Age of Iron

by Angus Watson

  “Please don’t kill this one,” said Tadman, “because I would absolutely love to. And I won’t be nearly so gentle next time.”

  Lowa looked up at the blue sky.

  Come on gods. Do something good for once.

  Chapter 25

  “King Zadar, I’ve come from the gate. There’s a girl who wants to see you. She says you know her,” said the soldier.

  Zadar nodded. “It’s Sabina, or Spring as she’s calling herself.”

  “I don’t think so. Her name’s Ing-bo, Ang-bo, Icky Icky Wang Bo Bing Bo Bong Bo Bong Bo. She made me memorise it.” The soldier scratched at his beard. It looked like he’d had a difficult morning.

  Still damp from an earlier rain squall, Elliax was shivering. It was cooler than it had been for a long time. Zadar had come to his throne earlier, on his own, and sat. It had looked like he was thinking. Elliax had wanted to say something but couldn’t summon the courage. Instead, he sat on the ground next to his holding post, clasped his knees to his chest and rocked, trying to warm up. He’d had some more special meat that morning and vomited nastily. He was unwell and unhappy, yet his mind was more with him today. He wished it wasn’t. He’d spent Bel knew how long convinced that this was all a test and he’d be freed any moment. Now he knew he was going to die as Zadar’s plaything. Not even his plaything, just a decoration that would be discarded like dead flowers.

  He looked at Zadar and hated him. How could the gods allow one man, one such twisted man, to have such power? Because the gods were either indifferent or, more likely, they revelled in human misery as much as the crowds he heard baying in the arena. Or perhaps they were as different as humans, complicated combinations of good and bad? Perhaps the fact that people like Zadar and, let’s face it, himself, were in the ascendancy at the moment reflected a similar shits-incharge situation among the gods?

  He thought of Vasin. Almost every word she said and everything she did had made him wince for a good few years now, but he’d loved her. And he’d been eating her. He should have refused. But it was so easy to pretend it wasn’t her. Even now they’d moved her nearby and he could hear her cries, he was still eating her. He just pretended the screams were someone else’s.

  “Hi, Zadar!” The chirpy voice shook him from misery. He looked up. A pretty young girl tripped in, ahead of a soldier. Age-wise she was at the younger end of the honeys Elliax had enjoyed at Barton when life was better. He’d seen her somewhere before though …

  The girl stood there, beaming.

  Zadar looked at her levelly. “Leave us,” he said to the guard, beckoning the child closer. “Sabina.”

  “It’s Spring.”

  “So I heard. And Silver. It makes no difference to me what you have others call you. Here you will answer to the name I gave you.”

  The girl shrugged. “Did you miss me?”

  “Had any of my other children absconded at your age, I would have expected them to die. I would have been disappointed if you had.”

  “Why?”

  “Because ever since you could talk, perhaps even before – you weren’t brought to me until you could – you have displayed charisma and intelligence. You may be protected by magic and may even be able to use it. I suspect that you will rule Maidun, and probably much wider lands, under the Romans.”

  “I won’t ever rule.”

  “Oh? And why not?”

  “I’ve seen what your rule does. I was in Barton before you destroyed it and killed them all. The people were good even though they were poor, and they were only poor because you took away their riches.

  That was it, Elliax remembered. Little Spring. She’d been part of Ogre’s gang. He’d done good business with Ogre, back in his other life. He’d noticed Ogre’s new little girl just a few moons before, but the earless bandit had threatened him when he’d asked to rent her for an hour.

  The girl continued: “Ogre told me that after you came to Barton their king went mad and you put a horrible little weasel-druid in charge, who took their food, raped their daughters and ruined a lot of lives.”

  Zadar nodded towards Elliax.

  Spring looked at him. Elliax looked back at her. His throat constricted. Horrors – his horrors – flashed into his mind. He saw hungry families and crying girls. He saw the girl who’d died in his hut. He hadn’t meant her to! He saw Vasin cowering as they came in to cut her again. He saw the Maidun cavalry surging over the weak Barton line and the horrible massacre of innocents that was all his fault …

  Spring looked away. The visions cleared and Elliax slumped, sobbing.

