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People, or Plishtim, as they called themselves, controlled access to iron so completely that we were obliged to use wooden boards for our plowshares. Tin and copper, such as we had, were no match for their forged arms. We could not pass freely even in the territory we claimed, that scant strip from Dan to Beersheva. But David believed the words I uttered that day, and so therefore did his followers. They took strength from that belief, andevents surged rapidly forward on the tide of their confidence. By the time the seasons turned through four more reapings, he had been crowned king of Yudah. By the time I was counted a man, he had added the crown of the kingdom of Israel and made the tribes of the Name one people at last.
    The day my father died, I left childish things behind me. Even though I remained a mere boy in the reckoning of the world, never again was I treated as one. If I took orders, it was from David, as a man willingly in service to his leader. The tribe of my birth meant nothing to me now. I was neither Benyaminite nor Levite, Yudaite nor Ephraimite, but simply David’s man. No one else had charge of me, or claim upon me. No one else nagged me about what chores to do or when I might come or go. From then on, I walked my own road, always at his side.
    I left behind all my close kindred. I left my widowed mother and my infant sister. My mother returned to her father’s household. Had my uncle been spared, he would have been charged with her care, but as things stood, she had no choice. Our last meeting was bitter. She did not give me her blessing when I left to follow David—how could she?—but she certainly did not press me to stay at her side. She did not like uncanny things, and the voice that had spoken through me had frightened her as she stood there, the screams dying on her lips as I walked forward toward what she thought would be my end.
    I felt, in her shunning, the first of many such turnings-away. It was hard for a child to feel that ebbing love, to sense an estrangement that I could do nothing to gainsay. For my part, I still loved her as much as I had the moment before my mouth opened and the words poured out of me. But like the leper when the first lesion darkens and pits his skin, I was marked in her eyes, blemished, unlovable. I grieved to leave her, and wished I had the power to make her understand that I was still the boy she had carried and suckled, not some strange, tarnished, foreign thing. When she died, of a sudden fever, David was not yetking, so she did not live to know the worth of my gift, to see the words I had spoken become true in fact.
    Given that my place with David made me into an outlaw in the world’s eyes, my grandfather sanctioned no contact with my infant sister. By the time my status changed, she was a betrothed maiden and I, a stranger to her, had no part in her life. I regret this, but as I have set down, I had no choice.
    I knew all this, even then, a boy of ten years. No other human noise was to come between that mysterious voice and me. Accordingly, when the season came to take a wife, I did not do so. I knew that the simple joys and intimacies of a common life were not for me. And in any case, who would want someone like me? The truth is, the people abide my kind, but no one loves us. There is awe, but no affection. We grow used to the turned shoulder, the retreating back, the bright conversation that sputters to a murmur when we enter a room, the sigh of relief when we leave it.
    David alone understood what I was to him, and why he needed me by his side. And that has been my life, twinned with his. Since I joined him, I have known him as well as any man alive.
    But what I did not know—what I would need to learn from several others in order to set down a full and true accounting of his life—was who he had been until that hot, dry, deadly day brought me to his side. I had heard the stories, of course. There is not a person now living in the