Clash of Iron (56 page)

He came to what had been a hedge until the Maidun army had retreated through it the day before, and stepped over broken branches. On the other side, grubbing in the churned earth, was a family of badgers – boar, sow and one cub. All three looked up at Dug, then returned to their foraging.

“Now that,” he said to himself, “has got to be a good sign.”

The badgers made him think of his dogs, waiting for him to come home. The idea of disappointing them sent the first pang of sorrow through him. He felt optimistic for Lowa. For himself, he wasn’t so sure.

Grummog, Bruxon and Manfrax were waiting. “Where the fuck is Lowa?” asked the big, bearded king, in a strong Eroo accent.

“Up in the hillfort,” said Dug. “And it’s Queen Lowa to you.”

“Is it now? And who the fuck are you?”

“I’m Dug. Dug Sealskinner.”

“I know who he is,” spat Grummog from a high seat. “He’s a mercenary Warrior. He worked for me for a while. He was a good fighter, but not the cleverest. I got rid of him because the idiot killed too many on our side.”

Dug remembered. It was the battle in which both sides had painted themselves blue. “That wasn’t my fault,” he said.

“Wasn’t your fault? I saw you! You were lashing out with that hammer like Makka had got you by the—”

“If you’re done reminiscing,” interrupted Manfrax, “would you mind awfully telling us why the fuck we shouldn’t feed you to the Fassites right now?”

Dug looked at the three kings, from one to the next. Manfrax leaning forwards threateningly. Grummog oozing hate from his chair. Bruxon subdued, looking at his feet. As if a gate had opened in his mind and a herd of sheep bleating out ideas had run through, suddenly he knew what to say and what to do.

“You, Manfrax,” said Dug, “are a torturer who brought misery to an entire land. Worse than that, in your stupidity, you’ve unleashed the Fassites on the world. They’ve seen your boats and now they’re building their own. They intend to leave Fassent and kill every human in the world, you included.”

“That’s what you’d like to think, isn’t it?” Manfrax said. “But I have a pact—”

“A pact you say? Like the wee pacts you have with the Murkans and Dumnonians? Which of those are you planning to break first?” Dug looked from Grummog to Bruxon. Grummog looked angry; Bruxon, still looking down, reddened. “I see. So, when Maidun is wiped out, you and Bruxon will turn on Grummog.”

“We will not,” said Manfrax, still smiling. “Although who can blame you, in your desperation, trying to turn friends on each other? That’s exactly what I’d do. It’s Maidun’s only hope. Sorry, my good man, it won’t work.”

“And when you and your Fassites have killed the Murkans, you will turn on Dumnonia.”

“This really is pathet—”

“And then the Fassites will turn on you. Probably before. The few giants here are just biding their time until the rest of them arrive.”

“How can you know all this?” Grummog said.

Dug turned to him, “Grummog. You also torture and murder your own. Greed and the love of violence bring you south. You don’t care that men and women on your own side will die. You wish nothing for others but suffering.

“And you, Bruxon.” Dug turned to the Dumnonian king. “You’re weak and you’ve been used. Not, as you might be imagining, by Manfrax, or even Grummog, but by your advisor, Maggot. Maggot has used you to bring all these evil shits and their armies into one place.”

“Now why would he want to do that?” said Manfrax

“You’re a scourge, ruining the world. You need to be wiped from the land and forgotten. Maggot has arranged for you all to be here so we can get that done. It won’t be long, so if you want to pray to your gods or say farewell to loved ones, now would be the time.”

There was silence, then Manfrax began to laugh. Grummog joined in, then Bruxon. Dug stood, watching them. He felt warm and content. It was coming. This was what his life had been leading to.

“Dug – it is Dug, right?” Manfrax said, recovering from his laughing fit.

“That’s it. Dug Sealskinner,” said Dug.

“You speak for a queen too shy to come to us herself. You speak for an army which I all but destroyed yesterday. Do you know what we’re going to do today?”

“I do. You’re going to die. All of you.”

“We are NOT!” shouted Manfrax. “Right now, we’re making shields for the Fassites so they can walk up the hill without worrying about your archers. When that’s done, up we’ll go and—”

Dug wasn’t listening any more. It was time. He was ready. He spread his arms. He turned away from the three kings. He looked back up the hill to where he knew Lowa and Spring were watching. He closed his eyes.