  “Yes, that’s him. I don’t know what he’s doing here and I don’t know why he looks so ill, but I am sure that even he doesn’t deserve what you’re doing to him.”

  Elliax opened his eyes. The girl was facing her father, hands on hips. “And Barton didn’t deserve what you did. I saw the battle. But it wasn’t a fight between two sides. You were like mad boys slaughtering a field of geese. That was the worst I saw, but everywhere where you rule I saw miserable people. Everyone said that you had made things worse. Almost all the good people were poor and miserable and the bad people, men like Elliax and Ogre, were happy and rich. As soon as I left the lands that you ruled, it was all fine. Kanawan and Mearhold were clean and nice and how towns should be. But then you came along and destroyed both of those too! Why?”

  Zadar looked long and hard at his child. She gazed right back, unafraid.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said eventually. “Come and sit down here.” He patted the chair that Felix usually sat on.

  “I don’t want to sit next to you.”

  Zadar breathed in and seemed to grow a little. Elliax had seen that happen before, usually just before he ordered someone’s death.

  “All right. Stand. Obedience can come later. The first thing you have to understand is that the Romans are coming. Disputes in Rome have delayed them and a slave revolt put them back a year or two, but the delays will not last for ever. They are surely coming. All the druids agree.”

  “Druids are liars and fakes.” Spring glanced at Elliax. It was like being slapped. He cowered. How could a little girl affect him so powerfully?

  “Most of them are, but, as you’ll learn, some aren’t. The Romans are coming.”

  The girl looked as if she was thinking. Elliax could swear the air was vibrating around her. “All right, maybe the Romans are coming, with endless ships and strange beasts, but we’ll fight them.”

  “Did you just…?” Zadar leaned forward. It was the first time Elliax had seen him look interested in anything.

  “What?” The girl looked confused.

  “Never mind.” Zadar sat back. “They are coming and we cannot fight them.”

  “Why not?”

  “Who wins in a fight between a squirrel and a bear?”

  “A bear. Unless it’s a giant squirrel with a bear spear.”

  “Let’s assume normal-sized, unarmed squirrels for the sake of this analogy. How about a bear against a hundred squirrels?”

  “The bear.”

  “Indeed. Now the Roman army is a like a hundred bears to Britain’s one squirrel. You saw the battle at Barton. That was a small part of my army, and we were outnumbered ten to one. Yet we obliterated them with no injuries to any of my soldiers because we’re well armed, well trained and well led, and they weren’t. The difference between the Roman troops and my troops is greater than the difference between mine and Barton’s. Their skills, weapons and tactics are immeasurably superior to ours. We cannot hold the land. They will invade, and they will invade successfully.”

  “Yes, but that’s like being in a running race against someone you know is faster. You can’t not race. You might win. You have to try.”

  “Not if you’re going to be killed for losing and there’s another option. We have to survive. I am not the wanton tyrant that I appear to be to those who cannot see. I am ensuring the survival of our people. The British people. We may be many tribes on this island, b
ut really we are one people bound by the sea. I am saving all of us.”

  “By killing us and selling us as slaves to Rome? That saves us, does it?”

  Zadar sighed. “Your mother – Robina, was she not?”

  “Yes.”

  “A good woman. I was sorry when she died.”

  “Me too.”

  “She took you to the beach in the summer?”

  “A few summers ago, yes.”

  “And you saw the tide. It comes in, it goes out.”

  “It does.”

  “Did you build sand forts?”

  “We did.”

  “What did the tide do to those forts?”

  “It destroyed them.”

  “And when the tide rolled back, what was left of them?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No trace at all?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, Sabina, the Romans are the tide. They are coming, and we cannot stop them. But they will ebb away like the tide. Empires never last for ever, but a people can. Britain is a nation of sand forts. Have you heard of Carthage?”

