Clash of Eagles

by Alan Smale

  Marcellinus wiped gunk from his eyes and spit. He had not taught the falcon warriors that trick. They had apparently learned it from watching the group drills below: a single coordinated surge of missiles was much more effective—and more deadly—than when everyone shot when he felt like it.

  The birdmen, at least, learned quickly.

  All right. They had been at this for several hours now, and Marcellinus should stop them soon for a break and a drink of water. The weather was much cooler these days, but he still didn’t want anyone passing out from overexertion.

  “First Cahokian, prepare to charge!”

  The braves liked charging. All soldiers did, at least when there wasn’t a real enemy in front of them. They leaned forward as one. Akecheta bellowed at them, reminding them to keep their heavy pila straight out and pointing at their imaginary foes, not sagging toward the ground.

  “Hold!” called Marcellinus. “Hold …”

  The First Cahokian seethed, impatient. But if there was one thing Marcellinus had vowed to ensure that his next army was capable of doing, it was waiting.

  “Hold,” Marcellinus repeated.

  The Hawk wings came around in formation for another strafing run. Marcellinus said nothing. He watched and waited.

  Then: “First Cahokian! Charge!”

  They were off and running, howling at the tops of their voices, pila still held out in front of them. Even at a full run they preserved a remarkably straight line. For some reason this had been much easier for them to learn than maintaining discipline while firing arrows. Marcellinus still hoped to get them into a steady progression, move-fire-move-fire-move-fire, with flights of arrows going off more quickly and efficiently than the men could manage firing at random, but at this rate it wouldn’t happen till next summer.

  Cahokian warriors charged fast. At his age and with the vestigial aches of his many wounds, there was no way Marcellinus could keep up with them.

  They hit the straw men head on, still running full tilt. The steel spear points went straight through the straw men and into the ground on the other side. Around half the troops drew gladii and raised them above their heads, some of them hacking at the remains of the straw figures. The other half dropped to one knee and covered them, as they were supposed to. In a real battle they’d be down there taking scalps, anyway. Marcellinus would never be able to train them out of that.

  Some of his troops were more coordinated with the steel blades than others. Eventually Marcellinus would arm all the men and women in his century with a gladius, but many of them needed more individual sparring practice before he could risk it. Right now, the chances of them disemboweling one another by accident in their excitement were too great.

  Even with the swords only in experienced hands, the hacking was getting overenthusiastic.

  “First Cahokian! Retreat!” Nothing happened. “First Cahokian, to me!”

  Marcellinus ran forward. “Centurion! Akecheta! Order the retreat!”

  Akecheta spun around, looking confused, and one of his own men nearly stabbed him in the thigh with Roman steel.

  “Gods preserve us,” said Marcellinus.

  A falcon warrior swooped over the front rank and shouted down at the warriors. They stood as one, turned, and began to jog back toward Marcellinus.

  Akecheta arrived first, panting, and Marcellinus gave him a companionable punch on the shoulder. “Lunkhead! Not supposed to retreat when enemy tells you to!”

  Akecheta grinned, unabashed. The “enemy” Catanwakuwa banked low over them and dumped a torrent of water and mud down Marcellinus’s neck.

  By the time he released them for the afternoon, Marcellinus looked as if he had been thrown into a bog. Small children scattered at his approach, screaming in delighted mock terror.

  He could tell already that discipline would be a persistent issue with his new army. He was smiling nonetheless.

  By Marcellinus’s best guess, he had two years. But he might have only one.

  If all had gone as planned and Marcellinus had taken Cahokia, he would have sent dispatch riders back to the Roman beachhead garrison at Chesapica well before the end of the campaign season, and a small longship would have been sent back to Roma to tell Hadrianus the news. It was now October, and Marcellinus had no way of sending news of his defeat to the Chesapica. But the Imperator and the Senate well understood the immensity of the Atlanticus and the difficulties his legion would face in a new continent. If a longship did not come to Roma or arrived with no real news of the 33rd, they would wait till the next spring. It might take until after the Ides of Maius—the Planting Moon, by the Cahokian calendar—before serious doubts began to register, and that would already be very late to summon, prepare, and dispatch another legion to Nova Hesperia the same year. In those circumstances it probably would be the following spring—nearly two years hence—before the Romans returned.

