Clash of Iron (26 page)

With some help, King Hari cranked back the catapult’s arm. On his word, two of the large attendants strode forward with giant iron-headed, three-pronged forks. King Hari pointed out a captive. The men pushed their forks though the thick twine binding the alleged horse thief’s feet and hands together, interlocked their forks’ tines and lifted. When he was dumped into the catapult’s scoop, the captive’s gag came loose and he unleashed a stream of the vilest invective.

“Oh dear, or dear,” chuckled King Hari. “I don’t like this one much. All that bad language. I do hope it doesn’t affect my aim. It might, though! Ha ha!”

The catapult was on a turntable. King Hari pulled a lever, and shoved the catapult round until it was definitely no longer aimed at the lake. The Gaul cursed at him all the while.

“And let’s try for a bit more height.” With help from two guards and the pulling of two more levers, King Hari moved the large leather and wool-wrapped crosspiece back towards the scoop holding the curled-up Gaul.

“Right!” He pulled the shooting lever. The catapult arm shot upwards and cracked into the crosspiece. The captive zoomed into the sky, shouting ever quieter curses. His trajectory was not far off directly upwards, a little towards the woods at the meadow’s edge. His flight slowed. Perhaps a hundred paces up, he hung in the air for a heartbeat, then fell, screaming. He landed with a thud twenty paces from the onlookers.

“Dead!” came Flotta’s cry from the lake. King Hari laughed himself into a coughing fit, reddening so much that Ragnall thought he might burst into flame.

“Too much crossbar!” he said when he’d recovered. “You’ll all learn, I hope, from my … mistake. Ha ha! Who’s next? Atlas, would you like to try?”

“No thank you,” said Atlas.

“I’ll give it a go!” said Carden, rolling up his linen sleeves. Ragnall wasn’t surprised. During the winter that Ragnall had spent at Maidun, Carden had been desperate to be involved in any game or competition. If none was happening, he’d start one. Ragnall had once played hit-the-molehill with him. He’d thought he was pretty good with a sling, but Carden had won with ease.

“Good, good!” King Hari slapped him on the back. “Pick a captive!”

Carden choose a medium-sized man with a long moustache, then walked around the siege engine, tongue between his teeth, like a man inspecting a horse from a famously dishonest dealer. With the help of the Germans, he cranked the firing arm, swung the catapult back towards the lake and moved the crossbeam forwards. As the captive was loaded, the Briton walked round the machine again. He sucked a finger and held it up to the wind. He shook his head and made a few more adjustments.

“Good luck!” he said to the panic-eyed captive, patting him on the head, “and try to keep your knees and elbows tucked into your stomach, like this.” Carden crouched and pushed his elbows into his midriff. “Blink if you get it? You do? Good!”

The Briton waited for an eagle to pass by overhead, then loosed.

A screech of twine and wood, a whump as the beam hit the padded crossbar and the man was gone, heading down the valley through the air, spinning in a tight ball, at around the same height as the top of the trees that flanked the meadow.

“Ooooooh!” cooed the onlookers, other than Atlas and Ragnall.

He landed short of the lake, bounced once, and again, then hit the water with a great splash. Ducks and pelicans scattered. Flotta peeled off her dress and dived in after him. The onlookers waited in silence.

“Come on, come on, Danu help him…” Carden muttered to himself.

“Dead!” came Flotta’s shout.

The Germans cheered.

“Bel’s bollocks!” shouted Carden.

“Very, very good effort,” King Hari said, grinning happily, “best I’ve ever seen on a first try. Go on, have another go. Oh, and I almost forgot – Ragnall, would you mind disrobing and joining the captives on the ground? You can choose him if you like, Carden? The gods love this one. He’s a marvellous looking young man, but a bit wet. And maybe about to get a bit wetter! If he’s lucky! Ha ha ha!”

Carden looked Ragnall up and down. He pinched the ring of fat that had agglomerated around Ragnall’s midriff in Rome. “He might be a bit heavy, but maybe with a bit more crossbar … yes, I’ll give him a go. Can I move the catapult nearer the lake?”

“Would that be fair?” King Hari seemed serious for once.

“I suppose not,” Carden admitted.

