Age of Iron (6 page)

Ducking into the porch and reaching for the door, she remembered how cold she’d been the other night. She dug her leather riding trousers out from her pile of battle clothes and pulled them on under the dress. So what if she wafted an equine aroma at the party? She’d still smell better than any of the men. She had a final look around the roundhouse and spotted a woollen shawl stashed on a high shelf. She reached it down and held it up to the firelight. It was better quality than the crap in the chest. There was a picture of a … badger perhaps … maybe a dog, embroidered on it. Unsophisticated and ill woven as it was, the lady of the hut had clearly been proud enough of it to keep it out of her children’s reach. It would be dark by the time it was cold enough to need it, so nobody would see the shitty design. Yeah, she’d take it. She reached into her old saddlebag and pulled out the gold brooch that Zadar had given her after a previous triumph. That would smarten it up a bit and
might
please Zadar. He certainly wouldn’t say, so she’d never know.

She slipped on her light leather shoes, then changed her mind. Iron-heeled riding boots would tackle the hill better, particularly on the way back, when it would be dark and she might be a bit drunk.
Good
, she thought. Thinking about something as mundane as her outfit had dispelled the dread. Unless she thought about it.
Danu!
Now she’d picked off the scab, the stomach-lurching unease came spilling out again. Nothing she could do about it though, it would seem, so the only course was to ignore it and get on with things. Drinking would help. She tucked the shawl under her arm, shook her head and stepped out of the hut into the bright evening light.

The hut was one of twelve similar huts in a circle around a central green, all surrounded by a low bank and shallow ditch. A spiked palisade topped half of the bank. It wasn’t newly cut wood, so some time ago someone had built half a palisade, which was about as useful as half a bucket. They must, she guessed, have started it ten years ago just before Carden Nancarrow defeated Barton’s champions, then thought,
Why build defences when you were already conquered?
and stopped. They’d found out why today. The Maidun army was unpredictable.

East of the huts, glowing golden in the low sun, the land swept up to Barton’s hillfort. From the west came the noises, smells and smoke of the rest of Barton’s spring-line village, now the Maidun army’s temporary camp. Raucous laughter and the clang of iron from practice bouts reminded Lowa of a simpler time when she would have been billeted with the body of the army. The evening would have been drinking games to cheat at and sexual advances to avoid or enjoy, rather than a poncey party to endure. The smoky aroma of roasting meat from the camp made her stomach lurch with hunger, even though it was mixed with the sweet reek of horse shit.

“Lowa! Lowa Flynn!”

It was her sister Aithne and the rest of her girls, waiting for her. Aithne had one hand on a meaty hip, a no-complications grin on her freckly face. The girlish circlet of flowers in her hair clashed nicely with her absurdly short leather skirt. “Little more than a belt!” at least five unimaginative dullards at the party were bound to say. As if reading Lowa’s mind, Aithne turned and waggled her arse at her little sister. A good thumb’s breadth of bare cheek showed on either side. Lowa felt a small smile escape from under her previous gloom and she raised a hand in greeting.

Usually only Lowa was invited to Zadar’s upper-ranks after-battle party, but because of their success in opening up Barton’s lines that morning, all six of her squad of mounted archers had been asked along. It amused Lowa that they’d waited for her. On the battlefield they’d charge anything, but the idea of walking without her into a party full of Maidun’s elite terrified them.

“How’s Findus?” asked Lowa.

“Out to pasture, happy. He was such a funny pig this afternoon. Grabbed an apple out of my bag when I wasn’t looking then trotted away like a prince, farting with every step!” said Aithne with a sing-song chuckle. Lowa’s sister loved horses. Lowa thought they were useful. “How’s the smarter end of town?”

“Clean. Quiet.”

“Opposite of ours then. What’s up? You look … troubled?”

“Nothing. Hungry, I think.”

“Ah yes, sorry about that.” Aithne shrugged. “Good thing is, now I’ve forgotten our lunches once, chances are I won’t do it again.”

“You did it last year at Thanet.”

“Doubly likely not to do it again then.”

Aithne took Lowa’s arm and led her to the track running up to the hillfort.

