Clash of Iron (2 page)

“Lowa,” Atlas shouted over the drumming hooves, “We need to go back. There are too many of them. We have to come to terms. It is not too late—”

“It is too late. Call a council the moment we return. We have a battle to plan.”

“I
can’t,” she said, shaking her head then looking up.

Lowa looked seriously angry. Spring couldn’t remember anyone ever looking so angry with her, apart from perhaps her father, King Zadar. It wasn’t like Lowa at all. Being in charge changed people, it seemed, and not for the better.

“Spring, whatever you did to Dug and me in the arena, you’re going to do it again to both of us and to as many other Maidun Warriors as you can, and we are going to tear this Dumnonian army to pieces.”

“Lowa, no. I can’t.” Spring looked at the sling in her hands. She’d come into the woods ostensibly to hunt game, but really she wanted be alone. Finding out that she could use magic had thrilled, confused and upset her. Realising after the death of her father that her magic seemed to have left her had not cheered her any. She’d thought that getting away from all the noise of Maidun and walking on her own through the trees might make things clearer. So far it hadn’t. She’d also thought she’d been careful to leave no trail, but Lowa had tracked her.

“You will try,” said Maidun’s new queen. “This isn’t a game. The Dumnonians outnumber us massively. It is very likely that they will kill us all, Dug included. Do you want that to happen? I don’t know what your power is or where it comes from, but I know what it can do. You have to use it to help us.”

Spring wanted to burrow into the ground to get away. If she could have used her magic still, she would have created an island miles across the sea where she could have lived with Dug for ever, and perhaps a few other nice people, but certainly nobody who wanted to get involved in battles. “Can’t Drustan help?” she asked.

“He’s going to do what he can, but he says that compared to you he can’t do anything.”

“I do want to help, but I can’t. I don’t know what I did to you and Dug to give you strength, I just did it. It was the same the night before when I took Chamanca’s outfit. I knew that I should take it, I knew that by touching it I’d make the leather strong and it would protect you, and I knew that I should put it in your cell. But I don’t know how I knew. And I’m certain that I can’t use my magic against the Dumnonians, totally certain, as certain as I am that I can’t drink all the water in the sea. There’s no point trying, I just can’t.” Spring’s vision blurred with tears.

“But in the arena—”

“I know! I’m sorry!”

Lowa’s lips were a thin white line. For a moment Spring thought she was going to hit her.

“So, when you put – for want of a better word – the magic into Chamanca’s outfit that stopped the chariot’s blade from chopping me in half, that was the first time you’d used magic?”

“I don’t know if it was magic, or what it was.”

“Was that the first time?”

“Oh no. It’s happened loads before. Like when I met Dug he wanted to kill me, so I had to change his mind, but before that Ulpius wanted to kill me so I had to wake Dug up by going into his dream and getting him. Sometimes I just know things. Like I know the Romans are coming, and just before I met you I knew that Weylin would want a cart and I could rescue you and Dug by getting one. Sometimes I can do things, like when Juniper the dog jumped at me I stopped her heart, and sometimes I can make other people know things, like when I taught the girls to use the slings and then, like on Mearhold, I can make people fall in and out…” Spring reddened as she remembered that Lowa mustn’t know about that. “…of boats, like I did for a joke once with one of the boys—”

“Hang on.” Lowa took Spring’s chin gently in her hand and looked into her eyes. “That’s not what you were going to say.” Spring tried to pull away. Lowa’s fingers tightened. She leant forward. Her gaze speared through Spring’s eyes and bored into her brain. “You missed something out, didn’t you?” she said quietly.

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

“On Mearhold. You used your magic for something that you’re not telling me.”

Spring tried to squirm away, but Lowa’s grip was iron. “No, I didn’t!” she insisted. With her lips pressed together by Lowa’s strong fingers she sounded like someone who’d had their tongue split in two by liars’ tongue scissors. “What could I have used it for?” She had used her magic to make Lowa fall out of love with Dug on Mearhold. At the time it had made good sense. She and Dug been happy before Lowa had come along. Meeting Lowa had resulted in Dug being savaged half to death by a horrible animal, not to mention Spring herself being stabbed and kidnapped by the awful Ogre, and who knew what more trouble this blonde archer was going to bring them? So Spring had acted to save Dug, and, if she was honest, because she wanted Dug to herself. However, when Spring had seen how much her actions had upset Dug, and Lowa, too, she’d realised that she’d made a mistake. She’d tried to cancel her spell, or whatever it was, but she didn’t know if she had succeeded, and there was nothing she could do now that she had lost her magic. Besides, even if it came back, she’d learnt her lesson about mucking around with people’s affections and she wasn’t going to do it again. So she could have told Lowa what she’d done, but there was nothing to gain from it and plenty to lose.

