Age of Iron

by Angus Watson

  “You know, old man, you might just have something there. You are a clever fellow. Perhaps you’d like to stick around for a while? Share some ideas? But now why don’t you get some shut-eye, and we’ll see you later?”

  “Aye. And thanks for all of this. Sorry if I’ve been a bit off. There was a battle, then we didn’t sleep last night…”

  “You’re very welcome. And I totally understand. I don’t think she needs it, but I’m glad you’re being protective of Lowa. Any friend of Lowa’s … Just let me know if there’s anything else you need.”

  “There is one thing.”

  “Yes?”

  Dug lowered his voice. “Where can I go to take a crap?”

  Chapter 5

  An hour later they were riding through the woods side by side, Ragnall leading the angry little packhorse on a long rein. He was vexed that his mind kept returning to Simshill. He’d stop himself, think about Anwen or the death of his family, but then his thoughts would drift off only to lap ashore invariably on Simshill’s leather-clad bottom. Part of him wanted to return to her despite what she was selling and, worse, despite Anwen. He tried to think about something else, and a realisation struck him like a slap to the face.

  “Drustan, how did we pay for the inn at Bladonfort? And to join the convoy?”

  “With coins.”

  “What coins?”

  “Coins taken from corpses at Boddingham. Quite a lot came from your brothers’ and your parents’ huts.”

  “How could you—”

  “Think, Ragnall. Who was hurt or inconvenienced when I took these coins? How can they help in finishing Zadar’s reign? It is good that your morals are strong, but letting them flail in each and every direction is not helpful. Imagining offence on behalf of others is the pastime of morons. Save your energy for real wrongs.”

  “But the rightful owners of the coins are dead!”

  “And so cannot own anything or be angry that their possessions are taken.”

  “Or speak out when people wrong them.”

  “Exactly.”

  The packhorse stopped to munch on track-side grass and Ragnall was jerked to a halt. Drustan rode on ahead. Ragnall gave his horse the reins so that he might eat too. He wanted a little time away from Drustan’s sense.

  Chapter 6

  Dug lay awake, breathing in fresh, warm air from the open door. He felt good. He’d slept for a while, but now in the middle of the day it was too hot. Not that that was stopping Spring, who was snoring like an asthmatic piglet in her bed on the other side of the hut.

  He lay there thinking about Lowa. He’d had relationships and liaisons, but he hadn’t been in love with anyone since Brinna. But then again he hadn’t met anyone like Lowa. Maybe if he’d been ten or even five years younger he would have fallen stupidly in love with her and made a fool of himself. But now he was pragmatic. Or boring, perhaps. Whatever it was, it made life easier. Meeting Farrell had stiffened his resolve not to make any sort of play for her. The man was a smug wanker for sure, but he was also the sort of man that Lowa should and would be with – good-looking, successful and, most of all, young. That was the way of the world. Young, strong women got it on with strong young men while tired old men looked on with envy. The fact that old men desired young women – and old women desired young men, he supposed – was just another example of the gods’ twisted sense of humour. The only way a man his age could pull a wonder like Lowa was by amassing piles of riches. However, it was becoming increasingly obvious that he was never going to amass much more than scars and memories.

  His musing was interrupted by a girl’s voice from outside, inviting Lowa to lunch at Farrell’s hut. It was Enid, Farrell’s daughter, he guessed. He was surprised by a pang of jealousy when he heard Lowa agree to go without asking whether he and Spring were asked too. He was cheered when Enid knocked on their hut door, then bumped back down when she told him that he and Spring would be more than welcome to lunch at the communal cookhouse. Never mind, he told himself. He might not be spending time with Lowa today, but at least he wouldn’t have to put up with Farrell.

  They left Lowa combing her hair and headed off down the hill. Spring had dreamed that Dug could fly and was telling him all about it without, as far as Dug could work out, breathing. She broke off mid-word when they arrived at the cookhouse to find two long tables of Kanawan faces looking up at them.

  They halted and stared as if they’d found their path blocked by a badger brandishing an axe. Dug was not socially confident, and neither, it seemed to his surprise, was Spring. Luckily the villagers were effusively welcoming, and they soon relaxed.

