Age of Iron by Angus Watson

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 children 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