Reign of Iron (38 page)

“Of course not.”

“Exactly! The Romans should go home! They shouldn’t try to make us play their game!”

“But I’d explain why it was a good game and I’d suggest that you played it.”

“Exactly again! If you told me about your dumb game, I’d listen to you and maybe give it a go if you were persuasive enough. Rome could do exactly that. They could send embassies here, they could invite British delegations to visit Rome. They could fill them up with dolphin legs and pig’s wings and all that other stupid food, show them the gladiators and the mosaics, let them bathe until they smell like flowers. Then let them
decide
. Instead they’ve come over here to kill everybody until the only people left are the ones who aren’t brave enough to fight and pretend to agree with them. They don’t want to change our lives – they want to take them!”

Ragnall shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that, Spring. You’re too young to understand—”

“Who’s changed their argument now? And I’m not too young. You’re too stupid. So don’t come. Stay with your new idiot friends. I’m still going.” Spring yanked the chain.

Ragnall wrapped it around his fist. Spring reached round to the back of her leather shorts and brandished his dagger.

Ragnall’s nostrils flared and the blubber that had accumulated around his once square jaw quivered.

“I will kill you if you don’t let me go.” She stepped forward.

Ragnall stretched a hand out to take the knife. Spring swished it out of his reach. He made a grab for it. She spun around him, stuck a foot out and pushed him over it. He stumbled and fell into the back of the tent.

“I’m warning you, Spring,” he said, clambering to his feet.

“Warning me what?”

“Give me the knife or I’ll take it.”

“Come and try. I’m a trained soldier from Lowa’s army. You’re a fat traitor. Come for the knife and I’ll kill you. Stand aside, let me out of the back of the tent and I won’t.”

He advanced, more carefully this time, stance wide, arms out.

“I don’t want to kill you, Ragnall.”

He grabbed at her knife hand. She swept in, darted a short but hard punch into his jaw and melted away. It was easy, like fighting a practice dummy.

“Let me go.”

He stood back, holding his jaw and blinking at her. “You bitch,” he said.

“I could have broken your nose. I could have crushed your windpipe, or stabbed you for that matter in your gut, heart or neck. I don’t want to. I don’t want to kill you. You’re not bad, you’re just stupid. Now let me go.”

Ragnall roared and leapt. Spring ducked round him and punched him on the temple, hard this time. He fell on her bed, dazed. She vaulted onto him, legs clamping his arms to his sides. As the fug cleared, his facial expression morphed from stupefied to enraged.

He struggled and bucked but she squeezed her knees, tucked her heels under the camp bed’s metal frame and pinned him with ease. She’d repeated Lowa’s exercises and her own constantly improving routine almost every day since captivity, often several times, and she’d jogged most of the way from Rome to northern Gaul. Ragnall hadn’t. She was half his weight, but she was a good deal stronger. With her feet holding the bed frame he wasn’t going anywhere, but still he writhed, face reddening. She squeezed her thighs until his red face started to turn purple and his efforts weakened. She relaxed her grip a little.

“Get off me or I’ll—” he spat.

She crushed her legs together, gripped him by his hair and pressed the tip of the knife into his windpipe.

“Go on then. Kill me,” he spat.

She didn’t want to kill him. She didn’t know what to do.

Lying on the bed, Atlas woke often, day and night, always in pain, always maddened by not knowing what was happening with Lowa, the Romans and the squad of aurochs riders that he should have taken to join the fight Sobek knew how long ago. Often the curly-haired old woman was out when he woke, and he’d lie awake until she returned and gave him the same honey and apple drink. Then the pain would subside and he’d go back to sleep.

Nothing was clear, but soon he was awake for longer periods and the drink seemed to be losing its flavour. After what might have been a day, or a year, he couldn’t tell at all, movement returned a little and he could move his digits, then speak. Finally he could ask questions, but it didn’t help as much as he’d hoped.

He’d been brought to her by Elann Nancarrow, the woman told him. Her name was Nan; that was it, no elaboration. They were in Nan’s hut, which was somewhere in the Branwin forest. He asked her to tell him all about the Aurochs tribe and Manfreena and why Elann had brought him to her even though she seemed to be under Manfreena’s spell. Nan said she didn’t get involved with other people’s business. She shored up this latter point by asking him no questions at all, not even his name. When he asked her something that she didn’t want to answer, such as what was wrong with him, or how long it would take him to recover, or what was in the honey and apple drink, she’d turn away and get on with her work. That work was comprised solely of spending a lot of time in the woods, tidying the hut far more than could possibly be necessary and cooking foul-smelling stew.

