Reign of Iron (7 page)

Shortly after dawn and half a moon later, Ragnall was on horseback next to a curve of the Rhenus, part of Caesar’s retinue awaiting the king and queen of the Usipetes and Tencteri, who were late. The Romans chatted patiently. They weren’t unduly worried, since barbarians were always late. The valley here was perhaps two hundred paces across and thickly wooded. Ragnall had heard Titus Labienus, Caesar’s deputy, warn of possible ambush, but the engineers had cut down the nearest fifty yards of trees on their side of the river and the praetorians had swept the woodland beyond that and claimed all was clear. Ragnall looked across at the trees on the other side of the river, where they hadn’t swept. Nothing stirred, but those eastern woods brooded with menace. Perhaps it was a hangover from the stories about monsters in the German forests from the liars in Vesontio, but he was certain he could feel evil eyes staring at him from the darkness.

They said in Rome that no Roman had ever crossed the Rhenus. It wasn’t true: Rome’s traders and explorers had been everywhere, but it was a convenient mistruth that both excited Ragnall and filled him with fear for what was on the other side. He’d also heard in Rome that no Roman had ever been to Britain, and that Britain was populated by mustachioed cannibals who painted themselves blue, shaved their bodies and drank nothing but milk. The Romans’ notions of the rest of the world were usually wilder than the reality.

The Germans came into sight and Caesar kicked his horse a few paces ahead, beyond Titus Labienus and the praetorians. They were meeting the leaders of an unknown tribe who could easily be assassins, but Caesar rode forward, head high. Although much of Caesar’s reputation for bravery came from exaggerated reports, he was genuinely courageous. Ragnall was proud, and worried. He gripped the pommel of his sword.

Various other legates, including Felix, were behind Labienus and next to Ragnall, with two dozen of Caesar’s black-leather and iron-armoured praetorian guards fanning out on their mounts to either side.

The German queen and king approached, followed by a disorderly guard of perhaps a dozen. It looked, thought Ragnall with some relief, like Caesar was safe. It would have been hard to find a less likely looking pair of assassins. The king was a skinny man with shaggy black hair wrenched into what looked like three balls of hairy wool. The queen, by far the more impressive-looking of the two, was riding an aurochs – one of the giant oxen common in the German forests.

“Greetings, noble Caesar!” said the queen. “I am Queen Brostona of the Tengoterry and this is Senlack of the Ootipeats!” She swept a majestic hand to indicate her hirsute companion. Her voice was loud and haughtily enthusiastic. German accent aside, it reminded Ragnall of his mother.

Caesar gestured to the praetorians. They charged the Usipete and Tencteri guard. It was over in moments. The German soldiers were all unseated and dying, not a praetorian was harmed. The Romans closed in on the regal pair.

King Senlack flicked his reins. His horse gave a high-pitched snort, whipped round and sprang as if stung by a wasp. The king ducked one praetorian’s sword swipe, parried two more with his curved blade and then he was off down the road, horse galloping as if it was fleeing from the Underworld, the king’s big hair bouncing in rhythm with its stride. A knot of Romans set off in pursuit, but the Usipete’s horse was faster and he was away.

Brostona watched from her seat on the aurochs until Senlack had disappeared over a rise, then turned back to Caesar, still smiling as confidently as a queen whose entire guard hadn’t just been slaughtered. “Don’t worry, Caesar, he won’t come back with the army. They do only what I tell them. Now perhaps we can talk terms? If you look in that man’s satchel,” she pointed to a man on the ground who was scrabbling weakly at his slashed, blood-pulsing throat, “you’ll find a map that shows my plans.”

Caesar turned to his deputy. “Labienus, this woman amuses me. Have her disarmed and brought to my tent this evening.”

“I am not armed, and I look forward to seeing you as a peer in the evening. We will discuss terms. I have a plan that will surely…” She tailed off because Caesar had turned his horse from her and begun to talk to Labienus. Ragnall saw knuckles whiten on the hand holding her aurochs’ reins. She was angrier about the general snubbing her than the death of her entire retinue.

“Keep the praetorians here to hold the road,” Caesar continued to Labienus. “I’ll send up a cohort of the Tenth as well to cover the country around. No Roman is to go any further north than this point. Any Germans who attempts to come south of it will be killed.”

