Historical Novels

"I could say nothing that I had not already said, and I didn’t want to breathe a word that might upset the moment. We clung to each other for a long time, and although I was weak she seemed to have the strength for both of us."

"As it is, he willingly gave his blood, in the flesh, so that others might find life, for it is written: “He did not come by water only, but by blood” and “without the shedding of blood there is no remission.” Now blood is required to give new life to the dead."

"Where all was once unseen, now it is seen. What was done in spirit will be done in the flesh, so all men will know that evil walks and speaks and that the Maker’s great romance is a kiss of love, an offering of blood."

"I cannot live but to say that you have taken my heart captive. Please, I beg you, release me from this cage, for I am bound by honor to my empress. Now you have become my empress, and these words I write now would be my death warrant."

"I was beside myself for her. My own emotions refused to give me any space. I had put up a brave face and made myself as invisible as possible after much vacillation, but none of it had tempered my feelings."

"Look at me, Toma. I will show you pleasures that you could never know with her."

"“I have a problem with any emotion that shuts down the mind and encourages stupid behavior,” she said calmly."

"“Beauty,” he said. “Beauty like this is absolutely maddening.”"

"I don’t like the way this Vlad van Valerik acted. He was eyeing you like a vulture eyes a dead horse."

"War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god. [...] Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view. The willingness of the principals to forgo further argument as the triviality which it in fact is and to petition directly the chambers of the historical absolute clearly indicates of how little moment are the opinions and of what great moment the divergences thereof. For the argument is indeed trivial, but not so the separate wills thereby made manifest."

"And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die."

"Where is yesterday? Where is Glanton and Brown and where is the priest? He leaned closer. Where is Shelby, whom you left to the mercies of Elias in the desert, and where is Tate whom you abandoned in the mountains? Where the ladies, ah the fair and tender ladies with whom you danced at the governor's ball when you were a hero anointed with the blood of the enemies of the republic you'd elected to defend? And where is the fiddler and where the dance?"

"What man would not be a dancer if he could, said the judge. It’s a great thing, the dance. [...] Drink up, he said. Drink up. This night thy soul may be required of thee."

"In that sleep and in sleeps to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing."

"What joins men together, he said, is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies."

"The horse was watching, out there past men's knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea."

"Men are made of the dust of the earth."

"They rode up into the dripping hills and in the first light Brown raised the rifle and shot the boy through the back of the head."

"The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But the trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all."

"The good book says that he that lives by the sword shall perish by the sword, said the black. [...] The good book does indeed count war an evil, said Irving. Yet there's many a bloody tale of war inside it. It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way."

"The arc of circling bodies is determined by the length of their tether, said the judge. Moons, coins, men. His hands moved as if he were pulling something from one fist in a series of elongations. Watch the coin, Davey, he said."

"Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."

"… and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, the first fire and the last ever to be."

"I could have been somebody in this world wasn’t for him."

"His among the clouded faces seemed unperturbed. He looked over the Americans, their gear. In truth they did not look like men who might have whiskey they hadnt drunk."

"This is a terrible place to die in. Where’s a good one?"

"The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos."

"Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. [...] Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth. Because he is a special kind of keeper. A suzerain rules even where there are other rulers. His authority countermands local judgments. [...] The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation. [...] Toadvine sat with his boots crossed before the fire. No man can acquaint himself with everything on this earth, he said. The judge tilted his great head. The man who believes that the secrets of this world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate."

"In three days they would fall upon a band of peaceful Tiguas camped on the river and slaughter them every soul."

"The men as they rode turned black in the sun from the blood on their clothes and their faces and then paled slowly in the rising dust until they assumed once more the color of the land through which they passed."

"You can’t be all Mexican. It’s like being all mongrel."

"When Glanton and his chiefs swung back through the village people were running out under the horses' hooves and the horses were plunging and some of the men were moving on foot among the huts with torches and dragging the victims out, slathered and dripping with blood, hacking at the dying and decapitating those who knelt for mercy. There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew [...]"

"The hour that followed was a long hour."

"How many is there, John?. Did you learn to whisper in a sawmill?"

"Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings."

"They rode on. They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds."

"I can man anything that eats. Get me a piece of jerky."

"The judge looked about him. He was sat before the fire naked save for his breeches and his hands rested palm down upon his knees. His eyes were empty slots. None among the company harbored any notion as to what this attitude implied, yet so like an icon was he in his sitting that they grew cautious and spoke with circumspection among themselves as if they would not waken something that had better been left sleeping."

"If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons."

"All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage. So. here are the dead fathers. their spirit is entombed in the stone. [...] For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was these masons however primitive their works may seem to us."

"But ingratitude is more common than you might think."

"But dont draw me, said Webster. For I dont want in your book. My book or some other book said the judge. What is to be deviates no jot from the book said the judge. What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it's writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all. [...] Whether in my book or not, every man is tabernacled in every other and he in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being and witness to the uttermost edge of the world."

"In the days to come they would ride up through a country where the rocks would cook the flesh from your hand and where other than rock nothing was."

"He had the pistols stuck in his belt at the back and he drew them one in each hand and he is as eitherhanded as a spider, he can write with both hands at a time and I've seen him to do it, and he commenced to kill indians. We needed no second invitation. Got it was a butchery. [...] Before the last poor nigger reached the bottom of the slop there was fifty-eight of them lay slaughtered among the gravels."

"Where for aught any man know lies the locality of hell. For the Earth is a globe in a void the truth there's no up nor down to it."

"The gifts of the Almighty are weighed and parceled out in a scale peculiar to himself. It's no fair accountin and I dont doubt but what he'd be the first to admit it and you put the query to him boldface."

"And so these parties divided upon that midnight plain, each passing back the way the other had come, pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men’s journeys."

"At dusk they halted and built a fire and roasted the deer. The night was much enclosed about them and there were no stars. To the north they could see other fires that burned red and sullen along the invisible ridges. They ate and moved on, leaving the fire on the ground behind them, and as they rode up into the mountains this fire seemed to become altered of its location, now here, now there, drawing away, or shifting unaccountably along the flank of their movement. Like some ignis fatuus belated upon the road behind them which all could see and of which none spoke. For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies."

"Glanton spat at the fire and looked at the man where he sat horseless in his rags and he shook his head at the wonderful invention of folly in its guises and forms."

"God dont lie. [...] And these are his words. [...] He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things."