Clash of Iron (21 page)

“There was no one orator. All the Gauls seemed to believe what they were saying. They were very convincing. And … is it not possible that creatures that we haven’t previously encountered live in those endless dark forests? Perhaps they have migrated recently from the unknown east, where for years they’ve been mustering—”

Caesar held up his hand for silence. “Labienus, keep every man away from the town. In fact, pull them all back and lock down the camp. If any man steps outside the walls, his century will be decimated. Send Felix to me.”

“What about foraging? We are short of firewood and—”

Labienus saw the look on Caesar’s face, stopped talking, held up his palms, bowed, turned and walked briskly from the tent.

“M
orning, Atlas.” Chamanca smiled up at the tiptoeing Kushite. Dawn sliced dusty bright lances through the shutters of the three-bed room that Kapiana had allotted them, but Chamanca would have recognised Atlas’ heavy footsteps in total darkness, even over Carden’s snores. Both he and Carden were big men, but Carden had mastered the art of stealthy movement while Atlas had never come close.

“Hmmph,” said Atlas. He placed his axe carefully on the floor, dropped his woollen cape and climbed on to his creaking wooden bed.

“How was Kapiana?”

Atlas rolled over, facing away from her. A few moments later he rolled back, grabbed his woollen cape from the floor and rolled over again, pulling it around him. Heartbeats later, he was snoring.

Chamanca lay awake, listing to the men’s snores. She had never before slept in a town’s stone building and she didn’t like it. She’d stayed in huts with stone walls, but you could step out of those easily enough. Here, you had to go through at least three other stone-walled rooms before you were in fresh air and that was too removed from the real world for her. It was like being buried alive. The window didn’t help, high up as they were. It was like a display of unreachable food to a hungry man.

She tried her best to drop off. The way to sleep with a snorer, she knew, is to align your breathing with theirs and pretend to yourself that it is your breath making the snoring sounds. That might have worked with one, regular snorer, but Carden and Atlas were grunting like a whole sounder of confused wild boar. She lay, looking at the black ceiling.She tried to fantasise about Kapiana and her slender neck, but for some reason her thoughts kept coming back to Atlas sleeping with the Gaul. For some reason, it annoyed her.

She was woken a good while later by a hubbub outside. She sprang up silently and jinked open a shutter. They were a storey up, with a good view of the high street.

A group of black-clad Roman soldiers was moving slowly through the town, questioning people. At their head was a figure she recognised – Felix. Even from behind, at fifty paces, he was unmistakeable. She gasped. What the Fenn? What was Zadar’s druid doing with the Romans in far-flung Gaul?

As if feeling her gaze, he turned and looked up at the window. She ducked, then felt foolish. It was a bright day, the room was dark and she had the shutter open only a finger’s breadth. There was no way that he’d be able to see her. Slowly, she rose up and put her eye to the slit again. Felix was still looking straight at the shutter – at her, it seemed.

Fenn! she thought to herself, crouching down. Had he seen her? Did he know it was her? Did it matter if he did? As far as Felix knew, she, Carden and Atlas were professional soldiers, whom he’d last seen …

Who was she kidding? This was Felix. Chances were he’d seen her and read her mind. Chances were, if he was with the Romans now, that he knew all about them and their mission already. So what could they do?

“What’s up, Chamanca?” asked Carden from his bed.

“We may have a problem,” she said.

The Iberian argued for leaving immediately. There were boats all along the city walls, so they could have been across the river and away to the Roman-free north in moments. Atlas said that their mission was to hamper and, if possible, stop the Roman army from reaching Britain, or at least gain information, so they had to stay in Wesont until they knew what the Romans would do next. There was no point sacrificing their entire mission because a flighty Iberian thought that one man might have seen her, when there was no way he could have done. Chamanca said that Atlas wanted to stay only to protect Kapiana, which was noble, but stupid, suicidal and of no help to Lowa and Britain. Felix had seen her, and they should go. Atlas said that this was nonsense, they should stay. After far too long arguing with the Kushite, Chamanca asked Carden to have the casting vote.

“Whatever Atlas said,” he replied.

So they stayed in their room, Atlas taking watch at the window since his dark face would be harder to spot from the street. Chamanca was nodding off to sleep again when Atlas gently closed the shutter.

