by Angus Watson
“Apart from you. Surely we don’t need to kill them all? Certainly not the children. I agree we need to do something, but surely there’s something else?”
“Yeah, don’t worry, I don’t want to kill them either and there is something else. It’s a bit more risky for us–actually, a lot more risky–but it means, with some luck, that we won’t have to kill any adults, let alone their kids. Don’t worry, Mal, I’m not Zadar.”
“Don’t become him.”
“I’m not planning to.”
After a quick check back over her shoulder that there were no cavalry streaming out of Haxam to chop them down, Lowa outlined her plan.
Chapter 12
Spring held her breath as the cavalry charged the demons. The drumming of German hooves shook the very air, its thundering rhythm speeding up as they approached the armoured giants. The Leathermen had spotted the attack and fallen behind their iron-clad allies.
“This is going to be interesting,” said Chamanca.
“Surely not,” Walfdan shook his head. “It will be a massacre! Surely nothing can stand for a moment against a charge like that. Watch, watch, my friends, and remember. Few have been or will ever be lucky enough to see such a thing.”
Thirty paces away, in precise unison, the cavalrymen and -women howled a shiveringly rousing battle cry and lowered their spears. The horses, already galloping as fast as Spring thought horses could gallop, sped up.
They struck.
Spears splintered. Not a single Ironman fell. Several grabbed German horses by their necks and hurled them in the air, riders and all. Beasts and people flew up, then tumbled and landed behind the Ironmen, shy of the Leathermen, who dashed about and chopped their swords into struggling people and animals.
As the Leathermen hacked the fallen Germans into chunks of meat, the heavier Roman demons went to work with their arm blades, leg blades and swords on the remainder of the cavalry, butchering horses and men.
“Spring?” said Atlas. He was standing next to her, still holding Chamanca around the waist even though she’d been unconscious only for a moment and looked fine now.
“Yes?”
“While they’re distracted?” He nodded at her bow.
It was a good point. Spring plucked an arrow from her quiver, nocked it, drew, aimed and loosed. Her target, a Leatherman who was holding a German rider by the shoulder with one hand and twisting his sword in his stomach with the other, looked up at the last moment. An arm flashed and he caught the arrow. He smiled and hurled it back. Spring stepped to the side. The arrow whizzed by and thwocked into the ground behind them. If she hadn’t moved, it would have hit her.
“They didn’t do that before,” she said.
“I suspect,” said Walfdan, “that their power comes from killing, as with much druid magic. The more they kill, the faster, stronger and more skilled they become. It is horrific.”
“So you’d better burn their route to us.” Atlas nodded at the bridge. He was still holding Chamanca. She had one palm flat on his chest and the other hand on his big bicep. Spring had seen Lowa and Dug stand like that.
“Yes, good point.” Walfdan held a torch to the pitch-soaked wood and flames raced along the bridge. And not a moment too soon. Already the famous Tengoterry cavalry were no more and the Roman demons were looking for something else to kill.
Chapter 13
With a leg up from Mal, Lowa vaulted the palisade. She landed in the shadow of one of Branwin’s bone towers and held her crouch. All was quiet. As intended, she’d crossed the fence into the town’s industrial area. Halfway between sunset and sunrise, there wasn’t a sound from the blacksmith huts, retting pool or wheel yard.
Movement caught her eye. Danu’s tits, she thought to herself. Never congratulate yourself too early. A hundred paces away along the wall, a perimeter patrol–a man and a hunting dog–were walking quietly towards her.
They’d discussed this possibility and planned for it. Lowa had said it was regretful, but if a guard had to die, so be it. But Mal had come up with another idea, which seemed even more stupid now that Lowa was about to try it.
She slipped one of the arrows he’d prepared from her quiver and nocked it, feeling foolish and shaking her head. She could only draw three-quarters because tied behind the arrowhead was the freshly butchered rib of a pig.
She shot the meaty arrow into a palisade post next to the guard. The dog yipped once then leapt at the rib, trying to wrench it out of the fence while the patrolman tried to pull him away.
