Age of Iron (11 page)

“And what would you say?”

“That we saw a hare running across a field of cattle. It means nothing other than that the hare has learned to be wary of people but knows cattle won’t harm it, and the cattle have learned that running hares and riding men are not dangerous. Probably. Druids like to make up reasons for the way animals behave and teach them as facts, but we don’t really know why beasts do what they do. I believe the only relevance that the hare and cows have to you is that they prove your eyes work. However, I could be wrong. Perhaps Danu did send the hare as an oblique, indecipherable clue to your future, but it seems like a lot of effort for no point. Plus I have always thought that it is unlucky to be too superstitious.”

Ragnall’s laugh was like bubbling honey. “It would be good, surely, to have some idea if Anwen and I are destined to be happy? How can I know if I will love her for ever?”

Drustan rode on with his eyes closed. The sun shone on the bald dome of his head, lighting up his ring of woolly white hair.

“When people ask for advice,” he said eventually, “they are usually looking for corroboration. You saw no omen in the hare and you knew that I wouldn’t either. You asked me what I thought, even though you knew already. Why? Because hearing someone state what we ourselves believe pleases us, especially when we know that others disagree. That’s why like-minded people tend to group together, even though it would be more constructive to mingle with those of differing opinions.” The old man slowed his horse as they came to a hill, then continued: “This is a little different, but also common when people think they’re asking for advice. You seek praise. You want me to say that you’re a great man and that Anwen, or any woman, would love you for ever.”

Ragnall bobbed his head. “That would do.”

Drustan smiled. “But I’m going to give you some real advice. When you see Anwen later, look at her face. Look into her eyes. Then use your imagination. Change her face in your mind into that of an old, old woman, wrinkled as a walnut, but keep her eyes the same. You’ll be seeing Anwen in fifty years’ time. If your stomach still lurches with joy to look into her eyes, even though her soft-cheeked youth has evaporated to leave an aged husk; if your breath catches with delight to know that she loves you, even though in your mind her once-firm skin hangs under her chin and her shining hair has become brittle and colourless, then it’s possible that you will love her for the rest of your life.”

“I’ll try it. But maybe not when we’re in bed!” Ragnall laughed heartily.

The old man chuckled. The horses plodded on through the warm morning, across open farmland and into shady woods.

“And how will I know that she truly loves me, and not my wealth and position?”

“Ah, that’s much easier. Do you have the pick of your father’s flock?”

“I should hope so, after all these years away.”

Drustan wafted an inquisitive bumble bee away from his beard and returned his hand to the reins.

“Slaughter the third-best sheep. Make sure Anwen knows you are doing it for her. Have the best shawl made from its wool and the best boots from its skin. Give it all to her. Ask her which part of the animal she likes best to eat and have it cooked by Boddingham’s best cook. Ten days later, slaughter the second-best sheep and do something similar with its skin – perhaps gloves and a hat this time. Nine days later announce your plan to have the best sheep killed for her.”

“I can’t kill all of my father’s sheep.”

“You need kill only two. When you say you are going to kill the third sheep, if she loves you, she will beg you not to. ‘Please,’ she will say, ‘stop wasting your wealth on me. It’s my turn to treat you.’ She will offer to make you a stew of mushrooms or a linen shirt – something that is an effort to her and no cost to you. If she does that, she loves you.”

“If she doesn’t?”

“Do not kill the third sheep, break the engagement and find a woman who loves you and not your wealth.”

“Hmmm.”

“If she really loves you she will stop you even before the second sheep.”

“What if she lets me kill the third sheep, but my desire to bed her is so strong that I keep her anyway?”

“That, my dear Ragnall, would mean that you are a young man who, like all young men, ignores the wisdom of his elders and will spend the rest of his days regretting it. Old age may look impossibly far away, but looking back it will seem but the blink of an eye since you married a woman with an ugly soul because she once had a beautiful body. And you will hate her and you will curse yourself for marrying her.”

“Right.”

