Clash of Iron

by Angus Watson

  “Hello. I’m Ragnall,” Ragnall managed, wondering if he’d imagined this avuncular fellow pushing a man to his death.

  “Ragnall! Ragnall. Not a Roman name.”

  “No, British.”

  “Ha! But you are now with the Romans?”

  “Yes.”

  “How wonderful! You must tell me all about how that came to be. But not right now! You find us right at of the beginning of a game of Trial By Falling. The rules of the game are simple: they’re all in the name! Ha! These good fellows and lovely ladies,” he put one hand on Ragnall’s shoulder and used the other to indicate the line of nude captives, “have been accused of a variety of crimes. Other tribes and other kings might go into that bothersome business of witnesses, arguments, evidence and all that guff. We prefer to speed things along and make it enjoyable for everyone. So today the mountain is deciding who’s innocent and who’s guilty. It’s not always the mountain – we don’t always have a mountain – but today it is. You saw the fellow fall just now?”

  “I did…”

  “We all wondered if he’d killed and eaten someone else’s duck, as someone or other had told us. Now we know he did! The gods decided that he was guilty of whatever it was he was accused of. I’m pretty sure it was duck theft, duck cooking and duck eating. And now we know he did it! Ha! And at exactly the same time we discover his guilt, he’s punished! You see? It’s clever, uncomplicated, quick and everyone’s happy!”

  Almost everyone, thought Ragnall, but he nodded.

  “Now, I’d be – we’d all be – deeply honoured if you tried the next one?”

  Ragnall thought he must have misheard.

  “Here,” King Hari handed him his sword, hilt first. “You saw me, it’s easy! Cut the cord and push! Opposite to giving birth. Ha ha!”

  Ragnall took the sword. The thought that he might attack King Hari and the Germans poked its nose out from one of the braver recesses of his mind, but the much larger self-preservation section shooed it back in. He walked towards the nearest captive; a hairy, thickset man.

  “No no no,” said King Hari, shaking his head with a grin. He walked along the line, beckoning Ragnall. The courtiers or whatever they were followed. King Hari stopped and nodded at a captive. It was a girl. She was slight, stooped and shaking with silent sobs. She might have been fourteen years old. “This one.”

  Ragnall’s bravery nearly surfaced. It really nearly did. He almost – almost! – did the heroic thing and attacked the German king, but Hari the Fister stepped behind two big women and a ferret-faced man and the moment was gone.

  He walked to the edge and took a good look at the slope and its various features, then returned to the girl, chopped through her tether and shoved, angling leftwards. She fell. Somehow her arms came free as she tumbled. Ragnall realised how noble it would have been to cut her bonds before pushing her, and sort of regretted not doing so.

  She bounced off a stake, missing its spike. She landed arms first on a ledge about halfway down. They heard the crack of a bone breaking. She yelled, but grabbed a shrub with her uninjured hand. It didn’t hold, but it slowed her enough that she slid down the rest of the slope without suffering further injury. She lay on the grass at the bottom for a moment then sat up, held her wrist and rocked.

  “Alive!” shouted the woman in the blue dress.

  The Germans cheered.

  “Well done, well done!” King Hari was beaming. He walked back from the cliff edge. “That was superb. A very nice angle. So, you have terms from indomitable Caesar, the noble slayer of innocent Helvans?”

  “I do.”

  “Am I going to like them?”

  “I shouldn’t think so.”

  “He is a dreadful man.” King Hari smiled and shook his head, as if amused by the antics of a charmingly mischievous child. “So, what does he say?”

  Ragnall told him. Some of the nearly naked Germans cursed. King Hari’s smile twitched, but remained.

  “I see,” he said, “and he’s expecting you to return with a reply?”

  “…Yes.” Ragnall held his breath.

  “Well, you won’t be doing that! Ha ha!” King Hari’s mouth held the smile, but the look in his eyes made Ragnall want to follow the girl off the cliff. “The Romans have no business in a territory that’s mine by right of conquest. Unless of course they want to conquer the conquerers, which they’re welcome to try. Many have tried to destroy me before, but brought destruction only on themselves. Do you know, Ragnall, that I haven’t slept under a roof for fourteen years?”

