Reign of Iron (2 page)

One day, she taught him how to use magic.

She showed him how to squash a frog and use his mind to direct its ebbing life power to kill a bird. A few days later she showed him how to reach inside a wild pig, crush its heart and use the force created to send another pig into a killing frenzy.

After a month or so, Thaya asked Felix to bring two children to her. He did, enticing them with the promise of cakes at the cave.

All four of them walked back to the pirates’ port. The pirates gathered and approached. Thaya reached into the chest of one child, and squeezed. The pirates attacked one another. Soon they were all dead apart from the red-bearded Iberian captain. He staggered towards them, bleeding from several wounds, cudgel in one hand, still grinning as he had when his ship had sunk. Felix did not need asking twice when Thaya offered him the remaining child. He plunged his hand into the girl’s chest and squeezed, his little fingers popping through the delicate walls of her heart. He felt her life energy flow up his arm. He twisted it in his mind, pushed it out into his other arm and flung it at the captain. The grin melted from the red-bearded face. He fell, dead, and it was Felix’s turn to smile.

Thaya said that she was very tired, so he should gather supplies for a boat journey while she slept. Felix waited until she was snoring, found a large rock, lifted it as high as he could and dropped it on her head. He used the rush of her life power to explode a dozen or so wheeling seagulls, then loaded up a boat himself and set off over the sea.

As he sailed away, he chewed on Thaya’s heart, which he’d cut from her chest with the Iberian captain’s cutlass. It was disgusting – gristly and tough – but a little voice inside told him that eating it was the right thing to do.

T
he water from the great wave receded. Spring walked down Frogshold hill. Her knees jarred on the steep slope but she didn’t notice. People were shouting at her but she hardly heard them. She was aware of Lowa’s voice telling everyone to leave her be. Somewhere deep down she was grateful, but over the top of that a dull but overwhelming rage exploded into her mind. It was all Lowa’s fault! If only they’d never met Lowa! She and Dug might have been travelling together and getting into adventures, but, no, all because of Lowa, Spring had had to kill the only person, bar her mother, she’d ever loved. He’d looked after her and done a million things for her without ever asking for anything. She’d never done anything in return, then she’d killed him.

She found Dug’s hammer leaning against a pile of stones that might once have been a storage hut, its head half buried. She pulled it free with a schlock of wet mud, slung it over her shoulder and walked away. She didn’t look for his body because there were no bodies. All had been washed out to sea as the wave retreated, she guessed, to be a feast for the fish and the birds. She hardly noticed the rain, drizzle at first but then a downpour like the tears of a million mourners, washing the mud from the hammer’s head and the broken land.

At first she walked along the coast, but the devastation that she’d caused with the flood was too harrowing – the few people left alive rummaging through wreckage and wailing multiple bereavements – so she headed inland. She walked all day, all night, all the next day and on. She ate nothing, drank nothing and did not sleep. She’d killed so many that she deserved no comfort. The only thing she saw was her arrow piercing Dug’s forehead. The only thing she could hear was the scream of tens of thousands of men and women crushed by the giant wave. She didn’t feel the blisters form, pop and bleed on her feet. She didn’t feel the handle of the hammer wear through the material of her smock and the skin on her shoulder.

After several nights – she neither knew nor cared how many – she emerged from a wood onto a grassy hillside at dawn and collapsed on the dew-soaked grass to die. Sensing someone was there, she looked up. Her father King Zadar was looming over her, shaking his head, a twist of disapproval on his usually dispassionate face. He opened his mouth to mock her but was silenced by dogs’ barking. Sadist and Pig Fucker, the dogs that Dug had inherited by killing Zadar’s champion, Tadman, bounded up, tongues lolling. They champed their ghostly jaws into the increasingly spectral Zadar until he disappeared. Tyrant dispatched, the dogs looked at her stupid-eyed, saliva drooling in cords, tails wagging. Sadist scurried forward to lick her.

“Back, Sadist, leave her. That one does not like the licking,” said someone in an accent from the far north of Britain. Dug Sealskinner strode up behind his dogs. Spring’s arrow was still protruding from his forehead, its feathers quivering as he walked.

