The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  “Bree,” her mother said. Her voice was wet, strained. Tears trickled from her brown eyes. “Bree, what are you… what are you doing out here?”

  Bree didn’t know how to answer. She fell to her knees, felt her pants slicken from the blood. She reached out a trembling hand, wanting so badly to hold her mother but fearing what any contact might do.

  “It’s all right,” her mother said, and she smiled despite her obvious pain. “Bree, it’s all right. It’s…”

  Her lips grew still. She breathed in pain no more. Her hand fell limp, holding back her sliced stomach no longer. Bree touched her shoulder, shook her once.

  “Mom,” she said, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Mom, no, mom, please.”

  She buried her face against her mother’s chest, shrieking out in wordless agony. She didn’t want to see any more, to hear any more. Bree wrapped her arms around her mother’s neck, clutching her tightly, not caring about the blood that seeped into her clothes. She just wanted one more embrace before the vultures came to reclaim her wings. She wanted to pretend her mother was alive and well, holding her, loving her, kissing her forehead before flying away for another day of training and drills.

  Not this corpse. Not this lifeless thing.

  A hand touched her shoulder. Bree pulled back, expecting to see her brother, but instead it was a tall Weshern seraph. Blood smeared his fine black coat. To her surprise, the surrounding neighborhood was quiet, the battle seemingly over.

  “Was she your mother?” the man asked. Bree could barely see his face through the shadows cast by the midnight fire. She sniffled, then nodded.

  “Then you must be Breanna. I… I don’t know how else to tell you this. It’s about your father.”

  His words were a dagger to an already punctured heart. It couldn’t be. The world couldn’t be that cruel.

  “No,” she whispered. “No, that can’t be right.”

  The seraph swallowed hard.

  “Breanna, I’m sorry.”

  Bree leapt to her feet, and she flung herself at the man, screaming at the top of her lungs.

  “No, it can’t. Not both, we can’t lose them both, we can’t… we can’t…”

  She broke, collapsing at his feet, her tears falling upon his black boots. She beat the stone cobbles until she bled, beat them as she screamed, beat them as high above, the midnight fire burned like an unrelenting pyre for the dead.

  introducing

  If you enjoyed

  THE PARADOX,

  look out for

  AGE OF IRON

  Iron Age: Book 1

  by Angus Watson

  LEGENDS AREN’T BORN. THEY’RE MADE.

  Dug Sealskinner is a down-on-his-luck mercenary traveling south to join up with King Zadar’s army. But he keeps rescuing the wrong people.

  First, Spring, a child he finds scavenging on the battlefield, and then Lowa, one of Zadar’s most fearsome warriors, who has vowed revenge on the king for her sister’s execution.

  Now Dug’s on the wrong side of the thousands-strong army he hoped to join—and worse, Zadar has bloodthirsty druid magic on his side. All Dug has is his war hammer, one small child, and one unpredictable, highly trained warrior with a lust for revenge that might get them all killed…

  CHAPTER 1

  “Mind your spears, coming through!”

  Dug Sealskinner shouldered his way back through the ranks. Front rank was for young people who hadn’t learned to fear battle and old men who thought they could compete with the young.

  Dug put himself halfway in that last category. He’d been alive for about forty years, so he was old. And he wanted to compete with the young, but grim experience had unequivocally, and sometimes humiliatingly, demonstrated that the young won every time. Even when they didn’t win they won because they were young and he wasn’t.

  And here he was again, in another Bel-cursed battle line. Had things gone to plan, he’d have been living the respectable older man’s life, lord of his broch, running his own seaside farm on Britain’s north coast, shearing sheep, spearing seals and playing peekaboo with grandchildren. He’d been close to achieving that when fate had run up and kicked him in the bollocks. Since then, somehow, the years had fallen past, each one dying with him no nearer the goals that had seemed so achievable at its birth.

  If only we could shape our own lives, he often thought, rather than other bastards coming along and shaping them for us.

  Satisfyingly, the ragtag ranks parted at his request. He might not feel it, but he still looked fearsome, and he was a Warrior. His jutting jaw was bearded with thick bristle. His big head was cased in a rusty but robust, undecorated iron helmet. His oiled ringmail shone expensively in the morning sun, its heaviness flattening his ever-rounder stomach. The weighty warhammer which swung on a leather lanyard from his right hand could have felled any mythical beastie.

