Reign of Iron (36 page)

He was very good. Not as good as her, but he was stronger. It was possible that he might beat her. Unlikely, but the offer to make love instead was beginning to seem more appealing.

“Why do you fight for the Romans?” she asked. “They are monsters.”

“As am I.” He came at her, darting forwards then back, swinging left and right with his club.

She dodged and blocked, but he was wearing her down and she saw no gap for the counter with her mace. She’d become used to fighting with two weapons. She considered dropping to smash his knees or crush his balls, but if that went wrong she’d be at his mercy. She couldn’t remember ever having to think this much during a fight.

He broke the onslaught and stood back.

“You look worried,” he said. “Perhaps you instead would like to change sides? You could ride into battle with me on my elephant Bandonda. There is no greater feeling in the world.”

“I will ride on your elephant with you, if it is against the Romans.”

He shook his head, smiling, and Chamanca darted in. He saw, but too late. She hammered a punch into his guts and cracked her ball-mace into his temple. He fell, unconscious. She jumped onto him and sank her teeth into his neck. Oh, it was good, it was
very
good. Saltier and hotter than Roman blood.

Engrossed, she heard the footsteps almost too late. A dozen of them, maybe more, charging. She sprang to her feet, snatched up her sword and sprinted away. She felt missiles whizzing, and dodged. Two clubs like Jagganoch’s whistled past. She ran on, scurried up the side of a hut, bounced off its roof, over the town wall and away. She would have loved to have stayed and played, but she had work to do.

Felix and his legion arrived back at their landing site after several hours’ walk to find two Maximen, two Celermen, no ship and no ship’s crew.

“Where’s the ship?” he asked.

“Done gone,” rumbled a Maximan.

“What?”

“What he’s trying to say,” said one of the Celermen who’d stayed behind, “is that the ship is gone.”

“I guessed that. But why? How?”

“We were tricked, I’m afraid,” said the Celerman. “Almost as soon as you were gone, the tide came in – and by Jupiter did it come in, never seen anything like it. I thought it was a flood or another great wave, but the sailors said it was normal.”

“Yes. Big tides here. And?”

“And they said they needed to anchor the ship to stop it drifting off. They told us it was dangerous for people who didn’t know the sea, and told us to wait above this line of seaweed,” he pointed at a dark line in the pale sand, “so we did. The crew all went to the ship and climbed aboard. The water came higher and higher, then the ship was floating. They pulled up that leather thing—”

“The sail.”

“That’s it. They pulled that up and off they went. That way.” He pointed out over the moonlit, empty sea.

“On the bright side,” said the Celerman, “they were true to their word about the seaweed. We stayed above it and the water came right up to it, but not over it. Did you find any people on your trip, or any food? We’re all pretty hungry here.”

L
owa stood alone on her command tower, high above the palisade on Big Bugger Hill. All across the wide plain to the north, lit up rather fetchingly from the east by the rising sun, was the Roman army.

It could not be called a surprise assault. There were thousands of men, all marching in neat, boring squares. To the east was cavalry and to the west of centre was a battering ram, towed by oxen. The ram looked pretty much exactly the right size and weight for smashing her new hillfort’s gate. She counted five legions, which meant they’d left one legion of five thousand men guarding the ships.

She looked along her palisade, lined with dozens of scorpions and hundreds of archers. It had looked formidable the day before, but in the context of twenty thousand men marching towards it looked like exactly what it was – a wooden wall that could be knocked down.

The front line of the Romans was approaching her longbow range. She stretched her arms up above her head, clasped her hands and bent over to one side, then the other.

“Badgers’ spunk trumpets, that’s a great look,” said a voice that she’d once known very well. She turned slowly.

“Dug,” she said, suddenly feeling faint and grabbing the tower’s wooden wall. It was her head wound, she told herself. He was leaning against the wall at the other side of the tower. “Are you a ghost?” She wanted to run over to him, but held back.

“No, not a ghost, just part of your mind talking to you. I guess you’ve conjured me up to reassure yourself,”

“No, you’re not part of my mind. I have plans, I don’t need reassurance. And I don’t hallucinate. You’re a bloody ghost…”

“I’m not.”