The four other women smiled hello and fell in behind. Cordelia Bullbrow had biceps that made men envious, olive skin, a forehead like a shield boss and a beard that she was apparently unaware of. Maura Drunkstotter was small and angry. Seanna Applehead was the oldest and tallest. Her small head sprouted a massive bush of curly blonde hair. Realin Ghostfeet was the group’s beauty, with a voluptuous figure, a bell of thick, dark red hair and green eyes that seemed to catch any light, focus it, and twinkle it out in such a filthily flirtatious way that anyone talking to her – man or woman, young or old – was convinced that she was keen to perform any number of depraved sexual acts with them right there and then. She was very popular and possibly the most chaste woman in Zadar’s army.

They were dressed in a mixture of scanty battle garb and scraps of cloth they’d plundered from the village. They wouldn’t look out of place, thought Lowa, in Maidun’s whorepits. Knots of soldiers and camp followers stopped to watch the heroes of the day’s battle pass. Lowa’s gang. She felt her dread lift a little. Pride was a defensive pretence of the weak, so she wasn’t proud of her gang as such. They were just better than everyone else, and she was the best of them and their leader. That was how it was, and how it was felt good.

S
moke drifted across the field and reached in misty fingers up the steep escarpment that led up to Barton’s hillfort. The usually white chalk-cut walls of the fort were tender pink in the sun’s low rays. Light glinted off the bronze torcs, bracelets and other jewellery of the straggling procession that zigzagged along the path up to the hillfort and Zadar’s victory party.

Lowa recognised most of Maidun’s luminaries. There was Atlas Agrippa, the huge ebony-skinned Kushite, his mighty double-bladed iron axe strapped to his back – a party accessory that would have looked ridiculous on many, thought Lowa, but it suited Atlas. Talking to him was almost-as-big Carden Nancarrow: Zadar’s champion, the blacksmith Elann Nancarrow’s eldest son and the man responsible for the grass stain on Lowa’s dress. Lowa smiled. Alongside Carden was the rangy figure of Deirdre Marsh, or Dionysia Palus as she now, Roman-style and very annoyingly, called herself. She was a head taller than Lowa but looked small next to the two men.

The track crossed a broad meadow of grazing land. Over to their right junior chariot drivers were practising dashing and turning, running up draught poles, jumping from one horse to another and other tricks that
might
be useful in a battle but were mostly about showing off. Evening light flashed off wheel hubs and horses’ flicked saliva.

Over on the left, atop an ancient burial mound, Zadar’s head druid, Titus Pontius Felix, known as Felix, was disembowelling children.

He had selected nine of the youngest new captives, nine being an auspicious number, and had them tied to wooden crosspieces hammered onto uprights to face the setting sun, which meant they also faced those heading to Zadar’s party. Felix was circling them widdershins, with the children always on his right, as the gods preferred. Three of the Barton kids, slumped in the ropes next to piles of their own entrails, had already served their purpose. Six were yet to help.

Felix waggled an iron rod encrusted with tiny bells at the children as he walked. He stopped, then shouted, “Eenha, meenha, minha … mo,” pointing his stick at a different child with each syllable. The rhyme finished on a boy and Felix advanced. Lowa and her gang stopped. The chosen boy stared past the druid straight at the women. He was thin, with a tuft of red-brown hair. Seven years old, Lowa guessed. The lower half of his left leg jutted at a strange angle from his knee. Part of her wanted to intervene, an old part that had no say any more.

“There have to be nicer ways of talking to the gods,” said Aithne. “And it’s not like it works. He never even gets the weather right.”

They watched the druid. A wood pigeon hooted in a nearby tree. Felix raised his balding head to the darkening sky, drew a silvered bronze blade across the child’s taut stomach and shouted, “Bel, show me!” The boy gasped, then screwed his face into a ball of silent agony. A slimy sac bulged from the slit in his stomach. Felix ran his finger along the protruding offal. The child tossed his head from side to side but made no sound. Felix punched the child in the chest. The boy convulsed, the slit in his stomach burst into a broad gash and a bloody gloop of intestines slopped out. Felix deftly stepped clear, then squatted and stirred the shining pile with the iron rod. The boy stared down at his own intestines, then closed his eyes and cried wobblingly but silently.

“That was a brave one,” said Aithne as they walked on.

“He had guts,” said Lowa.

The other women laughed but Aithne raised an eyebrow. “You don’t ever think…?”

“What?” Lowa sounded testy.

“That it’s wrong?”

“Wrong?”

