Clash of Iron

by Angus Watson

  “Ready?” yelled Carden. He didn’t wait for a reply.

  A lurch, a bang and a whoosh, and he was flying. It felt like he’d left his guts on the ground. He tumbled, elbow and knees tight, eyes screwed shut. He wondered if Carden had asked him to tuck so that he’d fly further, or so that he’d bounce further along the land. He felt the thongs around his calves come loose and his sandals slip off, and he wondered crazily if his footwear knew that he was about to die so were fleeing like rats from a foundering ship.

  Just when he was thinking he’d been in the air far too long, something slapped into his back, hard, knocking the air from him. He bounced, slapped down again and then he was underwater and sinking. He struggled to free his wrists from his ankles. He had no breath in his lungs. His back nestled into mud. Weeds waved up at the sun-dappled surface. The lake was not deep. He wrenched at his binding. He couldn’t free himself. His head was swelling with the need to breath. How vexing, he thought, to have survived the flight only to drown. And how annoying to drown in calm, shallow water.

  Then his hands and feet were free and something was pulling him upwards. He was on the surface, choking and gasping.

  “Alive!” he heard Flotta shout, next to his ear.

  There was a distant cheer.

  He saw a chance. There weren’t many swimmers faster than him, and the nearest captor with the standard number of arms was a good distance away. He pressed a foot into Flotta’s midriff and pushed her away. He flipped, and took a powerful stroke. A hand grabbed his hair and pulled him around. Flotta’s forehead crashed into his nose. Light whirled, then all was darkness.

  Chapter 17

  Chamanca’s wounds healed in days. She’d always been a quick healer. The bed that she’d been chained to while she recovered was taken out of her tent and in its place, while she sat wound in heavy chain, two engineer types dug a deep, narrow hole and filled it with a yellow-grey, lumpy liquid. They held a thick, waist-high oval loop of iron in place while the liquid solidified into rock. Four of the black-clad legionaries guarded her with swords while the engineers passed chains though the loop and soldered them on to her wrist and ankle shackles.

  So there she was, legs and arms attached to a wheel of iron set in stone. She was impressed by the neat job. Escape would be difficult.

  Everyone left, bar one engineer who stayed behind to gloat. He told her that the liquid stone was a substance called concrete, one of the many inventions that showed how superior Romans were to barbarians like her. That was why it was the Roman duty to conquer, to enlighten benighted lives.

  She told him that the Romans might be great, but he himself looked like an inadequate little freak, not fit to pick the nut husks from her turds. And besides, she’d seen concrete in Iberia and been equally unimpressed by it then.

  Back in Iberia or Britain, the average man would have responded to a jibe like this by trying to outdo the insult, but Chamanca knew that most Romans were conceited, humourless and unable to accept mockery, especially from their social inferiors. Roman men were markedly shorter than barbarian men, many not much taller than her, and she suspected that it was something to do with that. What was it that Carden had said to her? Being small didn’t turn men into pricks, but Danu knew which men were going to be pricks so she made them short as a punishment. She liked that.

  The response of the Roman engineer supported her prejudice. His face stretched in surprise then screwed into a mask of rage. He charged, punches flailing. She dodged a couple of blows, took a couple more to draw him in, then clamped her teeth on to his wrist and sucked warm blood. His hits grew weaker until he passed out. She stopped drinking then, reluctant for some reason to finish him; she shouted for someone to take him away before she changed her mind.

  The next day Felix came to the tent with a couple of burly legionaries, showed them how to feed her safely using a pan on a pole and told them that they’d be crucified if they spoke to her.

  Chamanca had nothing to do but sit, think and rub her ankle and wrist chains against the iron loop. Her rubbing, which had to be quiet enough for the guards outside her tent not to hear, had no noticeable effect. She disliked the optimists’ philosophy that no matter how hard something seems at the outset, if you try again and again you’ll get there in the end. Try running through a stone wall, she thought. But she persevered. It was a project.

