Age of Iron (5 page)

At sea long spells of boredom had been broken by terrifying, exciting and shameful adventures. His self-obsession and growing penchant for brutality suited marine life. Soon he’d risen from junior deckhand to junior pirate. He did well. He killed a lot of people. Butchery skills, he discovered, lent themselves well to knowing how to finish a knife fight. A shipwreck on Britain’s south-west Dumnonian coast had put paid to piracy for a while, and Ulpius, via a host of ugly events that he’d pushed to the recesses of his memory (the men who’d rescued him, half-drowned, from the beach had pretended that they didn’t know he was a man, which wasn’t a great start), had ended up where he was now. Still with gorgeous, heavily styled but manly hair, he was stuck on the Hades-blighted isle of Britain, earning a performance-related wage as a land pirate in a small band of bandits run by a man called Landun Ogilvie, who went by the name of Ogre.

Ulpius suspected that he’d been recruited to bring some beauty to the gang since Ogre had a large nose, no hair and no ears. He’d lost them in a torturing incident that he didn’t like to talk about. He could still hear through the puckered clumps of gristle that he had instead of ears, but he didn’t like talking about them either. Very few who mentioned waggishly that his ears looked like cats’ bumholes got away with their lives.

Ogre was not just the most uncannily perceptive gang leader; he was also the cruellest man Ulpius had ever met, which was saying something. The depravity visited on the gang’s victims kept Ulpius very happy. Until his new obsession arrived. An obsession to rival or even supplant the mirror. This was Spring. A girl called Spring was ruining his life.

Spring was the newest member of Ogre’s gang. They’d found her working in a drinking house and Ogre had taken a liking to her, Pluto knew why. They needed a replacement for Farrell, who, to everyone’s surprise, particularly Farrell’s, had been killed by a bear earlier that year.

Ulpius knew that all women were trouble and Spring was no exception, even though she couldn’t yet be ten years old. She’d seemed fine to begin with, a quiet girl who sat on her own and was small, flexible and useful for burglary. But slowly, somehow, Spring had done something despicable and unforgivable that nobody else had ever done. She had made Ulpius feel embarrassed about his hair.

She had a way of looking at him when he was combing it.

Yesterday he’d asked her straight out, “Are you trying to mock me?”

“No,” she’d replied. “Why would I mock your hair?”

It was an hour later, running the exchange back in his memory, that he realised what she’d done there. He decided to kill her at the next possible opportunity.

Sitting on the hill, drinking cider, watching the massacre below and looking forward to the next day’s battlefield looting, Ulpius silently practised tomorrow’s potentially tricky conversation. “That’s right, Ogre. Bugger was still alive! He stuck a knife in her when she tried to take if off him. A terrible shame. Such a sweet child, cruelly taken.”

D
ug fled.

He’d had a go at rallying them, shouting that they couldn’t lose if they just held the badger-fucking line! He’d grabbed a spear off a passing man and tried to push to the front. He’d thought,
Coward
, but knew he was no braver; he just knew that his best chance of survival lay in the line holding. “Cavalry can’t charge a spear line!” he’d shouted, but in vain. Barton was beaten before the armies even met. So Dug turned and ran as fast as a fit but mildly overweight forty-year-old man wearing ringmail can run through a panicking army. He could have stood like a hero of old and met the Maidun force, he thought as he ran, but there were old soldiers and there were brave soldiers. You can’t be both.

He almost tripped over the boy who’d been on his shoulders.

“Help meeee!” squealed the boy, reaching up for Dug. His spindly shin was broken into a right angle.

Dug stopped. “Why didn’t you run? I told you to run!” The boy tried to get up but fell, faced twisted in agony and slimy with snot. Dug looked back. Zadar’s heavy cavalry were a hundred paces away and coming fast.

He stooped to pick the boy up, then remembered the mantra that had kept him alive since he’d left the north, since the day he’d lost everything. Never help anyone. He glanced up again. The cavalry were closer. If he picked the boy up they’d both die. If he didn’t, he might make it. And it wasn’t his fault that the boy hadn’t done what he was told.

He ran on, telling himself to ignore the boy’s screams.

