Reign of Iron (34 page)

They didn’t bother with the plume-headed centurion this time; they took him straight into the middle. By the amount of black-clad men and snooty fuckers wearing a lot of bronze, it had to be the commander’s camp. Clearly he was expected and so he should have been. He had a lot to tell the combover general.

Atlas’ eyes felt like they were gummed shut. Finally they came unstuck and sprang open. The light was like spears through his head. He tried to lift a hand for shade, but nothing happened so he closed his eyes. He tried to wiggle his toes. Pain bolted through his body and limbs.

He opened his eyes again, slowly this time.

He was in a hut. Something noxious was cooking on a stove. So his nose worked but he’d have preferred that it didn’t. There was noise to his right. Ears were also good then. He tried to turn his head but had to settle for swivelling his eyes.

Silhouetted against the lancing windowlight, facing away from him, was a squat woman with a ball of curly hair, busying herself with something on the bench. After a long while, she turned and came to loom over him.

She was maybe seventy years old, but sure on her feet with bright eyes, a look of concern on her face and an iron knife in one hand. The knife might have been worrying, but the look on her face told Atlas that she was no torturer.

“Can you move?” she asked. She spoke in the same accent as Dug had, meaning she was from Britain’s northern wilds.

He blinked.

She shook her head as if annoyed with him, and bustled out of view, only to reappear moments later with a wide-necked wooden jug. She grabbed his cheeks, squeezed his mouth open with surprisingly strong fingers and glugged in a small amount of liquid from the jug.

He swallowed. It was water mixed with honey, apple and other ingredients that he didn’t recognise. She nodded, said “Hmm” in a satisfied tone and tipped the jug again.

He looked up at her and blinked a few times, hoping that she might tell him who she was, what had happened, where he was, why he couldn’t move and so on, but she didn’t. Glug by glug she emptied the contents of the jug into him, then lumbered over to the corner to stir the foul-smelling pot, then returned to whatever she was doing on the bench, her back to him.

Atlas blinked in frustration. Had he been in the woman’s position, he’d have not only explained what the Sobek was going on, but also established a rudimentary method of conversation – one blink for yes, two for no, three for “Can you scratch my arm please?” and more. But, no, she had things to be doing and no time for the man with questions and a maddeningly itchy arm. She carried on as if there wasn’t a massive African Warrior taking up a significant portion of her hut. He watched her for a while, then went back to sleep.

“N
o, no, don’t kill them all! Don’t kill any more!” shouted Felix, running towards the massacre, but he might as well have been ordering a passing flock of birds to fly down out of the sky and dance a jig for him. All of them – Maximen and Celermen – were frenzied, leaping about the bodies of horses and people and hacking at anything that moved. Idiots. They’d killed all the Gaulish captives on the beach in their excitement and now they were finishing off the British. The only other people left for sustenance were the seven crew. They’d need more fuel than that!

“Save some of them! Gub! Bistan!” he shouted pointlessly. Some of the Celermen were chasing fleeing horses away along the beach now, for the love of Mars. Animals did almost nothing for the magic that powered them. They needed humans and they were slaughtering them all! It was like the legionaries landing and immediately gorging themselves on every single morsel of rations they’d brought with them before they knew what foraging was available.

Felix slowed as he came to the prone Maximan. A lucky shot had found his eye slit. He put the sole of his sandal on the giant’s shoulder and shoved. No response. The Maximen were tough, but put an arrow through their brains and they died. He pulled at the arrow and it came out with a shiveringly unpleasant sucking sound. The missile was a marvellous bit of design and ironwork, he had to concede, better than anything the Romans had. Elann Nancarrow’s work, no doubt. He’d have to try to make sure she remained alive when he took the land. She’d designed and forged Tadman Dantadman’s armour, the prototype for the amazing armour the Maximen wore. Other smiths had replicated her designs. They’d been skilled, but none of them had been the innovator that she was, and besides he’d had them all killed to keep the secrets of his legion. When he captured Elann he’d see if she could do anything about the eye slits. A mesh of iron, perhaps?