  “Uh … no?”

  “Well, I haven’t. And why not? Because I’ve been campaigning! I am a seasoned campaigner, a general who has never lost a battle – as your leader will soon find out! Ha! Now, by Toutatis, to more immediate matters. How are we going to work out whether Ragnall the British Roman envoy lives or dies?” He looked around himself exaggeratedly. “If we only had a way of deciding guilt from innocence. Some sort of a trial, if you will…” He panned his narrow eyes around the valley, until they came to rest on his line of naked captives. “Oh! Look here! Ha! Just the thing! How lucky we all are!”

  He turned to Ragnall, brimming with good cheer. “Now, will you undress yourself, or shall we do it for you?”

  Chapter 14

  A sea mist swirled in the bracken as Mal and Nita walked uphill through the wide clearing, ten paces behind Lowa and Spring. The woods were closely managed by the Aurochs tribe that populated the Forest of Branwin. They chopped down their fuel and building wood only in clearings like this one, which explained the well-used cart track that they were walking along. Mal was relieved to see some sign of civilisation after creeping through the eerie woods for so long. You never knew what was behind the next tree when you were in the woods, and then you never knew what was behind the tree after that. The suspense was relentless. Mal always ended up hoping that something, anything, would jump out from behind the next tree just to get it over and done with.

  So he was glad to be out of the trees for now, even if it was going to be only a brief respite.

  They’d been going for a while, but they’d had not a sniff of an aurochs. On the two occasions he’d been to the Forest of Branwin previously, when he hadn’t been hunting, there had been aurochs everywhere. However, the giant wild cattle were famously canny. Usually the sacred beasts had no fear of humans, who fed them and rarely harmed them. However, the moment you picked up a spear and looked for something beefy to stick it in, the enormous animals vanished.

  Generations before, aurochs had roamed the entire island of Britain, but since they were made of meat, covered in leather, connected with sinews that made excellent twine, veined with fat for candles and soap and much more, they had been hunted to extinction everywhere but in the Forest of Branwin. Here, the local tribe, who called themselves the Aurochs, maintained the forest and protected its bovine inhabitants. Every now and then, they hunted an aurochs, and, very rarely, they invited an outsider to do so. This latter honour they had bestowed on Lowa.

  The Aurochs were effectively a client tribe of Maidun, but Lowa’s rule benefited more than burdened them. She’d reduced their taxes from exorbitant to manageable. She’d sent Maidun’s finest agriculturalists to teach them new farming methods. She’d introduced them to her idea of bards and druids teaching all children, not just the high-born ones. She’d liberated several of their enslaved loved ones and freed two Aurochs women from the Whorepits (although one returned a moon later, Mal had heard). She still demanded men and women for her army, but now she’d made soldiering a full-time, paid job, rather than something that farmers were forced to do instead of farming, positions in the Maidun army were sought after rather than feared.

  In all, Lowa had improved the lives of the Aurochs tribe after the previous tyrant had made them miserable, so they had given her this great honour of hunting and killing one of their massive sacred animals.

  Lowa, Mal knew, was far from thrilled by the prospect. She had any number
of tasks that were more pressing than chasing a freakishly large cow through the woods. However, she’d already put it off to the verge of impoliteness, so here they were. She’d asked Mal and Nita along since they were her top generals with Atlas and Carden away and she wanted to show respect to the Aurochs tribe. Mal couldn’t think of anything much worse than a day in the woods hunting a dangerous monster that had done them no harm. Nita was thrilled, however. She’d been in a good mood for the entire five days that they’d known they were going on the hunt, which was a good mood record by about four days.

  Spring also seemed pleased about the aurochs hunt. Other than to sleep, she’d hardly stopped talking about the hunt from the moment they’d ridden out of Maidun the afternoon before until the hunt had begun. Now she was striding up ahead with Lowa at a cracking pace.