One morning Nan helped him sit up and spooned some of the stew into his mouth. It tasted worse than it smelled, like she’d gutted a dozen squirrels and cooked the wrong bits. Even though he was ravenously hungry, he struggled to swallow what might have been a rat’s kneecap and shook his head when Nan offered him a second bite. She said “Tsk” and gave him some honey and apple drink. He went back to sleep, exasperated that the old crone was doing nothing to help him.

C
hamanca vaulted over the front of the chariot and landed smoothly on the horse’s back. She slashed back one side and then the other with her sword, severing the leather ties that attached the animal to the chariot’s yoke, gripped its mane and dug her heels in.

“Around the camp to the north on the sea side!” she yelled as she approached the fleeing Maidunites. With good fortune some of them would make it.

A heartbeat later and the Iberian was among the thundering Maidun chariots, jinking reins to dodge in between them. It reminded her of avoiding the landslide during Rome’s battle with the Nervee in Gaul, but this time she wasn’t energised by fresh blood and she was reliant on an animal responding to her commands. She was glad that she’d spent so many hours riding the little horse, and that Lowa had had the wheel blades removed from the chariots. The blades had always been more for show than anything else and often injured more friends than foes in normal warfare. The one thing they were great for was massacring unarmed, fleeing people, but Lowa wasn’t planning on doing much of that.

A moment and an age later, Chamanca burst out of the chariots onto bare heathland. It was a hundred paces to the Maidunites on foot. There was no point in them running, they’d never make it, but they were also doomed where they were, with legionaries marching steadily towards them from one side and elephants charging from the other. Every other army Chamanca had seen would have run, but not Lowa’s brave light charioteers. They stood, firing arrow after ineffectual arrow into their attackers. Some were shooting fire arrows at the elephants, which Chamanca thought would have stampeded the reputedly skittish creatures, but the well-trained beasts didn’t seem to notice them.

Two burning darts hit one elephant’s little wooden fort and set it ablaze. Chamanca hoped for a moment that that elephant might run amok and cause havoc with the others, but the archers leapt and slid down the elephant’s rump. The driver jumped onto the beast’s neck, reached around behind himself and severed leather thongs. The turret crashed down in an explosion of sparks and the elephant charged on.

The legionaries stopped forty paces from the Maidunites, but the elephants kept coming. The Romans, sensibly, didn’t want to be trampled along with the Britons. The charioteers realised this, tossed their bows aside, unsheathed their swords and charged the Romans, screaming battle rage. Chamanca’s heart swelled with admiration as she galloped towards them.

As the Maidunites rammed the shield wall of the legionaries, the elephants hit the Maidunites’ rear and galloped on, trampling enemy and ally alike, shaking their heads, bladed tusks slicing limbs and heads from Maidunites and Romans.

Chamanca spotted her chariot crew, slashing a legionary’s throat then rolling to avoid a sweeping elephant blade.

“Yanina!” she called. Yanina looked up and spotted Chamanca. A Roman took advantage of the distraction to whack a shield into the young woman’s face. She went down. The legionary’s sword went up.

“Fenn’s tits!” said Chamanca, digging her heels into her horse.

Lowa watched as all along the wall and throughout the body of the fort at Big Bugger Hill, British men and women struck flints into buckets of pitch. A thousand archers put aside their quivers of standard arrows and reached for incendiary ones. They dipped the heads in the burning mix, lifted their bows, strung, drew and shot.

Dotted among the archers in the body of the fort, two dozen catapult crews lifted sealed buckets packed with wool and whale oil, and covered in wool soaked in pitch. They placed them carefully into the scoops, lit them with torches and let fly.

On the wall, Mal’s sixty scorpions leapt as they unleashed their mighty bolts.

Burning arrows and great balls of fire sailed up over the fort’s wall, onto the shields of the nearest legionaries. Further back in the Roman ranks, beyond the range of bows and catapults, scorpion arrows struck shield tortoises, smashing great holes and maiming swathes of soldiers.

