Age of Iron

by Angus Watson

  The night was old by the time they heard the shouts of Zadar’s messaging system. Dug didn’t catch the exact words, but “Lowa” was definitely one of them.

  “We’ll be safe where we’re going,” she said as the echo died.

  “But they’ll hear the shout. Whatever it was.”

  “‘To all. Capture Lowa Flynn and companions. Help Weylin Nancarrow,’” muttered Spring.

  “It doesn’t matter if they do hear it,” said Lowa. “We’ll be safe. We’ve nearly reached a village called Kanawan. It’s run by a friend of mine. We can lie low with him until Zadar stops searching for us and relaxes his guard.”

  The idea of lying low with Lowa appealed to Dug. Relaxation, he’d always thought, was most enjoyable when it was forced upon you so it didn’t feel like indolence; like the time he’d broken a leg and couldn’t do anything apart from lie in the sun, drink cider, eat and watch the world go by. But he didn’t like the sound of this friend much.

  Some while later the eastern sky began to pink behind them. Colour suffused the hills, meadows and trees so softly and sweetly that Dug almost had to blink back a tear at the beauty of it all. So quietly that he could hardly hear it at first, Spring began to sing.

  A formori is a fearsome beast,

  With purple fur and rows of teeth.

  Don’t you ever hit it with a sword,

  Cos it’ll rip off your prick

  And chew on your balls.

  Dug assessed his two new companions. Lowa rode in front, head up, more like a hero setting out on a quest and still within view of his tribe than a woman who’d been riding all day and night. Next to him Spring lolled into sleep then jerked awake with a snort. A strange child and a beautiful, skilfully vicious young woman. By all the badgers’ arses in Britain, what was he doing? Three days before he’d been on his way to sign up with Zadar’s army for a lifetime of remunerated sloth. Now he was a fugitive fleeing Zadar’s army out of choice, and he’d managed to adopt a child by mistake.

  Yet helping Lowa seemed the decent thing to do, and it had been a while since he’d done the decent thing. Brinna would approve. He wasn’t helping her because she was achingly attractive. It was nothing to do with the way that she made him feel like the king of the world every time she spoke to him. And the girl? He liked her. When he’d left her, it was because he couldn’t bear being responsible for her. Now, it wasn’t just that she was perfectly capable of looking after herself. There was something special about her. The gods clearly loved her no matter what Lowa said about coincidence. He felt honoured that she seemed to have chosen him to hang around with.

  He looked from one to the other. He’d travelled with innumerable companions over the years – great Warriors, hilarious bards, fascinating men and women – but he could never remember being as happy as he was with these two. It’s odd, he thought, where life leads you.

  Pale dawn lightened into blue morning sky. The road crested a hill to reveal a thriving agricultural valley. Clusters of round huts, triangular grain stores and other buildings lay either side of a grey river. A patchwork of fields was outlined by a network of stone walls and wooden fences. Some fields were given to corn, flax or oats, others were pastures containing pigs, sheep, cattle and horses. On the far side of the valley the road climbed to a small hillfort. There was no sign of life on the fort, so it looked like everyone was down in the village, not expecting any trouble.

  Chapter 2

  Weylin didn’t like him. He had no ears but seemed to be able to hear. That was freaky. If you block your ears you can’t hear, so how can you hear if you don’t have any? He’d have to ask Felix. The druid was sure to have chopped someone’s ears off at some point to see what happened. Deaf or not, the squat, tough-looking man had an attack-first-and-don’t-ask-questions-ever air about him. There were plenty of aggressive twats like that in the Maidun army. Weylin had found that one, it was best not to upset them, and two, they tended to upset easily.

