by Angus Watson
“Lowa! Lowa Flynn!”
It was her sister Aithne and the rest of her girls, waiting for her. Aithne had one hand on a meaty hip, a no-complications grin on her freckly face. The girlish circlet of flowers in her hair clashed nicely with her absurdly short leather skirt. “Little more than a belt!” at least five unimaginative dullards at the party were bound to say. As if reading Lowa’s mind, Aithne turned and waggled her arse at her little sister. A good thumb’s breadth of bare cheek showed on either side. Lowa felt a small smile escape from under her previous gloom and she raised a hand in greeting.
Usually only Lowa was invited to Zadar’s upper-ranks after-battle party, but because of their success in opening up Barton’s lines that morning, all six of her squad of mounted archers had been asked along. It amused Lowa that they’d waited for her. On the battlefield they’d charge anything, but the idea of walking without her into a party full of Maidun’s elite terrified them.
“How’s Findus?” asked Lowa.
“Out to pasture, happy. He was such a funny pig this afternoon. Grabbed an apple out of my bag when I wasn’t looking then trotted away like a prince, farting with every step!” said Aithne with a sing-song chuckle. Lowa’s sister loved horses. Lowa thought they were useful. “How’s the smarter end of town?”
“Clean. Quiet.”
“Opposite of ours then. What’s up? You look … troubled?”
“Nothing. Hungry, I think.”
“Ah yes, sorry about that.” Aithne shrugged. “Good thing is, now I’ve forgotten our lunches once, chances are I won’t do it again.”
“You did it last year at Thanet.”
“Doubly likely not to do it again then.”
Aithne took Lowa’s arm and led her to the track running up to the hillfort.
The four other women smiled hello and fell in behind. Cordelia Bullbrow had biceps that made men envious, olive skin, a forehead like a shield boss and a beard that she was apparently unaware of. Maura Drunkstotter was small and angry. Seanna Applehead was the oldest and tallest. Her small head sprouted a massive bush of curly blonde hair. Realin Ghostfeet was the group’s beauty, with a voluptuous figure, a bell of thick, dark red hair and green eyes that seemed to catch any light, focus it, and twinkle it out in such a filthily flirtatious way that anyone talking to her – man or woman, young or old – was convinced that she was keen to perform any number of depraved sexual acts with them right there and then. She was very popular and possibly the most chaste woman in Zadar’s army.
They were dressed in a mixture of scanty battle garb and scraps of cloth they’d plundered from the village. They wouldn’t look out of place, thought Lowa, in Maidun’s whorepits. Knots of soldiers and camp followers stopped to watch the heroes of the day’s battle pass. Lowa’s gang. She felt her dread lift a little. Pride was a defensive pretence of the weak, so she wasn’t proud of her gang as such. They were just better than everyone else, and she was the best of them and their leader. That was how it was, and how it was felt good.
Chapter 6
Smoke drifted across the field and reached in misty fingers up the steep escarpment that led up to Barton’s hillfort. The usually white chalk-cut walls of the fort were tender pink in the sun’s low rays. Light glinted off the bronze torcs, bracelets and other jewellery of the straggling procession that zigzagged along the path up to the hillfort and Zadar’s victory party.
Lowa recognised most of Maidun’s luminaries. There was Atlas Agrippa, the huge ebony-skinned Kushite, his mighty double-bladed iron axe strapped to his back – a party accessory that would have looked ridiculous on many, thought Lowa, but it suited Atlas. Talking to him was almost-as-big Carden Nancarrow: Zadar’s champion, the blacksmith Elann Nancarrow’s eldest son and the man responsible for the grass stain on Lowa’s dress. Lowa smiled. Alongside Carden was the rangy figure of Deirdre Marsh, or Dionysia Palus as she now, Roman-style and very annoyingly, called herself. She was a head taller than Lowa but looked small next to the two men.
The track crossed a broad meadow of grazing land. Over to their right junior chariot drivers were practising dashing and turning, running up draught poles, jumping from one horse to another and other tricks that might be useful in a battle but were mostly about showing off. Evening light flashed off wheel hubs and horses’ flicked saliva.
