Age of Iron (12 page)

“Aye well, I thought it was just me too. I used to do it the whole time with my girls.”

Spring nodded as if she knew exactly what he meant.

“That one’s a whale jumping,” said Dug.

“What’s a whale?”

“A big fish.”

“Bigger than a pike?”

“Dear oh dear. Bigger than a thousand pikes. Have you never been to the sea?”

“I have. But only to the edge, never out in a boat.”

“You should try it. The clouds are even better when you’re at sea.”

“Can you tell me the story of the war against the halfmen, please?” she asked a little while later as he lifted her across the gap in a broken bridge. Sunlight speared through the trees and dragonflies hummed along the babbling stream.

“Aye, well, that’s a good one. My ma used to tell me that one, and I used to tell it to my girls. Many years ago, before the war of the gods and the time of ice, Britain and the rest of the world were one big land and you could have walked from here to Rome without getting your feet wet…”

“Y
ou’re a bad husband. Do you want to know why?”

Weylin didn’t bother answering. She’d tell him anyway. He looked over his shoulder. The six other riders – also members of the Fifty who Felix had ordered to capture Lowa – were far enough back and talking among themselves. They probably couldn’t hear Dionysia even if her voice was like knitting needles in his ears. He sighed and looked at the face he’d come to hate. Green eyes that were once seductive now radiated sour misery. Once-kissable lips were ruckled like a dried limpet. Freckles that he’d once traced with an adoring finger were now a blight across flushed, angry cheeks.

“You never support me. You didn’t support me in front of Felix last night. You didn’t take a Roman name like you said you would. Worst of all, you didn’t look out for me in the battle!”

“A kingfisher!” Weylin pointed at the brightly coloured bird watching them from a fence post. They were riding along the riverside path to Bladonfort, so he’d been looking out for kingfishers. “They’re usually more shy than that. It might be injur—”

Dionysia grabbed his arm and pulled him back towards her. “Stop looking at the fucking wildlife and get back to the subject. You. Were. Not. Looking out for me!”

The kingfisher darted into cover. Weylin shook his head. His thick mane, lumpen from that morning’s application of beeswax, swayed heavily. The sun glinted off his freshly shaved scalp. Not often you saw a kingfisher.

“All right. In which battle do you think I wasn’t looking out for you?”

“At Barton.”

“That wasn’t a battle. Nobody was killed.”

“
Thousands
were killed!”

“I mean on our side. None of ours even got injured.”

“That’s still a battle.” Dionysia sounded unsure. Weylin loved the rare occasions when he wrong-footed her.

“Actually I did hear about one guy afterwards,” he said. “A guy in the light chariots got stabbed by the woman he was raping about an hour after the battle. He’ll live. She won’t. He punched her face in. He had to finish off into her corpse…” Weylin chuckled.

“You are such a fucking animal. You think it was totally fine to rape her and kill her when she resisted? And then … a dead body? Do men have no shame?”

“I dunno. What does it matter? We won the battle; he can do what he wants. But he should be ashamed that he let her stab him, and she was stupid not to kill him. And what do you mind? I’ve never seen you try to stop the raping. And it’s not like I join in.”
Not when you’re around anyway
. “But that’s not the point. Point is, it wasn’t a proper battle, so I didn’t need to keep an eye on you. But, as it happens, because I am such a good husband, I
was
watching you. And what I saw was you, as always, showing off to Atlas and Carden.”

“That’s bullshit.”

Weylin’s horse skittered as a frog hopped off the road and into the grass. He rubbed its neck soothingly.

“I heard you shout, ‘Atlas, Carden, watch this!’ then ride, big arse in the air, at a group of peasants who you chopped down from behind. You almost fell off trying to copy Atlas’s torso-in-half thing on a girl who couldn’t have been more than twelve.”

“I do not have a big arse!”

“Don’t you?”

“It’s smaller than Lowa’s.”

“Really?” Weylin rolled his eyes in disbelief, knowing how much that would annoy her.

“You turd. You’re no looker with your … stupid, stupid hair … and that wasn’t showing off to Atlas and Carden, it’s my fucking
training
. I’m at a level now that you won’t ever reach. I could have asked you to watch, but frankly I’m not interested in any criticism about my swordplay from anyone who isn’t at least as good as Atlas.”

