61
" She was no Christian. Instead she believed that every place and every thing had its own god or goddess; a nymph for a stream, a dryad for a wood, a spirit for a tree, a god for the fire and another for the sea. The Christian god, like Thor or Odin, was just one more deity among this unseen throng of powers, and her dreams, she said, were like eavesdropping on the gods. One day, as she rode beside me on the hills above the empty sea, she suddenly said that Alfred would give me power. "
― Bernard Cornwell , The Pale Horseman (The Saxon Stories, #2)
62
" Are you familiar with Saint Cuthman?" Alfred asked me cheerfully.
"No, lord."
"He was a hermit," Alfred said. We were riding north, keeping on the high ground with the swamp to our left. "His mother was crippled and so he made her a wheelbarrow."
"A wheelbarrow? What could a cripple do with a wheelbarrow?"
"No, no, no! He pushed her about in it! So she could be with him as he preached. He pushed her everywhere."
"She must have liked that."
"There's no written life of him that I know of,' Alfred said, 'but we must surely compose one. He could be a saint for mothers?"
"Or for wheelbarrows, lord. "
― Bernard Cornwell , The Pale Horseman (The Saxon Stories, #2)
70
" There, ahead of me, was the enemy.
I love the Danes. There are no better men to fight with, drink with, laugh with or live with. Yet that day, as on so many others of my life, they were the enemy and they waited for me in a gigantic shield wall arrayed across the down. There were thousands of Danes, Spear-Danes and Sword-Danes, Danes who had come to make this land theirs, and we had come to keep it ours. "
― Bernard Cornwell , The Pale Horseman (The Saxon Stories, #2)