"Sword at Sunset", by Rosemary Sutcliff

I'll save the full review for my October Book Reviews post, which is due shortly anyway. But this book filled me with so much joy, I need to post some of my favorite quotes right now. It's a retelling of the story of King Arthur, but an attempt at making his story one of plausible historical fiction--no Round Table, etc. But still retaining elements of the legend. Instead of Lancelot and the Knights of the Round Table serving King Arthur and Queen Guinevere at Camelot, we get Bedwyr and the Brotherhood of the Romano-British war chieftain Artos, who is married to a woman named Guenhumara and spends his life fighting against the Saxons. And I really, really enjoyed it. The soul of the stories are still here, bright and beautiful and written with both realism and poetry. I enjoyed it so much, I put it aside yesterday when I had about fifty pages left so I could savor the reading of it a day more. This is a novel highly recommended.

This is one of the moments that stood out most for me. The book is told from the perspective of Arthur himself, and this scene is where he goes hunting with the High King Ambrosius, shortly before gaining the Kingship himself. Ambrosius is dying of disease, and on this particular day is determined to go hunting, which is treated as a metaphor in the story that he is going knowingly to his death, hunting his death. Anyway, this part really stood out to me, both in terms of beauty and due to its fascinating and poignant musings on how one prepares for death:

'The sun came up, and the frost melted around us as we rode, giving place to a thin white mist lying close to the ground in the hollows. The horses waded through it as through shallow seas of gossamer as we dropped into the valley, and small bright drops trembled in the light, hanging from every dried hemlock head and half-silken, half-sodden feather of last year's willow herb. And I remember that over the open fallow the larks were singing. In a sheltered hollow of the woodshore, the first hazel catkins were hanging out, and as we brushed through, shaking the whippy sprays, the air was suddenly stained with a sun-mist of yellow pollen for yards around. And I wondered how it all seemed to Ambrosius: whether he had yet freed himself utterly from the dearness and strangeness and piercing beauty of the world, from the lark song and the smell of melting frost on the cold moss under the trees, and the thrust of a horse's flanks beneath him, and the faces of his friends. His own face betrayed nothing, but I thought that he looked about him from time to time, as though he wished to see very clearly the winter woods dappled like a curlew's breast, the prick of a hound's ears, the crimson thread tips of a woman-bud on a hazel spray, the flying shadow of a bird across the turf, to draw them in and make them part of himself, part of his own soul, so that he might carry them with him where he was going.'

And here's one more quote as a bonus, this time from the lips of Mordred--for there is a Mordred in even this version of the Arthurian story, though called Merdraut. Again, his link with his mother is stressed. This seems to be a sign by which one can tell when Mordred is really being written well: That the relationship between Mordred and Morgause is not merely that of a son whose mother has taught him to hate, but that of a man who was warped and ruined somehow by his mother's very love. It's a terrifying concept, but also one that can, in the right hands, invoke immense pity. I'm thinking the part in 'The Once and Future King', here, where Mordred is described as having been somehow drained of himself by his mother, as though she sucked him dry like a brooding spider, so that he lives as not only an embodiment of his own hate, whether he will or no, but also as a projection of hers. Check out the similarities with that idea here:

'[Merdraut] came toward me, and before I knew what he was about, knelt beside me and bowed his head onto my knee. It was a horrible womanish gesture. "No escape . . . It is in what you are and in what I am." His voice muffled against my knee. "No, don't draw away from me. Whatever else I am, I am your son--your most wretched son. If you do not hate me, try to love me a little, Father; it is lonely never to have been loved, only devoured.'

The same images of devouring and helpless hate are here. And the characterization is similarly brilliant. It's an interesting parallel to ponder. And masterfully written in its own right.