Age of Iron (4 page)

Barton’s men and women breathed a collective sigh of relief. The dead and wounded were dragged back, and people began shouting, trying to reorganise the line. Their shouts were drowned out by cries of terror as Zadar’s heavy cavalry trotted, then thundered towards Barton’s right flank, spears lowered. On the left, Zadar’s fifty elite cavalry charged, brandishing long swords in circles about their heads. Leading them, swinging his heavy sword around his horned helm as if it weighed nothing, was King Zadar. His musicians, still blaring a throbbing storm wave of sound, followed behind.

“Hold! Hold! Hold!” shouted a few in the Barton line including Dug. But before Zadar’s cavalry had covered half the distance between them, more than half of Barton’s forces turned and ran. The line collapsed. What should have been a parade and could have been a battle became a rout.

Those who didn’t flee were impaled by spear point, slashed open by swords, trampled under hooves and separated from their lower legs by chariot blades. Those who fled didn’t fare much better. Zadar’s men slowed into a trotting line of hacking and stabbing butchery.

Elliax Goldan stood on the cart next to King Mylor, his mouth widening.
What the Bel was Zadar doing?
He looked at Mylor. The king gulped up at him smilingly.

“Back across the bridge!” Elliax shouted at the carter.

The carter whipped the oxen, which lumbered forward to begin a wide turn.

“Can’t you go backwards?”

The carter looked him in the eye and shook his head with what looked like disgust.

“Fuck this shit!” said Elliax. He leaped off the back of the cart and headed for the bridge.

“Elliax!” He spun round. It was his wife Vasin, looking after him from the back of the cart, hands on hips. “Where do you think you’re going?” she boomed at him.

Cromm Cruach
, he thought.
Why am I the only one who can think?

“Come on!” he shouted. Then, much more quietly, “You silly bitch.” Splinters exploded as an arrow hit the cart next to her. She seemed not to notice. Another zipped into the ground not three paces from him. “
Come on!
”

“But you know Zadar! We won’t be harmed.”

“Yes, but I don’t know the arrows, do I?”

“Oh really, Elliax. Come back here and—”

“This is happening
now
! Stop complaining about it and
fucking come on
!”

Finally she began to climb heavily from the cart, which had now trundled about a tenth of the circle that would bring it back to the bridge. Not waiting for her, Elliax sprinted across the bridge and didn’t stop on the other side. He didn’t turn until he was a good way up the slope to the hillfort. Vasin was panting her way towards him across the riverside pasture, a beacon of brightly dressed fatness in the muddled stampede of young and elderly who’d been nearest to the bridge. She stopped, bent over with her hands on her knees and panted. She looked behind her, seemed to be reminded of her predicament, and lumbered on as tiny children raced by.

Cromm fucking Cruach,
thought Elliax.

The cart was halfway across the bridge. King Mylor was still sitting on his chair and looking about smilingly as if on an outing to view autumn leaves. The carter was whipping the oxen like a madman, but if they felt his urgency, it didn’t show. The vast majority of Barton’s people were stuck behind the cart on the wrong side of the river. Zadar’s forces were advancing steadily, slaughtering as they came.

The six horse archers who’d started the battle broke from the Maidun line and wheeled in a wide galloping loop around the fleeing Barton people. Reaching the river, they raised their bows as one and shot the oxen. The beasts bellowed and bucked, kicking chunks of flesh out of each other and smashing the cart’s front wheels to pieces. The cart pitched forward. The oxen panicked and surged, trampling several children. The splintered axle of the cart jammed into the stonework, pulling the cart sideways and blocking the bridge.

With the bridge jammed, it was safe for Elliax to wait for his wife. He watched Zadar’s forces advance in their organised line, chopping Barton’s bakers, fieldworkers, chandlers, smiths and bards into piles of meat.

U
lpius brushed a lovely tress of hair from his face as he watched the Maidun troops’ massacring advance through the population of Barton. By Mars it was a sight. Was there a better way to spend a day than sitting on a sunny hillside with his brothers in arms – well, brothers in thievery, rape and murder – and watching a battle? It was as if it had been arranged for their entertainment. Ogre had been right, as usual. Ulpius normally loathed authority figures, but Ogre was like some druid with his ability to foresee opportunities and sniff out pickings. He’d known not only that this battle was going to happen, but he’d also worked out a great place to watch it from. The others said Ogre was a living legend. Ulpius wouldn’t go that far – about anybody, ever – but he was prepared to allow that the man had some talents. He was content to be in his gang, for now.

