More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
‘Is this going to be one of those times when you pretend not to have a plan until the last moment?’ Makin asked. ‘And then turn out to really not have one?’
The bladder-pipe, a local Highlands speciality, is to music what warthogs are to mathematics. Largely unconnected.
‘The centre of a man isn’t found by your geometry, Highness.’
‘All times are desperate,’ I said. ‘You think we’re safe here, on our mountainside? This castle might look big from the inside. From a mile off you can cover it with your thumb.’
‘This is a bad idea, Jorg.’ ‘It’s a dangerous idea, Coddin, but that doesn’t have to mean it’s bad.’
I bowed my head and listened to the prayer. It never hurts to cover your bases.
Sometimes I wonder if we all don’t have a blue-steel spring inside us, like that dena of Gorgoth’s coiled tight at the core. I wonder if we don’t all go stamping and crashing, crashing and stamping in our own little circles going nowhere. And I wonder who it is that laughs at us.
‘You won’t pass as a road brother,’ I said. ‘You look like an actor who’s raided the props chest for all the best knight-gear.’
‘We’re going to need a bigger army,’ I said.
I remember everything. I recall the pattern of her breath. In the heat of Drane’s kitchen I remember a single bead of sweat and the slow roll of it, down her neck, along the tendon, across her throat. I’ve killed men and forgotten them. Mislaid the act of taking a life. But that drop of sweat is a diamond in my mind’s eye.
When a game cannot be won, change the game. I read that in the book of Kirk.
Give an inch, give any single man any single inch and the next thing you hear will be, ‘One more, Jorg, one more.’
No crimson tabards here, or gold braiding, no rampant lions or displayed dragons or crowned feckin’ frogs, just tatter-robes in rock shades. I hadn’t come out for a uniform competition. I came out to win.
In the end though, everybody dies, but not everybody lives – the climber, though he may die young, will have lived.
The art of survival in the mountains is knowing when to give up. The art of reaching the top is knowing when not to.
The Silent Sister is of course—’ ‘Silent?’ I asked. ‘Even so. But others are interested. Sageous, the Blue Lady, Luntar of Thar, even Skilfar.’
All of us fractured, awkward collages of experience wrapped tight to present a defensible face to the world.
He has a small army of trolls at his beck and call, and he can set men on fire by thinking about it. I don’t believe a sword will help.’
‘Topology,’ I said. ‘It’s a kind of magic.’
‘I love you, Jorg, as my king, but also as a father loves his son, or should.’ There are some things two men can only say to each other when arrows are raining down and one of them lies mortally wounded, walled away in a rough void amid a mass of fallen rock, and thousands of enemy troops are closing in. Even then it’s uncomfortable.
And that exhausts my insights into the kicking of severed heads. Admittedly it’s more than most people have to offer on the subject but there were Mayans who knew a lot more than I do. That of course is a whole different ball-game.
The thing about the path less travelled is that it is often less travelled for a good reason.
‘Men are afraid of dying. Not of death. Men want it to be quick, clean. That’s the worst thing, the wound that lets you linger.
my uncle’s death had taught me that revenge is far less sweet than it promises to be. An empty meal, however long you take over
‘We’re not memories, Katherine, we’re dreams. All of us. Each part of us a dream, a nightmare of blood and vomit and boredom and fear. And when we wake up – we die.’
She pulled out a black velvet bag, dangling from its drawstring. Big enough to hold an eyeball. ‘My dowry,’ she said. ‘I hoped for something bigger.’ I smiled and took it. ‘Isn’t that my line?’ I laughed out loud at that. ‘Somebody poured an evil old woman into a little girl’s body and sent it to me with the world’s smallest dowry.’
There is no sound more annoying than the chatter of a child, and none more sad than the silence they leave when they are gone.
Still the music, the deep slow melody, the high and broken counterpoint, as if the mountains themselves had become the score, as if the glories of hidden caves and secret peaks had been wrapped around the ageless majesty of the ocean and turned into the music of all men’s lives, played out by a woman’s fingers, without pause or mercy, reaching in, twisting, laying us bare.
Pride has ever been my weakness and my strength, but there are three things only of which I’m proud. The first – I climbed God’s finger to stand alone in that high place and find a new perspective. Second – I went to the mountain for Gog, even though I couldn’t save him from his fire, just as no one can save me from mine. Third – I fought the all-sword, Master Shimon with the sword-song all around, and we made a thing of beauty.
