Reign of Iron (26 page)

The route was choked with carts, boat builders, mercenary gangs, legionaries and others all accusing each other of not knowing how to use the road, so Ragnall walked cross-country, through pillaged fields and denuded woods, five miles to Portus Itius, the launch site for the second invasion. Ragnall didn’t know the Gaulish name for the place, and it was a shame that Publius Crassus, who always knew the Gaulish name for everywhere, wasn’t there to tell him; not because he gave the tiniest crap about the seaside village’s name, but because he missed his only friend in the Roman army. Publius had gone campaigning with his father off into the east, hoping to find Alexander the Great-style fortune and glory.

From his position on a low cliff top, Ragnall could just make out the remains of the Gaulish village in the centre of a long, open bay that swarmed with Roman activity. A river met the sea at the village, splitting a broad, pale sandy beach which was fringed with low, brown cliffs. At the far end of the beach, to the north, the cliffs soared upwards into the same type of white chalk cliff common on the south coast of Britain.

He took all this in with his peripheral vision while gawking at the astonishing amount of ships pulled up above the high-tide mark, in various stages of loading. There were hundreds upon hundreds of them. Almost all were the same design – transport vessels larger than the eighty from the previous year’s invasion – each kitted out with oar-slots and benches for rowing as well as rigging for sails. Moored out to sea were even more impressive boats, huge multi-levelled things with row after row of holes for oars, towering mini castles fore and aft, prows wickedly pointed into metal rams. Their visible upper decks were lined with giant arrow-firing scorpions and platforms, presumably for archers and slingers.

Ragnall smiled. Nobody would call this invasion a reconnaissance mission. There was absolutely no way that this kind of power could fail to take Britain.

“Quinqueremes,” said a jaunty voice behind him. It was Quintus Cicero. “My pig wife has caught up with me again so I ran off, telling her I was coming up here to survey the fleet. Guess you’ve done the same? She’s all right, your piece, great legs and nice tits, too – a rare and welcome combination – but I bet she’s a bitch the second that the world isn’t watching. Women, hey? Can’t live with them, can’t kill them.”

Ragnall was torn between wanting to flee this boorish bullshit and his fascination for the great boats. “Quinqueremes?” he asked.

“Five-decked rowing warships. Crew of six hundred in each; three hundred rowers, three hundred archers, slingers and scorpion crew. Those dirty Britons are in for a big surprise, if they can stop fucking their own daughters for long enough to realise they’re being invaded.”

“I suppose they are.” Despite being at his wedding, Quintus didn’t seem to have worked out that Ragnall was originally British.

“Tell you what, I can’t wait to get among the women of Britain. Apparently you don’t even need to rape them, they just lie down waving their legs in the air with their snatches open. That reminds me – that wife of yours, do you ever hire her out? I’ve got a two-hundred-year-old Macedonian spear that you can have for a night with her. I bet she’d love some Roman cock.”

Before he had time to think of the consequences, Ragnall leant forward and said, quietly: “I catch you anywhere near her and I’ll stick that spear so far up your arse that you’ll be speaking Greek.” It didn’t really work as a threat, Ragnall realised as he said it, but it was the best he could do spontaneously and he could hardly say, “Oh, hang on, wait a moment while I think of a better insult”.

Quintus purpled and muttered, “You grubby barbarian. How dare you seek to preach morals to me? You British fuck your own daughters!” So he did know Ragnall was British, he was simply untroubled by tact.

“No, we don’t.”

“We’ll see when we get there. I’ll make them fuck their daughters. I’ll make them fuck their sons! And I’ll take your sordid, copper coin slut wife and I’ll—”

Before Ragnall knew he was going to punch him, Quintus was lying on the ground, blowing hard and holding his jaw. Immediately Ragnall realised he had made a big mistake.

Technically, Ragnall and Quintus were both legates and equal rank. In practice, Quintus was massively influential, famously cruel and vengeful and a hundred times more powerful. Ragnall was under Caesar’s protection to a degree, but someone like Quintus would easily find a way to kill him, nastily, without Caesar finding out. He would be certain to take it out on Spring too. He could not have chosen a worse man to punch. He might as well have climbed into a bag of snakes and hopped to the river himself.

“I’m sorry,” he said, reaching out a hand.

