by Alan Smale
“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 and 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 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 alongside him 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.
Sisika stood, and with a final contemptuous glance she turned and walked away. As if it were a signal, the Cahokians pounced upon Marcellinus and dragged him to his feet.
Marcellinus did not fight back. He had rarely shown mercy. Let none be shown to him in return.
Still, they did not kill him.
Marcellinus knelt at the top of the Master Mound of the Cahokiani, his head bowed. Sweat, blood, and dirt caked him, and the late afternoon sun burned his neck. Above him glowed the golden Aquila of the lost 33rd Hesperian, the shaft that held it buried deep in the soil of an alien land. Around him stood silent braves dressed in breechcloths and feathers. Tattoos, war paint, and scarifications adorned their brown skin. Like Marcellinus, some of the warriors still clutched battle-fresh wounds that dripped blood into the clay of the mound.
The warrior standing behind him held his gladius and pugio. At any moment Marcellinus expected to feel the steel of one of his own weapons pierce his neck. He had no objections. His will to live had drained away with the last of his adrenaline.
The hubbub from the plaza faded, leaving only the sound of the breeze that had helped the Cahokians soar high above his army and destroy it.
Not far away, a man began to speak. His words were incomprehensible to Marcellinus, but the man’s tone was that of an orator, and his powers of projection would have been the envy of any in the Roman Senate. Marcellinus raised his head.
Sisika stood close by, still clad in her leather flying tunic. Her falcon mask dangled from her fingers, and her face was impassive. Perspiration lined her temples and the hawklike forked design painted around her eyes had smeared, but her chin was held high. Despite her obvious weariness, her stance breathed power and strength.
Beyond her stood the much taller figure of the man who was addressing the crowd. He wore a headdress adorned with eagle feathers and a woven kilt in blocky patterns. His chest was bare and muscular, and around his shoulders was a short feather cape. From his earlobes hung pendulous copper ear spools crudely fashioned into the shape of a human head. He carried a mace of chert and stood so still that if it were not for the movement of his mouth as he spoke, he could have been fashioned out of rock himself.
The man stood at the very edge of the plateau, proclaiming in a sonorous baritone that seemed to roll down the face of the mound and wash over his people. Even so, it was miraculous that such a large assembly could hear him. The Great Plaza had to be fifty acres in area, but the sea of Hesperians all appeared to be following his words. Marcellinus glanced to the right and left and only now saw braves on the lower plateau of the Great Mound gesturing in big sweeping movements, eloquent motions of a sign language that conveyed this chieftain’s meaning farther than his voice could reach. Along the sides of the plaza and far beyond, other braves took the gestures and repeated them, spreading the words so that all could share them.
The crowd was enthralled. Every face was upturned. The chieftain of the Cahokians commanded absolute attention from his people.
Marcellinus wished he could understand what they were hearing. Clearly, he himself was the object of much of it; the chieftain would occasionally lift an arm and point at him.
He also wished he could stand, but only because of the pain in his knees and legs. It should have been ignominious for a Roman Praetor to be kneeling at the beck and call of a foreign army, but Marcellinus was beyond that. Stoically, he took the shame as his due. He was, after all, defeated.
The chief’s voice built to a crescendo, then stopped abruptly. He made another sweeping gesture toward Marcellinus while still facing out over the mass of his people.
From behind Marcellinus came the familiar ring of steel. Above him, he saw the glint of a blade. The warrior had raised Marcellinus’s sword over his head.
An expectant silence fell. Sisika turned slowly to gaze at him.
Unable to meet her eyes, Marcellinus looked out beyond the crowd to where the sun sank over a great brown river and wide fields of Hesperian corn. Plumes of smoke rose from the thousands of huts that made up the Great City. Mounds, some truncated pyramids of earth topped with a house and palisade and others conical and unadorned, dotted the landscape as far as he could see. Away to the east, the golden rays of the sunset illuminated the pale face of the low landlocked river bluffs that marked the edge of the immense Cahokian floodplain five or more miles distant.
If Marcellinus did not look down into the fields of death beyond the plaza, he might have imagined that nothing in particular had happened this day, that this was just another glorious evening deep in the heart of a new continent.
If these were his last moments on earth, he wanted above all to feel at peace.
The killing stroke did not come. The silence extended. The chief held his position, his hand pointed toward the Roman. Nobody else spoke. No ritual was being conducted here. Marcellinus was still breathing.
A broad shadow swept the plaza as the sun set, and as if they had been freed from bondage, a mighty howl burst forth from the crowd accompanied by the rattle of wood against wood, wood against steel, steel against steel. Thousands of Cahokiani were beating captured Roman weapons against Roman armor in a deafening cacophony.
“Holy gods,” Marcellinus said aloud, awed at the din. He looked up.
Above him, the Roman standard still gleamed. It wounded Marcellinus to see the Legion’s eagle captured. But the loss of a golden bird was nothing to the loss of three thousand men, his command, and his world.