“Sobek,” he said.

“What’s Sobek?” asked Carden.

Atlas ignored him. He looked to be deep in thought.

“He or she is a Kushite god, I think,” said Chamanca. “Atlas says it as a curse the whole time. You must have—”

“They’ve got Kapiana.” Atlas’ voice was quiet.

“What?” Carden asked.

“The Romans are leading her down the street at pilum-point. Only her. How could they know that she—?”

“Felix,” said Chamanca.

“How could he know?”

Chamanca had never seen Atlas this disturbed. It unnerved her. “Felix knows,” she said. “He knows we’re here, he knows why, he knows about you and Kapiana and he’s trying to draw us out.”

“If he knows we’re here,” said Carden, “why doesn’t he come and get us?”

“I don’t know? Because he’s a shit? Maybe he wants to be able to say that the British attacked the Romans first? It’s no coincidence that he paraded Kapiana under a window that Atlas was looking out of. He knows that Atlas will want to rescue her.”

“In that, he is correct.” Atlas picked up his axe.

Chamanca put a hand on her hip. “Atlas, what did you say about our mission here? I cannot remember. Are we acting for the good of Maidun and Britain as a whole, or is our goal to fall in love with a woman that we’ve spent one night with and jeopardise everything for her?”

Atlas narrowed his eyes and flared his nostrils and seemed to hold his breath. “You’re right,” he said eventually, deflating. “So what should we do? Because I don’t see ‘nothing’ as an option.”

“Stay here,” said Chamanca, “I’ll have a look around, see if I can find out what’s happening.”

E
lann Nancarrow’s iron came from central Britain, several hundred miles north-west of Maidun Castle, where a fierce little tribe called the Kerbees controlled a rich source of the highest quality ore and used secret methods to produce the hardest, least brittle, most malleable metal. They defended their mines and their methods like a gang of vixens protecting cubs.

“Any idea how the Kerbee tribe make the iron?” Lowa had been walking up to Maidun’s Eyrie, but drizzle had become a deluge, so she’d ducked into the cover of Elann’s forge complex, along with one of Elann’s cats, which shook itself like a dog then curled up next to the fire.

Lowa was happy to shelter there. She liked watching Elann heat, hammer and cool rough bars of iron into exquisite weaponry.

“I know exactly how they make it.” Elann rarely said more than necessary. Lowa had never heard her ask anyone a question, or even seem to notice anything outside the direct parameters of weapons smithing. She’d accepted her change in boss from Zadar to Lowa without a murmur. Indeed, the day that Lowa had killed Zadar and walked up into Maidun, above the triumphant roars of the frenzied crowd, she’d heard Elann’s hammer beating away on iron as if it was just another day. Lowa supposed Elann must have hated Zadar for the murder of her son Weylin, but it didn’t show. Lowa had sent her other son, Carden, to Gaul. Elann had never asked after him.

“So if you know how to make this excellent iron…?” Lowa asked.

Elann scowled down at her work for a moment, then carried on hammering. She was a short woman, with an incongruously large head, a jutting jaw that was never troubled by a smile, and the bulging biceps of someone who hammered metal all day, every day. It was a mystery how a woman as short as Elann Nancarrow had produced two such hulking sons as Weylin and Carden. It was another mystery that she’d taken enough time away from weapon smithing to conceive them.

“Then we could make iron like theirs here,” elaborated Lowa, “in large quantities, and produce better weapons for the whole army.”

Elann hammered on.

“Couldn’t we smelt iron as fine as the Kerbees’ and make hundreds of swords with it?”

“We couldn’t’

“Why not?”

“Three reasons.”

“…Which are?” said Lowa eventually.

Elann hit the hot sword four more times, examined it, grunted with satisfaction and thrust it into a clay oven filled with hot charcoal. She pulled off her huge leather gloves, slapped her hands against themselves, swallowed a draught of water from a clay mug, then looked at Lowa.

“Reason one, the ore here is bad. The Kerbee tribe own and guard the best ore mines in the world.”

“So we could buy more iron from them, or, if you know their methods, buy ore and make the iron ourselves?”

