Only the Necromancer Saw What Saul Heard

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The Road to Endor

Saul went out of the camp after dark in another man's clothes, and he was still the tallest thing on the road. Two servants walked with him. Below them the Philistine fires sat in a long line on the low ground, close enough to count, and there were more of them than there had been the night before.

He had asked properly first. He had asked by dream and by lot and by the prophets, and heaven had gone quiet on him in a way it had never done when he was young and did not need it. So he asked his servants to find him a woman who spoke with the dead, and had to watch them work out how to answer that, because he was the one who had cleared the land of them. His own decree, his own soldiers, his own hand. The servants found one at Endor. It took them a while.

The Oath He Had No Right to Swear

She would not let the three of them past the door. She said what everyone in her trade said about Saul, to Saul's face, without knowing it was his face: he has cut off the ones who speak with the dead out of the land, so why are you setting a trap for my life.

He swore to her. He swore by the God who had stopped answering him that no punishment would come on her for this night's work, and the oath was worth exactly nothing and she took it anyway, because a king's word is heavy even when it is hollow, and because it was the middle of the night and he was not going to leave.

She asked whom he wanted brought up. He said Samuel.

How the Work Is Done

She had not eaten, which is how the door opens in that trade. The fast comes first and everything else comes after.

Others in the same work carry a bone from the yaddua' in the mouth and let the speech come out around it. The one they call the ob stoops while she works, folded over, so that the voice seems to climb out of the joints and hollows of the body rather than off the tongue, which is why the Greeks called them speakers from the belly. And there are the ones who need no equipment at all, who simply ask the dead a question, and they cross the same line the Torah drew and are named in the same breath with it (Leviticus 19:31; Deuteronomy 18:11).

Saul stood where the one who asks stands, which is a little back, and out of the way, and blind.

She Screamed and He Bowed to the Floor

Then she screamed, because she could see him coming up: an old man wrapped in a mantle, dressed the way the dead come, in the clothes the living last saw on them.

Saul saw a room. He saw a woman with her hand over her mouth and a lamp guttering because she had knocked the table. What he got instead of the mantle was a voice, and it did not come from the doorway or the corner or the woman. It came up through the floor, whispering and muttering out of the ground, the sound Isaiah names when he says they chirp and mutter from the dust (Isaiah 8:19; 29:4). Saul knew it anyway. He went down on his face into the dirt of a banned woman's floor and bowed to something he could not see, because the rule holds and has always held: when the one who calls sees the shape, the one who asks gets only the sound, and no one has ever been given both at once.

The Answer, and Then the Bread

The voice did not soften for him. He had asked because heaven had gone silent and he wanted the silence explained, but the explanation came with tomorrow's date on it: the army scattered, the kingdom torn out of his hand, and Saul and his sons on the other side of the ground by evening.

His strength went out of him all at once and he went full length on the floor, because he had eaten nothing all day and nothing all night either. The woman stood over him and argued him up. She had risked her life on his word, she said, so he could listen to her for one minute of his. She killed a calf that was in the house, and baked, and put it in front of him, and he ate sitting on her bed with his servants standing there.

Then he went back up the road toward the morning with her bread still in his mouth. Behind him the woman he had outlawed put out her lamp and went to bed in a house she had expected to lose that night.