But fate, as Merlin always taught us, is inexorable. Life is a jest of the Gods, Merlin liked to claim, and there is no justice. You must learn to laugh, he once told me, or else you’ll just weep yourself to death.
The bards sing of love, they celebrate slaughter, they extol kings and flatter queens, but were I a poet I would write in praise of friendship.
I decided to start a war, father”, I said, cheerfully, “it’s so much more interesting than peace.
This isn’t just a war over land, it’s a war about God. And Alfred…is Christ’s servant…
And I looked,’ Pyrlig said to me, ‘and I saw a pale horse, and the rider’s name was death.’ I just stared in amazement. ‘It’s in the gospel book,’ he explained sheepishly, ‘and it just cam to mind.
I have learned that it is one thing to kill in battle, to send a brave man’s soul to the corpse hall of the gods, but quite another to take a helpless man’s life…
So a good man can be a bad Christian?””I suppose so.””Then a bad man,” I said, “can be a good Christian?
A sad, plangent music. In the British camp, Sharpe thought, they would be singing, but no one was singing here.
I would hear him screaming, I would watch him bleed, I would tear his flesh piece by piece before I would worry about Æthelflaed. This was family. This was revenge.
Nor did he care about his childhood, for certainly I never heard him speak of it. I once questioned him about his early days and he would not answer. ‘What is the egg to the eagle?’ he asked me…
An enemy sees his attackers laughing? It is better than all the insults. A man who laughs as he goes into battle is a man who has confidence, and a man with confidence is terrifying to an enemy. “For the whore!” I shouted.
Lord Derfel, you do insult a man so very easily. What was it to be? My head in a pit dunged by slaves? What a paltry imagination you do have. Mine, I fear, sometimes seems excessive, even to me.
Is all ordained? Foreknowledge is not fate, and we may choose our paths, yet fate says we may not choose them. So if fate is real, do we have a choice?
When a man cannot fight he would curse. The gods like to feel needed.
It’s better to make the wrong choice,” my father had continued, “than to make no choice at all.
The preachers tell us that pride is a great sin, but the preachers are wrong. Pride makes a man, it drives him, it is the shield wall around his reputation… Men die, they said, but reputation does not die.
The wheel of fortune that had once raised her so high had taken her into the utter depths.
I forget your name,” I said.”Most people spew shit from their arse,” he retorted, “you manage it with your mouth.””Your mother gave birth through her arse,” I said, “and you still reek of her shit.
Prisoners!” Finan shouted, and I suspected he was shouting at me because I had so blatantly ignored my own insistence that we take men captive.
Do you ever read the scriptures?””Every day,” I said enthusiastically, “not a moment passes that I don’t have a quick read of Ieremias or dip into Ezekiel.”She smiled, amused. “What a barbarian you are!
All you need to know, boy,” Finan growled, “is that Lord Uhtred’s side is the one that wins.
…victory does not come to men who listen to their fears.
Serpent-Breath was famous…Wasp-Sting, short and lethal.
If they saw men swarming up the wall, if they saw the axes chopping at our shields on the wall’s top, then they would join the battle. Men want to be on the winning side.
He has a mouth, lord,” Gerbruht said.”I envy him,” I said.”Envy him, lord?””Most of us have to lower our trews to shit.
We should know who they are,” I said, “before we kill them. That’s just being polite.
Don’t tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.
What I mean by that is that the point of life, as I see it, is not to write books or scale mountains or sail oceans, but to achieve happiness, and preferably an unselfish happiness.