  After two days attached to the loop with no human interaction other than furtive glances from the silent feeders, a shiny chest-plated centurion with a plumed helmet under one arm swept into her tent. He stood and looked her up and down, his thin, pink tongue protruding just a little from his lips. She squirmed under his glare. She was used to being ogled, encouraged and enjoyed it even, but this was like being licked all over by a toad. She was about to suggest that the centurion fuck off when he undid his leather skirt, took his erect penis in his fist, hunched over and began to masturbate furiously, eyeing her torso and legs all the while.

  Chamanca watched as his elbow worked away, wondering how she might use him. He was a tall, fit looking fellow, with an off-centre patch of white at the front of his otherwise black hair, as if he’d been shat on by a bird. Penis in hand aside, he did not look like a pervert. She guessed that perverts probably never did.

  Very soon after he’d begun, the centurion pumped out a couple of gluey jets of semen that, thank Fenn, fell well short of Chamanca. His open-mouthed smile twisted into an ogre’s grimace as he milked the final few globs of pearlescent ooze from his detumescing cock, then tucked himself away and scurried from the tent.

  It had been unpleasant and not flattering, but on the upside it had relieved the boredom. So she wasn’t that upset when the onanist returned the next day, and the next. She tried to talk to him, but he was too excited beforehand to respond and too shameful afterwards.

  “I will,” she said to the centurion on his sixth visit, as he set to strumming, “say naughty things to you in exchange for news.”

  “What … sort … of naughty … things?” he managed, before ejaculating and running from the tent. Fenn’s tits, she thought, and went back to rubbing her chains on the loop.

  The next day, as he unbuckled himself, he whispered: “What news do you want? Answer quietly so the guards don’t hear.”

  “Everything about the army – what it’s doing, what the plans are.”

  He came closer, but not so close that she could bite him.

  “All right. We’re camped perhaps a mile from the Germans. That’s around fifteen hundred paces in Barbarian measurement.” He sounded intelligently didactic, like a clever father explaining a difficult point to a daughter who was a little too young to understand it. “They’re dug in well behind a high wall with a clean, steep face, and a well-angled, stout palisade. We could break through this wall, but we would lose half the army doing so. The only option is to goad them into coming out, which we’re trying to do by marching past their camp and shouting insults. That usually works with barbarians – they’re a prideful bunch – but this lot are holding back. Meanwhile, their cavalry is attacking anyone who leaves our camp – foragers mostly, and our own, smaller, less capable cavalry. Frankly, their tactics are good and, so far, we have no reply to them. If they carry on like this, we will have to retreat.”

  “How long before your supplies run out?”

  The centurion glanced nervously over his shoulder. “I’ll tell you more tomorrow. Now you tell me how much you’d like to take my cock in your mouth.”

  Chamanca laughed. “That is funny. I would love to have your cock in my mouth, but I don’t think you would like it very much.” She bared her pointed teeth.

  The centurion looked disappointed. “Can you say that again, but in a more alluring matter? Perhaps say it in barbarian?”

  Chamanca sighed.

  Chapter 18

  Sapphire should have been in a good mood. They’d all but wiped out the Roman cavalry, and the few that remained had fled into a dead-end valley. She and the rest of th
e German cavalry had only to follow them in and finish them off. She did feel sorry for the poor Romans. Their ignorance of the landscape had been as much of a log on their funeral pyre as their inferior headcount. Time and time again she and the others had chased foolish, outnumbered men into swamps, to cliff edges or impassably steep slopes. Some had even got themselves trapped in the loop of a river’s meander where it had been a doddle to take them out with slings. That was the other thing. The Roman cavalry were armed with swords and spears, so it was easy to kill them with slingstones before they even got close. So she did feel sorry for them, but she was also glad that most of them were dead and that the rest would be soon. They said that when the cavalry was gone the Romans would leave and they’d be at peace again. Well, everyone else would be at peace. She wouldn’t, not until she’d dealt with Kondar.