It was as if the Cahokiani had been waiting for him to move. The brave stepped past him and laid his gladius and pugio on the ground by his side at the standard’s base.
Marcellinus’s legs had stiffened. The brave grabbed his arm and pulled him up onto his feet. Sisika and the chieftain were already walking toward the huge longhouse that capped the mound. Marcellinus took a few steps after them.
Braves in falcon masks converged on him, turning him around firmly. Marcellinus did not resist as they ushered him down the steps of the mound and tethered him to a tall cedar pole.
Marcellinus awoke at dawn lying on the ground, his body stiff and aching. His eyes were stuck shut, and with his wrists lashed together it was hard to raise his fingers to rub the sleep out of them. He felt a tacky dampness at his shoulder and leg where hi
s wounds had reopened and a fierce throbbing pain along his arm from the Cahokian liquid flame.
They had bound his wrists and hobbled his ankles with a fine sinew that cut into him when he moved. A short rope held him fast to the pole of red cedar that stood just inside the open gates of the palisade, the same gates he had run through the previous day, near the battle’s end.
With some difficulty Marcellinus rolled onto his back and peered up the steep slope of the Master Mound. He saw no one.
He grasped the pole and levered himself to a sitting position. Through the gates, the early sun lit the straw-thatched huts, turning them golden. Native men and women walked back and forth between them, rubbing their eyes. Marcellinus rubbed his own eyes again. The Cahokiani were a people who in the heat of summer did not wear very much. Many of them were clad only in breechcloths—and some in even less.
A woman limped past, her long gray hair in braids. She was dressed more modestly than the younger women in a fringed tunic that might have been deerskin. Her hip clearly troubled her, for she had a rolling gait and rubbed her hip bone and grumbled as she walked.
Seeing Marcellinus, she stopped dead in her tracks. Her expression hardened. Pursing her lips, she turned and hobbled back the way she had come.
Moments later a grim-faced brave walked through the gate. His head was shorn at the sides, leaving a sharp spiky crest of hair that jutted up from his scalp and hung down his back in a long braid. His shoulders were decorated with dark feather tattoos, and a jagged pattern of blue and red war paint adorned his chest, smudged where he’d slept on it. The stink of battle was still on him.
Halting in front of Marcellinus and not meeting his eye, the warrior raised a chert knife.
Marcellinus tilted his head back, baring his throat. He would welcome whatever death was his due, and a quiet dispatch in the dawn was as good as any, but he would prefer the slash to be quick and sure-aimed.
The brave grabbed his hands and sawed through the sinew that bound him. When Marcellinus still didn’t move, the man pushed his wrists apart a little impatiently.
“Maybe I should stay here,” Marcellinus said.
The brave grunted and hacked away the sinew binding Marcellinus’s ankles. The older woman reappeared and quacked at him peevishly, dragging Marcellinus to his feet with only belated help from the brave. She only came up to his shoulder but was considerably stronger than she looked.
The woman’s hut was only a couple of hundred yards outside the gate, but every step sent shooting pains through Marcellinus’s legs and spine. He tottered like an infant, muttering in profane Latin and bleeding gently into the dust. Just as they arrived, the cramps in his muscles started to ease.
Outside the hut a much younger woman nursed her baby, bare-breasted and long-legged. She gaped at the Roman, then stood and strode away. The brave called after her, but the harsh set of her shoulders was answer enough: yesterday’s enemy was hardly welcome at their house. “I don’t blame you,” Marcellinus said.
The old woman returned bearing a bowl of water. Marcellinus bowed his head to drink, but the woman’s shriek brought him upright again in short order. She gestured, hands flapping and braids bouncing, and he finally understood. Dipping his palms into the bowl, he splashed water onto his face and rubbed his hands together, did it again, and a third time.
The water quickly turned dark and bloody. Marcellinus touched his face more gingerly, trying to locate the gashes in his skin so he wouldn’t irritate them further.
The old woman slapped his hands away from his forehead. Startled once again, Marcellinus sat quietly as she dabbed at his brow with the corner of a small blanket that itself looked none too clean. Satisfied, she babbled another stream of words at him and emitted an explosive psssht! of disgust at his continued lack of comprehension.
Meanwhile, the brave pushed a smaller clay bowl of water into his hand. Marcellinus hesitated, wary of breaching etiquette again. The brave understood and gestured, lifting his hand to his lips.
Marcellinus drained the bowl in two large, painful swallows and held it out for more.
As the sun rose higher, Urbs Cahokiani came to life at its own speed. People moved slowly and dallied to chat with one another. Their motions seemed aimless to Marcellinus’s eyes. It was nothing like the purposeful bustle of the castra.
