Age of Iron (50 page)

He walked away, back towards the gate he’d emerged from. The crowd booed.

“And where do you think you’re going?” shouted Tadman, loud enough for the crowd to hear. The Mearholder tried to run, but Tadman caught him easily, holding him by the neck of his waistcoat. The giant Warrior lifted his long-handled curved blade in one hand, the Mearholder in the other. The waistcoat strained, but its toggles held as Tadman lifted him a good pace from the arena floor, his muscles rolling and swelling like a draught horse’s, the Mearholder’s arms and legs waving like a gassy baby’s. The crowd cheered.

Tadman, soaking up the crowd’s admiration, turned slowly.

When his slab of a back was towards her, Lowa picked up the spear. It was short, with a heavy head – very much not a throwing spear. She took aim and launched it anyway. It missed by a good three paces.

Tadman turned, smiling at her.

“You have to kill them Lowa, or I kill them.”

Tadman let go of the man, pushed him stumbling away and swung his blade. The back of the Mearholder’s knees sprang open with a double spray of blood and he fell onto his face with a scream. He struggled onto his elbows and tried to slither away.

The giant raised his bloodied weapon for another cheer, walked over to the crawling man and knelt next to him. He scrunched the back of the man’s waistcoat in one hand and lifted him onto all fours. With the other hand he lifted his weapon. Slowly, all the while smiling at Lowa, he pushed the blade into the man’s anus then pulled it out. The Mearholder shrieked, then bellowed.

“All right, Tadman, I’ll kill him,” Lowa shouted.

“You had your turn. Now it’s mine.”

Lowa picked up her mace. She made to throw it at Tadman. He ducked behind his victim, then emerged grinning. He pushed the blade halfway into the Mearholder, withdrew it to the tip, then thrust it back, harder and deeper. Then out again. Then back in.

The Mearholder waved his head, screaming. His helmet tumbled to the arena floor and his long ginger hair swung from side to side.

Most of the crowd went wild with adulation, but there were also yells of horror and shouts of “Stop!”

Lowa put down the mace and yanked her chain two-handed. No joy there. She picked up the mace again and aimed a throw. Tadman ducked behind the screaming Mearholder again. This time he carried on working his blade, his arm bloody to the elbow and becoming bloodier as gore squirted with every thrust. Lowa took aim and threw the mace. It spun through the air and lodged in the Mearholder’s head. The screaming stopped and the man went limp. Some cheered, but most of the crowd booed.

Tadman pulled out his blade and stood. He grabbed the shaft of the mace, yanked it from the Mearholder’s head and tossed it back to land by Lowa’s feet.

“You kill them or I kill them. It’s up to you. Next!” he shouted.

Lowa looked over to the door that the ginger man had come from. A woman no more than seventeen years old – a girl really – came stumbling out of it as if pushed. She had a long dagger in each hand.

Roars of joy drowned out the few cries of “Shame!”

The girl looked around wide-eyed.

“
Please
don’t kill this one,” said Tadman, “because I would absolutely love to. And I won’t be nearly so gentle next time.”

Lowa looked up at the blue sky.

Come on gods. Do something good for once.

“K
ing Zadar, I’ve come from the gate. There’s a girl who wants to see you. She says you know her,” said the soldier.

Zadar nodded. “It’s Sabina, or Spring as she’s calling herself.”

“I don’t think so. Her name’s Ing-bo, Ang-bo, Icky Icky Wang Bo Bing Bo Bong Bo Bong Bo. She made me memorise it.” The soldier scratched at his beard. It looked like he’d had a difficult morning.

Still damp from an earlier rain squall, Elliax was shivering. It was cooler than it had been for a long time. Zadar had come to his throne earlier, on his own, and sat. It had looked like he was thinking. Elliax had wanted to say something but couldn’t summon the courage. Instead, he sat on the ground next to his holding post, clasped his knees to his chest and rocked, trying to warm up. He’d had some more special meat that morning and vomited nastily. He was unwell and unhappy, yet his mind was more with him today. He wished it wasn’t. He’d spent Bel knew how long convinced that this was all a test and he’d be freed any moment. Now he knew he was going to die as Zadar’s plaything. Not even his plaything, just a decoration that would be discarded like dead flowers.