  Dug sat with Spring on one side and a large, curly-haired young man called Channa on the other. Some girls from the school, who’d eaten earlier, served roast pork with mashed apple, bread and a sharp paste made from crushed mustard seeds, which overtook the morning’s porridge as the best thing Dug had ever eaten. Mutton was by far the more common meat, and Dug was happy with that, but it was a long time since he’d eaten pig, and he’d forgotten how much better it was. Spring stayed mercifully quiet while Channa told Dug about Kanawan’s crops and industry, especially his speciality, the retting of flax.

  After lunch the schoolgirls were free from lessons and serving duties. A few came over to ask Spring to join their games. She was reluctant, but Dug helped to persuade her so he could carry on talking to the interesting and friendly young farmer. Besides, he thought, it would be good for her to mix with people her own age, or at least nearer it. He wondered if she was playing with other girls for the first time, and realised with a mild jolt that he didn’t actually know anything about the girl’s background. Spring went off unhappily, but shortly afterwards galloped back past the tables clopping two wooden bowls together and whinnying like a frightened horse, pursued by five barking girls.

  Dug spent the rest of the afternoon with Channa on a tour of Kanawan. He was struck by several of the innovations, including the retting field. He’d seen people soak flax or hemp in ponds and streams to separate the fibre from the stem. That had the downside of making the water smelly and undrinkable. Here they laid their flax out in a field and the dew did the work, without making a tenth of the smell or ruining a pond. Dug didn’t like change as a rule, particular Roman-inspired change, but the chubby young retter was so honestly enthusiastic, and Kanawan so undeniably prosperous, that he found himself coming round. Here, he thought, was a good society. He decided to forget garrison work at Maidun and get back to farming. Maybe even learn some carpentry. What was he thinking, wanting to be a mercenary with Zadar? Perhaps he could stay here and farm, and leave Lowa to her crazy revenge mission? He could get back to the life of creating things that he’d had with Brinna, and away from the Warrior’s life of destruction.

  He’d have to put up with Farrell of course, but he could stand that. He’d just do the standard human thing and put on a friendly face while undermining him behind his back.

  Late that afternoon, great black thunderclouds rolled across the blue sky from the south-west. A chill breeze whipped up whirls of leaves and blossoms, and the world darkened. Dug said a quick goodbye to Channa and marched back to their huts. He arrived just as the first fat drops of rain began to fall. He looked into Lowa’s hut. She was still at Farrell’s lunch. In his, Spring was curled in a ball on her bed, thumb in mouth and snoring again. He thought about waking her so that she’d sleep that night, but then remembered how much his own girls had slept and left her.

  He sat on the floor of the porch and watched as the raindrops came harder and faster. Soon it was total downpour. It was the sort of rain you saw only every few years, like a giant had scooped up all the sea and was tipping it onto the hills and valleys. The drainage channels running from the huts became rivers, and the central one in the road a mini torrent, but, Dug noticed with a satisfied nod, they seemed to be holding up nicely. This really was a well put-together little town.

  At the height of the downpour Lowa came running through
the rain. She stopped when she spotted Dug and stood, panting and smiling, wet hair clinging to her head and neck, white hemp shirt plastered to her, transparent.

  “Hello!” she laughed.

  “Hello there.” He raised a hand in greeting, trying to keep his eyes focused on her face.

  “It’sh raining!” she said, looking up at the sky. Clearly a good lunch, thought Dug with a pang of envy.

  “Oh aye? I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Well, move over then.”

  He leaned to one side and she ducked past him into his hut. He turned. She was already peeling off her wet riding trousers. He looked back to the storm. A minute later Lowa squeezed onto the ground next to him, wrapped in a wool blanket. It was narrow enough that her arm pressed against his arm and her thigh against his thigh. The weather was coming from behind the porch so they were dry, but half a pace away rain thundered into dancing earth. Lowa leaned her head on Dug’s shoulder. They sat in silence, watching as the heavy rain became heavier hail, shifting in swishing curtains across the valley. Very quickly the ground had a covering of little ice balls, bouncing as more pellets fell.

