Reign of Iron (22 page)

“Caesar will launch an invasion next year,” the general continued, “for a full campaign. His reconnaissance has confirmed what he thought. The Britons are a tougher nut to crack than the Gauls, so he will require a larger nutcracker. Six legions, more cavalry, more slingers and archers, your legion and more. Out of sight of Rome, the entire war machine might be fully tested in the obliteration of the British.”

“I see. Where will we winter?”

“Caesar’s wintering is unclear – there is rebellion in Illyricum that he will have to stamp on – but you will winter with your legion in the marshes of Belgium. There is insurgency fomenting in those swamps which may hamper next year’s invasion of Britain. You and your troops will end it. Travel quietly and swiftly from village to village and teach them the folly of resistance.”

“Execute some as an example?”

“Execute them all as a solution.”

Felix sighed. Another ball-achingly cold winter away from Rome did not appeal, but at least he’d have some fun.

“Certainly, Caesar,” he said.

“Good, then farewell, Caesar shall see you in the spring.”

“Right. Ah. There’s one other thing. Do you still have that British girl you captured?”

Caesar looked into his eyes unblinkingly for so long that Felix felt sweat prickle under the skin on his brow. “You seem unnaturally interested in this girl,” he said eventually. “You were desperate to have her on the beach in Britain. Why do you want her?”

“I knew her in Britain.”

“You did not know her well. Unless you were pretending not to recognise her at first.”

“She has changed from a girl to a woman, she looks completely different.”

“Answer the question now and truthfully. Why do you want her?”

“You know that my sacrifices are more effective if I know the victim. I have known this girl since she was born, so—”

“No. It is more than that. Caesar can see your desperation. Perhaps she is the great British magician of whom you spoke, whose powers will enable Caesar to conquer the world? Perhaps you mean to take these powers for yourself?”

“No, Caesar, no, you have it wrong. The magician, like all those who can use magic, is a man of reasonably advanced age, not a girl. It is possibly the man who commanded whales to hole my ship. Women do not have the capacity for magic.”

Caesar looked him in the eye for far too long again. Felix felt a treacherous bead of sweat leak from his bald skull and trickle down behind his ear.

“No matter,” the general said eventually, “because you will not be going anywhere near the girl and you will make no attempt to see her.”

“If that is what Caesar wishes, I will strive to—”

Caesar turned and walked away at speed. It seemed that their audience was over, so Felix set off back to his legion. Shortly afterwards he came across a large grass snake writhing on the open road, a female by her size, presumably injured by the woodcutters. He stamped on her head. It gave him a little boost and he felt a great deal better. He’d bide his time and he would have that girl.

“B
ah bah bah!” shouted Dug “Aye … bah!” He pointed his forefinger to the sky behind her with his eyes so wide that there might have been a dragon coming in to land, and screamed even more loudly than he’d been able to last time Lowa had seen him.

She looked up. Nothing there. Who knew what the little oddball’s developing mind was seeing? Maybe there was a dragon that adults couldn’t see? Elann Nancarrow’s cats were forever staring freakily at terrifying invisible beings. Maybe when people aged they lost the ability to see into other worlds? It was possible, she supposed. Lowa dragged herself back from ridiculous musing. She’d been on her horse all night and her mind was bouncing around like a storm-tossed sailing dinghy.

Keelin put Dug down on the rug, on all fours. The day was cold but sunny, and the baby was bundled into an outfit made of fox fur which made him look like a fat bear cub. He spotted his wooden dog on the far side of the rug, screamed with joy and crawled towards it wobblingly.

“See?” said Keelin. “Crawling.”

“I see,” said Lowa, as Dug’s arms splayed and he face-planted into the rug. But he pushed himself up, looked at his mother, scream-shouted happily and carried on.

“He’ll get better. He’s later crawling than most, but I’m sure that’s because of his whacking great head weighing him down. He’s still the cheeriest baby I’ve ever seen. Even when he’s crying you can see the smile in his eyes. He’s the smartest as well. He knows things, that one. He certainly should be clever, with a head that size. His dad had a big head, didn’t he?”

