Reign of Iron (37 page)

Spring had identified the chain’s strongest and weakest links and focused on rubbing the former on the latter. She thought she’d made some headway but it was hard to tell. She put the weakest link under the bed leg and sat heavily on the bed. That only embedded the chain into the earth. She wrapped the links around a bed leg then around her wrists, braced her feet against the edge of the bed and pulled.

To her great surprise the chain snapped with a ping and she fell back. She gathered up the chain, still attached to her ankle but no longer to the bed, and found that a different link had broken – not the one that she’d worked at for ages. There’s probably a lesson there somewhere, she thought. She jumped over to Ragnall’s side of the tent and rummaged about in his pack for his knife. You didn’t want to be escaping without a knife.

At the shore Chamanca yanked her left rein. The horse skidded on the sand as it turned to the north, then galloped along the beach in between the lapping waves and the high wooden wall of the Roman base. Chamanca bounced along, repeatedly flicking reins on the horse’s back to remind him of the ongoing need for speed.

This was the dangerous part. Theoretically, there would be no defenders on the Roman camp’s seaward, eastern wall because it was protected by the ships. Indeed, she could see nobody on the wall. So far, so good.

Out to sea, people were running about on the ships, but none of the dreaded scorpion bolts flew. As Lowa had reckoned and Chamanca had hoped, while not using the giant bows they’d let the tension out of the draw-twine to avoid overstretching it, which meant she and her squad had a few dozen heartbeats before they cranked the twines back and a deadly salvo of scorpion missiles flew their way. It was going to be tight.

She reached the point where she was sure she was in range of the most northerly warship, dragged her chariot to a halt, grabbed her bow and quiver of special arrows and leapt out. Around her two dozen other charioteers stopped and dismounted, too. Fifty paces back along the beach another two dozen were doing the same; fifty paces back from them were another two dozen, and so on. Five of the chariots in each group carried sealed buckets of pitch. The charioteers with buckets grabbed them, twisted them down into the sand, prised off the lids, chucked in a handful of dried grass already mixed with slivers of highly flammable dried dog’s nose fungus and struck flint sparks onto it.

Chamanca dipped her arrow into the burning pitch and loosed it at the northernmost warship. The burning missile rose slowly and looked like it would never make the distance, but it flew as far as Elann had promised. Instead of the usual iron head, each arrow had a bulbous, freakishly wide arrow-shaped pod with a thin wooden skin. This pod was packed with wool soaked in the finest whale oil on the inside, and then wrapped in wool and a whale-fat glue on the outer. This outer wool was soaked in burning pitch by the dip in the bucket, then shot. The arrowhead would burst on landing, unleashing its small but fiercely burning little cargo.

Chamanca shot ten arrows into the northernmost warship then surveyed the damage. Small fires were burning all over it. Sailors with buckets were seeing to several of them, but they hadn’t spotted all and even if they had they’d never be able to get to them – especially the three high up the mast which Chamanca naturally assumed were her shots. The ship was doomed.

“Next boat!” she shouted, and her gang shifted their aim to the next ship along. Each group was to target two warships and any transports in range before fleeing. She fired three arrows and looked along the line. Several of the warships were fully ablaze and the rest were well on the way. Four more arrows and Chamanca was happy. All the warships were burning merrily, as well as a few dozen transports.

“Hurl buckets, then south!” she shouted, mounting up and flicking the reins. Charioteers slung the burning buckets at the wooden palisade.

Her horse sped along. To her right, flames from the buckets of pitch licked up the silent seaward wall of the Roman camp. To her left the ships burned. The cart’s wheels fizzed along the packed wet sand, faster and faster as Chamanca whipped the reins. It was exhilarating. The goal of the attack was to remove the base camp’s defences and reduce the Roman supply line from Gaul, while leaving them enough transports to flee in. That goal had been achieved. She hadn’t been a fan of Lowa’s plan initially – it didn’t involve nearly enough blood drinking – but now that it was done she felt a new thrill, of being part of a tightly organised, minutely planned, diligently executed exercise. For the first time, she had some appreciation of the Roman hive mentality. Of course in this particular hive exercise she was queen bee, and she wouldn’t have had it any other way, but still, on the whole—

Her gleeful self-congratulation was instantly cauterised as she rounded the corner of the camp.