Lowa tiptoe ran to them. The guard turned at the last moment and Lowa cracked him across the temple with her bow staff. He collapsed. She took the tailbone of a calf from her pouch, gave it to the dog then gagged and bound the Haxmite. She crouched for twenty heartbeats next to the guzzling dog, stroking it. Well, it had worked. If Lowa hadn’t believed that the gods were human inventions for teaching morals to children, keeping the masses in line and giving succour to the dying, she would have thanked them.
There was no sign of other guards, so Lowa left the happily gnawing hound, jogged back to where she’d leapt the palisade and coughed twice. Some splintering wrenches and a couple of snaps, and three poles were dislodged while Lowa kept guard, arrow ready. No more Haxmites came and Mal, Adler and four more of the Two Hundred crept in.
Lowa led them through the sleeping fort to Jocanta’s longhouse. Mal had thought it wouldn’t be guarded at night; Lowa had been sure it would be. She was right. Torches burnt either side of the entranceway, lighting up Jocanta’s floral throne and shining dully on the iron helmet of her champion, Yilgarn Craton. He stood peering out into the darkness, war axe in one hand.
He was big, thought Lowa, but not bright. Any useful guard would have been in the shadow, looking out into the light. Lowa waited and watched until she was sure that Yilgarn was the only sentry then gestured to the others to stay put, handed her bow to Mal and strode towards him.
“What the—?” said Yilgarn, but Lowa put her finger to her lips, unsheathed her blade then beckoned him to approach. He smiled and came. She dropped her sword onto the grass, put her right hand behind her back and tucked her fingers into the waistband of her leather trousers.
Yilgarn’s brow knitted, his lips pursed, but then he seemed to understand that she intended to take him on unarmed and one-handed. He grinned and nodded. “If that’s what you want…” he said. He danced on his toes, hair bouncing from shoulder to shoulder, flashed the axe around in a series of complicated arcs, then charged.
Lowa leant back. A decapitation blow swished through empty air and Yilgarn stumbled. He regained his footing and lifted his axe high. Lowa darted in and drove the straightened fingers of her left hand into his armpit. The Haxmite champion’s eyes flew open and he dropped the axe onto his helmet with a clang. His right arm fell to his side, useless. One hand still behind her back, Lowa chopped his windpipe with the edge of her left, then balled her fist and jabbed him on the nose, one, two, three times. He flailed at her with his remaining good arm. She grabbed it, used his momentum to bring it across his body, leapt, and powered her knee into the dead arm spot between bicep and tricep.
He stood, both arms useless, blinking at her in pain, disbelief and rage, trying to cry out, but unable to make a sound through his damaged throat.
She jabbed him twice more with her left. He staggered, blinking as she wound up a mighty uppercut then powered a fist into his jaw. He went down, out cold.
Rubbing her sore left hand, Lowa walked into the candle-lit longhouse and found Jocanta Fairtresses on a large, fur-covered bed with an older woman and a younger man. All were naked, all were asleep.
Adler and the Warriors from the Two Hundred bound and gagged them before they were fully awake. They tied the chief’s friends to the bed and the chief herself to a chair. She struggled and glared hatred.
Lowa gripped her by her lovely locks and rested the sword blade on her throat. “Jocanta, you promised me two hundred and fifty men and women, armed and a
rmoured. Tomorrow we leave. If three hundred–yes, three hundred–good Haxmite men and women have not reported to me at Maidun by the next full moon, fully equipped, then I will return, burn your fort and slaughter your tribe–man, woman, child and sheep. Nod if you understand and agree.” Jocanta nodded. “Good. And because I don’t want you to think I’m all kindness…”
Lowa pulled the hank of hair tight and sliced through its roots with her sword. She repeated the manoeuvre until there was a carpet of golden hair on the floor and only a scrub of short, uneven stubble on Jocanta Fairtresses’ outraged head.
Chapter 14
Felix stood in the meadow. Only pillars of stone remained of the bridge, jutting from the heaving, muddy water like charred bones. The river was five hundred paces from bank to bank, fully in spate with logs and whole trees bobbing along briskly on filthy mountain snowmelt. They would not be swimming across.
