Clash of Iron (34 page)

Except … Except it was an awfully long time since she’d taken a breath, but she felt fine. Totally fine. Was she dead, then? No. She felt magic surge. Shadows swam and solidified and she could see. She was underwater, in a rock chamber with pale yellow walls. The current was half-arsed eddies where she was at the top of the cave, but a few paces below it surged along enthusiastically, carrying specks of rock on its eternal task of moving the land grain by grain into the sea.

She tucked then kicked off the rocky roof and shot through the water like a fisherman’s spear to rejoin the stream.

“T
hat’s it? They’re going?” said Ragnall, to nobody in particular. A few hard-jawed men around him nodded. Standing in between the scorpions on one of the neat little forts that the Romans had built overnight, Ragnall, Caesar and an assembly of tribunes and centurions watched as the Gauls swarmed up the opposite side of the valley and away, leaving a wrecked, mud-churned landscape and the odd tendril of smoke from an unextinguished fire.

“Caesar has outmanoeuvred them,” said Caesar. “They cannot attack and they cannot remain. They must retreat, then they must divide into smaller forces. When they return to their towns and villages, they must bow to Caesar or face destruction.”

A few of the centurions exchanged glances. Whether it was the result of bathing in a whole winter’s worth of hero worship, or he genuinely considered himself too superior to use the standard “I”s and “we”s of other men, Caesar now almost always referred to himself in the third person. He’d been chucking in the odd third-person remark for a while, but now it was pretty much constant. So, instead of “I would like you to bring me ten captives” he would now say “Caesar wants you to bring him ten captives”. Ragnall had heard murmurings of surprise at his theatricism, and he’d heard a few legionaries take the piss when were certain that they were out of any praetorian’s earshot, but generally people accepted it. The previous year’s plunder and slave receipts had made every man at the head of the army wealthy, even the most junior legionary was substantially better off than he’d imagined possible, and they all owed it entirely to Julius Caesar. One man had changed the course of history and made them all rich. So, as long as the gold was flowing, if he wanted to speak like a pompous arse he was more than welcome to do so.

Here again, right at the start of his second year of campaigning in Gaul, he’d shown tactical brilliance. He’d worked the army as hard as any general could, but they’d done what he told them because he’d always been right before. The forced march, the short rations, the gruelling night of chopping and digging and building had put the Romans in a perfect position. They could not be attacked and the Gauls had to retreat. By understanding his enemy and demanding more from his men than most generals would dare, Julius Caesar had defeated by far the largest force that any modern Roman army had faced without a fight.

“What will we do now?” someone asked.

“Caesar will follow them,” said Caesar.

A
tlas, Carden and Chamanca rode west, depressed. It was bad enough that the Gauls had fucked up so inanely and dishearteningly, but the night before they’d heard what Caesar had done to the German captives after the battle with King Hari the Fister. He hadn’t killed them, as he’d done with so many Helvans. Instead, the Romans had blinded nineteen out of every twenty men, women and children. The twentieth had been blinded in only one eye. Then he’d set them free to walk home, led by the “lucky” half-blind ones. Chamanca could not stop thinking about tens of thousands of Germans, in agony, hungry, thirsty, stumbling along in darkness. She wondered how many of them would have died before reaching safety. Almost all? All? It did not bode well for the rest of Gaul, nor Britain.

“But Galba said—” Carden said.

“Galba is a dissembler and a fool,” interrupted Atlas. “I should have known.”

“But why is she sending all the Gauls home? Why did she say she was going to—”

“Because it was easier to say yes to me and avoid an argument than to disagree, even though she didn’t consider my plan for a heartbeat. She lies as easily as she smiles. Sobek take her soul.”

“So what will happen?”

“The tribes that comprised the Gaulish army will capitulate or be conquered. I suspect that Galba has done a deal so that her tribe will be free. That woman is a selfish fool who has doomed her tribe and all those that trusted her. That she could have done this after what Caesar did to the Germans…” Atlas shook his head, heeled his horse and sped up. Chamanca thought she’d seen the glint of a tear in his eye.

“Galba will do what she was planning to do before Atlas told her his plan,” she told Carden.