“Get back, get back! Praetorians!” hollered Quintus, scrabbling away. Thank Danu there was nobody close enough to hear him.

“Let me help you up. I’m sure we can put this behind—”

“Get away from me, or I’ll have you killed today!”

Ragnall walked off and didn’t look back. Spring’s company suddenly didn’t seem so unappealing. What’s more, maybe showing her the ships would help ram home just how advanced and impressive the Romans were in every field. Apart from, he thought with an inner smile at how witty he was becoming, the field in which Quintus the Roman had just been such an offensive moron.

“Do you want to come and see some boats?” asked Ragnall, as if he hadn’t banned her from leaving the boring tent just hours before.

“Yup!” she said. She held up her chained wrists to her new praetorians Tertius and Ferrandus and smiled.

Ragnall was strangely quiet and brooding on the walk to the coast. Spring wasn’t bothered. She’d heard enough of Ragnall’s Roman arse-kissing to last a lifetime, then a long stint in the Otherworld, then another lifetime. She concentrated on forgetting that she was a prisoner, that her wrists were chained together, that she hadn’t killed Caesar yet and was unlikely to get a chance to, and focused instead on enjoying the walk. She missed everything about Dug, but possibly the long walks with him more than anything else. Her chief hope was to spot some rabbits, the funny little fat hares that they didn’t have in Britain, but there were none around, probably, Spring reckoned, because the sun was too hot for them in the middle of the day. Or because the Romans had eaten them all.

“The countryside’s better around mine,” said Dug, striding up beside her, dogs following. “And walking is definitely more pleasant without your hands tied together.”

Ragnall was ahead. Looking back, Spring saw that Tertius and Ferrandus were twenty paces behind, arguing.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

“Where haven’t I been?” Dug raised an eyebrow.

“You haven’t been in Rome.”

“I don’t like Rome.”

“How do you know if you’ve never been there?”

“Do you like Rome?”

“Not one bit.”

“There you go. I told you, I’m just made up by your mind. You don’t like Rome, I don’t like Rome.”

“But that doesn’t explain … oh never mind. How am I going to escape back to Britain?”

“Wait for your moment, then escape.”

“Wow. That is cunning. Dwyn himself would be proud of that plan.”

“OK. To begin, you might as well let them take you back to Britain. No point escaping while you’re still in Gaul.”

“True.”

“Then, maybe pretend you’re going along with their plans. Come over all Roman. Style your hair as if you’re in a most stupid hair competition, claim there’s nothing more delicious that wren foetuses floating in bulls’ spunk. Wait for them to drop the guard, then nip off when you get the chance. These two new guards seem a lot slacker—”

“No way am I pretending to have gone all Roman. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of thinking they’ve persuaded me that their way is better.”

“They’ll know you were faking it when you kill Caesar.”

“Good point.”

“And watch out for Ragnall.”

“What do you mean? He’s actually OK, just a bit too much in love with Rome.”

“He’s not ‘actually OK’, he’s a treacherous bastard who’s
a lot
too much in love with Rome. He’ll turn on you if it suits him, or if Caesar asks him to. You be careful.”

“Who are you talking to?” asked Ragnall, who’d slowed down to fall back with her.

“Nobody. Just practising for future arguments. Doesn’t everyone do that?”

“I don’t.”

“Maybe you should.”

“Well, this is new,” he said when they arrived at the cliff top.

“They’ve dragged up all these ships since this morning?” said Spring. There were so many ships on the beach that it almost made Spring cry. How could Lowa possibly hope to beat off this invasion? There were enough surely to carry every Roman who’d ever lived across the Channel. And the size of those warships with all their scorpions and archer platforms! Just one or two of them surely could obliterate any Maidun force that tried to prevent a landing, and there were twenty-eight of them!
How could the Britons possibly fight this?

“Most of the ships were on the beach,” said Ragnall, a smug note in his voice, “and the big warships were here, but that lot have arrived in the last couple of hours.” He indicated their end of the beach, where civilian-looking types were swarming around carrying, hammering and shouting and doing all the bits needed to assemble a collection of ships on the beach.

“What a hassle. Why didn’t they sail them here?” asked Spring.

“Some of them did, look.” He pointed out to sea, where four large boats, not as big as the Roman warships but a good deal more sizeable than the Roman transports, were sailing for the shore. They had flat fronts, rather than pointy prows like every other ship Spring had ever seen. There were odd things moving on them, too. As they sailed closer, Spring could see that they were giant beasts, surrounded by crews of people with skin as dark as Atlas’.

