Making History

by Rick Wilber

  If the gods of Nova Hesperia had planned to kill him, they would have done so. Fate still smiled upon Gaius Publius Marcellinus.

  He would survive this. He might even win.

  ***

  As the month of Julius gave way to Augustus, the heat soared. The sky became white with humidity, and the air felt like a damp sponge against their skin. The shade of the few remaining stands of trees offered little relief. The moisture invaded the fabric of the tents and wouldn’t come out; by night the castra reeked like a barnyard.

  And the occasional downpours just made it all worse. The rain came down in giant sheets of water that did not freshen the air but merely sat rancid overnight and then boiled off the soil in the morning sun in great mists.

  Marcellinus had not known the air could hold so much liquid. Beneath his armor his tunic was permanently wet, and would not dry out at night. His crotch felt like a fouled bird’s nest.

  Bengal had sometimes been like this. But at least they’d had a cooling monsoon every afternoon and drier air by night. Here in Nova Hesperia, so far from the sea, the wind had forgotten how to blow. The soldiers were surly, and the horses spooked at nothing, their ears flat back against their heads.

  The Hesperians were still out there. Another nine of Marcellinus’s legionaries died, picked off and mutilated while collecting firewood or stalking the white-tailed deer. With supplies this short, forbidding his men to hunt was futile, yet all too often they themselves became the prey.

  By now everyone knew that they were going on, that there could be no return to Chesapica before winter. That once the weather turned cold they would be building a fortress and staying put out here in the wilderness, if they hadn’t acquired a better option in the meantime.

  The heat and damp and uncertainty played with men’s tempers. Marcellinus lost an additional seven soldiers to violence when a brawl turned murderous and he had to execute the culprits. Once more he cursed the ill mix of the men given him to command: raw Nubians, Magyar mercenaries, veteran Teutons and even some patrician Romans, a mixed bag of races and languages that turned his centurions into diplomats who spent as much time coaxing their men not to kill one another as they did in maintaining their battle readiness.

  His feelings of isolation grew. Urbs Roma became a marbled dream. And, just as his legion eroded further into squalor and ill temper, the barbarians around them seemed to grow ever more civilized.

  Though they saw few natives, they passed plenty of evidence of their activities. The tents and lean-tos of the east had now given way to firmer structures of wood and wattle-and-daub. In some areas the remains of broad tree stumps showed that the locals had torn down the forests for farmland. Though Marcellinus was no lover of trees for trees’ sake, he was surprised at how much of an effect this had on him.

  The Romans became the beneficiaries of the increased cultivation of the land; they swarmed the corn like locusts, leaving only stalks behind them. Deer would still appear startlingly close to the Legion’s path, and die quickly in a hail of arrows. The soldiers often had to pull fifteen or twenty arrows out of a downed buck before they could skin and dress it for the fire.

  Despite their living off the land as much as they were able, the Hesperian corn still provided a paltry yield compared with the robust crops of Europa. Leogild’s baggage carts continued to grow lighter as the victuals dwindled. Three thousand men on the march ate a great deal.

  As long damp day followed long damp day, Marcellinus saw more and more evidence of how the local tribes were taming the land. And more than once, he could have sworn he saw an aviator fly by, banking and swooping behind the trees.

  In his dreams they wheeled over him in a giant flock, and he awoke with his ears still full of the beating of their wings.

  ***

  Now the Legion started coming across the mounds; small conical earthworks in the clearings by the abandoned villages. In the days that followed, the number of villages and the size of the mounds both showed a marked increase.

  “This is more like it,” said Marcellinus as they rode past a mound fifteen feet tall.

  “Piles of earth?” said Corbulo.

  “Yes, just piles of earth, patted down nice and neat. We could put one up in an hour that would put this one to shame. But these people aren’t Romans. For them to build a mound like this is a triumph of effort and organization. And these are just the beginning. Ahead, there are cities of these things.”

  “Ah, big piles of earth,” said Corbulo. “You should have said so sooner.”

