Age of Iron (17 page)

The cart lurched forward and Weylin fell out, barking with rage.

“You little…” Tristan jumped up from his perch in the back. The girl whipped the reins again, two-handed now, and the oxen jerked into a lolloping gallop. Tristan toppled.

“Go!” said Dug. Lowa felt him shrink as he breathed out and pulled his arms in. The ropes around her loosened massively and she slid out. Tristan was crawling up the bouncing cart to get at the girl, long knife in his teeth. Lowa leaped onto his back, grabbed the hilt of the knife and pulled. Tristan had been clever or was lucky enough to have put the knife in his mouth blade forwards, so he escaped without serious mutilation, but it was easy for Lowa to manoeuvre him to the back of the cart and kick him out.

Weylin was already up and running behind them with the guards. “Slings!” He shouted. Lowa dropped into the cart.

Dug was lying on his side, still struggling to free himself from the rope. “Watch out for slingstones, Spring!” he shouted.

“So you
do
know her?” said Lowa above the rattle of the careering cart.

“Aye. Like I said, every northern Warrior has a wee—” A stone whizzed through Dug’s hair and he ducked lower.

Lowa peered over the back of the cart. The guards were ten paces away and keeping up. Slingstones flew. She ducked as they cracked into the backboard and zipped overhead.

“Where did you get the cart from?” shouted Dug.

“Where did you get the tart from?” Spring replied.

Lowa smiled. “Can we go any faster?”

“No. But there’s a stable not far from the gate where we can steal some horses,” answered the girl.

“Yes…” Lowa looked over the edge again. They were no farther from the running guards. She crawled up the cart, grabbed her bow and strung it. She peeked again, but the slingers were ready. She felt the wind of a passing stone on her cheek as she ducked. So she couldn’t shoot the guards …

“Problem!” shouted Spring from the front. “Drawbridge is up!”

Lowa and Dug crawled speedily to the front. Bladonfort’s residents were diving right and left to avoid the speeding oxen. Beyond them the drawbridge was indeed up, its counterweights hanging from ropes. Lowa looked at her quiver. There were two half-moon-headed rigging-cutter arrows in it, the ones she’d thought she’d never get a chance to use.

“Dug, I can cut the ropes, but the slingers…”

“I’ll see what I can do.” Dug gripped one side of the cart and shook. It didn’t budge. He crawled across and tried the other. There was some give. “Arrgghhhh!” he shouted, pulling at the heavy plank.

“We’re getting close!” Spring yelled. “What should I do?”

“Keep driving at the gate. Come on Dug!” Lowa shouted.

“We’re nearly there!” Spring’s voice was an octave higher.

“Drive at it! Don’t slow down!” Lowa notched a half-moon.

Dug stood in a stoop and worked at the plank. Two slingstones bounced off his back with painful-sounding
whumps
. The blows seemed to make him stronger. He wrenched the side of the cart free of its nails, spun and stood, holding it as a shield.

Lowa leaped up in its lee.

The counterweight was falling from the first severed rope as she loosed another arrow. It sliced the second rope, which whizzed through its pulley as the drawbridge fell open and banged down onto the stone quay. A heartbeat later the cart thundered across the River Bladon.

“Wait!” shouted Dug, leaping off the back with his hammer and makeshift shield.

Spring dragged the oxen to a halt.

“What are you doing?” Lowa shouted.

The guards, just the other side of the gate, saw their chance and sped up, yelling. Lowa could see Weylin a few paces behind them. “Take them alive!” he shouted.

Dug swung his hammer about his head, then down and round into the side of the bridge. There was a loud crack. The bridge shifted maybe a finger’s breadth. The first guard was on the bridge, sword raised. Dug swung his hammer into the bridge again. There was a splintering, wrenching, crashing scream as drawbridge and guard fell into the river.

Dug sprinted and leaped back into the cart just as the first slingshots from the guards in the gateway hit the backboard.

H
e was on the beach near the broch at night with Brinna. The light from the boat was like a white sunrise. They couldn’t see who or what was aboard.

“What do they want?” said Brinna, clutching his arm.

“I don’t know.” Dug tried to wave the boat away. “We don’t want you!” he shouted. “Go away!”

The light on the boat went out and the sun came up, and it was Lowa, standing in the place of a figurehead at the prow of a great sailing ship. The vast white sail was full, but the boat was still in the water, ten paces from the beach. Out of sight somewhere, all the horns of Maidun’s army were blaring their cacophony.

