Clash of Iron (The Iron Age Trilogy) Read online

  It was a strange but excellent feeling, knowing that he’d never have to toil for food or shelter again. It was like a smothering weight that he hadn’t known was there had been removed. He felt more generous towards everybody, not materially perhaps, but certainly in spirit.

  So he moseyed cheerily across Maidun Castle and up to the eyrie, half-singing breezy greetings to everyone he passed.

  He’d made up his mind. Forget the farm. There was only one place he wanted to be, and that was with Lowa. Maybe she had been dismissive the other day, maybe she hadn’t. He needed to know. She definitely had liked him – loved him even? – so there had to be a chance that she still did. He loved her, so he had to risk it. He’d tell her about Spring’s spell, that it wasn’t her fault she’d shagged Ragnall, and that he’d forgive her if there’d been anything to forgive, but there wasn’t. If she was pregnant with Ragnall’s baby that might add some complications, but they could cross that bump when they came to it.

  “Sorry it’s late,” he said to the guard at Lowa’s hut, “but could I see Lowa, please?”

  “Hello, Dug! How’s it going?”

  “All is wonderful, thanks. You?” He peered at the woman. He didn’t think he knew her. Since he’d defeated Tadman in the packed arena and become a wee bit famous, a lot of strangers now acted as if he were an old friend. It was disconcerting.

  “I’d let you straight in,” said the guard, “but she’s got someone with her.”

  “No matter. I’ll wait.”

  “I don’t know how long she’ll be. Might be all night.” The guard winked. “It’s a young man – a fine-looking fellow.”

  “Oh?” said Dug.

  “Name of Ragnall. Lovely manner about him.” She nodded enthusiastically at Dug’s blank look. “Very well-spoken, he is, very well-spoken. A real young hero, quite the match for Queen Lowa.”

  Dug had taken a hammerblow to the guts once. This felt very similar, perhaps a little worse.

  “Has he been in there long?” he asked.

  “Ages. And I’ve heard some fascinating noises.” She made a long moaning sound, then giggled smuttily. “You’re welcome to wait, though?”

  “No, no, that’s fine. I’ll come back.” Dug smiled. Without thinking, he turned and walked away. He was vaguely aware that the guard was still talking.

  Ragnall sat back, feeling a great deal happier and much less drunk. It had helped, telling Lowa about his family and Anwen.

  “I am sorry, about how I was,” he said.

  “Don’t worry.” Lowa put a hand on his knee. “You have losses to grieve. And I think you’re fairly new to heavy drinking? Not that many people ever learn how to do it without regularly making dicks of themselves.”

  She really was a very decent woman. Firm, but fair. He remembered her naked body pressed on to him, his hands on her back and buttocks and her thighs, her eyes looking into his. She certainly was firm and fair. He told himself to focus. There was something important he wanted to ask her … oh yes.

  “You said that you had a mission for me and Drustan? More slaves to free?”

  “No. Something quite different. I want you to go to Rome.”

  “Rome?”

  “Yes. Big place. Easy to get to by road, apparently.”

  “Rome.” Visions flooded Ragnall’s mind. They said there were a million people living in just the one city, buildings the size of hillforts, and flocks of beautiful, degenerate women … “Why Rome?”

  “If we’re to fight them, I need to know about them. I also need to know when they’re going to get here. I’d like you and Drustan to pose as a prince and his tutor who have travelled to see the city – which is exactly what you will be, so that shouldn’t be too hard. When you’ve found out all you can about the Romans and their invasion plans, come back and tell me.”

  The idea was exciting, but there was one massive reason he didn’t want to leave Britain.

  “What about us?” he asked.

  Lowa grimaced. That, thought Ragnall, was not the response he’d hoped for.

  “I like you very much and I enjoyed our time together, but it was a fling, Ragnall, just a fling. I’m sorry.”

