Clash of Eagles

by Alan Smale

  The mound was truly gigantic. Its base must cover a dozen acres. It was no mere lump of soil but an engineered structure of packed earth and silty clay, practically a pyramid. On a wet floodplain like this, the Cahokians who built it must have known something about drainage or it would have subsided. How long would it take even a legion to construct such a thing?

  A figure loomed over him. Startled, Marcellinus sat upright, pulling a muscle in his side and sending shards of pain through the stitches in his leg. He expected a brave with a knife; he always expected a brave with a knife … but it was a woman, and not the one with the gray hair and the sore hip who fed him but someone young and lithe.

  Women could be killers, too. Marcellinus scooted backward on his rump away from her. But the girl’s eyes in the night showed only disgust for him, her body language only contempt. She made a throwing motion, and a blanket landed on Marcellinus’s ankles.

  And then she spit on him.

  The wordless moment stretched between them, strangers, enemies, and then she turned and stalked off without a backward glance. At last he recognized her from this familiar act of walking away: it was the young mother who avoided him when he came to eat, that nameless woman full of loathing who surely must have been persuaded to bring him the blanket under sufferance, commanded by the older woman who must be her mother or mother-in-law.

  She did not fear him. To her, and perhaps to all of them, Marcellinus was vermin, a war captive not even worthy of the sacrifice, fit only for the company of children who had been ordered to learn his language to communicate with future Romans. Marcellinus, a Roman Praetor and commander of legions, was reliant on the charity of a haughty, scornful, dirty people. He had no place here.

  And even now Marcellinus could be slain at any time. Enough Cahokians had made their hatred of him very evident, and the young woman had worn a knife at her belt. If she had found him sleeping unprotected, might she have used it?

  Despite his weariness, he could not stay here a moment longer. They were not even going to guard him? Fine. Then let them lose him.

  Leaving the blanket where it lay, Marcellinus stood and walked out through the gates of the palisade, across the plaza, through the neighborhood of dark and silent houses on the other side, and on into the night.

  Marcellinus walked straight as a Roman road through the city, past the wagons, and onward. This was the way his army had swept into town, and it was the way Marcellinus left it, heading southeast. Due east technically would have been even more direct, but that route would take him through an area unknown to him: more neighborhoods, perhaps damp ground or marsh, and eventually the escarpments of the river bluffs, a challenge to navigate by night. This was the way his Legion originally had been guided into town by the Cahokians. There was a road that led through a break in the bluffs; this was the way he knew.

  At any moment he expected braves to appear and bar his way, perhaps at the city’s edge. Surely someone must be watching him. What manner of people would let an enemy roam their city unguarded, with free access to their women and children? But no one came.

  Let them try to stop him. He would walk around them. If they knocked him down, he would stand up and walk again. If they trussed him with sinew and carried him back, he would wait an hour or a day and then leave again. He would wear them down until they let him pass. Or killed him outright.

  Marcellinus had decided that he would not idle away his days in captivity at the pleasure of barbarians. He would not be their tame language tutor. He would not keep the company of children, however engaging. They could kill him or he would march through the night, sleep through the day, and eat berries until he was killed, starved to death, or made it back to the sea. And given the huge distance ahead of him and the savagery of the tribes in his path, the odds of his ever seeing the Mare Chesapica again were laughable.

  This time there would be no horse to carry him. He did not need one. He had no duties and did not need to think. He was responsible for no one but himself.

  He would not rest until dawn.

  Marcellinus walked.

  The wan light from the shielded moon was barely sufficient to light his way. For a while he walked by the extensive fields of Cahokian corn that fed thousands, the plants rustling quietly in the gentle breeze. Though well worn, the road he followed was Hesperian, not Roman; as often as not he found his foot dropping several inches into a hole or catching on a root. Every time it happened, he cursed silently and walked on.

  Worse was the wooded area he came to next: copses of chestnut and hickory, oak, and birch. The crowns of the trees masked what little moonlight there was. Cahokians did not maintain their forest floors as free from brush and undergrowth as the Iroqua, and his legs were constantly being scratched and scored by unseen thorns.