Standing next to him, half his height again, was Gub, leader of the Maximen. Felix had originally called them Herculeses and Nymphs, but Caesar has said he disliked such fey Greek appellations, and renamed the giants Maximen and the speedy ones Celermen. Felix thought those names were exceedingly boring, but he didn’t care enough to argue. He hadn’t argued with Caesar yet and, if he did, it would be about something that mattered. “Pick your battles” was one of the very few things he remembered his father telling him.
“Yus, Suh, four Celerman kill, all by same. Big dark man, sexy woman and archer woman,” said the Maximan, finally, in answer to Felix’s question about who’d killed the four Celermen.
“How can you know who killed them? If you were there, why didn’t you kill their killers?”
“Duh?”
“Oh, for Jupiter’s sake,” said Felix, stamping his little feet. The magic that had increased his Maximen’s size, strength and speed had unfortunately decreased their intellect. Felix guessed that the growth of their skulls had squashed their brains. The thicker the bone, the thicker the man, it seemed.
“Jupiter’s?” said the Maximan, the deep flesh on his meaty brow coalescing in confusion.
“Forget Jupiter. This dark man–in what way was he dark?”
“Guh?”
“Dark man. Dark clothes, dark hair or dark skin?”
“Dark clothes.”
“Ah.”
“And dark hair. Dark skin, too.”
“I see. And did the sexy woman have a mace and a sword?”
“Little mace. Little knife.”
“And the archer, was she a blonde-haired woman?”
“She had hair.”
“Blonde?”
“Guh?”
“Never mind. Where did they go, these three?”
Gub looked over to where the bridge had been, his face a picture of gormlessness. “Don’t know. Was different before.” He looked back to Felix. The druid swore he could see through Gub’s dark eyes right to the back of his skull.
“OK. Now get back to the others.”
“Guh?”
“Back. Home! Find Kelter and send him to me.”
“Guh?”
“Send. Kelter. The. Celerman. To. Me.”
“Gub.”
The Maximan waddled away, back to the nest or whatever one wanted to call the sordid filth holes that the giants had dug themselves amid the corpses and dereliction of the Ootipeat and Tengoterry camp. The Maximen were little more than the basest animals, until they started killing, when they became beautiful, marvellous acrobats. The Celermen also killed wonderfully well, but if anything their intelligence had been increased by their metamorphosis. It was odd, because Felix applied the same dark magic process to produce both Celermen and Maximen. He never knew which he was going to get until it was done. Usually he got a corpse. Sometimes he produced one of his mutants. So far he had forty Celermen and twenty Maximen. Caesar had banned him from making any more, and so he wouldn’t for now. It was another battle he wasn’t going to pick, not yet.
Initially he’d found the Celermen better company. You could have a conversation with a Celerman. But now he preferred the Maximen. Felix had never much enjoyed conversation and the big ones were easier to control.
He looked across the river. So, Chamanca and Atlas were still around. It was a shame his troops hadn’t caught them. Caesar would have rewarded him well for killing them after all the trouble they’d caused. By the skill it would have taken to shoot three Celermen, the archer surely had to be Lowa. That was interesting. He’d assumed that Chamanca and Atlas were working as mercenaries with the Gauls and the Germans, but if Lowa was with them it seemed like they were indeed a British effort to hamper the Roman advance. Lowa would have been a good kill, too… No matter, he thought, all three would be dead soon enough.
“Pondering your successes?”
Felix span round. It was Kelter, chief Celerman.
“Hello, boss,” he said, his accent thick Sicilian. “What’s next?” He’d stripped to the waist and removed his hood. Kelter had been a beautiful man once, with prime skin, high cheekbones, thick, dark hair and a lean, muscled body. Unfortunately, the magic that gave the Celermen speed also caused their hair to wither and fall out, and blazing red pustules constantly surfaced all over their heads, each blooming, yellowing and erupting in a few hours. The pus-spouting spots were why Felix made them wear hoods. From the neck down, they were hairless but unblemished, their torsos and limbs not far from perfect in the druid’s eyes.
