Sword at Sunset Quotes

“Presently I went back to my Companions, and slept under the apple trees, wrapped in my cloak and with my head on Cabal's flank for a pillow. There is no pillow in the world so good as a hound's flank.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Sword at Sunset

“It is lonely never to have been loved, only devoured.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Sword at Sunset

“I said, 'Then why don't we yield now, and make an end? There would be fewer cities burned and fewer men slain in that way. Why do we go on fighting? Why not merely lie down and let it come? They say it is easier to drown if you don't struggle.'

'For an idea,' Ambrosius said, beginning again to play with the dragon arm ring; but his eyes were smiling in the firelight, and I think that mine smiled back at him. 'Just for an idea, for an ideal, for a dream.'

I said, 'A dream may be the best thing to die for.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Sword at Sunset

“With three hundred men properly mounted, I believe that I can thrust back the Barbarians at least for a while,' I said at last. 'As for saving Britain - I have seen the wild geese flighting this autumn, and who can turn them back? It is more than a hundred years that we have been struggling to stem this Saxon flighting, more than thirty since the last Roman troops left Britain. How much longer, do you think, before the darkness closes over us?' It was a thing that I would not have said to any man save Ambrosius.

And he answered me as I do not think he would have answered any other man. 'God knows. If your work and mine be well wrought, maybe another hundred years.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Sword at Sunset

“we held fast together, and wept somewhat, each into the hollow of the other’s shoulder. Maybe it is easier to weep when one grows old, than it was in the flower of life. The strength ebbs, or the wisdom grows ...”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Sword at Sunset

“It was a small bothy, one step brought us to meet in the midst of it; my arms were around him, and his around me, the strong right arm and the maimed left that felt sapless and brittle as a bit of dead stick, and we held fast together, and wept somewhat, each into the hollow of the other’s shoulder. Maybe it is easier to weep when one grows old, than it was in the flower of life.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Sword at Sunset

“My most dear, we have fought many fights together, and this is the last of them and it must be the best. If it is given to men to remember in the life we go to, remember that I loved you, and do not forget that you loved me.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Sword at Sunset

“Lying sprawled uncouthly at the foot of the Red Dragon where the men had tumbled him down, there was a certain splendor about him still. An old man, an old giant, with bright hairs that shone like gold wires in the gray jut of his beard and the mane of wild hair outflung about his head. I recognized him first by the earl's bracelet twisted about his sword arm, for a spear had taken him between the eyes, but as I looked down more closely into the smashed and blood-pooled face, I recognized the cunning iron-bound mouth, drawn back now in a frozen snarl. I recognized above all, I think the greatness that seemed to cling about him still, an atmosphere of the thing that had made him a giant in more than body; this ancient enemy of Ambrosius's. Hengest, the Jutish adventurer who had grown to be a war lord of the Saxon hordes, lying flung down like a tribute at the foot of the British standard that stirred faintly in the night air above him.

That left the son and the grandson to deal with.

'So-o,' Bedwyr said softly. 'Earl Hengest goes at last to his own Storm Lords again. He should have died on a night of tempest, with the lightning leaping from hill to hill, not on a still summer evening with the scent of hawthorn in the air.'

'He was a royal stag,' I said. 'Thank God he is dead.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Sword at Sunset

“Presently, as I followed the water down, the steep fall of the valley leveled somewhat, and the ground underfoot changed from moor grass to a dense aromatic carpet of bog myrtle interlaced with heather; and I began to feel for the firmness of every step. Then it dropped again, and the stream plunged after it in a long slide of black water smooth as polished glass under the overarching tangle of hawthorn trees, and rough pasture came up to meet me among the hillside outcrops of black rock, and almost in the same instant I snuffed the faint blue whisper of woodsmoke.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Sword at Sunset

“Without will of my own, my startled sight jumped to Guenhumara's face and I saw the tide of painful color flood up to the roots of her hair, and I knew too that she had had no warning, but that unlike me, she had feared in advance; and that the heavy paint of her face had been put on as a young man takes up his armor.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Sword at Sunset

“Laethrig is my father's first son, and Sulian is already knotted in a girl's long hair, while I- I am free, and have an itch to the soles of my feet that I shall not find easement for, here in my father's hall."
I looked at him in the clear upland light, the set of his head that matched that of the hawk on his fist, the hot red-brown eyes under the black brows; and I thought that he might be well right in that, and thought also that it would be good to have this frowning youngster among my captains.
"I can maybe find the means for easing the soles to your feet," I said. "And if there is a like itching in the palm of your sword hand, I can find you a fine way to appease that also.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Sword at Sunset