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Making History

Page 26

by Rick Wilber


  A burning thunderclap rippled toward the Praetor, blowing him backward. The screams of his men merged into a single agonized wail as the new liquid fire of Nova Hesperia rained down across entire centuries of them. Those not directly smitten by the deadly flaring liquid fell to the ground once they trod in it with their sandaled feet, there to roll in torment. Through the bright afterimages that dazed his eyes, Marcellinus saw the red, flaming weals on his soldiers’ bodies as they frantically tugged their armor away from their seared flesh. Men who splashed water from their canteens onto their burning skin howled anew; the water did not quench the fire but only spread it further.

  The second Thunderbird lumbered over them, directed and shepherded by the smaller wings, sparrows looping around eagles. Marcellinus viewed its trajectory carefully, but the crew of this bird was saving its firebombs for cohorts further up the line; as he watched, it shed Greek fire into the square formations of the Fourth and Fifth Cohorts. By now his centurions had called their infantry into the defensive testudo formation, their solid metal shields interlocked above them in the tortoiselike structure that gave the formation its name. But huge and terrifying gouts of liquid poured over them, the fire splashed and dripped between the shields, and the shell of the tortoise splintered quickly as the soldiers flung their bodies back and forth in the same terrible dance as their comrades in the First and Second.

  In a single pass the two Thunderbirds had rendered a thousand Romans ineffective. All the formations Marcellinus could see had fallen apart. And clearly audible above the screams of the Romans came the battle cries of the Cahokiani as they sprinted across the hundred short yards that separated the armies, their clubs and hoes raised high above their heads.

  Marcellinus bellowed, ripping his voice hoarse with commands to the troops around him to fall in and regain fighting formation. He ordered his Romans to set pila and march forward, and his Teutons and Scythians to ready axes and gladii for the melee, but his words were swept away in the din.

  The two armies crashed together. Marcellinus felt the visceral shock as Roman met Cahokian. The exultation of combat filled him, and the surge of simple ecstasy threatened to explode his heart. With battle joined, no doubts remained, no fears of fiery torture or flint-tipped death, no visions of his lost family or regrets at the man he had become; even the memory of his tribunes’ treachery was swept aside. Marcellinus had dedicated his life to moments like these. It was time to fight.

  In his nose was the smell of battle, the blood and mud and dust; in his ears the warrior roars, the din of steel on wood, flint on steel, the screams of the wounded, and the pounding of his own pulse. The frenzy around him became a series of sharp images: a Cahokiani brave baying as he held aloft a curly-haired Roman scalp, the sickening crunch as a pilum cleaved a path between ribs into a living heart, a Roman sandal skidding in blood, a plumed helmet banged aside by an axe-head, the skull beneath smashed open in the backswing. Everywhere naked flesh slammed willingly into leather and steel plate, the howl and hullabaloo of the braves fit to deafen Jove and echo across the world, as the people of the Great City of Nova Hesperia showed themselves no simple brawlers after all but true warriors, less armored and drilled than the soldiers of the Imperium but with a berserker strength the equal to that of any Roman.

  Marcellinus dispatched a tattooed dervish armed only with a hoe who seemed nonetheless to be moving with preternatural speed; he took a fearful blow to his shield and at the same time planted his gladius into the man’s face and saw him fall, cheek and throat gashed to the bone. With a fluid motion Marcellinus tugged the sword free and spun to meet the next threat, then froze in midswing. For it was a woman who attacked him now, fierce and howling yet large-breasted and unarmored, ridiculously vulnerable. As he paused, her club struck him full on the helmet; he dropped to a knee to absorb the pain, his ears ringing, and sliced through the woman’s thigh. As she fell he threw himself forward, his shield grinding her head into the muck.

  She stopped moving. Marcellinus, his tears flowing in earnest now, spared himself not a moment to wonder whether she was dead or merely unconscious but hurled himself at the next of them. Knowing that that one short moment of hesitation could have been his last added even more vigor to his arm.

