Chapter FORTY-FOUR

The Stronghold

Refuge still required obedience, and obedience did not always choose the safer hill.

Adullam could hide a captain and a desperate band.

It could not hide his parents forever.

Jesse had grown older in a month. Davin saw it most when the man slept, with command drained from the face and only fatigue left to arrange it. His mother bore the strain better in appearance and worse in the hands. They shook sometimes when she thought no one was looking.

So Davin took them east.

The road to Moab was not simple, but it was possible, and old blood ran in that direction through Ruth's line whether the kingdom liked remembering it or not. He left the stronger brothers and most of the cave-company under trusted watch, took only a small escort, and led Jesse and his mother across the wilderness tracks toward Mizpeh of Moab where local rulers knew enough of border politics to understand the value of sheltering the parents of a hunted man.

The Moabite court received them warily and without warmth. Warmth is too expensive for most governments.

Davin stood before the king of Moab in a stone hall hung with dyed wool and said the plainest thing he had to say.

"Let my father and my mother remain with you till I know what God will do for me."

No rhetoric. No appeal to destiny. Only the helpless honesty of a son who could no longer guarantee even his own next dwelling place.

The king of Moab looked from Davin to Jesse, then to the mother who carried silence like a more dignified burden than fear.

At length he nodded.

"They may remain."

Jesse said nothing at first.

Not in public.

Only when they had been shown to the smaller court behind the hall and the attendants had withdrawn did the older man turn to Davin and speak in a voice roughened by more than travel.

"You were not meant to be the one sending me away."

Davin understood the sentence immediately.

Not accusation.

Grief.

He answered without mercy for either of them.

"You sent me away first."

Jesse closed his eyes.

For one awful instant Davin wished he had left the sentence unspoken. Then he saw the old man take it into himself without defence and knew there was no other road through some wounds except the true one.

"Yes," Jesse said at last.

"I am not doing this to punish you."

"I know."

His mother touched Davin's shoulder before the moment could harden further.

"Go where He tells you," she said. "Do not stand still just because it would comfort us to know where you are."

He left them there and returned west into the hills with a hollowness in him no battle had ever quite produced.

Kingship, if it meant anything under God, was proving itself less and less compatible with keeping the people one most wanted near.

The company received him back at the stronghold with relief that did not ask questions first. Men need the sight of the one they are following more often than they need the whole account.

For two days he let the cave settle around the new order.

Then the prophet Gad came.

He arrived without escort at noon, walking out of the scrub as though the wilderness itself had decided to speak and chosen his frame for the inconvenience. He was lean, weathered, and not built for court softness. The men on outer watch tried briefly to challenge him, then stopped trying when it became clear the man had no interest in being halted by forms less ancient than his purpose.

He found Davin near the upper spring above the cave.

"You are the son of Jesse."

"Yes."

"Then hear the word of the LORD."

Davin straightened.

Gad did not delay for courtesy.

"Do not remain in the stronghold. Depart and go into the land of Judah."

Obedience under God rarely arrives with enough information to flatter the flesh.

Some of the men argued when he announced the departure.

Not rebelliously.

Plainly.

"Moab was safer."

"The cave holds."

"Judah is where Shaul thinks to look."

All true.

Davin heard them and did not rebuke the truth for sounding inconvenient.

Then he said, "The cave holds until the LORD says move. It is no shelter after that, only disobedience with stone around it."

That ended the argument without ending the fear.

Fear remained.

It had simply lost the right to decide.

They packed what they had, broke the camp by stages, and moved out under broken cloud toward the forest of Hereth in Judah, where cover came not from caves but from thickness, branch, and the refusal of wooded land to reveal everything at once.

As they climbed back into Judah's rougher interior, Davin felt the cost of the road with unusual sharpness.

His parents gone east.

Yonatan behind enemy walls and still naming that wall father.

Michal under the same roof as the man who had sent murder to her chamber.

Adah somewhere inside the house's mechanisms, still alive if Providence continued its particular fondness for difficult women.

And he himself obeying into greater exposure because God had spoken and no other reason could possibly justify the move.

He did not call that feeling peace.