Reign of Iron
Authors: Angus Watson
Spring 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.
Angus Watson
is an author and journalist living in London. He’s written hundreds of features for many newspapers including
The
Times
,
Financial Times
and the
Telegraph
, and the latter even sent him to look for Bigfoot. As a fan of both historical fiction and epic fantasy, Angus came up with the idea of writing a fantasy set in the Iron Age when exploring British hillforts for the
Telegraph
, and developed the story while walking Britain’s ancient paths for further articles. You can find him on Twitter at
@GusWatson
or find his website at
www.guswatson.com
.
Find out more about Angus Watson and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at
Y
A
NGUS
W
ATSON
Age of Iron trilogy
Age of Iron
Clash of Iron
Reign of Iron
COPYRIGHT
Published by Orbit
ISBN: 9781405528511
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Angus Watson
Excerpt from
Blood Song
by Anthony Ryan
Copyright © 2011 by Anthony Ryan
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Orbit
An imprint of Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
Contents
Part One: Britain and Gaul – 56 and 55
BC
Part Two: Britain and Gaul – Late Summer 55
BC
Part Three: Britain, Rome and Gaul – 55/54
BC
For David, Penny, Camilla and Christo
BC
A
s shipwrecks went, it was undramatic. Arguing over whether the basking shark a hundred yards to starboard was larger than the basking shark that they’d seen earlier, the two lookouts failed to spot a granite megalith, relic of a town drowned by the sea many years before, which brooded a couple of hands’ breadth beneath the sparkling surface. The cargo vessel rolled up on a gentle wave, crunched down onto the rock, scraped along horribly for a few heartbeats, then sailed on. A hundred paces later, the deck was sloping unnaturally and the captain shouted the order to lower the sail. Water lapped over the starboard gunwale, curses and pleas rang out from the cargo below deck and the ship tilted more worryingly. There was an island ever nearby, but waves exploded all along its cliff-fringed coastline.
Still young Titus Pontius Felix didn’t understand that anything was particularly amiss. The cargo was always yelling and, according to stories that a string of nannies had told him, ships sank in storms. Today was sunny, so he was sure that everything was all right and the grown-ups would swiftly resolve the problem. Only when he heard a voice below shout in broken Latin: “
Chains take off! Bel-cursed stinkenshits! Sinken we! Sinken! We are sinken!
” did the six-year-old who’d grow up to be King Zadar’s and Julius Caesar’s druid grasp what was going on.
“Crew and passengers to the tenders!” shouted the Iberian captain, fists on hips, red-bearded face split by a foul-toothed grin. “She’s going down like a Roman boy on his tutor!”
Felix didn’t know what he meant but he did not like the man’s tone. Surely a shipwreck was a time for seriousness? His father clearly agreed. “It is
not
going down!” he shouted, short arms flapping as he struggled to keep his feet on the slanting deck. “We
cannot
be sinking. Do you have
any concept
of the cargo’s value?”
“I do. I can give you an exact price for your wares,” said the Iberian. He was almost twice Felix’s father’s height. “Considering the current market, our situation and the condition of the goods, the entire cargo comes to the princely sum of … precisely fuck-all. Nobody buys drowned slaves.”
“We’re not sinking. You cannot sink. All my money is in that hold. My whole life! You will get us to a beach or a port or … please!”
The captain laughed. “Poseidon and his arse own these waves and today he floated one of his mighty shits in our direction. It happens. The boat’s going down. We could free your cargo, but they are many, they are desperate and there’s no room for them in the tenders. Best for everyone if they remain chained.” The captain raised his already loud voice to be heard above the screams from below deck. “Buck up, man, you’ll make more money! Life is always more valuable than cargo.”
Felix’s father raved until he was purple, then went with the others. Felix followed him to the side of the ship and watched him climb down into the tender. Because of the ship’s list it was even further down to the water than normal, and the little swell-swayed boat was banging hard against the ship’s exposed, slippery-looking underside. Felix couldn’t see how he would get down there and was frightened. The captain noticed his plight and climbed back up to help him.
