The Last Kingdom (The Saxon Stories, #1)

by Bernard Cornwell

Destiny is all, Ravn liked to tell me, destiny is everything. He would even say it in English, “Wyrd bi ful aræd.”

We were a boy on the edge of being a grown man, a girl, and a dog, and we were going to nowhere.

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.

At the top is the king, and beneath him are his sons, and then come the ealdormen who are the chief nobles of the land and without land a man cannot be noble, though I was, because I have never abandoned my claim to Bebbanburg. The king and his ealdormen are the power of a kingdom, the men who hold great lands and raise the armies, and beneath them are the lesser nobles, usually called reeves, and they are responsible for law in a lord’s land, though a man can cease to be a reeve if he displeases his lord.

Urr, Verandi, and Skuld, the three women who spin our threads at the foot of Yggdrasil, had decided my fate. Destiny is all.

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.

Beware the man who loves battle.

Ravn had told me that only one man in three or perhaps one man in four is a real warrior and the rest are reluctant fighters, but I was to learn that only one man in twenty is a lover of battle. Such men were the most dangerous, the most skillful, the ones who reaped the souls, and the ones to fear. I was such a one, and that day, beside the river where the blood flowed into the rising tide, and beside the burning boats, I let Serpent-Breath sing her song of death.

We are all lonely and all seek a hand to hold in the darkness. It is not the harp, but the hand that plays it.