“I know you are not paying me any heed, Ragnall. I can warn you over and over, but it will make no difference because you are a young man with beauty, strength and the firm belief that you know better than anyone who has ever trod Britain’s green fields before you. In reality you have the judgement of a sex-starved billy goat with a head injury. When you are old and wise, you will see what a fool you are now, and you will see life’s cruellest joke.”

The horses’ hooves clopped on the stone road.

“Which is?”

“By the time you realise what a wonderful gift youth is, you no longer have it.”

“You’re wrong, Drustan. I’m already fully aware of how wonderful life is. I know myself.”

Drustan coughed out a short laugh. “You don’t. Men will know the ways of all the beasts and the gods before they know themselves. The only way men or women can know themselves is if there’s almost nothing to know. If that was the case, however, they wouldn’t have the nous to know even that.”

“I thought
you
knew everything, Drustan?”

The old man smiled. “The wisest man or woman is but a child poking a stick into a rock pool next to a boundless ocean below an unending range of mountains. Which is why, Ragnall, it would do well for those druids who think they can explain everything to take their heads out of their own arses.”

“I don’t remember learning that on the Island of Angels.”

“I would not be welcome there if I taught it, but it is something that everybody who aspires to be more than a sheep or a dog should know.”

“Hold,” Drustan said several miles later. He dismounted, walked ahead and bent down. The woodland track had narrowed so they’d been riding in single file with the druid leading. Ragnall couldn’t see what had made him stop.

“Sword to the gut, I would say,” Drustan said.

“What?” Ragnall slipped off his horse and ran forward. A dead man lay across the path. The woods felt suddenly colder. The birdsong had stopped. This was not part of his imagined homecoming.

Drustan lifted the dead man’s shirt. There was a black wound. Dried blood was crusted down his stomach, trousers and leather shoes.

“I would say he has walked between five and ten miles after being stabbed with a sword,” said the druid.

“Which means he could have come from Boddingham.”

“It is a possibility. Do you recognise him?”

Ragnall leaned over the man’s face.

“No. I don’t think he’s from Boddingham. More likely he’s been attacked by bandits right here and your calculations are out by between five and ten miles.”

Drustan raised an eyebrow. “Here, help me.”

The two men heaved the body a little way into the trees. Drustan called on the beasts and birds to eat the flesh and return it to Danu. He asked that the man might be given a longer life in the Otherworld. As he stood and listened, Ragnall became increasingly worried. What if the man
was
from Boddingham? If his home had been attacked, then his father, his mother, Anwen …

“Let’s go,” said Ragnall as soon as Drustan had finished. They left a marker on the path so that if the murdered man’s kin came looking for him at Boddingham they could tell them where to find his body.

Six miles later the road left the woods. Woodsmoke, thick and white, was billowing up into the clean blue air from Boddingham Hill. Ragnall kicked his horse into a gallop.

“I
like your ringmail. Did you make it yourself?”

“No.”

“Is it heavy?”

“Yes.”

“Was it expensive?”

“It would have been if I’d paid coin or bartered for it.”

“What did you pay for it?”

“The blood price.”

“The
blood
price?”

“I took it from a man I killed. Well, I think I killed him. Actually someone else probably killed him. But I killed the man who killed him. I think. Battles get confusing. I didn’t pay coin for it or exchange anything is the point.”

“Oh, I see.”

Spring skipped ahead for a while, her pigtails bouncing. It was going to be a hot day, but it was still cool in the woods. A soft breeze shivered through a grove of aspen. The girl picked up a stick and slowed down until she was back at Dug’s side, swinging her stick and looking up at the big northerner.

“Why was there a battle yesterday?”

“Because adults, as you’ll come to understand when you are one, are fools.”

“Oh, I already know that. Ulpius was a total fool.”

“Who’s Ulpius?”

“The man who put poo and pee in his hair, who you killed with your hammer.”

“Oh yes.”

“But why was there a battle yesterday at Barton?”

“You can look at it on two levels.” Dug looked down and raised his eyebrows at Spring to see if she understood what he meant. She nodded.

“In the big picture it’s because the Romans are coming. Go to any marketplace and you’ll find a druid shouting about it. The Romans are very dangerous people who have conquered—”

“I know who the Romans are! Ulpius was Roman.”