“Next,” said Felix, letting his eyes stray over Kelter’s pectoral and abdominal muscles then pretending that he’d looked down because he’d seen something interesting on the ground, “we rebuild the bridge, cross it and kill everything we find: man, woman, child, dog, cat, bird–everything. The Germans will learn that Gaul is Roman territory. They will never cross the Rhenus again. When we’ve killed all we can find, we cross back and destroy our bridge.”
“There are many injured Germans in the camp,” smiled Kelter. “We can use their energy to build this bridge.”
“Good, yes. Have the Maximen gather building materials from the smashed camp–large stones, long planks of wood, rope and pottery–and bring them here.”
“Pottery?”
“To be ground and mixed with limestone for cement that will set underwater. I’ll have engineers deliver the limestone and requisite tools and show you how to make it. Have the other Celermen corral the German survivors, and appoint three in rotation to guard them from the Maximen. Keep four hundred Germans alive to power the bridge building. The rest you can kill. Got it?”
“I have it.”
“Set it in motion then, quickly.”
Chapter 15
Ragnall walked through the thriving industry of an itinerant Roman army making camp, glad that he was spared the donkey work of digging ditches and pitching tents every night. The centurions and legionaries did all that. Ragnall was officially a legate now, one of Caesar’s inner circle, upgraded from clerk. Nobody had told him what his new role was, but it seemed that he was expected to follow the army, hang around the other legates, keep quiet and simply be a British king in waiting. So he spent his waking hours marvelling at Roman efficiency and watching the scenery change as they marched across the land. It was enough to keep him busy.
Now he’d been summoned to Caesar’s tent, however, and was worried that he might be called upon to do something dangerous like going on another envoy mission. Surely Caesar wasn’t going to send him to Britain? Carden and Atlas had seen him acting as Roman envoy to King Ariovistus. If he went back to Maidun, who knew what they’d do to him?
As usual, Caesar was dictating his diary when Ragnall arrived: “So Caesar pursued the treacherous Germans to the Rhenus where he found that the bulk of their army had escaped by boat. His advisers suggested that he and his army cross in the same manner. However, travelling by boat is beneath Caesar’s dignity, so he ordered that a bridge be built. In ten days, Roman engineers and legionaries built a strong bridge across the Rhenus, forty feet wide and fi
fteen hundred feet long. Caesar crossed and spent eighteen days ravaging the land to discourage further German incursion…”
Caesar continued. Ragnall only half listened, but his ears pricked up when Caesar began describing some of the creatures that they’d found on the other side of the Rhenus. The men, he said, had reported seeing unicorns, and elk with no knees that ran along straight-legged and rested by leaning on trees. These latter creatures, the general said, his men had captured by half sawing through trees so that they broke when the elk leant on them.
These made-up tales of bizarre creatures perplexed Ragnall for a while, then he realised what the general was doing. If the rumour of a monstrous legion was the only tall story that the chattering citizens of Rome heard then they might give it some credence. If the tale of monsters was just one more unbelievable story in the fountain of nonsense spouting from fantasist legionaries in Gaul, nobody would believe it for a moment.
When he’d finished making up animals and creating the most Rome-palatable tale of the Usipetes’ and Tencteri’s destruction, Caesar sent his scribes away and turned to Ragnall.
“Stay for wine, king of the Britons. Tell Caesar more about your land.”
The slaves poured two goblets and Caesar shooed them away, ordering them to leave the amphora. Ragnall and the general sat in collapsible chairs facing each other across a small table, in front of the screens painted with pictures of the battle of Aquae Sextiae, in which Caesar’s uncle Marius had killed a hundred thousand barbarians–far fewer than Caesar’s own campaign had killed over the previous two years.
Ragnall told him about the Island of Angels, Drustan, his adventures on the floating island, his love affair with Lowa, the death of Zadar and more. All the while Caesar kept refilling Ragnall’s goblet, but never his own. Ragnall, excited to be alone with the great leader and to be telling his own story, drank heartily.
Halfway through the fifth or possibly the sixth goblet, Ragnall found himself saying: “So these rumours about Felix’s dark legion… they’re true, right? They attacked the Germans?”