Reign of Iron (39 page)

Something hit his head very hard. He staggered. That almost knocked me over, he thought, and whatever it was feels extremely odd.
Why can’t I see?
he wondered. Then he wondered no more.

Lowa looked to the source of the thin blast. Smoke billowed clear and she saw the squat figure of Yilgarn standing on the wall blowing his little trumpet. Immediately she regretted letting him live. She’d known of his treachery the year before because he’d been seen coming back from the Roman camp. This year he’d been useful. She’d fed him the line that she expected Caesar to tarry at the coast, watched him go and deliver it, then seen Caesar march inland immediately, exactly as she’d wanted.

And then she’d let Yilgarn back into the army, thinking to use him to deliver made-up plans again. The notion had crossed her mind that he might do more than simply report her plans to Caesar, that he might sabotage her, but he was so valuable as a planter of false information and so lacking in nous that she’d gambled that he wouldn’t. The instant she saw him blowing that stupid little trumpet she knew she’d lost the bet.

She flipped up her bow and shot him in the head. But it was too late. As she strung a second arrow she saw Yilgarn’s Haxmites, spaced evenly all over her defences, ruin everything. Several shot fire arrows into the buckets of pitch, sending flames bursting over her troops and the wall. A few of them lobbed torches into the buckets of whale oil piled up next to the catapults, which exploded with great gouts of flame. She saw one creeping up on Mal, hatchet in hand. She shot him, but there were many more, lashing out at the scorpion crews with swords and pushing the giant bows off the wall.

The Maidunites reacted well. There was a swift counter and within perhaps twenty heartbeats all three hundred Haxmites were dead, and already men and women were running to douse the wall, but it was all too late. Almost all the scorpions and all of the catapults, as far as she could tell, had been destroyed.

She’d wiped out one Roman legion, but the other four were fully intact and ready to march on her barely defended fort.

“Put your hand in my mouth!” Chamanca commanded.

Thankfully Chamanca had slapped the idea of questioning orders out of Yanina a long time ago, and the girl immediately jammed a hand between the Iberian’s waiting teeth. Chamanca lapped the girl’s palm, already bloody from her fight with the legionary, then bit into the pad at the base of her thumb and sucked as the four African archers loosed their bows. Four arrows flew as warm blood flowed down Chamanca’s throat. Time slowed. The missiles came at them like fat pigeons. Chamanca whipped up her sword and slapped them out of the sky. She steered the horse at the archers with her legs, blade in one hand, mace in the other, Yanina’s bleeding hand clamped in her mouth. The archers saw what she planned and tried to escape, but for Chamanca they were no faster than statues. She sliced open two of their heads and clubbed the other two. The world whooshed in and time returned to normal speed and she galloped off. She took one last, long suck at Yanina’s hand then opened her mouth.

“You can have you hand back. Are you injured?” she shouted.

“Never been better,” said Yanina quietly but firmly in her ear, linking her hands around the Iberian’s midriff again, pressing up against her back and resting her chin on her shoulder.

They skirted the corner of the Roman camp and pelted along the sand, sea and burning ships on one side, burning wall on the other. The heat tightened Chamanca’s skin, blood from the girl’s injured hand ran down her stomach and into her shorts. She was wildly happy. There was no situation in the world, not one, that wasn’t improved by a few gulps of blood.

The few Roman sailors who had escaped the warships and swum ashore were clustered in the shallows, away from the heat of the burning wall. None tried to impede their passage. Chamanca guessed they weren’t in the mood to give death another chance so immediately.

As they neared the end of the camp, she saw out to sea that her chariot attack had succeeded in its goal of burning the warships and half the transports. Judging by what she’d seen on the other side of the camp and the seaward wall, they’d destroyed a good bit of the Roman camp, too. She looked back along the beach. She and Yanina had been the last of the Maidunites to escape, but there was no pursuit. Many had died, but she wasn’t going to let that dent her mood. They’d won! She grabbed the girl’s hand, held it to her mouth for another suck of blood, and galloped on.

Spring despised Ragnall, but he was right.

“I can’t kill you,” she said, “you’re too harmless.”

His eyes widened in anger and he shouted, “Ferrandus, Tertius, to me, quickly!”

“Big badgers’ bollocks” said Spring, lifting the knife from Ragnall’s neck.