He looked at Zadar and hated him. How could the gods allow one man, one such twisted man, to have such power? Because the gods were either indifferent or, more likely, they revelled in human misery as much as the crowds he heard baying in the arena. Or perhaps they were as different as humans, complicated combinations of good and bad? Perhaps the fact that people like Zadar and, let’s face it, himself, were in the ascendancy at the moment reflected a similar shits-incharge situation among the gods?

He thought of Vasin. Almost every word she said and everything she did had made him wince for a good few years now, but he’d loved her. And he’d been eating her. He should have refused. But it was so easy to pretend it wasn’t her. Even now they’d moved her nearby and he could hear her cries, he was still eating her. He just pretended the screams were someone else’s.

“Hi, Zadar!” The chirpy voice shook him from misery. He looked up. A pretty young girl tripped in, ahead of a soldier. Age-wise she was at the younger end of the honeys Elliax had enjoyed at Barton when life was better. He’d seen her somewhere before though …

The girl stood there, beaming.

Zadar looked at her levelly. “Leave us,” he said to the guard, beckoning the child closer. “Sabina.”

“It’s Spring.”

“So I heard. And Silver. It makes no difference to me what you have others call you. Here you will answer to the name I gave you.”

The girl shrugged. “Did you miss me?”

“Had any of my other children absconded at your age, I would have expected them to die. I would have been disappointed if you had.”

“Why?”

“Because ever since you could talk, perhaps even before – you weren’t brought to me until you could – you have displayed charisma and intelligence. You may be protected by magic and may even be able to use it. I suspect that you will rule Maidun, and probably much wider lands, under the Romans.”

“I won’t ever rule.”

“Oh? And why not?”

“I’ve seen what your rule does. I was in Barton before you destroyed it and killed them all. The people were good even though they were poor, and they were only poor because you took away their riches.

That was it, Elliax remembered. Little Spring. She’d been part of Ogre’s gang. He’d done good business with Ogre, back in his other life. He’d noticed Ogre’s new little girl just a few moons before, but the earless bandit had threatened him when he’d asked to rent her for an hour.

The girl continued: “Ogre told me that after you came to Barton their king went mad and you put a horrible little weasel-druid in charge, who took their food, raped their daughters and ruined a lot of lives.”

Zadar nodded towards Elliax.

Spring looked at him. Elliax looked back at her. His throat constricted. Horrors – his horrors – flashed into his mind. He saw hungry families and crying girls. He saw the girl who’d died in his hut. He hadn’t meant her to! He saw Vasin cowering as they came in to cut her again. He saw the Maidun cavalry surging over the weak Barton line and the horrible massacre of innocents that was all his fault …

Spring looked away. The visions cleared and Elliax slumped, sobbing.

“Yes, that’s him. I don’t know what he’s doing here and I don’t know why he looks so ill, but I am sure that even he doesn’t deserve what you’re doing to him.”

Elliax opened his eyes. The girl was facing her father, hands on hips. “And Barton didn’t deserve what you did. I saw the battle. But it wasn’t a fight between two sides. You were like mad boys slaughtering a field of geese. That was the worst I saw, but everywhere where you rule I saw miserable people.
Everyone
said that you had made things worse. Almost all the good people were poor and miserable and the bad people, men like Elliax and Ogre, were happy and rich. As soon as I left the lands that you ruled, it was all fine. Kanawan and Mearhold were clean and nice and how towns should be. But then you came along and destroyed both of those too! Why?”

Zadar looked long and hard at his child. She gazed right back, unafraid.

“I’ll tell you,” he said eventually. “Come and sit down here.” He patted the chair that Felix usually sat on.

“I don’t want to sit next to you.”

Zadar breathed in and seemed to grow a little. Elliax had seen that happen before, usually just before he ordered someone’s death.

“All right. Stand. Obedience can come later. The first thing you have to understand is that the Romans are coming. Disputes in Rome have delayed them and a slave revolt put them back a year or two, but the delays will not last for ever. They are surely coming. All the druids agree.”

“Druids are liars and fakes.” Spring glanced at Elliax. It was like being slapped. He cowered. How could a little girl affect him so powerfully?

“Most of them are, but, as you’ll learn, some aren’t. The Romans
are
coming.”

