Clash of Iron (31 page)

“A delegation? I would take the army,” said Atlas.

“No, they must train more. We’ve had three years learning how to wage war with teamwork and intelligence, the Romans have had centuries. I will take a delegation. Besides, if you’re right about Eroo, and if the Dumnonians have been plotting behind Bruxon’s back and either invade, then we’ll need the army here.”

“And us?” asked Carden.

“You three are going to go back and keep an eye on the Romans. If you can stick a spear in the cartwheel of their advance, so much the better.”

The three of them nodded resignedly.

“There’s one other thing,” added Chamanca. “We found out what happened to Ragnall.”

“Oh really?” said Lowa.

L
owa rode at the head of the column, her recurve riding bow holstered, arrow-stuffed quiver on her back, slim sword scabbard slapping gently on her horse’s flank. Miller was beside her, also dressed in battle leathers, longsword at his side. Behind them were sixty variously armed Warriors of the Two Hundred, Lowa’s expanded and updated version of Zadar’s Fifty.

Spring enjoyed the irony that if you didn’t want to fight you had to display your arms as if you were Makka the god of war and his retinue. She was riding at the rear of the group, green woollen hood covering her head, quiver on her back and bow in one hand. After two days of uncomfortable riding through sweeping rain showers, the day was finally sunny with splodges of white cloud, but it wasn’t warm yet. It was a good while since dawn, but if she breathed out from deep down she could still see her breath.

Bright plants had risen bravely from the winter soil and bloomed into flowers that speckled the roadside and forest floors with a crazy range of colours. They didn’t impress Spring. Despite her name, she found spring the season too obviously lovely, with its show-off flowers and vomit-inducingly adorable baby animals. She preferred melancholy autumn, with hazy sunlight, pungent funguses and warm-smelling woodsmoke. As with music, sorrow was more beautiful than happiness in nature. She thought that if she was Spring, then Dug was probably Autumn. Did that mean she liked him more than she liked herself?

The bark of a dog brought her back to the present. For the last two days, perhaps eighty miles, they’d ridden through the open countryside of a land at peace. All the hillforts they passed were overgrown and unused. Instead of walled towns and fortified ranches, there was a smattering of farmhouses and little hamlets with no defences; no ditches nor a spiked palisade to be seen. One of the Two Hundred told her that this was what it had been like in the south before Zadar’s time. People had moved away from the hillforts to undefended farms. When Zadar’s ravages had started, the palisades had gone back up.

For the last dozen miles, nobody had run and hidden, as Spring would have done had she been a farmer or potter watching half a hundred heavily armed warriors ride towards her. The people had of course been wary, they weren’t mad, but good old Miller had soon put them at ease with a few friendly quips.

That morning, the wide valley sides of the floodplain had narrowed in to a bouncing little stream, and they were following a track along its western bank. The barking dog was a sinuous, smooth-haired, happy little animal. It circled the horses a few times, then galloped up the road to a cluster of large huts next to a stone bridge. Smoke curls from the huts’ roof holes created a morning haze. A larger cloud of smoke to the east proclaimed the position of Mallam’s main settlement, but they weren’t headed there. They were bound for Grummog, king of the Murkans, at his cliff-top fort.

They passed the huts without seeing a soul, wound uphill through some trees and the pale grey cliff of Mallam burst from the valley floor. Three hundred paces tall, the rock face filled the valley like an impossibly high and smooth wall. There were cliffs as high on the south coast near Dug’s place, possibly higher, but Spring had never seen anything like it inland. Sea cliffs seemed to be on the defensive, cowering from the power of the waves and regularly succumbing to it in crumbling rockslides. The landlocked cliff at Mallam looked like it was on the attack, ready to rush down the valley like a great wave itself, to smash and crush everything before it. She looked away then quickly looked back. Had it moved forwards? Of course not. But it looked like it wanted to.

“You know what they say, don’t you?” said Holloc, falling back to ride alongside her. He was one of Lowa’s Two Hundred, a nice enough guy. Spring would have found him attractive if he’d been as clever as he thought he was.

“Depends who ‘they’ are and what they’re talking about?”