  He came out of the copse and crossed another cornfield, this one flanked by a cluster of four Cahokian houses arranged around a small head-high conical mound. The clouds were shifting, and the moon, long past full, was dropping toward the horizon. However, Marcellinus’s night sensitivity had improved, and now the growing darkness troubled him less. He tripped rarely now, taking the natural rise and fall of the land beneath him in stride. He picked up the pace when he saw the next stand of trees in his way.

  Through to the other side of it, he saw no further Cahokian houses. A small field separated him from another stretch of trees. His mood lifted just a little.

  He heard a faint clicking.

  Marcellinus knew the sounds of animals and already had heard the rustlings of owls and field mice. He was familiar with the whisper of the breeze as it shifted the ears of corn. This noise was none of those.

  He was currently walking into a small, shallow bowl of land; this close to the Mizipi floodplain the topography was all minor, yet he was clearly on a gradual downhill incline, the horizon lifting around him by a few degrees. There was nothing nearby any taller than a knee-high bush. He had seen no human beings since he had walked away from the plaza. Yet his senses told him someone was near.

  The inhabitants of Cahokia were not night walkers. The Great City had slumped into inactivity just moments after the end of twilight. And out here there were no dwellings; no one would wander this far afield through insomnia or bodily needs.

  Maybe Marcellinus had not left Cahokia behind, after all. Was he being trailed?

  Then, ahead of him at the edge of the next copse, he glimpsed the faintest of motions.

  It was not the wind in the brush, and Marcellinus did not think it was a deer. But he did not understand how any braves who were supposed to be following him had managed to get so far ahead or why they would need to unless it was to lie in wait and apprehend him.

  Or kill him.

  Reaching the lower limit of the bowl-like depression, he found the tiniest of streams flowing through it. He slid to the ground in a single movement, collapsing as smoothly as a dropped tunic.

  Marcellinus had been walking southeast, so if he followed the path of the stream, his options were now to crawl north or south. He chose south solely because the four houses and the small mound had been to his right when he had walked past them twenty minutes before and because beyond them had been a more extensive stand of trees. To the north there was no significant cover within crawling distance, and eventually the Cahokian creek might block his path. Therefore, he crawled southward, but long before he came to trees, road, field, or houses he came across a pair of opportunistic bushes growing out of the side of the gully cut by the stream and alongside them a deeper cutaway ditch. There he stopped and lay still.

  Perhaps it had been suicide for him to try to leave Cahokia. Well, so be it.

  Time passed. The moon set. And then they walked right past him, no more than twenty paces away, six braves in a line. One of them muttered something, and the Hesperian in the lead made a curt gesture, the hand-talk for “no.” Clearly, grumbling was not permitted on this expedition.

  They looked to right and left as they passed him, all alert
, but Marcellinus was doing such a superlative impression of a lichen-covered rock that none of them even paused for a second glance.

  Marcellinus waited. Now what?

  After two hundred breaths, he raised his head. Three more groups of braves were moving through the open area, six men per group. Behind them, nothing and nobody so far as he could tell.

  Well.

  Wearily, he placed his face down in the dirt. Opened his mouth to let the sultry water of the stream dribble into his mouth and cool his throat.

  For long moments Marcellinus had no idea what to do. His mind was blank, his muscles quivering in reaction, his heart pounding. This was the last thing he had expected.

  Pursuit from behind would have been no surprise. But these braves, two dozen in total that Marcellinus had seen so far, had not been on his trail. They probably had not even seen him. Because they were heading in the opposite direction, heading toward Cahokia from the east.

  And over the last few days, even Marcellinus’s tin ear had grown accustomed to Cahokian consonants and the natural rhythm of their speech. The words muttered by the passing warrior had had a different cadence altogether.

  Stealthily, Marcellinus pushed himself up onto his hands and knees and made ready to hunt the Iroqua war party.

