Reign of Iron: Iron Age Trilogy: Book Three

by Angus Watson

“Great directions! Thanks!”

  “You’re welcome.” He walked off, then stopped, pointed seawards and up at the sun again, and nodded to himself again before walking on, a satisfied jaunt in his step.

  Spring headed off, weaving between the tents. Lowa had told her once that men’s love of giving directions was so strong that it could override all other senses. It looked like she’d been right. Lowa was always right. She should have come and seen Spring after Dug had died, though. Having thought that, Lowa had had an army to build and a big collection of tribes to run. It wasn’t a good excuse, but Spring was beginning to accept that it was, at least, an excuse, and just maybe she shouldn’t have hated Lowa for putting the needs of the entire land before the wants of one girl.

  At first Chamanca thought it was one of Felix’s monsters coming along the road towards her–he was walking as if burdened by improbably heavy armour–but when he got closer she saw that it was just a man with bad knees trying to walk as fast as he could.

  She pulled up ahead of him. “Have you seen a short, bald man with a sneer on his face?” she asked.

  His upside-down Roman-five-shaped eyebrows danced as he blinked at her. “More balding than bald?” he said, “with hair round the back of his head? Cocky fucker?”

  “That’s him.”

  “I’ve got him!”

  “You’ve got him?”

  “Tied up in my house. He appeared out of nowhere and tried to knife me. I knocked him out and tied him up. I was coming to tell good Queen Lowa.”

  “Good Queen Lowa?”

  “That’s what we call her round here. She is good.”

  You don’t know her like I know her, thought Chamanca, but she let it go. “Where is your house?”

  “A way back that way on the road. You can’t miss it.”

  “Is there anybody guarding him?”

  “Not really. My daughter Autumn’s there but I’ve told her not to touch him and I reckon he’ll be out cold until I get back anyway.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Five.”

  Oh fuck, thought Chamanca, closing her eyes.

  “What?” said the man. His widening eyes and his creasing brow pressed his jiggling eyebrows into motionlessness.

  “Nothing. Nothing to worry about. But I have to go now.” She dug her heels into her horse and willed it to gallop as fast as it could. After a hundred paces she turned. The man was following her, arms swinging, coming as fast as his stiff-legged gait would carry him.

  Spring thought about crouching between tents and waiting until Caesar emerged from his, but then decided that standing in plain sight was probably a more effective way of hiding.

  “Spring!” cried a woman’s voice, instantly proving her wrong. It was Clodia, loping towards her. For an urbane socialite, Clodia had a very rural stride. She wore an almost obscenely short, belted white toga, and her long brown hair was hanging free. The skin on her bare arms, legs and face was the same colour as her hair. She had spent a good deal of time in the sun since Spring had last seen her.

  “What are you doing here?” she called, still a good ten paces away.

  Spring smiled.

  “Of course, you can’t speak Latin, can you?”

  Spring looked back uncomprehendingly. Clodia had been talking to a knot of toga-wearers who were now staring. All the nearby praetorians and normal legionaries had also turned at her call.

  “Come with me into Caesar’s tent. He’d like to see you, I’m sure, and there’s a translator there so we’ll be able to have a good talk. Gaulish is the same as British, isn’t it? I’d love to hear what you’ve been up to. But what are you wearing? That’s a man’s toga. And it’s dirty. You can’t see Caesar like that. Come back with me to my place and we’ll find something proper…” She lowered her voice, so that the watchers wouldn’t hear. “Wait a moment, is that blood on your hem? Are you hurt? You look scared. Are you lost? Come on, take my hand.” She reached out.

  Spring leant away, and, because she was a complete idiot, dropped the knife. She squatted immediately and picked it up, but Clodia had seen it. She took a step back, opened her eyes wide in surprise, but not shock. She looked as if she’d just caught her preparing a thrillingly daring but harmless jape. Spring immediately thought of running, but there were several praetorians watching and an assortment of other Romans blocking her escape.

