man can bear-save for his faith in God. So, perhaps I am cast as Abram, or perhaps my lot is that of Job.” Fire looked toward the heavens. “Either does not matter because the moral of each Scripture is that faith will sustain us through the most horrible of trials. Our reward for faith is to abide with God forever in Heaven.”
Nathaniel stoppered his canteen. “I ain’t of a mind to say you’re wrong, Steward, and I don’t know enough Scripture to tell if you’re right. But I seem to remember-and you can correct me-that the Good Lord hisself said that the children should come unto Him on account of they was innocent. I cain’t see anybody what loves children that much wanting to happen to them what happened to the children in Piety.”
“You must understand, Mr. Woods, that God challenges us so we reaffirm our faith in Him.”
Nathaniel frowned. “Now, see, that is something I don’t reckon I can figure out. You clearly is a pious man, doing His work, gathering up people that believe in Him, and He goes and slaughters a bunch of them to test your faith? Ain’t that like having a sweetheart that goes out a-walking with another man, then comes back and asks if you believe her when she says she is chaste? Once you do, she goes out walking again, but this time they hold hands. How far would you let her test you? Would you wait until you found them naked and under the sheets, and would you believe when she says she’s chaste?”
The Steward opened his hands. “The mind of God is not knowable to man.”
“I hear you say that, but they’s an awful, terrible, powerful lot of preachers who claim they do know what God is thinking. They don’t skimp on giving you a piece of His mind when they get to preachifying.”
Rathfield raised a hand. “You tread perilously close to blasphemy, Woods.”
“I is not neither.” Nathaniel shook his head. “I reckon religion can give you peace on account of it tells you that there’s a reason things happen, terrible things, horrible things. When the good ones happen, you’re happy with God; when the bad ones happen, you just count it up as something God don’t think you need to understand at that moment.”
Kamiskwa raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps my brother would get to the point of his discussion.”
“I reckon I might, thank you, Kamiskwa.” Nathaniel pointed his rifle off toward Happy Valley. “You don’t know if God intends to kill them people, or if He’ll tell you it was just a test at the last moment. From the stories you mentioned previous, odds are four to one that blood is going to be shed. Seems to me there was some Scripture stories about great leaders, bringing their people out of the wilderness, to a promised land. Ain’t it possible that’s how God is leaning?”
“Woods, that will be quite enough!”
The Steward focused distantly for a moment, then hung his head. “You may well be right, Mr. Woods. I allowed myself to succumb to the sin of pride. I elevated the trials I shall face above those of the people who have put their trust in me. That I need to be strong for them, and strong to face these trials, this is an even greater test than I imagined. I am blessed that your insight revealed to me more of His plan.”
Nathaniel nodded once. The Steward still wasn’t grasping the seriousness of what they faced, but at least he now allowed as how not everyone should be given up to death. As long as Fire held open the door that some might survive, they might be able to evacuate the settlement and get people back over the mountains.
As they shouldered their packs again, Rathfield took off in the lead. Makepeace walked with the Steward, shouldering his pack and sharing some prayers. Kamiskwa watched their back trail, leaving Owen and Nathaniel walking together.
Owen glanced at him. “Do you honestly think he’d let them all die?”
“Being as how he’s more worried about their souls than he is their mortal remains, I don’t reckon he’s seeing death as quite the tragedy we do. Tragedy or not, long as I’m breathing, ain’t no way Becca Green’s going to the Lord, even if He comes down and invites her to Him. I reckon if He weren’t keen on being tacked to a tree and having a spear poked into his side, He surely ain’t going to like a bullet punching him dead center.”
Surprise widened Owen’s eyes. “You seem to bear God some animosity, Nathaniel.”
“It ain’t I got a hate-on for Him. It’s more I got a hate-on for his followers.”
“Like Makepeace?”
“Nope. Makepeace, he goes and prays good times and bad. Sometimes he does what he oughten’t to do, but he’s sorry and sincere about it and fair good at seeing it don’t happen again for a good long time.” Nathaniel nodded. “He weren’t always like that, but come his meeting with the Good Lord and that bear, he’s been sincere since.”
