Reign of Iron (21 page)

She’d brought Chamanca with her partly to help deal with any overly alert sentries, but mostly to stop her brooding over Atlas. Maggot had done all that he could, but the African’s wound had become septic and already spread its poison too far into his body. Given his great strength, Maggot guessed that he might live for another moon, perhaps a little longer. One man was a small price considering the number of Romans that they’d killed, but Lowa wished that it hadn’t been Atlas. He was arguably their best fighter and a good leader, and seeing someone as indestructible as Chamanca brought low reminded Lowa just how much they had to lose by taking on the Romans. Atlas had advised flight. He would not be dying now if Lowa had taken his advice.

She’d hoped that they might encounter a guard or two for Chamanca to tap, but so far they’d seen nobody. It was so quiet that Lowa was certain there was something afoot, but when they reached the top of the dunes and saw what it was, it was the last thing she had expected.

The transports were inshore, legionaries streaming onto them. In no time at all, the transports were full, the warships were refloated and all were sailing away. As the last act of their first invasion of Britain, the Romans put their camp to the torch. Chamanca and Lowa sat silently atop their dune and watched it burn.

S
pring leant on the ship’s rail as the sun set, watching the Roman camp burn through a blur of tears. She didn’t give the tiniest rat’s cock that she’d been caught. She was crying because she’d told Dug she’d look after Sadie and Pigsy and instead she’d killed them both.

“Don’t cry, Spring,” said Dug, squinting back at the burning base. “The dogs chose to save you and they’re with me now.”

“In the Otherworld?”

“Aye.”

“So you
are
a real ghost and not just part of my mind!”

“No, I am in your mind, but you think I’m in the Otherworld.”

“But then how would you—”

“Don’t overthink it. The point is the dogs were glad to die saving you and they’re glad to be back with me. It wasn’t for nothing. It was a good idea to kill Caesar and you nearly did it. Now you might get another chance.”

Spring looked over her shoulder. Caesar was perhaps six paces away, talking to a scribe who was scribbling furiously. It was a shame she was attached to the rail by a pace-long chain, with nothing lethal within reach to throw.

“What the badger’s arse bristles is that man doing?” Dug asked.

“Talking.”

“The other one.”

“Writing.”

“I’d wondered what that looked like.”

“I know how to do it. The girl who taught me Latin showed me,” said Spring, expecting Dug to be surprised, but he’d gone.

Spring and the Roman merchant’s daughter who’d taught her Latin at Zadar’s behest had invented a wide range of abusive terms. Spring had been within a heartbeat of unleashing the lot of them on Caesar back in the physician’s tent, but then decided that it would be more interesting if she kept her linguistic abilities to herself. Already it had proved a good decision; she was enjoying Ragnall’s discomfort around her, looking forward to his awkwardness when he told her they were to be married, and planning a whole range of suitable responses.

Back in Britain, the flames were dying. She wondered if Lowa was watching the same fire, whether she’d noticed that she was missing yet, and if she’d care even a little bit when she did.

The wind dropped and she could hear what Caesar was saying to the scribe. It was an account of his trip to Britain, sort of. She listened in, increasingly amazed. The general’s story was detailed, plausible – and utterly fabricated. He finished off by saying how he had put the Britons to flight, burnt a number of villages and secured hostages. Due to a lack of space on the ships, only two of these hostages were returning to Gaul with him – Spring guessed he must mean her and Ragnall – but he’d be back to collect the rest.

No space for hostages? thought Spring. It had been pretty convincing until that part. Surely nobody would ever believe that you’d leave hostages behind because you had no space for them! There’s always a bit more room on a ship and it was not a long journey.

They arrived in Gaul at dawn and rode to a Roman camp, Spring under Ragnall’s and the praetorians’ guard. Over the next days she was allowed to walk around their boring, regular camp a little, but she remained chained and was watched constantly by four praetorians operating in shifts of two. To stay fit and strong – ready to slay Caesar then escape – she jumped on the spot, lifted heavy things and performed all the exercises that Lowa had taught her. The stony-faced praetorians didn’t seem to mind.

