The Pale Horseman (The Saxon Stories, #2)

by Bernard Cornwell

But deep under the earth, where the corpse serpent gnaws at the roots of Yggdrasil, the tree of life, there are three spinners, three women who make our fate. We might believe we make choices, but in truth our lives are in the spinners’ fingers. They make our lives, and destiny is everything. The Danes know that, and even the Christians know it. Wyrd bið ful āræd, we Saxons say, fate is inexorable, and the spinners had decided my fate because, a week after the witan had met, when Exanceaster was quiet again, they sent me a ship.

And that, too, was the truth, that a man cannot step back from a fight and stay a man. We make much in this life if we are able. We make children and wealth and amass land and build halls and assemble armies and give great feasts, but only one thing survives us. Reputation. I could not walk away.

There comes a moment in life when we see ourselves as others see us. I suppose that is part of growing up, and it is not always comfortable.

The kingdom of Wessex was now a swamp and, for a few days, it possessed a king, a bishop, four priests, two soldiers, the king’s pregnant wife, two nurses, a whore, two children, one of whom was sick, and Iseult.

“A fight by a hill,” she went on, “a steep hill, and there will be a white horse and the slope will run with blood and the Danes will run from the Sais.”

“Words are like breath,” she said. “You say them and they’re gone. But writing traps them. You could write down stories, poems.”

Men fear wanderers for they have no rules. The Danes came as strangers, rootless and violent, and that, I thought, was why I was always happier in their company.

“Life is simple,” I said. “Ale, women, sword, and reputation. Nothing else matters.”

“If you had an army of angels, lord,” Pyrlig went on, “then a rousing speech about God and Saint Augustine would doubtless fire their ardor, but you have to fight with mere men, and there’s nothing quite like greed, revenge, and selfishness to inspire mortals.”