“A slave?” Gallen said, amused by Orick’s tirade. “Maybe so, but … I was born to be a Lord Protector.”
“Yeah, so you’re a clone of some famous Lord Protector,” Orick grumbled. “That doesn’t mean you have to follow in his footsteps. As I remember the story, didn’t he eventually get martyred? Are you going to follow in his footsteps? Are you going to let somebody else decide how you’ll live your life?”
“What else can I do?” Gallen said. He began pacing, hardly daring to look at Orick.
And at that moment, the answer came to Orick, an answer he had felt in the depths of his soul but never had been quite able to voice to Gallen. “Ignore evil,” Orick said. “Jesus said to forgive others. If a man comes to you, though he has sinned seventy times seven, and asks forgiveness, then you forgive. Ignore evil.”
Gallen shook his head angrily. “I disagree! ‘Resist Satan, and he will flee from you’! God strengthened David so he could slay Goliath. God ordered Joshua to destroy the Hittites and the Jebusites.”
Orick grinned, a glint in his eye. “The devil quotes Scripture, too. You’re not a religious man, Gallen. When did you start quoting Scripture?”
Gallen laughed. “I warmed my share of pews as a kid. You forget, I’ve got more than one priest in my family.”
Orick felt chagrined. He said softly, “Sometimes, sometimes God has commanded men to fight. But I’d like to know Gallen, are you so eager to fight because that’s what God wants of you, or is it just in your nature? Sometimes God tells people to run, too. Moses took the children of Israel and fled from Pharaoh. Joseph and Mary were told to flee Israel when Herod sent his soldiers to slaughter the babes. Sometimes you should run from evil. Maggie’s right in this, in asking you to run. Her life is at risk as much as your own. And there’s the babe to worry about. She has to make the choice for her own life.”
Gallen opened his mouth to argue, yet nothing came out.
Orick looked up at Gallen, then shook his head in despair. “Gallen, my oldest and dearest friend, I think it’s time for me to leave you.”
There, he’d said it. He’d been thinking it for months, and now he’d finally said it.
“Leave?” Gallen asked, astonished. “Where would you go?”
“Anywhere. We’ve been on a dozen fine planets. Home, maybe. Back to Tihrglas.”
Gallen’s mouth just worked of its own accord, as if he would speak but couldn’t find the words. He’d been totally unprepared.
Orick felt weary, sick at heart. “Oh, don’t you see it, Gallen? I’ve been thinking about this for months. The night the dronon came to Tihrglas, I almost left you for good. You know I’ve always wanted to be a priest. I wanted to serve God, but you’ve become a slave to evil, and I can’t watch it anymore. You sicken me, my friend. You’re destroying yourself!”
Orick’s eyes watered with tears. It hurt to say these things.
“What do you mean, I sicken you?” Gallen asked. “I haven’t changed.”
“Oh yes you have!” Orick said. “Remember the day we first met?”
Gallen looked at Orick, confused, and shook his head.
Orick reminded him. “We were on that hot August road that runs through the hills by the mill outside Gort Ard, and you was hunting for that killer, Dan’l O’Leary?”
“You mean the very first time we met?” Gallen asked. “You were with that friar, what’s-his-name.”
“Friar Bannon,” Orick said, remembering the thin old fellow with the rotting teeth, his head shaved bald. “A godly man-one of the best there has ever been.”
It had been a scorcher of a day, and Gallen was tracking a murderer and had lost the boy’s trail somewhere along the road. Dan’l O’Leary had managed to leap off the margin of the highway into some brush. Gallen could not discover his trail. Yet Gallen also knew the general area where the boy had vanished, and he’d asked Orick to sniff the killer out.
Now, Friar Bannon had known the killer. Dan’l O’Leary was only fifteen, but he was a big kid, and dumb. The kind who figured it was easier to make it as a highwayman than as a farmer. So one summer’s night he waylaid a wealthy traveler, brandishing a cudgel. When the fellow was slow to get his purse open, Dan’l hit him in the head, hoping to subdue him, but in his excitement he hit the fellow too hard, knocking his brains all over the dirt road.
While Dan’l stood over the corpse, looking for coins hidden in the man’s boots, his own mother rounded the bend in the road and discovered her son was a murderer.
In her shame, she ran into town and told everyone what had happened. Dan’l took off into the woods, where he foraged off the land and sometimes visited Friar Bannon, telling how he was tom by the desire to return home, wanting to repent, knowing he’d hang if he did, suffering from the pain of a damned soul. So it was that Orick came upon Gallen, hunting for the killer, and Gallen asked Orick to sniff the boy out.
“What will you do to him if you catch him?” Orick had asked, for Orick was a young bear, and having heard of the boy’s grief from Friar Bannon, he was not sure if it would be appropriate to help apprehend the youngster. Friar Bannon felt convinced that the boy would repent, and he hoped that the law would be lenient with the child-perhaps give him a good beating rather than a hanging. The murder was a youthful mistake, after all, not the act of a hardened criminal.
Yet the boy compounded his crimes by not turning himself in. Friar Bannon had said that given one winter in the wild, this boy would become a hardened highwayman-or the weather would break him, and he’d come to his senses. Friar Bannon hoped for the latter.
“I don’t know what I’ll do with this one,” Gallen had answered Orick thoughtfully, sitting down on the roadside. “It’s been bothering me. Gut him, maybe. I don’t want to put the kid through a hanging. The wait and embarrassment. His poor mother is beside herself already. He isn’t a mean lad. So I think I’ll kill him swiftly. Looks like that would be about best for everyone.”
“Not for Dan’l,” Friar Bannon had said quickly.
“Maybe not,” Gallen had agreed. “But I can’t just let him go free.”
“No, the best thing for the boy would be to make his peace with God and man,” Friar Bannon had said. “If only he would run far away and start his life over, but I think the lad is sort of like a dumb calf that hasn’t realized it’s time to wean from his mother. He still wants to go home, and there’s no telling him otherwise. “
Gallen had looked the friar in the eye, just held his gaze for a moment.
“I helped you hunt Dan’l, for three days,” Orick said, wondering if his message would get though, “and when you caught him, what did you do? You gave him some money from your own purse, pointed him toward the border, and kicked him in the pants as you sent him on his way.”
Gallen’s face took on a closed look. “It was the best thing I could do, it seemed. Like Friar Bannon, I hoped he would change.”
“A devil’s bargain,” Orick intoned. “A year later, Dan’l became a highwayman, and we had to track him down all over again, and that time you gutted the lad.”
“I thought he’d go straight,” Gallen whispered. “But he murdered three more people. Do you think I did wrong letting him go the first time?”
“No, you idiot. Don’t you see it? You did exactly right.” Orick replied. “You exercised compassion. You hoped for the best. It wasn’t our fault the lad didn’t live up to our expectations. It was his fault. He deserved what you gave him-both the forgiveness and the punishment.”
“So what is your point?”
Orick grunted and frowned as he considered. “My point is this: when I first helped you catch that boy, I almost didn’t do it. I only came with you that day because you were trying to do what was best for everyone. Sometimes, we have to make a choice, and hope that it’s best for everyone, and offer no blame to ourselves or others if we’re wrong.”