  “Oh, Spring!” She looked about to check that nobody had come within earshot. “You naughty girl! And to think I was going to take you right in there!” She gasped and shook her head, mouth wide. “I can’t let you kill Caesar, you wicked thing. Now, come with me to my tent, and you can tell me what’s happened.”

  The child was simply the most winning little creature that Felix had ever met. He genuinely thought that, he wasn’t pretending. He could almost feel tears developing at the thought of killing her. Which was great–such affection for his victim should fuel his return to Gaul easily.

  “Why don’t you make Felix the dog chase Spring the sheep?”

  “Dogs aren’t meant to chase sheep, silly! They’re naughty if they do.”

  “Maybe Felix is a naughty dog?”

  “No! He’s a good dog.”

  “Tell you what, why don’t you bring the sheep and the dog over here, sit on my knee, and I’ll sing you a song all about the day that the sheep decided that enough was enough and it was time for the sheep to chase the naughty dog for a change.”

  She nodded and skipped over to him.

  Felix thought he could feel his heart breaking, which made him very happy.

  Chapter 12

  The forest road emerged from the trees and curled up a grassy hill to the palisaded Branwin village. A couple of the Aurochs tribe heading for the woods with empty wicker baskets stared at Atlas as if they’d never seen a huge African with an axe on his back, then seemed to remember their manners and greeted him and Ula cheerily. Four aurochs near the road looked up as they approached, didn’t find Atlas nearly so interesting and returned to their grazing.

  From a distance the grazing aurochs looked like standard cows. Up close they were more impressive: immensely muscled, so tall that they were almost at eye level with Atlas on his horse, and with great horns that swept forwards, as if designed for charging headlong and ramming into the side of an elephant. Atlas found himself nodding. They weren’t nearly as big as elephants, maybe a quarter of the weight, but size wasn’t everything in a fight, as Chamanca proved so very often.

  Outside the wooden village wall was the blacksmithing complex built for Maidun’s master smith, Elann Nancarrow. It lay in a hollow that hid it from view until you were right on it, although the smoke pouring up from five forges had given away its location as soon as they cleared the trees. There were smiths at each forge, including Elann at one of them, several leatherworkers and others carrying out the various tasks that contributed to the production of the beasts’ armour. At the edge of the thronging industry were several large, neat stacks of shaped plate iron and dozens of elongated conical horn tips.

  Atlas caught Elann’s eye and raised a hand in greeting. She looked at him briefly and he was fairly sure she nodded before returning to her work.

  “Doesn’t exactly gush with emotion, Elann Nancarrow,” said Ula as they rode on towards the settlement’s open gates.

  “No, but she’s the best smith.”

  “Her son Weylin came to Kanawan once. He wasn’t the brightest.”

  “He wasn’t, but Kanawan captured him and he escaped. What does that say about Kanawan?”

  Ula chuckled. “Fair point.”

  Atlas thought back to the day Weylin had arrived on Maidun Castle, lied about what had happened at Kanawan and been executed by Chamanca on Zadar’s orders. Atlas and Weylin’s brother Carden had sat and watched while Chamanca strangled him. They’d all excused themselves their behaviour under Zadar because they’d decided that Felix had put them under a glamour to do Zadar’s bidding.

  It was a convenien
t excuse that made sense, but Atlas wondered sometimes if it was true. He, Carden, Chamanca, Lowa–all of them–had complacently murdered dozens of men and women at Zadar’s command. He hadn’t felt like his mind was under anyone else’s control at the time. However, it did seem unbelievable that Carden had been able to watch the slaying of his brother so impassively unless he’d been under some sort of magic control, and none of his friends now seemed like keen murderers (apart from Chamanca).

  But did that mean that they were being controlled by Felix’s magic when they’d sacked towns or attacked inferior forces knowing it would be a massacre? Or were groups of people capable of atrocities because other people’s complicity normalises one’s own behaviour? The legions murdering their way through Gaul were surely not under any glamour. If you plucked any one of them away from his mates, Atlas reckoned, and asked him if the legions’ relentless rape and murder was acceptable, he would probably have broken down and repented. Atlas was sure that most individuals weren’t inherently evil. But when everyone around you was doing evil things, maybe that became the norm and…

  “Ah, here you are now!” An Eroo accent snapped him from his reverie. Ula slipped from her horse, skipped up to the woman walking towards them, gripped her arm and kissed her full on the lips. It was like watching a teenage girl greeting an exciting new boyfriend of whom she was fiercely proud.