  But if Roman survivors made it to the Chesapica, if his errant but skillful scout Isleifur Bjarnason learned of the destruction and made haste to the east, or if the garrison somehow learned of the loss of the 33rd Legion from the Powhatani or the Iroqua, Hadrianus might still receive the news this coming winter.

  What happened then would depend entirely on how the war with the Mongol Khan was going and whether the Imperator himself was campaigning with the Roman army on the front line—adding to the length of time it would take to get dispatches to and from him—or had returned to Roma. It also depended on whether a legion could be spared and where that legion currently was.

  In all likelihood, then, two years. Perhaps even more. But if all the pieces fell into place, if Hadrianus learned the news of the massive defeat quickly and acted swiftly to avenge it, if a new legion was sent and came thundering west along the very trails and bridges that the 33rd had blazed through the land … Marcellinus might have as little as six or eight months.

  He would need every day.

  The two lines of braves crashed into each other. Half of the first line fell over. “Halt!” cried Akecheta with the absence of timeliness for which he was now renowned.

  Marcellinus groaned. This afternoon, no one in the First Cahokian was concentrating at all. He had no idea why.

  His troops helped one another to their feet, having the decency to look a little embarrassed.

  “All right,” Marcellinus said. “Now let’s—”

  “Present arms!”

  Akecheta’s suddenly barked command in Latin cut off his thought in midstream. There could be only one reason for the interruption: Marcellinus was outranked. He turned.

  “Leave tomorrow,” said Great Sun Man, striding up to him. He wore what Marcellinus thought of as his kilt of office, with the blocks of geometric patterns carefully dyed into it. Serious business was afoot, then.

  “Where you go?” Marcellinus asked, wiping his face with a blanket. It was the nearest these people got to a good honest towel. Then he saw the expression on Great Sun Man’s face. “What, me? I must leave Cahokia? Why?”

  “You. Me. Many warriors. Kill Iroqua.”

  Marcellinus looked around for Tahtay or Kimimela. By now he knew a few hundred basic conversational and combat words in Cahokian and could sign and understand much more complicated gestural sentences, but Great Sun Man knew no Latin and rarely deigned to use hand-talk with him. This conversation might quickly exceed Marcellinus’s language skills.

  “Joke? Ha-ha?”

  “Not joke.” The war chief eyed him suspiciously and then looked around at the First Cahokian. “Fight.”

  “So we fight? Where?”

  “Sunrise.” Great Sun Man pointed east in the Cahokian style by turning to face the sun so that his left side was aligned eastward. “Mizipi, then Oyo, and then,” he gestured, “Iroqua long camp.”

  “What?”

  “Iroqua build winter? No-no. We fight. Kill Iroqua.”

  Marcellinus couldn’t follow this. “Uh, wait, sorry, where’s your son?”

  Tahtay’s excitement at t
he news was infectious. “Cahokia scouts have found Iroqua war camp, past Snake Mound along Oyo River, long-way. They, Iroqua warriors, build up camp there for winter. A place called Woshakee. We cannot let them stay so close. We go now, destroy Iroqua long camp before winter, kill much Iroqua.”

  “We all?” He turned to Great Sun Man. “Tahtay come, too, Iroqua battle-fight?”

  Great Sun Man said something Marcellinus didn’t understand, then, seeing the Roman’s baffled expression, simplified his words. “Yes. Tomorrow before dawn, we go. Many warriors. You and your—” He gestured at the men around them a little quizzically. “—fighters. We see what you do. And Tahtay, for words, my son Tahtay, for man, for battle. I have spoken.”

  The war chief walked off abruptly; the conversation was always at an end after “I have spoken.” Marcellinus shook his head and turned to Tahtay. “What did Great Sun Man say?”

  He hardly needed to ask. Tahtay was grinning from ear to ear. “Great Sun Man say time for Tahtay to come to war, time for Tahtay to become a man!”

