[told by Cheiron]

'You know, one advantage to having Erik here is that he's weird enough to make the rest of us look normal by comparison,' said Jack. 'Yesterday he asked me if the reason I'd had sex with lots of women but wasn't exactly in love with any of them was that I was secretly in love with a man! I said no, it was because I liked having sex with women, and he said that proved I was trying to deny it to myself, and he thought King David was probably the same. So I tried to explain to him about friendship-love being different from romantic love, and he said, in that case, he thought he was falling in friendship, and was that all right? I said yes, as long as he stopped asking stupid questions. I don't know why I put up with nonsense like this from Erik, when I wouldn't from anyone else.'

'Probably because you understand that Erik truly doesn't know any better,' I suggested. 'We know that it's natural for a man to love his family and his friends as well as his mistress, but Erik's not used to feeling anything about other people, because he's spent most of his life just surviving, and so having emotions or relationships would get in the way. And then the first person he did have any feelings for was Christine, so, as far as Erik is concerned, "love" means the passion that makes a man stalk a woman obsessively and then kidnap her to try to force her to marry him. So it's no wonder he's confused when the Bible says, "Love your neighbour as yourself." It's as though he'd lived nearly all his life seeing only in black and white, until one day someone showed him a piece of purple cloth, and now we're expecting him to understand what a rainbow is.'

Erik had decided to read the entire Bible to prepare for being baptised. With his phenomenal powers of concentration, this wouldn't have taken long, except that he was baffled by concepts like morality, love, and mercy. Where most people were shocked by passages where God's wrath against a person, or a city or an entire country, seemed disproportionate, Erik couldn't see why the victims needed to have done anything wrong to deserve punishment, or even what 'wrong' or 'deserve' meant. He assumed as a matter of course that an all-powerful God would destroy cities for the fun of it, simply because he could. And when a story had a happy ending – for example, where Joseph, after playing tricks on his brothers to pay them back for selling him into slavery, forgives them and invites them to come and live with him in Egypt – Erik would just ask, 'But why didn't he kill them?'

This was why the whole group of us had to spend most of each rest period studying the Bible with Erik and trying to explain to him what it meant. Oddly enough, Jack turned out to be the best at this. He might be a very lapsed Christian who had broken most of the Ten Commandments at every opportunity (possibly not murder, or at least not in person, but he seemed cheerfully casual about having got soldiers under his command killed), but his imagination was furnished in Biblical stories and imagery: Lazarus the beggar at the rich man's gate, Job covered in sores and sitting among the ashes, and the Prodigal Son returning to his father.

Satyrs are more spiritual creatures than most humans realise, even though they are too uninhibited to seem reverent by human standards. In classical times, the original satyrs had been the companions of Dionysus because he had been willing to live with them when more established gods like Zeus had not. But later on, satyrs had interbred with humans, and produced descendants who looked more or less human, but who combined a satyr's instinct for playfulness, irreverence, and imagination and inspired insight, with a human's ability to think and question. A surprising number of storytellers, poets, and philosophers have had some satyr ancestry.

Some of them, because they could see the inconsistencies in the social and moral codes they were supposed to accept, decided to do whatever they felt like, and spent most of their lives getting into trouble without ever really understanding why other people had a problem with their behaviour. But others, like Socrates, who did try to live virtuously, tended to look much more deeply than anyone else into what virtue really meant, and insisted on asking awkward questions like, 'Is the political system we've got really the best way to run a state?' and, 'Is the true God really like the gods we claim to believe in?' These people were called philosophers, and heretics, and seditious teachers, and corrupters of the young, and, sooner or later, martyrs.

I was going to have to warn Jack about all this before too long. But for now, it was time to gather the whole group round for the latest instalment of Erik's journey through the Old Testament.

'Can everyone remember what we were looking at yesterday?' I asked. 'Andrew?' (I knew he hadn't been paying attention.)

'Was it to do with kings?' asked Andrew. 'David was a Good King and Solomon was a Wise King, but I can't remember what happened after that.'

'Solomon's son Rehoboam was a Tactless King who infuriated the Israelites by making insulting Yokes, claiming that his little finger was thicker than his father's waist, and threatening to scourge them with scorpions,' explained Jack. 'The Israelites considered this to be a Bad Thing and nearly all seceded, splitting the kingdom into Israel (not to be confused with Judah) and Judah (also called Israel), and built a fresh wave of golden calves so that people knew where they were. As a result, the kings of Israel (and, of course, Judah) became less and less memorable, especially when the king of Israel had the same name as the king of Judah or vice versa. Whenever there was a battle, the Israelites charged around the battlefield shouting, "Cry God for Whatsisname..." "No, he was king last month, it's his uncle Thingummy now..." "Well, anyway, the king of Israel..." "No, Israel's the bit that got conquered by Assyria, so they worship Assyrian gods now, and this is Judah, where we worship the God of Israel..."

