Age of Iron (10 page)

He shook his head to clear it and bring himself back into the present, and looked over to the left. There things were more problematic. Four angry men, presumably accomplices of the wig-wearing body robber whose skull he’d crushed, were advancing on him in a line, knives drawn. They were filthy, clad in tattered leathers. Three, in rough-spun woollen hoods, looked young, wiry and strong. The older one – hoodless, hairless and it seemed earless – looked like he knew what to do in a fight.

Dug, on the other hand, looked like a heavily armed ringmail-clad Warrior, even if he didn’t feel much like one. His head! He could hardly see with the pain.

He opened his arms, bloody warhammer in one hand, bloody knife in the other, and roared, “Come on! Come and get it, you soft shites! Arrrrggghhhh!”

One of the hooded men turned and fled immediately at an efficient jogging pace. The other three looked at Dug, then at each other. Dug hefted his hammer and took a step towards them. The robbers turned and ran.

Nice
, thought Dug, smiling to himself. Then one of the younger men stopped to pluck a sling from a corpse. He found a stone and slung it at Dug.

Dug dropped into the reeds as the stone swished by. He rummaged in his pocket, pulled out his own sling and fitted a stone in the leather. Through the reeds he could see the would-be assassin creeping towards him, sling ready. Dug took a few crouched paces through the reeds, leaped up and flung his slingstone into the centre of the man’s forehead. The attacker’s eyes widened in cross-eyed surprise and he fell. The other body robbers stared at him slack-jawed. It had been a lucky shot. Dug hardly ever hit anything with his sling. But they didn’t know that. Fighting was one half bravado and one half luck.

“Fuck off or I’ll kill you all with one stone!” He twirled the weighted sling in circles. Surely they’d know he’d never hit them at that range and that if all three of them rushed him he wouldn’t have a chance?? But they ran away. Dug slung the stone at them. To his surprise, it whumped into the hairless robber’s back. He staggered, then carried on all the faster.

He watched them go then crouched over his first attacker to see if he had anything useful on him. You could find good stuff, looting bodies. It never felt quite right, but if you’d killed them yourself then surely it was acceptable? And if someone else had killed them but not robbed them, then that was pretty much OK too, Dug always told himself. Some kings punished bodyrobbing with a cruel death, but they weren’t watching. If you commit a crime and nobody sees you, then surely it can’t be a crime?

There was a good leather bag across the man’s chest. Dug dropped his hammer and wrestled it from the corpse’s shoulders. He pulled up the toggle and opened the draw-twine. Inside, packed in wool, was a heavily gilded, well polished mirror. He held it up. It was a while since he’d seen himself. Brown eyes looked back at him from a straggle-bearded face caked with dried mud and blood. His otter-brown hair splayed wildly from under his helmet, with the odd silver strand running through it like spiders’ web in dry autumnal scrub. His eyebrows seemed to have gone insane and sent long runner hairs out to probe the air around. His face was more lined than he’d thought, the bags under his eyes baggier and darker and his nose more lumpen from its innumerable breakages. His beard had more even grey strands than his fringe.

He stared at himself. That’s what he looked like. That’s what other people saw when they looked at him. Weird. He’d been chosen as “Danu’s most handsome” in a fair as a young man. Not much chance of that happening again, even if he did trim his eyebrows.

Then he remembered the girl with the cart, no doubt a member of the body-robbing team. He whipped round. It didn’t do well to forget any of your enemy. The girl hadn’t moved. She was still over by the trees, looking at him with disarming indifference.

He picked up his hammer and walked over, untying the leather chin strap and taking his helmet off on the way. There was a big new dent in it, pocked with stone dust. That explained it then. He must have taken a big slingstone to the head while waiting for the chariots to attack collapsed into the reeds, and the chariots had seen someone else to go after.

As he approached, the girl’s attitude turned from relaxed insolence to pert defiance. She was an elfin child beneath that pile of dirty blonde-brown hair. She had blue eyes, a wide mouth, an overbite that made her somewhat duck-like, and a nose like a ball fungus, but she was pretty all the same. He’d already decided what to do with her. Time was he would have left her, but in these bad days, far too often, he’d seen people killed by children they’d underestimated. Her cart was half full of battlefield spoil so she was definitely part of the gang that had tried to kill him. That settled it. If he walked away, especially in the state he was in, she might follow him and stab a knife up into his groin. He’d seen plenty of men killed by knife thrusts from apparently harmless foes, and it seemed like a particularly crap way to go. Plus, if he left her, Zadar’s army would find her, and who knew what they’d do with a pretty little girl, especially one who’d been bodyrobbing.