“Felix seems to kill a lot of kids for no reason?”

Lowa sighed. “Zadar could have philosopher druids, teacher druids, storyteller druids, but Felix the cruel dark mystical druid suits our image better, so it’s him we have. The enemy don’t run screaming because they’re terrified we’re going to lecture them on the properties of herbs. And besides, we do have healing druids. You just notice them less because they don’t torture people in public.”

“But, children…”

“Look Aithne, the best place to be in Britain is in Zadar’s army. There’s nowhere safer or more lucrative. Until that changes, I agree with everything Zadar says and does. And so do you.”

Up ahead a vixen broke cover from a patch of bushes and streaked downhill. The women watched her run. She’d have a fine night feasting on the day’s battlefield.

As they walked Lowa could feel Aithne brooding next to her and knew there was more whingeing to come. A scream rang out from the sacrifice mound below, seeming to prompt her: “But there was a time it wasn’t like this. When murder and torture were unusual. When druids were good. You don’t remember – you’re too young.”

“You’re two years older than me.”

“Exactly. I heard more about it before Mum died.”

“If it wasn’t for me we’d still be peasants, like Mum. So how about you remember how quickly we could go back to that, or end up like those children or much, much worse, and shut the fuck up? And besides, we lived across the sea. How could you or Mum possibly have known what it was like here?”

Aithne looked away. Lowa felt guilty, but her sister had to be told, partly because it was deeply irritating when she made up stories about their shared past, but more because talking like this was dangerous. Remembering what had happened to the last woman who’d been reported for gossiping about Zadar and imagining it happening to Aithne made Lowa shiver. Few lived a happy or long life with their tongue split in two by red-hot liars’ scissors.

The sisters trudged in silence up the steep slope to the hillfort, up the switchback path which finally curved onto the ridge. To the south – their right as they reached the scarp top – a rough road ran gradually downhill. To the north, carved in a circle from the escarpment promontory, was Barton Hillfort. Its four-pace-high gates were gaping open, as they had been when Lowa and others had ridden up to claim it that morning.

It was a standard medium-sized hillfort. Nothing compared to Maidun Castle – few were – but still a useful gain for Zadar, and totally defendable if you didn’t do something really stupid like pour all your people out of it into a weak line of inexperienced infantry in a field perfectly suited to your mounted enemy. Its white chalk-hewn ramparts rose from a ditch as deep as the walls were high. There were tufts of vegetation on the wall and too much scree in the ditch, Lowa noticed. That would have to be fixed. There should be as few handholds as possible on the rock-cut walls, and a hillfort should have nice clear ditches, preferably with sharpened stakes dug into the bottom, or at least a liberal sprinkling of large caltrops to make anybody leaping into it regret that they had. The spiked oak palisade that crowned the rampart was in reasonable repair, but it was vertical, which irritated Lowa. The palisade should have been canted back to the same angle as the bank, so that attackers couldn’t shelter in its lee. Fort builders should
know
that.

Rather unoriginally, fresh heads had been impaled on some of the palisade’s spikes.

“Is that King Mylor, do you reckon?” asked Aithne, pointing at a big head in a plain, rusty iron helmet with a swollen black tongue resting on stiff beard bristles and something stuffed into its mouth.

“Doubt it. That’s a boar necklace in his mouth. He’s one of the few Warriors they had. Mylor was captured. Zadar’ll probably sell him. Although you can’t get as much for a king as you used to be able to.”
Or he’ll keep him as a pet
, she thought.

Lowa surprised herself by shuddering at the idea. Aithne’s doubts about the murdered children had begun to get to her too. What
was
wrong with her? Why should she suddenly care anything for a bunch of loser kids and their moron king? If they’d stayed in their stupid fort, she thought, Mylor would still be ruling happily, those heads would be attached to their bodies, the nine sacrificial children would be a great deal happier, and the people whose hut she’d taken would be settling down to their evening meal. Last night they’d been a family. Now they were carrion.

As they passed through the gates, Lowa was convinced that the four heavily armoured guards looked at her and her girls like foxes might look at chickens behind a badly made fence. She thought she saw one whisper something to another, then look at her and smirk. But Lowa had seen people who panicked about things that weren’t there, who had the arrogance to believe that everyone was out to get them. There was no way she was becoming one of them. Food. Food would help. Booze would help more.