Holloc looked surprised. He’d no doubt been expecting a standard “no, please do enlighten me oh clever older person” reply. Even though she was thirteen now and could fire a bow about as well as Lowa, people thought she was still a child. She couldn’t remember ever thinking of herself as a child.

“Many, many generations ago,” Holloc swept an arm to indicate the length of the rock face, “a great river ran over a mighty waterfall, right here. The river runs underground now. One day it will come back to the surface and the waterfall will start again.”

“And what will that mean?”

“What do you mean, ‘what will that mean’?”

“Oh, I don’t know, there’s usually something with these things, isn’t there? Something like the dead coming back from the Otherworld on the day the waterfall starts flowing again? Or the gods coming to the earth and smiting the tribes who have slightly different beliefs to our tribe?”

“Not with this one, I don’t think. That’s it. They just say that the waterfall will come back.”

“I see. Great story.”

Holloc scowled at her and kicked his horse to rejoin the others. Spring shook her head at herself. That had been a bit mean. After so much time with Lowa, she’d become somewhat sarcastic herself. She liked it and thought it was funny, but sometimes it upset people. It was of course their fault for not getting she was joking, they should have been cleverer, but she still didn’t like it that they were hurt. When she was queen, she decided, she’d make everyone who didn’t get sarcasm or piss taking for fun to wear seagull feathers in their hats, so you knew not to joke with them.

Former waterfall or not, there was a gang of people peering down at them from the top of the cliff. On their left and her right was a giant, with short arms and an oversized head. Spring had never seen one before, but she knew it was a wicker woman. Wooden cages were nailed together in the shape of a woman and their bars interwoven with wicker. They’d fill the wicker woman with live animals, then set light to it. It was horrible idea, and Spring couldn’t believe that it impressed the gods, but it was also kind of awe-inspiring. She couldn’t take her eyes off it. A vision flashed into her mind of Lowa, bound and helpless, trapped in the burning—

She shook her head and the image cleared. It had been like a bad daydream, not a proper vision like she’d had with the aurochs. There was nothing to be afraid of here. They were a delegation, and nobody would ever break the ancient code and attack a delegation, especially a royal one. And, besides, she knew that this place wasn’t as scary as it looked. Dug had told her all about Mallam before they’d left the south. From this direction, it looked like the most impenetrable fortress imaginable. However, come from any direction other than the south, according to Dug, and you could easily get around the cliff and the only defences were a few scrappy stone walls. The fort at Mallam, seat of Grummog, king of the Murkans, Dug had said, was all mouth and no trousers. The people from that part of Britain, Dug had added with a naughty look in his eye, were mostly the same.

“Come on, Spring!” yelled Holloc. Spring realised she’d stopped. She kicked on to catch them up.

Lowa and Miller had almost reached the track that led up the steep slope to the top of the cliff. The sixty soldiers from the Two Hundred were spread out behind them, riding in a more casual manner now they’d reached journey’s end unmolested and could look forward to a feast and a rest. Some had ambled to the stream to let their horses drink, others were dotted about while their horses pulled toothily at the clumps of grass which sprouted all around the field below the cliff, between large bushes.

Spring looked about. On their long walks, she and Dug speculated often on how the land had come to look like it did; why specific plants lived in specific places and so on. Going by the washes of gravel all around, here was a place that flooded regularly. If it did flood, it meant that the only vegetation would be that year’s growth – the grass – and no large bushes.

She opened her mouth to scream a warning exactly as the out-of-place vegetation burst apart. Four or five men and women jumped from each bush and stabbed spears into the Maidun riders. Spring watched, mouth open, as the few Maidun soldiers who’d survived the surprise attempted to rally, but were closed down and speared by the hundreds of Murkans who’d suddenly emerged.

By the cliff, Miller and Lowa were caught, pulled from their horses, spear points at their throats. As she watched, Lowa whacked away her guard’s arm with her bow and fell back, stringing the bow as she fell, shooting an arrow into her captor, then almost immediately stringing and shooting another. Another Murkan fell and Spring realised with a jolt that she was in a battle, and so far all she’d done was watch like a dumb-struck dimwit. She reached for her bow, but something thumped into her and knocked her from her horse. She hit the ground. She shook her head. A man with a moustache trimmed into a straight-edged square was sitting on her, his legs pinning her arms. She opened her mouth to tell him how stupid he looked but he punched her in the side of the head. His moustache swung around and around, filled her vision, then shrunk, taking everything with it and she saw no more.

