The Winter King (The Warlord Chronicles, #1)

by Bernard Cornwell

Life is a jest of the Gods, Merlin liked to claim, and there is no justice. You must learn to laugh, he once told me, or else you’ll just weep yourself to death.

He shook his head. ‘To fight battles, Derfel,’ he corrected me, ‘on behalf of people who can’t fight for themselves. I learned that in Brittany. This miserable world is full of weak people, powerless people, hungry people, sad people, sick people, poor people, and it’s the easiest thing in the world to despise the weak, especially if you’re a soldier. If you’re a warrior and you want a man’s daughter, you just take her; you want his land, you just kill him; after all, you’re a soldier and you have a spear and a sword, and he’s just a poor weak man with a broken plough and a sick ox and what’s to stop you?’ He did not expect an answer to the question, but just paced on in silence. We had come to the western gateway and the split-log steps that climbed to the platform over the gate were whitening with a new frost. We climbed them side by side. ‘But the truth is, Derfel,’ Arthur said when we reached the high platform,

‘that we are only soldiers because that weak man makes us soldiers. He grows the grain that feeds us, he tans the leather that protects us and he polls the ash trees that make our spear-shafts. We owe him our service.’

I had never seen a proper library before and King Ban, delighted to show the room off, watched my reaction. I gaped, and no wonder, for scroll after scroll was bound in ribbon and stored in custom-made open-ended boxes that stood one on top of the other like the cells of a honeycomb. There were hundreds of such cells, each with its own scroll and each cell labelled in a carefully inked hand. ‘What languages do you speak, Derfel?’ Ban asked me. ‘Saxon, Lord, and British.’

‘Is a camel disturbed by a grasshopper?’ Father

this small place, my dear fellow, is stored the wisdom of our world, gathered from its ruins and held in trust. I wonder what a camel is. Do you know what a camel is, Bleiddig?’

‘because He knew the earth was finished. We’re

Arthur was one, but of all my friends there was never another like Galahad. There were times when we understood each other without speaking

History is nothing but ifs.

He could charm the fish from the sea, my dear.’

‘Everyone knows!’ Sansum said derisively. ‘A camel is a fish, a great fish! Not unlike,’ he added slyly, ‘the salmon that your husband sometimes remembers to send to us poor monks?’

that a king is only as good as the poorest man under his rule. That was Ban’s lesson.’

‘Ambition,’ she said flatly, then thought for a second. ‘His soul,’ she went on, ‘is a chariot drawn by two horses; ambition and conscience, but I tell you, Derfel, the horse of ambition is in the right-hand harness and it will always outpull the other. And he’s able, so very able.’ She smiled sadly. ‘Just watch him, Derfel, when he seems doomed, when everything is at its darkest, and then he will astonish you. I’ve seen it before. He’ll win, but then the horse of conscience will tug at its reins and Arthur will make his usual mistake of forgiving his enemies.’

How much of our earth has been wet by blood because of jealousy!