14
" And thus Lancelot died, though the songs he had paid for lived on, and to this day he
is celebrated as a hero equal to Arthur. Arthur is remembered as a ruler, but Lancelot
is called the warrior. In truth he was the King without land, a coward, and the greatest
traitor of Britain, and his soul wanders Lloegyr to this day, screaming for its shadowbody that can never exist because we cut his corpse into scraps and fed it to the river.
If the Christians are right, and there is a hell, may he suffer there for ever. "
― Bernard Cornwell , Excalibur (The Warlord Chronicles, #3)
18
" suppose I thought of people as dogs,’ he went on ruefully, ‘and that if you gave them enough affection then they would be docile, but they aren’t dogs, Gwydre, they’re wolves. A king must rule a thousand ambitions, and all of them belong to deceivers. You will be flattered, and behind your back, mocked. Men will swear undying loyalty with one breath and plot your death with the next. And if you survive their plots, then one day you will be grey-bearded like me and you’ll look back on your life and realize that you achieved nothing. Nothing. The babies you admired in their mothers’ arms will have grown to be killers, the justice you enforced will be for sale, the people you protected will still be hungry and the enemy you defeated will still threaten your frontiers. "
― Bernard Cornwell , Excalibur (The Warlord Chronicles, #3)
20
" are a curse on the earth, yet our oaths are made to kings, and if we had no oaths we would have no law, and if we had no law we would have mere anarchy, and so we must bind ourselves with the law, and keep the law by oaths, and if a man could change kings at whim then he could abandon his oaths with his inconvenient king, and so we need kings because we must have an immutable law. All that is true, yet as Galahad and I rode home through the wintry mists I could have wept that the one man who should have been a king would not be one, and that those who should never have been kings all were. "
― Bernard Cornwell , Excalibur (The Warlord Chronicles, #3)