Clash of Iron (27 page)

Sapphire had grown up in one of the many smaller tribes ruled over by King Hari the Fister. It hadn’t been Hari the Fister when she was young, it had been someone else – a woman – whose name she couldn’t remember. She wasn’t interested in politics. In most German tribes, men and woman formed unions for life, or at least until they could no longer stand one another. In her tribe, however, they saw monogamy as stressful, miserable and unnecessary, so everyone lived communally with everyone. Childcare was shared, and sex was whenever, with whoever. Fornication was fun, like a game of capture the fort. Would anyone ever suggest that you only ever played capture the fort with one other person for the rest of your life?

So why oh why had Sapphire agreed to move into Kondar’s hut permanently, and not to make love to anyone else? She did love Kondar, in a way, or at least she liked being loved by him. Or at least she had done. When it had begun, he’d pleaded so much and told her so many times how much he loved her that she’d agreed to step away from social mores and be faithful to him, to live as man and wife as they did in other tribes. It worked for a while, and they had a lovely little baby boy named Rontik. Sapphire had assumed that they’d look after him themselves, like they did in monogamous tribes, but Kondar did not seem to have any trouble with communal childcare aspect of their culture, so they handed young Rontik into the care of the tribe.

The valley was narrowing. Both sides were mostly bare rock cliffs, and wherever trees had managed to grow it was far too steep to climb. In two or three more turns they’d come to the unscalable waterfall at the head of the valley. The Romans would have to mount a last stand there, but there were so few of them left that she expected they’d kill them all without loss to their own side. She checked her sling and stone bag. All fine.

So they’d had their baby and gone on living together, but lately any fun that there’d ever been had evaporated and she’d felt so smothered by Kondar’s constant presence, and his jealousy when she so much as spoke to anyone else, that she’d told him that their arrangement was over. She’s said it wasn’t the sex, because it really wasn’t, or at least it wasn’t just the sex. He’d wept like a toddler, wailing and coughing. He’d even been sick. In between the histrionics, he pleaded and pleaded and told her he’d change. He begged her to take a moon to think about it. And she, fool that she was, had agreed. She knew she’d feel exactly the same in a moon, and she knew that it would have been better for both of them if she’d stuck to her slingstones at the time. But she’d agreed. Possibly she was being kind to him, possibly she was trying to make things easier for herself. Whatever it was, after they’d finished off the Roman cavalry she’d have to go back to the tribe and go through it all again. She hoped he wouldn’t be there. She’d hoped he’d run rather than face her rejection again. But she knew he wouldn’t have, because he was desperate to clutch at any chance that they might stay together. She hoped, and she did feel bad for thinking this, that he’d get the message this next time and that he’d leave the tribe. It wasn’t a charitable thought, but flirting with other men – even talking to other men! – was going to be ruined with Kondar looking on like an abandoned puppy.

Yes, the moment she got back she’d tell him that she’d shagged her fellow rider Grax a few days before, which was true, then she’d spend the next few nights in Grax’s hut to prove the point. If Kondar went mad and attacked her or Grax, well, they’d kill him and that would be that. He was no fighter, Kondar, and it was hardly her fault that he was behaving so strangely.

She’d been a fool, she should have listened to the elders and walked away from him right at the start, but at least she knew now, and it was somewhat heartening to resolve to do something that would solve the problem.

Up ahead, riders were stopping. Well, this was odd.

Blocking the valley, hemmed in by cliffs on both sides, were what looked like twenty or so big metal carvings of men, but they weren’t carvings, they were moving. She made a tight tube with her hand and peered through it – she could see more clearly that way for some reason – and saw that they were men, large men, dressed in crazily heavy iron armour with big blades on the shins and wrists. Each was holding a huge sword that looked too heavy to lift in one hand. In the other, each was holding a chain attached to a skinny man or woman dressed in tatters. These small, rag-clad people were moving slowly and strangely, as if drunk, exhausted or both. Most odd. The only vaguely normal looking one among them was a short, balding man in a short-sleeved jerkin, sitting on a woolly pony smiling like a demented imp at the approaching Germans.