  “Support me, Lucius,” Marcellinus said quietly. “Your sarcasm grows wearying.”

  “Of course. Sorry.”

  Leogild cleared his throat. “Sir, we should talk again about supplies.”

  “Supplies, always supplies.” Corbulo put his hand up to his temple, as if deafened by the Visigoth.

  Leogild eyed him. “Fine. You don’t want to eat, that’s more for everyone else.”

  Until now they’d scavenged from the fields and forests as they’d gone by. Now the tended forests were giving way to plains, and fields of tall, well-tended corn were replacing the earlier sickly patches. The cornfields were separated by stands of nut trees; by this time nobody doubted that the Hesperians had transformed the landscape around them. But reaping the new bounty would take time.

  “We march on,” Marcellinus said. “Let’s travel light and get this done. Their crops aren’t quite ready yet, anyway. Once we’ve taken their city, an organized harvest from these fields will feed us to bursting.”

  Corbulo looked relieved; he had obviously feared a delay in reaching their goal. As for Marcellinus, now suddenly freed from constant worry about running out of food, he felt positively giddy.

  The gamble was going to pay off. Once they’d harvested the corn, the Legion would overwinter here in relative comfort. He might even have time before winter to send an exploratory cohort or two to march on further, maximizing their westward expansion. Even without gold, Hadrianus might be pleased at their annexation of so much land.

  All they had to do was take the city.

  “Give the orders that any farmers who don’t flee are not to be harassed. From now on, the crops are to be left undisturbed.”

  “Four days, I’ll give you,” said Leogild. “After that, I’ll counsel a day to restock the wagons before going on.”

  “Agreed,” said the Praetor.

  On they went. The stillness of the air was uncanny, and the utter absence of any breeze was stifling. Marcellinus rarely saw a face that was not dripping with sweat, or passed a soldier who did not reek. Much more of this and the leather and wool would rot on their bodies.

  In Europa such an epic trek could have taken them from Urbs Roma almost as far as Parisi, in Gaul; but in Europa the way would be well signed and the rivers already bridged. Nova Hesperia was a giant land, with no roads at all aside from the one they were creating. This was going to be one hell of a province for a Roman legate to administer one day.

  To Marcellinus it felt as if the past weeks had carried the Legion on a long march through time. First, the poverty-wracked fisher-gatherers of the Powhatani by the giant bay of the Chesapica, at the mercy of the tide and the berry plant. Next, the woodland husbandry of the Iroqua, savage to invaders but gentle to the land, cultivating their meadows, burning their undergrowth, shooting their deer. Now, here in the alluvial bottomlands of deepest Nova Hesperia, the Cahokiani farmed their fields and lived in stout wooden huts that represented a giant leap forward from the animal-skin tents and lean-to shacks on the coast. Such settled and well-ordered agriculture was essential to support the Great City they sought, and judging by the increasing size of the Cahokiani settlements they passed, that city must now be very close.

  Soon it would be time to fight.

  ***

  “Damn it, man,” said centurion Pollius Scapax. “If you’re not sure you’re within bow range, hold your fire.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the soldier thus chas
tened. “Thought I had him, sir.”

  “Arrows don’t grow on trees, you know.” An old Legion joke.

  “No sir. Sorry, sir.”

  Their enemy was no longer invisible, yet the armed braves in the road ahead did not engage them; instead, they withdrew before the approaching Roman army. From a distance Marcellinus could see they were warriors in full regalia, feathers in their hair and javelins and bows in their hands. They looked very different from the earlier peoples. No one could confuse the Cahokiani with the fishing tribes of the shore, the flying tribes of the mountains, or the warrior bands of the woodlands. These were men of much grander aspect than the previous collections of natives.

  Never had Marcellinus seen men so practiced in running backward. Yet their appearance of retreat was obviously a ruse; they were luring the Romans toward a place where they would stand and do battle. Fair enough. Since Marcellinus could no longer safely send his scouts forward to locate the enemy for himself, he welcomed the assistance. Let the Cahokiani choose the battlefield; this land was all flat anyway. Aside from the mounds there was no high ground for the savages to launch their wings from, and few natural features aside from the stands of trees and the occasional creek. Little opportunity for a trap or an ambush.

