Jordan

“With three hundred men properly mounted, I believe that I can thrust back the Barbarians at least for a while,' I said at last. 'As for saving Britain - I have seen the wild geese flighting this autumn, and who can turn them back? It is more than a hundred years that we have been struggling to stem this Saxon flighting, more than thirty since the last Roman troops left Britain. How much longer, do you think, before the darkness closes over us?' It was a thing that I would not have said to any man save Ambrosius.

And he answered me as I do not think he would have answered any other man. 'God knows. If your work and mine be well wrought, maybe another hundred years.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Sword at Sunset

“Lying sprawled uncouthly at the foot of the Red Dragon where the men had tumbled him down, there was a certain splendor about him still. An old man, an old giant, with bright hairs that shone like gold wires in the gray jut of his beard and the mane of wild hair outflung about his head. I recognized him first by the earl's bracelet twisted about his sword arm, for a spear had taken him between the eyes, but as I looked down more closely into the smashed and blood-pooled face, I recognized the cunning iron-bound mouth, drawn back now in a frozen snarl. I recognized above all, I think the greatness that seemed to cling about him still, an atmosphere of the thing that had made him a giant in more than body; this ancient enemy of Ambrosius's. Hengest, the Jutish adventurer who had grown to be a war lord of the Saxon hordes, lying flung down like a tribute at the foot of the British standard that stirred faintly in the night air above him.

That left the son and the grandson to deal with.

'So-o,' Bedwyr said softly. 'Earl Hengest goes at last to his own Storm Lords again. He should have died on a night of tempest, with the lightning leaping from hill to hill, not on a still summer evening with the scent of hawthorn in the air.'

'He was a royal stag,' I said. 'Thank God he is dead.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Sword at Sunset

“I said, 'Then why don't we yield now, and make an end? There would be fewer cities burned and fewer men slain in that way. Why do we go on fighting? Why not merely lie down and let it come? They say it is easier to drown if you don't struggle.'

'For an idea,' Ambrosius said, beginning again to play with the dragon arm ring; but his eyes were smiling in the firelight, and I think that mine smiled back at him. 'Just for an idea, for an ideal, for a dream.'

I said, 'A dream may be the best thing to die for.”
― Rosemary Sutcliff, Sword at Sunset

“If the windmill should prove too formidable," said he, from the threshold, "I may see what can be done with the wind.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche