Clash of Iron (13 page)

Further away, he could see lights. Perhaps the lights of human settlements, built against the beasts, where people gathered before making the journey to the Land of the Light?

He would do better, he decided, in this world. He may have been a decent fellow in the previous one, but he had done nothing outstanding. Here, he was going to be a hero. The hero.

Carefully, quietly, he felt about at his side. If the Otherworld fit his fantasies, he’d have a mighty sword girded to his waist. He’d take this blade and adventure across the Dark Places. He’d need neither food nor water. He’d rescue others from the beasts and lead them into the Light, where he’d find his father, his mother, his brothers … Drustan perhaps he would meet on the way. With Drustan’s cunning and his strength, they would prevail.

There was no sword. He was still wearing his toga. Far off, but unmistakeable, he heard the donkey-bray laugh of a young, upper-class Roman. He sat up. Soil from his hair tumbled down his back. He leant forwards and shook his head until there was no more earth to come.

The area immediately around him was in darkness, but nearby were hills and illuminated buildings that looked an awful lot like Rome. Closer, the piles of rock and angular trees came into focus and he realised he was on a building site. The tall strutures weren’t trees or gibbets, they were cranes. The cough he’d heard was a guard. He could see him now, heading away, torch aloft.

By the position of the lights of Rome and the size of the unlit area, he even knew which building site he was on. Pompey, scourge of pirates and recipient of three Triumphs for military victories, was using his immeasurable resources to build a colossal theatre on the Field of Mars. Ragnall had walked past it with Drustan a couple of days before. They’d commented on a particular block of stone, saying how massive it was. Drustan had marvelled at the ingenuity needed to cut it, and speculated on how they might have brought it to the site. They’d talked to one of the workers and found out that Drustan’s speculations had been correct.

Ragnall was atop that very stone. He realised what Drustan must have done. He looked about, but there was no sign of the druid. Surely he would have transported both of them? Or had he given his life to make magic powerful enough…? No, it wasn’t worth considering. Drustan could not have sacrificed himself to save Ragnall. He couldn’t have done. Drustan would be just as alive as he was, only elsewhere.

Wherever he was now, surely Drustan would head for the apartment they’d rented – their lofted hovel, as his old tutor had called it – on the top floor of a block in the Aventine? Ragnall would go there and meet him.

He climbed down his stone and out of Pompey’s building site with ease. Its high wooden wall had been built to keep people out, not in.

He walked home, keeping to the side streets. Even at night they were full of men, women, rag-clad children, stray dogs, dusty pigs and easily flustered chickens. At one point he had to break cover and cross the Forum, where suddenly everything was cool and spacious – a stone pavement, elegant ladies and gentlemen gliding about in clean togas – then it was back into the pell-mell, slummy tangle of filthy alleyways that made up most of the great city.

He ran up the rickety flights of stairs and slammed open their door. Drustan wasn’t there. No matter, he’d wait. There was nothing else he could do. Or was there? Was he being stupid, going back to their rented apartment? Nobody apart from them knew that they lived here, they’d given false names to the landlord, and if Felix could use magic to find him, then he’d find him wherever he went. No, the best thing would be to stay put and wait for Drustan.

F
or the first time in her life Lowa knew relative peace. The Romans were coming, that was for sure, but there was no sign of an imminent invasion. There was no immediate, obvious enemy, no rival to fight. She’d never been so stressed.

She had three main problems, she mused as she strapped on the ungainly new iron armour that Elann Nancarrow had made for her. One, she had no idea how soon the Romans were coming, or where they might land. Spring still insisted that they’d be there “quite soon”, but merchants and other travellers insisted that there was no sign of any Roman move towards Britain. So somehow the Romans were keeping their preparations secret. With any luck, Ragnall and Drustan would be back soon and they could tell her what they were up to. Until they did, she was in the dark, and preparing to meet a foe without knowing anything about the size or composition of its forces. She sometimes fantasised about knowing exactly where they were going to land and preparing a load of surprises to knock them straight back into the sea. She wished that she could make the whole coastline one big death zone – the salt flats pocked with hidden, spike-filled pits, beaches covered with caltrops and all the cliff paths blocked and guarded by archers who’d shoot anyone who tried to climb – but that was far too massive an undertaking and, besides, the fishermen and seafaring merchants wouldn’t like it.