The two praetorians ducked into the tent. If they were surprised to see Spring straddling Ragnall on the bed and brandishing a knife, it didn’t show.

“Yup?” said Ferrandus.

“I caught her crawling out of the back of the tent,” said Ragnall. “Your chain wasn’t good enough. So first wrap her in this chain and secure her so she can’t escape again, then go and get a better chain.”

Ferrandus looked at Tertius, lifting his lower lip into a “What do you reckon?” expression. Tertius nodded.

She climbed off, considered attacking the praetorians for a moment but quickly dismissed the idea. She didn’t want to hurt these good men.

Looking apologetic, Tertius gathered the chain, then both he and Ferrandus attached it around her arms. They tied her legs together and fastened her feet to the bed with a short length of rope. She tested the bonds. There was no give in them. It was strange to think that such nice men as Tertius and Ferrandus knew how to tie someone up so that they wouldn’t escape.

“And now get some better chain,” said Ragnall.

“She will come to no harm while we’re away,” said Tertius.

“I will look after her.”

The praetorians left and she was alone with Ragnall.

He rubbed his temple where she’d punched him, then his jaw. He touched his ribs on both sides, wincing. The leg squeeze must have bruised him, she thought.

He looked at her. She’d seen that look on other men. Quintus Cicero, for example.

“It’s not my fault you got hit,” she said. “You shouldn’t have attacked me.”

He advanced, shaking his head. She strained at the chain and rope to no avail.

“You should have let me go! You should have come with me! It’s not too late, I’ll tell Lowa that you—”

“You and Lowa,” he growled, “you’re as bad as each other.” He raised a fist.

“Ragnall, no, you’re not yourself. You’ll regret it if you—”

He swung at her. She dropped back onto the bed, lifted her bound feet and kicked her heels into his chest. He staggered back and fell on the other bed. He lay there for a few heartbeats, panting, then sat up, looking even angrier than before. He leapt, knocking her kick aside this time. She tried to roll away, but he turned her onto her back and scrabbled until he was straddling her, as she’d been straddling him not long before. He was heavy, and smiling horribly.

“Ragnall, no! Stop! I’m sorry I hit you, but you—”

He punched her in the mouth. It hurt a little. She looked up at him, eyes wide and pleading. It had no effect. He punched her again and again and again.

Spring rolled her head with the blows, as Lowa had taught her, but after the third it began to hurt properly. She hadn’t expected this. He wasn’t strong and he was a bad puncher, but he was heavy and he was putting weight into his work.

“Stop!” It was Tertius. He grabbed Ragnall by the shoulders, yanked him off Spring and hurled him to the floor. She heard Ragnall exhale in pain and craned over to see Tertius kick him in the stomach. Ragnall curled into a ball. Tertius glanced at Spring, shook his head and unsheathed his sword.

“No!” she said.

The praetorian put his sword away. Ragnall scrabbled to his feet and fled from the tent.

M
al found Taddy Ducktender cradling Gale Cossach’s head in her lap. Her friend was either unconscious or dead. Judging by her pallid, greyish skin, it was the latter. When this was all over, Mal decided, he’d ask Lowa if he could lead the revenge raid on the Haxmite tribe.

“Come on, Taddy, there are a few scorpions intact and I need you,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

She looked up, her blood-and soot-stained face beautiful in her hazelnut helmet of hair, and nodded. She laid her friend down gently, walked over to the corpse of a nearby Haxmite, pulled her sword from his chest and said, “I’m all yours.”

Despite the very recent deaths of several scorpion crew, almost all of whom had been friends, Mal smiled. He’d just been reminded why they had to defeat the Romans.

The fires on the palisade wall were all doused, and no real damage had been done to the structure. They were lucky. As Mal and only a few others knew, the inside of the wall was packed with flammable material. If any of the Haxmite fires had set that off, then Mal himself would have perished along with Lowa, Taddy and all the other Maidunite defenders on the wall.

There were bigger problems. Of sixty scorpions, fourteen remained operational. Three were being fixed and the rest were smashed beyond repair. All the fire bucket ammunition for the catapults had been destroyed, and nearly all the fire arrows were burnt. Relatively, not that many Britons had been killed, leaving out all three hundred Haxmites, but the Haxmite insurrection had been a complete success and might well do for them all yet, because the Romans would be coming soon and they had nothing that would stop them.

