Clash of Eagles

by Alan Smale

  “First Cahokian, to me! Two lines, back to back!”

  Under Akecheta’s urging they were already doing it; a double line of warriors already faced the copse behind a solid rank of shields while another double line fell in behind them, raising shields in the opposite direction, toward the city. Akecheta, resplendent in Roman breastplate and leg greaves, stood at the uphill end of the First Cahokian, and Marcellinus took his place at the downhill, riverside end. The rest of the Cahokian force was fanning out under Great Sun Man’s command, already firing arrows into the city while racing to gain the higher ground. This brought them within easier reach of the birdmen, and one Cahokian fell to an Iroqua arrow. Another, splashed with liquid flame, shrieked and fled at full speed into the river.

  Marcellinus nocked his bow, aimed well ahead of the Iroqua Hawk warrior, and fired. He missed, but the Hawk swerved and headed cross-river to land on the other bank, unable to regain altitude, now effectively out of the battle.

  “First Cahokian, advance!”

  They had settled beforehand that “advance” meant toward the city, and his warriors now did exactly that, walking along the bank behind their shields toward the palisade while the men facing the other way backed up to guard their rear, the men with no shields shuffling along between the lines. In a very small number of paces they would be out of range of the arrows from the trees behind them.

  But now those arrows were ceasing as battle was joined. The warriors from the five Cahokian canoes that had gone ashore early were storming the copse, slaying Iroqua in hand-to-hand combat. Even from the scouts’ description of the land, the copse had been an obvious hiding ground for a Mohawk ambush, and preparing a secondary assault force to take care of business there had been one of the first orders Great Sun Man had given during their on-river planning.

  Beyond that, their powers to predict what would happen had been limited. Hawks from the ridge had been another obvious danger, but the Cahokians had had no chance of forestalling that possibility. Sending a team of warriors to sneak around and take the ridge from the rear would have added another day to the attack and spread their forces too thin.

  The sounds of cheerful slaughter from the copse continued, and now Cahokians began to run from the copse to join their fellows out on the open riverbank. Fresh scalps bobbed from their waists, splashing blood onto their legs and the grass as they ran. The danger from the Iroqua archers having passed, the rearward-facing unit of Marcellinus’s First Cahokian began to shuffle around and slot themselves into the forward line even before Marcellinus or Akecheta gave the order; Marcellinus shook his head at their acting on their own initiative, but it was the correct thing to do.

  Fortunately, the wings from the ridge were few and far between. Marcellinus suspected the Mohawk had not brought many pilots with them; the central part of Nova Hesperia lacked the crags and hills of Appalachia, giving little reason for the Iroqua to have brought a substantial force of aerial warriors. Nonetheless, the birdmen they did have were wreaking a fair degree of havoc. The Cahokians with shields to spare raised them when the Hawks came over, and some of his other soldiers even lifted shields that were supposed to protect them against arrows from the city to guard against liquid flame from above. It was clear which danger the Cahokians feared the most.

  Marcellinus’s cohort continued to advance, firing arrows in rotation for every ten feet of ground covered. Having a live enemy firing back had done wonders for their concentration, and they sent off coordinated flights of arrows almost without a hitch under Akecheta’s bellowed orders. Two hundred feet from the palisade, no one in the First Cahokian had fallen, none had dropped out of line, none had even spoken except to relay orders. Their faces were set in focused glares. Akecheta had not yet given them a confusing or ambiguous order, and none of the individual warriors had botched anything. Marcellinus was grimly proud of how the battle was going so far, and how well the men were using the shields given how little practice they’d had with them.

  The larger force of Cahokian Wolf Warriors with Great Sun Man had made it far enough up the hillside that they could fire more easily down into the city. Men with slingshots hurled the Cahokians’ liquid flame over the palisade. Many firebombs smacked into the wood of the stockade; the fire spread quickly over the surface of the tall, well-packed poles but burned only where the bombs hit. Beyond the splash zone the wood did not catch fire the way Marcellinus had hoped it would. The stockade was not visibly covered with pitch, but the Iroqua had treated it somehow to make it fire-resistant. That was disappointing.

  With a few gestures of warrior sign, Great Sun Man split out four groups of six warriors from his force and sent them up the hill toward the crest where the Hawk wings were being launched. The warriors ducked and weaved as they ran up the hill, using the occasional stands of pine and hemlock for cover, howling for blood with convincing ferocity. Marcellinus felt sorry for any Iroqua they encountered on the ridge.

  But the city itself was their main problem. Though the Cahokians had plenty of arrows, they were hitting few targets. The Iroqua could feel quite comfortable tucked away behind their sturdy ramparts of wood. Few Cahokians were falling under Iroqua arrows either. This battle would not be over quickly. Each army could gather and reuse the arrows of its enemy, and neither army was inflicting or suffering significant losses.

  Presumably the Iroqua had many more warriors than the few dozen Marcellinus could see; they probably would man the palisade in shifts, with the bulk of them able to rest between bouts of action. At some point the Cahokians would need to retreat out of range and rest as well.

