Making History

by Rick Wilber

  Corbulo grinned. “I think not.”

  Suddenly, all around Marcellinus was movement; Gnaeus Fabius seized a pilum and stepped up to stand with Corbulo, and flanking the two mutineers came four swarthy auxiliaries, mercenaries from east of the Danube, Magyars perhaps, or Bulgars. Too late, Marcellinus saw that this little scene was not as impromptu as it had first appeared. He dropped back several paces to open up space around him, his adrenaline surging.

  The pilum of Fabius was the first danger, with its reach so much longer than a sword’s. The javelin was capable of ending a fight in a single well-aimed throw, but could be cumbersome as a hand-to-hand weapon. A better fighter than Fabius might have charged in and pinned Marcellinus to ready him for the dispatch, but apparently Fabius’s magistracy had not primed him for such martial boldness; instead he launched the pilum at Marcellinus from fifteen feet away. The Praetor took a single step to the right as it flew by, and remained on balance.

  Hands free, no shield within reach, Marcellinus unsheathed his gladius with his right hand and his pugio with his left, and stood fast as the six men charged him.

  But here was Aelfric, arriving beside him quicker than a thought, so nimble that if the Briton had been a party to the treachery Marcellinus would have been on his knees with a blade through his kidney before he could have parried. With a strange howl that was neither a berserker yell nor a cry of abandon, Aelfric hurled himself into the fray at his commander’s side.

  Marcellinus cut down the first two mercenaries with swift slices to the gut. They were hardly the first young hotheads to fatally misjudge his speed. The paid help from Roma’s provinces were generally not skilled gladiatorial fighters. On the battlefield they relied on numbers and ferocity rather than virtuosity with weapons, and Marcellinus had been training daily in swordplay since he was a child.

  The third and fourth auxiliaries backed away rapidly once they saw the fight was not as simple as they’d hoped, and stepped apart to encircle him.

  Meanwhile Aelfric’s gladius clashed with Corbulo’s; the two men slashed and parried, swung and ducked, and Aelfric staggered back. Faced with the choice between two opponents Marcellinus chose the third, darting between the two Magyars to lunge at Domitius Corbulo’s flank. Corbulo spun to face him, startled, and Marcellinus drove the pugio up under his breastplate and deep into his ribs, leaning back to slice his gladius across his tribune’s gut. As Corbulo reeled like a drunkard, swinging his blade wildly, Marcellinus dropped to one knee, allowing Aelfric to leap over his sword arm and slam bodily into the nearest of the mercenaries, bowling him over.

  The unexpected trade in opponents made short work of the insurrection. Corbulo screamed like a banshee as his entrails tumbled out into the dirt, a cry that turned into a guttural bubbling as Marcellinus tugged his dagger free and severed the man’s windpipe.

  The mutineer fell to the ground with an audible thump.

  Beside him, Aelfric had handily slain the third mercenary. The fourth raised his sword over them with a yell and was almost casually decapitated by Pollius Scapax, arriving better late than not at all.

  Left alone in his mutiny in a matter of seconds, Gnaeus Fabius stood stupidly before them, his gladius pointing at the ground. He looked around for reinforcements, but the men near him stood mute. Praetor Gaius Marcellinus calmly cleaned his two blades on Corbulo’s tunic at his feet while holding his Second Tribune’s gaze.

  Pollius Scapax strode the ten paces that separated them. Fabius raised his sword but didn’t have the courage to swing it at the centurion. Gently, almost kindly, Scapax reached forward and seized the tribune’s gladius at the hilt, turned it toward Fabius’s belly, and kicked his knees from behind. As Gnaeus Fabius fell onto his own sword, Scapax ripped off the man’s cape and plumed helmet and threw them aside, demoting him from the rank of tribune and the ranks of the living in the same moment.

  Marcellinus sheathed his pugio. The closest legionaries swiveled their heads almost comically back and forth between Marcellinus, Scapax, and the assembled swath of the Cahokiani nation behind them. Marcellinus realized that two entire armies had come to a halt, waiting for the leadership battle to be decided.