They were near the sea, but she was forbidden to go to the port area, presumably to stop her seeing the extensive shipbuilding that was going on to prepare for the next invasion. Even if she hadn’t been able to listen to everyone talking about it, the constant stream of timber-laden carts that trundled seaward and returned empty gave the game away. She heard that these boats were to be larger than the previous lot, so that they might carry livestock, horses and elephants, and that they were to have a shallower draught, so that the next landing wasn’t such a cock-up. She wondered what elephants were.

Ragnall forbade the praetorians from speaking when they were near her – he was paranoid about failing Caesar and letting her learn Latin – but they only stuck to his orders when he was there. The rest of the time, despite their tough looks, they chatted away like elderly sisters who hadn’t seen each other for ages. Spring learnt that the men loved and trusted Caesar. They were confused about the recent trip to Britain, why it had changed from an invasion to a reconnaissance mission, and quite why the general had taken twelve thousand men on what had turned out to be a camping trip, then burnt the camp. Even Caesar’s most zealous supporter among the four praetorians conceded that his hero had made a mistake – the clincher being that they’d come away with no loot – but they all agreed that it was his first error in three years of successful campaigning and he would set it right soon enough.

There were rumours that he would cross next year with ten legions as well as these things called elephants that they all thought were pretty amazing. None of them ever mentioned Felix’s Ironmen and Leatherman so Spring guessed they didn’t know about them. She was dying to ask, but managed not to. The most difficult thing was keeping the horror from her face when they talked about her. Perhaps some women might have been flattered but Spring was disgusted. The things they said! Did men really talk like this when there were no women around? She was sure that British men didn’t. Several times she nearly said something pithy and complicated in Latin just to see the looks on their faces, but she resisted.

One surprising thing she did learn was that the praetorians held Ragnall in some grudging respect. Not enough to not talk in front of her as he’d asked, obviously, but apparently he had killed a German king and that had impressed everyone. Spring knew all about Harry the Fister, or Ariovistus as this lot called him, from Atlas’ tales. Killing him probably had been a feat, and she waited for Ragnall to tell her the story of how he’d done it, but he never did. She’d thought he was the type of man who’d be unable to refrain from talking about his own successes, but actually he never talked about himself at all. She didn’t like him; he was a deluded dick who saw no flaws in Caesar’s murderous warmongering, but he wasn’t a show-off.

What he did go on and on about – and on and on – was Rome. He was frustrated that they weren’t heading directly for the capital because Caesar had a local rebellion to crush, but he more than made up for it by constantly telling Spring every little thing about the city.

His only topic of conversation other than Rome and its inhabitants was Caesar, whom he idolised, just as he’d idolised Drustan when they’d first met, and then Lowa. Ragnall, she thought, needed someone to follow. Dug had once told her why people were addicted to things like alcohol and mushrooms. Their addiction, he said, was a comfortable place that removed them from the troublesome real world of decision-making, guilt and so on. That was why Ragnall always had to follow someone, she reckoned. He’d never had to make a decision in his life and had become addicted to being told what to do. Nothing had ever been his fault. It might be, she mused, why he never talked about himself and his successes. Just as he thought his failures were other people’s failures, he probably never counted his successes as his own.

Eventually, over a moon or so in Gaul, she found herself coming to like him, a little. He was a traitor who’d joined the enemy. He was blind to the faults of those he idolised and followed them unquestioningly – something that Spring would never, never do – but he was not a bad man and there was a certain strength to him. She was his prisoner. He could have neglected her or beaten her or worse, but he didn’t. Instead he spent most waking hours with her, explaining how Roman structures worked and how they all culminated in this wondrous city where they were going to spend the winter. Ultimately, his incessant enthusiasm was effective. By the time they headed for Rome, Spring was quite looking forward to seeing it.

W
ith the ship and crew that Caesar had provided, Felix crossed back to Gaul. The journey was achingly slow because the captain and slave rowers refused to believe that he could make things go very badly wrong for them if they didn’t speed up, yet he found his legion stunningly unchanged. Felix’s keen mind needed constant occupation, yet his creations could sit and stare unthinkingly into space and simply wait for him to return. He was fairly sure that some of them hadn’t moved at all since he’d left. That irritated him on one level because he thought it proved that they were seriously unintelligent, but on another, more niggling level he knew that he’d never achieve the peace of mind needed to simply sit, yet these brutes could do it with ease. So, in one way, their minds were superior to his.