  He’d been asking in Bladonfort for information on Lowa Flynn. Annoyingly, the story of the day before had got about and he was getting more questions than answers. Who was she? Where had she learned to use a bow like that? Who’d made the bow? Who was the strong man who’d smashed the bridge? Had he heard about the child who’d outwitted Zadar’s best? The last question was asked by people, he was pretty sure, who knew that it was he who the child had outwitted. Their mockery made him yearn to torture information out of them, but he believed that they didn’t know anything more than he did about Lowa, and he didn’t have the time for pointless torture. He had the inclination for it though. He resolved to return, find everyone who’d disrespected him that morning and make them regret it.

  Down in the lower market Savage Banba had brought the man Ogre to him. She’d been the first person he’d picked to make up his twenty-strong pursuit group, more because he wanted to sleep with her than for her fighting skills. She hadn’t seemed particularly impressed. In fact to get her to come at all, he’d needed to tell her that he was working directly for Zadar and to talk to him if she had a problem. No matter. He’d show her.

  He stood close to Ogre, almost shouting over the din of the bustling market.

  “You’re sure it was Lowa Flynn?”

  “Smallish, blonde hair, shoots a bow like Kornonos?”

  “That’s her.”

  “Travelling with a man and a child.”

  “Possibly.”

  “She killed my dogs. I want compensation.”

  Weylin stared at the man with loathing. Ogre looked back, small eyed, thin lips turned down at the corners in an inverse smile. Compensation. How he hated people who blamed everything on everybody else, who couldn’t accept that accidents happened. He’d lost his fucking wife yesterday. He didn’t need compensation. Revenge, yes. Gold or some other kind of unrelated reparation, no. He stifled an urge to headbutt the man.

  “You can get your ‘compensation’ from Flynn when we find her. Tell me all you know about where she was heading.”

  “Nah.” Ogre put his hands on his hips. The corner of his lips rose into a smile, but there was no mirth in it, only derision and challenge.

  “No?”

  “Happens I’d like to catch up with her myself. Like you said, I need to collect my compensation for the dogs. I’ll tell you where she went when we get there.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll come with you on your hunt. I can help you because I know which way she went.” Ogre enunciated each word as if talking to a simpleton. Behind him his two henchmen grinned toothlessly. Their leader was teasing the Warrior, and they were loving it.

  Weylin’s head hurt. He’d managed to turn another conversation into a battle and, yet again, he was losing. How did other people manage to talk to each other so easily? Fuck it he thought. He’d take the earless thug and his two skinny men with him. He didn’t want to overstate Lowa’s skills – he could have definitely taken her in a fair fight – but having twenty-three people under his command would be better than twenty, and anyway the chances of a fair fight were very slim. He’d kill these three when he found her, or maybe Lowa and that fucker Dug would do the job for him.

  “All right. But you’re going to do what I say, and we take Flynn unharmed. Got it? I report directly to Zadar. You do not want to fuck with me.”

  Ogre looked him up and down. “You’re right. I wouldn’t think that anyone would want a fuck with you.” Everyone laughed apart from Weylin. “But seriously,” Ogre continued, “you can trust me, my friend.”

  When Weylin and his brother were children – he must have been about six years old and Carden ten – they’d swum in the sea. They’d gone to the coast with another family. Their mother, Elann the blacksmith, had as usual been too busy to come. “Swim between my legs!” Carden had said. Weylin did everything Carden told him to, so he’d taken a breath and dived down. Carden had closed his legs and trapped him. He’d thought it was a joke at first, but then Carden hadn’t let him go. He remembered
as if it were yesterday the moment when he’d realised Carden was trying to kill him. When his struggles had weakened, Carden had opened his legs and pulled him to the surface. “Learn a lesson, Weylin,” Carden had said as Weylin gasped in sweet air. “Never trust anyone.”

  And he never had.

  “Why do you want Flynn?” he asked Ogre.

  “Like I already said twice. Compensation for the dogs.”

  Weylin looked down at the stout criminal, then looked around. About ten of his own troops had gathered behind him while they were talking.

  “Tell me what you want out of this—” Weylin leaned down and spoke directly into Ogre’s puckered earlump “—or I’ll cut you down here.”