What was going on? Had they happened upon a group of bards who’d launched into an impromptu show? Everyone else was as confused as she was, sitting on their horses and staring.

As they watched, the little balding man gave a command. The leftmost of the armoured warriors forced his captive to the ground, put a metal-booted foot on his head, then all his weight. Just the day before, Sapphire had watched a cow gave birth. As she’d cooed at the sweetness of the calf, a great sac of afterbirth had pulsed out of the mother’s gaping vagina, hit the ground and split with a great slapping smack. The captive’s head now made exactly the same noise as it burst. Immediately afterewards, the iron-clad man leapt as if he’d been stung by a wasp and ran with incredible speed and clattering of metal towards the German line. Meanwhile, the next iron man lopped the head off his captive with a swing of his great sword and came running too.

Slingstones spanged harmlessly off the first armoured warrior. At the German line he leapt, lashed out with a foot and severed a horse’s head with his ankle blade. He landed with an almighty clang, swung his great sword in a wide arc and chopped two riders in half. He picked up the horse’s head by the mane, tossed it up in the air, watched it fall, then kicked it into the German ranks and sent another two riders tumbling from their horses.

The second armoured warrior hit the line. A brave cavalry man shattered his sword on the thick helmet and was eviscerated by a backhand swipe from a wrist blade. More iron men were killing their captives and coming. A few Germans fought back, but none of them lasted more than the blink of an eye. Humans and horses fell as the armoured warriors advanced. She saw her recent lover Grax raise his sword to strike at one of the attackers. A moment later his head was spinning into the air.

Fuck this, thought Sapphire. Here was dark magic. Flight was the only option. She dragged her horse round by its reins. Most others had had the same idea, and soon she was part of a stampede, galloping back the way they’d come. She looked over a shoulder. She couldn’t see any pursuit. She felt a rush of relief, tempered by the horror of what she’d seen and the worry of what might come next. Had the iron-clad soldiers been Romans? Demons? A new race of men who didn’t like Germans? She didn’t know. She had to get out of there, find baby Rontik and then get further away.

Then the bodies began to fall. Clad in the same rags as the iron infantry’s captives, they fell silently down the cliffs on both sides and landed in tangled heaps. One of them hit a rider, who screamed, fell from his horse and lay still.

At first Sapphire thought that the dark figures that followed were more bodies, but, no, they were lithe young men with swords, half tumbling, half leaping down the cliffs, swifter than mountain deer. Several reached the valley floor. They were clad all in brown leather, including their heads, apart from a slit cut for the eyes. They moved so quickly and so weirdly that they couldn’t possibly be human. She and some others shot slingstones, but almost all managed to dodge them. One of them jinked his head into the path of another stone, but the blow didn’t even slow him. There was no escape. The leather-clad men jumped and spun and slashed and stabbed, chopping into both flanks of fleeing cavalry.

Sapphire gave up all idea of fighting, put her head down and dug her heels into her horse. The good little animal set off at a gallop that would surely outrun anything on two legs. Shortly afterwards she looked over her shoulder. Two of the demons were running behind her, expressionless in their leather masks. They were catching up.

The terror was too much. She screamed and the world spun as she fell from her horse. She hit something hard and rolled to a stop. She opened her eyes just in time to see a sword flash towards her neck. She felt it hit, felt it chop, felt her eyes roll back so they could see only darkness. Was her head severed? Could she still think with her head severed, she thought? Then she thought no more.

B
efore Chamanca could say anything, the centurion said: “The impasse is over. The German cavalry has been destroyed. We can now forage, supply lines have reopened and it will only be a matter of time before the Germans leave or we massacre them in a pitched battle.”

“How did you destroy the cavalry?” asked Chamanca

“Officially,” he said, “they were hit by a rockslide.” He looked over his shoulder and came a little closer, but not close enough that she might grab him. “But I’m in Caesar’s inner circle so I know what really happened. I could tell you, but I’d be risking my life – the information is top secret. I would expect a lot in return.”

“Would you like to touch me?” she asked, flickering her eyelashes at him. She was hungry for blood and she’d had quite enough of this man perving at her. He could tell her about the cavalry while she drank his life away. He’d probably enjoy it.