The only option was to kill her. He’d be doing her a favour. He raised his hammer.

R
agnall Sheeplord and Drustan Dantanner ducked under bright leaves as their horses splashed into the ford. The little packpony dug her hooves into riverside shingle, but Ragnall jagged her leading rein and she followed reluctantly through the fast, cold water.

The packpony was elderly and angry. Ragnall was young and superb. He was third son of Kris and Sabrina Sheeplord, king and queen of the Boddingham tribe. He had never been hungry, sick or insecure. By the age of ten he had the thrusting dimpled chin, spade-shaped jaw, bright iron-grey eyes, thick dark wavy hair, muscled limbs and long triangular torso of a legendary prince. By twelve he could outwit his eldest brother. By fourteen he could better all the boys – and most of the men – in wrestling, sword fighting, horsemanship and all the other sports in which magnificent young men excelled.

Despite his position, looks, abilities and youth, Ragnall was self-deprecating, empathetic and helpful. When his father was feeling his age, the young Ragnall would swoop in to ease whatever burden was troubling him. If ever you couldn’t find him, chances were he’d be at the river helping with laundry or running errands for the tribe’s infirm. All the teenage girls, many of the women and some number of the men desired him, but his eyes and polite fantasies had never strayed from Anwen Smith. While the other teens were zooming around, making moony eyes at each other and fucking like foxes, Ragnall and Anwen had walked about sensibly, earnestly discussing life’s challenges. They didn’t judge others, but he and his true love had decided to wait for marriage before becoming fully physically intimate.

He was so wonderful that most people hated him, despite wanting to sleep with him. The other children saw his good behaviour as a deliberate reproach to their own. Other parents saw his very existence as a slight on their parenting skills. So, when he was sixteen, his mother and father sent him to the centre of druidic life on the Island of Angels, some two hundred and fifty miles to the north-west, to train as a druid along with other young men and women from all over the druidic world – from the dusty plains of Iberia to the endless German forests and everywhere in between. It was for the best, they told each other. He probably wouldn’t be a full-time druid when he grew up – although there were worse things, given the privileges that could come with the position – but the training would be useful for the high-achieving life that Ragnall was bound to have.

Ragnall loved the Island of Angels. Its groves of sacred oaks, wooden worship rooms and longhouses for sleeping, eating and learning sprouted all over the rocky, often rain-swept sanctuary. The halls and groves were linked by an intriguingly misleading network of passages, seemingly built over hundreds of years purely for him and his friends to explore.

The lessons were interesting, if disappointing. Back at Boddingham children thought that you went to the Island of Angels to learn how to bring bodies back from the dead, control others, see the future, bend elements to one’s will and so on. To learn magic, in other words. However, it turned out that druids’ magic wasn’t magic at all. It was all about knowing which herbs treated what ailments and how to prepare them, learning which gods looked after what, memorising history, poems, songs and stories by rote and discussing the meaning of life. The closest they got to magic was sacrificing animals to the gods and reading their entrails to divine the future, but Ragnall, despite his unshakeable belief that there was magic in the world, was sceptical about these lessons. Only the predictions of the class wags – “I see Ragnall getting wet” before pouring water over him, for example – ever seemed to come true.

There were constant rumours that the older druids
did
perform what the pupils called “proper magic”. Boys and girls were always claiming they’d seen wraiths floating out of the higher druids’ windows or sages starting fires by pointing at bushes, or walking at night accompanied by their doubles from the Otherworld, but Ragnall saw only one wraith in all the time he was there, and that really could have been fog.

That didn’t mean there wasn’t plenty to see and do on the island. Despite the numbers of creatures killed in the classroom, the seashore was thick with animals, especially seals. A head druid four hundred years earlier, enchanted by seals’ wide-eyed, undemanding amiability, had decreed that the rotund animals were children of Leeban, the goddess of the sea, and must not be harmed. Now they coated the island’s shores like lazy bees on a hive. In summer there was a constant background of seal barks, coughs, clicks and honks, and pupils and teachers would play in the sea with the seal pups like Ragnall had played with puppies at home.