Problem two was Spring. Not the girl herself. Lowa like having her around. She lightened things up and Lowa enjoyed teaching her what she knew, especially about archery, which Spring was taking to like a fish to water. The girl was such good company in fact that Lowa had nearly given up trying to work out if Spring had used her magic to make her go off Dug temporarily. No, the problem with Spring was that there was only one of her. Lowa had to rely on only one soothsaying druid’s prediction, and that prediction was far from specific. With Drustan in Rome, Spring was the only druid whom Lowa believed in. There were plenty more around, all raving about Romans, but many of these were drunk and most were certainly charlatans. A few seemed sensible, but Lowa had no proof of their abilities and she mistrusted them. She’d felt Spring’s power and knew that her magic was real. She’d seen evidence of Drustan’s magical ability in the arena, when he’d found her hiding under the bridge, and possibly when he’d claimed to have changed the wind direction for the battle with the Dumnonians. But what if both he and Spring had been mistaken, or, more likely, what if things had changed and Spring didn’t know? Drustan had told her that Roman invasion would have come sooner if it hadn’t been for civil war in Rome and a slave revolt. Perhaps something else had happened? What if they weren’t coming for a century? Or, more likely, what if a hundred thousand fiercely trained legionaries were climbing into boats in some secret cove that very day?

So Lowa desperately wanted another believable druid to consult, several preferably, but she couldn’t find any. She’d sent Mal and Nita to the Island of Angels to see if there was any help there. They’d been well received, but Mal said that they’d seen no evidence of real magic, nor been able to find out anything more than a general sense that the Romans were coming. They had found out a good deal more about Rome, its history and its army from the island’s scholars, which had already come in handy, but Lowa would have much preferred if they’d come back with a team of reliable druids who could have told them exactly what the Romans were up to.

Third problem was her army. First, it was small. By freeing the slaves and reducing the crushing taxes in the lands that Maidun had conquered, Lowa had massively reduced her income, making it near impossible to keep the twenty thousand men and women who were already in the army, and she wanted more. A lot more. The tribute she had secured from Dumnonia provided some funds, but more important were the contributions that she’d negotiated with the loose agglomeration of tribes that occupied the tracts of land east of Maidun’s territory, bordered by the Channel to the south and east and by Murkan land to the north. Before Lowa’s time, the eastern tribes had been terrified that Zadar was going to invade and enslave them, and, indeed, that had been his plan. So when Lowa usurped Zadar and displayed her military capabilities by immediately triumphing over the Dumnonians, the eastern tribe sent delegations pleading loyalty, and, more importantly, tribute. Lowa negotiated a tithe – one-tenth – of their agricultural output. Still it wasn’t nearly enough. She would have liked an army five times the size.

Size wasn’t the only problem with her forces. The army she did have kept fucking around and buggering off. Very few of them took anything seriously. It had been easy enough against the Dumnonians when she’d split the army into three, each with a clearly defined task, but they’d need much more advanced manoeuvrings against Rome’s tactics and ferociously well-trained legionaries and, so far, she hadn’t been able to make her men and women see the value of working in small groups. There was no honour, excitement or fun in learning how to move around the battlefield like interacting flocks of birds, only hard, boring work, which the average Briton did not have the stomach for. The one exception was her cavalry, her Two Hundred, but, in a way, their cohesion and skill just exacerbated the problem. People didn’t see the point of acting like the Two Hundred if they didn’t share the glory of being part of the Two Hundred. “Why should I dart around like a twatty Warrior when I’m just a bog-standard soldier?” she’d overheard someone say. She didn’t sympathise and she wouldn’t have been like that herself – she would have worked her tits off to prove she was better than anyone in the Two Hundred – but she could understand the point. It didn’t help. She couldn’t garrison the entire coast; she needed a superbly mobile army and for that she required dedication and discipline. Those two characteristics, it seemed, were impossible to teach.