  She looked sad and vulnerable. Underneath her iron skin, she was just a person like him. She hadn’t wanted to kill his family, Zadar had made her. She had been in love with Dug, and he’d used magic to make her betray him. She still thought it had been her own decision. She was hurt and consumed by self-loathing. He knew what betrayal felt like from the side of the betrayer, and he didn’t want her feeling like that because he’d tricked her. He had to tell her.

  “You should know something, before I go to Rome. I have some druid powers. Nothing like Spring or Drustan, but I’m learning.”

  He paused. Lowa was looking at him, seemingly unmoved by his revelation, waiting for him to get to the point. He couldn’t hold her gaze.

  “On Mearhold I put a spell on you to fall out of love with Dug and fall in love with me. It was my magic that made you betray him.”

  Lowa looked at him for a long while. He looked at his hands and waited, half expecting her to fly at him and ram the arrow that she was holding through his eye. He deserved it.

  “So you raped me,” she said eventually.

  “What!? No!” It was worse than an arrow through the eye, because as soon as she said it, he knew it was true.

  “You made me have sex with you against my will?”

  “…Yes.”

  “What else would you call that?”

  She was right, but she wasn’t right. It was hardly like grabbing someone by the hair on a village raid and dragging them behind a hut. It wasn’t the same at all. “But there was no violence,” he stammered. “You enjoyed it!”

  Lowa sat quietly, letting him stew in the misery of realisation. She was right. It was just as bad as if he’d forced her against her will, because he had forced her against her will. The only difference was that he’d used magic instead of a knife point. It didn’t sound so bad in all the stories, but it was. “Love potions”, the bards called them.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I forgive you.” She was half smiling.

  “But I…”

  “It’s done, it’s over. Don’t tear yourself to bits about it. Just don’t do it again, and make sure you do a good job for me in Rome.”

  “I will! I’ll do the best job. I’ll … leave no Rome unturned!”

  “While you’re there, you might use some of that magic on your sense of humour.”

  He looked at her. She seemed happy. Was he really forgiven? She was a wonderful woman. He couldn’t blame her for following Zadar’s orders, especially when it was her who had ended the tyrant’s rule. And how could he not forgive her when she forgave him so easily? He would do the best possible job for her in Rome, and when he came back he’d be older and wiser and very much his own man, and maybe she’d want him again? Although, after he’d met the women of Rome, would he still want her?

  Part Two

  Rome and Britain

  Chapter 1

  Ragnall put himself away, but continued to stare down at the pool he’d urinated into. A small shark broke the surface then flashed away. Three small rays flapped past like lazy birds. A spider crab, golden torchlight gleaming off its spiky red shell, picked its way delicately along the tank’s rocky floor.

  “This is nothing!” A man arrived next to him, hoisted his purple-fringed toga and urinated with a stream that would have pleased a horse. “I take it you’ve never been to one of Licinius Lucullus’s parties?”

  “I haven’t,” Ragnall replied, wondering where to look.

  “Shame! The man is building some disgustingly eastern gardens in Rome – they’re going to be simply marvellous, they really are – but his horribly over-the-top showpiece is his villa at Naples. It’s not far from one of my places actually. He’s had thousands of his slave-johnnies rebuild Mount Athos to bring saltwater to a whole string of simply amazing lakes. They a
re enormous. They make this little piss pond of Caesar’s look like a rock pool. A bloody rock pool! Simply amazing. Although again, nastily Persian. Xerxes in a toga, someone was calling him the other day. Bit unfair, but he definitely has gone a smidgen native after his jaunts out east. Those boy-shagging desert-johnnies like their ridiculous gardens, but I doubt they have anything that comes close to Lucullus’s little inland sea. He had a dolphin when I was there, but I suspect he’s eaten it by now. Wonderful chef he has, wonderful.”

  The man finished urinating, dropped his toga carelessly and turned to Ragnall. Like most Romans, he was short – a good foot and a half shorter than Ragnall. Small dark eyes peered from his smoothly fat, melon-shaped face.

  It seemed that a reply was required, although there’d been no question.