  “The tribe who won loads of big battles against the Romans? Yes, my mum told me about them.”

  “The Carthaginians did win a battle or two. They almost finished the Romans at the battle of Cannae, but almost wasn’t good enough. Do you remember the end of the story?”

  The girl looked at the ground.

  “The Carthaginians were obliterated. Their huge city of Carthage – imagine fifty Maidun Castles built of cut stone rather than hewn rock – was ground into the soil and its people slaughtered. When I was a boy I met an old sailor who’d seen Carthage a few days after its destruction. The horrors that he described – mountains of hacked-apart bodies, hordes of lions, vultures and other beasts feeding on flesh – have stayed with me. He said that the worst of it were the dead dogs and horses piled up in the rubble with the human remains. The Romans had killed every living thing in the city. But the greater horror for me is that the Romans obliterated an entire culture.”

  “So what? We’ll fight them and beat them.”

  “No. Since then, they have greatly improved their armies. Around the time you were born, hundreds of miles from Rome, a Roman general called Lucullus marched a small force into the lands of a king called Tigran. Tigran had a mighty army and thought he was invincible. He’d conquered four other huge tribes and made their kings into his personal slaves. They had to run behind King Tigran’s horse wherever he went and take it in turns to be his chair and his footstool whenever he sat. When Tigran saw Lucullus’ little force marching towards him, he joked that it was too big for a deputation but too small for an army.”

  “What happened?” asked the girl, clearly as interested in the story as Elliax. He liked the sound of this Tigran.

  “Lucullus attacked,” said Zadar, “and defeated an army twenty times the size of his with almost no loss to his side. Tigran fled.”

  “Hmm,” said the girl.

  “Sabina, the Romans are unbeatable. If they had come ten years ago, before I’d bolstered Maidun, they would have washed over the land and wiped out our people, leaving no trace of our stories, our songs, our ways – what makes us a people, rather than just people.”

  “And now?”

  “Let’s go back to your sand forts. What if you’d built them on rock, out of boulders?”

  “They’d have been knocked over by the waves.”

  “Bigger boulders.”

  The girl pouted and Zadar continued.

  “A boulder fort would stand, and remain when the tide retreated. And that, Sabina, is what I am doing. I am making Maidun and the land around it into a fort of boulders. The Romans will come, they will wash around and through us, but we will stand. When they go, the British people will still be here.”

  “What about everyone who isn’t in your boulder fort?”

  “They are like the bees that die so that the queen bee and the hive live on.”

  “The rest of Britain suffers so that Maidun can thrive?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s unfair.”

  “It’s not. The best come to Maidun, more and more every day. They are welcome. It is only the weak, the unwell and the stupid who suffer.”

  “But those people are just as important. Everyone is as important as each other.”

  Zadar looked genuinely amused. “Do you really think that, Sabina?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who have you been talking to? The idea that all people are equal is for wool-headed druids who are given everything they need and don’t see or live in the real world. Compare an oak tree to a dandelion. They’re both plants but they are hardly equal. There is that much difference, and more, between people. Do you know why the best hunting dogs are from Britain?”

  “No.”

  “We take the strongest and most intelligent dogs and breed them with each other. The lesser ones we kill.”

  “But that doesn’t mean the lesser ones have any less value.”

  “It means exactly that. What value is a small, weak hunting dog? And humans are just animals, like dogs. It is no more difficult to separate the weak from the strong, the useless from the useful. If we’re going to become stronger as a people, in order to protect ourselves from this stronger breed called the Romans, we cannot support the weak. This is not a new idea. A Greek druid called Aristotle said centuries ago that the greatest inequality comes from trying to make unequal things equal. If Maidun accommodated the weak and ineffectual from Barton and places like it, we might well move towards some sort of equality, but only by weakening the strong. We’d become less as a people and ripe to become an inferior race under the superior Romans. I’m amazed that the self-evidence of this evades you. I thought you were better than the smug, unaware, ideology-stuffed blowhards they produce in places like the Island of Angels.”