The sounds that drifted up to them – the cries of the horses, the screams, the clang of metal on metal, the chop of iron through old wooden shields – made his arm hair stand up and sent shivers of glee up his back. Best of all was watching some fleeing fool being run down by a chariot. It was like someone trying to escape a wave on a beach. “Oh oh oh ooooooh!” they’d all shout together as the pathetic figure was running one moment, disappeared the next, then reappeared as a corpse. Best of all were those who sat up with their lower legs missing, looked around, spotted their own feet some distance away, then collapsed. Such fun. The gang loved it too. They whooped and cheered and pointed out bits that the others might be missing, and acted out amusing little skits of life without feet. It was this sort of fun that brought them together.

All of them apart from Spring of course. Ulpius looked around. Yes, there she was, lying on the grass and staring at the sky while a once-in-a-lifetime spectacle took place below them. How could she not watch? Some people had no idea how to enjoy the world.

There’d be rich pickings tomorrow. But not as rich as –
Mars!
Where was it?
Ulpius patted himself like a man with a wasp down his toga. Ah, relief. His mirror was exactly where he’d put it, like it always was.

Aulus Ulpius Galba had been known as Ulpius for so long that he hardly remembered his full Roman name. He was a short man with a triangular, pox-cratered face which rose from a minute goateed chin into a broad forehead crowned with a voluminous, flowing display of lustrous, excellently coiffed, obsidian-black hair. Unlike any other outlaw he’d met since leaving Rome, he owned a mirror. Wealthy people, some Warriors and some druids had mirrors, but nomadic bandits, as a rule, were not so vain.

Ulpius’ mirror, until recently at least, was the most important thing in his life. Much of his leisure time was spent gazing into its polished silver surface and styling his hair. He spent hours formulating the finest styling creams and lotions. Current favourite was a few gobs of his own saliva mixed with a smear of clay, a squirt of beery piss and plenty of blood. Didn’t matter what kind of blood; human was the easiest to find, so he used that mostly. He’d lost his sheep’s bladder, so now he stored his hair goo in a girl’s bladder that he’d picked up after another of Zadar’s actions.

When he wasn’t perfecting the peaks and troughs of his bouffant halo, Ulpius liked to polish his mirror. The repetitive circular movement with the metal cradled in his lap calmed him, even if some jealous onlookers likened it to masturbation. One ill-mannered fool had paid for a wanking jibe with a cut that she’d be reminded of if
she
ever saw a mirror.

Ulpius reckoned he was about thirty-five years old, although he told everyone he was twenty. (The truth, for him, was what he thought other people would believe.) He saw his existence as two lives separated by the incident caused by the mirror. The first was, by a long shot, the happier.

He was the only child of a couple who owned an upmarket butcher’s shop in Rome. Had owned, at least. He didn’t know whether either was alive still. They were first cousins, both single children who’d felt neglected by their own parents and envious of others’ siblings. They wanted nothing more than to marry early, trot out a multitude of children and lavish love on a happy brood. So they’d married at sixteen and taken over the butcher’s shop left to Ulpius’ father by Ulpius’ paternal grandfather, who’d died, wailing in despair at the unfairness of it all, when a Cimbrian spear severed his femoral artery during the Roman defeat at Arausio. The shop had been one of the best in Rome, pandering to the tastes of the rich with a bewildering range of animal flesh. Ulpius’ parents improved it and were justifiably proud. But they still, more than anything, wanted children.

After seven miscarriages and most of the profits of the business going to Rome’s wide range of fertility experts – from sensibly bearded Greek bloodletters to raving barbarian chicken-wavers – Ulpius had been a gift from the gods. Tiny, sickly Ulpius with his funny-shaped head. When he’d almost died of smallpox, they’d almost died of worry. When he recovered, they focused on making him the happiest child in the world, despite his pox-scarred face. It was no surprise to their few friends when total indulgence and no discipline turned a mildly eccentric capricious child into a nasty self-centred oddball.

