by Alan Smale
Two years earlier, a Roman navy warship had intercepted a Norse longship approaching the north coast of Hibernia. An innocent Norse vessel sailing home from the recently discovered Vinlandia had naught to fear from a Roman inspection; this longship had tried to use its greater maneuverability to escape and, when that failed, had tried to bluff the Roman captain, badly.
After a brief but fierce engagement the Romans boarded the vessel to find it stuffed with gold plate, jewelry, and bizarre statues from an as yet unknown culture, along with large quantities of turquoise and lapis lazuli and a few bags of spice. Alas, Roman efficiency had slammed into Viking berserker battle ardor with such completeness that there was nobody left alive on the longship capable of testifying about where they had acquired such a lucrative cargo.
Despite this inconvenience, Hadrianus was badly in need of revenue and not one to pass up such an opportunity. It was at that point that he had raised the priority of the conquest of the continent beyond Vinlandia.
There was no reason to suspect that the equatorial regions of the Evening Continent should be any richer than those of famine-stricken Aethiopia. Logically, then, the gold must have originated around the same latitude as Roma.
Hadrianus sent scouting parties into Nova Hesperia. Those who returned brought back tales of a large city of mounds, longhouses, and at least ten thousand people in the plains far beyond the mountains. Admittedly they hadn’t brought any gold back with them, but then again, the locals hadn’t allowed them within the boundaries of the city.
Very well; Hadrianus could spare a legion to throw at a high-risk, high-return venture. All he needed was the right Praetor to lead it.
By dawn the next day the legionaries had folded tents and were on the trail again, heading west in as straight a line as they could manage. Which, being Romans, was pretty damned straight.
For a while, Marcellinus’s tactic seemed to be working. The harassing actions the Iroqua had been running against the Legion’s advanced corps of engineers and its flanks and stragglers stopped. Freeing one woman had apparently earned the Fighting 33rd a clear path all the way to the mountains. Even the grumpy Domitius Corbulo had to agree it was well done. The miles fell away under the military sandals of the Legion. Day by day they left the sea farther behind, and the interior of the giant land opened up around them. They covered two hundred miles without a single death, and the march became so routine that the centurions grumbled that the men were getting soft and added daily weapons drills.
True to his word, Marcellinus left the villages unscathed. Usually the inhabitants deserted them and hid out in the wilds till the army had passed; sometimes they sat sullenly outside their scrappy, insect-ridden hovels with their heads bowed. Good enough, thought Marcellinus. They may be untouched by civilization, but at least they comprehend a threat when they hear it.
Truth be told, Marcellinus felt sorry for them. He hadn’t asked to be sent here, and these folks hadn’t asked to have a Roman legion trampling their pastoral quiet. The Hesperians had so little to begin with. Roma’s ancient ancestors might have been painted men very much like these, long before all the marble buildings and the metalsmithing and the lawmaking. They were less than farmers, and their tiny patches of sickly corn were so pitiful that even Leogild didn’t think them worth requisitioning; as far as Marcellinus could tell, the inland peoples survived by trapping coneys and picking berries. Marcellinus could be ruthless when necessary, but there was no glory in waging war against beggars. The true enemy lay ahead, in the Great City that the Norse scouts had reported and Sisika had confirmed.
Soon enough, the terrain creased around them and rose up into a series of rolling ridges and craggy mountains that Fuscus, in his broken tongue, called Appalachia. The peaks were neither as classically sculpted as the Alps of Europa nor as grand as the ranges of the Himalaya, but they had a hazy comeliness to them that reminded Marcellinus of parts of northern Italia. Despite the rigors of getting the Legion through such a trackless wilderness, Marcellinus thought it a land of some charm. Then again, he got to ride a horse up the interminable hills.
They had only a couple of dozen horses, and only the Praetor and his tribunes, scouts, and dispatch riders rode them. They were much too valuable to put to work hauling the supply wagons, and besides, they had slaves for that; to their surprise the Hesperian shores had proved to be devoid of beasts of burden. Aside from the Powhatani themselves, that is.