Another thousand fire arrows whizzed into the air and down into the legionaries.

The vanguard of the Roman attack dropped burning shields and ran, many themselves ablaze. The hut on wheels that had housed the battering ram went up, its draught oxen bellowing in horrible agony.

“Standard arrows!” shouted Lowa. “Scorpions continue!” All along the British defences, captains repeated her orders. The four thousand archers who’d paused while the fire arrows flew resumed their shooting. Their missiles tore into the shieldless Romans. After the second salvo there were no legionaries within arrow range left standing.

Mal’s scorpion arrows flew, smashing more tortoises. Realising their vulnerability, the centurions shouted commands and the legionaries jogged neatly out of reach.

The rest of the Romans – most of the army – stood behind them, still in their tidy squares. At the rear was a small group on horseback. One of those men was, presumably, Julius Caesar. Her missile attack had just killed an entire legion – nearly five thousand men and one sixth of his invasion force. Lowa wondered what he was thinking.

A surprisingly sensible and never-before-heard internal voice told Chamanca to flee immediately and live to fight another day. With the elephants on one side and the legionaries on the other, her chariot mate Yanina and the other dismounted light charioteers who hadn’t fled were doomed. So was Chamanca if she stayed around a heartbeat longer.

Chamanca told the voice to piss off. She’d decided to rescue Yanina and that’s what she was going to do. Once she had the girl, she had a reason to leave the field. Without the girl, she would be running away, and Chamanca the Iberian did not run away.

She galloped behind three elephants which were carving and stamping havoc in the mass of Britons and Romans. She noticed that they didn’t have boots on their back legs, so as she passed she leant over and slashed their rear tendons. She hadn’t expected great results, but the animals scream-trumpeted, their back legs collapsed and they crashed onto the ground, crushing soldiers from both sides.

There were two figures struggling on the ground ahead of her. A legionary, sitting on Yanina, was trying to force his sword point into her chest. Yanina was holding the sword back by its blade, bloody handed, legs thrashing.

The Iberian leant over the side of her mount and cracked her ball-mace into the Roman’s face as she galloped past. She pulled the reins around. The clever little horse turned very swiftly, probably keen, Chamanca guessed, to be away from the battle.

Yanina was up and waiting. Chamanca scooped her onto the back of her horse and galloped on.

“Thanks!” Yanina cried as they speeded up, gripping Chamanca around her bare midriff, hands slippery with blood.

“Hold tight,” said Chamanca, kicking her heels. She pulled the reins to the right to take them out of the fighting, but the crew of one of the downed elephants was up and had spotted them. They reached for arrows, strung them and aimed at the fleeing women.

Yilgarn Craton was not a fan of fussy warfare. For most of his life he’d considered any suggestion that he might follow any sort of plan as a direct insult to his hero-hood. Run at them, attack them with all you’ve got. That was how men like him fought. When he’d battled as Jocanta’s champion, and when he’d led her troops into battle that one time, he hadn’t had a plan and he’d won every fight.

He was, however, grudgingly impressed by Lowa’s strategy. She’d lured, what, four or five thousand Romans in – not most of them by any means but a good proportion of their army – by pretending that her only defence was an absolute fuck load of arrows. Well, that’s all they’ve got, the Romans must have thought, and it has no effect on us, so we’ll march merrily up to her wall under our shields. But then, when they were all crammed in, Lowa had let them see her real defence and it had worked an absolute treat.

Yilgarn wished he’d known about the fire scheme when he’d gone to Caesar. He’d known that Lowa expected the Romans to stay in their camp for several days before marching inland, and he’d told Caesar that, but that’s all he’d overheard that time he’d walked behind the queen as she made plans with Mal.

So, yes, Lowa’s plan was clever. However, inspired when Lowa had explained the strategy to all the captains, Yilgarn had devised a plan of his own. He had his three hundred Haxmite troops stationed all round, ready for the right moment. And now his moment had come. He reached into his pouch, pulled out his little trumpet and blew. This would show Lowa, he thought, who the greater Warrior was. If she somehow lived through her forthcoming defeat, a defeat at his hands, he’d find her and they’d have it out, a fair fight this time, no hand behind the back tricks, a good, proper—