Age of Iron (18 page)

“They came down the river in a skiff,” said the yellow-hatted druid. “We never seem ‘em before. They had a baby with ’em. She said it was ’ers.” He pointed at one of the women, then the other. “And so did she.”

“Hers died. This one’s mine!” The women began accusing one another again.

“Silence!” shouted Felix again. Zadar leaned forward, chin in hand, and studied them. The crowd waited.

“The women will share the child,” he said. “Tadman.” The big bodyguard nodded. “Cut the baby in half.”

Tadman strode forward, hefting his short-handled iron blade.

“Noooo!” screamed the shorter and older of the two women, dashing at Tadman. He met her with a backhanded slap. She fell. The other woman stood, arms folded, a small smile pulling up one corner of her mouth. The baby wailed.

“The one who attacked Tadman is the mother,” said Zadar, wearily raising his voice above the baby’s crying. “The smug one is the liar.”

The rightful mother fell to her knees, moaning thanks. The other woman’s smile dissolved. The Honey murmured approval of Zadar’s wisdom. Tadman turned to walk back to his post.

“Tadman. You haven’t finished.” The German stopped. The crowd hushed. The baby’s crying was the only sound. Zadar continued: “I told you to cut a baby in half. Why can I still hear a whole baby?”

The crowd gasped. The baby’s mother collapsed. Weylin smiled. Tadman returned to the wicker basket and picked the squalling child up by its feet. He slid the blade between its legs. There was silence all around the field. Tadman looked at Zadar. Zadar nodded.

When it was done, Zadar said, “Give the rightful mother a piglet. She will learn to look after her young and I will see that piglet alive and happy on my next visit.”

He turned to look at the false mother. A rare, barely noticeable smile crept onto his face.

“You, druid,” The Honey’s druid stared at him. “Fetch liars’-tongue scissors, a fire dog and a pot of cooking oil. You and you – ” Zadar pointed at two of the Honey tribe “ – help him. Someone else lay a fire.” The woman made to bolt, but Chamanca was on her like an eagle on a crow. She tripped her, leaped on her back, gathered and gripped her arms, leaned forward and sank her teeth into her neck.

“Calm, Chamanca!” said Felix. “We don’t want to hurt her yet.”

Weylin smiled. This was what he’d come to see. Nothing like other people’s troubles to make you forget your own.

Judging over, the Maidun troops dispersed, those of the Honey tribe still capable of walking carried those who couldn’t away, and it was Weylin’s turn to see Zadar.

He stood in the pasture in front of his king, bandaged head throbbing. The summer evening sky had turned the tenderest blue, melding to orange at the western horizon. Delicate insects floated up from the grass. Bees buzzed. Weylin could feel Felix’s gaze worming through his mind.

“You let Lowa Flynn escape,” said Zadar. It wasn’t a question.

It wasn’t my fault!
But Weylin knew better than to disagree. “Yes,” he managed.

“Her flight was aided?”

“By a band of men. Ten of them. Their leader said his name was Dug.”

“He introduced himself?”

“Yes. No. That’s what his men called him. Tough buggers they were. Northern. Murkan, I think. They killed everybody else before we knew we were being attacked. Only my reflexes saved me. I managed to do for four of them before they knocked me out.” He pointed at his injured head.

Felix leaned over to Zadar and spoke quietly in his ear.

“You were outwitted by a child. A girl,” said Zadar.

How could he know?

“There was a girl.” Weylin felt himself reddening under the amused stares of Zadar’s entourage. “But that was luck, and it was mostly this northerner—”

“‘This northerner’. Single. Not a group?”

Weylin looked into Zadar’s emotionless eyes. They looked like the eyes of a fish that had lain too long on the fishmonger’s slab. He glanced at Felix. Felix smiled back, terrifyingly, then whispered something else to Zadar.
He knows what happened.
The idea that Felix had been somehow watching him made Weylin’s bowels churn. What else did he know? It was time to tell the truth.

“There was one northerner. He bested us through trickery, with the child’s help. They escaped on horseback.”

“How old was the child?” Zadar asked.

Weylin’s eyes darted to Felix. “Eight?”

Savage Banba barked a laugh. Tadman snorted. Even Keelin’s bruised mouth pulled into a pained smile.

