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948c270
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Folk tell their children that success lies in working hard and being thrifty, but that is as much nonsense as supposing that a badger, a fox, and a wolf could build a church. The way to wealth is to become a Christian bishop or a monastery's abbot and thus be imbued with heaven's permission to lie, cheat, and steal your way to luxury.
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Bernard Cornwell |
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59097f6
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A sad, plangent music. In the British camp, Sharpe thought, they would be singing, but no one was singing here.
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camp
here
music
plangent
sad
sharpe
singing
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Bernard Cornwell |
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35b0ceb
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we fight them where we choose or where we must, not always when we want.
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Bernard Cornwell |
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5e76fd5
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So, with no real plan for my future and content to let fate
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Bernard Cornwell |
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48af74b
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He grinned at Sharpe. "Christ, but this is joy! What would we do for happiness if peace came?" He turned his horse clumsily, rammed his heels back, and whooped as the horse took off. "Let's go get the whores!"
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Bernard Cornwell |
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89a55e5
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They're frightened that we'll make a sally and kill them all," Ragnar said, "so they're going to sit there and try to starve us out."
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Bernard Cornwell |
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1a11d23
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Juan Fernandez islands." Cochrane drew on the cigar and watched its smoke drift out the window. "The islands are three hundred fifty miles off the coast, in the middle of nothing! They're where Robinson Crusoe was marooned, or rather where Alexander Selkirk, who was the original of Crusoe, spent four not uncomfortable years."
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Bernard Cornwell |
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29befe7
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an arena where, so Merewalh's priest told me, Christians had been fed to wild beasts. Some things are just too good to be true and so I was not sure I believed him.
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Bernard Cornwell |
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4f5b94a
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Do you know who wins battles, boy?" "We do, Father." "The side that is least drunk," he said, and then, after a pause, "but it helps to be drunk." "Why?" "Because a shield wall is an awful place." He gazed into the fire. "I have been in six shield walls," he went on, "and prayed every time it would be the last."
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Bernard Cornwell |
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eaa0215
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One thing I learned about the Danes was that they knew how to spy. The monks who write the chronicles tell us that they came from nowhere, their dragon-prowed ships suddenly appearing from a blue vacancy, but it was rarely like that. The Viking crews might attack unexpectedly, but the big fleets, the war fleets, went where they knew there was already trouble. They found an existing wound and filled it like maggots.
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Bernard Cornwell |
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33b2665
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houses. I remember the first time I ever climbed a Roman staircase, and how odd it felt, and I knew that in times gone by men must have taken such things for granted. Now the world was dung and straw and damp-ridden wood. We had stone masons, of course, but it was quicker to build from wood, and the wood rotted, but no one seemed to care. The whole
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Bernard Cornwell |
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0f645f6
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world rotted as we slid from light into darkness, getting ever nearer to the black chaos in which this middle world would end and the gods would fight and all love and light and laughter would dissolve.
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Bernard Cornwell |
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c072b5b
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What did you want to achieve?" "Liberty, of course!" The answer was swift, but followed immediately by a deprecating smile. "Except I've learned there's no such thing." "There isn't?" "You can't have freedom and lawyers, Sharpe,"
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Bernard Cornwell |
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2073dac
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At sea, sometimes, if you take a ship too far from land and the wind rises and the tide sucks with a venomous force and the waves splinter white above the shield-pegs, you have no choice but to go where the gods will.
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Bernard Cornwell |
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c5370ba
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They make laws that no one wants, then make money disagreeing with each other what the damned law means, and the more they disagree the more money they make, but still they go on making laws, and they make them ever more complicated so that they can get paid for arguing ever more intricately with one another! I grant you they're clever buggers, but God, how I hate lawyers.
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Bernard Cornwell |
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b0e3305
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abandoned the weapon because of its propensity to shatter the shoulders of the men pulling its trigger, but in Patrick Harper the seven-barreled gun had found a soldier capable of taming its brute ferocity. The gun was a cluster of seven half-inch barrels which were fired by a single lock, and was, in its effect, like a small cannon loaded with grapeshot.
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Bernard Cornwell |
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8ffa4e2
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AEthelfrith
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Bernard Cornwell |
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3ab7b13
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there was something about Gawain's youth and credulity that was driving me to puncture his pious innocence.
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Bernard Cornwell |
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4dc34ee
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Liberty! Man has no liberty except the liberty to obey rules, but who makes the rules? With luck, Kate, it will be reasonable men making reasonable rules.
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Bernard Cornwell |
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7d96a41
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So you know it was a glorious battle, Hook, in which God favoured the English, but God's favour is a fickle thing.' 'Are you telling me He's not on our side?' 'I'm telling you that God is on the side of whoever wins, Hook.
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Bernard Cornwell |
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e109596
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Svein had offered to talk. The Danes, quite suddenly, had stopped raiding. Instead they had settled in Cridianton and sent an embassy to Exanceaster, and Svein and Odda had made their private peace. "We sell them horses," Harald said, "and they pay well for them. Twenty shillings a stallion, fifteen a mare." "You sell them horses," I said flatly. "So they will go away," Harald explained. Servants threw a big birch log onto the fire. Sparks ..