Lowa nodded and smiled. It was good to see new life, particularly because she knew what was coming next. She’d arrived back at Maidun that morning from another recruitment trawl. This time she’d been to the treacherous bastards in Dumnonia. She was that desperate. It had been depressing, whole villages populated by the elderly and children after so many of fighting age had perished under the Spring Tide. Thank Danu that most of them blamed their dead king Bruxon for leading the whole army to their deaths against Maidun, rather than blaming the queen of Maidun for drowning them. She’d still received the odd angry shout and thrown egg, though. She’d very nearly killed the first man who’d thrown an egg, but Mal had calmed her down and charmed the egg thrower so much that he had become her chief recruitment agent, mustering half a thousand on his own. So forgiveness did work sometimes, she guessed, although that half-thousand were pretty much all fourteen-year-olds who’d been deemed too young for the army the year before.

When she’d reached Maidun, Mal had run up to say that the merchants and fishers all reported that the Romans were preparing a much larger invasion fleet, to be ready early the coming summer. Then Chamanca had approached, wrapped in a woollen shawl, looking as if she hadn’t slept for a year.

“Welcome home,” the Iberian had said. “Atlas is still alive, the stubborn bugger. Maggot says anyone else would have died a moon ago. He will die tomorrow or possibly the next day.”

“I will see my son, then I’ll come straight to Atlas.”

“Thank you. He’d like to see you. He is in his hut.”

Lowa left Keelin feeding cow’s milk and honey to Dug from a cored bull’s horn fitted with a leather teat. The boy, guzzling happily, didn’t seem to notice Lowa leaving.

The door to Atlas’ hut was open. Lowa could smell death from twenty paces away. She knocked on the doorframe and Chamanca answered from the darkness. The stench inside was so strong that for a heartbeat she couldn’t see. When her eyes had adjusted, she saw Chamanca sitting on a stool. She looked up at Lowa but didn’t greet her or stand.

Atlas was on the bed, lying on his side, a thin woollen blanket over his shrunken bulk.

“Lowa, welcome,” he said, his voice deep as a god’s. “Chamanca, please will you offer our guest a drink.”

“Don’t worry, I just … drank.” Lowa didn’t want to breath in.

Atlas sniffed a weak laugh. “Don’t be awkward, please. Death is merely a stage of the journey. Not an enjoyable one, I grant you, but there is no need to be miserable. Have you seen people grow old? It is not pleasant. I have no desire to age and weaken. I look forward to seeing what comes next. Now, take a seat. Chamanca, fetch Lowa a mug of beer, please. And have one yourself.”

Sitting down on the stool next to Chamanca’s, Lowa could see Atlas more clearly. His frail smile was twisted by the scar that she’d given him with a deer bone, when they’d killed her women and tried to kill her. Sometimes that evening seemed as if it were centuries ago and sometimes as if it had happened only moments before. This was one of those latter times. She felt a flash of anger that he’d killed Aithne, then reminded herself that he’d been under Felix’s spell and he’d done his best to make up for it since, plus it was hard to hate someone so obviously near death. His injured shoulder was grossly swollen. A black, sewn-up wound ran across it, with a tube – a cow’s vein, Lowa guessed – running from the wound into a wooden bucket by the bedside. It was hard to be precise, but it seemed that most of the stench was emanating from the grim bucket.

“I never thought I’d be Rome’s first victim in Britain,” said Atlas.

“The Taloon man and the Haxmite who killed him were the first victims of Rome’s invasion,” said Chamanca, sitting down with two mugs of beer and handing one to Lowa. “So stop trying to blow your own trumpet.”

“Quite right, quite right,” said Atlas. “I’ll leave that to Carden. Where
is
Carden? He was just here.”

Chamanca clamped a hand to her face, stood and walked swiftly from the hut.

“Tetchy, that one,” said Atlas, “now, tell me, where is Carden? Off with his brother Weylin somewhere?”

“That’s one way of putting it,” said Lowa.

She sat and talked to him until he went to sleep. When she left he was snoring quietly and unevenly.

Chamanca was waiting outside, alongside Maggot and Walfdan. Lowa nodded a greeting and opened her mouth to ask if there was anything the druids could do for Atlas, but closed it again. They would already have done everything.

Chamanca went back into the hut and Lowa asked Maggot and Walfdan to return to the eyrie with her to discuss deployment of the new recruits, training schedules and other things such as who would replace Atlas as the infantry commander.

