Age of Iron (45 page)

“You’ve lived under the Romans?” Miller sounded sceptical.

“Oh, it wasn’t so bad. My parents and me worked in a big Roman villa – like a load of big huts stuck together and lived in by just one family and all their slaves. My mum and dad always said that being a slave under the Romans wasn’t that different to living under a king’s rule. We didn’t like the beatings though.”

“Beatings?”

“They beat us all the time – but not so we’d be really hurt. We were always able to work the next day, and we could have had it much worse. The Romans have these big mines in Iberia. Tens of thousands of slaves work at each one. The air at the mines is so poisonous that the slaves’ skin turns white and any birds that fly overhead drop dead from the sky. The slaves don’t live long either.”

Her listeners made various amazed noises and somebody asked, “How did you get away?”

“Well first my dad died.”

“How?”

“The Romans killed him.”

“What for?”

“He was caught making cider.”

Everyone at the table gasped, apart from Mal, who shook his head and walked away. He did not want to hear this.

L
owa looked like she was asleep when he came back, but, standing over her, he saw that her eyes were open. Then he noticed her hand on her knife. One didn’t creep up on Lowa.

“That wasn’t what I expected,” he said.

“She wasn’t there?”

“No. Nor anyone who’d heard of her.”

“I see.”

“What does that mean?”

Lowa stood up and rubbed an eye. She
had
been asleep.

“Could be any of three things. She could have been taken elsewhere, most likely shipped across the sea, possibly to Rome. But if she’s as beautiful as you say, it’s possible that one of the Warriors has her up in the Castle, or she’s in Zadar’s harem up there, or…”

“Or…”

“Or she’s dead.”

“What do you think?”

“I think you need to ask around and find out. It’s time we went our own ways for a while.” She held out his purse.

He didn’t take it. He stood on the green hill under the blue sky, feeling as if a trap door had opened under him. The whole world was whooshing into it and he was about to plummet himself.

“But, tonight … to get you into the fort, I need to make a … distraction?”

“You don’t. It was never an integral part of the plan. Chances are it’ll make things worse. They won’t divert any guards and you’ll put them on a general alert.”

“But?”

Lowa took him by the shoulders.

“Ragnall. Go back to the camp. Talk to people. Keep your eyes open. Go and see a show at the arena. You’ll soon find out what happened to Anwen.”

“And you?”

“I’m probably going to die very soon.”

He’d never seen anyone look more beautiful.

“I hope to kill Zadar first,” she said with a shrug. “If I do, the place will be in turmoil. There will be chances for advancement. You could do worse than stay here and join the army. You could easily make Warrior in a year or two. While you’re doing that you’ll probably find Anwen and discover whether she’s still interested in marrying you. If she’s not here, you should be able to discover where she went, then go on a well-informed quest to find her. Or just move on.”

“But, Lowa…”

“Come on. Buck up. I’m only
probably
going to die. I might get away, in which case I’ll come and find you. OK?”

“OK.” He looked at his toe, which for some reason he was poking into the grass. He’d last felt like this as a child being upbraided by his parents for something he hadn’t done.

“Now, go back that way.” Lowa pointed west. “Nobody will ask anything. If they do, you’ve been to the whorepits.”

“And you?”

“I’m going the other way. Goodbye, Ragnall.”

“No. Lowa.”

She stopped and turned. “Go, find Anwen and be with her.”

“But—”

“Go.”

Ragnall watched her walk away.

N
ita shook her head, took another swig of cider and carried on as loudly as before: “I bet she’s right. She’s been there. She should know.”

Mal looked around apprehensively. There were too many people in the courtyard of Maidun Camp’s biggest inn for this kind of talk. But he also knew better than to try to quieten Nita after a few mugs of cider.

“I’ve seen the way Felix looks at women when he walks through the camp. He doesn’t like them. Stands to reason the rest of Rome will be the same. No women in the army. No professions for women. Can you imagine! No female smiths! Where would smithing be without women like Elann Nancarrow? And I’d like to see what Chamanca and that Lowa would say about no women Warriors.”

