More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Many men do not beat their wives, even though the law allows it and the church encourages it, but a man gains no reputation by beating a weaker person. Æthelred had beaten Æthelflaed, but he was a weak man, and it takes a weak man to prove his strength by striking a woman.
I was hated, and I knew it. Part of it was my fault, I am arrogant. Just as Eardwulf was about to relish his victory, so I had relished victories all my life. We live in a world where the strongest win, and the strongest must expect to be disliked. Then I am a pagan, and though Christians teach that they must love their enemies, few do.
The oars dipped, pulled slow, and rose. The long blades dripped water, swung forward, then dipped again. The boat surged with each long stroke, then slowed as the oars trailed their drips in the gray-green Sæfern.
weakness invited war.
And now we left Cymru, blown by a south-westerly wind, the sea seething at the Ðrines’s bow and the wake spreading white and fretful behind us.
I stared at the distant shore and saw unfriendly hills beneath heaping clouds. The wind was fretting the waves, shivering them with whitecaps,
Instinct is a strange thing. You cannot
touch it, feel it, smell it, or hear it, but you must trust it,
I turned to look astern, but the new burh was now nothing but a shadow within a shadow, a shadow flickering with firelight, while the masts of Sigtryggr’s ships were dark streaks against the western sky.
We reached the town just before dawn. There was a gray sword’s edge to the eastern sky, a hint of light, nothing more. The first birds sang. The pale walls of the burh were night-dark, the northern gate a shadowed blackness.
I have tried to explain to my grandchildren what war is. I am dutiful. I tell them it is bad, that it leads to sorrow and grief, yet they do not believe me. I tell them to walk into the village and see the crippled men, to stand by the graves and hear the widows weep, but they do not believe me. Instead they hear the poets, they hear the pounding rhythm of the songs that quickens like a heart in battle, they hear the stories of heroes, of men, and of women too, who carried blades against an enemy who would kill and enslave us, they hear of the glory of war, and in the courtyards they play at
...more
If we did as the priests want, if we beat our swords into plowshares, we would all be dead or enslaved,
We leave nothing in this world but bones and reputation,
Dawn. A small mist on the Mærse was broken by the dark shapes of twenty-six dragon-ships that rowed slowly to hold their place against the flooding tide.
Someone wise, I forget who, said we must leave our children to fate.