“Which is?” he asked.

Chamanca looked at his strong, happy face, dappled with the morning sunlight that shone through the track’s overarching leaf canopy. Were handsome men born dumb, she wondered, or had their looks always got them everything they needed, so they just didn’t bother to be clever? “The plan that everyone was talking about. The one that made Atlas so angry?” she said.

“Uh … nope?”

“Do you pay any attention to your surroundings?”

“Depends what they look like.” He eyed her up and down and winked.

Chamanca smiled. For such a stupid man, Carden was easy to like.

“Galba hoped,” she said, “that the Romans would see the size of her army and run home. That hasn’t happened. Her next plan is for every tribe to return to its villages, towns or whatever and wait for the Romans to attack. When one tribe is hit, all the rest will come to its aid and crush the Romans. But it won’t work. They are fucked.”

“Why won’t it work?”

“Because,” said Atlas, who’d calmed down and rejoined them, “she has no experience of the Romans and she doesn’t understand her own people.”

“What do you mean?” Carden asked.

Atlas sighed. “Most Gaulish tribes, like tribes everywhere, are selfish and cowardly. If another is besieged, they will not rush to help.”

“But why not? There are so many of them!”

“It will not feel that way now that the great army is split. Say a tribe is attacked. Let us call it tribe one. Tribe two will vacillate about going to its aid, worrying whether tribes three, four and five are going to help. While they hesitate, they’ll realise that all the others are dithering for the same reason. They’ll send messengers and deputations to each other, spurring each other into action. They will eventually agree on a plan, maybe even a good one. But by then it will be far too late. Caesar will have defeated tribe one and visited some terrible punishment on any of them unlucky enough to survive the legionaries.”

“I get it!” Carden said with relish, “then tribe two are attacked, and the same thing will happen. Tribe two and three will hesitate and—”

“No.”

“No?” Carden was like a child denied a honey apple.

“Tribe two saw what happened to tribe one, so they surrender immediately for fear of suffering the same fate, and offer to help the Romans against tribes three and four. The Romans won’t need any help, of course, because tribes three and four will surrender too. It is a lesson for Britain – present a united front in the first instance, or your chance is gone and the Romans are your new masters.”

“But won’t Galba recall the army once she sees what’s happening?” Carden asked.

“Possibly. That’s why Caesar will attack her tribe first, even if Galba does have an agreement with them. Unlike everyone else in this land, the Romans are not stupid. Evil, yes. Stupid, no.”

“Well, I suppose that’s that then. Back to Britain?” asked Carden.

“Not yet,” said Atlas. “There are Gaulish tribes further west who might yet hold the Romans.”

“OK then, who’s next to let us down?”

“The most numerous are the Nervee. I spent some time with them a few years back. I knew their current king, Bodnog, before he was king. He was a good man. Hopefully rule hasn’t ruined him.”

Two days later they rode into the lands of the Nervee. It was strange countryside. The Nervee had no cavalry or chariot-based soldiers. To defend itself against tribes that did, they had criss-crossed their territory with high, thick hedges, and interwoven the branches of trees. These were linked together to create a huge, leafy labyrinth, like a massively larger version of the gates into Maidun Castle. Somehow Atlas knew the way through. Chamanca felt like a blinded German as he led her and Carden a twisting route into Nervee lands.

All this foliage harboured a multitude of wildlife. As they rode along between high walls of vegetation, birds swooped from side to side, squirrels chittered, wild boar groinked and deer pranced away then stopped to watch them in wide-eyed wonder before bucking and skipping off. Chamanca, to her surprise, found herself thinking that it was all rather lovely.

L
owa woke on the hard earth floor of a hut with no ornament or furniture, other than two stools bearing two half-asleep guards. She was on her side, facing them. Slowly she moved her limbs to test her situation. Those guards looked pretty sleepy, and if she could just …

No. She was trussed like a paranoid farmer’s best sow on market day. She probed with her fingers. Her wrists and ankles were shackled and attached by thin but strong chains to an iron ring at her back. The ring was woven into a thick leather girdle that seemed to have been sewn around her waist. She strained against the bonds, but felt no give in any part of them.