“Oh, Fenn,” she said.

A multitude of legionaries had flooded from the west gate and formed their boringly impervious shield tortoises. They were marching in dreary order towards the four hundred light chariots and twelve hundred charioteers who’d stayed on that side of the Roman base. Smoke was billowing up from the merrily burning camp, but that was scant consolation for the position that the Maidunite light chariots found themselves in. Because the legionaries were the least of their worries.

They’d known the fort’s garrison would come, so the plan at that point was to mount up and flee back westwards, passengers peppering any cavalry pursuit with arrows. Marshland meant there was no escape along the coast to the south.

That point had been reached, but the plan to retreat had been thrown in the air, stamped on then fucked from behind by the arrival of forty war elephants, galloping in a line towards the camp. They were armoured in iron skull plates, iron boots and bladed lances extending their already fearsome tusks. Mounted on each was a mini walled wooden fort holding a driver and four dark-skinned archers. These latter were pouring arrows at the brave British chariots that charged them.

It was a beautiful manoeuvre; the chariots swung round in front of the elephants, the crew of each firing arrow after arrow, but it was ineffectual and doomed. The arrows that found unarmoured flesh had little or no effect on the animals’ thick hides. A few archers in the mounted towers were hit, but the Africans had a better shooting position, lofted as they were, so were taking a heavier toll on the chariots. As drivers and horses were struck, so chariots slowed and stopped. The elephants ploughed through them, heads dipping and bucking, iron-capped tusks shunting and splintering wood, impaling and destroying men, women and horses. Out of the couple of hundred chariots that had attacked the elephants, perhaps ten fled back to the main body of the Maidunite light chariot squad, blood-soaked monsters galloping and trumpeting behind them. It looked like a fleet of full-sailed triremes chasing down a handful of fishing smacks. One elephant had a horse impaled and kicking on a tusk, but it ran as fast as the others.

The other charioteers who’d stayed to shoot arrows into the base were trapped between the closing jaws of two forces – elephants on one side, legionaries on the other. They were loosing swarms of arrows in both directions, but their missiles were sticking in the shields of the legionaries, hardly noticed by the elephants and not finding the African archers ducked down in their turrets. It galled Chamanca, but there was only one option (“Or is that no options?” said Carden’s voice in her head – as he’d said to her moments before he’d died).

She blew three short blasts on her whistle, the signal to retreat, then two longer blasts, which meant “to the east”. The only possible escape lay along the beach to the north, back along the fort’s burning eastern wall. The chariots might make it. Anyone on foot was doomed.

The Iberian wasn’t going to retreat yet, though. She’d ridden into this battle with two people on her chariot, and two of them were going to ride out of it. She slapped the reins and sped towards the Maidunite chariots as they thundered towards her, between the closing jaws of the Roman legionaries on one side and the African war elephants on the other.

The air between Big Bugger Hill and the enemy was thick with the arrows from five thousand Maidunite archers, shivering up from the wall, slowing and then pelting down onto the multitude of Romans. They had no noticeable effect on the steadily marching ranks, other than turning the tortoises into hedgehogs.

The Romans had no catapults, no towers, no scorpions, just men and a battering ram. Lowa scanned the land around. She could see no clever plans, no jinks to the left or right, no cavalry looping round the back. She was confident that there was nothing going on that she couldn’t see because she had shouters hidden all over the place. The Roman plan seemed simple – break the gate, come in, kill the Britons. And this was the tactical genius that had crushed Gaul? Maybe their success was down to superior equipment, training and doggedness, she thought, because they still came. The battering ram was ten paces from the gate, five …

“FIRE!” shouted Lowa.

Spring found the knife eventually where he’d hidden it in his bedclothes, grabbed the striped horse-skin quiver that Caesar had given her and had wriggled nearly all the way under the back of the tent, when something yanked at her ankle chain.

“You’d think,” said Ragnall, hauling her back in, “that after the last time you escaped under the tent that we might have done something to make it more secure.”

