I AM...
Swathed in fur hides and uncured leather, flesh mottled with red clay and war paint. I beat back the onslaught of the Others-those who walk on two legs, who use clubs and spears, but are not men.
The rude stone ax heavy in my hairy hands, I smash skulls like eggs and, ravenous after the battle, I feast on my enemies' hearts and wash in their blood.
Called the Hand of God, I wield a sword made of bronze. My shield is leather and beaten lead. I fought and I died in the desert sands of Jerusalem, struck down by the demon Ba'al in a holy war long forgotten by mankind, though it echoes through eternity.
Here I die with my king, arrow-pierced Leonidas, as the Persian chariots burst through the Spartan defenses at the mountain pass called Thermopylae.
At Carrhae, I retreat with Cassius's legions, cut to pieces by the Parthians who tricked the Legionnaires into breaking formation, then massacred the Roman troops with cavalry.
In burnished steel armor, astride a stirrupless saddle, I beat back the Huns who seek to destroy Roman civilization and thrust the world into the ignorance and superstition of the Dark Ages.
I ride a Mongol pony into Samarkland with Genghis Khan. We leave mounds of sun-bleached skulls and utter desolation in our wake. Harvesters of death.
My chain mail encrusted with rust and sweat-salt, I hack my way over prostrate Jerusalem's walls with the Knights Templars. I put the Infidel to the sword and liberate the Holy Lands in the name of my most Holy Pontiff, Urban the Second.
At Bosworth, I wear a white rose and die in the arsh during Lord Stanley's bloody advance.
I am captain of the mercanaries, I besiege Magdeburg with the Roman Catholic armies of Gustavus Adolphus. No one could stop us. Overwhelm the Hessian defenders and butcher thirty thousand Protestant men, women, and children.
Both sides fight for the glory of God. I fight for plunder.
Wind chimes tinkle in the chill night air. The garden sparkles with crystalline ice. I wear a sky blue silk kimono; my skin is yellow. I dance in the falling flakes, silver blade flashing, dark ninja blood staining the virgin snow as black-clad forms fall dead at my feet.
Perfectly dealt, my strokes slash out a haiku of death, each cut a decapitation, each lunge a disembowelment.
I fight for the emperor and my shogun master.
I trek across the deserts of Egypt and the steppes of Russia with Napoleon. Our triumphs, our cruelty are legendary, our retreat through a freezing hell our penance.
At Veracruz, we remembered the Alamo by invading Mexico via the sea and defeating the Mexican Army in their own streets.
I die in a dusty ditch next to a wheat field in a place called Antietam, then spring to life.
On the walls of old Peking, I stand side by side with heroes, to beat back a horde of Chinese hatchet men who seek the deaths of all foreign devils.
For fifty-five days we hold, a hundred United Stated Marines who defeat a two-thousand-year-old empire.
I feel the wood and fabric of my SPAD shudder under the chattering machine guns. I watch a Fokker DVII crumple in the air, its wings burning as it plunges, spinning, to the Western Front far, far below.
I love a Blackfoot Indian girl named Silver Fox.
I meet Hemingway in Spain.
I fight in the trenches, breathe poison gas.
I parachute into Normandy on D-day.
I wage war in Malaysia, Vietnam, Korea, Laos, Cambodia, France, Belgium, Austria, Istanbul and Peking.
In Jerusalem, in Actium, Rome, Paris, Fort Pitt, Yorktown, Moscow, Osaka, Cambrai, Flanders, Belleau Wood, Guernica, the Sahara, Caen, Berlin, Dien Bien Phum and Hanoi.
All of them were me. Me. The Eternal Warrior. The Hand of God, the Master of War. An immortal spirit with no beginning and perhaps no end, only an eternity of suffering and strife and the tide of battle. No peace, no rest. No love, no family, no home. The sword my only mistress, the battle-rent banner my testament.
With stone and wood, with bronze and iron, with steel and adamantium as my tools, my weapons, I live the warrior's life, die the warrior's death a thousand times over. My lives line up behind me on parade, and I can see them all, like dim silhouettes marching over Golgotha.
I've suffered the spear's tip and the headsman's ax, the slashing sword, the arrow's pierce, the crossbow's bolt. I've drowned. Been burned. Crucified. Blown asunder. Felt the hangman's noose.
And in the end, all that pain ever led to was a finality that is never truly a climax, only another beginning in the endless, eternal cycle of blood and conflict, as inevitable as the rising sun, the phases of the moon, the passing of the stars, the falling rain.
I fought for honor, found peace in the sound of wind chimes and the rustle of snow...