“Tell me everything you can remember about both of these rescuers. Leave nothing out.”

Weylin told them all that came to mind. Zadar probed further.

“So. Lowa has escaped you twice,” Zadar said finally.

That was totally unfair. It wasn’t his fault that the troops he took to Bladonfort had been so useless. And when Lowa had escaped from Barton, he and Dionysia had been two of many pursuers. Carden and Atlas were more to blame. They’d had her in their clutches and let her go.

“I am aware that others are to blame as well as you. I’m going to give you another chance, Weylin.”

It was better than he’d hoped for. Felix looked disappointed.

“Pick twenty good Warriors and horses. Travel light and fast. I shall send shouts to all the tribes. They’ll give you supplies and information. If they refuse, take what you need. Go back to Bladonfort and find their trail. Bring Lowa Flynn to me alive, uninjured. Bring me the child, unharmed. Torture the man Dug in front of every tribe you pass on your return. Make them watch. Explain that this is the penalty for defying me. I’d prefer him alive, but don’t hold back. If he dies – ” Zadar shrugged “ – so be it. But make sure many people see him suffer. A lot. That will be all.”

Weylin walked away through the warm, calm night into the camp. The shout went up behind him and echoed along the valley and over the hills: “To all! Capture Lowa Flynn and companions! Help Weylin Nancarrow!” The call would be relayed between the farms, hamlets and villages under Zadar’s influence. By the end of the night there would be a network of people stretching a hundred miles in every direction ready to help him.

The shout’s echoes died away as he walked through a camp that smelled of woodsmoke and horses. Zadar’s rule that everyone must shit and piss well downstream of wherever they camped had caused much initial bitching, but nobody objected now that the camps didn’t smell of a thousand people’s crap. Plus it was brilliant riding through villages further down the river the following day and seeing their mills, dykes and fishing nets caked in turd.

“S
o. What happened with Zadar?”

Lowa narrowed her eyes at Dug. What were his motives? Why had he risked his life for her and why did he want to help her now?

She abhorred vanity, but the most likely explanation was that he wanted to shag her. No, more than that – that he’d actually fallen for her. Not long ago a drunken Aithne had told Lowa that she wasn’t overly attractive in any normal way, but she was the type that some men would always become besotted with. What Aithne had actually said was, “Not everyone gets you. Most guys would do you if they were drunk and you made it easy, but they’d just as happily shag me. However, there’s something about you that some guys see and
really
go for, so there’ll always be a number of men who’d be grateful to crawl two miles over jagged flint to sniff the cock of the last man who fucked you.”

Aithne was right, perhaps not literally, but men did seem to fall heavily for her every now and then. It was a shame she never felt the same way. Usually she pitied her suitors, and pity was about as big a turn-on as incontinence.

Maybe Dug was different. He was old, but he was good-looking, and beneath a slightly bumbling exterior he was competent and relatively bright. And modest – she liked that. Even more, she liked that he hadn’t tried to jump on her the night before. She couldn’t see herself falling for him, but he was right, she could do with some help from him and the weird little girl. Even if it was just guarding her while she slept or being decoys while she escaped.

And if he did try it on … well, that would depend on what sort of mood she was in when he made his move and whether she’d been drinking.

“OK,” she said. “I’ll tell you.”

Dug wobbled his bottom on the log like a duck settling down on a clutch of eggs, making himself several degrees less attractive. Spring, back from washing the breakfast gear in the river, sat next to him and looked at her expectantly. Well, Lowa thought, we’ve got hours before it’ll be safe to get back on the road, so I might as well begin at the beginning.

“My first memory is when our village was sacked and I saw my mother, father, two older brothers and a younger sister killed, along with uncles, aunts, cousins, my friends, their families. All apart from me and my older sister Aithne. We’d been gathering berries near the village…”

It took Lowa a long time to tell her story, accompanied by the chirruping chatter of wrens and tits hopping about the encircling foliage. She’d never done this before – she rarely talked about herself – but she was surprised how easy and enjoyable it was to tell everything to these strangers. She wanted to get it out. She found herself impatient to carry on when Dug spent too long off in the woods on his mid-morning dump.