  For a while it seemed that Marcellinus fought alone, a single man against the ferocious horde. Then soldiers bearing the signum of the Fourth Century of the First Cohort found him and began to group around him in a rough phalanx. Pollius Scapax was there, dispatching barbarians with ruthless efficiency while still finding the breath to bark orders to the other Roman troops nearby, gathering them around their Praetor.

  A Thunderbird roared over them, and Marcellinus leapt up with his gladius outstretched, as if he could actually have slashed it from the sky.

  They had to stop this. They had to destroy the launching system that threw the giant wings aloft. If it wasn’t already too late.

  Whirling, Marcellinus got his bearings.

  “Scapax! The mound!’

  His First Centurion nodded and bellowed again. His soldiers closed up and surged forward, crashing once more into the thinned battle line, fifty men with swords and shields in a wedge-shaped cuneus formation with Marcellinus and Scapax fighting side by side at its tip.

  Fury and pain drenched the air, and for a while it all became a blur again. Then, miraculously, the Roman squad was running unassailed past corpses. Beside and behind them the melee still raged, yet only a short stretch of mud separated them from the Cahokiani palisade. They had punched their way through the barbarian army and out the other side.

  A quarter mile north, the new Thunderbird disgorged its bellyful of fire. Close by, yet another bird creaked in the air, flying in the opposite direction.

  Marcellinus cast his shield aside and ran, the thud of each sandal-fall sending a bang of pain up his spine and into his head. Beside him ran Scapax, and behind them the remains of the First Cohort.

  The Master Mound grew before their eyes. The gates of the palisade were open. The Cahokiani guards at the gates backed up and made no move to prevent them from running on through. Marcellinus heard a new cacophony in his ears and realized it was his own voice screaming out the names of Roma, Titus Augustus, and Vestilia; in addition to his land and his daughter, he was invoking the name of an Imperator long dead.

  Now Marcellinus was on the mound, and he pounded up it with all the energy and determination he could muster. It wasn’t enough. The earthwork was enormous, and after the travails of battle, a sprint to the top of it was beyond him.

  At the first plateau, where the steep incline leveled out, he stopped and bent over, panting. Sweat poured into his eyes, and the hot fire of combat had drained from his blood to leave him bereft and empty. Far above him at the mound’s crest he could see the top of the giant unmarked wooden building–a palace? Temple? Marshalling yard for the wings? Below them was the palisade and beyond that, the battlefield they had left behind.

  Beside him Scapax roared orders at the tattered remains of the cuneus, bringing them together and back into close order for the last stand. From the top of the mound and around its sides came the Cahokiani, long spears at the ready.

  The end was brief and bloody. The braves overwhelmed them, bowling the Romans over and back down the side of the mound, and then leaping after them to rain blows upon them. Marcellinus saw Scapax go down, three of the Cahokiani beating him with clubs and finishing him with a spear thrust, just before his own gladius was knocked out of his hand and he was barged off his feet and onto his back. Two Cahokiani sat on his legs and arms, and another pulled off his plumed helmet, leaving him bare-headed and unprotected, almost steaming.

  He was pinned ignominiously, trapped against the soil of the Master Mound. He struggled, desisting only when his own pugio was jabbed at his face, perilously close to his eye. Around him Cahokiani screeched, gleeful.

  It was over. Marcellinus panted, staring at the sky, waiting to be speared or bludgeoned or scalped. Waiting fo
r the end.

  It did not come.

  He heard no command, but his captors got off him, rising to their feet and looking around them and down to the plaza below. Cautiously, Marcellinus sat up to see where they were looking. The Cahokiani did not stop him, but the two who flanked him kept a watchful eye on him.

  Down in the plaza some areas of fighting still raged, a last desperate effort by the few remaining Roman centuries to take as many barbarians to hell with them as they could. One of the fiercest pockets of resistance marked the distant area where the Fourth Cohort had been; Marcellinus hoped Aelfric was still fighting, and would die well. Such pockets aside, the battlefield was a morass of downed Romans, charred leather and blackened steel doused in blood.

  From this elevation it was clear beyond doubt that Marcellinus’s army was no more. The 33rd Hesperian Legion had been utterly destroyed.