Labienus nodded agreement, but glanced at Felix, tightening his cheeks and pursing his lips as if he’d put something unpleasant in his mouth. Ragnall wondered what was going on.

L
ittle Dug lay on Lowa’s lap, wrapped in cotton and wool, breathing softly and staring into her eyes. He was a pretty little thing – thank Kornonos, since she’d seen some grotesque babies in her time – and she definitely felt some affection for him. But love? No. Why should she? Shitting, crying and sleeping, his sole activities thus far, were not endearing. Everyone said that being a mother would change the way she thought about everything forever, but she hadn’t expected it to and it hadn’t. She had a child and that was that. She liked him, but if he was taken away right then and she never saw him again? She’d live. She’d lost people before.

Perhaps other mothers saw more of their babies, and that’s why they fell for them. Lowa had hardly seen Dug since his birth because she spent most daylight moments and many of the nights training her army. She was in charge of the cavalry, Mal looked after the scorpion crews, Atlas was head of the infantry and Chamanca commanded the heavy and light chariots, but with those latter two in Gaul and Lowa as overarching chief, she spent as much time with the other sections as her own.

It was hard work. They were slowly learning new methods, and gradually mastering new weapons and equipment, but so many had been killed in the battle with the Eroo and their Fassites that their real problem was numbers. The coming Roman army was likely to be a good deal larger than hers, not to mention vastly more experienced, with years more training and, apparently, supported by a legion of unspecified but powerful demons.

As well as preparing to defend against an invincible foe, she had to continue to manage resources to avoid the famine that might have followed the Spring Tide – and might still – and she had to ensure her army and its ancillary support was fed, sheltered, fuelled, stopped from running wild, that its shit was taken away, outbreaks of disease contained, squabbles stifled before they could escalate … She’d put people in charge of all these tasks, but found herself having to intervene again and again. With a few exceptions, her commanders simply did not give nearly as much of a fuck about getting everything right as she did.

The only thing that she’d done since she’d been queen that could be considered selfish was learning to swim. Escaping from Zadar years before, she’d almost been caught because she couldn’t swim. She never wanted to be in that situation again, so on a succession of calm evenings she rode south to the sea alone, waded into the frigid water and worked out how to float and paddle about. She hadn’t expected it to be difficult – as she’d told herself all those years ago, many children could swim and children were idiots – and it hadn’t been.

With running a conglomeration of tribes and invasion preparation taking up every heartbeat of her time, she reckoned Danu might forgive her if she didn’t go all weak in the limbs and gushy about her son.

People told her, all the time, that the boy looked exactly like his father, Dug. Yes, maybe there was some Dug in his eyes, but it was no big surprise that a baby looked like his father and not something to coo about like a brain-damaged hen. On the other hand, in her rare moments when she wasn’t obsessing about her army and she had enough energy left after the long day not to be cynical, it did please her that little Dug looked like big Dug. It was fitting that the line of the man who had died to save them all might be continued. But the cooers and gushers implied that this baby had
replaced
Dug. That was wrong. Very wrong. Dug Sealskinner had been the love of her life and nobody would ever replace him.

“Run a finger across his mouth and he’ll smile,” said Keelin Orton, who was standing and watching her. Her tone was brisk. She was brisk about everything, but she clearly adored the little boy. She didn’t wince when he was sick on her, and wiped the weird green shit from his little pink arse as if she were mopping spilled water.

The queen had been surprised when Keelin had turned up on the day of Dug’s birth and asked to wet-nurse the child. She hadn’t seen Keelin since the day she’d killed her lover, King Zadar, and shortly before she’d broken the girl’s jaw with a stool when escaping Barton. However, if Keelin wasn’t going to hold that that against her, then Lowa didn’t need to remember that Keelin had been sleeping with the man who’d murdered her sister and tried to kill her.

Moreover, Keelin seemed to have grown from a pouting sex chattel into a sensible young woman, and her breasts were even bigger now that they were making milk. Dug would get enough sustenance, and Lowa was pretty sure there was no truth in the jokes that any baby nursed by Keelin would become a wide-mouthed adult. Discreet enquiries revealed that Keelin’s own daughter had died shortly before little Dug had been born and that the child’s father had been killed fighting the Eroo, so Lowa was glad to give the girl a baby to mother and something to distract her from her grief.