Marcellinus felt the odd twinge of guilt about resting easy in the saddle, but he genuinely needed to conserve his strength. At night in castra his men might drink their watered wine and gossip over games of knucklebones with no further cares, but Marcellinus spent those hours meeting with his quartermaster about the ever-present question of supplies, his tribunes and armorers about their battle readiness, his centurions on matters of discipline, and doing a hundred and one other things. There was never a lazy evening for a Praetor. Technically he might have left some of these details to others, but with his authority over the Legion as precarious as it now seemed, it behooved him to stay involved with all aspects of legionary logistics. If Marcellinus could be everywhere at once, no one could talk about him behind his back.
The men noted his diligence and didn’t seem to begrudge him the ride. Their job was the hike; his was to look after his men and keep them as comfortable as possible, not waste the sweat they were donating to the enterprise, and be trusted not to squander their lives when the crunch came.
Around noon one day Marcellinus found himself riding near Marcus Tullius, who hailed from Etruria. “What d’you think, Tully? Long views and enough land for anyone once we get rid of some of these damned trees.”
Tullius made a sour face. “Over that whore of an ocean? It’s too far from Roma. Nobody is going to want to come and farm this crap.”
It was true enough. Romans were not natural sailors, and the trans-Atlanticus voyage had been a puking nightmare the way the big troop transports rolled on a heavy swell.
“Some men might prize a bit of separation from the capital. Independent sorts, regulation-weary?”
“Ex-convicts, maybe. But they won’t be growing olives or grapes on these slopes. Bad soil, worse sun. You’ve seen what passes for corn here? Even the Norse can’t make a go of it, and they can farm Graenlandia.”
“Well, only with sheep and a few cattle,” said Marcellinus. “They don’t grow crops there.”
“Either way. No, if the redskins have gold, we want it; if not, we just kill the bastards off. Hack ourselves a bloody road right across the continent and use it to go and stab the slant eyes in the back.”
Marcellinus winced. “That might be quite a distance,” he murmured, and didn’t raise the issue of natural beauty again.
Whatever their scenic glory, the Legion found the high ridges heavy going, and their average daily march dropped from twenty-two miles to nearer twelve. On one frustrating day when they had to ford several streams and backtrack twice in search of a route the baggage carts could negotiate, they advanced only seven. Finding areas broad and flat enough to host a full castra added to the challenge, and Marcellinus sorely missed the guidance of Thorkell Sigurdsson and his other Norse scouts, still conspicuous by their absence.
His men grumbled, and even Leogild’s sunny Visigoth humor began to cloud over. Each day took them farther from the coast and stretched their provisions even thinner. Battle was ahead, a city to be sacked, spoils to be had—but how far? It was the conversation on every tongue, the thought in everyone’s mind.
Arguments broke out over the Legion’s campfires on a nightly basis. Best to go on to death or glory, risk everything on a single throw of the dice? Or eventually beat a prudent retreat to the coast, winter up, and next spring surge back along the path they had already carved?
They could go on, but once winter came, the march would be over. The Legion would have to build a fortress and hunker down within it, unable to travel again until the thaw. And then what would they eat?
Then came the ambush, and everything changed.
The Legion marched down a long valley that was narrow and high-sided. Below them the plains opened up; they had conquered the Appalachia, and an enemy might suppose that high spirits would make them careless. But the Fighting 33rd were career soldiers to a man, and this was such an obvious site for an ambush that there really had to be one.
They had been sighting Iroqua all day: a fleeting glimpse of a warrior behind a tree here, a feather seen over a rock there. Once the trend was clear, Marcellinus passed the order down through his tribunes and centurions that the men were to ignore the natives until actively engaged. That way, the natives might assume they’d gone unnoticed. Even as the Iroqua tried to lull the Romans into a false sense of security, Marcellinus was sanguine that he had instead tricked them into overconfidence.
As his cohorts tromped downhill, eagerly awaiting the onslaught and whistling like longshoremen, Marcellinus felt that surge of energy he loved, the spark that ran like lightning through well-trained men on the verge of combat. Today, at least, his Legion was behind him to the last man.
