The Bright Sword

by Lev Grossman

God is terrible, and He is merciful, and the really hard thing is that you never know which you’re going to get.

“God’s love is all well and good, but Britain needs a king.”

“Of course you’ve fucking sinned! Good God, you think that makes you special?!

Scrolls are just impractical, the way you have to keep rolling and unrolling them. In a book you can jump from place to place. And it saves on parchment, too, because you can use both sides.”

“it was Julius Caesar who invented books. He was tired of unrolling papyrus all day to read his military reports.” “And then he burned the library of Alexandria.” “Complicated man, Caesar.”

“Make a scene. Act the fool. What’s the point of being a king if you can’t be a mad king once in your life?” “And? How was it?” “In truth it was less satisfying than one had hoped.”

Like many teenagers he thought he possessed guile, whereas in fact he had none.

I can’t be the first person to observe, she thought, how often those best placed to take care of a child have the least idea what it needs.

This is not God making peace. He is washing His hands of us. And where does that leave us?”

“Good God, woman, a king can’t hunt wolves!

“They must have a high opinion of your relationship with God if they think you’re running a scam together.”

The sun seemed to be beaming down cold, not heat.

She wanted to achieve goodness, not perfection. After all if God had nothing to forgive her for then how would he maintain his hard-earned reputation for mercy?

All boys need a father’s love, and they’ll do anything to get it, and Arthur had tried being good, and it hadn’t worked, so that left only greatness. Perfection. If only, if only Arthur had had a father there to say, it’s all right, this is good enough. You can stop now, I will love you whatever happens, whatever you do, whoever you are. But there was no one there to say it. God would never say stop. And so Arthur never would.

Imagine what we must look like to them: a bunch of wealthy Christian killers, walking around in a fortune’s worth of steel armor, trampling their gardens and yelling about our God in a language most of them don’t even understand. Look at us go, chasing divine marvels, while they break their bodies to plough our land! Of course they don’t care!

“I don’t know what it all means, and I suppose I never will, but I won’t beg anymore. I can’t. He was my father’s God, Uther’s God, but He is not mine. We’ll find our own way. Or maybe we’ll go to war with Him,

What a thing it was to be married to a king, to be the only other person who knew his secret, though it lay right out in the open, every day, for all to see, which was that he was just a man and nothing more.

She loved him more than he loved himself. And was that not the point of a marriage, to love a person more than they can love themselves?

“I suppose,” she said, “we’ll have to find some way to live in a waste land.”

They waded through a soft moonlit sea of knee-deep ferns in a half-dreaming state.

A large moon was sinking behind the trees, almost harsh in its brightness.

nothing grows from bitterness.

Dawn wasn’t far off, but stars still ruled the night sky.

“We’re not the heroes, we’re the odd ones out. The losers. But did you ever think that might be why we’ve lived so long? Losing makes you tough.”

Merlin wasn’t in the explaining business.

The Romans were rich in nothing if not human blood.

Power was Merlin’s real medium, even more than magic, and power, like heat, was never destroyed, only redistributed. Somebody somewhere always had it. You just had to figure out who it was and how to get close to them.

It was deeply confusing to her, even hurtful, that the only way she could survive in God’s world was by practicing pagan magic, but it couldn’t be worse than starvation or prostitution, could it? Or maybe this was a test, maybe she was supposed to starve herself to death and be a martyr.

The world tells him he’s a king, but he feels he is a fraud, and he’s terrified the world will find out.”

“Drink hot piss in hell!”

It would’ve been nice if God helped out, too, but something told her He was going to sit this one out.

The Romans cherished many misconceptions.

It was his soul that had been lost, and like so many who’d lost their souls, he had to insist the bargain was worth it and show contempt for those who still had theirs.

there, inside, like a swirl of cinnamon in a loaf of sweet bread, was the promised word.

“Did you think magic was free?”

I find that it’s the people who actually want to be king who are the problem.”

this is heroes’ work. Not really our department.”

overhead the stars made silver skeletons of men and beasts and gods, who gazed down on them indifferently.

The great door of autumn blew open with a bang and through it came cold wind and sudden squalls splashing them with cold rain. Red and yellow leaves went streaming through the air and across fields and down lanes like lost pages from a broken book, plastering themselves on rocks and grass.

the year was rushing past them, as if every night while they slept a week or two slipped away, like they were dreamers in a fairy cave.

I find that if there’s one thing you can count on in this world, it’s your God doing fuck-all, especially when you need Him most.

The world is finally broken enough that we can put it back together the way it should be.”

it is a principle of mine never to turn down an invitation to travel.”

No one is mightier than God. When He turns up.

“There are times when I think will never understand anything ever again,”

will tell you something about your gods: They are easy to love, because they are like us. They drink and fight and fornicate. My God may be harder to love, but that’s because He is not like man. He is greater.”

“I was educated in a nunnery. They taught me that the world is a dead place, that my body is sin, and the only life that matters is the next one. But they lied. The world is alive, and there is no other life.

no man knows how to fight like a witch.”

Angels weren’t so different from the fairies, at the end of the day they were all of them monsters.

We are all of us magic. We are all of us holy.