He found four more Leathermen killed by the vicious Maidunite salvo, all of them head-shot. Felix prayed to Diana that that was it, but he knew it wouldn’t be. He expected to find more dead Leathermen among the corpses ahead – but surely no more dead Maximen? He also hoped that the one Leatherman he’d seen leap up from the site of the first skirmish and run off to join the main battle had been Bistan. From the way he’d run he thought it was, but with those hoods it was impossible to tell them apart with any certainty.

At the main battle ground it looked like a herd of horses and a crowd of people had been butchered ready for roasting then chewed up and scattered all over the place by a multitude of marauding foxes. The Maximen and those Leathermen who weren’t off chasing horses were pawing through the bodies, looking for survivors to kill. There weren’t any.

“Bistan!” he called. “Bistan!”

One of the Leathermen came tripping up, soaked in blood, carrying what Felix guessed was a human thigh bone, but it could have been a smaller bone from a horse. “Yeah, boss?”

This time Felix was relieved to hear it.

Lowa gripped Adler around the waist and the horse thundered along beneath them. She’d been staggering around trying to work out where the Bel she was when the captain of the Two Hundred had grabbed her, pulled her onto her horse and galloped away, dodging Maximen, flying from the beach and plunging between dunes that had hopefully obscured their escape. She’d only just managed to grasp all this, because she was only just managing to grip on to consciousness. Her right shirt sleeve was sodden with blood. She guessed it was from her head, which was spinning about like a stone in a whirling sling.

She tried to remember what had happened. She’d shot a Leatherman with her second arrow and a few more had gone down, then the demons had hit them. She’d been knocked from her horse immediately, possibly she’d killed the Leatherman that had done that, then she’d taken on an Ironman. The next thing she remembered was being pulled onto Adler’s horse.

“We have to go back,” she managed.

“They’re all dead,” said Adler. “We go back and we are, too. You’re needed. We’re headed for Big Bugger Hill.”

“No.”

“You are needed. There’s no sense dying here.”

Lowa didn’t feel that she deserved to live after leading the Two Hundred to their deaths, and if her best-trained, most talented men and women had been wiped out killing just a few of the beasts, what hope did the rest of them have? But Adler was right. Shitty as it felt, it made sense for them to return to base. What was more, she thought with a pang of guilt, there was a little boy at Big Bugger Hill who she was desperate to see.

She gripped Adler’s shirt and looked back to check that they weren’t being followed.

They were.

A solitary Leatherman was sprinting down the forest path behind them. He was a hundred paces back and catching.

“Adler…”

The captain glanced back. “Danu’s cuntfluff,” she said.

“Indeed,” said Lowa. “We’ll have to stop and face him.”

“I will. You’ll keep going.”

“No. The two of us will have a better chance.”

“You’re injured, you’ll get in the way. You have to go back and command Maidun and Britain to victory. I do not…”

“Adler, no, it’s too much, I—”

“I’m doing it. You never know, I might beat him.”

Adler stood up on the galloping horse’s back, turned, put her hands on Lowa’s shoulders and sprung over her head.

“Kill the Roman bastards for me!” she shouted, unsheathing her sword as she flew.

Lowa galloped on, between the trees, knowing that Adler was right again, she had to return and command the army. Still, she squeezed her eyes tight in rage and shame for leading so many to their deaths.

R
agnall was surprised. They had an unassailable base here on the coast. They’d landed only that morning and he’d seen no reconnaissance patrols head out. Surely the best course was consolidation and caution? So why was Caesar commanding the centurions to prepare five legions to march inland at dawn the next day? No doubt it was the right thing to do, but Ragnall couldn’t for the life of himself see the reasoning behind it.

“King Ragnall?” Caesar said when he’d finished explaining the marching order to the plume-helmeted centurions and they were striding away. Ragnall raised a hand. “Ah good, there you are. How is the queen?”