“Excuse me?” A showily wealthy fellow called Ollic, whom Mal had never liked or trusted, leaned back from a nearby table. “Is this true, what I’m overhearing?”

“I
have
heard pretty much the same stuff before,” said Miller. “From a man who’d spent many years in Rome. He said that woman are treated like animals. Like pampered animals, to be sure, but like animals all the same. They can’t own property or coins. They wear jewels – better, bigger jewels than we have – but these are owned by their men and can be taken from them at a man’s whim. There can never be a queen, only kings. Worst of all, all the women in each family have the same name.”

“That
can’t
be true!” Nita protested. “How would that work?”

“Say you and Mal had a daughter. Rather than getting her own name like, let’s say … Chamanca Fletcher…” There were a few guffaws. “Yes, yes, calm down. Mal and Nita’s daughter would be called Mallia. Just Mallia, not Mallia Fletcher. If you had two more daughters, they’d both also be called Mallia. Mal’s mother would be called Mallia, because his dad would have been called Mal, and if he had any sisters they’d also be called Mallia.”

“So the men get the same names too?”

“No. I didn’t quite get it, but it seems they have three or even four names each. One, I think, is passed down the generations, but the rest are your own, including maybe a nickname. So my name here is Cheb Miller. Cheb’s my name, Miller is my family name. In Rome I might be called Cheb Zadar Miller Most Handsome.”

There were laughs and a few derisive comments.

“But my daughter would be just Millia, as would my sister, my mum, her sisters, her mum, her sisters … Women all just share the one family name.”

Mal and everyone looked quizzically at Miller. Yet again Mal had no idea what Miller was talking about. “Can you say that again,” he asked, “but so that people with just the one brain can understand it?”

“You idiots. The point is that women are thought of as objects in Rome so they all get the same name. If I have two dogs I give them different names. Roman women don’t get that much respect. I’m pretty sure that’s right, isn’t it, Silver?”

The girl nodded.

“What about the lands they’ve conquered? What about the women there? They can’t own anything?” asked Ollic.

“Same.”

“But how do they get everyone to agree?”

“I can guess!” said Nita. “The men go along with it! They see the chance to double their wealth overnight. To shag that sexy little cousin they’ve always had their eyes on. They run the businesses, do all the fighting, make all the decisions and have all the fun while the women do the drudge work. That’s about it, isn’t it, Miller?”

“That is, indeed, about it.”

“That’s just the women,” said Ollic, grinning. “We’ll be all right, won’t we, lads? Better off!” His friends laughed and clashed tankards.

“You’d think,” said Miller, “but I’ve heard that it’s not just the women who suffer. I’ve heard it said that everyone in the lands that Rome conquers, men and women, are slaves to the Roman soldiers, who treat them like curs with beatings, murder, rape, including male rape, by the way. Your Roman man loves a bit of male arse, apparently. For them, sex is all about power, rather than love or lust. So someone bold like you, Ollic, will need to be put in his place with a regular unwelcome bum-pounding. That’s just the normal people of course. The kings and the rulers still have it all right, better even, which is why so many tribes go down without fighting. The kings tell their people that it will be fine, so they surrender. Then the people live like slaves and the kings live like, well, kings. That about right, Silver?”

Spring gave another big nod.

Ollic had nothing to say to that, which pleased Mal because he always liked to see a dickhead silenced, but this was dangerous talk. If any of the Fifty overheard, they’d all be heading for the arena. People had been killed for saying a lot less. He had to put a stop to it.

“You’re wrong. We stay here under Zadar’s rule and we’re in a position of power like no Iberian tribe ever had. We can negotiate with the Romans to keep our way of life. A couple of minor things may change for the worse, but I’m sure that overall we’ll be better off. They have better healers, heating in their huts and plenty of cheap wine!” There was a murmur of approval. “We’ll have more comfortable lives. We’ll live longer. Things will be better.”

“Will we?” Miller looked sad. “Or will the well off simply become better off, while people like you and me sink?”

