The great thing about a short story is that it doesn’t have to trawl through someone’s whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.
Brother, there’s no end to your knowledge.’ ‘I’m just old,’ Cormac says with a chuckle.
Fog makes an island of every man.
Life is the weightiest of gifts, and there’s no giving it back till the end.
The old world was changed utterly, dying on its feet, and a new one was struggling to be born.
I didn’t forget a day of you either.
The weaklings – ashamed, but grateful – holding out their hands to the flames, their renewed faith glowing inside them. Well, he supposes there are times mercy may do what strictness can’t.
Sometimes Artt wishes he’d never set eyes on either of these stupid men; had set out alone in search of his island. Could he have managed the voyage on his own? It might have been better to make the attempt, and die trying.
Every symptom is a word in the language of disease, but sometimes we can’t hear them properly. And even if we do, we can’t always make out the full sentence... So we just shush them, one word at a time.
Freedom from versus freedom to.
What’s wrong with you, girl, that you would make yourself over again?
So. In open ocean, drifting blind now, and with no way to stop moving through the dark. It is Artt who’s brought them to this extremity, and it’s too late for doubt. ‘Never mind. We won’t founder,’ he assures them. ‘We travel in the palm of God’s hand.
Well, he need be nobody’s Prior anymore. His bonds are broken. No more obligation to teach, guide, direct, and chasten. No human babble to clog up his ears. Artt has this whole island to himself and it’s his alone. The steep land will be his pristine page and he’ll write on it with every step, every prayer, every breath. A bastion of faith, a sentry post where he will man the outer frontier of Christendom: oh, such a place it’ll be now! No one and nothing to bar his way to heaven.
And how will we recognise our island?’ Trian wonders. ‘By a sign of some kind.’ Cormac realises something: the Prior doesn’t know. Trian hesitates as if about to say more, but doesn’t. It comes to Cormac that maybe it’s their fault the boat hasn’t reached the island yet, his and Trian’s. We of little faith.
After a while the first lights stand out in the sky. Trian asks, ‘Are they holes, the stars?’ ‘Bodies of cold fire,’ Artt corrects him, ‘fixed in a sphere around the earth. God spins it westwards every day. That’s what makes the air and the clouds move.’ He cranes up, a little dizzy, imagining that giant hand flicking the globe.
Trust me, the island must have water, since we need it to live. This place was set aside for us when the earth was made.
I did realise that this job was too grim for most people, all the stinking and leaking and dying. Mine was a peculiar vocation.
It was Anubis who set your heart on the scales against the Feather of Truth, and if your crimes weighed it down at all, it was thrown to the crocodile-faced demoness Ammit like any other scrap of meat. Only the clean-hearted got to walk forever in the Field of Reeds.
How illimitable is the gullibility of mankind, especially, it must be said, when combined with provincial ignorance. But Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur; that is to say, “If the world will be gulled, let it be gulled.” Thus quoth Petronius, in the days of Our Lord, an aphorism just as pertinent to our own time.
Look around you, Mr. Groyne. This is where every nation draws its first breath. Women have been paying the blood tax since time began.
Blame the germs, the unburied corpses, the dust of war, the random circulation of wind and weather, the Lord God Almighty. Blame the stars. Just don’t blame the dead, because none of them wished this on themselves.