Spring fixed her eyes on Lowa’s and said, as firmly and seriously as she could through her squashed mouth: “I did not use my magic on Mearhold.”

Lowa released her, but her stare did not let up. Spring squirmed and resisted the urge to tell her all just to stop those eyes poking about in her head.

“Enough of this,” said Lowa, “I’ve got a battle to plan.”

“I’ll come to the battle. I’ll do whatever I can to help. I’m good with my sling! But I won’t be able to use magic. I’ll try, I will, but I know it won’t work.”

“You do what you want.” Lowa strode away.

Spring watched her walk off. She’d come to the woods to try and make herself feel better, but now she felt as rotten as she ever had.

D
ug wrinkled his nose at the endless Dumnonian army, stretching out of sight south and westwards across the grassy undulations of Sarum Plain. Opposite him, in the enemy line, horses stamped and blade-wheeled chariots creaked. Some hairy Dumnonian men and women shouted insults but for the most part they waited quietly like Dug. There’d be plenty of time for shouting once the Dumnonians charged. Assuming that they did charge. Dug didn’t know the battle plan in detail, he knew only that he and the hundred men he’d been put in charge of were to wait until the enemy came at them. He looked down and saw that his knuckles were white from gripping his hammer. He relaxed his hand, filled his lungs then breathed out long and slow.

It was a cool, dry late summer’s day under a white cloud sky, which was a plus. Fighting was more pleasant when it wasn’t too hot. But why was he fighting at all? He could have carried on out of Maidun and be waking up now in some town like Bladonfort with a bit of a hangover, ready to start working on the next one. Instead he’d come back, had risen before it was light with thousands of other nervous bastards and was lining up for yet another battle. Great big badgers’ arses, why? Because, he admitted to himself with a self-chastising shake of his head, he was an idiot who wanted to impress Lowa, even though she didn’t even know he’d gone away, let alone that he’d come back, and she was too busy being queen to care anyway.

Talk was that the Dumnonians numbered a hundred thousand men and women. Dug was sure that they didn’t. That was what the shout had said, and everybody had accepted it. People always exaggerated army sizes and it wasn’t as if anyone had popped over to the Dumnonian camp, asked them all to stand still and counted them. One thing was sure, though – there certainly were shiteloads of the nasty looking buggers – many, many, many more than the Maidun army had.

So it looked like Queen Lowa’s reign was to be a short one. It was an odd twist of fate, mused Dug. If Lowa had waited less than a moon, then Zadar would still be ruling Maidun instead of her, the Dumnonians would have crushed him instead and would have avenged her dead sister and friends for her. But now Lowa was leading a formerly enemy army that she’d previously been a part of, against an army that she would have joined, had she known it was going to attack the army she was now leading. The world, thought Dug, was rarely straightforward.

The outcome of the battle would be, though, without even taking the massive difference in army sizes into account. Before it had even begun, Lowa had made some blinding errors, as Dug had noticed that new kings and queens were wont to do.

There was a ripple along the Dumnonian line and a couple of chariots started forward. Were they about to charge? Dug and the rest of the Maidun army tensed as one, but the chariots wheeled round to display a couple of naked, mooning posteriors, and returned to the Dumnonian lines.

Now, where was I? thought Dug. Oh yes, he’d been thinking that he should have gone to the war council and pointed out how rubbish the plan was, and not chickened out of it because he didn’t want to see Lowa and that woman-stealing arsehole Ragnall together. Whatever advice Drustan, Carden, Atlas and the rest had given her, it had either been crap or she’d ignored it. He could see three glaring mistakes.