Spring came to. She was on a horse, her hands were bound and somebody was holding her from behind. Up ahead were Miller and Lowa, both riding on their own horses with their hands chained, spears at their backs.

The path – the track to the top of the cliff, Spring deduced – curled on to a broad expanse of flat, bare rock, criss-crossed with cracks and mini crevices. There were a couple of dozen more spearmen dotted about, but no buildings other than a black longhouse in the centre of the pavement, with the wicker woman looming behind it. Three sides of the field of rock were overlooked by craggy bluffs, dotted with tartan and leather-dressed Murkans, come to gawp at the captives from a safe distance.

The longest side of the rock-floored expanse was the top of the cliff. The view was vast. Spring fancied that she could see Maidun Castle, three hundred miles south, and, just beyond that, Dug’s hut by the sea. She wished she was there. Here, a semi-circle of Murkans with long spears demanded that Lowa and Miller dismount. Spring looked behind her. The Murkans held six more Maidun people at spear point, including Holloc, whom she’d been rude to just a few heartbeats before, when things had been very different. Each of them had their wrists chained like Lowa and Miller. Presumably the rest been slaughtered at the base of the cliff. She’d liked a lot of them, but she didn’t feel upset by their deaths, which seemed odd. She guessed that she would later. This must be what war was like. You had to get on with it and grieve when you had time. The man behind her dismounted and pulled her from the horse.

“Come on you,” he said, pushing her in the back, “over this way and no fucking funny business. Start acting the squirrel and I’ll stick you with my fucking spear.” He had an unpleasantly sharp, nasal voice.

“What do you mean, acting the squirrel?” she said.

“You know – larking about, causing trouble.”

“Oh, I see. I thought you might be worried I was going to bite your moustache off. Why is it that strange shape? Did you lose a bet?”

She ducked his punch, said “OK, OK, sorry,” and went where she was pushed, over towards the longhouse. The network of cracks on the cliff top, mostly about a hand-span wide, made it look like a giant version of a dried mud puddle. They picked their way over the gaps.

The longhouse was a heavily constructed, black wooden building, with curved iron blades splaying out from each corner of its roof and no obvious door. Spring followed Lowa and Miller and their captors round to the long side facing the cliff edge, which was open, without a wall. The six captured riders filed along behind them. All the Maidun people had their hands tied, but Murkan soldiers still followed them closely, spears ready.

King Grummog and his retinue were waiting, looking out over the edge of the cliff. The Murkan king was a wee man, sitting in a big wooden chair that made him look all the smaller. He was perhaps a little older than Dug, but it was hard to tell because his little body and limbs were all twisted. His shoeless feet and his hands were curled into claws and his round head jutted forward on a scrawny neck, forced there by the large hump of his upper back. He had the blinking eyes of a bird that expected to be thrown a crumb, but a straight, expression-free mouth.

Towering behind Grummog was a giant of a woman with puffy, piscine eyes and fat, shiny-wet lips which were the same pale yellow-pink as the rest of her face. The expression in those fishy eyes, Spring reckoned, said that she would watch you drown in a puddle rather than bend to help you. She wore a thick, dark wool waistcoat with a faded, smudged swirl decoration and a stupidly short leather-flanged skirt. Her legs were like bark-stripped oak trunks, each of them surely heavier that two of Spring put together. Her arms were heavy with fat-coated muscle, thicker at the biceps than Spring’s thighs. Her broad, smooth shoulders were rounded with bovine strength and extra bits of muscle grew from midway along them almost up to her head, like scaffolding to help her neck support her thick skull. Sprouting from her meaty right hip was the large coil of a thick leather whip. On her left hand she’d grown and somehow thickened her nails, so it looked like she had bear’s claws. Spring thought that she might be a Fassite – a giant from the island of Fassent. Everyone agreed that Fassent existed, just south of Eroo, but nobody set foot on the island for fear of the mythical giants that were said to live there. Spring had met a man once who said that he’d sailed past Fassent and giants had hurled rocks at his boat from the shore. She’d assumed he was lying, but this woman looked like proof that the myth of the giants was a reality.