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up in rows upon the ground as David’s men ran the measuring cord alongside their squirming bodies, measuring life as one might measure out cloth, marking out aquantity to live and sentencing those beyond the cord’s end to be butchered where they lay.
    Whatever it takes. What was necessary
.
    These words might well have been the graven mottoes of his house. What was necessary, and no more. He spared a hundred of the Aramean horses—they are the ones that pull our merkavot today. He spared what he deemed to be a safe number of the Moavites, who pay tribute to us now and trouble us in war no longer. And he spared me, also, to be the pebble in his sandal and the goad in his hide. For he took me into his service that day and since then I have rarely left his side.
    It might seem strange, that a boy would so easily desert all that he knew to serve his father’s killer. It seemed strange to me, too. But as I lay there, my grief raw and my mind addled, I was not confused about where I now belonged. I knew, in some deep place, even then at the very beginning of things, that the heart of a prophet is not his own to bestow. I had to go with David whether I would or no. And not just because he willed it. Had he beaten me, thrown me out and left me dying by the side of the road, I would have crawled after him, shouting the words he needed to hear. Later, had he exiled me (as he might well have done, after some of my pronouncements) to some dry scab of white crystal in the middle of the Salty Sea, I would have waded back to him. But I have not needed to do any of those things. Until now, he has kept me close, even when my words have blistered him. I think he learned from what passed between Shaul and
his
prophet, Shmuel. He saw that the kingship of a people such as ours could not be fashioned after the kingships of other nations. It is, instead, a fragile and mysterious gift, and what is given by such a mighty hand can be snatched back in less than an eyeblink.
    The remarkable thing is that he recognized me, even then, for what I was. It would be several seasons before I spoke again in that strange voice, and when I did, the message I gave was by no means as welcome as the first. Yet his faith in me never wavered. It has beenallowed to me to see many things—bright shards of vision that sometimes foretell events as they will unfold, and other times are waking dreams that come and go with less effect than mist in the valley or the smoke about an altar. Some of these words have become famous; some have been for his ears alone. Some bear my name, some are remembered now as if they came to him directly from the mouth of the divine. It matters not, to me. In fact, it is better—truer—that men think so. For they are not my words. Often, as it was that first time, others have had to tell me what I have uttered.
    He did not speak to me, that first day in his tent, of what I had said. He did not then realize that I did not know. I gleaned the content of my words from the men around him. It was easy enough to do so, for the whole camp was abuzz over what they already called Natan’s oracle.
    I had promised David a throne. More than that: the voice that used my mouth foretold for him an empire and a line that would never fail throughout the generations. Now, when the first two of those promises have come to pass, it is hard to recall how outlandish such words seemed. David, then, was an outlaw. A wanted man, declared a traitor. And the Land, this narrow notch, riven and divided by jagged lines of hills, was hardly the country likely to usher forth an empire. Our tribes were a frayed and flimsy alliance, fragmented by enmity, led by a king whose own anointing prophet, Shmuel, had disavowed him, whose behavior was erratic, if not mad. We were squeezed between the Sea People on the coast, Pharaoh’s armies to the southwest, and the mighty peoples of the Two Rivers to the east. Our chief and nearest enemy, the Sea