They said he was born beneath a bleeding star and that the midwife ran screaming, hands slick with afterbirth and awe. He weighed as much as a yoke ox and the village priest, trembling in linen robes, named him in silence for fear of angering God. His mother suckled him with offerings of goat milk. By three he'd cracked the threshold beam with this skull. By seven he shattered the neighbor's neck with a playful shove. How he wept for that, held the man's head on his lap and kissed his grizzled hair, though the man could not hear it for the blood in his ears. 

When the king's men came they brought no chains. They came with cloaks and burnt meat and silver coins heavy as the horn of a slain ram. They told him he was chosen. When he asked for what they said you are to be a wall. A punishment. A future with a name. 

You are Goliath. And he believed them. 

So they dressed him in bronze armour he could not remove without help. They painted signs on him he could not read. They led him from one killing field to the next. He took what lives he had too and knelt for every one of them after dark when no one saw.

At night he drank cheap wine and slept with dogs curled at his feet. He would wake at dawn and walk barefoot through the grass and let the dew wet his soles and kneel among the flowers with hands the size of shovels and lift them delicately by the stem to smell the rain in their petals. They never taught him to read but he learned the names of birds and flowers. He spoke and sang to them in quiet. They did not answer but they did not flee. 

One morning he was told the war had changed shape. No longer the shape of armies of men but of a boy they said. No armor. No sword. A sling, five smooth stones, and a heart that burned for God. 

He stood above the valley while his own men chanted his name like it were a warding spell and the sun fell flat against his helm and the air tasted of iron and ash. The boy came forward. Barelegged. Brown skinned. The eyes of a child who has never doubted a thing in his life. And Goliath looked upon him and felt no anger and said: do not come. He said it again. A whisper. A breath. Do not come closer little shepherd. But the boy did not hear him. 

The screams of soldiers drowned the world. The sun bore down. A bird turned in the sky and vanished. The boy fit a stone into his sling and there was no tremble in his hands. And the giant did not raise his sword. 

He knelt. Just slightly. Enough to meet the boy's eyes. Enough that the wind might carry the flower from his gauntlet and the weight from his heart. He thought perhaps the boy would stop. He did not.

Did the boy hesitate even for a heartbeat? Was there a flicker of recognition or was Goliath already no longer man but target? 

The stone sang. There was no pain. Only light. A final image of the sky. Of the boy's face. Of something that might have been mercy or fate. He fell without a word. 

When they sang of Goliath they sang of conquest. Of a monster slain. But in the valley where he died the flowers bloomed a second time that year in colours no man could name.