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Bernard Cornwell |
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6e1875b
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Then, just as d'Alembord was about to sell his commission and retire to one of his prospective father-in-law's farms, Napoleon had returned to France. Colonel Ford, worried that he was losing his veteran Captain of skirmishers, had begged d'Alembord to stay for the impending campaign and implicit in the Colonel's plea was a promise that d'Alembord would receive the next vacant majority in the battalion. That enticement was sufficient. The c..
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Bernard Cornwell |
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5fa22ce
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And when you speak with him," I said, "tell him to stop hitting his wife." Erkenwald jerked as though I had just struck him in the face. "It is his Christian duty," he said stiffly, "to discipline his wife, and it is her duty to submit. Did you not listen to what I preached?"
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Bernard Cornwell |
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5295b41
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For what?" the Lord of Douglas demanded. "For"
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Bernard Cornwell |
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79e9570
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To be discreet, '"he looked up to glare at AEthelflaed, "'chaste! Keepers of the home! Good! Obedient to their husbands!' Those are God's own words! That is what God demands of a woman! To be discreet, to be chaste, to be home-keepers, to be obedient! God spoke to us!"
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Bernard Cornwell |
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9982a03
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and their worship has always made more sense to me than bowing down to a god who belongs to a country so far away that I have met no one who has ever been there. Thor and Odin walked our hills, slept in our valleys, loved our women and drank from our streams, and that makes them seem like neighbors. The other thing I like about our gods is that they are not obsessed with us. They have their own squabbles and love affairs and seem to ignore ..
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Bernard Cornwell |
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d1d4c0f
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A hall-burning," Rorik said bitterly. "Hall-burning?" "It happens at home," Rorik explained. "You go to an enemy's hall and burn it to the ground. But there's one thing about a hall-burning. You have to make sure everyone dies. If there are any survivors then they'll take revenge, so you attack at night, surround the hall, and kill everyone who tries to escape the flames."
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Bernard Cornwell |
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a86a65b
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Of the insolence of the Scots, my father used to say, there is no end.
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Bernard Cornwell |
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12fcc50
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The men with leather or mail mostly possessed helmets and had proper weapons, swords or spears, while the rest were armed with axes, adzes, sickles, or sharpened hoes. Eadred grandly called it the Army of the Holy Man, but if I had been the holy man I would have bolted back to heaven and waited for something better to come along.
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Bernard Cornwell |
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96f5207
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The hall's door was framed by a pair of vast curved bones that had come from some sea monster.
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Bernard Cornwell |
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9a67f4a
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Who summons the dead man?" she asked. "A fresh corpse," AEthelwold said. "A fresh corpse?" I asked. "Someone must be sent to the world of the dead," he explained, as though it were obvious, "to find Bjorn and bring him back." "So they kill someone?" Gisela asked. "How else can they send a messenger to the dead?" AEthelwold asked pugnaciously."
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Bernard Cornwell |
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9e7456b
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thought folk were buried there?" "They are! And their treasures! So the dragon guards the hoard. That's what dragons do. Bury gold and you hatch a dragon, see?"
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Bernard Cornwell |
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d0a2a16
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Night was falling across the trampled rye. Nine thousand men had been killed or wounded in the fight for the crossroads,
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Bernard Cornwell |
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9469842
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but men inspired by prophecy will attempt any foolishness in the knowledge that the fates have ordained their victory.
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Bernard Cornwell |
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3a8f04a
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Giving inspiration to a lawyer, Sharpe thought sourly, was like feeding fine brandy to a rat.
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Bernard Cornwell |
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6a8e2ad
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He says he's going to die. He's got a what do you call it? A premonition. He says it's because he's going to be married.' 'What's that got to do with it?' Price shrugged as if to demonstrate that he was no expert on superstitions. 'He says it's because he's happy. He reckons that the happiest die first and only the miserable buggers live for ever.
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Bernard Cornwell |
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97bb6e1
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He's discovered the value," I said, "of murderous bastards like me, so perhaps he'll learn to distrust the advice of sniveling bastards like you who told him the Danes could be defeated by prayer."
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Bernard Cornwell |
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b299e34
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This time, if God wills it, we shall replace him. A man bitten by a snake once does not let the snake live a second time.
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Bernard Cornwell |
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8ab3609
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Derfel, Derfel - sospiro Merlino.
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Bernard Cornwell |
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8885f19
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Derfel: - Capisco che puoi guardare negli occhi una persona e renderti conto a un tratto che la vita ti sara impossibile senza di lei. Che la sua voce puo far saltare un battito al tuo cuore, che la sua
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Bernard Cornwell |
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43a035e
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We pulled slow and steady through the darkness and we hammered the ears of the gods with prayers.
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Bernard Cornwell |
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ae676aa
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Bugger Shekhar. How about a instead?" "Maybe I'll read." "Your choice," Sharpe said carelessly."
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Bernard Cornwell |
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161519f
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They're mean bastards, those monks," I said. I was supposed to deliver a weekly cartload of firewood to Saint Rumwold's, but that was a duty I ignored. The monks could cut their own timber. "Who was Rumwold?" I asked Willibald. I knew the answer, but wanted to drag Willibald through the thorns. "He was a very pious child, lord," he said. "A child?" "A baby," he said, sighing as he saw where the conversation was leading, "a mere three days o..
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Bernard Cornwell |
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41ac6df
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The church, we're to meet in the church. Do try to wipe that blood off your mail, Uhtred. We're an embassy!
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Bernard Cornwell |