First rule when fighting a larger army was to find somewhere narrow to fight, like a valley or, better, a cliff-lined gorge, to ensure that fighting was never more then one on one. Yet Lowa had decided to meet Samalur on an open plain, where he would surely encircle her much smaller force and attack every soldier of hers with ten of his.

Second rule with a smaller army was surprise. Hit the enemy when and where they didn’t expect it. Yet the Dumnonians had been camped in the same place for three days, and Lowa had announced that she would attack them there. It couldn’t have been less of a surprise.

The third, and biggest, error was meeting Samalur in battle at all. An army that size would be able to feed itself for only a matter of days in enemy territory, so, had Lowa pulled her people up into impregnable Maidun Castle and closed the gates, the Dumnonians would have gone home soon enough.

The only good thing he’d heard that she’d done was to tell the Dumnonian king that they were going to attack the night before. With any luck he would have kept his troops awake in readiness, while the Maidun forces had slept. And, Dug admitted to himself, he didn’t know everything. There might have been more to the plan than immediately met the eye. Whatever, it didn’t matter. He just had to follow orders, give orders, and fight.

Down by his feet were two long spears and a large, hefty shield. They’d been sneaked forward once the ranks were already in place so that the Dumnonians wouldn’t know they were there. That was pretty tricksy and should really muck up a chariot charge, so it was possible, he supposed, that Lowa had other schemes in place.

Another positive was that the breeze was an easterly on the Maidunites backs, rather than the more common south-westerly. That was a spot of luck, since their projectiles would go further than the enemy’s, but it was hardly a gale, and there was no way Lowa could claim credit for the direction of the wind.

Dug’s thoughts were interrupted by a rattling blare of bronze trumpets with wooden clackers in their mouths. They rang out first from the Dumnonian army, then from their own. The Dumnonian front line shuddered as one, then rolled forwards. Here we go. Dug felt the contents of his stomach lurch and asked Makka the god of war to ensure, if nothing else, that he didn’t shit in his leather battle trousers. If he was going to the Otherworld today he wanted to arrive clean-arsed.

“Ready!” he shouted, looking around at his men and women, then added, “Arms’ length between you all!” more for something to say than anything else – they were already well spaced. They looked back and him and nodded; some were wide-eyed with their lips parted in fear, some serious, some wild-eyed and froth-mouthed. They were mostly armoured in leather like him, a few wore iron helmets like his. Most were armed either with hefty iron swords or stout spears. He was the only one with a hammer. Very few, thank Toutatis, looked like they were going to flee before the fighting had begun, so that at least was a great improvement on some battles he’d been in. He looked back to the Dumnonians and spotted a large dragonfly, flying between the armies as if it was just another day.

From horseback in the centre, atop one of the burial mounds that clung on to Sarum Plain’s uplands like a well-spaced migration of giant slugs that had died and solidified, Lowa watched as the Dumnonian chariots charged her right flank. She’d sent Atlas to the right with the infantry to encourage Samalur to line his heavy chariots there. The young Dumnonian king had obliged. With his massively superior force, Samalur had done the sensible thing and matched her battle lines on both sides, heavy chariots on the left, infantry on the right, light chariots and cavalry in reserve ready to zoom wherever they were needed. Numerically superior, the Dumnonians had no incentive to try anything more advanced than the classic “infantry attacks chariots, chariots attack infantry” tactics.

Dug was leading a section on the right, she remembered once again, about to be hit by thousands of thundering chariots and their crews of murderous, heavily armed Dumnonians. Atlas had told her that he’d come back to Maidun offering his services, and that he’d been given a company to lead. She was hurt that he hadn’t been to see her on his return, but then again it wasn’t long since she’d woken him up by having sex with Ragnall on the other side of the campfire. How could she begin to explain and apologise for that? She banished Dug from her thoughts. This was no time for childish romanticising.

Thinking of children … it was irksome that Spring wouldn’t use her magic. If the girl had made Lowa feel like she did when she’d fought the chariot and Chamanca, she would have taken on the whole Dumnonian army herself. But Lowa believed that she’d been telling the truth about not being able to use her magic, because the girl was a terrible liar. Lowa was sure she’d lied about using her magic on Mearhold, and she had a fairly firm idea about what the jealous little brat might have done. That was something else she’d have to address if they lived through the day. Right now, she’d found another use for Spring.