“I’m a Warrior.”

“We’re all Warriors! It’s not hard to kill ten people when you’re in this army, although there are those who think that cutting down ten children shouldn’t count.”

“I have earned my Warrior medal again and—”

“Possibly,
dear
. But there are different levels of Warrior. And since I’m quite a few above you, there’s no point asking you to assess my swordplay. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Cromm Cruach, paranoid
and
arrogant.”

They rode on in uncomfortable silence, Dionysia gazing blankly at the road ahead, Weylin looking for kingfishers.

“You don’t fancy me any more,” she said after a while. “I saw the way you looked at Chamanca. Only you could fancy a woman with teeth like a dog’s. But she’d never go for you, you know, not with that stupid hair and the brains to match. What does your hair look like? What was it Carden said? It was brilliant. ‘Like a squirrel fucking a turnip!’ That was it! I’d forgotten that! Just brilliant.”

Dionysia bent over her horse’s neck, almost choking with fake laughter. Weylin thought about opening up the back of her head with his sword. He looked back. Nah. The others were too close.

They rode on to Bladonfort.

A
n hour later Dug and Spring came to the hideout described to him a moon before by a short-term travelling companion. He hadn’t thought he’d need it, but it was always good to have an escape plan.

It was an enclosure maybe ten paces across, ringed with a ditch and low bank, tucked into woods skirting a grassy flood plain. Probably it had been a small fortified farm, but many generations ago it had been abandoned or sacked, looted for building materials and overrun by trees and bushes. Now it was part of the woods and far enough from the river that people walking the banks wouldn’t know it was there. Dug was glad to see the vegetation was untrodden. Nobody had been here for a while. It should suit his purpose.

A battle, Dug thought, was like a boulder lobbed into a pond. The initial splosh of killing and uproar created waves and then ripples of violence all around for days. A petty thief might become a murderous highwayman. A women who’d been happy to be unhappy at home for years might suddenly butcher her husband, children, dogs and a couple of the neighbours before throwing herself off a cliff. That sort of thing. So Spring would be better off hiding here for a couple of days until the region had calmed. Dug wasn’t concerned about himself. There were so many easy targets around that someone his size and ugliness needn’t worry too much.

Spring sat on the bank and made a daisy chain while Dug stripped bark from a silver birch with his flint knife, folded it into a watertight box and pinned the corners with split twigs wound in bark twine. He walked over to the river, checking all the way that there was nobody about, and filled his new container. He drank it down, refilled it, drained it and refilled it again. A grey heron watched from the opposite bank. Dug felt for his sling. He’d left it with Spring. The heron, seeming to read Dug’s mind – or actually reading it for all he knew – took off and flew lazily upriver.

He sloshed out quite a lot of water crossing the hummocky meadow, but there was enough left for the child. He handed the box to her, then rummaged in his bag and fished out a nub of dirty bread.

“Now be a good girl and stay here while I go into town.”

“Why don’t
you
be a good girl and stay here while
I
go into town?”

Dug sighed. “Because Bladonfort will be awash with Zadar’s troops full of vicory, and nothing makes men into bigger twats – fools – than being in a gang of other fools with whom they’ve just won a battle. It’s no place for a girl.”

Not the safest place for anyone
, he thought, but the sooner he joined Zadar’s army the better. He’d been fantasising recently about garrison work. Being on the losing side the day before had bolstered his desire for a life of violence-free indolence. Assuming he could get into the garrison of Maidun Castle itself – and he saw no reason why he shouldn’t, being a Warrior who was going to lie about a leg injury that would make him less useful in the mobile army – it would be a life of peaceful days, piles of food, gallons of booze, lots of sleep, a modicum of whoring and, who knew, maybe even a love affair with a comely milkmaid? He felt Brinna’s disapproving glare from beyond her watery grave and dismissed it. She’d always be his true love, but she couldn’t expect him to mourn for ever.

“Stay under the trees,” he continued. “If you need more water, wait until dark. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“When tomorrow?”

“Um … in the morning. Or maybe the afternoon.”

