The Last Kingdom (The Saxon Stories, #1)

by Bernard Cornwell

“You can’t live somewhere,” he told me, “if the people don’t want you to be there. They can kill our cattle or poison our streams, and we would never know who did it. You either slaughter them all or learn to live with them.”

Still, priests have never been great men for the truth and I kept quiet, which was just as well.

An army, I learned in time, needs a head. It needs one man to lead it, but give an army two leaders and you halve its strength.

“Ragnar wants to kill people,” Ravn said. “My son’s ambitions are very few, merely to hear jokes, solve riddles, get drunk, give rings, lie belly to belly with women, eat well, and go to Odin.”

And Alfred had been generous, though a lord should be generous. That is what a lord is, a giver of rings, and a lord who does not distribute wealth is a lord who will lose the allegiance of his men,

No one expects to love a wife, not if they marry for land or position, and I was marrying for land and she was marrying because she had no choice, and there really is no point in making too much of a fuss about it, because that is the way the world works. My job was to take her land, work it, make money, and Mildrith’s duty was to give me sons and make sure there was food and ale on my table. Such is the holy sacrament of marriage.

I am certain he was happy that winter, criticizing his ancestors’ rules and dreaming of the perfect society where the church told us what not to do and the king punished us for doing it.

The preachers tell us that pride is a great sin, but the preachers are wrong. Pride makes a man, it drives him, it is the shield wall around his reputation and the Danes understood that. Men die, they said, but reputation does not die.

Fear might work on a man, but confidence fights against fear.

Never, he had said, never fight Ubba.

That was what Ragnar had taught me, to take joy from the fight.

Forward now. Forward to battle slaughter. Beware the man who loves battle.

“Arrows of insight have to be winged by the feathers of speculation.”