U
p on the wall, Spring knew what to do. She glanced at Lowa. The queen was even paler than usual.

She looked at Maggot, hoping that he’d tell her not to do it. He smiled, but his eyes were full of tears. She nodded, sick in her stomach. She took a long-distance, slim-pointed arrow from her quiver and slotted it on the bowstring. She lifted her bow and drew. She didn’t need to aim.

“Spring?” said Lowa. “What are you—”

She loosed. The arrow thrummed off into the sky.

Bruxon was perplexed, and worried. The big northerner seemed strangely calm and confident. He knew things he shouldn’t have known. Had Maggot played them all? The notion made some sense, until you got to the part about the Maidun army somehow defeating them. Hopelessly outnumbered and surrounded, it was a matter of when they were destroyed, not if. Any fool could see that.

And now Dug had turned away from them, apparently to show his chest to his friends on the hill. It looked like Maggot-style dramatics. Perhaps the druid had arranged this little show?

Then he saw the arrow, flying down from Frogshold like a diving hawk.

It hit the big Maidun man’s forehead and came halfway out the back of his skull. Dug fell back on to the earth, arms out, face up, stone dead.

“…What the fuck was that?” said Manfrax, with a surprised chuckle.

Bruxon looked about. Everything was the same, apart from the envoy from Maidun had been killed by an astonishing shot from his own side. What was the point of it? Was it a sacrifice meant to bring the gods’ help? Was it some sort of display of machismo?

“Somebody clear that shit up,” said Manfrax, pointing at Dug’s body with half an eye watching for any more long-distance arrows from Frogshold, “and let’s get busy – that little gang on the hill isn’t going annihilate itself. Are those shields ready yet?”

As soon as the arrow left the bow, Lowa knew where it was going. She knew what Spring and Maggot and Dug had planned.

She watched it fly, helpless. She saw the tiny figure of Dug, standing in front of the kings and spreading his arms. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Spring drop her bow and crumple down into a ball. She heard the girl cry out at the moment that Dug fell.

“No!” shouted Lowa. Tears came. She shook her head. “Nooo!” she screamed to the sky and the gods.

O
n the island of Fassent, two hundred and ninety miles from the spot where Dug lay dead, the ground vibrated with a low rumble. The Fassites stopped their boat building. The rumbling became louder; a deep, immensely powerful noise. The vibrations grew until the land was shaking. Boat scaffolds collapsed and buildings toppled. A few were injured and one crushed under a ship, but for the most part the buildings were so lightly built and the giants themselves so robust that the collapse of all the Fassite-made structures on the island was more of an inconvenience than a disaster.

The giants ran then crawled to clear land and sat as the ground beneath them buckled and heaved. Most were laughing – bouncing around was fun. Several started fighting, as Fassites always did when they were enjoying themselves. They were interrupted by a terrible roaring, wrenching thunder from above; much, much louder than the earthquake.

The great mountain, the huge rock that dominated their island, split in half and slowly collapsed. The ground they were sitting and fighting on lurched and folded over on itself, and all the Fassites on Fassent were crushed or drowned as a trillion tons of rock fell into the sea.

L
owa shook off her numbness and ordered two men to carry Spring to her hut. The girl looked dead but Maggot insisted she wasn’t.

“What was that? What the Bel was that?” she asked.

Maggot, for once, looked serious. “I’m sorry. Powerful magic was needed, possibly the most powerful magic that’s ever been. Magic works through love and death, and Spring and Dug … I am sorry that it had to be Dug. But he has saved us all. Not just us here – everyone. Everyone decent, that is. These armies surrounding us? They’re fucked, but it is their own fault.”

Lowa looked down from the hundred and thirty pace-high mound of Frogshold. Well outside her own arrow range – she had no idea how Spring had made the shot – a Fassite was dragging Dug’s body away from the kings.

“He saved us by going down the hill and dying?”

“Yes,” said the druid. He walked away, jangling.

Dug’s body was out of sight now. Lowa wanted to scream and rip her hair out, but she forced herself to ignore the pain for now. She had a hillfort to defend and an already much reduced number of Maidunites to save.