  Aelfric had stood by him, after all. But Marcellinus was not surprised that no one else had come to his aid. To most of the men Marcellinus and Corbulo were of a muchness: patricians, Roma’s natural masters, representatives of the ruling class. Their lot would be largely the same whichever man wore the Praetor’s crest. Unless they were paid or coerced, they had naught to gain and all to lose by picking a side.

  Scapax approached, his gladius still unsheathed but reversed so that the point pushed up against his own breast. “I was not close by when I might have served you, Praetor,” he said gruffly. “And so I offer you my life. But I’d rather expend it killing some barbarians for you, than follow Fabius to hell right away, if you’ll give me leave.”

  “Of course,” Marcellinus said calmly. “Think nothing of it. I relished the chance to clean house.”

  His First Centurion’s relief was palpable. “My thanks.”

  “In addition, I find myself short of field lieutenants. I will take the Second and Third. Assume the tribuneship of the First, if you please.”

  Scapax’s eyes glinted. “Very good, sir.”

  He saluted, and Marcellinus returned the salute. His new officer turned and marched to his command.

  Likewise, Aelfric turned to hurry back to the Fifth.

  “Tribune?” said Marcellinus. “Thank you.”

  Aelfric looked back, and their eyes met.

  “And, my apologies. I was perhaps… harsh.”

  The Briton grinned. “Not at all, sir.”

  “We’ll drink wine tonight.”

  “As my Praetor requests.” Aelfric bowed and set off toward his cohorts at a trot.

  Considering that there were perhaps ten thousand men present, the stillness of the afternoon was impressive. If not for the tension in the air, Marcellinus could have closed his eyes and thought himself alone in the sunshine. As it was, he felt his army extending out from him in all directions like a drawn bow, arrow nocked and at the ready, bowstring tight, arm muscles aquiver.

  The Praetor slowed his breathing and studied the battlefield. His Legion was deployed uniformly, presenting an even front a thousand yards long. The Cahokiani horde was by no means so well distributed; the northern end of their line was thicker, holding thousands more than the southern end that stood between him and the Master Mound. Would they deliberately expend more troops defending their population center than their sacred hill? Was it just an accident of formation? Or was the nearer end of their line guarded by something he couldn’t yet see?

  Not the wings, certainly. Though impressive, their Master Mound did not approximate to a mountain. Pilots who leaped from its top barely had time to loop back around before they were on the ground again.

  A hidden pit? All the soil that went into these mounds had to come from somewhere. Had the Cahokiani concealed their borrow pits, in the hopes of enticing their enemies to charge headlong into them?

  Perhaps. But in that case all Marcellinus had to do to minimize his losses was to have the Legion walk rather than run. And Marcellinus still didn’t like the looks of the mounds and longhouses that stood between his army and the palisade. He wasn’t about to rush pell-mell into those in any case.

  He turned his attention to the enemy line. At last, Marcellinus could see the Cahokiani clearly. In their garb they were a mixed bunch, some wearing only breechcloths and swirling tattoos, others decked out in what might be tunics, with wooden mats hanging down over their chests and stomachs as the simplest of armors. Here and there were men wearing a woven sash, a kilt bearing geometric patterns, moccasins of deerskin, or a collar of what might have been rabbit. Hanging from many ears he saw pendulous adornments of antler and bone.

  The Cahokiani had no flags, standards, or symbols, and little organization. Nowhere was this more apparent than in their array of
weaponry: wooden bows, probably crafted of hickory, spears of wood much shorter and lighter than the Roman pila, and clubs and axes too, but also a variety of other tools hurriedly pressed into service: hafted hoes and mattocks, and some men clutched nothing more deadly than a rock or a knife.

  He faced a mass of nobles and commoners, farmers and traders, warriors and weavers all mixed together, and a style of fighting the Romans had outgrown a millennium and a half ago. The Romans were heavily outnumbered, but they had metal blades and armor and intense discipline on their side. Marcellinus’s sympathies lay with his foes.

  Yet he still felt an instinctive unease at these people with their almost intimate stares, waiting as calmly as if they went toe to toe with a Roman army once a week. In the mountains, people not so different from these had assaulted them from above. What was about to happen here?

  Isleifur Bjarnason’s voice echoed in his head. “They have more . . . . You haven’t seen anything yet . . . .”

