Crispin: The Cross of Lead Quotes

“As judge, jury, and willing executioner, Aycliffe had but to give the word, and the offender’s life was forfeit. We all lived in fear of him.”

“Aycliffe stared at me for a long while as if in search of something. All he said, however, was ‘With your mother gone you’re required to deliver your ox to the manor house tomorrow. It will serve as the death tax.’ ‘But… sir,’ I said—for my speech was slow and ill formed—‘if I do… I… I won’t be able to work the fields.’ ‘Then starve,’ he said and rode away without a backward glance.”

″‘What’s your name?’ she asked me. I made myself look up. ‘Its... Crispin.’ ‘Now there’s a highborn name for a lowly lad.‘”

″‘It seems my father grew weary of me,’ Bear continued. ‘Said I caused too much trouble and ate too much. In truth,’ he added with sudden bitterness, ‘I suspect he offered me to God to fulfill a pledge he’d made in exchange for some profitable trade. Though, I ask you, what kind of man would exchange a boy for a sack of wool?‘”

″‘Do you ever smile, boy?’ he demanded. ‘If you can’t laugh and smile, life is worthless. Do you hear me?’ he yelled. ‘It’s nothing!‘”

“What’s more, everything he talked about was stitched with laughter. It was as if life itself were a jest. Except, every now and then he’d cry out with an awful anger at what he called the injustices of the world.”

“As the priest chanted the Latin prayers, whose meaning I barely understood, I knelt by his side and knew that God had taken away the one person I could claim as my own. But His will be done.”

“The burial took place amongst the other paupers’ graves in the walled cemetery behind our church. It was there the priest and I dug her grave, in water-laden clay. There was no coffin.”

“For as long as I could recall, my mother had simply called me ‘Son,’ and, since her name was Asta, ‘Asta’s son’ became my common name. In a world in which one lived by the light of a father’s name and rank, that meant—since I had no father—I existed in a shadow.”

“There was little my mother or I could do about our plight. We were not slaves. But neither were we free.”