  “Sounds … god-like,” said Ragnall, and he meant it. Rebuilding a mountain for nothing but display and entertainment, surely, was something that only capricious, wasteful gods would do. In Britain, he’d thought it was stupid when eccentrics gave the best bits of meat to pet dogs, but remoulding a mountain to house pet fish was another level. Were the fish even pets, he wondered, or more like farm animals? Romans didn’t piss on their pets, surely? Or their farm animals for that matter … “They won’t eat these fish, will they,” Ragnall asked, “after everybody’s—”

  “Pissed in their water? Depends how drunk the chefs get, what!”

  Ragnall chuckled hesitantly.

  “But probably not, no,” the man continued, “they’ll all die this evening of piss poisoning and be thrown into the main drain.”

  “Seems a waste.”

  “A waste?” The Roman’s face creased into such a look of disgust that Ragnall took a step back. “A waste? A few fish? You’re not some bloody actor making me part of a clever new play are you? You’re meant to be taking a piss, not taking the piss! Ha!”

  “No, I’m from—”

  “The provinces? Yes, you do have a touch of the barbarian brush, don’t you? That would explain it. Sorry for calling you an actor, old fellow. Waste! A few fish! Ha ha! Just the other day Caesar had a villa built – in Campania, I think it was – then he had it knocked down – razed completely – without ever seeing it.”

  “Why?” Ragnall asked.

  “Why?” The man snorted a laugh. “Why? By Jove, you really are very provincial.”

  He walked away, leaving Ragnall next to the fish-churned piss pond.

  He washed his hands in a water-filled giant clam shell held by a topless, dark-skinned woman with sparkling black eyes, a shaved head and very pronounced cheekbones, which he took particular notice of while endeavouring not to look at her chest. She didn’t acknowledge him in any way. Her eyes seemed to be focused on an entirely different reality. The whole toilet experience had made Ragnall feel very uncomfortable. The sooner he found Drustan, the better. If the rest of the party was anything like its loos, he’d be better off at the side of his unflappable mentor.

  Drustan had used some magical persuasion and a good deal of charm to get them into the birthday party of Julius Caesar, the man whom nearly everyone Ragnall had met was talking about. He shouldn’t have left Drustan so soon, but he’d been bursting. He’d been drinking a lot of water, partially because it was always as hot in Rome as the very hottest days in Britain, and partially because man-made rivers supported on arches – aqueducts – carried the most delicious cool mountain water right into the middle of the city where anyone could drink it for free.

  Magical persuasion was something he couldn’t do, thought Ragnall, as he dried his hands on a wondrously soft animal fur, baby goat perhaps, held by yet another topless, oiled slave, this time a male one who was alternately tensing each pectoral muscle of his shaved chest.

  He would never be able to persuade anyone to do anything with magic. He was magically barren. On the voyage from Britain he’d failed again and again to light a fire with his mind until eventually Drustan had confessed that he’d cheated that first time, and lit the fire that Ragnall had thought he’d lit. His tutor had done it to encourage him, he’d said, since he’d thought he might be the powerful saviour druid that had been foretold. Instead, Spring was the druidical messiah and Ragnall had no magic at all.

  He didn’t blame Drustan and he couldn’t miss something he’d never had. In fact, it was something of a relief, since it meant that he hadn’t used magic to make Lowa have sex with him, so he could in no way be accused of having raped her. She’d dropped Dug and shagged him purely because she was selfish and unkind.

  A while later, it had come up in conversation that Drustan had told Lowa about Ragnall having no magical ability, well before he’d confronted her in her hut. So she’d known it wasn’t rape! But she’d persuaded him that he had raped her, and used that to make him forgive her for killing his family, and to go to Rome. She was more than unkind, he thought. She was evil. He wasn’t sure yet what he was going to do with all these revelations. He had lots of ideas. Returning to Britain and reporting to Lowa as if nothing had happened was not one of them.