“You’re alive!” Spring’s tiredness and sorrow evaporated. Her energy flooded back for an instant, then all flowed out again as she realised what Dug’s appearance must mean.

“So I’m dead, too?”

“Nope.”

“So you’re talking to me from the Otherworld because I’m
about
to die?”

“No, no, nothing like that. I’m just in your mind, nowhere else. You’re really talking to yourself.”

“I see. But I’ll see you soon, when I die?”

“I’d rather you stayed alive.”

“Why? I killed you. I don’t deserve to live.”

“Probably true, but someone needs to look after the dogs.”

Pig Fucker barked, Sadist stared vacantly. Spring nearly smiled.

“If I have to look after them I’m going to change their names.”

“No. We’ve discussed this. You cannot change a dog’s name. I don’t know why Tadman gave them those names, but he did and that’s that.”

“You’re dead. Why should I do what you say?”

“Because you did this, you wee badger’s bollock.” Dug turned to show the sharp end of the arrow protruding from the back of his head.

“I’m sorry! But it was all Lowa’s fault.”

Dug sighed. Were his eyes bigger and browner now that he was dead, she wondered? “No, Spring,” he said, shaking his head, “it was not Lowa’s fault. By bringing those armies together so you could finish them off by killing me she saved us all. Well,
you
all anyway.”

“If we’d never met her you’d be alive.”

“Maybe, but a lot of other good and helpless people would be dead and a lot of shitty people would be busy ravaging the land and killing the rest of them. You must not blame her. As you know very well, because I’m just part of your mind talking to you.”

“Bollocks to that. If you are part of my mind you’re a stupid part. It was all Lowa’s fault.”

“Fine. I’m not going to convince you, but you could at least help me out with the dogs? You did put an arrow through my head and my wee dogs are all alone.”

Spring sighed. “All right. But there’s nothing ‘wee’ about those dogs, and I don’t want you rolling the ‘you put an arrow through my head’ dice every time you want your own way.”

“You assume you’re going to see me again?”

“You said you were in my head.”

“Aye?”

“So I’ll see you again when I want to.”

“Not if you die now, and you’re not far off it. You should’ve died of thirst sometime yesterday or the day before, and the hunger’s not good for you either. So hurry up and get something to drink then something to eat very soon, or the dogs’ll be alone. There’s a stream in the woods at the bottom of this hill. Head for that.”

“Sure, just magic me to the bank and I’ll drink. Or how about a mug of beer right here?”

“Magic you? No no no. Do you not get what you did?”

“What do you mean?”

Dug shook his head. “And you’re meant to be the bright one. Your magic came from me, and you killed me. I’m not blaming you, you had to do it to produce power enough to collapse a great big fuck-off island and create a wave that Leeban or any sea god would have bragged about for centuries. But I’m gone now and that’s it for you, magic-wise. No more, ever. You’ll have to walk to the stream, like everyone else would, without complaining.”

The idea of walking almost made Spring pass out. “I don’t think I can walk.”

“Then you’ll have to slither. You can do it!” Dug winked and disappeared.

Spring opened her eyes. The sun’s rays stabbed into her brain. When her vision had swum into a cloudy semblance of normality, the woods were a long way away. She was buggered if she was going to slither down the hill. She had dignity. She would crawl.

She pushed up onto her hands and set off.

With the rational part of her mind begging her to give up, collapse and die, she crawled down the slope, hands and knees sliding on the slick grass. When she reached the trees, darkness bloomed. She thought for a confused moment that night had come, then realised that it was her vision failing. Consciousness teetered. Her hands slid away, her arms buckled, she face-planted into the grass and closed her eyes. The relief was amazing. A quick rest couldn’t hurt, could it? So what if she died? The dogs would understand and surely they were big enough to look after themselves? They were certainly ugly enough …

“Wake up, Spring!” shouted a northern voice, startling her.

Come on
, she told herself. She tried to push up into a crawl, but could not. So, she thought, I’ll be slithering after all.