The girl looked as if she was thinking. Elliax could swear the air was vibrating around her. “All right, maybe the Romans are coming, with endless ships and strange beasts, but we’ll fight them.”

“Did you just…?” Zadar leaned forward. It was the first time Elliax had seen him look interested in anything.

“What?” The girl looked confused.

“Never mind.” Zadar sat back. “They are coming and we cannot fight them.”

“Why not?”

“Who wins in a fight between a squirrel and a bear?”

“A bear. Unless it’s a giant squirrel with a bear spear.”

“Let’s assume normal-sized, unarmed squirrels for the sake of this analogy. How about a bear against a hundred squirrels?”

“The bear.”

“Indeed. Now the Roman army is a like a hundred bears to Britain’s one squirrel. You saw the battle at Barton. That was a small part of my army, and we were outnumbered ten to one. Yet we obliterated them with no injuries to any of my soldiers because we’re well armed, well trained and well led, and they weren’t. The difference between the Roman troops and my troops is greater than the difference between mine and Barton’s. Their skills, weapons and tactics are immeasurably superior to ours. We cannot hold the land. They will invade, and they will invade successfully.”

“Yes, but that’s like being in a running race against someone you know is faster. You can’t not race. You
might
win. You have to try.”

“Not if you’re going to be killed for losing and there’s another option. We have to survive. I am not the wanton tyrant that I appear to be to those who cannot see. I am ensuring the survival of our people. The British people. We may be many tribes on this island, but really we are one people bound by the sea. I am saving all of us.”

“By killing us and selling us as slaves to Rome? That
saves
us, does it?”

Zadar sighed. “Your mother – Robina, was she not?”

“Yes.”

“A good woman. I was sorry when she died.”

“Me too.”

“She took you to the beach in the summer?”

“A few summers ago, yes.”

“And you saw the tide. It comes in, it goes out.”

“It does.”

“Did you build sand forts?”

“We did.”

“What did the tide do to those forts?”

“It destroyed them.”

“And when the tide rolled back, what was left of them?”

“Nothing.”

“No trace at all?”

“Nothing.”

“Well, Sabina, the Romans are the tide. They are coming, and we cannot stop them. But they will ebb away like the tide. Empires never last for ever, but a people can. Britain is a nation of sand forts. Have you heard of Carthage?”

“The tribe who won loads of big battles against the Romans? Yes, my mum told me about them.”

“The Carthaginians did win a battle or two. They almost finished the Romans at the battle of Cannae, but almost wasn’t good enough. Do you remember the end of the story?”

The girl looked at the ground.

“The Carthaginians were obliterated. Their huge city of Carthage – imagine fifty Maidun Castles built of cut stone rather than hewn rock – was ground into the soil and its people slaughtered. When I was a boy I met an old sailor who’d seen Carthage a few days after its destruction. The horrors that he described – mountains of hacked-apart bodies, hordes of lions, vultures and other beasts feeding on flesh – have stayed with me. He said that the worst of it were the dead dogs and horses piled up in the rubble with the human remains. The Romans had killed every living thing in the city. But the greater horror for me is that the Romans obliterated an entire culture.”

“So what? We’ll fight them and beat them.”

“No. Since then, they have greatly improved their armies. Around the time you were born, hundreds of miles from Rome, a Roman general called Lucullus marched a small force into the lands of a king called Tigran. Tigran had a mighty army and thought he was invincible. He’d conquered four other huge tribes and made their kings into his personal slaves. They had to run behind King Tigran’s horse wherever he went and take it in turns to be his chair and his footstool whenever he sat. When Tigran saw Lucullus’ little force marching towards him, he joked that it was too big for a deputation but too small for an army.”

“What happened?” asked the girl, clearly as interested in the story as Elliax. He liked the sound of this Tigran.

“Lucullus attacked,” said Zadar, “and defeated an army twenty times the size of his with almost no loss to his side. Tigran fled.”

“Hmm,” said the girl.

“Sabina, the Romans are unbeatable. If they had come ten years ago, before I’d bolstered Maidun, they would have washed over the land and wiped out our people, leaving no trace of our stories, our songs, our ways – what makes us
a people
, rather than just
people
.”