Over on the left, atop an ancient burial mound, Zadar’s head druid, Titus Pontius Felix, known as Felix, was disembowelling children.
He had selected nine of the youngest new captives, nine being an auspicious number, and had them tied to wooden crosspieces hammered onto uprights to face the setting sun, which meant they also faced those heading to Zadar’s party. Felix was circling them widdershins, with the children always on his right, as the gods preferred. Three of the Barton kids, slumped in the ropes next to piles of their own entrails, had already served their purpose. Six were yet to help.
Felix waggled an iron rod encrusted with tiny bells at the children as he walked. He stopped, then shouted, “Eenha, meenha, minha … mo,” pointing his stick at a different child with each syllable. The rhyme finished on a boy and Felix advanced. Lowa and her gang stopped. The chosen boy stared past the druid straight at the women. He was thin, with a tuft of red-brown hair. Seven years old, Lowa guessed. The lower half of his left leg jutted at a strange angle from his knee. Part of her wanted to intervene, an old part that had no say any more.
“There have to be nicer ways of talking to the gods,” said Aithne. “And it’s not like it works. He never even gets the weather right.”
They watched the druid. A wood pigeon hooted in a nearby tree. Felix raised his balding head to the darkening sky, drew a silvered bronze blade across the child’s taut stomach and shouted, “Bel, show me!” The boy gasped, then screwed his face into a ball of silent agony. A slimy sac bulged from the slit in his stomach. Felix ran his finger along the protruding offal. The child tossed his head from side to side but made no sound. Felix punched the child in the chest. The boy convulsed, the slit in his stomach burst into a broad gash and a bloody gloop of intestines slopped out. Felix deftly stepped clear, then squatted and stirred the shining pile with the iron rod. The boy stared down at his own intestines, then closed his eyes and cried wobblingly but silently.
“That was a brave one,” said Aithne as they walked on.
“He had guts,” said Lowa.
The other women laughed but Aithne raised an eyebrow. “You don’t ever think…?”
“What?” Lowa sounded testy.
“That it’s wrong?”
“Wrong?”
“Felix seems to kill a lot of kids for no reason?”
Lowa sighed. “Zadar could have philosopher druids, teacher druids, storyteller druids, but Felix the cruel dark mystical druid suits our image better, so it’s him we have. The enemy don’t run screaming because they’re terrified we’re going to lecture them on the properties of herbs. And besides, we do have healing druids. You just notice them less because they don’t torture people in public.”
“But, children…”
“Look Aithne, the best place to be in Britain is in Zadar’s army. There’s nowhere safer or more lucrative. Until that changes, I agree with everything Zadar says and does. And so do you.”
Up ahead a vixen broke cover from a patch of bushes and streaked downhill. The women watched her run. She’d have a fine night feasting on the day’s battlefield.
As they walked Lowa could feel Aithne brooding next to her and knew there was more whingeing to come. A scream rang out from the sacrifice mound below, seeming to prompt her: “But there was a time it wasn’t like this. When murder and torture were unusual. When druids were good. You don’t remember – you’re too young.”
“You’re two years older than me.”
“Exactly. I heard more about it before Mum died.”
“If it wasn’t for me we’d still be peasants, like Mum. So how about you remember how quickly we could go back to that, or end up like those c
hildren or much, much worse, and shut the fuck up? And besides, we lived across the sea. How could you or Mum possibly have known what it was like here?”
Aithne looked away. Lowa felt guilty, but her sister had to be told, partly because it was deeply irritating when she made up stories about their shared past, but more because talking like this was dangerous. Remembering what had happened to the last woman who’d been reported for gossiping about Zadar and imagining it happening to Aithne made Lowa shiver. Few lived a happy or long life with their tongue split in two by red-hot liars’ scissors.
The sisters trudged in silence up the steep slope to the hillfort, up the switchback path which finally curved onto the ridge. To the south – their right as they reached the scarp top – a rough road ran gradually downhill. To the north, carved in a circle from the escarpment promontory, was Barton Hillfort. Its four-pace-high gates were gaping open, as they had been when Lowa and others had ridden up to claim it that morning.