  They watched as the hail became fresh rain, still without saying anything. Dug could feel Lowa breathing. He could smell her wet hair. Rills of rainwater washed the hailstones into miniature hills and valleys. The raindrops became smaller and fewer, the sky brightened and then it wasn’t raining any more. The silence seemed almost loud after the heavy beat of rain. Within moments sunlight was lancing down and steam rising from the dazzling gold road. On the far side of the valley the sky was still the black of wet slate and rain was lashing the fields, but the trees were brightest sunlit green.

  The rainbow was so faint at first that Dug wasn’t sure if it was there, then suddenly it very much was, preposterously bright and gigantic, forming an arch over the path they’d taken from Bladonfort. Dug turned to say something to Lowa, but she turned at the same time, grabbed the back of his head and kissed him.

  Chapter 7

  It felt like they were moving faster than the merchants’ convoy, but given their circuitous route, ducking under branches, following valleys, winding along meandering rivers and skirting swamps, they almost certainly weren’t. They stopped in a few villages remote enough to be untouched by Zadar’s barbarism and, it seemed to Ragnall, remote enough to be deeply weird. At one collection of huts clustered under a circle of great trees at the bottom of a meadowed valley they found, once they’d penetrated the dialect, that the inhabitants couldn’t, or wouldn’t, count higher than four. Any number above four was “many”. Ragnall struggled to buy eight apples.

  As they rode away, Ragnall marvelled at their stupidity. Drustan replied that numbers were good only for showing off and warfare and that they’d all be better off without them.

  “What if you needed to know in advance how many visitors from another tribe to cater for?” Ragnall asked.

  After a long pause Drustan said, “See if you can work that out for yourself.”

  Got him! thought Ragnall.

  Chapter 8

  Somebody had once tried to persuade Weylin that it hardly ever rained.

  “Just think,” they’d said. “You train outside for, what, at least two hours every day? How often does it rain?”

  “Hardly ever,” he’d had to admit.

  “And people say we live in a rainy land! But it hardly ever rains,” the smug arsehole had concluded. Well it was raining now, like a bastard. If the rain denier had been on hand, Weylin would have drowned him in a puddle. The only upside was that they seemed to be heading in the right direction. Several peasants had seen three riders, and two roadside farmers had had things stolen, including a horse, which would corroborate Ogre’s story that their quarry had had only two horses between three.

  However, right track or not, the downpour was so deeply unpleasant that he called the halt for camp a few hours early. Riding along with water trickling through his head bandage, down his back, round his armpits, down his arse crack and around his groin was nasty enough, but when the wet leather began to chafe his inner thighs raw, it was time to stop. They pitched their supposedly waterproof leather bivouacs. Weylin picked the best spot, a fallen tree trunk where a previous traveller had made a good lean-to with branches, sticks and leaves. But still it was wet. Combined with his bivouac, the lean-to kept him dry from above, but the very air was sodden. He sat spread-legged and shivered. His bones were wet.

  By Bel, he was going to take this out on Lowa when he caught up with her. Such a shame he couldn’t kill her. He prayed to Toutatis that the lunk who’d helped her escape was still with her. Thinking about strange tortures he’d visit on the northern bastard finally lulled him into peaceful sleep.

  It had stopped raining by morning, thank Toutatis, but the rain had obliterated the tracks that had already been difficult enough to follow on the busy road. The only course was to continue north, but it didn’t feel right. At first everyone they asked had a story about the man, woman and child who’d passed, but for the last few hours the people in the roadside settlements swore they hadn’t seen any travellers fitting their descriptions for days. Morale was low. Two of his men had caught colds in the sodden night and were sneezing at him.

  At first the beautiful freshness of the land framed by rising tendrils of mist as the summer sun boiled the rain out of the ground had buoyed him a little. Steadily though, as they rode further and further without a sniff of Lowa, Weylin became increasingly depressed. He’d just resolved to take his misery out on the next person they came across when the shout came faintly in the distance, then ringing clear from a nearby hamlet.

  “Have Lowa. Village of Kanawan. Do not repeat this message near Kanawan.”

