Sword of Kings (The Saxon Stories, #12)

by Bernard Cornwell

“What do you think we do?” Finan snarled. “We kill the buggers.” Because when queens call for help, warriors go to war.

“Don’t be such a pathetic fool,” he snarled. “The gods didn’t want your rotten carcass in Valhalla, not yet. They haven’t done with you. What is it you like to tell us all the time? Wyrd bið ful ãræd?” His Irish accent mangled the words. “Well, fate hasn’t finished with you, and the gods didn’t leave you alive for no reason, and you’re a lord, so get on your damned feet, strap on a sword, and take us south.”

Did I want to see Northumbria swallowed into a greater land, a Christian land? Better, I thought, to let Æthelstan and Ælfweard fight it out, to let them weaken each other. And all that was true, except I had given my oath and I had lost my sword. Sometimes we do not know why we do the things we do, we are driven to it by fate, by impulse, or by mere stupidity.

I remember Ravn, the blind poet and father to Ragnar, often telling me that courage was like a horn of ale. “We begin with a full horn, boy,” he had told me, “but we drain it. Some men drain it fast, maybe their horn was not full to begin with, and others drain it slowly, but courage lessens as we age.”