  Ogre stepped back, palms spread in supplication but still smiling smugly.

  “All right. I want the girl who’s with them. She’s my daughter. I’d let her go – cocky little bitch she is, more trouble than she’s worth – but the wife wants her back.”

  So he wanted the girl that Zadar wanted. That was decided then. He’d definitely have to kill Ogre when he’d served his purpose.

  “All right, my friend, I will trust you.” He put a hand on Ogre’s shoulder. “Lead the way.”

  Chapter 3

  Drustan bought them places on a guarded caravan heading south-west to Dumnonia. They joined around twenty merchants and ten guards. The latter were swivel-eyed men and women, armed and armoured as if they were expecting the war with the gods to restart at any moment.

  Despite the good roads, with several wagonloads of wares that had to be unloaded and displayed wherever anyone might have a coin or two, progress was halting through the strangely mixed landscape of southern Britain. In the first few places they passed, Drustan told Ragnall that little had changed since his last time on this road a decade before. Children and dogs ran out of prosperous villages and towns to greet the convoy, and the merchants laid out their wares for well dressed healthy-looking inhabitants. In other places Zadar’s destructive tentacles were obvious. In the afternoon they passed several shattered, deserted farmsteads and then a village where they were stared at by moon-eyed peasants only a few missed meals from starvation. The wagons rolled straight on through these shabbier places while the merchants carried on conversations and looked at the road ahead.

  “So go the whims of Zadar,” said one of the merchants called Simshill when a particularly grim village’s last broken hovel was safely behind them. Simshill was an even-featured woman about thirty years old, with tight leather trousers. She had the sleekest black horse and the most alluring come-get-me eyes that Ragnall had ever seen.

  He’d heard of this new class of tradespeople. There had always been itinerant merchants, but they tended to be eccentric lone operators, trundling about the country with a wagonload of goods for barter. They were travellers foremost, keen to see the world or escape a particular part of it. The exchange of goods was a means to that end. Ragnall had heard that nowadays merchants were less travellers and more horders, as obsessed with the accumulation of gold as dragons. Melancholy after his string of tragedies as well as prejudiced against these coin grubbers, Ragnall didn’t seek their conversation, but it was unavoidable. He was surprised to find that, for the most part, they were decent men and women whose motives seemed to be a mixture of enjoying themselves and improving the lot of their families. There was one unpleasantly opinionated man who thought he knew best and spoke over everyone else, but that was heartening because, as Drustan pointed out, every group needs its twat, and if you’re in a group of people and there isn’t a twat, then it’s you.

  He’d heard plenty of tales of far-off places on the Island of Angels, but the tales the merchants told were different because they were from an adult world and because most of them were about Zadar. On their first night at an inn the merchants outdid each other with tales of Maidun army atrocities. Some of them were truly horrific. Ragnall’s resolve to bring the tyrant down was stiffened. To Ragnall’s surprise, Simshill’s glances and smiles were having something of a stiffening effect on him too. For the first time ever he was tempted to be unfaithful to Anwen, just days after finding his brothers and parents dead.

  “Ah yes,” said Drustan when Ragnall told him about his unbidden lust. “Grief is not as simple as we would like. Before we experience it, we imagine it will be as sluice gates that drop, shutting off all flows of joy and turning us into woe-weighted living dead. In fact, after grief bludgeons its way into their lives, everyone apart from the most self-indulgent posturers who don’t need to work every day to provide food – kings, druids and bards, for example – find themselves carrying on very much as before. The mundane acts of existence temper grief more than kind words or fine philosophy.

  “So, despite ourselves, very shortly after bereavement we laugh, enjoy food and yes, develop carnal fantasies. The latter is particularly common. I suspect it’s because emotions have been stripped raw, allowing previously suppressed, baser instincts to surface. If I had a sheep for every grieving girl who had offered herself to me after I said words for her dead father … I would have four sheep. Perhaps four and a half.”