Sure enough, where the way was narrow and the crags around them tall, the Iroqua attacked.
Predictable. And yet not.
Suddenly the air was full of darting shapes that whirled above them as if the laws of nature and common sense had ceased to apply.
Briefly, Marcellinus feared he had lost his mind. A swarm of giant moths seemed to assault him, and for several dangerous seconds he couldn’t even bring them into focus. Then the shapes resolved, and he realized they were farther away than he’d thought.
The moths were actually men harnessed to rigid triangular wings.
Each pilot was spread-eagled beneath his wing, lying prone, steering left and right by tugging at a stiff cord that passed under his chest and extended from wingtip to wingtip. Yet control of these crude aerial vehicles required only part of their energy; each also held a bow and could reach across himself to pull arrows from a streamlined quiver strapped to his thigh to rain down death on Marcellinus’s troops. Each aviator wore a mask bearing the powerful hooked beak of a falcon.
His thoughts raced. Men in flight! Had this been a circus display, he might have laughed for joy. But these wings were not for sport; their intent was deadly serious. Marcellinus had been caught flat-footed. Behind the beat of the battle, he mentally lunged to catch up.
He was not the only one. Legionaries shouted, turning around and around, flinching from this strange aerial threat but finding nowhere to retreat to. Centurions barked, fighting to regain control. Close to Marcellinus a soldier lifted his shield over his head in defense, knocking the helmet off the man next to him. Soldiers slipped and fell.
The archers of his First Cohort, the cream of his military crop, capable of recognizing an enemy no matter what direction it came from, laconically pumped arrows into the air. But they were below the thrust of the attack and so were forced to fire back over the mass of the Legion. If they weren’t careful, there was a real risk that their arrows would fall among their own fellows.
As the Iroqua swooped over the densely packed line of the Legion, their deadly projectiles rarely failed to find a mark. These arrows needed only to wound, poison-tipped for sure; legionary after legionary toppled to the ground like a cut-string puppet moments after suffering no more than the shallowest nick. Fortunately, most of the arrows plinked off armor.
The trumpeters looked to Marcellinus for commands. A pair of flying Iroqua buzzed them, an arrow thwacked into the ground by his side, and Marcellinus found his tongue. Over the pandemonium he shouted, “First, Second, Third: split line! Fire outward! All other cohorts, orbis!”
The signalmen nodded, and the trumpets brayed.
As always, the 33rd Legion spread over several miles. The Iroqua attack was concentrated on his first three cohorts, bottling up the men behind. Expecting a ground assault from both sides, Marcellinus had planned a split line anyway, and it was also the best formation to resist an attack from the air. The cohorts in the rear were overextended, and for them the hollow-square orbis formation would form the best defense even if hordes of barbarians flooded down the ravine behind them, given the advantages of discipline and steel armor.
More Iroqua swooped and soared; more legionaries fell. Up the hill the cohorts of Tullius and Aelfric were breaking into sections and forming ragged squares. Beyond them, in the distance, the slaves were crawling under the supply wagons. From somewhere came the unmistakable scream of a horse.
On either side of Marcellinus, the First and Second fell into close-order parallel lines, facing out to the left and right. Behind the First, the honor guard clustered around the Aquila.
From the sky came stones as well as arrows. Some of the flying warriors were armed with slings rather than bows. More arrows came from Iroqua archers standing on the crags above, shooting from much greater range.
One of his signiferi took an arrow in the neck and went down, screaming. Carrying no shields, the standard-bearers made easy targets from above. Next to Marcellinus an adjutant received an arrow to the arm; calmly, the man knelt and used his pugio to slice into his skin to yank out the arrowhead and then sucked the poison from his wound.
Then the Third Cohort broke in panic. Legionaries milled and shouted, unable to evade the soaring enemies without trampling their comrades. Such a loss of discipline was unacceptable. Where was Corbulo? Marcellinus recovered himself, left the First under the control of his senior centurion, Pollius Scapax, and ran uphill into the ranks of the Third.