“Oh, OK. So the Romans are coming, and everyone’s scared and they’re behaving like even bigger idiots than normal. We could unite and defeat them but instead we’re doing the opposite. It’s like we’re fowl farmers who know that a fox is coming. Instead of repairing our coops, we’re running around like fools, killing each other’s ducks and piling them up ready for the fox. In fact we’re even shipping ducks to the fox before he gets here. All in the hope that he’ll leave our own ducks alone when he comes. Which he won’t.”

Spring nodded wisely.

Dug continued: “At the heart of it all are three tribes. Really they’re groups of lots of tribes, but everyone uses the dominant tribe’s name to cover the lot.”

“Got it!”

“In the south west are the Dumnonians. They’re serious bastards from what I’ve heard, fierce as weasels and proud as cockerels. To the north and east of here the Murkans under King Grummog are more or less in charge. I worked for them for a while and they’re nasty buggers too. Down here in the south you have Zadar, king of Maidun Castle. They say – although it’s hard to know if they’re right – that even though he has the smallest army of the three, he’s the worst of the lot. They also say that Maidun Castle is the biggest and strongest of all the hillforts. It has three massive walls all the way round, a giant palisade and a labyrinth – a maze – for a gate. People get lost just trying to walk into the place. Zadar’s army lives in this fort. Well, probably next to it. I haven’t been there, but armies generally live outside hillforts unless they’re being attacked.”

“I know!”

Dug paused to clear a large branch that had fallen across the track in case a cart came along later.

“OK. So. We saw just how good Zadar’s army was yesterday when a handful of them beat a much bigger host, probably without so much as broken nail.” He thought back to the horse archers, the six who’d attacked first. He’d been thinking about them quite a bit, particularly their leader, the blonde one.

He felt Spring’s warm little hand take his. He pulled away gently but she tightened her grip. Her hand felt tiny, cool and precious in his coarse paw.

They walked on. The going was soft, dry and shady under overarching trees.

It had been a very odd day already and they were only a couple of hours into it. Waking in the reeds, being attacked by that bizarre-looking man, and now walking with this child who he really should have killed back on the battlefield.

“Don’t do that, please,” she’d said politely. That had stayed his hand, and she’d run over to the man he’d killed with the hammer, rummaged through his pockets, produced an antler comb, tidied her hair, tied it in two pigtails and run back over. “There,” she’d said. “I can look smart and we can be friends.” And he’d gone with it. He hadn’t killed her. He still wasn’t sure why. He quarter-suspected that she was not a child at all, but a mind-bending imp, slipped over from the Otherworld when he’d been so close to it. She was definitely an odd little thing and something weird had definitely happened to the speed of time when he’d woken up. It shouldn’t have been so easy to dodge that knife strike and to scalp the man who attacked him.

“So,” he continued, “Zadar’s doing what he wants, and piling up more riches than any king before him by taxing half of southern Britain and selling the rest as slaves to the Romans.”

“Why don’t people stop Zadar?”

“They can’t.”

“Bet they could. Oh look! A squirrel!”

A red squirrel was watching them from the branch of an oak tree, a nut in its paws. Dug reached for his sling. The squirrel squeaked and ran to safety.

“Why don’t
you
stop Zadar?” Spring asked.

“Me? What can I do?”

“Have you tried anything?”

“Not as such.”

Spring didn’t talk for a while, humming quietly as she walked. Her head twitched round at every rustle or tweet, trying to spot what made it as if she’d never seen a woodland animal before.

Dug strode along, mulling over his hypocrisy. Everyone else was selfish and blinkered, but he was off to join Zadar’s army, which was arguably even more selfish and worse than blinkered because he knew what he was doing. But he hadn’t started it. Why shouldn’t he make the most of a bad situation that he didn’t cause?

They walked into a grassy clearing. Bees buzzed about wildflowers, loud in the stillness.

“That cloud looks like a boar.” Spring pointed to the sky.

“So it does,” said Dug, “and that one’s a gull’s head.”

“Yes! With a fish in its beak!” He felt Spring squeeze his hand. “I thought it was just me that looked at clouds like that.”