More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
A smoking brazier stood in a heap of grey fire-ash close to the big copper mirror on which, extraordinarily, there hung a Christian cross with its twisted figure of their dead God nailed to its arms. The cross was draped with mistletoe as a precaution against its inherent evil.
The Isle of Britain, Sansum said, was beloved of God. It was a special land, set apart from other lands and girdled by a bright sea to defend it from pestilences, heresies and enemies.
Sansum would endorse Brexit. :p
The sword was called Caledfwlch, which means ‘hard lightning’ though Igraine prefers to call it Excalibur and I shall call it so as well because Arthur never cared what name his longsword carried.
of late the blessed Saint Sansum has been less meddlesome. Two novices have joined our small flock, mere boys with unbroken voices, and Sansum has taken it upon himself to train them in the ways of Our Most Precious Saviour. Such is the saint’s care for their immortal souls that he even insists the boys must share his sleeping cell and he seems a happier man for their company.
Creepy, dirty bastard.
When you get to the Otherworld, boy’ – he had turned back to me – ‘you won’t regret the men you never killed, but you will regret the women you passed up.’
Fate, Merlin always said, is inexorable. So much followed from that hurried ceremony in the flower-speckled clearing beside the stream. So many died. There was so much heartache, so much blood and so many tears that they would have made a great river; yet, in time, the eddies smoothed, new rivers joined, and the tears went down to the great wide sea and some people forgot how it ever began. The time of glory did come, yet what might have been never did, and of all those who were hurt by that moment in the sun, Arthur was hurt the most.
‘I failed Arthur,’ I said bitterly. ‘Everyone fails Arthur. He expects too much. Now go.’
He was not a good Christian, Bishop Bedwin, though he was a very good man.
‘There’s a Mordred party in the kingdom,’ she told me, repeating what Bishop Bedwin had spoken of on the night of my return. ‘They’re Christians, mostly, and they’re all praying for Arthur’s defeat. If he was defeated, of course, they’d have to grovel to Gorfyddyd, but grovelling, I’ve noticed, comes naturally to Christians.
Your God,’ Merlin said sourly, ‘despises amusement, demanding grovelling worship instead. He must be a very sorry creature. He’s probably rather like Gorfyddyd, endlessly suspicious and foully jealous of his reputation.
