The Last Kingdom (The Saxon Stories, #1)

by Bernard Cornwell

The law says I own that land, and the law, we are told, is what makes us men under God instead of beasts in the ditch.

I was ten years old and what did I know of Danes? I did know that they were savages, pagans and terrible. I knew that for two generations before I was born their ships had raided our coasts.

What he had thrown onto the path was my brother’s severed head. It was brought to my father who stared at it a long time, but betrayed no feelings. He did not cry, he did not grimace, he did not scowl, he just looked at his eldest son’s head and then he looked at me. “From this day on,” he said, “your name is Uhtred.” Which is how I was named.

Well shit...

That panic is worse than the terror of sheep penned in a cleft and being assaulted by wolves, more frantic than the writhing of salmon caught in a net and dragged to the air. The sound of it must tear the heavens apart, but to the Danes, that day, it was the sweet sound of victory and to us it was death.

because Osbert was a heavy man, his guts spilled out like eels slithering from a ruptured sack.

The Svear, the Norse, and the Danes were the Northmen, the men who went on Viking expeditions,

You! A child! You charged me with that little saxe! It was a gutting knife, not a sword, and you tried to kill me! I almost died laughing.

Men make a kingdom strong, not gold.”

Alfred spends half his time rutting and the other half praying to his god to forgive him for rutting. How can a god disapprove of a good hump?”

“In Denmark,” he went on, “our kings are the hard men, and if their sons are soft, then a man from another family becomes king, but in England they believe the throne passes through a woman’s legs.

What was the point of worshipping a god if he did not help you?

Truth.

A couple of dogs barked at me. Horses whinnied. Somewhere a flute sounded and a woman sang softly. Sparks flew up from the dying fires.

I lay on my belly like a snake and wriggled in the shadows to get closer to see what else he might do.

It seemed Alfred had humped a servant girl and, immediately afterward, had been overcome by physical pain and what he called spiritual torment.

Lol. Poor Alfred.

“Christianity is a soft religion,” Ravn said savagely, “a woman’s creed. It doesn’t ennoble men, it makes them into worms.

Huginn and Muminn were the twin ravens that perched on the god’s shoulders where they whispered into his ear.

“When an enemy wants to talk,” he said, “it means he does not want to fight. So we have won.”

It is only by obedience to God that we can hope to defeat the Danes.” “Only by obedience?” I asked. I thought swords might help.

Lol. For real!

The Wind-Viper rode those waves like a bird instead of thrashing through like a swimmer.

To be a Viking was to be a raider,

the priest was still cursing when Ragnar disemboweled him.

It was then that I first saw Brida. She was my age, black haired, thin as a twig, with big dark eyes and a spirit as wild as a hawk in spring,

Start your killers young, before their consciences are grown. Start them young and they will be lethal.

“He came to the monastery to pray,” she said, “and he farted when he knelt down.”

A ship, they say, is like a woman or a sword, sharp and beautiful, worth dying for, and certainly worth fighting for,

unlike the Christian hell Niflheim was icy cold.

“Corpse-Ripper feeds on the dead,” Ragnar went on, “but he also gnaws at the tree of life. He wants to kill the whole world and bring time to an end.”

we never killed everybody because Ravn drove it home to me that you always left one person alive to tell the tale so that news of the horror would spread.

Wergild was the blood price of a man’s life, and every person had a wergild.

I heard the hammering crash, the wooden thunder, of shields meeting shields. That was followed by the sound of spears striking limewood, the ringing of blade on blade,

Blood on the grass now, so much blood that the ground was slick, and there were bodies that had to be stepped over as our shield wall thrust forward,

“Your bone, lord,” I said nodding at the gold-tipped bone hanging in his hair. He touched the bone. “It’s one of my mother’s ribs,” he said. “She was a good woman, a wonderful woman, and she goes with me wherever I go.

“but what use is a soldier who cannot read God’s word?”

Alfred still ruled and had his peace, and so that kingdom remained, the last one of England.

Thus... The Last Kingdom. Lol

“Sixteen,” I said scathingly, “and unmarried, which suggests she has a face like a bag of maggots.”

“I was telling him, lord,” I said, “that his mother was a whore, his father a turd of hell, and that his children are pieces of weasel shit.”

“There is one thing I know about blood feuds,” Leofric said, “which is that they last a lifetime. You will have years to make your killing, but only if you live.

aged about sixteen or seventeen.” “Christ! That old? She must be an ugly sow!

What was I expecting? A woman who looked like a sow, I suppose, a woman with a pox-scarred face and a sour expression and haunches like an ox.

without land a man cannot be noble,

He was a spider, I thought sourly, a priestly black spider spinning sticky webs,

It quickens like a stream coming to a fall in the hills and, like a cascade foaming down jumbled rocks, it gets angry and violent, confused even.

War is fought in mystery. The truth can take days to travel, and ahead of truth flies rumor, and it is ever hard to know what is really happening, and the art of it is to pluck the clean bone of fact from the rotting flesh of fear and lies.

It was old, that fort; Father Willibald said it was older than the Romans, that it had been old when the world was young, and the fort had been made by throwing up earth walls on a hilltop and digging a ditch outside the walls.

And you’re a piece of weasel shit,

I felt the impact run up my arm as her tip punctured his belly muscles, and I was already twisting her, ripping her up and free, sawing through leather, skin, muscle, and guts, and his blood was warm on my cold hand, and he screamed, ale breath in my face,

He had stepped on the spilled guts of a corpse, and his left food slid sideways.