  Corbulo had been quite right. Now that Marcellinus had seen the Great City for himself, he would have given anything to avoid this battle. But such a thing was impossible.

  They already knew the Hesperians did not understand the civilized conduct of war. Their sneak attacks, their use of poison arrows, the torture and murder of his scout, and their use of the flying craft all provided adequate testimony on that score. Marcellinus could easily ride out between the armies under a flag of truce to try to parley, only to perish in a hail of arrows for his pains. Besides, no leader or chieftain was evident in the massed line of Cahokiani that faced him. He saw no one to negotiate with, even if he’d still had a word-slave at his disposal.

  Besides, they had literally passed the point of no return. The Legion needed the city’s food. And for that, Marcellinus needed to conquer the city.

  A truce or treaty would be quite untenable to his men, nor did the opposing army appear ambivalent. Marcellinus could not halt this battle any more than he could hold back the tide.

  Very well then.

  Praetor Gaius Publius Marcellinus raised his gladius high and gave the signals to his aquilifer and signiferi while shouting aloud: “Advance in steps, covering! Burn all buildings, secure high ground! Arrows in rotation once in range, maintain formation till melee. Forward the Legion, for Roma, the Imperator, and the Fighting 33rd!”

  Marcellinus dropped his arm. His sword rent the air. Trumpets sounded. With a roar the Legion surged forward, but tightly, masterfully, and in control.

  Across the plaza the amassed braves raised up their bows, their axes, their hoes. Marcellinus was sure they roared just as loudly as his own men, but thankfully he could not hear them.

  ***

  The Legion had methodically advanced a quarter of the distance separating them from the Cahokiani when the nearest longhouses burst into flame. Marcellinus had given the order to fire them in passing so that the enemy could not use them as cover, but these ignitions were not of Roman doing. The thatched houses went up in a series of giant whumphs, burning with an intense red-white flare. What had the savages put in them to make them blaze so fiercely?

  Yet no real explosion came, no scattering of burning debris. Not a single Roman was harmed by the incendiaries. Nor were they accompanied by an ambush: no Hesperians tumbled out from behind a mound or inside a hut. The Legion marched forward steadily, its front line replenishing itself, inexorably closing the distance to the foe that waited on the other side of the Cahokiani plaza.

  Their enemy adopted no formation except the simple line, and still Marcellinus saw no leaders, no orders given. They seemed content to watch the Romans closing in.

  Up the Roman line to the north, Marcellinus saw the front ranks of the Fourth drop to one knee. Auxiliaries less encumbered by shields and armor, and with fewer huts and mounds to navigate around, the Fourth had advanced more swiftly than the other cohorts and were now within arrow range.

  His attention was pulled back by cries of surprise from the men close by him. He followed their gaze and pointing fingers, and his eyes widened.

  From the summit of their Master Mound, the Cahokiani were shooting bodies into the air.

  Clearly a ballista or onager of considerable power ran up the far side of the giant mound. Marcellinus’s first thought - that they were lobbing diseased cattle carcasses, as one might heft over a city wall to break a siege - was incorrect; these were living humans that were being catapulted aloft, with incredible heft and force. At the greatest altitude of their arc they unfurled broad wings in a sudden stroke to become the now familiar fixed-wing flying craft. In minutes, the air was alive with them.

  They dived low and fast over the cohorts like winged demons, each pilot feathered and bird-masked and with an arrow nocked. They flew barely thirty feet above the Roman helmets, but so swift and agile that it would take a lucky pilum indeed to bring one down. Legionaries flung themselves right and left, breaking formation to avoid the flight paths of the wings, but even as Marcellinus drew breath to bellow a harsh command he heard his centurions’ voices booming across the battlefield: “Raise up your shields!” “Maintain formation!” “Stand firm, damn you!”

  Discipline reestablished, the Legion lunged forward again. The front lines of the Fourth and Sixth Auxiliaries discharged a volley of arrows into the enemy line, advanced a dozen paces, and dropped to one knee; the men behind marched through to become the new front rank, firing their own swath of arrows into the massed bodies of the savages. A wave of Cahokiani stumbled and fell, the Roman arrows scraping off the whole front layer of the opposing army.