  “Really?” Marcellinus was appalled. A boy of only eleven winters? Even his signiferi in the 33rd Legion had been several winters—several years—older than that.

  “Eat well today,” the boy advised him with the air of a seasoned professional. “Food on warpath very bad, hard meat and berries.”

  He meant dried deer meat pressed into small cakes, tough and unappetizing. Marcellinus had seen it before. “Yes. I will eat well.”

  Tahtay ran off, skipping in a most unwarriorlike way, and it was only then that the true import of Great Sun Man’s words sank in.

  Marcellinus was going to war against the Iroqua. With the Cahokians. Leading Cahokians by the sound of it, or at least his own small unit of them.

  After a long and sometimes frustrating convalescence, Marcellinus was certainly ready to see some action. But the First Cahokian? His efforts with them to be tested so soon?

  The consequences of failure might be huge. Fatal, even if he survived the Iroqua. Marcellinus was under no illusions: he was still very much on probation with the Cahokian war chief.

  “Great Juno …”

  He looked up at the sun. It was midafternoon. There was still time.

  “Akecheta!” He ran back toward his men. “Akecheta! Centurion! Warriors, fall in!”

  Rather than build a winter camp, the Iroqua had stolen one.

  “These, Mohawk Iroqua,” said Great Sun Man as they paddled down the Mizipi. The war chief took his turn at the oar just as often as any of his men. Marcellinus had been quickly exempted from rowing duties; he could not match the power and precision of the Cahokians, and the repetitive nature of the paddling put strain on his shoulder, his ribs, and even the wound in his stomach. So, much to his humiliation, he got to loll around in the war canoe for hours on end while the other warriors propelled them vigorously down the Mizipi. Even Tahtay got to paddle from time to time.

  At least it kept them warm. The chill had long ago crept into Marcellinus’s bones. Along with being hotter than Roma in the summer, apparently this Hesperian latitude was all set to be colder in the autumn and winter as well.

  “Mohawks.” Marcellinus nodded. “And long camp?”

  Great Sun Man spoke to Tahtay for what felt like several minutes. Marcellinus looked at the flotilla of war canoes that followed in their wake. Great Sun Man’s canoe had been the last to push off from the riverbank at Cahokia but by now had passed through the formation to take the lead.

  With so few leaves on the trees, the conspicuousness of their passage was making Marcellinus nervous. They were sitting ducks out there, and the breastplate he was wearing against arrows would drag him deep into the water if their canoe capsized in an attack. Even though the Cahokians assured him they had many days’ travel ahead before they encountered the Mohawks, Marcellinus felt ridiculously unprepared. He wanted all the details of what they were up against.

  “The Mohawk take a city,” Tahtay said. “Small city, fives-of-hundred mans and womans. City of our people.”

  “Cahokians?”

  “From Cahokia, no, but our people. People of the Mounds, most along the Mizipi but also the near rivers. Mohawk take that city, Woshakee, by creep, by sneak. They kill the warriors, take the womans and children. In the Mourning War they need children to replace braves they lose, need womans to make more children.”

  “Very nice,” said Marcellinus. “So, this city?”

  “City has palis …?”

  “Tall tree logs around it, like a wall? ‘Palisade.’ Or ‘stockade.’ ”

  “Yes, palisade, to stop attack. But Mohawks big clever and walk in with traders, then kill by night. So now they have a town close to Cahokia, with corn and many womans, and they can grow fat over winter and then rise and raid us, kill us quick when the first thaw come.”

  “But we will kill them quick instead. Now.”

  “Yes.”

  Marcellinus was going with a couple of hundred Cahokian warriors to besiege a walled city. He wondered what their chances were. “This happen before, Iroqua steal a city?”

  “No. This new.”

  “Do your enemies build stockades around their cities, too? Cahokians have attacked cities with stockades before?”

  “No. This new, too.”

  Marcellinus grimaced. “It would have been good to know this before we left Cahokia, Tahtay. We could have prepared, made special weapons and practiced drills for this. If we have to beat our way through a palisade, we need battering rams or borers. Did we bring liquid flame?”

  “Yes,” Tahtay said. “We have liquid flame in clay pots. Some. On canoes, not safe bring much.”

