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“How do you know all this?” Mother, she wrote, and a smile broke so gently on her face that Thomas bit his tongue viciously to keep from weeping for his own.
Among the bitterer lessons of brigandage Thomas had learned was that farmers were strong, often stronger than the horsemen who despised them, and that they lived so close to starvation that they would fight like bears to hold on to what crumbs and bits of wood or leather they owned.
Overcome with emotion at her kindness and her plain, handsome face, the girl kissed her hand. The wife stroked her hair. The girl suddenly felt the hurt in the woman, how it mirrored her own hurt. One had lost a daughter, the other a mother. Each saw a flicker of the dead one. It was bitter but very sweet and good. Annette took her head into her bosom, tentatively at first, but then with great emotion, and cried down into her hair. “What are you called, little bird?” “Delphine.”
between two fires
He said the thing
So one of the fallen, whose name was Baal-Zebuth, said, “Let us wear their greatest men like skins, and when they speak, they will speak our words; they will speak of wars and purgings, and of dashing the babe’s head. We will turn their understanding so they make their Christ a god of war, and we will cause them to set navies to the seas and armies under the moon with generals whose eyes glow like brands, and we will stir Turk and Christian alike to madness by our own deeds, and by our own hands will we hasten the death of men.”
Thomas would dig Père Matthieu’s grave as their host burned with fever and lost his reason; he would pull Matthieu from under the arms while his feet dragged and the girl cried and he got a last noseful of the priest’s woolly, winey, lonely smell.
1000 thumbs down, boooo
Romans made that road. How do I know this? I’m becoming something.