  The old man was right, he was sure, but Ragnall was determined to be neither happy nor horny. He was an iron-jawed hero out for revenge, with no time for frivolous humour or giddy fantasising. But his thoughts kept returning to Simshill.

  “Of course that is one way in which we will be better off once the Romans get here.”

  Drustan was still talking.

  Ragnall perked up. “The Romans?”

  “Yes. In Rome and in their empire, woman have a subservient role to men. They are treated in a similar fashion to our horses or dogs.”

  “What?”

  “Women’s lives are better under Roman rule. They don’t have to fight in armies. They don’t have to train as smiths or jewellers. They don’t have to face the same challenges as our women do.”

  “Don’t have to?”

  “Well, are prohibited from.”

  “They don’t fight?”

  “There are women neither in the Roman legions nor among the auxiliaries taken from the people they conquer.”

  “So men do all the work?”

  “Men do the mentally taxing and dangerous work. Women do other tasks. They work the fields and dig for minerals, but men oversee building, govern every settlement, run all martial matters and so on.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yes. It is a better system.”

  “I’m not sure…”

  “And of course men marry, but in Rome it’s laughable that a man should be faithful to one woman. They can sleep with any woman they find attractive – friend’s wives and daughters, slave girls, and prostitutes of course. Under Roman rule you could enjoy three days of lust with Simshill, and nobody would think that it diminished your love for Anwen. Anwen included.”

  “That’s outrageous,” said Ragnall. But he did see some benefits in the Roman approach.

  On the third day, when they’d travelled only about fifteen miles in total, they arrived in an idyllic-looking village. Ragnall particularly liked the ancient bench that encircled an even more ancient oak tree in the centre of the green. The merchants set out their wares around it. He sat on the bench for a while, watching the villagers file past the trestle tables of goods. As the morning passed, he found himself taking a look at his travelling companions’ merchandise for the first time.

  He’d expected lucky charms, hair-growth potions, statues of gods, woollen scarfs and so on. In fact, it was mostly second-hand, everyday belongings. There were weapons, farming equipment, an ivory comb with several teeth missing, a three-legged wooden dog with nails for eyes, several rusty daggers, a great blade on a pole and other mixed oddments.

  He wandered away and found Drustan lying on a grassy bank by their horses, studying the blue sky. His white hair and beard were bright in the sun. Ragnall shooed away the horsefly that was circling his old teacher’s head and sat down on the grass.

  “
Have you seen the merchants’ wares?”

  Drustan started up onto one elbow and blew air out between his teeth. He looked troubled. “You are wondering where the merchants find their goods.”

  “What?” Ragnall looked at Drustan. Drustan looked back. “Where do they get them?’’

  “The merchant’s wares come from battlefields and sacked villages,” Drustan said in exactly the same tone he’d used earlier that morning to explain why only an idiot would build a windmill when a watermill was possible.

  “They’re bodyrobbers!”

  “And?” Drustan was frustratingly calm. “It makes sense. The dead do not need these things.”

  Ragnall balled his fists and ground his teeth and spoke slowly. “They are making profit from the dead. That cannot be right.”

  “When a tree falls it is eaten by the forest.”

  Ragnall stared at Drustan and saw his eyes flicker away. He turned.

  “Hi, Ragnall. Drustan.” It was Simshill, heading back to her stall of murdered people’s belongings.

  “You know I can’t travel with these merchants any further?” Ragnall said when she was out of earshot.

  “Yes. There are other routes.”

  Ragnall turned to pack, then stopped and turned back. “You knew I wouldn’t want to travel with them when I found out what they were selling, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you were happy to let me travel with them?”

  “The situation has changed only because you know. Think of a woman who is unfaithful to her husband in the first year of marriage. Their son is another man’s. The husband does not know. Ten years later he finds out. That is when the situation changes, not before.”

  “Oh for Danu’s sake.”

  “Come on. We will go.”