The Boy Warrior - Season 1 - Episode 1

Episode 4 years ago

The Boy Warrior - Season 1 - Episode 1

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David dipped his rag into the special polish and applied it to the mail in his lap. He rubbed the silver polish evenly on the surface of the mail, its links clinking as he did. After using up the polish he scooped up, he dipped in the rag again and applied it to other parts of the chain mail.

Polishing mail was tricky work, as David had learned sometime ago. How long had it been? He paused his work as he tried to remember. A week? Most surely a week, just a few days more or less. He smiled and shook his head, returning to his polishing.

Polishing mail was harder than polishing, say, a breastplate, as he had learned that week or so ago, mostly because of all those links. You had to polish every inch of them, and do both the front and the back. A breastplate didn’t need polish on the back, just the front. But polish only the front of a shirt of mail, and the unpolished links would show from the front. It made mail look. . .wrong, imperfect.

And this wasn’t just any mail, this was the King’s mail. It couldn’t,couldn’tbe imperfect.
It was still hard for David to believe where he was. The king’s palace. It had been hard for him to recall how long he had been here, mostly because the past week had stretched on for what seemed like a year. Time had seemed to slow, probably to allow him relish every moment of living the life every other young man in Israel dreamed of living.

He still remembered it like it was yesterday. No, not yesterday. The events that had taken place a week ago were as fresh as if they had occured just this past hour.

He had been in the fields not too far from their home, tending to the sheep as usual. He had just finished seeing to the needs of the latest sheep in the flock that were with young and had gone to sit under the shade of a tree, his back resting against the tree’s trunk, watching the sheep graze, their mouths moving from side to side as they chewed contentedly.

He had brought his small wooden harp along to while away the time. He was working on a new tune he wanted to play at their family dinner that night. David had been plucking randomly on the harp’s strings, his eyes closed, perfectly at peace, as he always was whenever he was working on a new song. Letting the breeze sweeping through the open fields rustle the grass and wash over him, letting the bleats of the flock guide him into that place, that special place where the notes of the tune he wanted to create would move from his mind seamlessly through his body and guide the pluckings of his fingers.
The first few notes had been right there, hovering on the edge of his mind. . .and then someone had tapped him on the shoulder, shattering his concentration like the time the shaving mirror he borrowed from his father had fallen and broken into a hundred little shards.
He opened his eyes to see Eliezer, his immediate elder brother.

“What. . .what is the matter?” he asked, disbelieving. Eliezer merely looked at him as if he had two heads.
“What are you closing your eyes for?” he asked.

“And what areyoudoing here?” David shot back.

“Father sent me to call you,” Eliezer had said. “He says you are to come home right this instant.”

“But. . . ” David said, looking at the sheep and back at his brother, “but what about them? Who will look after them?”

“Surely the flock can wait for a minute or two while your father requests you to come back home.”

David dropped the harp on the ground next to him.

“And what is father calling me for?” he’d asked.
“You ask too many questions, David,” Eliezer snapped. “Come home and see.”
David frowned. He didn’t like the way his brothers treated him like a child, just because he was the youngest in the family. But he had a beard, and they tended to forget that he watched over his father’s flock all by himself, that he had broken family record— the entire Israel’s record, in fact —when he killed a lion and a bear.
He stole another glance at the flock, then picked his outer garment up from under the harp and went home with his brother.
And he had seen.
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