Perhaps the guards might be persuaded to let her go in exchange for gold, sex or something else? She eyed them up, trying to assess their proclivities. They were short, spiky-haired men with matching, oversize moustaches. They were certainly brothers, and could have been twins. They were a fey looking pair, but that didn’t necessarily mean they wouldn’t find her attractive. One of them noticed her looking at him and almost fell off his stool. He gathered himself, jumped up, ran to the open door and shouted, “Pomax! Lowa Flynn has woken up!”

The other leapt up to join his brother in the doorway: “Lowa Flynn is awake! Come and get her, Pomax!”

The first shouter hit the second on the arm. “I saw she was awake first!”

“So what? We were both asked to shout.”

“That’s not the point and you—”

“Shut up.” Pomax stooped her head under the lintel and pushed past them into the hut.

“Sorry.”

“Sorry.”

Pomax ignored them, grabbed Lowa by the ankle and dragged her on her stomach across the hut and out of the door. She blinked in the light. Before she could make much sense of her surroundings, she was picked up by, she guessed, the iron loop on the back of her leather waistband.

Pomax carried her one-handed through the village, swinging her as if she were a shopper heading home from Bladonfort Market and Lowa was her brimming basket. Lowa noticed that the nails on the Murkan queen’s free left hand were strangely thick, each the length of half a finger and honed into points like a falcon’s talons. How did she make them so thick? Lowa wondered.

Villagers gawped. They were scrawnier than their southern counterparts, but they looked handy enough and there were a lot of them. If she could somehow break her bonds and best her big-boned bearer, escape would still be near impossible.

Pomax shouted as she walked: “See the warrior queen of the Maidun! No more powerful than a bound lamb! Grummog’s cunning and the might of Pomax beat her famous bow with ease!” Her voice was high-pitched and whining, as if borrowed from a much slighter woman who’d been repeatedly wronged.

They arrived at a sinkhole where the flooding stream disappeared underground. Pomax put her down, facing the turbulent pond. “This is where your girl jumped yesterday,” she said. “We had her cornered here. She cried and pissed herself with fear. Then we came at her and she fell in. It must have been horrible, drowning down there in the dark.”

Lowa knew that Spring wasn’t dead. The last time she’d seen her she’d been surrounded by spears, facing a king who would happily murder her in a moment, but somehow she knew.

“Have you got her body?” she asked.

“No one’ll ever find it,” said Pomax, “those tunnels lead down into the very bowels—”

“You’ll never find it because you’re lying. That girl is a great druid and she escaped you. And she’ll be coming back for rev—”

Pomax cuffed Lowa on the side of the head, then picked her up. Lowa strained to take in her surroundings as she was carried around a mile down a path to the longhouse on the top of Mallam Cliff. Lowa’s weight was no strain for Pomax – she didn’t even swap hands on the journey.

Seven poles had been erected at the end of the cliff by the longhouse. Impaled on them were the six men and women of the Two Hundred, and Miller. Bones jutted from fall-broken limbs and their backs had been sliced open on either side of their spines, so that their ribs sprung out like pathetic little wings and, with some stretch of the imagination, it looked like they were launching to fly away south.

Pomax held her up so she could have a good look, and said: “Have you got something clever to say about that?” Lowa hadn’t. “No? I thought not.” She turned Lowa to face the wicker woman. “That’s where you’ll be going. But not for a while yet.”

The big woman carried her over to the longhouse and unpinned her wrists. Lowa tried to wrench free of Pomax’s grip, but she might as well have tried to pick up a menhir. The Murkan queen’s strength was astonishing. She pressed Lowa against a low wooden frame, reattached her ankles behind her and her wrists to the front, so that she was kneeling, facing Grummog’s empty throne. Pomax tested Lowa’s bonds, then took a chair from the dais and sat behind her.

“What a—” said Lowa, before she felt a finger and thumb grip her shoulder and squeeze. Sharp nails punctured skin and drove deeper, until she could feel them touching her collarbone, scraping against it. The pain filled her like nothing she’d ever known or imagined. Pomax let go and Lowa shook with sobs as agony throbbed up into her head and blood ran down her chest.