As they rowed away, his father looked very ill. “All my money,” he said, staring at the sinking ship, tears dripping off his chin. The others found this very amusing and Felix hated them for it.
Shortly afterwards, they found a break in the cliffs. Once they’d pulled the boats up a bright beach fringed by shattered white rock and gnarled, scrubby trees, a few dozen terrifying men and women strolled from cover and laid into the crew with blades and clubs, slaughtering the lot of them apart from Felix, his father, two women and the captain. These latter three seemed to be friends of the attackers. All of them turned to look at the Romans.
“Don’t kill me! Take the boy!” Felix’s father’s wailed, cowering behind his son. A man whose face was mostly moustache pulled Felix away and held him tight while others cut off his father’s toga and sandals. Laughing all the while, they jostled the newly naked Roman towards a flint-eyed, bronze-skinned woman with long, black hair. She peeled off her own clothes, then charged. Felix’s father tried to run but she caught him, tripped him and leapt onto him, all to the cheers of the pirates. His dad clawed at her pinning legs and pummelled her torso with little fists. She held him firm, ignored his attacks, punched his face until his nose was pulped and he was moaning and useless, then strangled him until he juddered like a caught fish and was still.
Felix followed the pirates back to their port. He didn’t know what else to do. They ignored him but let him eat their food. He found a place to sleep in a tent with four other children who didn’t seem to mind him being there, but who didn’t talk to him either.
He spent the days wandering the island on his own, killing insects, lizards and any other animals that he could catch. The killing made him feel good.
One day he climbed down a low cliff to a small beach on the east of the island and found a string of large rock pools. He smashed some limpets to lure crabs from the safety of their mini caves, then set to investigating how many legs they could lose before becoming unable to walk. He was so engrossed in his studies that he didn’t notice the small wooden boat with a white sail until it had bobbed nearly all the way to shore. He stood to watch as its bow wedged into sand and wavelets slapped its stern.
Little Felix couldn’t see anyone in it, so he left his crabs and ambled over to find what the mysterious vessel might contain. It contained a dead woman. He screamed.
He recovered and wondered if his delimbed crabs would like human flesh. He put one on her chest, another on her face. Her head moved. She wasn’t dead! She caught the face crab in her mouth and bit through its shell. Felix felt rather than heard a whoosh! and something very odd flowed out of the woman, washing over him like water, but it wasn’t water. It made him tingle but it wasn’t hot or cold. He’d never felt anything like it before, yet the sensation was familiar.
The woman groaned, sat, plucked the other crab from her chest and dashed it against the side of the boat. That seemed to energise her. She stood, flicked dried seagull shit off her salt-whitened black robe, jumped out of the boat and looked at him. She was very old – as old as his dad had been – with curly black and silver hair, black eyes, full, salt-cracked lips and a nose like a misshapen pear. She raised a hand as if to strike him, then smiled and lowered her arm.
“Thank you, little man,” she’d said, although she was not much taller than him. “Are your parents nearby?”
He didn’t know what to say.
She peered at him and he felt uncomfortable, then she said: “No parents? No matter, mothers and fathers never helped anyone much. Just tell me everything you know about this place and
please
don’t tell me we’re on an island.”
“We
are
on an island.”
“Oh cat’s piss,” she said and Felix giggled. “Tell me what you know about the island then. How big is it? Who else is on it? Why are you here?”
Felix told her everything. He asked her where she’d come from, but she told him only that her name was Thaya and asked if he knew anywhere safe from the pirates where she might rest and recover. He said he’d found a secret cave under a waterfall on the south of the island, near the ruined Cyclops temple. She asked him to lead her to it and he did.
She gave him a funny look when she saw the pile of small animal corpses on a rock a little way into the cave, but didn’t say anything.
He didn’t tell anybody else about Thaya, not because it was a secret but because he never spoke to anyone else. The next day he took her food, and the next and the next, until he noticed that she hadn’t eaten any of it. He carried on visiting her, though. He didn’t have anything else to do and he liked being away from the others.