From Book 3 – The Long Peace

Conversation between Dana Reyes and King Harald Bluetooth

“Do you believe in God?” she asked. Not softly, and not as a beginning; the way she said most things, as though it were the second half of an argument he had not heard the first half of.

He was a long time answering, which with him was not hesitation but courtesy, the weighing-out of coin. “Which one,” he said at last. “And whose.”

“You know which—God.”

“I know the word. The word is a fence.” He turned the cup in his hands without drinking from it. “Men build it to pen other men, and then stand within the pen and call it faith. If you would come anywhere near the thing you are pointing at, the first labor is to set the word down. I have had a long while to set it down. You may take it that I have managed it once or twice.”

“You took the cross,” she said. “You made a whole people take it.”

“I did. Coldly, in hard ground, and I cut a great stone to boast of it, and I slept the better for the boasting.”

There was no heat in it; a craftsman appraising another man’s joinery. “Their god I judged then as I judge him now — a thing built well, to a purpose: to rule men, and to gather their wealth into one house, and to make the gathering holy so that no one would think to ask after it. That is not contempt. It is the respect one workman pays another’s work. But it is not belief, and I have never once mistaken it for belief. I converted the Danes the way I would have signed a treaty, because it was the price of the chair, and I do not refuse a price that buys a thing worth the having.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“No.” Almost a smile, in the dark. “You asked do I believe in a god. Not in any shape your age would know one by. The nearest I have come — and I have come at it from every road there is — I learned on this continent, a long time before your histories troubled to find it. The peoples here had a name for it. Wakan Tanka. The Great Spirit is what your translators made of it; the Great Mystery is nearer the truth. It is not a lord seated apart from the world, handing down weather and judgment. It is the world, knowing itself. It is in the stone as much as in you. In the cold off that water. In the turning of the year that does not ask your leave. I will not pretend to understand it. A thousand years have taught me chiefly the size of the thing I will never understand, and that the size does not shrink for being stared at. It is best not to interrogate the Mystery. Look instead at any living thing — at your own hand — and you have your answer, such as an answer is ever given.”

“Then who made it,” she said. “All of it. The hand and the water and the rest.”

“That is the question that has built every church and not answered the question. We will not know it in a hundred thousand years that we did not know in the first morning. The wanting-to-know is honest; it is the best of us. The claiming-to-know is the whole of the disaster.”

“And your own gods? The old ones?”

“Thor, Loki, Odin, Mimir?” He did seem to smile then. “I have come to think they were never persons at all, but posts — markers a man steered his conduct by, in a dark country. The steering outlasted the believing. It was the only part that had ever mattered.”

She let the black water do nothing a while. “Then why suffer any of it. Why let men go on being fools. You’ve built a roof over half a hemisphere. You could lean on it. You could put a thumb on what they believe and tell yourself it was for their good — half the men who ever held your kind of power did exactly that and slept well.”

“Because a man’s freedom to be wrong is the very same freedom by which he is ever right, and I will not cut the one to spare myself the other. The cure for foolishness was never the sword, and it was never the thumb on the scale. It is light, given slowly, and the patience to let a man walk to it or refuse it. I will compel no soul to believe anything. That road I have walked, once, to the end of it — and I know the country it lets out into, and I will not go back. Belief is the people’s own. It is the first thing under the roof and the last thing I would ever reach for, because it is the thing every cage I have ever watched began by reaching for.”

“So you let them all alone.”

“Not all. There is one line, and I draw it once.” He set the cup down. “There are faiths that ask nothing but to be let be — to keep their own quiet, raise their own, trouble no one beyond their own gate. Those I will shield with my own hand, the harder the louder your modern world leans on them. And there are faiths — or factions grown like a canker inside them — that cannot abide the unbeliever to go on breathing; that hold a man who believes otherwise ought to be made to stop. With those I keep my peace until the day they cross from preaching their certainty to killing for it. On that day I interfere. Not chiefly for the love of the killed, though that too. For this: the man who wins his argument by the sword never afterward lays the sword down. He turns to the next unbeliever, and the next, and one of those, soon or late, is mine. Tolerance is not softness, Dana. It is the furthest-seeing self-interest there is.”

“And the rest of them?” she asked. “The harmless ones? The fools?”

“Believe as they please.” He looked out at the black water, where there was nothing to see. “The roof I have raised does not care which — and neither, I have found, across ten centuries of looking, does anything that has ever deserved the name of God.”