Spiter

“[…] Old Mordred and Ursil hate me, and I hate them; they spite me now, and when I can, I shall spite them.” / “Ah!” said Morgan, remembering his own expressions the evening before, when overheard by Father Aidan, “so I suppose we all are by nature.” / “All are what?” asked his companion. / “All haters and spiters of our enemies.” / “To be sure we are,” replied the girl; “it comes to us, as you say, naturally.[…]”

They considered that the sanctity of the mount had been ‹ brutally trampled on by the spiters of the Lord › when ‹ Ammonites, Moabites, Ishmaelites, Edomites, and Hagarites came bringing coffins and all kinds of unclean things to it. ›

For sheer blasphemous defiance, his moonlit scene rivals for me the great God-spiters of myth and literature: Dante’s Vanni Fucci, looking solemnly up to Heaven from Inferno XXV and flipping the Almighty the thirteenth-century equivalent of the Italian salute; Prometheus himself, writhing on his rock, forever unrepentant.

From the hand of the Lord, however, a spirit atween the king and his sleep; till the king reasoned that for reward to Mordecai, he should be set up on high; and with this, the crown set upon his head: as it was revealed that Mordecai had spoiled a plan spun together by the venomous spiters of the king.