Dunstan

by Conn Iggulden

What is a first line, but a door flung open by an unseen hand?

I have loved a woman and she ruined me. I have loved a king and yet I ruined him. And all I have gained in return for my lifetime of labour is fame and power and servants and an abbey.

Those three men took our small kingdom of Wessex on the south coast – and by war and wit and cunning, they made it into England.

When violent men secure your crown, they keep a knife at your throat ever after.

There never was a sin I could not learn to love.

Vengeance is a fine thing, but forgiveness can be just as cruel.

Thousands of years of witchcraft and worship have seeped into that damp ground.

do not neglect your souls, though your flesh withers.

I think boys are never truly away from home when they can walk back.

I knew, in something like joy, that I had found my enemy and he had found me.

it rained as if our little abbey had been chosen to serve as an ark.

I do not like to lead, but I will not be led. That is the heart of me.

This is a brief and bitter life,

After an age in which empires might have risen, known glories and finally fallen into dust,

I have always loved the land, far more than any people on it.

Love can be pure, especially if the face does not excite desire.

Jesus himself said that God rejoices more in a lost sheep returned than all the happy, bleating flock who never saw the open gate at all.

The world is harsh enough when we are well. It does not have to be cruel as we pass from it.

when you are surrounded by enemies, the least cruel of them is not your friend.

You cannot have an empire when your house is on fire.

We knew giants then, before the wine soured.

The king lived at the centre of a feast in those days.

men are either kings or slaves. Some slaves are kings and some kings, slaves, but that is because the world is corrupt and in ruins, no matter how high we build. Women, of course, are all slaves.

When I met him, he was sixteen, with the look of eagles.

He is the great failure of my life,

It is all an eye-blink.

Wide is the gate, Dunstan! Broad is the way that leads to destruction.’

I welcomed the freedom it brought me and those years were among the happiest of my life. Yet all things perish. Rose petals fall and summers end. Lent becomes Advent, as we used to say. That is just the way of it. We are not here to enjoy ourselves, after all.

It all turned to ash after him, as youth and courage vanish – as virginity is sold cheap, as good wine sours, as towers fall.

‘There is satisfaction in duty, without glory,’ I said. ‘In work done quietly, a life’s task.’

We have such a short time alive. Should we spend it drowsing in the sun? No! The sun goes down and each hour is more precious than a gold coin.

It is strange how we keep thinking we can change the world, only to be revealed as smaller than the turning of the sun on a single day.

It seems to me, at times, that I remember only great triumphs and disasters. The mere ordinary years of my youth, where the crops came in and the abbey rose higher, pass almost unnoticed. Yet a good life is made of such things.

each of those we lose becomes a shadow for the next, an echo, a bell struck, that sounds in our lives until our own last breath.

Lust goes to ashes in the end, like ambition, or honour, or hope.

Kings die in a crowd. Never alone, even if they wish to be.

There is honesty in ugliness,

I have, on occasion, lost sight of the object of true contemplation and fallen instead into the concerns of the world.

We are a valley of shadows, I sometimes think. No one knows how far down we go.

The wonder is when we are more, not less than our natures. Wolves can be cruel and so can we, but only man raises cathedrals and paints in gold.

I filled my lungs with air my ancestors had known for as long as the world had lived.

It was a city of eternal autumn,

The world knew giants once. I hope we will again.

We see death in the loss of sweet daughters and wives and fathers and old friends. Yet the world does not end, even in our grief. The sun comes up, the spring returns – and other families risk all their happiness to bring life into this vale of tears.

Age softens and that is not a bad thing. There were times in my youth when I might have chosen death, when I might even have welcomed it. I would have been wrong, each and every instance.

There is a moment in the affairs of men where they can be swayed.