It was a standard medium-sized hillfort. Nothing compared to Maidun Castle – few were – but still a useful gain for Zadar, and totally defendable if you didn’t do something really stupid like pour all your people out of it into a weak line of inexperienced infantry in a field perfectly suited to your mounted enemy. Its white chalk-hewn ramparts rose from a ditch as deep as the walls were high. There were tufts of vegetation on the wall and too much scree in the ditch, Lowa noticed. That would have to be fixed. There should be as few handholds as possible on the rock-cut walls, and a hillfort should have nice clear ditches, preferably with sharpened stakes dug into the bottom, or at least a liberal sprinkling of large caltrops to make anybody leaping into it regret that they had. The spiked oak palisade that crowned the rampart was in reasonable repair, but it was vertical, which irritated Lowa. The palisade should have been canted back to the same angle as the bank, so that attackers couldn’t shelter in its lee. Fort builders should know that.
Rather unoriginally, fresh heads had been impaled on some of the palisade’s spikes.
“Is that King Mylor, do you reckon?” asked Aithne, pointing at a big head in a plain, rusty iron helmet with a swollen black tongue resting on stiff beard bristles and something stuffed into its mouth.
“Doubt it. That’s a boar necklace in his mouth. He’s one of the few Warriors they had. Mylor was captured. Zadar’ll probably sell him. Although you can’t get as much for a king as you used to be able to.” Or he’ll keep him as a pet, she thought.
Lowa surprised herself by shuddering at the idea. Aithne’s doubts about the murdered children had begun to get to her too. What was wrong with her? Why should she suddenly care anything for a bunch of loser kids and their moron king? If they’d stayed in their stupid fort, she thought, Mylor would still be ruling happily, those heads would be attached to their bodies, the nine sacrificial children would be a great deal happier, and the people whose hut she’d taken would be settling down to their evening meal. Last night they’d been a family. Now they were carrion.
As they passed through the gates, Lowa was convinced that the four heavily armoured guards looked at her and her girls like foxes might look at chickens behind a badly made fence. She thought she saw one whisper something to another, then look at her and smirk. But Lowa had seen people who panicked about things that weren’t there, who had the arrogance to believe that everyone was out to get them. There was no way she was becoming one of them. Food. Food would help. Booze would help more.
Aithne took Lowa’s wrist and pulled her closer.
“Lowa, surely it’s not right that we’re killing all these people. They say it wasn’t like this before Zadar. They say it was so peaceful that hillforts were falling apart. It can’t be right that everyone needs to build them again. It can’t be right that we’re sacrificing children. The Earth Mother cannot approve.”
“If Danu doesn’t like it, why doesn’t she do something?”
“Maybe we should do something for her?”
“Aithne, seriously, stop this. Unless you really, really want to end the evening impaled on a stake?”
Aithne smiled saucily. “Well, I sort of do…”
“That’s better.”
The gateway opened up into the wide hillfort interior and chattering knots of conquering Maidun soldiers. Lowa fixed on her party face and plunged into her least favourite form of mêlée.
Chapter 7
Dug Sealskinner ran. He knew it was too late. His feet sank into sand and marram grass cut his hands as he hauled himself up the dune. The dune shouldn’t have been that high. A small part of his mind realised that he was dreaming, but it couldn’t make itself heard over the much larger part of his mind which was gibbering in a rolling boil of horror because it knew what he was going to find on the other side of the dune.
He paused when he reached the summit. His broch stood firm by the burbling burn, peaceful as a sleeping dog. Maybe he was wrong. Its circular stone wall was so solid, everything looked so quiet, surely this time all would be fine? Brinna would be waiting for him, Kelsie and Terry playing nearby? Kornonos had only blessed Brinna once with pregnancy, but Danu had given them two in one go and he loved them so much that just saying their names in his head almost made him weep.
He jumped down the dune in two huge leaps, sinking knee-deep in sand, like he’d done so many times with his wee girls whooping in his arms. He ran across springy estuarine turf, splashed through the burn’s stony ford. Geese scattered on the bank, honking angrily. Geese that should have been fenced into the walled yard. Horse hoof marks in the mud. They didn’t have any horses. No twin tots running out to meet him. No squeals of joy with the sunlight shining in their beautiful red hair. No noise from the broch. The door open.