“Reason two, they never sell their ore. I am the only person outside the Kerbee tribe to whom they sell their iron ingots, and they limit the number that I am allowed. They will never increase that number.”

“We could take it?”

“Reason three, to take their iron we’d have to kill all of them.”

“How many are there?”

Elann lifted one eyebrow. It was the most extreme display of emotion Lowa had ever seen from her. “It is difficult to think of a cause that would justify the extermination of a tribe. Besides that, they are protected by their god Crendin. She’s a mountain at the moment, but if the iron is threatened, she will become a giant and smite the Kerbees’ enemies.”

“And of course,” added Lowa. “The Kerbees have excellent weapons, so killing them would be a costly business.”

“Not far from impossible,” said Elann. She put her gloves back on and reached for a lump of iron. It was clear that the conversation was over. Lowa hadn’t been serious about killing all the Kerbees to get their metal. Or at least not totally serious … But where did one stop? If she could sacrifice one person to stop the Romans from taking Britain, she definitely would. A hundred? No bother. A thousand? Yup, probably. Ten thousand…? Tricky. More?

It wasn’t a simple question. Hopefully it would be made easier when Atlas, Chamanca and Carden returned with intelligence about the Roman army – if they returned. She was certain that the Romans needed to be stopped, even more since hearing what they were doing in Gaul. She knew that sending them back across the Channel would mean sending many, many troops to their deaths. So, if she could kill, say, a thousand Kerbees in order to gain weapons so good that ten thousand fewer of her own soldiers died, surely she should? No, she didn’t think she should. But why not? Zadar, she remembered, had always said that all his killing and destruction was for the greater good. She was still collecting many of his taxes, if not the slave quotas. She’d sent several friends to Rome and Gaul, possibly to their deaths, and those were just the first few of the many lives she was going to throw away to defend Britain from the Romans. What was her justification? Who was she to decide who died? Was she just another Zadar, fucking up others’ lives for her own ends?

Elann was hammering red-hot iron into the shape of a warhammer’s head. That got her to thinking about Dug. He was never far from her mind, not least because Spring never stopped talking about him. Lowa had done many things that she felt terrible about if she let herself, including killing a whole village’s worth of people under Zadar, maybe even a whole town’s. However, the only thing she’d ever done that made her feel sick with shame was shagging Ragnall in front of Dug. What had she been thinking?

She resolved to go to Dug’s farm, to apologise and throw herself on his mercy. Then she shook her head. It was a resolution she made often. She’d even started the journey once and got as far as Maidun’s gate before making an excuse to herself to turn back. She’d spoiled her relationship with Dug beyond repair. Lowa knew that she would rather face the entire Roman army on her own than stand in front of Dug and tell him that she would give up everything she owned to turn back time to that evening in the woods, to change what had happened. To tell him, in fact, that she thought about him the whole time and she supposed that that meant she loved him.

R
agnall stood on Vesontio’s wall with most of the senior clerical staff and a few of the praetorian guard. Along the wall from him, on top of the short gate tower, were Caesar, Titus Labienus, Felix, six praetorians and a long-haired man in chains whom Ragnall didn’t recognise. Held by two of the praetorians was Kapiana, the woman who’d told Ragnall about the German monsters. For a normal troop address, that entire space, wall top and tower would have been populated by senior centurions and just a few praetorians. Ragnall and the rest of the clerical staff would have had to watch from behind the soldiers, hearing second- or third-hand reports of what was being said at the front. However, with most of the centurions in disgrace for believing the Gaulish rumours, Ragnall and the others had been given the positions of privilege. It gave the young Briton a buzz to look down over so many people. Especially since he’d believed the Gauls’ stories too, but seemed to have got away with it.

Gathered below, stretching from the town wall to the Roman camp, were the entire army and all the townspeople, the latter guarded by the remaining praetorians and the trustworthy tenth legion. The other five legions were arranged in their usual no-nonsense parade-ground squares. Beyond them, the hangers-on and auxiliary soldiers milled about in unruly flocks.

The tower was only three paces higher than the walkway, so Ragnall could easily see Felix’s smirk, and that Kapiana, despite her attempt at a haughtily insouciant pose, was terrified. Probably with good reason, knowing Caesar and Felix.