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.
Priests come to my home beside the northern sea where they find an old man, and they tell me I am just a few paces from the fires of hell. I only need repent, they say, and I will go to heaven and liv...
Once you write something down it becomes fixed. It becomes dogma. People can argue about it, they become authoritative, they refer to the texts, they produce new manuscripts, they argue more and soon...
No, fate is difficult. 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 choice?
Mothers were sacred. Mothers were not expected to be pretty.
Mais tarde, muito mais tarde, aprendi que a alegria e o medo são exatamente a mesma coisa, uma apenas se transformava na outra pela ação, mas
Lawford shrugged. She jilted you.Easy come, easy go, Sharpe said, then belted the tunic.
Laughter in battle. That was what Ragnar had taught me, to take joy from the fight.
Kill them! I shouted and put my spurs back.Kill them. This is what the poets sing about. At night, in the hall, when the hearth smoke thickens about the beams and the ale-horns are filled and the harp...
Juan Fernandez islands. Cochrane drew on the cigar and watched its smoke drift out the window. The islands are three hundred fifty miles off the coast, in the middle of nothing! They’re where Robinson...
It might have been a moment or an hour. To this day I do not know. I listen to my poets sing of age-old fights and I think no, it was not like that, and certainly that fight aboard Haesten's ship was...
I was just twenty-one and my name was known wherever men sharpened swords. I was a warrior. A sword warrior, and I was proud of it.
I was Uhtred, Lord of Bebbanburg, in my war-glory. The arm rings of fallen enemies glinted on my forearms, my shield was newly painted with the snarling wolf’s head of my house, while another wolf, th...
I swear to be your man, I said, looking into his pale eyes, until your family is safe.He hesitated. I had given him the oath, but I had qualified it.I had let him know that I would not remain his man...
I recalled that a man named Judas had betrayed the nailed god. That never made any sense to me. The god had to be nailed to a cross if he was to become their savior, and then the Christians blame the...
I forgot to mention, Father Christopher said, smiling seraphically at Sir Martin, that I am also a priest. So let me offer you a blessing. He pulled out a golden crucifix that had been hidden beneath...
I am no Christian. These days it does no good to confess that, for the bishops and abbots have too much influence and it is easier to pretend to a faith than to fight angry ideas. I was raised a Chris...
How much of our earth has been wet by blood because of jealousy! And at the end of life, what does it all matter? We grow old and the young look at us and can never see that once we made a kingdom rin...
How does a lawyer lie? With passion, Mr. Starbuck, and with a self-inflicted belief, albeit temporary, that the facts he is reciting are the very stuff of God’s own truth.
He’s discovered the value, I said, of murderous bastards like me, so perhaps he’ll learn to distrust the advice of sniveling bastards like you who told him the Danes could be defeated by prayer.