“Indeed! And fairness is all! Ha ha! But don’t worry, my fine British visitor, I’ve seen bigger men fly further. Not too high, that’s the secret. Not too low, either – that’s another secret. None of them are really secrets! Ha!”

The catapult’s cup stank of disease. Ragnall wondered if it had been used to fling decaying animals – or humans, knowing merry old King Hari – into a besieged fort.

“Now tuck your arms and legs like the last guy,” Carden said. “I don’t want to blame him, it was partially my aiming, but he did untuck halfway through. He would probably have made the lake otherwise. But then again, you are heavier … Cross your feet over. Can you link your fingers? Yes? Good. That might help. Don’t uncurl and you might make it.”

Ragnall squeezed his body into a ball and prayed to Jupiter and Danu.

“Ready?” yelled Carden. He didn’t wait for a reply.

A lurch, a bang and a whoosh, and he was flying. It felt like he’d left his guts on the ground. He tumbled, elbow and knees tight, eyes screwed shut. He wondered if Carden had asked him to tuck so that he’d fly further, or so that he’d bounce further along the land. He felt the thongs around his calves come loose and his sandals slip off, and he wondered crazily if his footwear knew that he was about to die so were fleeing like rats from a foundering ship.

Just when he was thinking he’d been in the air far too long, something slapped into his back, hard, knocking the air from him. He bounced, slapped down again and then he was underwater and sinking. He struggled to free his wrists from his ankles. He had no breath in his lungs. His back nestled into mud. Weeds waved up at the sun-dappled surface. The lake was not deep. He wrenched at his binding. He couldn’t free himself. His head was swelling with the need to breath. How vexing, he thought, to have survived the flight only to drown. And how annoying to drown in calm, shallow water.

Then his hands and feet were free and something was pulling him upwards. He was on the surface, choking and gasping.

“Alive!” he heard Flotta shout, next to his ear.

There was a distant cheer.

He saw a chance. There weren’t many swimmers faster than him, and the nearest captor with the standard number of arms was a good distance away. He pressed a foot into Flotta’s midriff and pushed her away. He flipped, and took a powerful stroke. A hand grabbed his hair and pulled him around. Flotta’s forehead crashed into his nose. Light whirled, then all was darkness.

C
hamanca’s wounds healed in days. She’d always been a quick healer. The bed that she’d been chained to while she recovered was taken out of her tent and in its place, while she sat wound in heavy chain, two engineer types dug a deep, narrow hole and filled it with a yellow-grey, lumpy liquid. They held a thick, waist-high oval loop of iron in place while the liquid solidified into rock. Four of the black-clad legionaries guarded her with swords while the engineers passed chains though the loop and soldered them on to her wrist and ankle shackles.

So there she was, legs and arms attached to a wheel of iron set in stone. She was impressed by the neat job. Escape would be difficult.

Everyone left, bar one engineer who stayed behind to gloat. He told her that the liquid stone was a substance called concrete, one of the many inventions that showed how superior Romans were to barbarians like her. That was why it was the Roman duty to conquer, to enlighten benighted lives.

She told him that the Romans might be great, but he himself looked like an inadequate little freak, not fit to pick the nut husks from her turds. And besides, she’d seen concrete in Iberia and been equally unimpressed by it then.

Back in Iberia or Britain, the average man would have responded to a jibe like this by trying to outdo the insult, but Chamanca knew that most Romans were conceited, humourless and unable to accept mockery, especially from their social inferiors. Roman men were markedly shorter than barbarian men, many not much taller than her, and she suspected that it was something to do with that. What was it that Carden had said to her? Being small didn’t turn men into pricks, but Danu knew which men were going to be pricks so she made them short as a punishment. She liked that.

The response of the Roman engineer supported her prejudice. His face stretched in surprise then screwed into a mask of rage. He charged, punches flailing. She dodged a couple of blows, took a couple more to draw him in, then clamped her teeth on to his wrist and sucked warm blood. His hits grew weaker until he passed out. She stopped drinking then, reluctant for some reason to finish him; she shouted for someone to take him away before she changed her mind.

The next day Felix came to the tent with a couple of burly legionaries, showed them how to feed her safely using a pan on a pole and told them that they’d be crucified if they spoke to her.