The lack of dedication led to another problem: her soldiers kept deserting. Often the leavers were key people whom she’d thought she could rely on. No doubt they’d heard of trouble at home – flood, fire, bandits or something similar – and running to help was a reasonable response, but Lowa wished that they’d come to see her first so that she could have used her army to solve their problems. That would help them and, as a bonus, develop some camaraderie amongst the smaller army units she was attempting to form.

Hopefully the war game that she was going to try today would get people working together. Mal and Nita had learnt it on the Island of Angels, and it did sound like a good idea.

There was, potentially, a fourth problem, one that both Mal and Atlas warned her about often. Another possible arse-ache for Maidun Castle was the rest of Britain. Dumnonia still had a much bigger army and she’d humiliated them. To the north, possibly with a larger army still, were the Murkans. Lowa should be worrying more about these potential local enemies than the Romans, both men argued. She knew that they had a point, but she also knew that they were wrong. Rome was their enemy, Rome was the worry, and it was Rome that they had to focus on. She couldn’t tell herself why, she just knew.

She buckled the final strap of her abdomen and chest armour, basically a fitted iron sheet that protected her from neck to privates. She wasn’t convinced by it yet. Elann faced a balance between the armour being thin and light enough not to hamper movement, yet thick enough to deflect a thrust from Rome’s sharpest, finest iron swords. This current model managed to block a sword, to a degree – Atlas, Carden and a few others could stab a sword through it, but most couldn’t – but it was very heavy and hampered movement too much. Atlas was in favour of forgetting the heavy armour and teaching the soldiers to avoid or block sword blows instead and Lowa was coming round to his way of thinking.

She left her hut just as Spring walked through the gates of the complex that they shared on the Eyrie.

“Hello, Lowa!” she chirped. “What’s up?”

“Hi. How was Dug?”

“He sends his regards.”

“I thought he might come back for the war games. Did you ask him?”

“I did but he had something to build or something.”

“Right. Well, you better get your kit together. Be quick and I’ll wait for you.”

“Sure thing!”

Spring ran to her hut. Already, Lowa noticed, her gait was more like an athletic adult’s than a girl’s. She was shooting up like a nettle and broadening out at the same time. Their running training was working well, and she was almost as good an archer as she was a runner. The idea of Spring’s progress made her smile. There wasn’t much else to smile about.

T
here was a tap on the door. Ragnall got up from the uncomfortable bed and opened it, hoping it was Drustan. It wasn’t. It was several large Romans. Ragnall opened his mouth to say something, but the foremost Roman shoved him in the chest two-handed, hard as a horse’s kick. He felt his legs working in a backwards run to keep himself upright. He thumped into the wall, burst straight through the thin barrier and flew out into the Aventine Hill’s fetid morning air in a shower of dried mud and splinters. The last thing he saw of the room was his attackers’ surprised faces. You’re surprised? he thought.

Time stopped. His mind zoomed six storeys down to the ground, then splayed out past Aventine’s teetering immigrants’ tower blocks, through glorious, stinking Rome, across the giant fields and labouring slave gangs of the denuded Italian countryside, across dark Gaul, all the way back to Britain and his home tribe of Boddingham. His thoughts bounced off Boddingham’s broken ramparts and whooshed back, full of information on how far he had come, how much he had seen and more pertinent detail about the relatively short but still very much long enough distance from the top storey of a six-storey block of flats to the ground.

Drustan had talked about falling just a few days before, after they’d heard about people being thrown from the top of tower blocks by hoodlums. It wasn’t the impact that would kill you, Drustan had mused, it was the bounce. The force of landing would break most of your bones, but that was fine, you could live with broken bones. When you bounced, however, your broken bones would slice through all your organs and that would kill you. So, Ragnall had suggested, the trick would be to grip on to the ground when you landed, so that you didn’t bounce. Drustan had agreed, but pointed out that it would be tricky with ten broken fingers and toes.