He hurtled across the flood plain towards the river, ringmail jangling. A woman was ahead of him. Suddenly an arrow shaft was jutting from her neck. She crashed to the ground, right arm flapping like an angry chicken’s wing. He jumped over her. More missiles fell all around. One moment someone would be running headlong, the next, falling. An arrow or a stone ricocheted off Dug’s helmet with a loud
spang
. It was like being whacked with a cosh. He stumbled, half-tripped over a corpse and ran on.

If he could make it to the bridge, he might get away. He looked over at it. A fan-shaped crowd of waving, shouting, screaming, pulsating humanity spread back from the crashed cart that blocked it.
Badgers’ arseholes!
There was no escape.

He was in the reeds before he saw that the river was too deep to wade. Dug could swim, but not when he was wearing ringmail. A green-headed mallard broke cover, padded along the water’s surface and took off, banking and flying away in the very direction that Dug would very much have liked to have flown. Was there time to pull off his mail before the enemy was on him? He turned.
No.

The heavy cavalry had slowed and was wheeling towards the bridge. Chariots came on in its wake, killing those who hadn’t fled fast enough. Two were slicing towards Dug like hot cleavers through warm blubber. They’d spotted his mail shirt and they wanted it. This, thought Dug, was the downside of being better dressed than the rest of the army. There was no hiding. Four pairs of enemy eyes fixed firmly on his as the chariots bounced along towards him. Javelins were raised. Dug looked around for a weaker, more lucrative target to point out to them, but saw only dying people with ineffective weapons wearing nothing anyone would want.

He was a big man and a good fighter. He knew he wasn’t the biggest or the best, but he was bigger and better than most. Although well past his best. He’d taken on and beaten a chariot before, but that had been up north and he’d been ten years younger. And it had only been one, while here came two of the famous Maidun Castle teams, drilled to a level of gung-ho military perfection that Dug had never had the time or character for.

Why oh why had he got himself into this? He’d been too stupid, and too drunk, let’s face it, to realise that taking on Britain’s most powerful and notoriously vicious army was a bad idea, no matter how safe the plan had sounded. He should have been on his way to Maidun right now to sign up with the very army that was about to kill him. But it was too late to explain that to the oncoming charioteers.

“Badgerfucktwats,” he muttered, feeling sick and sorry for himself. He sighed, stood square and readied his hammer, preparing himself for the final action of a long and tarnished military career. Bouncing on your toes from one foot to the other was meant to make it easier to dodge javelins. He gave it a go. His heels squelched in the riverside mud and it didn’t really work.

“Praise you, Danu! Praise Bel! Praise Toutatis! Praise Makka! Praise Camulos! Praise Lugh … Praise Cromm Cruach!” He wasn’t sure whether he was pleading for rescue or thanking the gods for death.

L
owa Flynn sat naked on the hearth edge, her usually pale skin golden in the firelight. She frowned as she scraped blood and soil from her fingernails with one of her beautifully forged, cruelly sharp iron arrowheads. She looked about, scowling. Was it the
hut
filling her with this annoying, unprecedented feeling of dread?

She looked around. Nothing seemed unusual. The packed-earth floor was strewn with clean reeds and the hut filled with the well ordered if meagre belongings of a poor but proud family. The circular wall was made of mud, dung and vegetation packed around twigs latticed between wooden posts. It led up to a conical reed roof with a central chimney hole.

There were four rolled-up sleeping mats next to the central hearth and a smattering of tools and toys arranged neatly on shelves. A shoddily made three-legged wooden dog with nails for eyes looked at her reproachfully in the firelight. Eight clean leather indoor shoes – two big, two medium-sized, four small – were arranged neatly in the doorway. Poignantly awaiting owners who’d never return, she found herself thinking.

Where was this sentimentality coming from? Life had beaten mawkishness out of her a long time ago, yet she’d been feeling distinctly odd since the end of the battle. She kept jumping at things in the corner of her eye that weren’t there. When a spider scampered across the floor, she almost cried aloud. Something was very wrong. Or maybe this was what happened when you got older? Maybe old people felt like this the whole time? That would explain a lot about their behaviour. She cursed her weakness, shook her head and returned to cleaning her nails with the arrowhead.

Usually the shaft was the most valuable part of an arrow. The fletches – feathers that straightened the path between bow and target – could be plucked from ducks, and ducks were easy to find and absurdly easy to shoot. Too easy. Unlike almost everybody she’d met, Lowa saw no reason to believe that gods existed. However, if there were proof that they did, then surely ducks were it. Only the protection of the gods could explain why an animal as delicious, fine-feathered and easy to catch as a duck could not only avoid extinction, but survive in huge numbers and myriad variations.