Marcellinus thought Corbulo was down and wounded until he reached his tribune’s side. Instead, Corbulo was watching the wings whirl over his head with something like terror, his hand thrown up as if to ward off a curse.
Marcellinus applied his foot to Corbulo’s ribs. “Up, man! Must your men see you trembling and afraid?”
“What?” Corbulo’s eyes searched for him as if the tribune were drunk or in darkness.
“Men in kites! You’re not so daunted by that?”
“Kites?” said Corbulo in a daze.
“Aye, kites,” the Praetor said. “And aboard them, just men.”
“Men!” said Corbulo. “Of course, I see it now,” and rose to his feet. Rushing into a group of his archers, he marshaled them to shoot long at the Iroqua who stood on the crag tops waiting to launch. A fusillade of arrows knocked a good half dozen of the attackers off their perches, and several more leaped off the crags, consigning themselves to the air. At least one crashed to earth immediately, a victim of the treacherous winds swirling up the valley.
Marcellinus leaned back to study the flying braves. It was the Praetor’s job to think strategically, but he was hard-pressed to devise a strategy against an enemy that soared out of reach.
Now, up the hill, he saw smoke. A flaming arrow had embedded itself in the canvas of one of the supply train carts and was setting a merry blaze. Critical provisions were at risk.
Marcellinus grabbed a pilum from a fallen soldier and ran to launch it upward at the nearest Iroqua. The javelin drifted lazily behind the wing and dropped back to earth; Marcellinus had badly underestimated the flying brave’s height and speed.
“Lead with your bows!” he shouted. “Fire ahead of them! Well ahead!”
Across the Legion the wave of terror had passed. The cohorts were getting back under control, shields arrayed in defense and bows at the ready. The men had found themselves an enemy they could fight. It became a game now, though a deadly one; the more practiced Iroqua slew three Romans for every wing the legionaries sent tumbling into the rocks.
Marcellinus took a bow from a man of the Third who had fallen to his knees, cradling his arm. Nocking an arrow, he swung it upward and let fly. And then he did it again. His second arrow pierced an Iroqua’s stomach, and he savored the man’s scream as he plummeted into the
ground.
The bow was not Marcellinus’s favored weapon. Let no man say the Praetor was not flexible in a pinch.
When the final tally came in, the Legion had lost two hundred fifty men in the skirmish. In return the Romans had shot down several dozen of the wings. Perhaps a couple of dozen more of the Iroqua had fallen out of the sky from overzealousness, or had misjudged the canyon walls, forging their own disasters.
Marcellinus loathed the loss of even a single legionary out here beyond the edge of the world, where they could not be replaced. Yet the deaths of their comrades brought such fire and fury to his men that considered as a whole, his Legion might well be the stronger for it.
“Cowards and skulkers, shooting their poison arrows from on high! We can hardly clamber into the air and meet them blade to blade!”
Side by side they rode at the head of the Legion, Praetor Gaius Publius Marcellinus and First Tribune Lucius Domitius Corbulo, as they had in happier times out east.
“Aye,” said Marcellinus tactfully. Corbulo was obviously not taking his momentary lapse of reason on the battlefield well.
Corbulo skewered him with a glance, and Marcellinus added, “As cowardly as picking off our legionaries when they step out of their marching line or go to fetch firewood.”
“Worse. What kind of man hides in the air?”
“The flying itself is not without risk,” Marcellinus pointed out. “Merely learning the skill must present its hazards. Plenty of opportunities to tumble out of the sky onto your head.”
“The basic trick looked simple enough,” Corbulo grumbled. “Those men were not warriors.”
Marcellinus doubted the simplicity of it. He had ordered his adjutants to ensure that one of the crashed wings was packed into his cart for later study. The wing appeared to be constructed of deerskin scraped thin as parchment and stretched over pine and cedar spars and adorned with feathers. Certainly Marcellinus would never jump off a cliff under such a flimsy frame and knew of no other sane Roman who would. And once the Romans had organized and begun to get their enemies’ range, the Iroqua had retreated by flying back up to land on the crags once more, also hardly an easy task.