Chamanca had nothing to do but sit, think and rub her ankle and wrist chains against the iron loop. Her rubbing, which had to be quiet enough for the guards outside her tent not to hear, had no noticeable effect. She disliked the optimists’ philosophy that no matter how hard something seems at the outset, if you try again and again you’ll get there in the end. Try running through a stone wall, she thought. But she persevered. It was a project.

After two days attached to the loop with no human interaction other than furtive glances from the silent feeders, a shiny chest-plated centurion with a plumed helmet under one arm swept into her tent. He stood and looked her up and down, his thin, pink tongue protruding just a little from his lips. She squirmed under his glare. She was used to being ogled, encouraged and enjoyed it even, but this was like being licked all over by a toad. She was about to suggest that the centurion fuck off when he undid his leather skirt, took his erect penis in his fist, hunched over and began to masturbate furiously, eyeing her torso and legs all the while.

Chamanca watched as his elbow worked away, wondering how she might use him. He was a tall, fit looking fellow, with an off-centre patch of white at the front of his otherwise black hair, as if he’d been shat on by a bird. Penis in hand aside, he did not look like a pervert. She guessed that perverts probably never did.

Very soon after he’d begun, the centurion pumped out a couple of gluey jets of semen that, thank Fenn, fell well short of Chamanca. His open-mouthed smile twisted into an ogre’s grimace as he milked the final few globs of pearlescent ooze from his detumescing cock, then tucked himself away and scurried from the tent.

It had been unpleasant and not flattering, but on the upside it had relieved the boredom. So she wasn’t that upset when the onanist returned the next day, and the next. She tried to talk to him, but he was too excited beforehand to respond and too shameful afterwards.

“I will,” she said to the centurion on his sixth visit, as he set to strumming, “say naughty things to you in exchange for news.”

“What … sort … of naughty … things?” he managed, before ejaculating and running from the tent. Fenn’s tits, she thought, and went back to rubbing her chains on the loop.

The next day, as he unbuckled himself, he whispered: “What news do you want? Answer quietly so the guards don’t hear.”

“Everything about the army – what it’s doing, what the plans are.”

He came closer, but not so close that she could bite him.

“All right. We’re camped perhaps a mile from the Germans. That’s around fifteen hundred paces in Barbarian measurement.” He sounded intelligently didactic, like a clever father explaining a difficult point to a daughter who was a little too young to understand it. “They’re dug in well behind a high wall with a clean, steep face, and a well-angled, stout palisade. We could break through this wall, but we would lose half the army doing so. The only option is to goad them into coming out, which we’re trying to do by marching past their camp and shouting insults. That usually works with barbarians – they’re a prideful bunch – but this lot are holding back. Meanwhile, their cavalry is attacking anyone who leaves our camp – foragers mostly, and our own, smaller, less capable cavalry. Frankly, their tactics are good and, so far, we have no reply to them. If they carry on like this, we will have to retreat.”

“How long before your supplies run out?”

The centurion glanced nervously over his shoulder. “I’ll tell you more tomorrow. Now you tell me how much you’d like to take my cock in your mouth.”

Chamanca laughed. “That is funny. I would love to have your cock in my mouth, but I don’t think you would like it very much.” She bared her pointed teeth.

The centurion looked disappointed. “Can you say that again, but in a more alluring matter? Perhaps say it in barbarian?”

Chamanca sighed.

S
apphire should have been in a good mood. They’d all but wiped out the Roman cavalry, and the few that remained had fled into a dead-end valley. She and the rest of the German cavalry had only to follow them in and finish them off. She did feel sorry for the poor Romans. Their ignorance of the landscape had been as much of a log on their funeral pyre as their inferior headcount. Time and time again she and the others had chased foolish, outnumbered men into swamps, to cliff edges or impassably steep slopes. Some had even got themselves trapped in the loop of a river’s meander where it had been a doddle to take them out with slings. That was the other thing. The Roman cavalry were armed with swords and spears, so it was easy to kill them with slingstones before they even got close. So she did feel sorry for them, but she was also glad that most of them were dead and that the rest would be soon. They said that when the cavalry was gone the Romans would leave and they’d be at peace again. Well, everyone else would be at peace. She wouldn’t, not until she’d dealt with Kondar.