He hesitated for a heartbeat. A few centurions had turned their heads at the words “King Ragnall”. Their looks combined unpleasantly into a waft of mild but universal hostility. They had a point, Ragnall had to concede. It was odd to hear himself and Spring referred to as king and queen, to be awarded with the rule of the entire province-to-be when they hadn’t done anything to earn it. In Rome a man strived for position. Yes, there were great families and being born into them was an advantage, but in the end a man stood on his merits. Caesar, Crassus, Pompey – all these had schemed and battled a long, lonely slog up the political ranks. There had been kings way back in Rome’s past, but they’d understood the folly and unfairness of the system and got rid of them
nearly five hundred years before
and replaced them with elected officials. That was how much more advanced they were than the British.

But they weren’t in Rome, they were in Britain on that chilly summer’s evening and he and Spring really were going to be king and queen.

Baths on Maidun Castle. That was the first thing he’d have built. Big, hot, marble baths, right next door to his palace on the eyrie. His palace. He’d burn Zadar’s – Lowa’s – little hut and have it replaced with a marble palace as huge and magnificent as Pompey’s theatre. Or something more huge and magnificent, why not? He’d heard of a triangular tomb in Egypt that was the tallest building in the world. Not for long, he thought. The Britons would need a project to work on, a symbol of the new order. It might as well be Ragnall’s Maidun Palace.

“The queen is well, my general, and she sends her congratulations on your successful landing,” he answered.

“Caesar is pleased. Now Ragnall, Caesar knows that young bucks crave adventure and burn to join the fight” – Ragnall nodded, thinking that he had no burning need to face the likes of Atlas and Chamanca in battle – “but you will abide in the shore camp to protect the queen and ensure that she remains with the Romans. You will not let her return to the Britons. Do you understand?”

“Yes. O Caesar, I hesitate to bring such a trivial matter to you, but there is a potential problem. The queen was attacked by—”

“Good,” said Caesar, waving Ragnall away. He’d stopped listening after “Yes.” “Where’s Mumarra?”

“Here!” Caesar’s chief engineer, a lanky, toothsomely smiley fellow stood forward.

“Tomorrow the army will require three identical battering rams, each thirty foot long with a diameter…”

Ragnall walked away. Caesar would be giving orders late into the evening, then he’d retire and fall asleep immediately. He didn’t have time to deal with Ragnall’s problem – or Spring’s, more accurately. Quintus hadn’t been at the briefing, so obviously he wasn’t on his feet just yet, but he didn’t need to be on his feet to give orders. But surely he wouldn’t attack Spring now that she was queen and under Caesar’s protection?

Then again, men like Quintus had such resources and influence that they were very unlikely to be tried successfully for any crime, and revenge on the girl who castrated him was probably incentive enough for Quintus to take a small risk.

“You’ve got to go now,” said Dug, “while they haven’t got you chained.”

Spring shook her head. “I’m staying here until I have something to take to Lowa.”

“You’ve got yourself. That’ll do. Go.”

“Oh yes, she’ll be jumping with joy to see me. Got myself caught, got the dogs killed … No, I have to have something, to know something useful – or I have to have killed Caesar.”

“You and your bow would be very useful right now. You might turn a battle. The war even. On top of that, if you stay here any longer, Quintus will kill you.”

“I’ve beaten him once.”

“Aye, and just him. He’ll come with ten men next time. And another thing, Lowa loves you. She’s having a shitty time of it and—”

“Lowa loves me! Now I’ve heard it all.”

“She does. She couldn’t visit you after I died because she was having a baby and then she had an invasion to ward off. You’re a great girl, Spring, the best, but you’ve got to start trying to see things from other people’s point of view.”

“I do see from others’ point of view! All the time! And besides, I can’t go without your hammer.”

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know, I guess the praetorian who took it still has it.”

“You can get Elann to make you a better one
if
you get out of here now.”

“I suppose you’re right…”

“I am.”

“OK. I just need to pack my—”

“Talking to yourself again?” asked Ragnall, dipping through the tent’s flap, followed by Ferrandus and Tertius. Tertius was carrying a length of iron chain.

“Only way I can get a decent conversation.”

“Hmmm. Well, sorry about this, but Caesar’s ordered me to chain you up so you can’t escape.”

“That’s a fine way to treat your wife.”

“I’m sorry.”

“But what if Quintus comes? I won’t be able to defend myself.”

“You’ll be chained by the ankle only. You’ll still be able to do what you did to him last time.”

“I won’t.”