  Now Marcellinus saw the real purpose of the brightly burning huts. As the wings flew overhead, loosing many an arrow into a Roman breastplate, their paths inevitably took them over the burning longhouses where their pilots expertly rode the hot, rising air up into the skies to recover their altitude. Again and again Marcellinus watched the human moths pass above the white fire and arc up into the sky, their skill even more dazzling than the flames. Three of the wings crossed paths a thousand feet above him, an incredible height with no strategic value, surely just an exhilarating distraction. But as Marcellinus watched them he experienced another dizzying mental leap: the native pilots were using their very patterns of flight to signal to their comrades. From their aerial vantage point the battle was laid out beneath them like a map. The wings were the ultimate surveillance tools, scouts in the sky.

  It was now abundantly clear that these people were not neophytes at war. The Cahokiani were a tribe–a nation–that had faced large-scale armed assault before, from the savage Iroqua, perhaps, or from even fiercer tribes that the Romans had not yet encountered.

  The aviators were not all men. Here came a woman, circling over him. Alone and unarmed, ribbons streaming out behind her in the air, her job was surely to find the Praetor and loop over his position, perhaps marking him out for attack.

  A flaming arrow hit a hut that had so far remained unexploded and it lit up like a torch. Greek fire, thought Marcellinus; these people had independently discovered Greek fire, hundreds of years after the secret was lost on the Roman side of the Atlanticus. He made a note to keep some of their apothecaries and armorers–or perhaps their priests–alive at the end of this day, in addition to a handful of the pilots.

  The infantry at Marcellinus’s end of the line was now within bow range of the enemy. This time the Cahokiani loosed a salvo of arrows first, a ragged torrent of sticks that scattered harmlessly off the tall Roman shields. The men of the First and Third cohorts jeered, drew, and sent a focused wave of metal-tipped death into the midst of the enemy . . . .

  But then, with a titanic roar, the world changed again.

  Marcellinus’s gaze was wrenched skyward once more, and all of a sudden he became aware of his own labored breathing and the sweat that trickled down his forehead, the smell of thousands of men in armor, the screams of the wounded, the strong breeze from the west. And of the massive, incredible shape that soared unsupported through the low ski
es toward them, spreading the broadest of shadows across the Roman army.

  “Jove!” he shouted, though he was a man who seldom cursed, and then, more reverently: “Thunderbird.” Because now everything made sense.

  Above them loomed a startling creation of sticks and skins, as if the longest of the Cahokiani longhouses had unfurled itself and taken flight. It did not flap like a bird, but rocked on the breeze like a gull hovering over a cliff top. Mesmerized, Marcellinus noted how the Thunderbird swung steadily on the very air, how the dozen flyers who hung beneath it steered it with concerted leans and pulls and heavy shoves against the rudder bars they clutched, steering the giant craft in a smooth arc. The aerial leviathan flew south of him and then turned, the flying men using the warm air from the farthest of the burning huts to raise the craft’s nose.

  And here came a second Thunderbird, rising from behind the Master Mound in a thrumming whoosh that was surely caused by the passage of the air over the giant wing and the vibrating of the skins stretched between the wooden poles.

  Bitter laughter bubbled in Marcellinus’s throat at the audacity of it. This was why the Cahokiani had built their giant mounds. It was not merely a conceit to put themselves closer to their gods, nor for their privileged classes to look down upon their people from on high. It was to train their pilots. Why go to the trouble of building a mound in the featureless flatness of the bottomlands, if not to throw yourself off it? Lining the far side of the mound must be the ballista to end all ballistas, used both to fling the insanely courageous braves in their tiny single-man wings to suicidal heights, and to launch these behemoths of the air.

  What Marcellinus wouldn’t have given for a ballista of his own! One good shot might bring a behemoth down. Then again, the iron bolt might pass right through the wing, leaving a neat hole but not affecting its aerial progress in the slightest.

  These beasts had not been fabricated purely for the joy of riding the winds. Marcellinus saw the row of sacks hanging beneath the wings of the first Thunderbird even as the braves began releasing them, to fall into the infantry of his First and Second Cohorts.