  He’d been paid Warrior’s wages to stay in the front rank to marshal the troops, so arguably he should have stayed in the front rank and marshalled the troops. But he didn’t feel the need to fulfil every tiny detail of the agreement. Or even the only two details of it. First, because nobody would know; second, because there wasn’t going to be a battle. He’d collect his full fee for a day standing in a field, one of thousands of soldiers. One of thousands of people, anyway. There were some other Warriors–Dug knew a few of them and had nodded hello–but the rest were men and women in leathers at best, hardly soldiers, armed with spears but more used to farm equipment. Quite a few of them were, in fact, armed with farm equipment.

  What, by Camulos, is that doing here? he thought, looking at a small, bald but bearded man holding a long pole topped with a giant cleaver–a whale blubber cutter, if he wasn’t mistaken. He hadn’t seen one of those for a while and wanted to ask its owner what it was doing so far inland. But an interest in fishing equipment wouldn’t help his battle-hardened Warrior image.

  He pushed out into the open field. Behind Barton’s makeshift army, children in rough wool smock-frocks ran across the bright field, laughing, fighting and crying. The elderly sat in groups complaining about the army’s formation and other things that had been better in their day. To the left, sitting in a heap of rags and shunned by all, was the inevitable drunken old druid, shouting semi-coherently about the imminence of Roman invasion, like all the other dozens of drunken druids that Dug had seen recently.

  Over by the bridge were those others who escaped military service–Barton’s more important families. A couple of them were looking at Dug, perhaps wondering why their expensive mercenary was taking a break.

  He put his hands on his hips in an overseer pose and tried to look like he was assessing the line for weaknesses. Very important, the rear rank of a defensive line, he’d tell them if they asked afterwards.

  Dug hadn’t expected to be in the Barton army that sunny morning. He’d been stopping in Barton hillfort the day before when word came that the cavalry and chariot sections of King Zadar of Maidun Castle’s army would be passing on their way home from sacking the town and hillfort of Boddingham.

  Boddingham was a smaller settlement than Barton, forty miles or so north-east along the Ridge Road. It had stopped paying tribute to Maidun. Perhaps Boddingham had felt safe, a hundred miles from the seat and capital of King Zadar’s empire, but along good metalled roads and the hard chalk Ridge Road, that was only three days’ journey for Zadar’s chariots and cavalry–less if they pushed it. It would have taken much longer to move a full army, as Dug well understood, having both driven and hindered armies’ movements in his time, but everyone Dug had spoken to said that Zadar’s relatively small flying squad of horse soldiers was more than capable of obliterating a medium-sized settlement like Boddingham. If that was true, thought Dug, they must be the elite guard of Makka the war god himself.

  The Maidun force had passed Barton two days before, too set on punishing Boddingham to linger for longer than it took to demand and collect food, water and beer. Now though, on the way back,
swords bloodied, slaves in tow, the viciously skilful little company might have the time and inclination to take a pop at weak, underprepared Barton.

  “You!” A man had shouted at Dug the night before. So courteous, these southerners.

  “Aye?” he’d replied.

  “Know anything about fighting?”

  You’d think his dented iron helmet, ringmail shirt and warhammer might have answered that question, but southerners, in Dug’s experience, were about as bright as they were polite.

  “Aye, I’m a Warrior.”

  And that was how he’d ended up at the previous night’s war council. He’d actually been on his way to sign up with Zadar’s army–finally fed up with the strenuous life of a wandering mercenary–but he saw no need to mention that to the Barton defenders.

  Fifty or so of Barton’s more important men and women, the same ones who weren’t in the battle line, had been packed into the Barton Longhouse for the war council. Calling it a longhouse was pretentiousness, another southern trait that Dug had noticed. First, it was circular. Second, it was only about twenty paces across. At most it was a mediumhouse. It was just a big hut really, made of mud, dung and grass packed into a lattice of twigs between upright poles. Four wide trunks in the middle supported the conical reed roof. Dug could have shown them how to build a hut the same size without the central supports, thereby freeing up space. Perhaps the hall predated that particular architectural innovation, but there was a wood at the foot of the hill and plenty of people, so rebuilding would have been a doddle.