He felt his bowels slacken as he walked in. He knew he’d find Terry first. They looked identical, Kelsie and Terry, but he always knew who was who.
There was Terry, the tiny thing, four summers old, slumped against a wooden pillar, as always. One eye staring at him, as always. One eye part of the pulp that the other side of her face had become. A mace blow, Dug thought, as he always did, as his knees buckled.
Chapter 8
Lowa Flynn sank her teeth into a gooey venison haunch. She was standing on her own, but not so far from the throng that people might ask what was wrong. She came to Zadar’s after-battle parties for the food. She stayed for the booze. Small talk she could do without. Chat at the beginning of parties was not conversation, it was just people making noises at each other. Lowa preferred to stand, watch and think.
She could hear Aithne’s honking laughter from over by the fire, above the minstrels’ cacophony. Her sister had shed her misgivings about the regime quickly enough once Atlas the Kushite showed her some attention. Shaking her hair and inflating her chest, she put a hand onto his broad, dark-skinned shoulder. Of Lowa’s mounted archers, Aithne was the keenest to leap into bed with pretty much anyone who asked. Actually, leaping into bed was rare. Nipping round the back of a hut, tumbling into a defensive ditch or simply shuffling a little further from the firelight was more her style.
People were always surprised that they were sisters. Aithne was big-boned, big-arsed, busty and tall with hair the colour of piss-soaked stable straw, while Lowa was average height, slender, with hair so blonde it was almost white. Admittedly she was on the stocky side of slender. Riding and archery had built muscle, and a keen observer would have seen that her right shoulder and arm were bigger than her left from drawing the longbow, but she was slim-waisted and supple, with a bottom that lobbed slingstones would have bounced off. Aithne had the small-featured, freckled face of a milkmaid. Lowa had the pale skin and high cheekbones of a fairy princess. Aithne had dark, bovine eyes with long heavy lashes. Lowa’s eyes were blue, pale-lashed and slanted like a wildcat’s. Aithne was gregarious while Lowa watched from the edges. Aithne was confused and idealistic where Lowa was logical and pragmatic. Aithne was a glutton for food and booze, often to be found vomiting before bed, while Lowa never overate and h
ad never been sick after drinking. Aithne was two years older, but Lowa had been the leader as long as she could remember.
Lowa had no memory of her father, but she was pretty sure he wasn’t the same guy as Aithne’s.
Her other four archers stood by the blazing fire, in a circle talking to each other, as they always did at the beginning of any social gathering. Lowa felt a swelling of affection. Must be the booze, she thought. Part of her wanted to join them, but she couldn’t be both friend and leader. Yes, they’d been together for years. Yes, they’d become Zadar’s most favoured fighters – right now more favoured than the Fifty. And yes, she loved Cordelia, Maura, Seanna and Realin like daughters. But that was exactly it. Lowa loathed mothers who got drunk and shared smutty jokes with their daughters. Too much familiarity cheapened and weakened the bond. So, even though she was younger than at least two of them, she kept a maternal distance.
Looking around at the chatting, laughing throng, it was odd to think that these people had spent the morning up to their armpits in gore, slaughtering the massively more numerous but woefully inferior foe. Ah, not all of them had fought. There was Keelin Orton, Zadar’s latest mistress, standing on her own because none of the men dared talk to her and none of the women wanted to. She was a beautiful girl, about fifteen years old, with come-and-get-it eyes, a two-handspan waist, an equine rump, tits the size of her head and a pout pettish enough to sour milk. Her white linen dress and broad leather belt would have looked virginal on most other girls. On Keelin, it had Lowa questioning her usual preference for men. She was typical Zadar fodder. When Zadar announced that she would open the morning’s battle by driving the gruesome man-drawn chariot, Keelin had squealed with delight. Once the draught-men were mad with the agony of a thick piece of metal hammered through each shoulder, she’d teased them coquettishly. She was no sweetie.