  Unless the braves planned to retreat right through their own city and out the other side, they would eventually have to stop dancing backward and form a battle line. Then, with their metal swords and armor and professional battle discipline, the Romans would march right over them and massacre them without breaking step, and irrigate the Cahokiani fields with their own blood.

  Marcellinus checked the sun. It was a little more than an hour after noon and, mercy of mercies, the wind was picking up after their many days of marching through stagnant air. A wise general might call a halt now to build a formidable castra for the night, stepping up to battle fresh in the dawn. But the rank and file would never stand for that. He could feel their turbulent energy, pent up over these long weeks of marching. Calming it would be impossible.

  So be it. They’d marched only twelve miles today. Still enough freshness in those hard Roman legs to carry them up and over a half-naked foe armed with sticks. They might even sleep in the Great City tonight.

  Another stand of tall hickory trees stood in their path, and Tribune Corbulo, riding ahead of him in the vanguard, steered the Legion around it in a broad rightward curve. A series of long huts with thatched roofs now bordered the Hesperian road; the troops stayed wary, shields at the ready in case of a sudden fusillade of arrows, but none came. Corbulo sent in his incendiary-men to fire the huts, which went up in a fast popping blaze.

  And now a corresponding crackle of excitement flooded the Legion, the men in the lead raising a ruckus, shouting “Roma!” and fanning out efficiently into battle formation. Marcellinus spurred his mount forward and was soon by Corbulo’s side, where he took in the scene with a broad sweeping glance.

  He looked out across a plain studded with hundreds of sculpted earthworks; cones, ridge mounds, and square-sided platform mounds, arranged in well-ordered lines. Set around them in a more haphazard pattern was a swarm of long huts with walls of reed matting and thatched roofs, along with larger wooden structures that must be granaries and lodges. The Cahokiani obviously did not believe in urban planning or a grid pattern, or even in streets. But a mile or more away, across what looked like a giant plaza, Marcellinus saw a stockade fifteen feet tall, built of giant logs, extending hundreds of yards in each direction. And within the stockade . . . .

  “Juno!” Marcellinus swore. “Hold! Hold!”

  Within the stockade sat an immense two-level platform mound, constructed entirely of earth. Its four sides angled up steeply like a pyramid to a first plateau, with a thatched hut on one corner, and then up again to a final flat crest. The mound was topped with a huge wooden structure that must have been eighty feet long and two or three stories high.

  “What?” Corbulo paused, contemptuous. “It’s a lump. We’ll slaughter ‘em, then kick it down.”

  “It’s further away than you think,” Marcellinus said. “Look at it. It must be over a hundred feet high, and acres wide.”

  How long must it have taken to construct such a massive pyramid, even using slave labor? The legion dug a six-foot earthen ridge around the castra each night, but that was the work of thousands of tough men at the peak of fitness. This thing had to be fifteen acres in area and as tall as the Palatine Hill in Roma. They must have spent lifetimes building it up to its current height and girth. And on wet foundations such an earthwork had to be hell’s own job to stabilize. How could one even engineer it?

  This was no scaled-up version of a fishing camp or nomads’ village. This truly was a Great City, complete with suburbs, urbs, and citadel. From the sheer number of houses and mounds, and the expanse of corn that stretched beyond and behind them as far as he could see, Marcellinus reckoned it must hold well over the ten thousand people Bjarnason had estimated, perhaps twice that number. After their trek across the most desolate and unpromising territory he had ever seen, the Great City had a grandeur for which he was not prepared.

  In that moment Marcellinus radically revised his assessment of their enemy. Savage, yes–but in the scope of their organization, as civilized as many a Roman province.

  And here they came: row upon row of Cahokiani pouring out from the palisade and hurrying in like ants from the outer regions of their city. Around Marcellinus his legionaries were similarly arraying themselves for battle, as they must, since their enemy could charge at any time. He became aware that nearby him Corbulo was shouting the order to advance. The trumpeters raised their instruments to their lips.