  “And do Iroqua have liquid flame?”

  Tahtay had been translating over his shoulder so his father would hear the conversation, too. Great Sun Man responded. “Yes. Iroqua use it before. Iroqua liquid flame not good as Cahokian liquid flame.”

  Well, of course not. “And I suppose a couple of score of good siege ladders would be too much to hope for? Even some picks and crowbars?”

  At least they had brought shields. Against Great Sun Man’s protests that they would weigh down the canoes and slow them down, Marcellinus had managed to bring four dozen of the tall rectangular shields for those of his men whom he’d trained in their use late in the afternoon before they left. That last-minute training looked even more fortuitous now.

  “Yes, they have the flame, too,” Tahtay added superfluously. “But why we need break stockade? Mohawk will come out and fight us. Why not?”

  With a perfectly good fort around them? Marcellinus doubted it. Iroqua honor and Cahokian honor were two very different animals. “We’ll see. Tell me more about city, about land around it. How far from river? There are trees, hills, what?”

  Tahtay asked Great Sun Man, who seemed impatient at the question. “No. He never go. I never go.”

  Marcellinus stared. “Has anyone in this canoe been to the city we’re going to relieve?”

  Tahtay inquired, but Marcellinus could interpret the brief head gestures and grunts of the other fifteen warriors in the canoe for himself.

  “Juno, protect us all,” he said.

  “Change paddle men,” Great Sun Man said. “Change!”

  And they did, with great nimbleness, walking up and down the canoe in midstream as if they were on land, nobody falling in the water or even needing to grab on to anything for support. That, at least, was impressive.

  “You people could teach the Norsemen a thing or two.”

  “ ‘Norsemen’ is what?” Tahtay asked.

  “Never mind.”

  It took them twelve days to travel to the vicinity of the captured city, Woshakee. For the first three days they paddled down the Mizipi, going with the current. During that time they passed several Cahokian-style villages and towns positioned up against the river, their reed-thatched roofs surrounding mounds of various sizes. The larger towns were protected by full palisades, but without firing platforms, and the
villages had only low fences that looked like they would fall to a strong sneeze. Tahtay told Marcellinus that those fences were made by weaving branches together and then painting them with mud; as in some areas in northern Europa, they were fit only for keeping cattle in … if these people had had any cattle.

  On the second day the Mizipi narrowed to flow through a rocky bottleneck. Here the Cahokians stopped for a few minutes to pay tribute to an immense rock that sat in the water near the riverbank. The rock was covered with petroglyphs: spirals, painted eyes, and falcon glyphs and figures of men, and weaving through them all the sinuous form of a snake that extended all the way from the crown of the rock down into the water and, presumably, beyond. The rock must have weighed a dozen tons, and the glyphs looked older than anything Marcellinus had seen in Cahokia, which meant older than anything he’d yet seen in Nova Hesperia.

  Kiche, the shaman acolyte, climbed onto the rock and lit six fire bowls, dedicating them to north and south, east and west, above and below, while the canoes maintained their station in the current with some difficulty. The other warriors, at least the ones not paddling, bowed their heads in reverence and chanted briefly.

  “Sky,” Tahtay said, pointing upward, and “Land under,” pointing down, far down by the way he was emphasizing it.

  “Yes,” said Marcellinus. He had moved to the stern of their canoe half out of respect for the Cahokians’ traditions and half out of embarrassment at their superstition; even now it was hard for him to square the pragmatic and down-to-earth everyday aspect of the Cahokians with the more superstitious and pagan side that came alive during their nighttime ceremonies and the occasional daytime rituals like this.

  “Is Rock of Thunderbird and River Snake,” Takoda said with a reproving air as the men moved back to their positions in the canoes and prepared to go on.

  “So I see,” said Marcellinus.

  “Water and air join here with the earth, and we thank them.”

  “I’m glad.” Marcellinus was aware he was failing a test, but he didn’t believe it was a critical one, and he really had no choice. He could not pretend to an animist faith his own people had mostly left behind centuries ago. What he wanted most of all was not the blessing of the air and the underworld but to make faster progress across the water.