“You want me to go?” Lowa said, pulling aside her brown dress to expose a firm white breast.

“No!” Dug looked at Brinna. Brinna stared back at him, ears smoking with hatred. “No, come here. We don’t mind, do we, Brinna?”

Brinna opened her mouth to disagree, but instead she disappeared and became Lowa. She took his hand. The boat had gone and they were outside the broch. “Let’s go inside,” she said.

“Daddeee!” called both his little girls. They were standing on the sand dunes, wind whipping their red hair about their heads and the marram grass around their bare legs. Dug worried that the sharp edges of the grass would cut them.

“Forget them,” said Lowa. “Come with me.”

The wind rose and caught in his girls’ dresses, lifting them and carrying them away.

It took Dug a moment to realise where he was. He was wrapped in a woollen blanket on the leaf-covered floor of the woodland enclosure where he’d tried to abandon Spring. They’d come back to it from the Bladonfort road leading two horses they’d stolen from the stable outside Bladonfort through the woods, diverting via his stashed mail shirt and helmet and waiting at one point as Spring stole blankets and food from a forester’s house.

It had been dark by the time they’d arrived. They hadn’t risked a fire in case anyone was looking for them, and it had been warm anyway. They’d supped on honey bread and apples stolen from the forester and Dug had gone to sleep quickly, Spring on one side, Lowa on the other.

Now the air was cold and wet but wonderfully clean-tasting after the dust and dung of the town. He rolled over. He could see Lowa’s hair in the false dawn light, shining like polished iron. She was facing away from him, close enough that he could smell her scent of dried earth, musk and flowers. He closed his eyes.

“Do you want eggs? I found some duck eggs. After you didn’t get eggs with my coin. Where is my coin?” It was full light now, and Spring was poking him with a stick. He looked about. There was no sign of Lowa. Someone had lit a fire. “She’s washing. Do you want eggs? I have mushrooms too. And nettles. She picked some berries and fruit so we can have those too. And she gave me some salt. I’ll put that in the eggs.”

Lowa returned and nodded good morning. They sat on logs and passed the pan, taking turns to scoop out crisp egg and mushrooms with their fingers. Chewing, swallowing and the whistles and squeaks of woodland birds were the only sounds. When the omelette was gone, Spring filled the pan with cherries, hazelnuts, blackberries and gooseberries, and passed it around. The sweet food mixed well with the salty egg remains, at least to Dug’s ravenous palate.

His absorption with breakfast wasn’t so total that it stopped him from glancing at Lowa. After a night sleeping rough she looked fresh and beautiful as a princess in a bard’s story. His interest was purely aesthetic, he told himself. There was no way she’d be interested in him – she must have been a good fifteen years younger. But there was no denying that she was the first woman in a long time he’d been so immediately and powerfully attracted to. The first, in fact, since he’d met Brinna at the ceilidh all those years before.

“That was good, child, thank you,” said Lowa when the omelette was gone. She had an accent that Dug couldn’t place.

“My name’s Spring.”

Lowa stood up. “I have to go.” She wasn’t a great deal taller than Spring, Dug noticed.

“You don’t,” said Dug.

“See ya!” said Spring, snatching up the pan and heading for the river.

“You don’t have to go.”

“I do. There are things I need to do.”

“What?”

“I need to kill Zadar.” Lowa picked up her bow and looked about for her arrows.

“Right. What are you going to do for the rest of the day?”

She slung the quiver across her back. “Goodbye.”

“Wait.”

“What?”

“I’ll help.”

Lowa looked at him for a long moment then said, “No.” She turned again to go.

“What’s your plan?”

She didn’t reply. She was at the top of the bank now.

“You won’t get anywhere, running at him with murder on your mind.”

Lowa disappeared over the bank. Dug raised his voice.

“You’ll be killed and Zadar will live happily ever after. You would have been killed yesterday if I hadn’t been there!” No reply. He shouted, “And we’d both be dead if a little girl hadn’t rescued us!”

All was quiet. She’d gone.

Ah well,
thought Dug.
Probably for the best.
He looked for things to tidy around the camp, but it looked like Spring had done it all.

“OK. I’ll admit that you may have been some help yesterday.” Lowa was standing at the top of the bank, hand on hip. Dug smiled. The sun shone whitely in her hair. “But we would have escaped without the girl. We freed ourselves from those ropes.”