  In the three years that Mal had known Spring, or Silver as she’d called herself when she’d wheedled her way into his chariot yard, she’d turned from a gawky child into an almost elegant woman. She must have grown a foot and her childish puppy fat had morphed into a lean, powerful frame, like a stretched, more graceful version of Lowa’s well-muscled limbs.

  If ever the gods had loved someone, thought Mal, it was Spring. She zinged with infectious, optimistic energy. It was hard to be with her and maintain a poor temper. Mal was sure that there was magic in her. It was more than just her cheering effect. He’d seen her calm when all went mad in the arena, and she was friends with Dug, and she had some great bond with Lowa, so he was sure that she’d had something to do with the extraordinary events on the day that Zadar died.

  And if anyone had ever given a crap that Zadar was her father, they didn’t any more. She was Lowa’s child now as far as everyone was concerned. Indeed, walking along together, picking silent steps on the path, longbows swinging in unison, chins raised in pursuit of their prey, it was hard to think of a pair who looked more like mother and daughter.

  Mal’s thought train was broken by Nita’s hand on his arm. Spring and Lowa had stopped on the edge of the wood. Spring motioned for them to approach quietly.

  “There’s an aurochs, a big male one,” Spring whispered, pointing, eyes shining, “a hundred paces into these trees, directly that way.”

  “How do you know?” whispered Nita, gripping Mal’s arm.

  “Saw him,” said Spring.

  They crept around the edge of the trees to get downwind of the beast.

  “I am a cat,” said Spring to herself. She thought of Elann’s cats up on Maidun stalking rats, bees, each other, people’s shoes … They crept, low to the ground, slow, steady, definitely never stepping on a twig. Never on a twig! Spring’s soft leather shoes made no sound and they were not going to. She paused, reached over her shoulder and slowly slid an arrow from its quiver. She felt Lowa do the same thing behind her. She reminded herself not to get too far ahead. Mal and Nita were going to take the beast with spears, as was traditional. Her and Lowa’s role was to step in if things went wrong, which apparently happened a lot where aurochs were concerned.

  She could smell the beast up ahead. Its aroma was beefy, old, strong – not massively dissimilar to Dug – and, in fact, could she sense sadness there? A sadness like Dug’s of an old, loved life lost? It was funny, she thought, that she could sense the aurochs, that she’d known where it was without seeing it.

  She paused, suddenly struck by sadness herself. No, it was fine to kill it. The Aurochs tribe had pretty much made them do it, and that meant that Branwin – goddess of the forest that they were in, and love, and, Spring had learnt recently, aurochs – thought it was a good idea. If Branwin wanted them to kill the animal, then she must have wanted it in the Otherworld with her and they were doing the animal a favour.

  The track led to a clearing by a pond, and there it was.

  Her breath caught in her throat. She’d heard descriptions, but never seen one before. He was better than a bear! Better and bigger. He looked so strong, so proud. He was standing there by the pond, as if waiting. Did he know he was about to die? She tried to look into his mind but she couldn’t. But he did look as noble and melancholy as a brave man waiting for death.

  The aurochs’ shoulder, Spring reckoned, was about the same height as Dug’s head, but his rear legs were lower, so his back sloped upwards and he looked like he was about to leap over the moon, like the cow in the rhyme. Now that she thought about it, hadn’t Mal said something yesterday about that rhyme originally being about an aurochs?

  His fur was blackest black, his head the size of man’s torso. His horns launched outwards and upward from his head, then swept together, so their sharp-pointed ends aimed forwards, like two swords permanently poised to pierce. If he’d ducked his neck and thrust those horns into someone’s stomach, then flung his head back, it would have been like a strong man tossing a mouldy turnip with a fork.

  They said that Branwin had made this beast, but Spring seriously doubted that the goddess of love had designed him herself. Makka, god of war, must have been involved. Although, she conceded, he was beautiful, too, with his slender legs and grave, noble eyes.