  Weylin pulled his horse round, raised his sword over his head and bellowed like a hero from a story, “We ride for Kanawan!”

  He might have continued looking like a hero had he galloped off in the direction of Kanawan, dirt flying from his mount’s hooves and surcoat flapping in the wind. Instead he almost fell off – riding with one arm in a sling was not easy when you let go of the reins with your good hand – then sat still on his horse, head jerking in random directions like a dog that’s heard a fly somewhere. The nub of the problem was that he didn’t know where Kanawan was or even what general direction it was in. He’d never heard of it.

  Felix, for all his crowing about the importance of geography, was never keen to share his knowledge. He had some plans of the land etched on vellum, but he kept them to himself. “Never let the right hand know what the left is doing,” Weylin had heard him say. Which was a bit fucking annoying when the right hand was holding a map and you were the lost left hand.

  None of his company nor Ogre and his men had heard of Kanawan either.

  The final person he asked was Savage Banba. She smiled at him, her distractingly white teeth shining from a tanned, square face beneath asymmetrically bobbed black hair. “I have no idea where Kanawan is,” she said with a short, barking laugh.

  “What’s funny?” he asked.

  “Nothing.” She looked down as if deciding whether to say something, then looked up again. “Although it is somewhat amusing that our search tactics have involved riding into the middle of nowhere, rather than staying warm and dry in Bladonfort. So that now that we do know where Lowa is, we have no way of knowing where that where is. But if we’d stayed in Bladonfort, we could have eaten well last night, slept in dry beds, got the shout this morning, asked a merchant where Kanawan is and been on our way there already. Rather than standing here like drunk children who’ve finished the beer they stole and don’t know what to do next.”

  Ogre and a few others sniggered. Weylin reddened under his dirty bandage. He had to regain the upper hand somehow.

  “We should have stayed in Bladonfort, you’re saying, because someone in Bladonfort will know where Kanawan is?”

  “I imagine that every merchant there knows where it is.”

  “Good. Go and ask th
em. We’ll wait here.” Weylin pointed at a nearby farmhouse. A worried-looking farmer was standing on his doorstep, watching them. They’d give him reason for that worried look in a moment, thought Weylin with a smile.

  “But that’ll take—”

  “The rest of the day and all night. Yes. Be back here by dawn with directions to Bladonfort, or I will whip you until you’re dead.”

  “You can’t—”

  “Yes I can, Savage Banba. Zadar’s orders. He wants Lowa. I have to do everything I can to get her. Anybody who stands in the way of that will soon find themselves standing in a whole heap of shit.”

  “But my mount isn’t fresh.”

  “Your problem. See you later.”

  Weylin dismounted and led his horse to the farmhouse. He heard Savage Banba gallop away, but he didn’t turn because he knew that not turning would look better. He felt the admiring gazes of his troop on his back.

  Chapter 9

  The broch is the stone fort’s gatehouse. The lower half of the broch tower is carved from the cliff’s rock, the upper half built from skilfully shaped, immovable blocks of stone. The only way into the fort is up wooden stairs to an iron-barred door ten paces up the broch wall. The wooden stairs can be raised on pulleys.

  High, smooth walls sweep back from the broch in the shape of a pulled longbow, until they meet the towering, sleek, black cliff. On the very stormiest days, with the wind blowing across the longest possible fetch, spray from waves might come over the walls. As far as attackers are concerned, however, the fort is impregnable. With the stairs pulled up, anybody trying to climb to the door or scale the walls gets a rock on their head or a faceful of boiling oil.

  Behind the walls, sheltered from wind and the salt spray, warmed by the sun in the day and by heat radiating from the south-facing cliff at night, are plots of vegetables and wheat. And fenced enclosures of livestock. And, why not, a flower garden. She’d probably like that. In fact, there’s a stream running out of a cave in the cliff that babbles prettily through the flower garden before plunging into a sinkhole just before the wall. Their helpful children do the laundry and wash the pans in the stream. The cave is long and dry, despite the stream running along its base. In it is a storehouse with enough provisions – smoked and salted fish, seal and pork in barrels – to last fifty years of siege.