“Actually, you did,” said Spring as she slid on her stomach back under the heavy leather tent side. “It was much harder to get under this time. Ferrandus and Tertius made it tighter. You shouldn’t blame them.” She blamed herself. If she hadn’t dallied finding Ragnall’s stupid knife she would have been well away.

Back in the tent she stood up. Ragnall was holding the chain and shaking his head: “Where the Jupiter did you think you’d go?”

“Home. I’ve had enough of this now and I want to go. My place is with the Britons. So is yours. Come on, let’s stop mucking around and get out of here. With all the noise outside nobody will notice.”

“My place is not with the Britons. The Britons killed my mother, my father and my brothers. When the Romans take Briton that won’t happen any more to anyone. Law will rule and nobody will have to suffer as I did.”

“Everyone suffers. You think the Romans are good and kind?”

“The Romans are just. Under them a good man can live a good life. In the Britain I knew the good were tortured, enslaved and killed – by your father.”

“But Lowa is in charge now. The good are living their lives and the country is at peace – at least it was until you and your dick friends crossed the Channel.”

“Spring, I know you’re young, but try to understand. Lowa might be good. I happen to disagree with that, but let’s say for the sake of argument that her rule is as just and fair as the Romans’ will ever be.”

“It’s better.”

“OK, it’s better – doesn’t matter. The point is, with things left as they are, without the Romans taking over, Lowa will be queen only until the next Zadar comes along, kills her and takes her place.”

“No way. Nobody could kill her.”

“Then she will get older and die. This is obvious stuff, Spring. The way Britain is ruled now, bad kings and queens will come again. It’s inevitable, it’s what happens when power is a free-for-all. The selfish, ruthless, cruel and the aggressive are in charge.”

“And sometimes the good win out, like Lowa.”

“True, sometimes they do – sometimes. But it doesn’t have to be so arbitrary. In Rome the people choose who’s in charge. It’s not faultless and they have their troubles, but it’s a thousand times better than the rule-free system in which the biggest shit floats to the top.”

Annoyingly, he had a bit of a point. But he was missing the main one. “No. Voting and all that stuff may well work for the Romans and maybe we should try it here, maybe we really should, but it ought to be our decision, not forced on us by plume-headed idiots from Italy. If we want to, we will work out our version of it – one that includes women, perhaps? It’s none of Rome’s business what we do here … Actually that’s a point, do you really think the Romans care at all what political system we have in Britain?”

“You’ve changed the subject. We were talking about how much better it is to have annually elected leaders. Are you conceding that argument?”

“Just answer me. Do the Romans care what system of rule we use?”

“Yes, that’s why they’re here!”

“Is it? Or are they here to pillage the land, to further the
glory
of Rome, to make Rome richer, to build more big silly buildings so silly people with stupid hair can walk around marvelling at how marvellous they are while people in Britain are enslaved and worked to their deaths in fields and mines and all the profits from their sweat are Romeward-bound?”

“Rome will be enriched by the conquest of Britain, but it’s a side effect. You say Lowa’s the best ruler ever?”

“Yes.”

“Is she richer than she was before she was queen? Does she have a bigger hut, more shiny possessions and finer clothes?”

“No!”

“You’re lying. Of course she does. Rulers always take from the people they rule. It doesn’t mean they’re ruling badly, it’s a reasonable reward for improving everyone else’s lives. But just imagine Britain covered with aqueducts so we all have that delicious clean water you drank so keenly in Rome. Better fields, better storage, theatres, plays, philosophy, writing and—”

“No. If we want it we’ll have it. It shouldn’t be forced! Say you loved the game Capture the Fort and I didn’t – would you make me play it?”

“Hang on a minute.” Ragnall stuck his head out of the tent flap, still holding Spring’s chain, and had a word with whoever was guarding. Spring wasn’t sure if it was Tertius, Ferrandus or both of them.

He brought his head back in. “The east and the south of the camp is ablaze.”

“Oh?”

“They’ll tell us if we have to move.”

“Right.”

“Now, where were we?

“I was asking if you’d make me play a game that you liked and I didn’t.”