times, examined it, grunted with satisfaction and thrust it into a clay oven filled with hot charcoal. She pulled off her huge leather gloves, slapped her hands against themselves, swallowed a draught of water from a clay mug, then looked at Lowa.
“Reason one, the ore here is bad. The Kerbee tribe own and guard the best ore mines in the world.”
“So we could buy more iron from them, or, if you know their methods, buy ore and make the iron ourselves?”
“Reason two, they never sell their ore. I am the only person outside the Kerbee tribe to whom they sell their iron ingots, and they limit the number that I am allowed. They will never increase that number.”
“We could take it?”
“Reason three, to take their iron we’d have to kill all of them.”
“How many are there?”
Elann lifted one eyebrow. It was the most extreme display of emotion Lowa had ever seen from her. “It is difficult to think of a cause that would justify the extermination of a tribe. Besides that, they are protected by their god Crendin. She’s a mountain at the moment, but if the iron is threatened, she will become a giant and smite the Kerbees’ enemies.”
“And of course,” added Lowa. “The Kerbees have excellent weapons, so killing them would be a costly business.”
“Not far from impossible,” said Elann. She put her gloves back on and reached for a lump of iron. It was clear that the conversation was over. Lowa hadn’t been serious about killing all the Kerbees to get their metal. Or at least not totally serious … But where did one stop? If she could sacrifice one person to stop the Romans from taking Britain, she definitely would. A hundred? No bother. A thousand? Yup, probably. Ten thousand…? Tricky. More?
It wasn’t a simple question. Hopefully it would be made easier when Atlas, Chamanca and Carden returned with intelligence about the Roman army – if they returned. She was certain that the Romans needed to be stopped, even more since hearing what they were doing in Gaul. She knew that sending them back across the Channel would mean sending many, many troops to their deaths. So, if she could kill, say, a thousand Kerbees in order to gain weapons so good that ten thousand fewer of her own soldiers died, surely she should? No, she didn’t think she should. But why not? Zadar, she remembered, had always said that all his killing and destruction was for the greater good. She was still collecting many of his taxes, if not the slave quotas. She’d sent several friends to Rome and Gaul, possibly to their deaths, and those were just the first few of the many lives she was going to throw away to defend Britain from the Romans. What was her justification? Who was she to decide who died? Was she just another Zadar, fucking up others’ lives for her own ends?
Elann was hammering red-hot iron into the shape of a warhammer’s head. That got her to thinking about Dug. He was never far from her mind, not least because Spring never stopped talking about him. Lowa had done many things that she felt terrible about if she let herself, including killing a whole village’s worth of people under Zadar, maybe even a whole town’s. However, the only thing she’d ever done that made her feel sick with shame was shagging Ragnall in front of Dug. What had she been thinking?
She resolved to go to Dug’s farm, to apologise and throw herself on his mercy. Then she shook her head. It was a resolution she made often. She’d even started the journey once and got as far as Maidun’s gate before making an excuse to herself to turn back. She’d spoiled her relationship with Dug beyond repair. Lowa knew that she would rather face the entire Roman army on her own than stand in front of Dug and tell him that she would give up everything she owned to turn back time to that evening in the woods, to change what had happened. To tell him, in fact, that she thought about him the whole time and she supposed that that meant she loved him.
Chapter 11
Ragnall stood on Vesontio’s wall with most of the senior clerical staff and a few of the praetorian guard. Along the wall from him, on top of the short gate tower, were Caesar, Titus Labienus, Felix, six praetorians and a long-haired man in chains whom Ragnall didn’t recognise. Held by two