  This tribe, however, was clearly neither architecturally diligent nor building-proud. One of the support posts leaned alarmingly and there was a large, unplanned hole in the roof near the door. At the end of a long hot day, despite the hole, the air inside was thick and sweaty. It could have done with double ceiling vents. Dug could have shown them how to put those in too.

  King Mylor of Barton sat on a big wooden chair on a platform in the centre, rubbing the back of his hand against his two remaining rotten teeth, staring about happily with milky eyes at his visitors and hooting out “Oooo-ooooh!” noises that reminded Dug of an elderly seal. He looked like a seal, now Dug came to think of it. Smooth rings of blubber made his neck wider than his hairless, liver-spotted skull, which was wetly lucent in the torchlight. Whiskers sprayed out under his broad, flat nose. Dug had heard that Barton’s king had lost his mind. It looked like the gossipy bards were right for once.

  Next to Mylor sat the druid Elliax Goldan, ruler in all but name. You didn’t cross Barton’s chief druid, Dug had heard. He was a little younger than Dug perhaps, slim, with tiny black eyes in a pink face that gathered into a long nose. Rat-like. If you could judge a man by his face–and Dug had found that you could–here was an angry little gobshite. Dug had seen more and more druids as he’d migrated south. There were three basic types: the wise healer sort who dispensed advice and cures, the mad, drunk type who raved about dooms–almost all Rome-related these days–and the commanding sort whose communes with the gods tended to back up their plans and bolster their status. Elliax was firmly in this latter camp.

  On Mylor’s left was the druid’s wife, Vasin Goldan. Her skin was shiny and mottled. Big eyes sat wide apart, far up her forehead, very nearly troubling her hairline. Frog-face, Dug had heard her called earlier. Spot on, he mused. Seal-head, Rat-nose and Frog-face. Right old menagerie.

  Behind Elliax and Mylor were four Warriors in ringmail. It was never a great sign, Dug thought, when rulers needed protection from their own people.

  Elliax silenced the hubbub with a couple of claps, interrupting Dug’s explanation to a young woman of how he’d improve the hut’s roof. “The meeting is convened!” he said in a surprisingly deep voice. Dug had expected him to squeak.

  “Could we not do this outside?” asked Dug, pulling his mail shirt away from his neck to get some cooler air down there. Spicily pungent body odour clouded out. The woman he’d been talking to shuffled away. Blooming embarrassment made Dug even hotter.

  “Barton war meetings take place in the Barton Longhouse!” Elliax boomed, also reddening.

  “Even when it’s hot and there’s plenty of room outside? Isn’t that a bit stupid?” Several people around Dug nodded.

  “Hot-t-t-t-t!” shouted King Mylor.

  Mylor, it was said, had lost his mind along with Barton’s wealth and position ten years before, when he’d bet his five best against King Zadar’s champion. The champion, a massive young man called Carden Nancarrow, had slaughtered Barton’s four best men and one woman in a few horrifying moments. Barton had paid painful taxes to Maidun ever since.

  By persuading Mylor to accept the five-to-one combat rather than defend the highly defendable fort, Elliax claimed he’d saved Barton from annihilation. Over the following decade he’d continued to serve his town as Zadar’s representative and tax collector. Zadar’s taxes would have starved Barton in a couple of years, said Elliax, but he was happy to mislead Maidun about Barton’s assets and collect a little less. All he asked in exchange were a few easy gifts like land, food, ironwork or the easiest gift of all–an hour or so with a daughter. While others became steadily malnourished, Elliax thrived, his wife fattened, and unmarried girls bore children with suspiciously rodent faces. Anyone who complained found themselves chosen by Elliax’s druidic divinations to march south as part of Zadar’s quarterly slave quota.

  “We have nothing to fear,” Elliax continued, ignoring Dug and King Mylor. “I have seen it. We pay our dues and it’s in Zadar’s interest that we keep paying them. He will not attack.”

  “But Zadar can’t be trusted to act rationally!” shouted a young woman at the back. “Look what he did to Cowton last year.”