“What are those animals?” asked Ragnall, in Latin.

“Elephants,” said Ferrandus the praetorian. “Monsters, the worst you’ll ever see. They make them drink saltwater and that gives them a taste for human flesh. I was a mercenary down in Africa once and—”

“You were never a mercenary in Africa,” interrupted Tertius.

“OK, it was a friend of mine, but story’s the same, so what does it matter? Why do you have to interrupt a story?”

“To point out that you’re a liar.”

“It wasn’t a lie. I was being succinct. Paraphrasing myself to make the story shorter for the benefit of the listener. That’s not lying. It’s oratory.”

“Oratory my cock. You don’t know the first thing about—”

“Can we get back to the elephants?” interrupted Ragnall. The first of the transports had reached the beach. The reason for the flat front of the ship became clear as it was lowered onto the sand to become a ramp for the animals to disembark.

The first of the elephants was led out. Spring was very pleased with it. Its fantastically long, dangling nose was bracketed by magnificent tusks tipped with gold. Other than that, its great head, its mountainous grey wrinkly body and its thick, tree trunk-like legs were unadorned. It was wonderful, like a giant, massive-headed, shaved and elderly dog. Its grey ears were flappy and each as big as its head. This lead elephant was missing half an ear on one side, but Spring reckoned that that was an injury rather than the norm. All animals, in her experience, were symmetrical. She wondered why briefly, then got back to admiring the elephants.

“They kit them up for battle,” said Ferrandus “put armour on them, great metal boots and little turrets with maybe four archers. When I fought against them—”

“When your friend fought against them,” Tertius reminded him.

“Right, prick, yeah my friend. Anyway, they came stamping through, mashing men under their feet and ripping them apart with those horns. Try and get nearby with a spear, the archers in the tower shot you.”

Ragnall translated fairly accurately for Spring and she thanked him.

The man leading the first elephant was almost as impressive as his beast. He had the same-coloured skin as Atlas, so Spring guessed he was a Kushite, too, or at least African, but he was much taller and skinnier that the Kushite she knew. He wore a thick yellow-brown fur around one shoulder, the giant paw of some beast still attached to it; a big lion, she reckoned, bigger than the ones she’d seen in Zadar’s arena as a child. His whole look was slightly ruined for Spring by his big, bulbous bronze helmet. Everyone knew that bronze was softer than iron so you wore it only because you thought it looked good, so his big round helm was just silly. There was nothing silly about the long, thick, curving sword that was strapped to his waist, though.

“As I was saying,” continued Tertius. “Nasty, nasty animals. They’ll gore you with those horns or stamp on you or strangle you with that nose, then they’ll eat you. Their skin’s impervious to arrows, spears or any blade. Only way you can kill one is to stick a spear in its eye.”

Ragnall translated for Spring, leaving out the bit about being able to kill one by sticking a spear in its eye. That interested Spring. Was he worried she’d escape and take secrets back to Britain? If so, that wasn’t a great secret. It would be hard getting close enough to the beast, let alone getting it to hold still for long enough to line up a spear thrust into that little eye. Besides, she didn’t believe they were so bad. She felt that they were kind animals. Was she getting vibes from them, or was it just that every large beast she’d ever met was a herbivore? She remembered the aurochs they’d killed, and its ancient melancholy. Surely the elephants were similarly peaceful beasts, not meat-eaters, cowed by centuries of—

There was a terrible scream from the beach. The second elephant, standing at the top of the ramp, had reared up on its hind legs and was waving its nose in the air, crying out in an undulating high-pitched wail that sounded like a cartload of trumpeters being pushed into a burning longhouse.

Forelegs crashed down, the ramp splintered and elephant and handler fell into the shallows. There was a mighty thrashing and more shredding of wood as the bellowing elephant regained its feet. Its handler found his at the same time and held out a calming hand. The elephant whacked him with its nose and he went down. It looked about as if seeking someone else to kill, spotted a gang of merchant types and their servants who were staring agog next to their half-built ship, and charged. The merchants stood like idiots for a moment, then ran, all but one, a great fat bearded man, who stood and stared as the beast galloped heavily towards him.