  “Wait,” Marcellinus said. “Deploy and hold. We don’t advance yet.”

  Corbulo turned, stiff-necked. “What?”

  “There’s more here than meets the eye. Look at the terrain; the braves can use the huts and mounds to good effect. Advancing, we’ll take attacks from the flanks as well as the front.”

  Twenty-five years of soldiering had lent Marcellinus a powerful intuition. He had not become a Praetor for nothing, and his gut told him now to keep his distance from that Master Mound.

  “We wait?” said Corbulo in contempt, just as Aelfric rode up from behind and cursed in his own tongue at the stupendous sight before them. “No, we must charge immediately while they’re still forming up. Frontal assault. We’ve come a thousand miles for this.”

  “Yes, and so we can wait ten minutes more.” In the ranks his centurions were in the thick of preparations, running back and forth bellowing at their men. Despite never having received a formal command, his Legion was already deployed in an admirably straight north-south triple line. The banners of the cohorts flapped in the growing breeze, the signa of individual centuries were displayed proudly, and at the line’s center he saw the golden Aquila raised high.

  Despite the stress of the moment a lump came to Marcellinus’s throat. They’d endured a grueling trek, with hunger, discomfort, and danger; dissent and discord had never been far away, yet his men had risen to the occasion in double-quick time. The Legio XXXIII Hesperia was ready for battle. And yet, and yet . . . .

  “Wings ho!” someone cried. And so there were, a dozen or more, leaping off the top of the Master Mound and circling out over the assembling barbarian horde like moths before gliding back to land behind the palisade.

  “They can’t reach us,” Fabius said. “That mound isn’t so high, and they’ve no updrafts to sustain them. Showy enough, but no threat.”

  Corbulo nodded. “These red bastards don’t like to fight unless they hold the advantage of stealth, darkness, or altitude. There’s no honor in ‘em. Burn a captive, drop a rock, poison a scratch, hack at a soldier squatting under a tree–that’s their game. We kill them all now.”

  “Tribune. Attend me.”

  Corbulo turned on him. “You told the men the redskins are cowards! They cower in defeat. Look at Fuscus!”

  “The Pow
hatani, yes. Even the Iroqua. Perhaps not these Cahokiani.” Marcellinus strode forward and clamped his hand onto Corbulo’s arm. “I gave you an order, Tribune. Obey me.”

  Corbulo’s hand dropped to the hilt of his gladius. “Not today, I think.”

  Their eyes met. Looking deep into Corbulo’s soul, Marcellinus saw many things: fear, resentment, and above all, Corbulo’s desperate and enduring need to redeem himself.

  It was the same wild look that he had seen in Corbulo’s eye during the ambush in Appalachia. Corbulo was suffering that same panic now. His nerve was cracking.

  Corbulo broke eye contact, but dropped his voice. “I know you, Gaius. You’re looking for an excuse to avoid slaughter. But it’s too late. The men will revolt and kill us both if we don’t attack now.”

  “The men will do as I order. They respect prudence.”

  “Prudence?” said Corbulo, reverting to a voice loud enough to carry into the nearest troops. “Prudence says we wipe out the savages, take their corn and gold and women, and, yes, grind the bones of the men to pave the temple to Jupiter Imperator that we’ll build on that sandcastle of theirs. As you said yourself, just the other night. Did you lose your stomach for the fight, Gaius Marcellinus? Forget so soon how these savages mutilated your Norse catamite? Or have you made deals by night, and now favor the red men?”

  “What?” Marcellinus shook his head, overwhelmed at this knot of bizarre accusations. But Corbulo’s gladius was now unsheathed, and that was something Marcellinus could understand.

  Legionaries might take advantage of the chaos on the battlefield to scrag an unpopular centurion. It happened often enough. But for a tribune to challenge a legate’s authority a few hundred yards from the enemy’s gate was unthinkable.

  “I’m relieving you of your command,” Marcellinus said.