A standard arrowhead was easy enough to knock from iron, knap from flint or cast from bronze, and could be dug out of flesh to use again. Shafts, on the other hand, had to be dead straight, a pace long and made from a light wood like ash, birch or poplar. A good shaft was difficult to make and tended to snap if an inconsiderate target pitched forward onto it, wrenched it from his leg or mistreated it some other way.

Lowa’s iron arrowheads were different. Each was lovingly forged, beaten and sharpened by Elann Nancarrow, Maidun’s chief weaponsmith. They were sharp and perfect. Just one of them could be exchanged for ten of the finest fletched shafts. She had a few different types: slim bodkins for distance and penetration, barbed broadheads for short-range damage, blunts for small game and even half-moons for cutting ships’ rigging. She knew that they were an affectation, little better than standard arrow heads, and that she’d never have a reason to use the half-moons. But they looked fantastic. As one of Zadar’s top soldiers, she’d amassed more riches than she knew what to do with, so she could easily afford them. And she liked beautiful things.

Her longbow leaned against the wall of the hut next to the shorter, less powerful recurve that she used on horseback. The longbow was no affectation. It was the culmination of years of learning, practice and experimentation – mostly Elann Nancarrow’s and her ancestors’. Elann had air-dried and cured a whole yew tree for five years, then rasped and sanded it into a two-pace-long bow limb. Stiffer heartwood made the bow’s belly so the draw was more resistant, adding more power. Springier external wood made the bow’s back, making the release quicker, adding even more power to the arrow. Most men couldn’t draw the bow properly, but after years of practice Lowa could shoot an arrow from a fully drawn bow every three heartbeats. Each arrow could pierce iron a finger’s breadth thick at close range or, at eight hundred paces, knock a ringmail-clad man off his horse.

The bow’s tips were fire-hardened aurochs horn, its string rawhide, the handle soft but tough foal’s leather. It had no decoration. It was gnarled and knobbed like a freakishly long badly stuffed sausage. Drawing it fully was an inelegant manoeuvre of squeezing the shoulder blades together and wrenching the chest open. Ballistas and other horse- or ox-drawn weapons aside, it was probably the most powerful bow in existence. Equal most powerful anyway. Its twin sat proudly in Elann Nancarrow’s hut on Maidun Castle, and she was making more. Many said that these longbows must have been made with magic, and that Lowa herself must be a powerful druid to be able to use one. That annoyed her. The bow and her skill were the product of a lot of hard work and nothing else.

Looking at her longbow now, then down at the beautiful iron arrowhead, its deep contoured hues even more lovely in the flickering light of the fire, didn’t give Lowa its usual warm pleasure. They were just things, she found herself thinking. She cursed and tossed a slingstone at the toy dog. The stone ricocheted off a wall upright and skittered into a dark corner.

Unlike her to miss.
What the Mother was up?
Must be hungry, she told herself. If Aithne hadn’t forgotten to collect their lunches from the food wagon that morning, or if she could be bothered to head to the main camp to forage, then she’d feel fine, she told herself. Much more importantly than hunger or paranoia, what was she going to wear to the after-battle party?

She rifled through a chest of clothes tucked into an alcove. Peasant threads. She lifted out a leather waistcoat. It still smelled of the dog shit it had been tanned with. You’d expect people with a well made hut like this to have better clothes. But Barton had been crippled by Zadar’s taxes for ten years. The structure of its prosperous past remained, but the luxuries were gone. She tossed the waistcoat back into the chest and pulled a crumpled red linen dress from her own leather bag. It was all she had for the evening’s festivities, but she’d worn it two nights ago. It had a mild body odour hum and a grass stain on the bottom. She smiled in memory of the grass stain.

She’d only planned for one victory party on this sortie. The red dress would have to get a second outing. In her teens that might have upset her. Now she’d reached her grand old mid-twenties, it still worried her, but she knew it shouldn’t. Men didn’t care if you wore the same thing ten times in a row, as long as you looked good. There were women who would notice, but the opinion of women who cared about shit like that meant almost nothing to her. Besides, as she’d decided years ago, and almost convinced herself, most people would be far too busy worrying about themselves to notice her outfit.