  Manfreena smiled at Atlas. Her eyes were so close together that it made him blink, her skin so white it was surely a little blue, her grey hair patchy, her two remaining teeth black with rot, and her large ears jutted at right angles from her head. Villagers all around smiled indulgently at the couple then up at Atlas.

  Something, he thought, was wrong. It was possible that a beauty like Ula could be smitten with a woman who’d win the ugliest old crone competition at most fairs, and it was possible that the villagers were all very happy about it–their tribe’s god Branwin was the goddess of love and this was her forest, after all. It was incredibly unlikely, but it was possible.

  But what clinched it for Atlas, what made him sure that there was something extremely odd afoot, was that he’d seen Manfreena before. When the Eroo army had landed on the beach two years before, shortly before the Fassites had followed and slaughtered Atlas’ men and women, a druid had danced a jig to curse the Maidunites. This was the same woman; Queen Reena of Eroo, druid wife of the tyrant Manfrax, who was meant to have perished under the Spring Tide.

  Spring sat on a prettily tasselled chair in Clodia’s tent, centrepiece of Clodia’s own little fenced camp, and told her what had happened since the wedding, leaving out what she’d done to Quintus, then asked her what she was doing. The socialite explained that she had been allowed to follow the army with her own little legion of slaves and guards in return for a whopping donation to Caesar’s war chest.

  “Being decadently rich doesn’t solve all your problems,” Clodia explained, “but it does make life more interesting.” Spring considered that she’d got to the same place without spending any coins, or owning any of the other goods like salt and lumps of iron that were money back in Britain, but didn’t mention it. “But, anyway, that’s enough of me going on about myself. We’d better get you back to Ragnall.”

  “Couldn’t you…?

  “What?”

  “Let me escape? Help me get back to Britain?”

  The big eyes again. “Oh, no. Everyone notices me, Spring, and about a thousand people saw me with you. If you disappear now I’ll be in trouble. Besides, you’re assuming that I’m your ally. I am not. I’m a Roman and you’re a Roman captive. You’re my captive. I have recaptured you. I’m really in the army now. Thrilling, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t think it’s that thrilling.”

  “Oh, don’t sulk. Come on, let’s go.”

  She stood up and Spring followed in her floral-scented wake.

  The feeling that Felix was nearby evaporated shortly after Chamanca had set off up the road from his captor. She guessed what that meant, but refused to acknowledge it. She galloped the horse as hard as it would go, without a thought for the return journey. She arrived at what had to be the place–a solitary blacksmith’s dwelling–leapt off and sprinted into the hut, sword in hand. The short blade was more useful in enclosed spaces than her ball-mace.

  She’d known what she’d find and she found it. Felix was gone. Autumn was dead.

  She’d seen thousands of corpses, made hundreds of them herself. But this one hit her, even though she’d never seen her alive. Little Autumn, the innocent girl with no involvement in all this British and Roman nonsense, had had her life cut short before it had really begun. The comparison with Spring was obvious. It was more than the name. Just a bit older, and Autumn would have had Spring’s nous and she wouldn’t have gone near Felix. But the gods, presumably, had decided that they didn’t give a fuck about letting little Autumn grow any older.

  Chamanca picked up the girl and laid her on the bed. It wasn’t difficult to make her look comfortable and she hoped that somehow this would soften the blow for the blacksmith returning to find his murdered daughter. There wasn’t a mark on her because, Chamanca guessed, Felix had suffocated her. That would have been a frightening way to die… She shook her head and left the hut.

  The blacksmith was already in sight, marching up the road towards his misery, straight-legged, arms swinging. He was fast, despite his handicap.