The queen brushed the tip of her finger along tiny lips. The baby flapped a hand weakly and his little face puckered into a smile. Lowa was surprised to find her smile twitching to life, the first time for a good while. The boy wasn’t entirely unappealing. She ran a finger along his cheek. So smooth. It was amazing, she thought, that she had Dug and somehow combined to produce this beautiful little bugger.

“He likes it as well when you—”

Lowa held up a hand to interrupt her. “I’m sorry, Keelin. I have to go.” Lowa held him out to his nanny.

“Oh, stay a moment longer, Lowa. Dug loves seeing his mum and—”

“Keelin. If his
mum
doesn’t get the army organised, he’ll have no eyes to see anything with because the Romans will gouge them out. And I hate to think what they’ll do to you. I am sorry, but I must go.”

“All right.”

“And it’s Queen Lowa.”

“Sorry,
Queen
Lowa,” Keelin muttered as she bounded from the hut.

T
hey’d been there for three days, attached to a thick chain running through iron ankle bracelets, and she was bored bored bored. Atlas and Walfdan were kindly enough, although patronising, but Chamanca clearly thought that Spring was no more than a foolish little girl and a hindrance, despite the fact that they’d all be prisoners of the Romans if it wasn’t for her and it wasn’t her fault at all that they were now prisoners of the Germans. The Iberian barely listened while she spoke, and never asked her opinion as she made plans with Atlas and Walfdan. Dug had always treated Spring as an equal but it had taken a while before Lowa had, so she guessed it was the same deal again. What was it Dug had told her – “People judge you by what you do, not by what you say you’re going to do’? Unless you say you’re going to make love to a pig or something like that, she thought, then they’ll judge you, but he did have a point. She hadn’t done much yet – talking them out of trouble hadn’t been that big a deal if she was honest – so she’d just have to do a few more things to make Chamanca like her. The strange thing was that she found herself much keener to please Chamanca than the two men who were much kinder to her. What, she wondered, was that about?

It didn’t look like the Iberian had that much time for Walfdan either. She’d asked him to use druid magic to break their chains but he’d said that his magic was of a more subtle variety. This had not impressed Chamanca at all. It hadn’t impressed Spring much either. If she’d still had her magic, she’d have at least tried to free them. She suspected that Walfdan was one of the many charlatan druids that Lowa so often cursed.

Chamanca did, however, seem very keen on Atlas. They often sat with their limbs touching, and they slept right next to each other. Spring hadn’t heard that they were a couple, however she had been away from Maidun for a while. But they didn’t seem like a couple, not quite. They were more like two children who fancied each other but didn’t know what to do about it.

They were chained in the open air, on a foot-high wooden platform at the edge of a square area clear of tents. Tall posts at each corner of their dais held up a leather canopy which kept the sun off for most of the day and would have kept them dry if there’d been any rain. Spring was pleased and a little surprised that her captors had been so thoughtful. Chamanca had spat when she’d seen the awning and said, “That’s Germans for you, so fucking sensible.” The clearing seemed to be the central meeting point, but it was impossible to tell how central it was in relation to the rest of the camp because she couldn’t see any further than the tents that surrounded it and she’d been blindfolded when they’d brought them in.

Spring expected the Ootipeats and Tengoterry to jeer and throw rotten food at them, as people would have done in Britain, but either the looks on Atlas’ and Chamanca’s faces stopped that from happening, or the Germans were simply more decent that the Britons. Despite the four armoured guards glowering at them silently from a safe distance, plenty of passers stopped to chat. After she’d heard the life stories of ten boring old farts while dodging repeated requests to tell her own, Spring began to think that a few decaying apples in the face would be vastly preferable to the intrusive politeness of her captors.

So, unwillingly, Spring learnt a lot about the Germans. The Ootipeats and Tengoterry weren’t so much an invading army as an evading one, driven from their own lands by an even larger force of yet another German tribe called the Suby. The numerically superior Suby drank nothing but milk and ate only meat. As a result they were all sturdy giants with no sense of humour, unbeatable in battle.