  He shook his head as he walked out into Caesar’s garden and the noise of a hundred conversations. To cheer himself up and clear Lowa from his mind, he reminded himself how he’d amazed Drustan by learning to speak Latin in the couple of weeks it had taken their ship to reach Ostia, Rome’s port. Apparently people spent years studying to be as good as he was. Indeed, a week after their arrival he was already more fluent than Drustan, who’d been speaking Latin since he was a boy. So he may not be some weirdo magic maker, but he was a great deal cleverer than most.

  And better looking, he added to himself, as a glamorous older woman peeled away from the throng of partygoers, grabbed his arm and spoke very close to his ear.

  “Wotcha,” she said “I’m Clodia. Clodia Metelli. What’s your ’andle?”

  Her rough accent was a surprise. She wore precisely applied make-up, a blue tunic that shimmered expensively in the breeze, a golden necklace of knuckle-sized precious stones and a heady perfume that wafted an aroma of young flowers and wealth, but she spoke like the street-wretches and rag traders from the Aventine Hill, the poorest quarter of Rome where he and Drustan had found the cheapest lodging.

  “My…?”

  “’Andle. Handle. Name.”

  “Oh sorry, I’m Ragnall Sheeplord.”

  “What a name. From Britain?”

  “Yes! How did you—”

  “Got some British slaves. You sound the same. Come with us then, Ragnall, I wanna hear why you’re talking to me and not carrying a tray of drinks. Talking of drinks—”

  Clodia whipped two golden glasses from a passing slave’s tray, beckoned with a tilt of her head for Ragnall to follow and walked away through the crowd. Her flowing tunic clung to her rear, which swung mesmerisingly below a narrow waist. Ragnall had a quick look about for Drustan and didn’t spot him. He shrugged and hurried after Clodia.

  They passed a group of older, sensible-haired, clean-shaven men in red leather shoes and finely made togas with broad purple stripes. They were looking with undisguised distaste at a gang of young men dressed in transparent, loosely belted tunics. The more youthful fellows all had similar goatee beards. They were looking back at the older men, talking under their breath to each other, all scratching their heads with one finger as if it was a secret sign, then giggling. One of them pointed out Clodia and Ragnall and they giggled all the more.

  The women, mostly standing in small clutches separate from the men, wore brighter, full-length variations of Clodia’s dress, though few of their clothes, if any, looked as finely woven as hers. They’d adorned their necks, ears and fingers with coloured stones and while Clodia’s locks hung down in simple tresses, many of the other women’s hair was piled high in elaborately curled, twisted and knotted towers.

  Gliding deferentially through the clumps of men and women were more dark-skinned, oiled, lithe slaves, carrying drinks and platters of what was apparently food.

  “Truffle-stu
ffed mare’s vulva?” asked a slave girl with an impish smile and a coquettish shake of her hips, proffering a plate of glistening brown lumps at him.

  “No thanks,” he replied.

  These slaves weren’t as dark-skinned as Atlas and the towel holder by the fish pond, more a paler bronzy-brown like Zadar’s former bodyguard Chamanca, so Ragnall assumed that they were Iberians like her. The party, after all, was to celebrate Julius Caesar’s recent military successes in Iberia, as well as his fortieth birthday.

  They passed a pair of enormous yellow and brown animals with bizarrely long necks that Ragnall took to be giant deer from some far-off land, and reached a quieter area that was draped in fruits and vegetables so preposterously ripe-looking and unblemished that they might all have been made of polished wood. Ragnall stuck a fingernail in an apple to see if it was real. It was.

  Clodia sat down on a rough wooden bench that looked out of place next to all the newly cut stone. A split in her dress fell open, revealing a tanned thigh. She crossed one leg over the other and patted the bench next to her.

  Ragnall sat down.

  “So. What brings you to Rome?”

  “I’ve come with my tutor. We’ve heard so much about your city that we wanted to visit and see if the stories were true.”

  “Your Latin’s brilliant.”

  “Thanks. So’s yours.”

  Clodia smiled. “I’d heard Britain was, like, all hairy barbarians dressed in smelly skins and that, too stupid to scratch their own arses?”