It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.

They ate and moved on, leaving the fire on the ground behind them, and as they rode up into the mountains this fire seemed to become altered of its location, now here, now there, drawing away, or shifting unaccountably along the flank of their movement.

They moved like migrants under a drifting star and their track across the land reflected in its faint arcature the movements of the earth itself.

They rode north onto the broad Sonoran desert and in that cauterized waste they wandered aimlessly for weeks pursuing rumor and shadow.

You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.

They rode on.

The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.

Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.

If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now?.

The desert wind would salt their ruins and there would be nothing, nor ghost nor scribe, to tell to any pilgrim in his passing how it was that people had lived in this place and in this place died.

All other trades are contained in that of war. Is that why war endures?. No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.

The good book does indeed count war an evil, said Irving. Yet there's many a bloody tale of war inside it.

In the predawn light he made his way out upon a promontory and there received first of any creature in that country the warmth of the sun's ascending.

He rode near the head of the column and he must have counted himself well out of that place yet if he gave thanks to any god at all it was ill timed for the country was not done with him.

Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove.

When the riders passed through this same village four days later the dead were still in the streets and buzzards and pigs were feeding on them.

Lightning stood in ragged chains far to the south, silent, the staccato mountains bespoken blue and barren out of the void.

To the west the cloudbanks stood above the mountains like the dark warp of the very firmament and the starsprent reaches of the galaxies hung in a vast aura above the riders heads.

The judge like a great ponderous djinn stepped through the fire and the flames delivered him up as if he were in some way native to their element.

He keeps from off the king's road for fear of citizenry.