Mal crossed over to the palisade edge to see what the enemy were doing. They were still body-collecting. Scores – hundreds – of dead legionaries littered the churned farmland in front of the fort. Pairs of unarmed legionaries walked among them, searching for the injured and bearing them away, well within British bow range but unmolested. Lowa had allowed this. When she’d signalled that the Roman stretcher-carriers could come forward, Mal had been impressed and surprised by her magnanimity. It was the right thing to do, of course, but she didn’t have to do it, and it gave the enemy a close and relaxed view of their defences. Now he looked at the size of the Roman army, he realised with a swelling of depression that she was probably just being practical. They were massively outnumbered and, objectively, their chances of winning the war were slim to none, so Lowa was probably being merciful to the Roman injured in the hope that they’d be kind to captive and wounded Britons. On the plus side, the lull in action also gave him, Lowa and the rest of them time to rearrange the defences and get as many of the scorpions back in action as possible. He got back to it.

A while later he was startled by a trumpet blast. A Roman rode forward, bare-headed to show that he was a non-combatant. He was a stiff-backed man with an off-centre patch of white at the front of his otherwise black hair, as if he’d been shat on by a bird. He looked up at Lowa’s command tower and raised his sword. Lowa raised her bow.

The Roman rode away. The battle was back on.

What would Dug have said? thought Mal. Something along the lines of
great big bags of badgershit
.

Jagganoch pulled the long blade from the third crippled elephant’s neck. The noble animal sighed mightily and gushed blood as he died. Had he been at home in Africa he would have nursed all three injured beasts and they would have had a good chance of returning to health. Here, on this cold shore, that would have been impossible, so he’d finished them. Three more elephants had been killed by the British charioteers, making six dead in total. He’d been surprised. He had not expected the milk-white people in their silly vehicles to kill any of his magnificent animals.

Around him, at least, his remaining elephants were finally eating properly, gorging on the dead. An elephant would pick up a dead or nearly dead person by the ankle with his trunk, swing them into his mouth, and suck and chew the flesh and blood from his bones. He would usually have watched them, it was a sight to see, especially if you fed them a living specimen, but right now he had work to do.

He’d gathered the survivors from the crews of the three injured elephants so that they might watch in shame as he put down the beasts. They looked at him now, rabbit-eyed. Perhaps the British were in fact braver than his own men.

“And this was all done by the same woman?” he asked them. He narrowed his eyes at the fools. A rider had never, ever, got behind Bandonda, and never would.

“A small woman, dressed in very little. She was a goddess, I think. I saw her rescue another woman. She picked her from the ground as if she weighed nothing, then four archers fired arrows at them. On horseback, she hit the arrows away as easily as if they were apples hanging from a tree, then killed the archers with a blade and a mace before any could jump out of the way. Oh, she was a goddess.”

“Then she rode away?”

“Yes.”

“And you did not follow her?”

“I was on foot, she was on a horse. I had no bow. I could only watch her go.”

Jagganoch flashed up his club and drove it into the underside of the man’s chin, knocking him over. The others jumped away and the driver lay, clutching his destroyed jaw and staring wildly at Jagganoch.

He probably faced a slow, horrible death from infection. The man had angered him, and what use was an elephant driver with no elephant? But Jagganoch was not without mercy. He would do the same for the man as he had for his elephants. He raised his club for the death blow, then changed his mind. He whistled to Bandonda, who ambled over immediately, the ground rumbling as he came.

“No, no!” the man with the broken jaw managed.

Jagganoch smiled, pointed at him and ordered Bandonda the to eat.

He turned to the others and the worms shuffled away, looking at their feet, trying to avoid catching his eye and risk the honour of being eaten by Bandonda.

How he hated them. Looking at them, shuffling and inadequate, flinching as Bandonda sucked the meat off their screaming comrade, he considered giving them all to his mount. But no. Among these devil milk skins, Romans as well as British, he needed all the Yonkari that he had and, besides, he did not want Bandonda to be sluggish from overeating on the return journey. Despites centuries of being trained to eat flesh, the Yonkari elephants reacted badly to too much and it was best to keep them mostly on their natural diet of roots, fruit, grass and bark.