“I can’t argue with you there, only having known him since. But you’re telling it right.” Owen climbed up a steep set of rocks, then offered Nathaniel a hand. “But what do you think of God? Do you believe?”
Nathaniel took his hand and pulled himself up. “You really want to know the answer?”
“I believe I do.”
Nathaniel swept a hand out over the panorama of the wooded valley below and the hills that defined it. “I look at all this and I know men see the hand of the Creator there. You got your God; Kamiskwa and the Shedashee, they got theirs. I reckon other people gots themselves gods, ’cepting the Ryngians who seem a mite confused and awful willing to take the Lord’s name in vain even though they don’t believe. And all them Creators get credit for the same thing, but they all has themselves a set of rules ’bout what a body can and cannot do. And the one thing all them rules have in common is that they tend to benefit whosoever is the one telling everyone else what them rules is.”
“I can’t deny your point there.”
Nathaniel patted Owen on the shoulder and they started walking again. “So I got to wondering not iffen there was a God, but whether or not any of them people got it right. It would be as if we done heard a big cat calling in the night, and we found pawprints, and we found a tooth, and we brung it all back to Prince Vlad. Now he’d go on and tell us how big the cat was, what it ate and so forth but, being a wise man, he wouldn’t tell us what color it was, or that it had wings and horns and two heads.”
“But holy men are doing just that?”
“’Xactly so.” Nathaniel nodded. “So I might allow as how there is a God. I might even go so far as to say that some things, like the Golden Rule and the whole ‘Thou shalt not murder,’ sounds like things a God might want us to be doing. Beyond that, I reckon men is inventing more than they ought to.”
“So you don’t think God let the people of Piety die?”
“Tain’t that. I don’t think He wanted them to die.” Nathaniel shook his head. “I don’t reckon any Creator what worked so hard to create beauty and life would make it part of a plan to have folks die hard and evil like that. You think he wanted them to die?”
“I really try not to fathom the mind of God.”
Nathaniel raised an eyebrow. “Your turn, Captain Strake. You believe in God?”
Owen ducked beneath a pine branch. “I’m afraid the God I believe in is a bit more capricious and nasty than the one you accept. Put it down to being raised in a family where we had our own Church and would sit up front at services, yet where my uncles, father, and grandfather would indulge themselves in cruel ways. And credit it to what I’ve seen on battlefields, where men pray for God to end their suffering. So simple a thing for Him to grant, and yet it always seemed that he who prayed the most devoutly, suffered the longest.”
Nathaniel’s thoughts flew back to Fort Cuivre and the aftermath of the battle at Anvil Lake. Shot and sword, bullet and bludgeon, the weapons of war had rendered men unrecognizable. Some did pray as they died, others wept, and still more cried out for mothers and wives living an ocean away. While he understood the injuries, and understood the desire for comfort, he’d never taken the time to fit that carnage into any theological context. Those battles had been Man’s creation and weren’t something for which he could imagine any god wanting credit.
“Almost sounds to me, Captain, that you’re leaning toward thinking there ain’t no God.”
“I probably would think that, save for something you touched upon earlier. Loving or cruel, capricious or calculating, God being in Heaven means there is a reason for everything.” Owen sighed. “I might not understand it, but knowing there is a reason is a lot more comforting than believing there isn’t. And if God does exist, maybe, just maybe, the next prayer He answers will be mine.”
Nathaniel leaped over a marshy stretch of trail. “I reckon this, Owen. Iffen God’s going to be answer any prayers, like as not they’ll be from someone like you.”
“How do you figure that?”
“My hunch is this: iffen you was dying and in a powerful lot of pain, you wouldn’t be praying for comfort for yourself, but for your daughter and wife. I reckon most of the others miss that. The Good Lord, if the tales be true, done sacrificed Hisself for others. Praying for yourself kinda mocks all that, don’t it?”
