A Man at Arms: A Novel

“What is belief, Michael? Does one ‘believe in’ the sun? The seasons? Even this flesh we inhabit? Belief is not necessary for these. Their reality is self-evident. Belief is only needed for that which does not exist.”

“We never cross a valley or any stretch of open ground by a road or trail,” the mercenary said, “but always from ambush site to ambush site. This is called highlining.”

“There is another world,” he said, “not ‘above’ this one but within it. In this world, all souls are linked by the commonality of their identity as children of God. In this world, care for others, even the humblest—especially the humblest—is the medium by which one may transcend that philosophy of isolation and despair which you so eloquently espouse.”

“I do not serve money. I make money serve me. At campaign’s end, I care for neither praise nor blame. I want cash. I want to be paid. In that way, war is work—nothing more. To serve for money detaches the warrior from the object of his commander’s desire. I serve for the serving only, fight for the fighting only, tramp for the tramping only.”

And this peril would proceed neither from hosts nor armies but from the pen of a single man—Saul of Tarsus, who became Paul the Apostle—who, to compound the irony, had himself been among the foremost practitioners of Roman tyranny and oppression.

It is one thing to study war and another to live the warrior’s life.

Here, the youth thought, stands a man whose feet are planted in the real world, not the sphere of dreams or delusion. Here is a man who fears death, as all do, and perhaps due to his vast experience of war reckons even more keenly the mysteries of fate and chance and destiny, yet who faces these down every day and bears the scars to prove it. This man seeks not some sphere beyond the mortal or the mundane but instead dwells in this world of dust and strife, without illusion or self-delusion.

This man-at-arms had a religion too. It was not a faith of the lamp or of the blessed by-and-by. It was not a soldier’s code or a code of honor. It was sterner and more solitary, a doctrine shorn of pity even for oneself but which touched somehow, David sensed, upon a truth as immutable as death and as primal as creation.

“Our position in this place,” declared this officer to his superior in a letter whose contents became widely circulated among the subject populace, “is like that of a lion seated upon an anthill. We may crush the Jews over and over, yet they remain up our ass and nothing we can do will dislodge them.”

“If we cannot believe in things beyond what our senses deliver, then we’re no better than these animals and there is no hope for any of us. That is the difference between a man and a beast: we can perceive that which is not, and strive, if not to bring it forth into reality, then to enter it as spirit. I pity you, brother. You have yourself and nothing more.”