Free Clash of Iron by Angus Watson Page A

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-stuffed 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?”
    “I thought you had British slaves?”
    “They’d been broken in and trained when I got ’em. So, are the British grunting hirsute idiots, got up in stinking rags, or not?”
    Ragnall looked down at his toga. He’d become completely accustomed to it in a very short time. He wondered how he’d ever felt happy wearing anything else.
    “Actually that’s not far off.”
    “Who are your slaves in Britain? Is there some island further north that’s got even stupider, hairier people?”
    Ragnall thought of Dug. “People from the north of our island are less intelligent, and there are islands further north that I’ve heard of, but I’ve never met anyone from them. We don’t have slaves. We just sell them to Rome – well, some of us do.”
    “Fuck!” Clodia’s eyes widened. She had unusually large eyes, set high up on a broad-cheeked face below a narrow forehead. She wasn’t a typical beauty – she looked nothing like the ubiquitous statues which were presumably considered the peak of female attractiveness in Rome, but something – the challenge in her gaze perhaps – blasted away any attempt to appraise her looks rationally and made Ragnall’s throat constrict with lust.
    “Who does all the shit work?” she continued.
    “Shit work?”
    “That awful messy business of agriculture. Washing pots and pans. Clearing up other people’s stink. Things that decent people shouldn’t have to do.”
    Her accent, Ragnall noticed, had swung from a market-trader drawl to a well-bred staccato that better suited her looks and outfit. “I suppose we all do those things. Well, I don’t, but—”
    “So ’ow come you’re different?” And her accent was back in the gutter. Odd, he thought.
    “I…” Why was he different? He thought of his family, about the people of Maidun, of the druids and other children on the Island of Angels, and he looked around the crowd of increasingly