L
owa Flynn slithered on her elbows through horse shit and grass towards the great white wall. The bundle containing her camouflage gear was tied between her knees, so her legs were splayed and of little use as she snaked along. She’d have liked to put the pack on her back, but it would have stuck up too much. Molehills were plentiful outside Maidun Castle, but none of them moved.

The path fifty paces to her right was thick with castle traffic. She was forty paces from the fort’s outer wall. She stopped and lay still for a hundred breaths, moved half a pace forward, then lay still again and counted. This was Drustan’s idea. People see movement, he’d said. After a hundred breaths – much longer than she thought necessary – any guard who thought they’d spotted her moving would decide that they hadn’t and moved on. Face down and unoccupied, she noticed things: the smell of the ground, the feel of the wind, the dropping temperature as night approached. With plenty of time for her mind to wander, she found herself thinking more about Dug than anybody else. She kept trying to focus on the mission ahead but Dug kept strolling into her mind with his ready smile and his childishly expressive eyes. She kept picturing the moment when she’d walked up to him in the valley after shooting the dogs. He’d looked so happy to see her, so vulnerable yet so brave.

She realised she’d stopped counting, then decided she must have been still for a hundred breaths and squirmed forward another half a pace, ignoring the temptation to lift her hooded head. It was most odd, she thought. She wanted to look after Dug and be looked after by him. She wished that he was lying on the ground next to her. This mission would be so much more pleasant with him along. Everything had been better with him around, until she’d … She shook her head. Thoughts like this had never troubled her before. Maybe it was the danger? Maybe she’d eaten something unusual. She decided to stop being so soppy and get back to counting.

She reached the bottom of the first wall, where grassy earth gave way to hewn chalk. This was the first place she was very likely to be spotted and pummelled with slingstones. The first of many. She untied the pack from her leg and pulled out the white-wool top and trousers. She took off her brown outfit and slid on the white one, pulling the hood’s white drawstring tight about her face. Her hair was near-enough white, but Drustan had pointed out that it might fly about in the wind.

She buried her discarded clothes in the loose soil of a molehill, tucked a coiled brown rope and its thin iron wool-muffled grapple into a white pouch on her side and looped the leather lanyards of the iron spikes around her wrists. She stood slowly and pressed herself into the white wall, arms spread, iron spike in each hand. She stayed there for a hundred breaths. The chalk wall smelled like flour, fresher than the soil.

No alarms and no surprises. She raised her arm, dug a spike into the wall, waited. No shouts from above. She raised the other spike. It was worryingly easy to jam into the soft rock but it seemed to hold firm.

Here goes, she thought, and ascended as elegantly as a spider. She was soon at the top, breathing heavily but quietly. She paused below the palisade and waited for a guard to pass. As soon as his or her footsteps died away – her, by the lightness of them – Lowa took out her rope and slung its padded grapple over the wooden wall. It landed between two spikes with a soft thud. She yanked. It held.

She landed two-footed on the walkway with a soft thump. The nearest guard was forty paces away, slowing as if about to turn. She gathered the rope, dropped over the inner edge of the walkway and slid, slowly, slowly down the wall. Mercifully, the inner side of the chalk-hewn wall was a little farther from vertical than the outer.

The base of the ditch was dark as a cave at night, but she stood still as she heard the guard pass overhead. She reached out and found two of the sharpened wooden stakes that lined the bottom of Maidun’s ditches. The second wall was as steep as the outer wall and significantly higher. The first seven tenths or so were in darkness, but after that the starlight lit the chalk a silvery white. She readied the iron spikes in her hands, then frowned.

Drustan’s theory that guards on a wall only ever looked outwards had seemed reasonable after a few ciders back on Mearhold. But the guards didn’t stand looking outwards, they walked along the walls. So they
looked
along the walls a good deal of the time. So when she climbed the starlit section of the second wall, one of them would surely spot her.

A low growl interrupted her thoughts. It was a dog, no more than ten paces away. She heard it pad closer. She flung herself onto the wall and scrambled up. When she was certain she was out of paw’s reach, she froze. Below her the dog barked, percussive shouts so loud she felt the air vibrate.

She clung to the wall. “Oi! What is it?” A man’s voice from atop the second wall. “Outer wall?”