"I must look that up as soon as I can open my eyes again. I've never heard it. English has too many words for some things, and not enough for others. You take too long in the telling. Your words can never match the music of our proverb-verse."
"I'll work through a King James Bible with you. It'll change your opinion."
"Arrgh. Those tracts, most of them read like the family history of a group of nomad pfump-raisers. One of your theosophists tried to instill in me a belief in my own soul, and me having tasted only the bitter surface of the Hell of Loneliness and Hell of Pain in the time before we met. The fool. As if Paradise could be gained by affirming the divinity of some human. Bah!"
"I've always thought there was more to it than that, my friend."
"My David, if you wish to learn the true path to Paradise, you must read of the Golden Ones' Rhapsodies. Then you will be steeled to torments that must be overcome before a joyful afterlife."
" 'There are four and fifty ways of constructing tribal lays, and every single one of them are right,'" Valentine quoted.
"Then what is your opinion of your gods?"
"God? You mean Bud?"
"There is only one? I thought you had two or three."
"Depends who you talk to," Valentine said, sinking into his bunk. On his back, the ship's motion seemed to tilt him headdown first, then feetdown.
"I don't remember anyone calling your god Bub."
"Bud. It's from an old story the top sergeant from Zulu Company used to tell."
"Old stories are the best ones. The bad ones die young. Tell me about Bud."
Valentine sifted his memory. "The sergeant's name was Patel. He was built almost as broad as you, a helluva wrestler, too, and he always fought clean unless someone tried something. Then it was anything goes. But back to the story, before he was in the Wolves, he fought with the regulars, the Guards-"
"Yes, I've seen them," Ahn-Kha said from the noisy darkness. "Good guns, better uniforms, and the best food."
"They can fight when it comes to it. I think when Patel was with 'em they didn't have the nicest clothing. Especially where he was. He said it started while he was watching the ground south of Saint Louis. For a while there, it was trench warfare: the men and Grogs working for the Kurians were trying to blast them out of these hills with artillery. Got so there wasn't a tree standing, but the Guards just kept digging and digging. They'd build little caves of wood with tons of dirt overhead-they were called 'dugouts.' Anyway
he was young, and he had this real nervous NCO running the dugout these twenty men were crammed into. The damn Grogs-sorry, old horse-the damn Kurian Grogs started building these rockets they were launching off of railroad rails, and they had enough of a bang in them to collapse a dugout.
"When those babies landed, Patel said it felt like someone picked up the hill and dropped it again. The concussion outside was enough to stop your heart. Well, this corporal starts to lose it-they're in there and it's dark and cold and wet, with the noise and smell of burnt flesh, and as if that isn't bad enough, it seems like any minute they're going to get blown to hell.
"'Get friendly with God!' this corporal starts shouting. 'The time's coming, and you'd better know him! You gotta know God and be on a first-name basis with him to get into heaven. Hurry up, guys!'
"Of course, some of the men just tell him to shut up, but you've always got a joker or two who thinks a nervous breakdown is entertainment, so they start quizzing him.
" 'Praise Jesus!' one hollers, trying to egg him on.
"T'm talking about God, not Jesus!' the corporal says. He keeps looking at the ceiling of the dugout. 'Know him. Love him.'
" 'Okay, what's God's name, then?'
"The corporal doesn't even think about it-he says Bud right away. Some of the guys think this is just too funny to let go.
"'Bud is my shepherd, I shall not want,' one starts to say. They start misquoting stuff like 'Praise Bud!' and 'Bud, bless this stewed rat, which I'm about to eat, and probably puke up again.'"
"Skip the food part," Ahn-Kha groaned.
"Well, after a couple minutes of humor like that, some old soldier yells, 'Shut your Bud-damned mouths, for Bud's frickin' sake.'
"The corporal loses it, says he's not going to stay in there with a bunch of blasphemers, and he heads out of the dugout with the shells and rockets still landing all over the hills. Patel thinks the corp is going to get killed, and so he goes out after him. Patel catches up to him thirty yards away and jumps on him, wrestles him to the ground in the trench, when one of those rail-rockets lands right on the dugout. Kills every man in there, either the blast or suffocation did them in. Patel and a bunch of others, even the corporal, tried to dig out the shelter to rescue them, but no luck. Sure enough, some of the bodies are blue, and this corporal starts pointing at the ones who suffocated and saying 'Bud's mark!' and things like that.
"Patel and this corporal get out of the trenches and are posted with a new unit in western Missouri in the bushwhack ground. This corporal seems sound enough most of the time, but now and then he points out the color blue and says 'the Hand of Bud,' or something like that. One day they're on patrol on a footpath and he just freezes, with his head cocked like a dog listening to a whistle. He says that 'Bud's whispering in my ear.' A couple of the guys pass him, maybe they thought he was taking a leak without bothering to use his fly, and go right into a tripwire that fires this harpoon through two men. Patel said he started to think that old expression about God looking out for drunks, children, and idiots might be true.
"After that, this corporal turned into the kind of NCO that stays behind to watch over the sick and the supplies. Until this one day, there's a beautiful blue sky. So he decides to climb a tree and look at Bud's handiwork. He falls asleep up there, no one knows where he is, they figure this time he's really flipped and run off into the woods. They don't even bother looking for him. Which is too bad, because if they had been dispersed, these three Reapers passing through the area wouldn't have caught all that lifesign in the camp. They went in and killed everyone but the corporal, maybe when he was in the tree talking to Bud, he didn't put out much more lifesign than a cuckoo clock. After that, the corporal