  Sapphire had grown up in one of the many smaller tribes ruled over by King Hari the Fister. It hadn’t been Hari the Fister when she was young, it had been someone else – a woman – whose name she couldn’t remember. She wasn’t interested in politics. In most German tribes, men and woman formed unions for life, or at least until they could no longer stand one another. In her tribe, however, they saw monogamy as stressful, miserable and unnecessary, so everyone lived communally with everyone. Childcare was shared, and sex was whenever, with whoever. Fornication was fun, like a game of capture the fort. Would anyone ever suggest that you only ever played capture the fort with one other person for the rest of your life?

  So why oh why had Sapphire agreed to move into Kondar’s hut permanently, and not to make love to anyone else? She did love Kondar, in a way, or at least she liked being loved by him. Or at least she had done. When it had begun, he’d pleaded so much and told her so many times how much he loved her that she’d agreed to step away from social mores and be faithful to him, to live as man and wife as they did in other tribes. It worked for a while, and they had a lovely little baby boy named Rontik. Sapphire had assumed that they’d look after him themselves, like they did in monogamous tribes, but Kondar did not seem to have any trouble with communal childcare aspect of their culture, so they handed young Rontik into the care of the tribe.

  The valley was narrowing. Both sides were mostly bare rock cliffs, and wherever trees had managed to grow it was far too steep to climb. In two or three more turns they’d come to the unscalable waterfall at the head of the valley. The Romans would have to mount a last stand there, but there were so few of them left that she expected they’d kill them all without loss to their own side. She checked her sling and stone bag. All fine.

  So they’d had their baby and gone on living together, but lately any fun that there’d ever been had evaporated and she’d felt so smothered by Kondar’s constant presence, and his jealousy when she so much as spoke to anyone else, that she’d told him that their arrangement was over. She’s said it wasn’t the sex, because it really wasn’t, or at least it wasn’t just the sex. He’d wept like a toddler, wailing and coughing. He’d even been sick. In between the histrionics, he pleaded and pleaded and told her he’d change. He begged her to take a moon to think about it. And she, fool that she was, had agreed. She knew she’d feel exactly the same in a moon, and she knew that it would have been better for both of them if she’d stuck to her slingstones at the time. But she’d agreed. Possibly she was being kind to him, possibly she was trying to make things easier for herself. Whatever it was, after they’d finished off the Roman cavalry she’d have to go back to the tribe and go through it all again. She hoped he wouldn’t be there. She’d hoped he’d run rather than face her rejection again. But she knew he wouldn’t have, because he was desperate to clutch at any chance that they might stay together. She hoped, and she did feel bad for thinking this, that he’d get the message this next time and that he’d leave the tribe. It wasn’t a charitable thought, but flirting with other men – even talking to other men! – was going to be ruined with Kondar looking on like an abandoned puppy.

  Yes, the moment she got back she’d tell him that she’d shagged her fellow rider Grax a few days before, which was true, then she’d spend the next few nights in Grax’s hut to prove the point. If Kondar went mad and attacked her or Grax, well, they’d kill him and that would be that. He was no fighter, Kondar, and it was hardly her fault that he was behaving so strangely.

  She’d been a fool, she should have listened to the elders and walked away from him right at the start, but at least she knew now, and it was somewhat heartening to resolve to do something that would solve the problem.

  Up ahead, riders were stopping. Well, this was odd.

  Blocking the valley, hemmed in by cliffs on both sides, were what looked like twenty or so big metal carvings of men, but they weren’t carvings, they were moving. She made a tight tube with her hand and peered through it – she could see more clearly that way for some reason – and saw that they were men, large men, dressed in crazily heavy iron armour with big blades on the shins and wrists. Each was holding a huge sword that looked too heavy to lift in one hand. In the other, each was holding a chain attached to a skinny man or woman dressed in tatters. These small, rag-clad people were moving slowly and strangely, as if drunk, exhausted or both. Most odd. The only vaguely normal looking one among them was a short, balding man in a short-sleeved jerkin, sitting on a woolly pony smiling like a demented imp at the approaching Germans.