“My love, you’re lying.” She’d always been able to read him. “Go deep into my mind and just maybe there’s a part capable of creating a vision of the man I love in a time of duress. However, nowhere,
nowhere
, would you find any part of me that could ever come up with the phrase ‘badgers’ spunk trumpets’.”

“Ah,” he looked abashed. “But you still love me?”

Lowa smiled. “That’s not the point. What are you? Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad to see you, although this possibly isn’t the best time.” She glanced at the Romans. They were still just outside her bow range. “I know that you’re not part of my mind. So what are you?”

“It worked on Spring.”

“What did?”

“She believed I was in her mind.”

“I bet she didn’t. She’s just more indulgent of you than I am. Look, we don’t have long. I miss you and want to hold you and I’m so happy to see you because perhaps it means that one day I’ll be with you again, but you always had terrible timing. The Romans are attacking.” She looked over her shoulder. The front ranks were coming to the edge of her bow range. “Tell me quickly, why have you come?”

“Our son is in danger from one of those demons.”

“He’s here, in the fort. Do you mean we’re all in danger from demons?”

“I saw a vision. There were people around but I could only see him, then there was a shout – ‘
Demons attacking from the north-west
.’ Shortly afterwards … little Dug was killed, by a demon.”

“Oh, piss.” Lowa had a vision of her routed army, of herself crawling broken-legged and hearing the words
Demons attacking from the north-west
. “Why have you told me this?”

“So you can save our son.”

Lowa sighed. “I’ll do my best to save everyone, him most of all. I have to fight now. I love you, Dug. Please come back to me after this, assuming I’m not already with you. Although, actually, can you do anything useful? How about scaring Caesar?”

“I love you as well,” he said, and he was gone.

She turned to face the Romans. They were in range. She slotted an arrow, drew and shot.

Two heartbeats later one of the two oxen pulling the battering ram went down. The archers and scorpion crews lining Big Bugger Hill’s palisade cheered. A couple of heartbeats later, she loosed another arrow and hit the second oxen, which toppled more slowly with a pained lowing, soon drowned out by more British cheers.

The Roman legionaries stopped as one and the squares of men nearest Big Bugger Hill raised shields to form impenetrable armoured boxes around themselves. They waited and the British watched as something that looked like a longhouse on wheels – a shield for the battering ram, presumably – was rolled forward, and a couple more oxen were driven in from the back lines.

During this lull, Lowa looked around for Dug again but he wasn’t there. Seeing him had filled her with a joy that she hadn’t felt in a long while and at the same time pissed her off massively. Why hadn’t he appeared to her before? And why couldn’t his warning be less cryptic? She would do her best to keep little Dug safe, and she’d listen out for the
Demons attacking from the north-west
shout, but really she could not be focused on him, not today, with twenty-five-thousand-plus men marching at her wooden walls and fifteen-thousand-strong army.

She wondered how Chamanca was getting on with the second phase of their plan for the chariots. And where the Bel was Atlas with those armoured aurochs? There hadn’t been so much as a shout from Atlas since he’d headed to the Aurochs tribe. Where was he?

Chamanca liked driving chariots, particularly these lighter, faster ones, and particularly when she was at the head of eight hundred of them charging at the Roman camp as the sun rose.

Some Roman foragers were out early. They spotted the chariots and ran for cover that was just a little too far away.

“Shoot them!” Chamanca commanded, without slowing or turning. She heard bows thrum behind her then squawks as several dozen arrows found targets.

“Did you get one?” she called back to her crew, a young woman called Yanina. Yanina had been Chamanca’s driver at the battle against the Dumnonians on Sarum Plain, when she was only a girl. She’d been a good driver then and she was a good fighter now.

“I got two.”

“Excellent.”