They set off slowly, since Walfdan was not well and could not go any faster, and Lowa sent three onlookers to fetch Mal, Adler and the blacksmith Elann Nancarrow. One of the many things she hated about being queen, possibly the thing that she’d hated most initially, was that there were always slack-jawed dimwits who thought it was perfectly acceptable to stand and gawp at her as she went about her day. However, since she’d realised that she could use them as a permanent fleet of errand people and a source for food and water, she’d despised them less.

“Y
ou said it was impressive.” Spring wrinkled her nose.

“You aren’t impressed?” Ragnall raised his arms at the wonderful architecture and stunning carvings towering all around them. There was nothing like this in Britain, nothing close to it. It must have looked like a god’s palace to Spring. She
was
impressed, she was just being annoying. “It kicks the arse off Maidun’s wooden arena.”

“That’s got seats all the way round.”

Ragnall sighed. They were in Pompey’s theatre complex. Several years before, Drustan had given his life to transport Ragnall there to save him from being buried alive by Felix. Back then it had been a building site. Now it was a freshly painted, palatial amazement. He and Spring were standing in the middle of the main theatre, on an expansive marble-floored stage surrounded by a towering semi-circular tier of seating and a three-storey, balconied, marble-columned backdrop.
Ragnall wasn’t the only one amazed by the gigantic edifice. All around them wealthy, well-dressed Romans had lost their usual “Oh I’m so bored, nothing impresses me” nonchalance and were gazing around wide-eyed at the newly opened wonder. Most of them were looking at the theatre, anyway. Quite a few of them were looking at him and the British girl, pointing and talking about them as if they were animals in Caesar’s menagerie.

They were famous because, yet again, Caesar’s adventures were the chat of the city, and they were the young barbarian royal lovers whom he’d rescued from the horrors of dark Britain. This time the Senate had granted a new record amount of holiday – twenty days of celebration – to honour the general’s new victories in Gaul and Britain, even though he hadn’t actually had any in Britain. Some people, most notably Marcus Porcius Cato, were calling Caesar a war criminal and saying that he should stand trial for his unprovoked massacre of the Usipetes and Tencteri. However, when most influential Romans were presented with the accusation, they replied
Twenty days holiday!
and carried on loving Caesar and lauding his adventures. The general himself was off east somewhere quashing a rebellion, which meant there was even more focus on the British couple.

The girl didn’t help matters. The hulking praetorians who guarded them were something of a giveaway, but many rich young Romans had bodyguards and they might have gone unnoticed if Spring hadn’t rejected the finest fashions and insisted on wearing her screamingly barbarian leather shorts and white cotton shirt. Many of the women glared at her exposed legs with outrage. Their male companions voiced their affronted agreement while taking good long looks at Spring’s tanned thighs to fully assess just how offended they were. Spring was certainly one of the most attractive women in Rome that winter, and, given her outfit, probably the most visually appealing of all – to Ragnall, anyway, even though she was so annoying. He, despite his embarrassment at being assessed as a barbarian who’d “gone toga”, was proud to be at her side and somewhat proud to be her betrothed. Everyone knew that they were engaged to be married and an auspicious date had been set in the new year. Everyone knew, that was, apart from Spring.

She pointed to the exquisite, columned temple that perched with tear-inducing majesty at the highest point of the theatre complex. From its apex an open-armed statue of the goddess Venus Victrix looked out over the marvels that man had made with pride, perhaps even awe.

“That stone hut with the lady on the top up there,” asked Spring, “what’s that then?”

“That is a temple to Venus Victrix, Pompey’s personal goddess,” said Ragnall.

“Oh, I remember,” said Spring. “Shagging Venus, not to be confused with Mother Venus who Caesar reckons he’s descended from.”

“That’s pretty much it.” At least she listened to him and remembered things, thought Ragnall. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

“I prefer woodland shrines.”

“Do you want to go up and look inside?”

“Nope.”

“All right, let’s go through to the gardens.” He added, in Latin, “And I’ll come back and see the temple when I don’t have to drag an ignorant child around.”

Spring beamed at him and said: “I like it when you talk Roman, it makes you sound like a frog barking.”