David Climbed a Unicorn Before He Became King

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The Hill That Made No Sound

David was a shepherd then, and he listened to things. Birds over the field. The brook turning through the trees. Branches shifting in the summer wind. All of it had music in it, and he kept catching himself turning around because he thought someone behind him had said his name. Once he was certain of what he heard.

"David, David. You shall be king of Israel."

He looked. Trees, flowers, nobody. So he left the forest and walked out onto a bare plain, and in the distance he saw a hill.

It was very high, and something about it was wrong. Nothing grew on it. From other hills he caught that faint sweetness he could never explain to anyone, and from this one he caught nothing at all. He climbed it anyway. The climb was hard, because the slope was smooth and gave him nothing to hold. At the summit stood what looked like a tall tree with no branches and no leaves.

The Tree Was Made of Horn

Up close it was not wood. It was horn.

He crouched and tried to cut a clod of earth loose with his knife, and the blade would not go in. The ground was not ground. It was hard the way hide is hard, tough the whole way through, and it gave a little under the knife and then pushed back.

Another boy would have run down the slope. David sat at the foot of the horn instead and said out loud that he wondered what would happen if he stayed.

What happened was this. The hill began to rise and fall in places, slowly, like something taking its time about breathing. A rumble came up through the hide and into his legs. Then a long swish, and at the far end of the hill something enormous swung into the air and whirled.

"That is just like a tail," David said.

Then the whole mountain stood up.

He got both arms around the horn and held on. The plain dropped away under him. Cloud came level with his face, and when he looked down he saw a shadow lying across the earth, thrown by the sun off the thing he was riding, and the size of that shadow told him what he was on. Not a mountain. A re'em, asleep in the sun, and he had walked up its flank and made himself comfortable on its horn.

David Bargains for a Way Down

A re'em one day old stands as tall as Mount Tabor. Its neck alone runs three parasangs. One of them once dropped dung into the Jordan and dammed the river.

David held on and worked the problem the way a shepherd works a problem. The animal would have to eat sometime. When it lowered its head to graze he would slide down the horn and be gone before it lifted again.

Then he made an offer, because waiting was not enough. If God brought him off this creature alive, he would build God a house. Not an altar, not a shrine. A house one hundred ells high, the exact height of the horns he was clinging to. He set the measure while there was still nothing under his feet.

The Lion Calls Itself King

The answer came from below, and it came roaring.

"Bow to me. I am king of the beasts."

David could barely find the lion. From that height it was a speck the color of the plain, and against the re'em it was nothing at all, a cat at the foot of a mountain. But the re'em heard it. And the re'em went down, head first, the whole tower of it folding toward the dust, the horn tipping over and over until the ground came up under David's feet and he slid the last of the way and stood.

He was standing directly in front of the lion.

Blazing eyes. The tail working against its own flanks, left, right. He had killed lions before, four of them out in the desert, and three bears, with nothing in his hands at all. He pulled the knife from his belt, the same knife that had turned aside on the re'em's hide, and walked toward the lion.

The Deer Takes the Lion Away

Something moved on the plain and boy and lion both turned to look.

A deer, and it was already speaking. "I will save you, boy. Get on my back and trust my speed."

David was up before the lion finished turning. Then the plain went past in one long smear, then the forest, branches whipping his arms, and behind him the roaring stayed close and would not fall away. He held the deer's neck the way he had held the horn.

It stopped where the houses began. Roofs, smoke, the ordinary world one field ahead.

"You are safe now," the deer said. "You are to become king, and my order was to save you. Do not be afraid. I will take the lion the other way."

He thanked it and slid down, and it was gone back across the plain faster than it had carried him, with the lion behind it, and then both of them were out of sight.

David walked home singing. He was still a shepherd. Nobody in the house had any reason to ask where he had been.

Years later he was a king with a harp instead of a knife, and he put that day into a psalm. The lion's mouth is in it. So are the horns.