  Back toward Cahokia he went, toward the city where he was neither a guest nor a captive, ignored rather than honored, and absorbed with condescending ease. Back toward a life he had forsworn just hours earlier.

  On reaching the edge of the cornfield, the group of Iroqua stopped and huddled. Marcellinus used the extra time to skulk across behind them, closer to the trees. He still would not get to the houses before the Iroqua did but would perhaps at least be near enough to raise some kind of alarm.

  Dividing again into their squads of a half dozen men, the Iroqua glided along the tree line so effortlessly that Marcellinus many times lost sight of one or other of the parties. He did not have time to stop and seek them out when this happened; the warriors were moving so quickly that they would outpace him if he delayed. By taking the sensible line instead of the most direct, the Iroqua would make it to the outskirts of the Great City in less than half the time it had taken Marcellinus to walk away from it.

  And as that fact sank in, he registered another: one of the bands of Iroqua was now only four braves strong.

  Marcellinus took a step back toward the trees, but it was too late. They were running at him from his right quarter, two dark ghosts flowing through the cornfield at astonishing speed. They had been galloping bent forward, almost in a squatting position, but once it was obvious he’d seen them, they stood up straight and ran at him even faster, still utterly silent and almost too tall to be human.

  Marcellinus swung away and ran into the forest. Once they left the cornfield and hit the leaves and twigs of the forest floor, he could hear their footfalls right behind him. He reached into his tunic for his pugio, swerved as if to avoid a tall oak that loomed up out of the night, and then swerved back toward it at the last instant.

  He jumped, turning in the air, and his back slammed into the tree trunk with spine-cracking force. He blew out air as he hit it, controlling the shock to his breathing. His knife arm was already up, extended back the way he had come.

  The first Iroqua ran onto the pugio blade while Marcellinus’s gasp of pain was still spilling from his mouth. The blade penetrated the man’s gut with such force that the Roman’s hand followed it beneath the flesh into the Iroqua’s stomach. The man crashed into him, flattening him into the oak, and Marcellinus felt an intense flare of agony as one of his ribs snapped.

  The Iroqua howled. Marcellinus wrenched at the pugio’s hilt, but it was slick now and jammed solidly in the brave. He let go and grabbed at the man’s head, trying to smack it into the tree, but his hand came free: the Iroqua’s feather headdress that had made him appear so preternaturally tall in the night had come off in Marcellinus’s hand.

  The Iroqua was winded, too, and slid down Marcellinus’s body. Marcellinus grabbed at the spear in the brave’s right hand, but the Iroqua maintained a tight hold on it and it slipped from the Praetor’s grasp. All Marcellinus could do was jab at the man’s eyes with his stiffened fingers as he toppled.

  The second Iroqua’s full-speed momentum had taken him past the tree. Marcellinus shoved the first warrior away to his right, hoping to impede the second one’s approach, but that was not the way the second brave came on his return; he looped around the tree and appeared to Marcellinus’s left. Hot flame scored Marcellinus’s stomach, but it was the broad slash of a blade, not a killing stroke. The Iroqua whirled the ax around his head as Marcellinus threw himself to the right; the warrior’s ax blade cut deeply into the tree. Wood chips flew.

  The first Iroqua seized his right ankle. Unbalanced, Marcellinus fell forward onto the forest floor, and as he did so, the Iroqua sank his teeth into his calf. Marcellinus lashed out with his left foot and caught the man under the chin. Momentarily the pain in his leg multiplied fivefold, but the Iroqua’s head slammed back into the tree trunk as Marcellinus heard the man’s skull crack with gruesome finality.

  Marcellinus rolled and came up holding the first raider’s spear. The remaining Iroqua left his ax embedded in the tree and reached behind him for the chert-studded club that hung from his shoulder on a leather strap. But at last the fight had become equal. Marcellinus leaned back to open up space and jabbed at the man’s left flank with the spear’s tip. The Iroqua tried to knock the spearhead aside with his club and step past it, but in committing to the move he opened up his right side; Marcellinus whipped the spear around and plunged it deep into the brave’s chest. The second Iroqua stumbled back over the unconscious body of the first. Marcellinus shoved hard and, releasing the spear, jumped forward.

