Thorns of Glory by Chris Heimerdinger

Author:Chris Heimerdinger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Tennis Shoes;Adventure;Series;LDS;Mormon;Fiction;Thorns;Glory;Thorns of Glory;World Altering;Heroes;Villains;Cumorah;Judea;Promise Land;Triumph;Salvation;History;Church;Clean;Fun;Savior;Mount of Olives;Nephite
Publisher: Covenant Communications, Inc.
Published: 2020-09-15T16:29:15+00:00

Chapter 11

Apollus

She had called me “worthy.”

The word would not exit my mind as I used my gladius to cut a path through a pernicious hedge of thorns to reach the place where the Eagle Division of Moroni stood ready for battle in a long and serried line along a spine of Cumorah’s western ridge.

“You are worthy,” she had declared, her voice solid as marble, placid as an alpine lake. Yet it collided with my ears like the tuba blast of my old castrum.

I realized I would traverse the slope and its obstacles for three-quarters of an hour before I reached the first Nephite soldiers. With each step and every swipe of my sword, I could not shake my fiancée’s words.

Meagan Sorenson did not know me. It occurred to me how little I had revealed to her about who I was and the things I’d done. If I did so, I’d always felt certain the truth would repulse her to the core. She’d be forced to concede the impossibility that someone of her nature might love someone like me.

She knew I was a Centurion. She certainly knew, even before we’d met that day in Galilee, that I’d slain men in battle, but she could not know how many. Nor that I’d done so in earnest. With insatiable zeal. A kind of intoxicating joy. Nor had I disclosed that I’d slain not just soldiers but ordinary, unarmed . . .

There was nothing I hadn’t slain. I’d also ordered others—legionaries under my command—to raze entire villages, enter homes of the helpless, and leave no breathing thing. In Ascalon of Galilee, I’d personally entered dozens of dwellings, my mind consumed with this objective. And what I did in Ascalon as compared to what I did in Jotapata . . .

If I’d learned anything in Meagan’s century, it was that none of its inhabitants fully understood the reality of what it meant to be a warrior in the days before gunfire or atmosphere bombs or airborne carriages. I do not wish to overstate this, for pain is pain. Death is death, no matter the era. But how could someone like Meagan grasp that to a soldier of Rome death was not merely an honor—it was a desire? A yearning? A passion? The idea of rotting from some foul disease or withering from “old age” was banished from our thoughts. At the moment of our induction, a destiny of death in combat was branded onto our hearts. To die for Rome. Rome was not a place. Not an Empire. Rome . . . was our God. Yes, there were Jupiter and Juno. Exotic eastern deities who fell in and out of fashion. All these paled beside the supreme being called Rome, whose human form was embodied in its Emperor.

Of course, we know of colonia settlements in which veterans who’d exceeded their quarter century of service retired to tiny plots of land. Death by plow: what a horrific fate! We never spoke of this. We did not daydream of it.

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