  Chamanca looked up to the blue sky. “By Makka the god of war, Fenn the god of fear and Danu the mother, I swear I will avenge this girl and all those innocents killed by the druid Felix. No matter what comes in my way, no matter what pain it might cause me, I will kill Felix and I will ensure that he suffers much, much more than that poor little girl.”

  Chapter 13

  By the time Felix reached the assembly outside Caesar’s tent the general had worked himself into a frenzied but eloquent stream of oration. His freshly built wooden speaking platform was squeaking under bouncing heels as he waved his arms and elucidated his plans to the plume-helmeted generals, senior centurions and toga-wearing legates. In between the dramatic language and heroic claims, Felix heard that two legions were to stay in Gaul under command of Titus Labienus, and six legions–almost thirty thousand infantry–along with two thousand cavalrymen and their horses, were to cross the Channel, leaving at sunset that very day. The previous year’s reconnaissance had identified the perfect place to land and make camp under protection of the warships.

  If anyone took exception to the word “reconnaissance” to describe the previous year’s aborted invasion, they didn’t show it.

  “What about the elephants?” someone muttered.

  Caesar peered about to see who had spoken, but couldn’t. “The few elephants that you may have seen are here as an aid to the engineers. They are not war elephants.” A few eyebrows were raised. Everyone had heard the story of the elephant pulping a merchant and splintering his ship. “Each of the beasts can bear the burden of twenty oxen, so we are testing their use as siege weapon transporters, camp constructors and builders of bridges. They are not to be described at any point, by anyone, as war elephants. This will be a victory for Roman men, not African animals. In fact, given that Caesar has employed the animals on a temporary basis as a favour to a friend, they will not be recorded as part of the Roman force.”

  Felix smiled. He knew about Jagganoch and his elephants. During his war with the pirates a decade before, Pompey had captured a pirate king from the Yonkari empire. The Yonkari had conquered much land in Africa but few Roman explorers had reached it because it was beyond the near impassable sand sea. Pompey had taken a liking to the pirate, or, more specifically, to his descriptions of man-eating war elephants larger and fiercer than any Roman had seen before, and freed him on the understanding that he’d send back his son Jagganoch with a herd of the beasts. Pompey had never expected to see the elephants–he had so much booty that he didn’t care–but the king had been true to his word and some time later Prince Jaggano
ch of the Yonkari had arrived at one of Pompey’s estates with a crowd of slaves, a squad of elephant Warriors and forty armoured war elephants, which, going by the descriptions of history, were indeed larger and fiercer than Hannibal’s elephants that the Romans had faced a hundred and seventy years before, and the Persian animals that Alexander had defeated and then employed a couple of hundred years before that. They were also more trouble.

  Pompey kept the elephants on his estate, but had been astonished at their expense; not so much their food, which was far from cheap, but the cost of the damage. As well as destroying buildings, they killed and ate horses, oxen, slaves and anything else that Jagganoch considered might be useful to their training. However, because Pompey was such a joker, as part of the previous year’s wranglings between him, Crassus and Caesar about how they were going to share the leadership of Rome, Pompey had insisted that Caesar take the elephants on his next campaign as a condition of the deal that allowed him free rein north of Italy. Caesar had escaped his pledge the year before, but Pompey had cornered him that winter and he’d been unable to wriggle out of it.

  So they had the elephants. While others had complained of the murder of a merchant on the beach, Felix guessed that Caesar had been encouraged by it and decided that he would definitely take Jagganoch and his troop across to Britain. However, he had sensibly decided to keep the Africans and their elephants in their own camp, clear of the legionaries. It was fine to kill the odd merchant, but if the elephants started stomping on Romans then even Caesar’s fiercely loyal troops might have complained.

  The general finished his briefing, asked if there were any questions in a tone that made it clear that there would be no questions, and beckoned Felix to follow him into his tent.

  “This is a glorious day,” said Caesar, pouring water from a long-necked bronze jug into a plain wooden cup. “Tell Caesar the state of your legion.”

  “The thirty-five Celermen and twenty Maximen are in full health and are ready to sail. I myself found a way of travelling to—”