Digging elbows and feet into soft soil, she pushed herself under the shade of the branches and on through leaf litter and twigs. She managed to lift her head and saw a blackbird watching her from a log, head cocked. She opened her mouth to tell him to piss off or help her, not just perch there, but her throat was too dry and she only rasped at him quietly.

Finally, the shallow gully of the stream.

She tumbled down the bank, floppy as a boneless squirrel, and squelched face first into the water. Mud filled her mouth and clogged her nose.

Oh, she thought. How apt. The girl who killed thousands with a giant wave was going to drown in a shallow stream. But she managed to twist her head so her face was only half submerged. She lapped cold, delicious, muddy water. Soon she had the strength to slide the rest of her body down into the stream, kneel, and drink water from her cupped hands. A good while later she managed to stand. Shivering with cold and shuddering with effort, she staggered to a blackberry bush.

Two days later the young archer crested the rise and walked down the track to Dug’s farm, his hammer over her left shoulder, its shaft wrapped with moss and cloth to prevent further chafing. Her right shoulder was coated in a poultice to soothe the hammer’s earlier rubbage.

Dug’s sheep ran to the fence, bleating accusingly, but there was no sign of the dogs. She’d expected the huge, idiotic animals to come bouncing up the track barking a happy welcome as usual, but Pigsy and Sadie were nowhere to be seen. Perhaps someone from the nearby village had taken them in?

She turned the corner into Dug’s yard. Dug’s yard … She staggered under the weight of the grief, then straightened. She could indulge her grief later. Right now she had things to do. There were dogs to be found, chickens to be fed, honey to be collected, sheep to be reassured and—

“Ahem!” someone fake-coughed behind her.

There were five men, clad in British-style smocks and tartan trousers which didn’t quite fit, as if they’d borrowed or stolen them. Two of the smocks were holed and blood-stained: evidence, Spring guessed, of what had happened to their previous owners. The men’s hair was cut short in the Roman way, which wasn’t unusual since plenty of Britons those days aped Roman styles. Each carried a short, double-edged legionary’s sword on his belt, which was more unusual but not unheard of. People liked to copy the Romans. But everything about this lot
looked
foreign – their skin, their eyes, the way they stood, the set of their mouths – and Spring was pretty much certain that they were, in fact, Roman. Now what, by all the bristly badgers’ arses in the world, would five Romans be doing at Dug’s hut?

They were a tough-looking lot, apart from the man in the centre, who looked extraordinary, right up with the druid Maggot in the gang of weirdest-looking weirdos that Spring had ever seen. He was toweringly tall and bulky, but with a tiny ball of a head. Black, pinprick eyes stared out of his tanned, wrinkled face. Despite his preposterous appearance, he had the expression of a man who took himself very seriously. His hair, suspiciously jet for someone his age, was greased and wrenched back from his leather-look forehead into a pert little ponytail.

She looked around. Pigsy and Sadie were nowhere. Even the chickens that usually scratched about in the yard despite Dug’s efforts to teach them to scratch about elsewhere had buggered off. There was no way she’d get through the door or any of the windows before they were on her, and they were blocking the mouth of the yard. She was caught, with no help on hand.

She couldn’t fight five. If they’d had the decency to run at her from several hundred paces across an empty field, and she’d had a bow and some arrows, then she’d have taken out the lot of them, no bother, but she’d left her bow on Frogshold and they were right next to her. All she had was Dug’s hammer, which she had trouble lifting, let alone wielding. One of them would have been unassailable. Five … Clever words would be needed to save her here.

“First of all, I’d like you all to know,” she said, smiling and thinking that they probably wouldn’t be able to understand British, “that you look a bunch of prize pricks. I’d heard that Romans were ugly, but if I had pigs that looked like you I’d paint faces on their arses on market day and make them walk backwards into town.”

Four of them looked blank, but the big one’s eyes narrowed even further. He raised his sword.

“And the second thing,” added Spring quickly, “is that I surrender, totally. If you’re here to rob, go for it. Rob away. If it’s slaves you’re after, I will be a
brilliant
slave – compliant, happy and diligent, I promise. If you want to rob
and
take me as a slave, go for your lives. I will not stand in your way. I’m sure clever Romans like you know that you’ll get
much
more for me if I’m unharmed.”