The Archer's Tale

You'll call me a damned Jew, a Christ murderer, a secret worshipper of pigs and a kidnapper of christian children.” This was all said cheerfully. “How absurd! Who would want to kidnap children, Christian or otherwise? Vile things. The only mercy of children is that they grow up, as my son has but then, tragically, they beget more children. We do not learn life's lessons.

Calix meus inebrians.

Robin Hood’s Lament”?’ Every archer knew that tune.

Pelos ossos de Deus, Tom, o diabo fez um serviço ruim quando trepou com sua mãe.

The wheel of fortune that had once raised her so high had taken her into the utter depths.

Harlequin, probably derived from the old French Hellequin: a troop of the devil’s horsemen.

Be mad enough, his father once said, and they will either lock you away or make you a saint.

O mundo está apodrecendo. A Igreja é corrupta e os reis são fracos. Cabe a nós fazer um mundo novo, amado por Deus, mas para fazê-lo temos de destruir o velho. Temos de tomar o poder e depois dar o poder a Deus. É por isso que estamos lutando.

The hellequin,” she said icily, “are the dead who have no souls. The dead who were so wicked in life that the devil loves them too much to punish them in hell and so he gives them his horses and releases them on the living.

Merchants,” the Duke said, “have no loyalties other than to money. They have no honor. Honor is not learned, madame. It is bred. Just as you breed a horse for bravery and speed, or a hound for agility and ferocity, so you breed a nobleman for honor.

Put a cat to watch a flock and the wolves eat well.

Guinefort had been a dog and, so far as Thomas’s father knew, the only animal ever to be canonized. The beast had saved a baby from a wolf, then been martyred by his owner, who thought the dog had eaten the baby when in truth he had hidden it beneath the cot.

Put a cat to guard the sheep and the wolves would eat well.

Where’s your bowstrings?’ Thomas asked, for the priest had neither helmet nor cap.‘I looped them round my…well, never mind. It has to be good for something other than pissing, eh? And it’s dry down there.’ Father Hobbe seemed indecently cheerful.

Only a fool leaves cash where a servant can find it,' he said.

St George!’ the English shouted, but the saint must have been sleeping for he gave the attackers no help.

Fighting fair! Whoever heard of anything so daft? Fight fair and you lose.

I can unbutton your breeches and I can point you down wind, but even with the Good Lord’s help I can’t piss for you.

They’re praying to ham bones, ham bones! The blessed pig!

You Christians,” he had said, “insist that prophets tell the future, but that wasn’t really what they did at all. They warned Israel. They told us that we would be visited by death, destruction and horror if we did not mend our ways. They were preachers, Thomas, just preachers, though, God knows, they were right about the death, destruction and horror.

Nondum amabam, et amare amabam.(No amé, pero anhelaba amar)

Be mad enough, his father had once said, and they will either lock you away or make you a saint.

Soldiers were not paragons; they were scarred, vicious men who took delight in destruction.

If God is within us then we need no Church and no Holy Father to lead us to His mercy, and that notion is the most pernicious of heresies

Remember the old saying, my lady,” he said slyly. “Put a cat to watch a flock and the wolves eat well.

I have never asked you for anything.” “But what would you have asked for?” She stared into the ripples of the stream. “What you gave me,” she said after a while, “kindness.” “Nothing else?” She paused. “I would have liked to call you Father.

Father Hobbe, his cassock skirts hitched up to his waist, was fighting with a quarterstaff, ramming the pole into French faces. ‘In the name of the Father,’ he shouted, and a Frenchman reeled back with a pulped eye, ‘and of the Son,’ Father Hobbe snarled as he broke a man’s nose, ‘and of the Holy Ghost!

An English man-at-arms had his helmet split open and his skull with it, so that he rode wavering from the fight, blood pouring down his mail coat. His horse stopped a few paces from the turmoil and the man-at-arms slowly, so slowly, bent forward and then slumped down from his saddle. One foot was trapped in a stirrup as he died but his horse did not seem to notice. It just went on cropping the grass.

were in the camp, given a day’s rest after leading the last failed assault. Will Skeat hated failure.