The Winter King (The Warlord Chronicles, #1)

by Bernard Cornwell

a kingdom without an heir is a cursed kingdom,

And the Christian God did fail.

Love it!!

The Irish were Britons, but they had never been ruled by the Romans and for that reason counted themselves better than the mainland Britons whom they raided,

Lol!

there hung a Christian cross with its twisted figure of their dead God nailed to its arms.

Love it!

Nimue was neither beautiful nor plain, but her face possessed a quickness and life that did not need formal beauty.

Magic, she said, happened at the moments when the lives of the Gods and men touched, but such moments were not commanded by men.

necessary but timewasting duty,

If it wastes time, how is it necessary?

So much blood from so small a child.

‘but girls live with warriors for one reason only, boy, to get rich. So make sure you keep her happy, or sure as eggs she’ll make you miserable.’

Taxes, as I was to learn, were the best source of wealth for men who did not want to work,

#USA

He was watching one of his men who had stripped a slave girl naked and was now smearing butter on her belly.

Ick!

Owain shrugged. His attention was back on the butter-smothered girl who was now being chased about the lower terrace by a half dozen drunken men. The grease on her body made her hard to catch and the grotesque hunt was making some of the watching men helpless with laughter. I was having a hard time stopping myself from giggling.

🤬🤮

You must learn to laugh, he once told me, or else you’ll just weep yourself to death.

May God forgive me, but I killed my second man that night, and perhaps a third too. The first I speared in the throat, the second in the groin. I did not use my sword, for I did not think Hywel’s blade a fit instrument for that night’s purpose.

Tragedy suited Nimue, she knew it and so she sought it.

‘That horrible man Bishop Sansum is trying to make us all Christians and I won’t put up with it!

You tell him!

They were young, mostly younger than myself, for war is truly a boys’ game,

He hated chairs.

Lol. What??

‘The last time I saw her,’ I said bitterly, ‘she’d been raped and had lost an eye.’ ‘These things happen,’ Merlin said carelessly.

Damn, boi!!

One of the things I can’t stand about Christians is their admiration of meekness. Imagine elevating meekness into a virtue! Meekness! Can you imagine a heaven filled only with the meek? What a dreadful idea. The food would get cold while everyone passed the dishes to everyone else. Meekness is no good, Derfel. Anger and selfishness, those are the qualities that make the world march.’

That’s why the Gods made it such a pleasure to engender children, because so many of the little brutes have to be replaced.

Lol

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 they’re putting each other to death. If you never write anything down then no one knows exactly what you said so you can always change it.

They are certainly immodest, but they are also filthy, their conversation is tedious, and the pleasure to be derived from them is as momentary as it is shameful.

Lol…

‘I thought madness would be like death,’ she said, ‘and that I wouldn’t know there was an alternative to being mad, but you do know. You really do. It’s as though you watch yourself and cannot help yourself. You forsake yourself,’

You have a mind like a stone falling off a cliff.’

The Gods play games with us, but if we open ourselves then we can become a part of the game instead of its victims.

Madness has a purpose! It’s a gift from the Gods, and like all their gifts it comes with a price, but I’ve paid it now.’

To ask another man’s blessing is simply to avoid taking the responsibility.

Hmm… I think I disagree.

‘May the Gods forgive me,’ Arthur said, ‘for the deaths I have just caused.’ Then we went to cause some more.

a small brooch of enamelled silver depicting an animal very like a hare though with shorter legs and ears.

Sounds like a bunny or Guinea pig, haha

We Irish know one thing above all others: an enemy forgiven is an enemy who will have to be fought over and over again.

Arthur confuses morality with power,

‘They will vanish like the mist!’

Interesting place, the Isle of the Dead, don’t you think? I go there when I need some stimulating company.

Lol

Gorfyddyd doesn’t want peace. The man’s a brute. He has the brains of an ox and a not very clever ox at that.

‘I envy your Christian God. He is three and He is one, He is dead and He is alive, He is everywhere and He is nowhere, and He demands that you worship Him, but claims nothing else is worthy of worship. There’s room in those contradictions for a man to believe in anything or nothing, but not with our Gods. They are like kings, fickle and powerful, and if they want to forget us, they do.

‘I do understand that you can look into someone’s eyes,’ I heard myself saying, ‘and suddenly know that life will be impossible without them. Know that their voice can make your heart miss a beat and that their company is all your happiness can ever desire and that their absence will leave your soul alone, bereft and lost.’

If this is romance, I’m definitely aromantic. I’ve never once felt this about anyone except my pets… that sounds wrong. 🙀

Fear gave us wings and made us scream our challenge.

abandoned the weapon and scraped Excalibur into the dawn.

The softness she had revealed at Lughnasa had been replaced by a chill bleakness that made me think I would never understand her.

I loved her, not as I believed I loved Ceinwyn, but as a man can love a fine wild creature, an eagle or a wildcat, for I knew I would never comprehend her life or dreams.

the curses flew across the river on wings of darkness.

Blood fountained up the blade,

The ring of sword blades and clatter of shield-bosses and clashing of spear-shafts was deafening, but remarkably few men died for it is hard to kill in the crush as two locked shield-walls grind against each other.

I guess this is how a lot of men survived so many medieval battles.

The enemy grasps your spearhead so you cannot pull it back, there is hardly room to draw a sword, and all the time the enemy’s second rank are raining sword, axe and spear blows on helmets and shield-edges. The worst injuries are caused by men thrusting blades beneath the shields and gradually a barrier of crippled men builds at the front to make the slaughter even more difficult. Only when one side pulls back can the other then kill the crippled enemies stranded at the battle’s tide line.

tendrils of blood

And for a moment, for a glorious moment, I thought the enemy would break, but then Gorfyddyd saw the same danger and he shouted at his men to form a new shield-wall facing north.

his horsemen rode like avenging Gods among the panicked mass while we pursued and cut the fugitives down in an orgy of blood.

That failure galled him, for he knew only too well how close we had come to utter defeat.

Indeed, he felt he had been defeated, for his vaunted horsemen had been held and all he had been able to do was watch as we were cut down, but he was wrong. The victory was his, all his, for Arthur, alone of all the men of Dumnonia and Gwent, had possessed the confidence to offer battle. That battle had not gone as Arthur had planned; Tewdric had not marched to help us and Arthur’s war horses had been checked by Gundleus’s shield-wall; but it was still a victory and it had been brought about by one thing only: Arthur’s courage in fighting at all.