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feeling sick and sorry for himself. He sighed, stood square and readied his hammer, preparing himself for the final action of a long and tarnished military career. Bouncing on your toes from one foot to the other was meant to make it easier to dodge javelins. He gave it a go. His heels squelched in the riverside mud and it didn’t really work.
    “Praise you, Danu! Praise Bel! Praise Toutatis! Praise Makka! Praise Camulos! Praise Lugh … Praise Cromm Cruach!” He wasn’t sure whether he was pleading for rescue or thanking the gods for death.

Chapter 5
    L owa Flynn sat naked on the hearth edge, her usually pale skin golden in the firelight. She frowned as she scraped blood and soil from her fingernails with one of her beautifully forged, cruelly sharp iron arrowheads. She looked about, scowling. Was it the hut filling her with this annoying, unprecedented feeling of dread?
    She looked around. Nothing seemed unusual. The packed-earth floor was strewn with clean reeds and the hut filled with the well ordered if meagre belongings of a poor but proud family. The circular wall was made of mud, dung and vegetation packed around twigs latticed between wooden posts. It led up to a conical reed roof with a central chimney hole.
    There were four rolled-up sleeping mats next to the central hearth and a smattering of tools and toys arranged neatly on shelves. A shoddily made three-legged wooden dog with nails for eyes looked at her reproachfully in the firelight. Eight clean leather indoor shoes – two big, two medium-sized, four small – were arranged neatly in the doorway. Poignantly awaiting owners who’d never return, she found herself thinking.
    Where was this sentimentality coming from? Life had beaten mawkishness out of her a long time ago, yet she’d been feeling distinctly odd since the end of the battle. She kept jumping at things in the corner of her eye that weren’t there. When a spider scampered across the floor, she almost cried aloud. Something was very wrong. Or maybe this was what happened when you got older? Maybe old people felt like this the whole time? That would explain a lot about their behaviour. She cursed her weakness, shook her head and returned to cleaning her nails with the arrowhead.
    Usually the shaft was the most valuable part of an arrow. The fletches – feathers that straightened the path between bow and target – could be plucked from ducks, and ducks were easy to find and absurdly easy to shoot. Too easy. Unlike almost everybody she’d met, Lowa saw no reason to believe that gods existed. However, if there were proof that they did, then surely ducks were it. Only the protection of the gods could explain why an animal as delicious, fine-feathered and easy to catch as a duck could not only avoid extinction, but survive in huge numbers and myriad variations.
    A standard arrowhead was easy enough to knock from iron, knap from flint or cast from bronze, and could be dug out of flesh to use again. Shafts, on the other hand, had to be dead straight, a pace long and made from a light wood like ash, birch or poplar. A good shaft was difficult to make and tended to snap if an inconsiderate target pitched forward onto it, wrenched it from his leg or mistreated it some other way.
    Lowa’s iron arrowheads were different. Each was lovingly forged, beaten and sharpened by Elann Nancarrow, Maidun’s chief weaponsmith. They were sharp and perfect. Just one of them could be exchanged for ten of the finest fletched shafts. She had a few different types: slim bodkins for distance and penetration, barbed broadheads for short-range damage, blunts for small game and even half-moons for cutting ships’ rigging. She knew that they were an affectation, little better than standard arrow heads, and that she’d never have a reason to use the half-moons. But they looked fantastic. As one of Zadar’s top soldiers, she’d amassed more riches than she knew what to do with, so she could easily afford them. And she