Chamanca had picked the girl to share her chariot firstly because she’d done well on Sarum Plain, probably saving Chamanca’s life when she’d deftly driven the chariot clear of a crowd of clinging Dumnonians, and secondly because she was good-looking. If a woman as beautiful as Chamanca had to have someone else in her chariot – and Lowa had insisted that she did – then it needed to be someone who complemented Chamanca’s appearance. Yanina had been terrified at first, remembering that the Iberian hadn’t been exactly kind last time. Now that the girl was fiercely trained and much more capable, however, Chamanca didn’t feel the need to whack her. She even felt able to treat Yanina almost as an equal, and she could tell by the new swagger in the tall girl’s rangy stride that she was proud to be so closely associated with the fiercest Warrior in Lowa’s army.

The wall of the camp loomed out of the sea mist and Roman trumpets blared through the still morning. The big gates in the centre of the south wall swung shut. There was no rattle in the neck of a Roman trumpet; they were all the same size and the trumpeters blew the same clean, single note. The British trumpets’ music, with wooden clackers in their mouths, all whatever size the bronzesmith had decided to make that day, all blown to the individual blower’s personal tunes, always swelled and throbbed like a swarm of gigantic insects. The Roman ones sounded like the honk of defiant but harmonious geese. Chamanca preferred the British ones.

A hundred paces from the wall she shouted, “Jump!” and felt her chariot lighten and speed up as Yanina leapt off. She wrenched on her right-hand rein and turned for the coast.

“Take care!” Yanina shouted behind her. Chamanca shot an evil look over her shoulder and Yanina grinned back. She had been too kind to the girl. Some discipline would be called for after the attack.

A couple of slingstones flew from the walls and landed ineffectively and soon there were several hundred British arrows suppressing the Roman defensive missiles. She glanced at the gate – still closed, which was good. She wasn’t sure how many legionaries were going to charge out and she wasn’t looking forward to finding out.

Half the chariots – four hundred of them – followed her to the shore, minus their passengers, and half the chariots stayed with the disembarked crews, adding to the deluge of arrows raining down onto the wall and into the camp. Soon they’d be adding fire arrows to the standard ones.

Ahead of her, she was glad to see, the twenty-eight Roman warships were still near the beach where they’d guarded the landing and camp construction. The hundreds of transport ships bobbed behind them, peaceful in the early-morning mist.

The trumpets woke Ragnall.

“Whassat?” he mumbled.

“That was your signal to let me go.” Spring was sitting upright on her bed, fully dressed, as if she hadn’t slept. “Lowa’s attacking. She’s sure to take the camp. If you let me go now I’ll put in a good word for you. Make sure she kills you quickly.”

Ragnall pulled his toga over his head, ran a hand through his hair and strapped on his sandals.

“You stay here.” He ducked out of the flap.

Legionaries were running eastwards, buckling their armour.

“What’s going on?” he asked Ferrandus, who was sitting on a canvas stool outside the tent, trying to clean muck out from under his fingernails with the tip of his sword.

“British are attacking.”

“Any more details?”

“Nope. Go and have a look for yourself if you want to find out more. They don’t think about people who need to clean their nails when they make these swords, do they? Or maybe it needs sharpening…” Ferrandus poked the tip into his palm.

“You’re not worried?”

“Nope.”

“But you said—”

“The British are attacking? Yes, and my orders are to guard Queen Spring. If the Britons breach the walls then I need to think about moving her. Until that happens, well, I could run up and down waving my arms shouting ‘What’s going on? What’s going on?’ like a prick, or I could sit here and get something useful done.”

He returned to his nails.

Ragnall ran in the same direction as everybody else, then stopped when an arrow thwocked into the ground by his feet. The running legionaries lifted shields over their heads and ran on as more arrows fell. Ragnall ducked behind one and tried to follow him to where thousands of legionaries were massing, ready to storm out of the camp, presumably.

“Sir?” said the shield-carrying legionary, looking over his shoulder at Ragnall.

“Yes?”

“This is a one-man shield. Would you mind fucking off?”

Ragnall did as he was bid and sprinted back in the direction he’d come until he was clear of the falling arrows. A flying spark caught his eye, then another and another. Fire arrows. He was outside their range but he ran back a little to be sure, then stood and watched as the burning barbs rained down.

They were effective, each landing with a bright little splash of flame. The tents they landed on quickly went up. He couldn’t see the mustering legionaries, but he heard horrible screams. It sounded like the little exploding missiles set people alight effectively, too.