They’re frightened that we’ll make a sally and kill them all, Ragnar said, so they’re going to sit there and try to starve us out.
They laughed, but I was melancholy. The remnants of Rome always make me sad, simply because they are proof that we slide inexorably towards the darkness. Once there was light falling on marbled magnif...
They gave death with impunity as they followed a war-maddened Scotsman down an enemy wall that was sticky with blood.
These word-stringers make nothing, grow nothing, kill no enemies, catch no fish and raise no cattle. They just take silver in exchange for words, which are free anyway. It is a clever trick, but in tr...
There is such joy in chaos. Stow all the world's evils behind a door and tell men that they must never, ever, open the door, and it will be opened because there is pure joy in destruction.
The sun flashed off the wet blades, splinters of light, then the oars dipped, were tugged, and the beast-headed boats surged, and I stared entranced.
The spelling of place names in Anglo Saxon England was an uncertain business, with no consistency and no agreement even about the name itself. Thus London was variously rendered as Lundonia, Lundenber...
The first stone, thrown by Hellgiver, crashed through the roof of a dyer's house close to St Brieuc's church and took off the heads of an English man-at-arms and the dyer's wife. A joke went through t...
So she needs a man! Hakeswill said. And a sergeant’s widow doesn’t get rogered by a stinking bit of dirt like you. It ain’t right. Ain’t natural. It’s beneath her station, Sharpie, and it can’t be all...
So now I shall write the tale’s ending with my sword beside me and I shall hope that I am given time to finish this tale of Arthur, my Lord, who was betrayed, reviled and, after his departure, missed...
So Urðr, Verðandi and Skuld would decide our fate. They are not kindly women, indeed they are monstrous and malevolent hags, and Skuld’s shears are sharp. When those blades cut, they cause tears that...
Silence. We like it when an audience is silent, when no one coughs, no one shuffles, no one cracks a nut, or uncorks an ale bottle with a sudden hiss. Silence means the play is working, and we have th...
She looked at Stiorra and grinned, and I wondered whether that was what the two girls had in common: bad fathers.
Se gli uomini possono comprare la legge, diceva sempre Artù, allora la legge diventa inutile.
Put a cat to guard the sheep and the wolves would eat well.
Pride, I suppose, is the most treacherous of virtues. The Christians call it a sin, but no poet sings of men who have no pride. Christians say the meek will inherit the earth, but the meek inspire no...
My dear Lord,’ I said, but not to him. I spoke to Arthur. And I watched and wept, my arm around Ceinwyn, as the pale boat was swallowed by the shimmering silver mist. And so my Lord was gone. And no o...
Masques are mere pious recitals, he said scathingly, devised to make the audience feel inspired with unending speeches about chastity, nobility, bravery, and other such nonsense. They're enchanting to...
It was madness. And, as Finan had said, sometimes madness works.
If we do nothing then Wessex will spread like a plague. There’ll be priests everywhere. We seek the future. We stare into its fog and hope to see a landmark that will make sense of fate.