At fifteen, when most Romans were as good as married, Ulpius showed no interest in girls. He liked only his own company. His parents didn’t push him. He spent long hours learning how to butcher the various animals whose parts they sold: goats, sheep, horses, cats, dogs, bees, hippopotamuses, ocelots, rhinoceroses and more. At first it had bored him into raging furies. He’d swear, hit, bite and often run away from his despairing parents. Slowly though he learned to love the trade. He became proficient, then good, then obsessed. A well directed obsession, his parents used to tell each other, is a blessing.

The only cloud in the bright sky of butchery was the deep smallpox scarring that covered his body and face, which the unsporting gods had seen fit to interweave with a virulent case of pustular acne. Ulpius didn’t mind that he looked so unappealing because he didn’t know. His parents were careful to keep the shop and their flat above it clear of reflective surfaces. Fortunately, there was a backlash against elitism and a championing of the downtrodden in Rome at the time, so the customers took his physical repulsiveness as a cue to be more kind and friendly.

So Ulpius was happy. He loved chopping up animals and talking to customers, and if you love your work, then it’s not work, right? That was what his dad used to tell him.

Then, the mirror. It was a typical Day of the Moon morning. He could remember it as if it were last week. He was preparing a boned jaguar’s head stuffed with various animals when a beautiful girl called Sulpicia walked into the shop. While waiting for Ulpius to sew up the head, she produced a hand-held mirror to check her make-up. He couldn’t remember how it came to pass, but one moment he was noticing the mirror, the next the jaguar’s head was spilling its filling onto the counter, and he was holding Sulpicia’s mirror, looking into it and looking at himself, really looking at himself, for the first ever time.

Ugliness looked back. His face looked like a sponge that had mopped up watery blood, been dipped briefly in molten cheese, then had a pair of eyes daubed on by an inept painter. But there was one good thing: he did have almost unnaturally black shiny hair. Seeing his face was a shock, but there was the compensation that he could use his hair to distract people from it. Unfortunately, like someone who likes the effect of one mug of beer so drinks another fifteen, he went too far.

Every Roman man that Ulpius knew had short, regularly trimmed hair, while the fashion among smart Roman women was to curl their hair in piles on top of their heads. Loads of barbarian slaves, tourists, merchants and immigrants, however, strolled around with long, unkempt hair. Ulpius believed that if he could combine the best aspects of barbarian men’s and Roman women’s hair fashions to produce a clean, managed wildness, it would look magnificent.

To his parents’ slowly burgeoning dismay he forsook the barbers, and slowly, slowly, his wonderful mane grew. While others his age were reading, running, going to the games, loitering in forums and visiting places like Capri, Athens and the ruins of Carthage, Ulpius was in his room, styling his hair. He concocted a range of hair unguents from herbs and animal fluids. He polished the shop’s knives to use as mirrors.

But Sulpicia’s mirror was the best. He looked forward each week to the Day of the Moon, when she’d come to the shop and let him look into it. Its polished silver surface reflected his tresses in much higher definition than knives and puddles, and its gold frame surrounded them with an appropriate degree of splendour. He began to obsess almost as much about that mirror as he did about his hair, and Sulpicia would have to spend longer and longer in the shop waiting for him to give it back.

Initially, Sulpicia thought he was sweet. As time went by, however, the purer emotions of her youth gave way to the insecurity of young adulthood and the compensatory desire to mock others. So she found the situation increasingly hilarious. She’d take friends to see the strange little butcher’s “tonsorial fetishism”, as she cleverly called it. When she married and had a son, she often interrupted her morning walks with her baby through Rome to visit the butcher’s.

Ulpius was blind to mockery and his parents’ increasing confusion because he was deeply in love with his own hair and Sulpicia’s mirror. He knew he could never hope to afford such a mirror, but he had to have it. That was why, one morning when Sulpicia had come to the shop alone, he found himself standing over her with the mirror in one hand and a paring knife in the other. Sulpicia was lying on the floor, blood jetting from her neck, staring at him with increasingly glassy eyes.

He’d fled to Ostia, then to sea.