“Aye, but we were well guarded. Without Spring it would have been near impossible.”

“Maybe…”

“Let’s face it. You’re not much use on your own.”

Lowa smothered a smile. “So what do you suggest?”

Dug shrugged. “That we make a plan.”

“Why ‘we’? Why do you want to help me?”

“I don’t know why I want to help you. I just might as well. I had planned to join Zadar’s army, but I’ve shat all over that path so now I haven’t got much else to do.”

“And I need you because…?”

“I’ve been a busy mercenary nearly twenty years and a Warrior for over fifteen.”

“So?”

“I’m still alive.”

“That is a point.” Lowa nodded.

W
eylin sat on the embankment, watching Zadar’s court. The evening was lovely, but Weylin wasn’t. His head was wound in an off-white woollen bandage and his arm was in a sling. His temples were tight with knots of pain. He felt sick. His wrist was pumping waves of hurt up his arm from where the oaf had whacked it with his hammer. Lowa Flynn had killed his wife earlier that day, badly hurt his brother and a good friend the night before and, worst of all, humiliated him. A wave of hatred almost made him vomit.
Why do bad things always happen to me?
he thought.

To cheer himself up he’d got pissed, obviously, then come to watch Zadar’s court. The Maidun force that had crushed Boddingham and Barton was camped for the night in a broad, lush valley halfway between Barton and Maidun, by a bridge over the River Otterhold in the territory of the bee-worshipping Honey tribe. In common with most tribes, the Honey’s gods normally dispensed justice through the druids. So, until recently, druids had been judge, jury and sometimes executioner. However, Zadar favoured a version of the Roman system, which separated law and magic, putting justice in the hands of magistrates. In Zadar’s version, Zadar replaced the magistrates.

On that summer’s evening Zadar was holding Honey assizes. Above him a few scraps of white cloud were drifting slowly across the blue sky. He was sitting on a throne – actually the village’s biggest chair – in a fenced pasture. On benches either side of him were the usual crowd – Felix the druid, Chamanca and Tadman, the king’s young mistress Keelin Orton, and others favoured by Zadar, including Savage Banba, a Warrior who Weylin had his eye on. Now that he was free of Deidre, there’d be more chance to do something about that.

His injured brother Carden and Carden’s friend Atlas were absent, no doubt convalescing somewhere. Keelin was another who bore the scars of Lowa’s escape. Her chin was swollen with purple-black bruising, and she had an expression like a hunting dog who’d swallowed one of the Honey tribe’s bees. Weylin still would have given all the tin in Dumnonia for ten minutes alone with her. He looked away. It wasn’t good to be caught staring at Zadar’s mistress. So instead he looked at his king.

Zadar was wearing a close-fitting iron helmet, undecorated apart from a central iron crest the thickness of a finger. Lank blond hair spilled out along the rim, hanging down in front of his shoulders to the top of his plate iron breastplate, which was unadorned but for a necklace of boar’s tusks. His fleshy lips were set in their usual thoughtful, piscine pout above a cleft chin coloured by days-old stubble. His large, hawkish nose seemed to be constantly sniffing out others’ weaknesses.

The Honey tribe were gathered at the far end of the corral, surrounded by Maidun troops who were as much guards as spectators. As Weylin settled himself on the bank, two women peeled from the Honey tribe’s ranks, approached Zadar and stood in full glare of his gaze. A man with an unkempt beard in a black peasant’s smock and round yellow woollen hat – a local druid, Weylin reckoned, in a shit attempt at a bee-themed outfit – shuffled forward and placed a baby’s basket on the turf.

“King Zadar!” cried the man. Everyone quietened. “Both these women claim this baby.”

“What?” said Felix, face crumpling in disbelief. “How could that happen? Which one of you pushed it out?”

Chuckles pulsed from the Maidun troops. Both women started to talk at the same time.

“He’s mine!”

“You bitch, I can’t believe you were my friend!”

“You were never my friend, clearly! How could you claim him? He doesn’t have your big ugly nose for a start, and another thing—”

“Quiet!” shouted Felix.

“Can anyone other than these women explain the situation?” Zadar asked. He sounded bored, but, even bored, his voice was like an iron sword drawn across a granite quern stone. Weylin shuddered despite the couple of skinfuls of medicinal mead that he’d knocked back.