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Coward , but knew he was no braver; he just knew that his best chance of survival lay in the line holding. “Cavalry can’t charge a spear line!” he’d shouted, but in vain. Barton was beaten before the armies even met. So Dug turned and ran as fast as a fit but mildly overweight forty-year-old man wearing ringmail can run through a panicking army. He could have stood like a hero of old and met the Maidun force, he thought as he ran, but there were old soldiers and there were brave soldiers. You can’t be both.
    He almost tripped over the boy who’d been on his shoulders.
    “Help meeee!” squealed the boy, reaching up for Dug. His spindly shin was broken into a right angle.
    Dug stopped. “Why didn’t you run? I told you to run!” The boy tried to get up but fell, faced twisted in agony and slimy with snot. Dug looked back. Zadar’s heavy cavalry were a hundred paces away and coming fast.
    He stooped to pick the boy up, then remembered the mantra that had kept him alive since he’d left the north, since the day he’d lost everything. Never help anyone. He glanced up again. The cavalry were closer. If he picked the boy up they’d both die. If he didn’t, he might make it. And it wasn’t his fault that the boy hadn’t done what he was told.
    He ran on, telling himself to ignore the boy’s screams.
    He hurtled across the flood plain towards the river, ringmail jangling. A woman was ahead of him. Suddenly an arrow shaft was jutting from her neck. She crashed to the ground, right arm flapping like an angry chicken’s wing. He jumped over her. More missiles fell all around. One moment someone would be running headlong, the next, falling. An arrow or a stone ricocheted off Dug’s helmet with a loud spang . It was like being whacked with a cosh. He stumbled, half-tripped over a corpse and ran on.
    If he could make it to the bridge, he might get away. He looked over at it. A fan-shaped crowd of waving, shouting, screaming, pulsating humanity spread back from the crashed cart that blocked it. Badgers’ arseholes! There was no escape.
    He was in the reeds before he saw that the river was too deep to wade. Dug could swim, but not when he was wearing ringmail. A green-headed mallard broke cover, padded along the water’s surface and took off, banking and flying away in the very direction that Dug would very much have liked to have flown. Was there time to pull off his mail before the enemy was on him? He turned. No.
    The heavy cavalry had slowed and was wheeling towards the bridge. Chariots came on in its wake, killing those who hadn’t fled fast enough. Two were slicing towards Dug like hot cleavers through warm blubber. They’d spotted his mail shirt and they wanted it. This, thought Dug, was the downside of being better dressed than the rest of the army. There was no hiding. Four pairs of enemy eyes fixed firmly on his as the chariots bounced along towards him. Javelins were raised. Dug looked around for a weaker, more lucrative target to point out to them, but saw only dying people with ineffective weapons wearing nothing anyone would want.
    He was a big man and a good fighter. He knew he wasn’t the biggest or the best, but he was bigger and better than most. Although well past his best. He’d taken on and beaten a chariot before, but that had been up north and he’d been ten years younger. And it had only been one, while here came two of the famous Maidun Castle teams, drilled to a level of gung-ho military perfection that Dug had never had the time or character for.
    Why oh why had he got himself into this? He’d been too stupid, and too drunk, let’s face it, to realise that taking on Britain’s most powerful and notoriously vicious army was a bad idea, no matter how safe the plan had sounded. He should have been on his way to Maidun right now to sign up with the very army that was about to kill him. But it was too late to explain that to the oncoming charioteers.
    “Badgerfucktwats,” he muttered,