Sword of Kings (The Saxon Stories, #12)

by Bernard Cornwell

It was what my father had called “a Scottish peace,” meaning that there were constant and savage cattle raids, but there are always cattle raids, and we always retaliated by striking into the Scottish valleys to bring back livestock. We stole just as many as they stole, and it would have been much simpler to have had no raids, but in times of peace young men must be taught the ways of war.

There are times when knowledge comes from nothing, from a feeling, from a scent that cannot be smelled, from a fear that has no cause.

Where were they now? I wondered. Did Gisela wait for me in Asgard, the home of the gods? Did Æthelflaed watch me from her Christian heaven? I have known many wise men, but none who could answer those questions.

Everything ends. Summer ends. Happiness ends. Days of joy are followed by days of sorrow. Even the gods will meet their end in the last battle of Ragnarok when all the evil of the world brings chaos and the sun will turn dark, the black waters will drown the homes of men, and the great beamed hall of Valhalla will burn to ashes. Everything ends.

“Serpent-Breath,” I said quietly. “Her blade was beaten out on Odin’s anvil, tempered by Thor’s fire, and quenched in the blood of her enemies.”

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.

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.”

It would be a battle, I thought bitterly, to decide which royal arse would warm a throne, and what business did I have deciding the throne of Wessex? Yet fate, that callous bitch, had tied my life’s threads to King Alfred’s dream. Was there really a Christian heaven? If there was then King Alfred would be gazing down on us even now. And what would he want? Of that I had no doubt. He wanted a Christian country of all the men who spoke the Ænglisc tongue, and he wanted that country led by a Christian king.