“No, I don’t like to touch. I like to look. Perhaps you would like to turn round and bend over, with your legs straight.”

“And then?”

“That’s it.”

“Tell me how the Germans met their end first and I’ll do it.”

“You swear you will?”

“You have my word.”

“Right. That vile, dark druid Felix has used some sort of magic to create demon warriors. I would not believe it myself, had I not seen them train. I wasn’t meant to. I rode away as soon as I realised what I was watching and thank Mars I wasn’t seen. There aren’t many of them, around fifty. But they’re as powerful as an entire legion, possibly much more so. Some of them move like you did on the wall. Others are bizarrely big and strong. They are amazing and unnatural and it’s an open secret in the upper ranks that they massacred the German cavalry with very little effort.”

Was this a version of what Atlas had tried to do in Vesontio, Chamanca wondered? Was this a plan to feed her demoralising information then let her escape back to the Germans? Probably not. Spreading the rumour among merchants would be a more certain and safer way of feeding news to the enemy than freeing her. And she was hardly one to rule out the idea that magic could enhance fighting abilities. “How did he create them?” she asked.

“That I do not know. Nobody does. I’ve heard rumblings that the whole thing is somehow linked to Crassus’s mass crucifixion of Spartacus’s rebel gladiators.”

“Mass crucifixion?”

“Six thousand, all on one day. They were rebels, but it was too much. Tasteless.”

“Why do you think Felix was involved?”

“I don’t know. I’ve told you all that I do. You already know much more than most of the centurions and all of the legionaries. Felix’s legion is being kept well away from them to stop word of it getting back to Rome. A group of devils created by dark barbarian magic would not play well in the Senate. They will, however, be very pleased with the victories it will secure. Now please will you do what I asked?”

“Tell me one more thing.”

“What?”

“What is the point? What is Caesar trying to achieve?”

“Conquest, simple enough.”

“No, that’s not it. There must be more.”

The centurion looked over his shoulder again.

“All right. But if I tell you, when you bend over, I want to you to say over and over how much you’d like me to … to make love to you.”

“OK.”

“Caesar’s goal is Britain. There is something there that he wants. That is all I know, I swear. Now, please do what I said.”

Chamanca turned round, her mind racing. What could Caesar possibly want in Britain, other than conquest? Was it something Felix wanted? Out of nowhere, the beginnings of an idea as to what – or, more accurately, who – it might be came springing to mind.

T
he Germans moved fifteen miles to more open ground. There was one trial on the way, in which Ragnall and other criminals were made to crawl along a stretch of stream converted by flagstones into an underwater tunnel. Ragnall had swum and dived a great deal on the Island of Angels, and he’d maintained some capacity for holding his breath. It was a long way from enjoyable, especially the part when he’d clawed past two newly dead who hadn’t made it to the end, but finally he surfaced and heard Flotta’s “Alive!”

Despite it all, he found that he was warming to King Hari. The man was psychopathic, sure, and had attempted to kill Ragnall three times, but he was perpetually cheerful and, apart from the murdering, a kind old soul.

He had had a short length of chain soldered on to Ragnall’s ankles to hobble him, and there were always a couple of soldiers nearby who appeared to be guarding him, but other than that King Hari treated Ragnall as if he were part of his inner circle, which included Atlas, Carden and Flotta the Left as well as a dozen fur-panted men and women. Shuffling along with other captives, he didn’t see the leaders often during the day, but every evening he’d eat with them next to their fire.

Nobody other than King Hari ever spoke to him, but he didn’t mind. He didn’t imagine that Atlas and Carden had anything friendly to say, anyway. He caught Flotta looking at him every now and then. Vanity said she might find him attractive, but the voice of reason – which always sounded a lot like Drustan – told him that she was gloating to herself about knocking him out with one blow.

One big problem with the evening gatherings was that there was no booze. The Germans, apparently, had seen how alcohol had weakened the Gauls and sworn off it. In his two years in Rome Ragnall had developed a healthy suspicion of people who didn’t drink, plus, with the constant threat of another trial and a nasty death hanging over him, by Bel he could have done with some alcohol himself.