  From the fringes of the killing ground, some Romans fled eastward. Marcellinus did not begrudge them their escape. For him, there could be no future that way. Even if he could somehow escape the mound and catch up with the fragments of his Legion, they’d probably kill him. And then on the terrible march back to the Chesapica, the Iroqua would kill them.

  For hundreds of years the Roman army had mown down primitives in droves. The Thunderbirds and firebombs of the Cahokiani marked the end of that. The discipline and rigidity that had proved such an asset to the Imperium in Europa and Asia had become a liability when faced with aerial bombardment; the testudo was not tight enough, the soldiers’ armor too thin, their heavy military sandals insufficient protection from liquid fire.

  The Roman Aquila was earthbound, while the People of the Eagle soared. Tactics effective in two dimensions were found wanting in three. They would need to scrap the classic Roman tight formations and rethink them from scratch.

  Not that Marcellinus would return to Urbs Roma to advise his Imperator on it. Roma was now forever beyond his reach.

  The wind tousled his hair. Looking along the line of the Master Mound to his right, he now saw a great brown river. Marcellinus had spent his life studying terrain, and felt sure that the continent of Nova Hesperia must stretch a distance at least as far to the west as his Legion had already marched from the east. This was too great a land for even the Imperium to swallow. Yet here he was, Praetor of a doomed Legion, stranded in the center of it.

  Several of the one-man wings had crashed or been shot down during the battle. Marcellinus watched as the fallen aviators were carried away reverently to the peak of one particular conical mound. A pilot’s body was not separated from his vehicle; rather, the two were taken and burned together on the pyre as if they were one thing, the ashes of man and wing rising together into the air. The pilots’ eagle masks were not even removed. It seemed that the Cahokiani honored their fallen heroes just as reverently as any Roman soldier, mother, or vestal virgin.

  Two Thunderbirds had landed, one in a cornfield far distant and the other at the northern edge of the Urbs Cahokiani. The nearer bird was being carried back into the palisade by its pilots; from Marcellinus’s vantage point it looked like an enormous crawling insect. In the distant sky two other aerial bombers turned in formation and flew back toward the mound, their giant wings flexing in the invisible air currents. And, in the air far above him, flyers wearing the individual wings still danced like dragonflies, wheeling and swooping in victory.

  One of the small wings separated itself from the throng and spiraled down toward him. It shot over his head at speed and looped around. Its pilot pushed up his craft’s nose to spill air, and landed running along the plateau toward Marcellinus. Ribbons fluttered behind the wing.

  The pilot shrugged out of his wing harness and laid the wing carefully against the slope of the mound. He appeared unarmed.

  She. Once the pilot began walking and her hips twitched left and right, there was no doubt.

  Sisika wore a light leather tunic, haphazardly cut. Her falcon mask now hung around her neck. In her hair she wore a band studded with eagle feathers. Her face was painted with swirling marks, a forked pattern around her eyes making her look even more hawklike. Back east she had not worn such marks, perhaps adapting to local customs. That, too, had been bravery, he now realized: to come all that way to see the Romans for herself.

  “Chieftain, daughter of chieftain,” Fuscus had called her. Once again, understanding had eluded Marcellinus. Here on her home territory, Sisika’s poise and authority were clear.

  Sisika squatted on her heels just a few feet away, staring into his face. Marcellinus tried to imagine how rough and uncanny he must seem to her.

  “Sisika,” he said, and, feeling ridiculous even as he did it, he pointed at himself and said, “Gaius.”

  She put her head on one side, birdlike, but seeing the harsh disdain in her eyes, Marcellinus did not smile.

  Marcellinus was battle-torn and filthy. He had cuts on his head, burns on his arm from splashes of Greek fire. His leg was gouged bloody, and he had lost a chunk of skin from his shoulder, wounds he did not remember getting. But of all his men he had survived and was here, now, on the mound.

  Soon he would be the only Roman left alive within the city. He was the farthest west any Roman had gone, buried deep in a whole new world completely independent of the Imperium.