“Will you get some hen’s eggs? Or duck’s?” Spring produced a bronze coin from her smock’s pocket. “That should be enough.”

Dug took the coin and frowned at it. He didn’t like this southern “money” thing. Exchanging small discs of metal for food and services was plain weird. It wasn’t that it was a bad idea. Metal discs were less cumbersome than the iron ingots or salt cakes that he’d had to get used to on his way south and definitely easier to handle than the buckets of seal blubber, skins and kludge – a cheese made from seal milk – that had served the same purpose when he was a child. They were a bugger to carry to market to exchange for meat and wheat. He could remember it all as if it were yesterday – the clouds of biting midges, the sore arms, the sweaty chafing and the stink. The kludge would always slop out onto him and he’d smell of fishy cheese for days.

So seal products, iron ingots and salt weren’t as portable as metal discs, but they were useful things in themselves. Coins weren’t. They were made from stuff that you dug out of the ground, so they were just pretentious pebbles. So how was it that you could swap them for useful things? They were unnatural and they were Roman. They were just a taste of the boring, sensible but deeply
wrong
Roman life that the druids said was coming.

He looked at Spring’s coin. There was a crude picture of a horse on it, or perhaps it was a dog.

“Is that a dog?”

“It’s a horse, silly! That’s Zadar on the other side.”

Dug turned the coin. A little bronze face with a gaping mouth looked back at him. “He looks like he’s giving a blow—”

“Yes?”

“—by blow account of something.”

“It’s a bad picture. You can get at least a dozen eggs for a horse coin. Try to get more. Say that you got twenty in Forkton. You can share them with me, four for you and eight for me. You can have more if you get more than a dozen. I’ll find garlic, mushrooms and an onion, and I’ll get some cheese from somewhere.”

“No, you won’t. You’re to stay within these banks, apart from getting water, which you do only at night. Got it?”

“Sure!” Spring smiled.

“OK, OK. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He patted the girl on the head and strode towards the low earthwork.

“Dug?”

He turned.

“Can I have Ulpius’ mirror?”

“What?”

“The mirror you took from the man you killed with your hammer this morning.”

“Ah that, yes. Well, no. Well you can, but I want to take it into Bladonfort to see how much it’s worth. I’ll give it to you after that.”

“OK!” Spring skipped in a happy circle. “Thanks, Dug!”

Before he knew what was happening, she’d darted forward and was hugging him, face pressed against his stomach.

Dug disentangled her arms, said goodbye, climbed the bank and headed off downriver. He could feel her watching him from the trees. With any luck the after-battle rage would have dissipated by the two days he reckoned it would take for her to be certain that he wasn’t coming back. He was glad he hadn’t killed her. The world was a better place, he thought, with her in it. That was why he had to leave her. He liked her. The idea of taking her with him and protecting her did appeal, but he knew he’d end up getting her killed. Better for her, and him, that they went their own ways.

He walked downstream along the river, following an increasingly well worn path. It was early still but already getting hot. He stopped to pull off his ringmail shirt. A fiery wave of body odour made his eyes water. He toyed with the idea of a swim, but he was starving. Good thing he’d got half his Barton pay up front. He’d have a feast in Bladonfort.

He thought about crisp-edged mutton or perhaps a fatty duck. His mouth filled with saliva and he swallowed. Maybe duck, then mutton. And he had the girl’s coin as well. That would cover a few drinks. He felt a twinge of guilt. No, screw her. He hadn’t killed her when he should have done. She should be grateful for that. Helping others got you killed. Britain was no place for sentimentality. Not his fault. He had things to do. She’d hate it where he was going. She’d be all right.

He walked on, a tune in his head and his step jaunty.

He felt slightly bad about taking the mirror, but it was his. He’d killed the guy. She’d just asked for it. You couldn’t go about giving people everything they asked for. Danu would agree.

It looked like the valley had once been pasture on both sides of the river, with oak trees for shade. Now there were stumps and wild grass untrimmed by grazing. The bones of a cow jutting from the grass confirmed his theory, and told him that the land had been pillaged more for pleasure than necessity. Only the wanton would leave good marrow behind.