  Dug had heard about Cowton. Everybody had. Zadar had wiped out the entire town. Men, women, the elderly, children, livestock… two thousand people and Danu knew how many animals had been slaughtered or sold to Rome as slaves. Nobody knew why.

  Elliax looked sideways at King Mylor. The king was picking at the crotch of his woollen trousers.

  “Who is your chief druid?” Elliax asked. Nobody had an answer. Elliax smiled like a toad who’d caught a large fly. He held out his arms. “This morning, on the wood shrine, I sacrificed a seabird from the Island of Angels to see its tales of the future. As the bird quivered in death, I was distracted by a sound. I looked up and saw a squirrel hissing at a cat. The cat passed by, leaving the squirrel unharmed.” Elliax looked around smugly, eyes finishing up on Dug’s.

  Most people looked at each other and nodded. More often than not the gods’ messages were too cryptic for Dug to grasp immediately, but he got this one.

  “Can’t argue with that!” said a stout man.

  “Yeah, if it was true. Ever heard a squirrel hiss?” muttered a woman behind Dug.

  “No one would dare lie about something like that!” whispered a man who, by the frustration in his voice, Dug took to be the woman’s husband.

  Elliax continued. “I looked into the bird’s viscera and found Danu. She told me we had nothing to fear from Zadar. Next I found Makka. He outlined our strategy. The weather has been dry, so Zadar will leave the Ridge Road and take the quicker lowland road, as he did on the way to Boddingham. Makka told me that we should gather everyone on the valley floor and form a spear and shield line between the two curves of the river on the other side of the bridge. Cavalry and chariots cannot charge a spear line.”

  “Unless the spear line breaks,” said Dug. He wouldn’t have usually challenged any god’s proclamations, especially Makka’s, but these people didn’t know battle and needed to be told. A few older voices murmured agreement, which encouraged him to continue: “In which case you might as well have a row of children holding wet reeds. Why not bring everyone up into the fort? Do a bit of work on the walls overnight–sharpen the angles, tighten the palisade, few spikes in the ditch–and they’ll never get in.”

  “And leave all our farms, homes and crops to the whims of Zadar’s
army!” Elliax spat, his voice becoming steadily higher. “You’re as stupid as you look, northman! You shouldn’t be in here anyway. You’re not from Barton. There’s no reason for a spear line to break. I think two gods know a little more than some shabby has-been Warrior. And actually I have the advice of three gods, because further into the guts of the bird, I found Dwyn.”

  “Pretty crowded in that bird,” said the woman behind Dug. Her husband shushed her again.

  Elliax ignored the interruption. “That cunning god perfected the plan. He told me to send a rider to Zadar to tell him that we’ll be lining the route to celebrate his passing with a ceremonial battle line. We’ll defend our land with something that looks like a show of respect. That’s the sort of strategic thinking you won’t have seen much of where you’re from.”

  “Are you sure that’s what Dwyn told you?” Dug had never questioned a druid before, but Elliax’s plan was madness. “Forewarned, as most kids where I’m from know, is forearmed.”

  Elliax sneered. “We have slings, many more than Zadar can possibly have. His troops will be on horseback and in chariots, we’ll be behind shields. If Zadar tries to attack, our shields will protect us and we’ll send back a hailstorm of death. Zadar is not stupid. He will not attack! He knows how futile it would be. Besides, the gods have spoken to me. Perhaps if you’d listened to them more, you wouldn’t be walking the land begging for work. At your age too. It’s shameful.”

  Dug’s ears were suddenly hot. Elliax turned away from him and outlined his plan in detail. Irritatingly, thought Dug, the jumped-up prick’s idea made some sense. Charging a line of spears on horseback or in a chariot was indeed suicide. Horses knew this too, so it was also near impossible. He was right about projectile weapons as well. Barton’s more numerous slingers and shields should neutralise any projectile threat.

  Geography also favoured Barton. To get from Zadar’s likely route to most of Barton’s land, you had to cross a river. The only bridge for miles was in the centre of a long bend. The best way for cavalry to beat a line of spearmen was to gallop around and take them on the flank or from behind. With the army bracketed by two loops of the river’s meandering course, that would be impossible. But there was still one big, obvious flaw.