  Still impaled on the spear, the Iroqua hit the tree. With a head butt Marcellinus broke the man’s nose, then punched him in the throat. As the man gagged and struggled, the Roman yanked his ax out of the tree and swung it, splitting the Iroqua’s skull from forehead to cheek.

  Marcellinus folded into a crouch. Adrenaline and battle fever had pushed the pain away but now it flooded him: broken rib, bleeding stomach, bitten leg, bruised spine. His ears still rang.

  Four ragged breaths and he was up again, pulling one of the sweaty Iroqua headdresses over his head so the feathers stuck up toward the sky. He grabbed the spear and the ax, but the ax was heavy and clumsy, and even lifting it put an unbearable stress on his chest and gut.

  Swearing, he dropped the ax and dived his hand into the first corpse, up to his wrist. It took two tries, but he managed to pull out the pugio. He wiped it on the ground and got to his feet once more.

  Still in shock, Marcellinus started running in the wrong direction but by the tenth step realized his mistake. He turned and ran back out of the tree cover and into the open.

  Throwing all pretense at stealth to the winds, he ran as quickly as he was able. The jabbing pain from his broken rib mingled with the chronic fire from his stomach, but the rib was not near his lung and the stomach cut was painful rather than dangerous. He tried to lope like a Hesperian, spear held horizontally, in the hopes of fooling any Iroqua who might glance back at him, but the hissing of his breath through his teeth was so loud that he doubted anyone would really take him for a native.

  Moreover, he could not see them. In the time it had taken him to slay his Iroqua welcoming committee, the rest of the war party had disappeared. He kept running through the next stand of trees and into the next clearing.

  They were just emerging from the little four-hut farmstead. One troop of six already was jogging on in the direction of Cahokia; the second and third were exiting the huts and forming up into lines. Marcellinus ducked quickly to his left, putting one of the huts between himself and them.

  He had to slow down. If they sent a second pair of warriors to deal with him, it would be all over; he was too exhausted to fight them. Marcellinus panted, his mouth open wide to reduce the sound
, and slowed to a walk as he came into the settlement from the rear.

  At first, he thought only the dead were there to greet him. Six Cahokian men lay torn and strewn on the ground, their throats cut or their necks broken, the hair hacked from their heads in a bloody swath. A seventh dead man knelt against the small ceremonial mound that centered their farmstead, naked and scalped, with his intestines sprawled on the ground in front of him. The Iroqua had been brutally efficient.

  Then he heard the sounds of muffled sobbing and found the women. Four of them were trussed at wrist and ankle with the same type of heavy sinew that had bound Marcellinus on his first night in the city. Marcellinus’s pugio made short work of it, though he left smears of Iroqua guts on their skin. With shrieks and wails, the women ran to the bodies of their men.

  Marcellinus left them to their sorrow and trotted on. Again he had lost sight of the Iroqua. His wounds flared once more as he pounded through field and forest, and the night eroded into a battle with himself as his senses reeled and unconsciousness threatened to claim him.

  He tripped on a root and a moment later heard himself scream aloud at the jolt of pain it sent through his body. Appalled, he clamped his mouth closed and raised an arm to clout himself on the side of the head. Was he sliding into some kind of waking nightmare? The noise continued.

  Two of the women from the farmstead were running up behind him, sprinting on fleet legs and fast overhauling him. Each had one arm longer than the other; clubs, they carried clubs. They did not scream from anguish. They were raising the alarm. He could recognize only one of the words they shouted, but that word was “Iroqua.”

  Marcellinus wondered if they would kill him when they caught up to him, if they could really tell him from an Iroqua in the darkness of the night, especially wearing his stolen Iroqua headdress. But one thing he knew: he would not defend himself against them, not if it meant any harm to them.