If the Danes are outnumbered, my father told me that night, they won’t fight. They’re like dogs, the Danes. Cowards at heart, but they’re given courage by being in a pack.
I'm getting old, I said again, and that was true. I had lived more than fifty years and most men were lucky to see forty. Yet all old age was bringing was the death of dreams.
I want to believe him, my lady! Leofstan said earnestly. I want to believe that this is a miracle to accompany my enthronement! That on Easter day we will have the joy of bringing a pagan horde into t...
I want it to be the poet's Camelot: green grass and high towers and ladies in gowns and warriors strewing their paths with flowers. I want minstrels and laughter! Wasn't it ever like that?A little, I...
I suspect most copies were used to wipe arses or light fires.
I remember Ragnar laughing one day. It is so kind of the Christians! They put their wealth in one building and mark it with a great cross! It makes life so easy.
I like to see a man obeying a woman, Father Pyrlig said as I fetched the loaf.Why's that? I asked.Because it means I'm not alone in this sorry world.
I learned that the joy and the fear are the exact same things, the one merely transformed into the other by action,
I have learned not to trust those times, because if the world is at peace then it means someone is planning war.
I had thought about Alban for a while. Why, I had then asked, if your god can pull out a man’s eyes, didn’t he just save Alban’s life? Because God chose not to, of course! Beocca had answered sniffily...
I had not liked him. I had struggled against him and for him, I had cursed him and thanked him, despised him and admired him. I hated his religion and its cold disapproving gaze, its malevolence that...
I had no idea what I was speaking of, but only knew I must sound confident. Fear might work on a man, but confidence fights against fear. Odda
I had broken three Saxon shield-walls and buried Hywelbane to her hilt in my country’s enemies before I had been elected to Mithras’s service, but all Lancelot had ever done was boast and posture.
I don’t fight old men, he said. That was strange. No one had ever called me old before. I remember laughing, but there was shock behind my laughter. Weeks before, talking with Æthelflaed, I had mocked...
I am never certain that deserters are to be trusted, Gudin said mildly. He was accompanied by a burly French sergeant who kept giving the tigers nervous glances. If a man can betray one flag, Gudin ob...
How anyone could endure three or four hours of chanting monks and ranting priests was beyond my understanding, just as it was beyond my understanding to know why bishops needed thrones. They would be...
Hengall the Warrior hated war. The business of life, he liked to say, is to plant grain, not blades.
He wanted to improve the world, while I did not believe and never have believed that we can improve the world, just merely survive as it slides into chaos.
He had pretended to be full of remorse, and shouted that remorse to the sky, No more tits, God! No more tits! Keep me from tits! and I remembered how Alfred had turned away in frustrated disgust. Exan...
Have you heard a cuckoo yet? I asked Steapa. Not yet. It’s time to go, I said, unless you want to kill me? Maybe later, Steapa said, but for the moment I’ll fight beside you. And