It looked like she had a while before the Eroo army or the Fassites were going to move, so she jumped down off the wall, headed out of the gate and began a circuit of the ditch. It had been deepened overnight and they’d dismantled huts to make spikes for its base. She wanted to check that these were all still upright, and that no grass tuft handholds had been left in the fort’s wall. She knew it would be fine, but her real goal was to keep herself busy. As she came round to the north, she saw that the Murkans were preparing to attack as well. Was it too much to hope that the Murkan and the Eroo armies would clash and end up wiping each other out while they watched from the hillfort? Yes it was. But perhaps that was what Spring’s magic would do?

“Lowa!” someone shouted. It was Maggot, calling from the wall nearby. “Come to me, there is a sight to see!” he yelled. Lowa jogged back into the fort and joined Maggot on the wall.

“Look to the west, out to sea,” he said.

She looked. The sea was calm. The only unusual thing were the hundreds of Eroo boats dragged on to the beach and moored off it.

Then she saw it.

On the horizon, stretched across the entire width of the Haffen Estuary, was a line of white, moving swiftly towards them and growing rapidly. Another line developed behind it, larger, then another, then another, each higher than the previous. They were waves, very big waves, moving at an astonishing speed, growing as they approached the shore.

“What the Danu…” Lowa asked.

“Fassent fell into the sea. These are the ripples,” said Maggot.

The Maidunites teemed onto the wall to watch in silence as the giant waves approached. Lowa looked down. The enemy was carrying on as before, preparing the assault. They did not know what was coming.

The first wave approached the beach, growing astonishingly, towering, breaking. It exploded onto an island near the shore then washed over it. It plucked ships from their anchors, drove them shorewards on a roaring wall of surf and smashed them into the beached boats. The people who’d been on the beach, who’d seen the wave and began to run, disappeared in an instant under the foaming, debris-filled surge. Another, taller wave broke on to the beach. That second one was awesomely, astonishingly huge, but a few waves behind it, perhaps a mile out, was a wall of water that dwarfed the others, overtaking the waves ahead of it and sucking them into itself. It was at least a hundred paces tall, nearly as high as their perch on Frogshold.

“By Danu,” said Lowa. “What…?”

“I think we’ll be calling it a Spring Tide,” said Maggot.

Bruxon strode back to the Dumnonian camp, deeply unhappy. He didn’t believe for a moment that the Maidun army was going to slaughter them all, but what Dug had said about treachery had rung uncomfortably true. He’d been a fool and a coward. He should have attacked and conquered Maidun himself, and never even been to Eroo. Because then … He thought back to the night before and what he’d done with Manfrax. What he’d done to Manfrax, all while his harpy wife looked on. He’d been overcome by lust and unable to stop himself. He’d sucked his nipple like a starving calf, hands all over him, and then … He shook his head. He sickened himself.

Deep in self-abusing thought, he didn’t hear the sound until it was a roar. He looked for the source, and saw a towering cliff of water rushing towards him across the flat farmland. He stood, open-mouthed, as it came at him, impossibly fast.

Ragnall Sheeplord was standing with Julius Caesar on the cliff, looking over the Roman fleet, newly swelled by captured Armorican boats, and telling him all he knew about landing an army on the British coast. It wasn’t very much. The only coastline he knew well was the Island of Angels, which was on the wrong side of Britain. He’d seen part of the coast near Maidun when he and Drustan had sailed to Rome but he hadn’t been paying much attention.

So he was relieved when Caesar held up a hand to silence him. The general was looking down at the bay with a quizzical expression. Ragnall followed his gaze and saw that the tide had rushed out preternaturally quickly and far. Some boats that had been floating moments before were marooned, others were being washed out to sea along channels revealed in what had been seabed.

“What a strange tide…” he said.

“It’s not a tide,” said Caesar. “Finally the British gods are showing their hand. Quick, come with me to higher ground. All of you,” he said to everyone nearby, raising his voice but remaining totally calm, “there is a giant wave coming, more or less immediately. Warn everyone, get everyone to high ground.”

Men ran off to do his bidding, shouting as they went. As Ragnall and Caesar strode up the hill, the sea returned. It was more like a strangely rapid rising tide initially, refloating the boats and slopping lazily ashore. Then came the waves, like a great swelling at first, then towering and breaking, smashing on the cliffs, rearing up into the bay and crashing down on to ships.