  What was going on? Had they happened upon a group of bards who’d launched into an impromptu show? Everyone else was as confused as she was, sitting on their horses and staring.

  As they watched, the little balding man gave a command. The leftmost of the armoured warriors forced his captive to the ground, put a metal-booted foot on his head, then all his weight. Just the day before, Sapphire had watched a cow gave birth. As she’d cooed at the sweetness of the calf, a great sac of afterbirth had pulsed out of the mother’s gaping vagina, hit the ground and split with a great slapping smack. The captive’s head now made exactly the same noise as it burst. Immediately afterewards, the iron-clad man leapt as if he’d been stung by a wasp and ran with incredible speed and clattering of metal towards the German line. Meanwhile, the next iron man lopped the head off his captive with a swing of his great sword and came running too.

  Slingstones spanged harmlessly off the first armoured warrior. At the German line he leapt, lashed out with a foot and severed a horse’s head with his ankle blade. He landed with an almighty clang, swung his great sword in a wide arc and chopped two riders in half. He picked up the horse’s head by the mane, tossed it up in the air, watched it fall, then kicked it into the German ranks and sent another two riders tumbling from their horses.

  The second armoured warrior hit the line. A brave cavalry man shattered his sword on the thick helmet and was eviscerated by a backhand swipe from a wrist blade. More iron men were killing their captives and coming. A few Germans fought back, but none of them lasted more than the blink of an eye. Humans and horses fell as the armoured warriors advanced. She saw her recent lover Grax raise his sword to strike at one of the attackers. A moment later his head was spinning into the air.

  Fuck this, thought Sapphire. Here was dark magic. Flight was the only option. She dragged her horse round by its reins. Most others had had the same idea, and soon she was part of a stampede, galloping back the way they’d come. She looked over a shoulder. She couldn’t see any pursuit. She felt a rush of relief, tempered by the horror of what she’d seen and the worry of what might come next. Had the iron-clad soldiers been Romans? Demons? A new race of men who didn’t like Germans? She didn’t know. She had to get out of there, find baby Rontik and then get further away.

  Then the bodies began to fall. Clad in the same rags as the iron infantry’s captives, they fell silently down the cliffs on both sides and landed in tangled heaps. One of them hit a rider, who screamed, fell from his horse and lay still.

  At first Sapphire thought that the dark figures that followed were more bodies, but, no, they were lithe young
men with swords, half tumbling, half leaping down the cliffs, swifter than mountain deer. Several reached the valley floor. They were clad all in brown leather, including their heads, apart from a slit cut for the eyes. They moved so quickly and so weirdly that they couldn’t possibly be human. She and some others shot slingstones, but almost all managed to dodge them. One of them jinked his head into the path of another stone, but the blow didn’t even slow him. There was no escape. The leather-clad men jumped and spun and slashed and stabbed, chopping into both flanks of fleeing cavalry.

  Sapphire gave up all idea of fighting, put her head down and dug her heels into her horse. The good little animal set off at a gallop that would surely outrun anything on two legs. Shortly afterwards she looked over her shoulder. Two of the demons were running behind her, expressionless in their leather masks. They were catching up.

  The terror was too much. She screamed and the world spun as she fell from her horse. She hit something hard and rolled to a stop. She opened her eyes just in time to see a sword flash towards her neck. She felt it hit, felt it chop, felt her eyes roll back so they could see only darkness. Was her head severed? Could she still think with her head severed, she thought? Then she thought no more.

  Chapter 19

  Before Chamanca could say anything, the centurion said: “The impasse is over. The German cavalry has been destroyed. We can now forage, supply lines have reopened and it will only be a matter of time before the Germans leave or we massacre them in a pitched battle.”

  “How did you destroy the cavalry?” asked Chamanca

  “Officially,” he said, “they were hit by a rockslide.” He looked over his shoulder and came a little closer, but not close enough that she might grab him. “But I’m in Caesar’s inner circle so I know what really happened. I could tell you, but I’d be risking my life – the information is top secret. I would expect a lot in return.”