  “A king isn’t a god to decide who is weak and strong. Why are so many people sad, sick and dying? Why does everyone hate you if what you’re doing is right?”

  “Sabina, as you’ll discover, a king must be like a parent to his people, not a lover. My duty isn’t to be liked. My role is to make us all stronger, to provide an environment in which we can thrive. I am a great king because, for the greater good, for the future of our people, I make decisions, force changes and enforce rules that go against the people’s will but are good for them. I will be remembered for ever as the great king who saved the land of Britain.”

  “You’ll be remembered for ever as a smelly badger’s dick!”

  Zadar’s already bulging eyes widened. “Spring, you’ve been with weak people and their bleatings for too long. You have been blinded. Everyone who follows me – everyone – has more because they follow me.”

  “What about everyone else?”

  “They don’t matter.”

  “But they do! You say it’s all because the Romans are coming, but you’ll destroy your stupid boulder fort on the sand by making everybody Roman before they even get here. Coins are a Roman thing. I saw a town full of people in togas because of you. And why the Roman names? I’ve got a Roman name.”

  “Those are all surface things. We remain British inside. The Romans will leave Maidun alone, but only if we convince them that they can leave us alone. They must think that we are already part of their empire. We’ll continue to send them slaves, to use Roman names and dress like Romans. We’ll look Roman but we’ll stay British. We’ll keep our stories and our gods. We will survive.”

  Spring stared at her father, her fists clenched at her sides. Tears bulged in her eyes, then burst to flow down her cheeks. “Badgers’ balls!” she yelled. “Big sweaty itchy badgers’ balls! You’re wrong! We should be helping everybody, not just ourselves! The strong help the weak. That is how it should be! I know that is how it should be!” The girl stormed away.

  “Chamanca!” Zadar called.

  The Iberian melted out of the shadows. Elliax had had no idea she’d been near. She cau
ght the fleeing girl like a hawk grabbing a mouse. Holding her by the shoulders, she marched her back to Zadar.

  “I’m sorry, Sabina,” said Zadar, looking a long way from sorry. “You cannot go. You will be a danger to me.”

  “Like Lowa?”

  “I hope you’d be a much greater danger than the little archer woman.”

  “So you’re going to kill me?”

  “No. You’re my daughter. I’m going to keep you by my side. You’ll soon see the reality of the world and come to agree with me.”

  “I’m sure I won’t. And do you know what?”

  “What?”

  “A squirrel could beat a bear if it jumped down its throat and choked it.”

  Chapter 26

  The crowd’s cheers were higher-pitched today, and they sounded less lascivious, more enthusiastic. Lowa blinked in the afternoon light. The arena’s seating was full, as it had been the day before, but there were many more women and fewer men. That explained the change in the noise they were making, but posed a new question. Why so many women?

  Tadman was standing in the centre of the ring, arms raised, the short spear from the day before in one hand. In the other was a wooden carving of a fish. Spotting Lowa, the crowd began to shout: “Lowa! Lowa!” It wasn’t a bad feeling, several thousand people shouting one’s name. She felt a small smile creep onto her lips and stifled it. She had no right to be proud. She’d executed five Mearholders and a few semi-capable bandit types yesterday, all for Zadar. Despite everything, she was still killing innocents at his behest.

  She looked to Zadar’s seat. He wasn’t there. Drustan had taken his spot, with that staff he’d affected to carry propped up behind him. Atlas sat next to him, then Carden. No sign of Anwen. The three men were talking quietly to each other, not looking at her.

  “Today is animal day!” Tadman shouted. The crowd cheered. “What will we give Lowa to fight with? Spear?” Tadman waved the spear. “Or … Fish?” He waggled the wooden fish.

  A deep-voiced chant started: “Fish! Fish! Fish!” but a higher-pitched counter-chant: “Spear! Spear! Spear!” overwhelmed it.