More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
These days, these my dying days that I spend writing in this monastery in Powys’s hills, I sometimes close my eyes and see Nimue. Not as she became, but as she was then: so full of fire, so quick, so confident. I know I have gained Christ and through His blessing I have gained the whole world too, but for what I have lost, for what we have all lost, there is no end to the reckoning. We lost everything.
I turned and saw a young woman who stood head and shoulders above the crowd and who carried a bold defiant look on her face. If you can master me, that look seemed to say, then you can master whatever else this wicked world might bring. I can see her now, standing amidst her deerhounds that had the same thin, lean bodies, and the same long nose and the same huntress eyes as their mistress. Green eyes, she had, with a kind of cruelty deep inside them. It was not a soft face, any more than her body was soft. She was a woman of strong lines and high bones, and that made for a good face and a
...more
‘Why?’ Aelle asked bluntly. Aelle used no circumlocutions like we British favoured. I came to notice that difference between ourselves and the Saxons. The British thought in curves, like the intricate whorls of their jewellery, while Saxons were blunt and straight, as crude as their heavy gold brooches and chunky neck chains. Britons rarely broached a subject headlong, but talked around it, wrapping it with hints and allusions, always looking for manoeuvre, but Saxons thrust subtlety aside. Arthur once claimed I had that same Saxon straightforwardness and I think he meant it as a compliment.
Merlin’s conscience, if he possessed one at all, was merely a guide to how lesser men thought, and thus served as a goad for Merlin to behave in the contrary manner. Merlin’s conscience was a jest to amuse the Gods. Arthur’s was a burden.
‘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.’
She said nothing for a while, but just looked at me with a slightly puzzled expression. ‘Has that ever happened to you, Lord Derfel?’ she asked at last. I hesitated. I knew the words my soul wanted to say and I knew the words my station should make me say, but then I told myself that a warrior did not thrive on timidity and I let my soul have government of my tongue. ‘It has never happened until this moment, Lady,’ I said. It took more bravery to make that declaration than I had ever needed to break a shield-wall.
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 ring for love.