Since the crew of slave rowers had been surly on his way back and the captain disrespectful, Felix enjoyed his first order to the Celermen and Maximen: to kill half of the slaves to fuel the Maximen’s row back, and to break the legs of the rest so that they might not cause any trouble until their deaths on arrival in Britain. Unfortunately they needed the captain, so he’d have to stay alive for a while, but Felix expected he’d be a good deal more deferential on the return journey.

After a faster but still annoyingly slow load using two tenders, they set off back to Britain with the Maximen rowing at an astonishing pace. As the boat surged through the swell, Felix kept a lookout for British druids in boats and ship-holing behemoths, but the sea was blissfully clear. He called over Bistan the Celerman and told him he was the legion’s new centurion. Bistan took the news of Kelter’s death matter-of-factly. Although they came from the same Sicilian village, the men were very different – Bistan was smaller, pale-skinned between his pustules, light-haired and openly friendly, while Kelter had been dark and cruel-faced. Bistan was cruel in character, of course – all of Felix’s creations were – but he didn’t look it or act it when he wasn’t actually hurting someone, which made him more pleasant to talk to than Kelter.

Felix told Bistan his plan for the landing, instructed him to continue the watch and settled back to bask in the wonderful music created by the screams and moans of the broken-legged Gaulish slaves, piled in the boat’s bow, now tied up after a couple had managed to scrabble over the side to drown. The sounds reminded him of childhood voyages with his slave merchant father and he soon floated into peaceful slumber.

Bistan shook him awake and said with a cheery smile that there was a fleet of ships to the north and a fire to the north-east.

It was the Roman fleet – the entire Roman fleet – heading back to Gaul with lanterns at bow and stern twinkling prettily above the black sea, away from the burning Roman camp.

“
Neptune’s knob end!
” he said. For a fleeting moment he thought about carrying on to Britain and taking the island himself – surely he could conquer the oafs with his legion alone? – but then he remembered that Caesar had Spring. And, actually, he needed the general’s legions. His troops were powerful, but they were few, and they were mortal.

“Turn the boat around,” he said, clenching his fists so hard that they shook.

“Sure, boss!” said Bistan, like a carefree junior baker asked to put a couple more loaves in the oven.

The following day, his legion safely concealed in a new and unlucky woodland village, Felix went to see Caesar. After a little asking around he rode along a road busy with empty ox-carts trundling inland and plank-laden carts bumping in the other direction to the coast, and found the general in the middle of what had once been forest but was now stumps, detritus and industry. Some slaves stripped leaves, twigs, branches and bark. Some tended great fires. Others carried logs to carpenters for the more skilled job of sawing planks. Swivel-eyed overseers armed with whips strode about with bored-looking legionary escorts. The air was thick with woodsmoke, sawdust, the bellows of oxen, the shouts of workers and the screamed pleadings of a few slackers that the overseers were whipping to the bone. Caesar stood as a serene hub in the Underworld-like whirl, peaceful as if he were watching a parade of vestal virgins on a cool afternoon.

“Ah, Felix,” he said, “walk with me.” He headed off, picking his way over broken branches and circumnavigating hut-sized piles of burning foliage and twigs.

When they were out of everyone’s earshot, Felix said: “What happened? Why—”

“The army returned because part of the plan failed. The part of the plan that failed was yours.”

“But I was on my way. I saw you and you agreed—”

“Had you landed as we’d arranged on your first attempt, then this conversation would not be taking place. However, you will not be punished.”

Not be punished!
The man was amazing. The plan was that he’d wait until Felix returned to Britain. It was Caesar’s plan and he’d even supplied the ship. Something must have happened or he must have found out something new. Whatever it was, Caesar had returned earlier than planned, forgotten what had actually happened and decided that it was all Felix’s fault. This was why he was so dangerous. A man might be executed for failure in any army. In this army you could be executed for landing the wrong role in Caesar’s fantasies.