  Below, three braves walked in through the palisade gates carrying the Legion’s golden Aquila. It looked unharmed, down to the two plaques mounted on the pole beneath the eagle, the “S.P.Q.R.” of the Imperium, and “XXXIII Hesperia” under that. Chattering excitedly, the braves began the long walk up the Master Mound with their trophy.

  Well, they’d won it fair and square; nobody could deny that.

  As the braves stepped over the shattered bodies of Pollius Scapax and the nameless Romans who had fought beside Marcellinus at the last, the reaction hit him. Deep pain plunged through his heart and stomach at the loss of his Legion. And if these people chose to burn him and tear out his heart, that would be his just deserts.

  Marcellinus stood as the trio reached the plateau. They noticed him for the first time and jumped back in alarm. Sisika stood too, and stepped back from him.

  Perhaps he could have leaped forward and slain them. They were young and unarmed, and Marcellinus still had two blades at his feet. But Sisika was watching, and the battle was lost an hour since.

  And if the eagle of Roma was to be planted at the peak of this immense mound to look out over Nova Hesperia, that was something. It wasn’t the way he’d expected the day to end. But maybe it was enough. Let there be gold in the Great City, after all.

  “Here,” said Marcellinus, and held out his arms to them. “Let me carry that for you.”

  Publishers Weekly has called Harry Turtledove “The Master of Alternate History,” and he has been the dominant figure in the field for many years. He has won a Hugo Award, three Sidewise Awards for Best Alternate History, and is a frequent nominee for these awards and others. He has written dozens of novels and stories exploring alternate histories of Rome, the American Civil War, World War II, the Korean War, and many more. His novel The House of Daniel displays Turtledove’s love of baseball as he describes the alternate history of a somewhat odd barnstorming baseball team. In this story, we meet an alternate version of the Sultan of Swat as he talks to H. L. Mencken about baseball and what might have been if only things had gone a little differently.

  Puffing slightly, Henry Louis Mencken paused outside of George’s Restaurant. He’d walked a little more than a mile from the red-brick house on Hollins Street to the corner of Eutaw and Lombard. Along with masonry, walking was the only kind of exercise he cared for. Tennis and golf and other so-called diversions were to him nothing but a waste of time. He wished his wind were better, but he’d turned sixty the summer before. He carried more weight than he had as a younger man. Most of the parts still worked most of the time. At his age, who could hope for better than that?

  He chuckled as his gloved hand fell toward the latch. Every ta
vern in Baltimore seemed to style itself a restaurant. Maybe that was the Germanic influence. A proud German himself, Mencken wouldn’t have been surprised.

  His breath smoked. It was cold out here this February afternoon. The chuckle cut off abruptly. Because he was a proud German, he’d severed his ties with the Sunpapers a couple of weeks before, just as he had back in 1915. Like Wilson a generation before him, Roosevelt II was bound and determined to bring the United States into a stupid war on England’s side. Mencken had spent his working life taking swipes at idiots in America. Somehow, they always ended up running the country just when you most wished they wouldn’t.

  The odors of beer and hot meat and tobacco smoke greeted him when he stepped inside. Mencken nodded happily as he pulled a cigar from an inside pocket of his overcoat and got it going. You could walk into a tavern in Berlin or Hong Kong or Rio de Janeiro or San Francisco and it would smell the same way. Some things didn’t, and shouldn’t, change.

  “Hey, buddy! How ya doin’?” called the big man behind the bar. He had to go six-two, maybe six-three, and at least two hundred fifty pounds. He had a moon face, a wide mouth, a broad, flat nose, and a thick shock of dark brown hair just starting to go gray: he was about fifteen years younger than the journalist. He never remembered Mencken’s name, though Mencken was a regular. But, as far as Mencken could see, the big man never remembered anybody’s name.

  “I’m fine, George. How are you?” Mencken answered, settling himself on a stool. He took off the gloves, stuck them in his pocket, and then shed the overcoat.

  “Who, me? I’m okay. What’ll it be today?” George said.

  “Let me have a glass of Blatz, why don’t you?”

  “Comin’ up.” George worked the tap left-handed. He was a southpaw in most things, though Mencken had noticed that he wrote with his right hand. He slid the glass across the bar. “Here y’go.”

 

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