'So, of course, this made it easy for the Babylonians (or Chaldeans) to invade, as they knew that they were fighting under King Nebuchadnezzar, and were only uncertain about whether they were Chaldeans or Babylonians. Whenever they invaded, they deposed the king and made somebody else king and then changed his name, to make sure that everyone stayed confused.'

'How do you remember all this?' asked Andrew.

'He doesn't,' snapped Malvolio. 'He's just making a mockery out of the few scraps of teaching that everyone remembers from Sunday School.'

'I don't,' said Andrew. 'I don't remember anything.'

'And I never went to Sunday School, which is why I'm trying to learn now,' Erik reminded us.

'It'd be easier to remember if we did it as a play,' suggested Jack.

'Yes, you could make a wonderful trilogy about Saul, David, and Solomon,' I agreed.

'A tetralogy,' Jack said. 'There are so many stories about David that he's just got to be a Split King.'

'Well, I don't think it's very appropriate to use the Word of God as material for a cheap charade,' said Malvolio.

'Fine; I wasn't planning to have you in it anyway,' said Jack. 'Shall we do the bit we were reading yesterday, where David is at war with his son Absalom? I'll be King David; Erik, you can be Prince Absalom, so try to imagine that you're very handsome and incredibly popular and charming, and have masses of long thick hair that you never cut until it weighs at least five pounds.'

'Who can I be?' asked Andrew. 'Can you write my lines down for me now, because I'm not much good at improvising?'

'Do you want to be Mephibosheth, son of Jonathan?'

'Who's he?'

'Well, I'm King David, the boy who started off as a shepherd and ended as the second and greatest ever king of Israel. Now, I had been working for Saul, who was king before me, as an officer in his army, and playing the harp to calm him when he was troubled, but when he started getting paranoid and chucking spears at me, I left. But I had been engaged to Saul's daughter Michal...'

'And having an affair with his son Jonathan,' added Erik.

'No I wasn't!' shouted Jack. 'Get it into your head: having friends doesn't mean I'm gay! I've got at least eight wives, mostly someone else's!'

'So what? Oscar Wilde had a wife and two children,' retorted Erik. 'That's probably the real reason Saul kept throwing spears at you, because he didn't want you seducing his son, any more than the Marquis of Queensberry did.'

'Anyway,' continued Jack, 'after the Philistines killed Saul's sons, and Saul committed suicide, I became king, and married a few more wives, including Michal, but she's a bit of a killjoy really – rather like Malvolio. And I invited Mephibosheth – that's you, Andrew – to come and live with my family, so that I could be kind to you because your father Jonathan was my friend. Also, you're lame in both legs, because when you were a little boy and had to escape when your father and grandfather were killed, your nurse was carrying you and dropped you and broke your legs and the bones never set properly. So that's good, because if you're disabled, you've automatically got the audience's attention. You can lean on a couple of tent-poles for crutches. So, in this play, I think you've turned against me, because your wicked servant Ziba has told me that you're plotting to take back your grandfather's kingdom, but when I come back from the war, I confront you about it, and you explain:

'I did desire t'attend your majesty,

But, being lame, I did command my servant

Bring me my ass that I might ride with you,

At which he stole away to slander me.

Nay, freely, you may slay me if you will;

You are God's angel, I a mangy cur,

The kin of Saul, deserving naught but death.

But that I love you, mark these witnesses:

My beard uncomb'd since you went forth from me,

My twisted feet more marr'd with nails untrimm'd,

My face and clothes unwash'd, save with my tears

As night and day I prayed for your return.'

'I can't remember all that,' said Andrew. 'Is it all right if I just read it out?'

'Of course,' said Jack, writing the lines out on a spare page of Andrew's notebook. 'You can wrap a bit of cloth round the book and make it look as though you're sobbing into your handkerchief as you speak, and ashamed to look me in the eye. If you were playing a soldier, you'd write your lines on the inside of your shield – it doesn't matter where they are, as long as the audience can't see them. Anyway, earlier I'd told Ziba that all your property was forfeit to him because you were a traitor, and now that I realise I was wrong, I order it to be divided between the two of you, but you say, "Let Ziba keep my wealth; why should I care?/ To see my king is wealth beyond compare." And that's the end of the play.'

We shared out the rest of the parts, with Arthur playing Joab and his brother Abishai, both generals in David's army (since the two brothers don't often appear in the same scene, it was simplest to treat them as one character) and David's friend Hushai the Arkite, who pretends to go over to Absalom's side in order to give him misleading advice. I was Mephibosheth's servant Ziba (since I could also be the donkey laden with food and drink that Ziba brings to David and his army), the counsellor Ahithophel who advises Absalom but commits suicide when his advice is rejected, and various soldiers and messengers.