The Evening and the Morning (Kingsbridge, #0)

by Ken Follett

Grendel wagged his tail without getting up.

He had been most impressed by the large out-jutting keel that ran the length of the ship, which—he had realized after some thought—gave the stability that allowed the Vikings to cross the seas.

“No matter how well you scarf two planks together, the joint is always the weakest part.”

As was the custom, the brothers had names that sounded alike,

Rents were usually payable four times a year, on the quarter days: Midsummer, which was the twenty-fourth day of June; Michaelmas, the twenty-ninth of September; Christmas, the twenty-fifth of December; and Lady Day, the twenty-fifth of March.

His father had often said that you had to build the entire boat in your imagination before picking up the first piece of timber.

Few women lived to her age, which was forty: most died in the prime childbearing years between marriage and midthirties. It was different for men. Pa had been forty-five, and there were plenty of men even older.

Life stretched ahead of him, empty.

“I’ll tell you what would have turned up,” said Ma. “Slavery. That’s your alternative. That’s what happens to people when they’re starving to death.”

Erman said petulantly: “No one’s going to enslave me.” “No,” said Ma. “You’d volunteer for it.”

Edgar could see why the arch was collapsing. The mortared joints between the stones of a round arch formed lines that should all point to the center of one imaginary circle, like the spokes of a well-made cart wheel, but in this arch they were random. That made the structure weaker, and it looked ugly, too.

He liked questions that had definite answers, such as how high the mast of a ship should be.

People said that bathing was bad for your health, and Edgar never bathed in winter, but those who never bathed at all stank all their lives. Ma and Pa had taught their sons to keep themselves fresh by bathing at least once a year.

Count Hubert was proud of many things. He cherished his warlike Viking heritage, but he was more gratified by the way the Vikings had become Normans, with their own version of the French language. Most of all, he valued the way they had adopted Christianity, restoring the churches and monasteries that had been sacked by their ancestors. In a hundred years the former pirates had created a law-abiding civilization the equal of anything in Europe.

There was some mystical communication across fields, Ragna knew: she could never understand it, but men and women working a mile or more away seemed to find out that visitors were arriving.

The church did not have jurisdiction over marriage. If two people exchanged vows in front of witnesses, they were married.

As a newcomer here he was trying to fit in, not stand out.

Strange. Edgar thought, how dogs know when you are talking about them.

“I ask him anyway,” he said. “I say: ‘Pa, what should I do about this?’—in my head.” He added hastily: “I don’t see an apparition, or anything like that.” She nodded calmly, unsurprised. “And then what?” “Usually, the answer comes to me.” She said nothing. A bit nervously he said: “Does that sound peculiar?” “Not at all,” she said. “That’s how spirits work.”

You could spoil anything by worrying too much.

The nun who had let them in said: “I’m Mother Agatha, the abbess here.” Ragna said amiably: “Named after the patron saint of nurses, I assume?” “And of rape victims.”

The Vikings had first raided this country two centuries ago and the English still had not been able to put a permanent stop to it.

Perhaps there were principles more important than the rule of law.

Aldred loved the phrase aurem cordis, the ear of the heart. It suggested a way of listening more intense and thoughtful than the norm.

Although a wedding was not a religious sacrament,

“Impose your will,” Aldred went on. “Pick small fights with Gytha and Wynstan and Inge, and win small victories, then larger. Let everyone know that in a conflict, Wilf’s first instinct will always be to support you.”

“And build up your strength. Develop allies. You’ve got me, but you need more—all you can get. Men of power.”

“I’ve spent twenty years living with monks. A monastery is awfully like a big, powerful family: rivalry, jealousy, squabbling, hierarchy—and love. And it’s hard to escape from. I’m glad when I see trouble coming, because I can deal with it. The real danger comes from surprises.”

In dog philosophy it was always better to go somewhere than to be left behind.

It was curious, but a wrongdoer found out could often be morally indignant, as if the discovery were the offense, rather than the original transgression.

Ragna had an instinct for government, he realized, just as he had an instinct for the construction of shapes in wood and stone.

He did not want his tendresse for Edgar to become embarrassing to them both. That might end their friendship, and friendship was all he had.

She ran around the streets, renewing acquaintance with the town dogs,

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

He did not want to be a fisherman. Nor a farmer. When he had dreamed about the life ahead of him, he had never envisaged that his great achievement would be a fish trap. He felt like one of the eels, swimming round and round in the basket and always missing the narrow way out.

Edgar’s gift had to do with shapes, and something about numbers; and somewhere in there was an intuitive grasp of weights and stress, pressure and tension, and the twisting strain for which there was no word.

The best people were rule keepers, clergymen such as Aldred and nobles such as Ragna.

The lower die, called the pile, showed the king’s head, seen in profile, with the title “King of the English” in Latin.

The upper die, called the trussel, had a cross, plus, deceitfully, the attribution “Made by Elfwine in Shiring,” also in Latin.

Two things gave him joy: money and power. And they were the same, really. He loved to have power over people, and money gave him that.

The hard part, he reflected wryly, was spending the cash. Because copper was not as heavy as silver, the forged coins could not be used for any transaction large enough to require the money to be weighed. But Wynstan used Cuthbert’s pennies in alehouses and whorehouses and gambling dens, where he enjoyed spending freely.

“I hesitate to arrest a bishop. I don’t want to turn the entire Church establishment against me.

But it was easy to take risks in a theoretical way.

The murder price was called wergild, and it varied according to the wealth and status of the dead man: a thane was worth sixty pounds of silver; an ordinary peasant, ten pounds.

Chapter was the hour of the day in which the monks remembered their democratic origins. They were all brothers, alike in the sight of God and equals in the running of the abbey. This conflicted directly with their vow of obedience, so neither principle was obeyed fully.

And so, Aldred thought, great ones sin with impunity while lesser men are brutally chastised.

This was not the life he had dreamed of: struggling to make a new monastery viable. He wanted books and pens and ink, not a vegetable garden and a duck pond.

justice might be something to hope for in the next world, not this one.

“There’s something about having slaves that brings out the worst in people. Slave owners become savage. They beat and kill and rape as if it were all right.”

That was not the same as the fire of passion, but it was like a pile of summer-dry wood that would burst into flames with a single spark, and today’s kiss had been the spark.