The rest of the time he listened attentively, asking questions every now and then. Spring whittled sticks. At one point she left with her sling, came back with a moorhen and cooked up a stew for lunch.

Lowa told them about her childhood of running and fighting, how her band of archers had come together by accident, how she’d come to work for Zadar, and how her band had risen to the pinnacle of Zadar’s favour before he killed all those she loved and tried to kill her. She found herself telling Dug that the attack on Barton had been her idea. Zadar had intended to march straight past. Barton was a good fiefdom that paid its taxes on time. She’d persuaded him that they needed a strong northern base and that the slave price for the battle’s survivors would cover a good few years of tax receipt. So it was her fault all those people at Barton had died, although, in her defence, she’d suggested blocking the bridge and capturing everyone, not slaughtering them.

Then, for no reason she could fathom, Zadar had had her women killed and tried to murder her too. So now she wanted revenge on Zadar. She didn’t, she said, need or deserve any help.

Spring nodded. “We shouldn’t help her, Dug. She’s not a good person and she wouldn’t help you.” The girl had an intense look that naggingly reminded Lowa of somebody, but she couldn’t think who. She kept almost getting it, but then the image dissolved like the tantalising memories of a dream.

“You’re right. And I haven’t asked for your help. But the people Zadar killed – my sister, the other four – were good people, and they deserve to be avenged, but … yes, there is no reason you should help me. This is my battle and I—”

“Shhhh!” Spring held a finger to her lips. She cocked her head. “Dogs. Over there. Coming nearer.” She pointed in the direction they’d come from the night before.

Dug began to say something, but Lowa held up her hand for silence. Lowa had never met anyone with better hearing than herself, but it was a good thirty heartbeats before she could make out the barking of dogs. She looked at Spring. The girl smiled and nodded like a mother encouraging a toddler who’s completed a simple puzzle.

Thirty more heartbeats, and Lowa was certain the dogs were coming in their direction. Shit. She’d thought she was clean away, but Zadar wasn’t going to give up that easily. What had she done?

“Pack up. Quickly,” she said.

Lowa gathered her bow and the meagre kit that Spring had pilfered from the forester, then helped Spring load the horses while Dug pulled on his mail shirt and helmet.

“Right,” said Dug in his strange northern accent, already heading up one of the low banks. “We’ll lead the horses up through the woods. There’s a stream—”

“No,” interrupted Lowa.

“No?”

“No. They’re after me and they’ll have my scent. You two take the horses and ride at speed along the river valley. You’ll be faster in the open. I’ll draw them up into the woods. When you hit the Bladonfort road, head west, away from Bladonfort. I’ll meet you on the road.”

“But they’ll see us out in the open.”

“Not if you’re quick, and even if they do see you and for some reason they come after you instead of me, horses will outrun dogs.”

“You’re on foot!”

“I’ll lose them in the trees. Get going. We don’t have time for a debate. Just go.”

Dug looked like he was going to say something else, but then climbed onto the larger horse. Spring, scowling, mounted the other, in front of their baggage.

“Yah!” Spring kicked the horse up the bank and out of the clearing. Dug bounced awkwardly after her.

Bow in hand and quiver on her back, Lowa Flynn set off up into the trees.

D
rustan and Ragnall carried the latter’s father’s tortured body from the battlefield at Barton on a stretcher made from spears and dead men’s clothes. Ragnall was the same person he’d been two mornings ago, but so much was different. How could he be alive and unchanged when they were all dead?

Zadar’s army had been easy enough to track. They’d followed the trail of looted farms and dead or terror-struck peasants. At night Ragnall hadn’t slept. Terrible images – Navlin and the rats, his brothers, the angle of his mother’s broken neck in the slave collar – tumbled in his mind. He’d thought he might go mad, but instead he went numb. So when they found his father among the corpses at Barton, dead with a bolt through each shoulder, attached to a cart next to some other luckless fellow, it wasn’t a surprise.

Pupil and teacher carried the body to the woods and into a clearing, as they’d done with his mother. Ragnall felt sick with guilt that they’d left his brothers where they’d fallen, and everybody else at Boddingham for that matter. Drustan had told him that, given the circumstances, the gods would make allowances, and all the deserving would still drift happily to the Otherworld. They had given the rites, and that was enough.