Excerpt: Scyldweall

With what is often assumed to be the wisdom of age but what is in truth merely the distillation of experience and bitter regret it is easy to see the moments that change the course of one's life, those often small, inconsequential decisions that set one on a new and all-together different path from the expected road.

I often amuse myself by considering what might have happened if I had chosen differently at many points in my life, if I made other decisions, followed other paths. Yet since the choices I made then brought me to where I am now, how can I complain of my lot?

I have arguments with the new priest about that, back and forth discussion over a mug of ale or two, long into the winter nights. He is not a bad sort, as priests go; more thoughtful than the last, less inclined to look unfavourably on my lack of enthusiasm for his teachings. Indeed, he seems to hold some fascination for the past and for the memories locked away in my head, for he often asks about it when he comes to visit me and I tell him what I can. What is wise for me to tell. I hardly think the king would appreciate the telling of it all!

However, enough of such things - his dissent lies in my easy acceptance of those moments, of the decisions I have made. To him each man stands alone, as if the actions of one have no effect on the rest. But he is a young man - only recently arrived from Ratae - and he still has much to learn.

"Think about it," I told him only yesterday. "If the king rises from his bed in a foul temper - perhaps his servant forget to layer an extra blanket on the bed and he was cold as a result - then it is not just the king who suffers that day! For wont of a simple thing, the lives of all are changed."

He pulled a face at that. "You cannot say that your choices affect the life of the king, William."

"Why not?" I countered at once, wondering if perhaps the man had sustained some fall from his horse in the course of his daily ritual of bothering the local villagers. "Are we not all children of your god?"

He winced at that; although he knows I am really a heathen and a sinner he generally chooses to overlook that as long as I present myself as a goodly man on Sundays, and he prefers that I do not remind him of the truth. "All men are sinners and imperfect; it is only through grace that we are redeemed and may ascend to heaven."

"So all mean are equal in the eyes of your god?"

"William..." he said exasperatedly, and I laughed and topped up his ale from my secret hoard because he is a good man and far more convivial company than his predecessor.

One day he will understand. One day he will see that the lives of all men, however great or lowly their station, depend on the actions of others, on the choices of others, on those moments that we can no more plan for than predict their coming. Perhaps when he reads this - though that will not happen until I draw my final breath - he will understand that even the destiny of a king can be changed on nothing more than the word of his most lowly subject in his land.