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...
If he was still alive, I thought. I knelt to him, then to Osferth, and I left. We walked in silence to a cloistered courtyard where the last roses of summer had dropped their petals on the damp grass....
I've known women! Æthelwold shouted at the rain, and they were bad women! Forgive me!Alfred was furious, but he could not stop a man making a fool of himself before God. Perhaps he thought Æthelwold's...
I sovrani deboli sono una maledizione in terra, tuttavia i nostri giuramenti sono fatti ai sovrani, ragionai; se non facessimo giuramenti, non avremmo leggi, e se non avessimo leggi, ci sarebbe solo a...
I put my hands over Saint Cuthbert's fingers and I could feel the big ruby ring under my own fingers, and I gave the jewel a twitch just to see whether the stone was loose and would come free, but it...
I heard only last week that they want to make Erkenwald into a saint. 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...
I hated Alfred. He was a miserable, pious, tight-fisted king who distrusted me because I was no Christian, because I was a northerner, and because I had given him his kingdom back at Ethandun. And as...
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...
Hurry up and do nothing, that was the army’s way of doing things.
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...
His charms worked, for though the bullets flicked close none hit him. He was the tiger of Mysore, he could not die, only kill.
He thinks with his heart, Uhtred,’ Alfred said, ‘not his head. You can change a man’s heart, but not his head.
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...
He came from the gutters of England and anyone born and raised in those gutters knew that most persecution and oppression was inflicted by lawyers. Lawyers were the devil's servants who ushered men an...
Have you ever fought in a battle? I know you burned down my barns, but that isn’t a battle, you stinking piece of rat-gristle. A battle is the shield wall. It’s smelling your enemy’s breath while he t...
Did I know all that at eleven? Some, I think. It lay in my heart, unformed, unspoken, but hard as a stone. It would be covered over in time, half forgotten and often contradicted, but it was always th...
Destiny is all, Ravn liked to tell me, destiny is everything. He would even say it in English, Wyrd biõ ful ãræd.
Derfel, Derfel – sospirò Merlino.
Dealing with the Scots, my father had always said, was like trying to geld wildcats with your teeth, but luckily the wildcats spent much of their time fighting each other. Once
But Alfred could not live long. He was already an old man, well past forty years, and now he was looking to the future. He