  Mal and Nita crouched down next to her, spears in hand. Suddenly their spears – the best, according to Elann, that she’d ever made – didn’t look so effective. Surely you needed more that those pointy sticks to end the life of such a creature?

  What was more, they couldn’t kill him here. The only paths through the woods were the ones made by the aurochs themselves, so they’d have the colossal bother of butchering him and carrying him from the woods bit by bit, rather than loading him on to a cart and taking him to a village with superior animal-chopping facilities. It wasn’t Spring’s worry, though, Lowa would know what to do, so she crouched and waited to be told.

  Spring had heard stories of great hunts, passed down for centuries. Wily teams of humans would take on some enormous beast. If they did triumph, it was only after a massive effort and the kind of teamwork that would leave your head spinning with its cleverness, and, of course, there was always a heartbreaking loss – the top hunter’s true love being swallowed by a great fish maybe, or a hairy beast with horns impaling the chief’s youngest son, just as the son managed to gouge its eye out with his stone knife …

  Lowa briefed them on their roles. She and Spring shouted “Ya!” at the aurochs and he plodded out of the woods. When he was in the clear, he stood still, next to the cart track, breathing hard. Mal walked up, stuck his spear in his neck and the aurochs fell over. That was it. It was nothing like the hunts of old. They wouldn’t be telling the story of it that evening, let alone in hundreds of generations’ time.

  Spring knelt next to him as he huffed out his last few breaths. His big eye looked into hers with aching sadness. Crying gently, she put her hand on his gigantic head. Images flowed up her arm and into her mind. She saw the slaughter of his kind by humans. She saw aurochs chased in their dozens over cliffs, fleeing burning forests to be met with spears, their orphaned, panicking calves caught and clubbed to death. Then, in a flash, she saw the future. She saw Romans, she knew that they were Romans, killing all the remaining aurochs, all of them, and piling their bodies into great carts.

  Usually when she felt the coming Romans, it was a cloudy thing, impossible to touch, more a case of knowing something rather than seeing it. This was as real as if it had happened in front of her. The Romans were going to kill all the aurochs in Britain, she had no doubt of it. So now she knew. No matter what they did, the Romans would take Britain. She looked up at Lowa. The queen had been watching her with the dying aurochs, smiling with rare compassion. Spring resolved not to tell her that their defence against the Romans was doomed. She knew that Lowa was going to try to beat back the invader, no matter what.

  Chapter 15

  “You must let me kill her, Julius. You saw what she did on the wall,” said the voice. It was Felix. Chamanca would know the clipped tones of that nasty little druid anywhere. She decided to keep her eyes closed a while longer.

  “
I saw what she did to the praetorian guard. I saw your magic fail. Then I saw her beaten. By me.”

  And that must be Julius Caesar.

  “From behind, when she had several wounds, any of which on its own would have incapacitated the strongest gladiator.” Quite right, thought Chamanca. “We must kill her now and we must be certain that she is dead.” That she didn’t like so much.

  “Can she not join your legion, Felix? She seems a little too … wonderful to simply destroy. I want to keep her. I will keep her.”

  “If you must, so be it. But I cannot have her in my legion. And I cannot guarantee holding her, because my magic does not seem to affect her. I think she may have even absorbed it…”

  I did absorb it, and I used it.

  “…but I’ve never seen any evidence in her of anything but the most brutish magic. I don’t think she is able to bend others to her will, or break metal, so if she is kept very well chained, she shouldn’t escape, but … I would rather kill her. We should case her in concrete and throw her in a lake.”

  “You’re sure she’ll survive her wounds?”

  “Yes. She was wounded often fighting for Zadar and I never saw any infection, only miraculously quick recovery. Perhaps I should try rubbing her wounds with excrement—”

  “No, Felix. I want her to be healthy. Caesar has decided. She will return to Rome with us.”

  “Because you want her as a gladiator! Of course. She’ll be good. Very good. You will have to build an arena that also acts as her jail, so audiences will be small, but once word gets out you’ll be able to charge what you want. I’d pay a lot to watch her tear apart two or three big, cocksure barbarians.”