Braves and women blinked at him as they walked by. Children stared openly, and many would have stayed to stare longer if not urged past by their parents. Some people had started the work of their day while the air was still relatively cool. A man carved strips of meat from a deer hung up on a wooden frame, a dog at his feet hoping for scraps. Two women outside the hut opposite began to grind corn on a dish-shaped rock, glancing at Marcellinus covertly out of the corners of their eyes. Outside another hut a little farther away, a plump older woman turned clay in her hands, fashioning it into a bowl; the fired and half-painted pots by her blanket showed her to be something of a craftswoman. She had a colored blanket draped over her shoulders, but most of the other Cahokians wore tattoos, body paint, breechcloths, and not a great deal more.
Marcellinus frequently glanced back toward the gates where he had spent the night, but no sudden consternation erupted at his absence from the pole, and no warriors came dashing down the steps of the mound to collect him. The Master Mound and the rest of the area inside the palisade seemed empty.
Of course, the warriors and ordinary folk of Cahokia were also awakening the morning after a ferocious and exhausting battle. A battle that Marcellinus himself had brought upon them. The paradox that he could be sitting eating some kind of corn mash in the morning light, unmolested and practically ignored in the middle of an enemy city he had just the previous day waged brutal war on, became even more acute.
And with that thought came another wave of delayed terror and nausea at the loss of his Legion. Marcellinus stopped chewing and swallowed hard.
He could casually eat breakfast on a morning like this? While the tormented souls of thousands of Romans still shimmered in the air around him?
The old woman reached out her hand in concern. Obviously his despair had shadowed his face, and how could it be otherwise?
Marcellinus stood abruptly.
He had presided over one of the greatest Roman defeats in history. This was his Teutoburg, his Carrhae, his Cannae. Today marked his entrance into the pantheon of the cursed: Roman generals whose incompetence had wiped out their entire commands, legates who had failed so disgracefully that their names were held in contempt for centuries.
What would his father and family think of him now? His daughter?
At least those other blighted generals had had the decency to perish in their final wars. Publius Quinctilius Varus. Marcus Licinius Crassus. Lucius Aemilius Paullus. All had fallen in battle with their men. Why should Gaius Publius Marcellinus go on living with this dark hole at the center of his soul?
Without even a nod to his hosts he stepped away from their hut and strode blindly forward into the heart of the Urbs Cahokiani.
People moved out of his way. As he limped past house after house, Cahokians fell silent and watched him go, and still nobody raised a hand against him. It all blurred around him: white walls, golden thatch, staring faces, soil and sand underfoot. The sun, already beginning to burn his face.
Then there were no more people and few houses, merely the twin stenches of burning and death.
His foot bumped into a corpse, and he stopped.
Marcellinus stood at the edge of yesterday’s battlefield. A sea of broken bodies stretched out before him, Romans and Cahokians piled in a mass of slaughter. The stink of viscera wafted over him.
Marcellinus grunted and shoved up the sleeves of his tunic. He had work to do.
The Cahokiani had made a noble start on the grisly work the previous evening. They had at least dragged the bodies away from their Great Plaza and the huts that surrounded it. But the battle line had extended for hundreds of yards beyond that, and the melee had ra
nged far and wide as the Romans had scattered under the assaults of the Thunderbirds and the warrior horde on the ground.
A few dozen grim-faced Cahokiani were already walking among the dead, lifting the broken bodies of their warriors and carrying them reverently away from the battlefield. As each body was moved, a small swarm of flies took to the air. By the nearest stand of trees Marcellinus saw a neat line of Hesperian corpses, their smashed bodies straightened as well as they could be, their weapons placed on their chests. With much less care, another team of Cahokians stripped Roman bodies of arms and armor. Children carried blood-streaked swords and breastplates off the killing fields and added them to the growing piles of steel at the edge of the plaza.
The spoils of war. Marcellinus could imagine how useful the Roman weaponry might be when pressed into service against local foes. Perhaps he had already changed the balance of power in the region.
What of that? He put the thought aside. He cared nothing for tribal politics. If the Cahokiani wanted to go off and slaughter Iroqua with Roman steel, more power to them. He walked forward and bent over to pick up the body of the first Roman soldier he came to, a fine blond-haired boy with green eyes open in surprise, his face unmarred but his intestines a mass of dark blood and flies.
Someone seized him from behind. Marcellinus tried to react, but he was hampered by the corpse of his countryman and the dizzy ache of his own limbs. He sprawled backward onto hard Roman armor, the dead lad’s weight across his knees.
Above him stood a Cahokian warrior, his face still daubed with war paint. Spiral tattoos covered his arms and shoulders. He held a Roman gladius awkwardly in both hands, the point of the blade bobbing in the air scant inches above Marcellinus’s unprotected chest. From his belt hung strips of bloody hair, the scalps of dead Romans. His features were distorted, and a few drops of his spittle alighted on Marcellinus’s cheek.
Belatedly, Marcellinus realized that the warrior was screaming at him and had been screaming for some time. His fugue state of despair apparently had rendered him insensible to the sounds around him. Nor had he been truly conscious of the terrible, fetid smell of the battlefield that burst upon him now, flooding his nostrils. He rolled aside, spilling the dead Roman boy off his legs, and vomited onto the bloody ground.