His friends were even better than the seals. Finally there were other boys and girls nearly as bright as him, and he could have proper conversations. He’d never realised that he was unpopular back in Boddingham, and he didn’t recognise his popularity on the Island of Angels, but it felt more like home than his home ever had. He had, however, been deeply affected by the news that Zadar had taken Boddingham, saddened despite subsequent reports that his father had agreed to pay the warlord a tithe with not a drop of blood lost. A few of the elder boys mocked Ragnall, calling his father a coward. He’d wanted to rush home, but word from his father told him to stay put, and counsel from the druids eased his mind.

So, most of the time, Ragnall put his worries aside, got on with school life and remained true to Anwen despite almost daily invitations not to. Anwen came to see him on the island once, during his final autumn there. They’d walked the beaches, marvelling at Danu’s creatures, discussing the other gods’ roles and planning for the future. She’d told him how the size and power of Zadar’s army had left his father with no choice, and almost all of Boddingham had agreed with the decision to capitulate and pay the tithe. Giving up a tenth of everything was no bother. People worked a little harder and had as much to eat and drink as before.

On her last afternoon, his manly hair blowing in the salt-tanged beach breeze, seals looking on and puffins, gulls, gannets and skuas spiralling overhead, Ragnall asked Anwen to marry him. She said yes, and they agreed to become husband and wife soon after he returned to Boddingham. That had been more than half a year before. He was aching to see her on a romantic level and, more and more, on a physical one. So the journey home – twelve days on horseback – had been too long. Luckily, Ragnall had Drustan Dantanner for company.

Drustan was, Ragnall reckoned, the school’s wisest teacher and the epitome of all that a druid should be. Unlike most druids, Drustan seemed genuine. He claimed no mythical powers of healing and didn’t seem to be angling every utterance to make himself look more excellent and mystical. He seemed genuinely kind. The theory of human sacrifice had replaced practical demonstrations at the school centuries before, but it was Drustan who had insisted that teaching even theoretical human sacrifice was no longer necessary. What’s more, Drustan had never put a clammy hand on Ragnall’s thigh as so many of the other teachers were wont to do. And he
looked
like a druid from the stories of Ragnall’s childhood. A few of the teachers used shells or iron razors to shave. Some were bald, some were women. Drustan was a good sixty years old but still sprightly, with a long white beard, an arc of curly white hair framing a shiny domed head and eyes bright with inquisitive intelligence. In his habitual long, undecorated and undyed woollen robe, he looked the part.

So when Drustan had suggested that he travel to his own home in the south-west via Boddingham and accompany him, Ragnall had accepted happily.

On the final morning of their trek, they clambered up the ford’s flag-laid slope and on past a sheepdog sunning itself on a low embankment around a small farm. Smoke from the farm hut’s fire curled up into the still morning air. The dog looked up at the two men expectantly. Ragnall smiled at it. Was there anything more pleasant than a well maintained ford, a charming farm and a happy hound?

“Good morning, dog!” Ragnall said, tossing the animal a bite of sausage that he’d saved from breakfast for that very purpose. The dog leaped from its perch, gulped the sausage, looped around Ragnall’s horse’s legs then rubbed its back on the road in absurdly grateful abasement. Ragnall laughed his warm laugh.

The men rode on in companionable silence. The air was soft, bright and warm. Ragnall was sure he’d never been happier. Finally he was on his way back to Anwen and his parents.

Up from the farm, a hare sat erect in the middle of the track. It watched them approach until they were ten paces away, then shot off faster than a slingstone northwards, across a field of cattle who remained unmoved by its speedy passage.

“A good omen?” asked Ragnall.

Drustan smiled, stroked his beard as he often did before speaking, then said, “There are druids who’d say that it was a bad omen. You’re returning to your family and your true love, so seeing an animal that’s often in a pair on its own could mean that disaster looms.” Drustan put on a booming, portentous voice – “You too are destined to run alone!”
–
and laughed to himself. “But there are others who’d say that it’s a good omen. The herd of cattle represents those to whom you are returning. They are going to accept your appearance as calmly as the cows accepted the hare’s.”