground between the stone wall was a mass of tortured earth, with clods of grass and earth torn up by the footsteps of the Israelite army marching steadily downward.
And David saw what made the noise like thunder. Their footsteps. Left-right left-right left-right. Boom-boom boom-boom boom-boom. Hundreds of men all marching as one, the tips of their spears bobbing up and down. David heard Abner, the chief of King Saul's army, shouting orders up and down the ranks.
But the Israelite army weren't the only ones moving. Across the Valley of Elah, on the other mountain, the Philistine army marched steadily down the steep decline, so far away that he couldn't hear them.
Something happened as the men neared the valley. Two lines of soldiers stayed back, while the others continued marching downward. David, throwing caution to the wind now, ran all the way down until he was right behind the last line of soldiers. He stopped right behind a man he had seen many times in the barracks.
“David, what are you doing here?”the man asked when he turned around and saw him.
“I came to look for my brothers,” he said, looking up and down the line of still-standing soldiers, some of whom were now talking.
“No,”the soldier said. “They are in the vanguard.”He nodded toward the soldiers still marching down the mountain.
They were already near the wadi when David saw it. On the Philistine side, something huge was making its way down to the valley. No, not something, as he saw when he looked closer. Someone. He had thought it was a battering ram, but surely battering rams didn't have two legs or wear helmets or coats of mail.
The giant—which was David's opinion of the man, whoever he was—ran all the way to the front of the Philistine army. There was a shield-bearer before him, carrying a shield so large he was completely hidden behind it.
“HALT!”Abner's voice boomed across the mountainside. The Israelite army stopped marching at once.
The Israelite army near the valley actually shied away from the giant, breaking up lines as they all tried to draw back.
The soldiers in front of David were muttering.
“Have you seen this man who is coming out?”the soldier he had spoken to said.“He comes to taunt Israel. The king will give great riches to the man who strikes him down, he will give him his own daughter, and he will give the house of his father exemption in Israel.”
The huge Philistine was wearing a shirt of mail of copper links, like the one the king had, except this one was nearly thrice as big. He roared, reminding David of the lion he had once killed who took a lamb from his flock.
“Why have you come out to draw up in battle formation?”he thundered in a voice so deep and loud it seemed to come from the heavens themselves.“Am I not the Philistine, and are you not the servants of Saul? Choose a man for yourself, and let him come down to me. If he is able to strike me down, we will then become your servants. But if i prevail against him, you will become our servants and serve us.”
The giant paused, and, in a way, the silence was even more menacing than his voice.
“I do taunt the battle line of Israel this day. Give me a man, and let us fight it out!”

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.

Please, I want to post a short story here on nairaland. Abeg, somebody assist me. How do I do it?