  The siege of Woshakee might not be resolved today or even this week unless something drastic was done.

  Marcellinus moved in behind the line of the First Cahokian to benefit from the shield wall. In the din of men shouting and arrows plinking off metal, he tried to think.

  Once his men found out what he was thinking, he was pretty sure they wouldn’t like it. He didn’t like it himself. It was really too soon to try something this complicated with such an untrained squad of soldiers.

  But he was also convinced that it was the only plan that made sense.

  Marcellinus looked up the hill. No birdmen had flown for maybe a quarter hour—it was hard to keep time in the blur of battle—and the last few to strafe the Cahokian force had been ineffectual. These Iroqua Hawks flew low, with wooden armor covering the body and legs of their pilots, and after releasing their liquid flame or arrows over the Cahokians, they generally landed back inside the city. Without the armor, their birdmen’s hopes of survival would be poor; at the heights they were flying the battle would become a duck hunt. However, the armor spoiled their aim with the bow, and their pots of incendiary were injuring several but killing no one. Maybe it wasn’t as good as Cahokian liquid flame, after all.

  Marcellinus could not assume that the Hawk threat was over. It was too soon for the four Cahokian war bands to have made it to the crown of the ridge, especially against opposition. Waiting a little longer might make his Cahokians safer from air attack. But they had been in battle for close to an hour now, and there was a limit to how long he could wait before his men grew tired or their nerve cracked.

  Or his own did.

  “First Cahokian, group for orders!”

  This wasn’t Marcellinus’s battlefield. Great Sun Man was Marcellinus’s superior officer. But Great Sun Man was three hundred yards away, working his own force of Cahokians up the slope around the north side of Woshakee, where they could launch their arrows from slightly above the line of the palisade and perhaps even throw fire onto those Iroqua shooting at the First Cahokian. Marcellinus needed to take advantage of that before the Iroqua could adjust their tactics and provide covering fire of their own.

  The First Cahokian formed a tight huddle inside a ring of steel. Tersely, Marcellinus told his men what he wanted. Then he told them again. Then he drew it in the mud beneath their feet. He was pretty sure they got it the third time. The older warriors
looked grim, the younger ones a little startled. Only half a dozen looked cheerful about it, but those men hooted and punched the sky, and some of their enthusiasm spread. Privately, Marcellinus thought they must be men of little imagination; this would be a bold move but one that could easily and quite literally collapse into disaster. His men would learn quickly or it would be all over.

  “I’ll be right there with you,” said Marcellinus. “Wanageeska will lead. Wanageeska will be first. I ask none of you to do a thing I would not do myself.”

  They looked uncertain. He had used too many negatives in that sentence to be safely understood. Rather than try again, Marcellinus grinned fiercely. “Maybe you will not keep up with me! Maybe I will win big glory! And maybe I will fall! In that case, futete! Fuck it!”

  That, he got a cheer for.

  He coached them in the three orders he planned to give. With various gestures they assured him that they understood.

  He looked at Akecheta, who wore a slight frown. Marcellinus swallowed. This was the moment when Akecheta could refuse his command, and it would all be over. “Are you with me, centurion?”

  “… Yes,” said Akecheta. “Got it.”

  “Got it, sir. You’re sure now? Yes? Go?”

  Akecheta pulled himself up to his full height. Three arrows plunked off the shield that covered him. “Yes, sir! Got it! I have spoken!”

  “Axes? Liquid flame?”

  Seven men and Hanska waved them to prove they had them at the ready.

  “Then First Cahokian, fall in!”

  “First Cahokian!” Akecheta shouted, showing teeth and punching the sky. “Fall in! Futete!”

  Akecheta wasn’t Pollius Scapax. He would never be. But he would do.

  The First Cahokian Cohort advanced toward the wooden walls of Woshakee in a diamond testudo formation. The men walked forward as a close group, the outermost warriors holding shields to guard the left and right flanks, those within holding them over their heads, overlapping and tightly locked. Tucked into the front apex of the group, Marcellinus could smell their fear, but no one flinched even when the din of missiles landing on metal rose sharply. They were just fifty feet from the palisade, and the Iroqua were flinging rocks instead of firing arrows.

  Marcellinus had six dozen men under four dozen shields. Against the onslaught of liquid flame that could spill from a Wakinyan it would not have worked. Against sticks and stones, if every warrior kept his head and was not distracted by his bowels, it just might.

  Marcellinus just hoped the Iroqua didn’t know as much about siege offensives—and how to protect against them—as he did.

  Behind him two men crumpled onto their knees, and the formation faltered. Somebody cursed in Cahokian. Marcellinus turned and helped shove the men back onto their feet. They were unwounded—one of them had merely tripped on a rock, taking the man next to him down as well—but their faces betrayed their terror.

  He clapped each man on the shoulder and grinned that fierce smile again. He knew it must make him look slightly insane. “Forward!”

  “Forward!” Akecheta cried.

  On they went. As promised, Marcellinus was again at the head of the diamond, right at the prow of this land ship they were sailing together along the grassy riverbank. His biggest fear was that the Iroqua would swarm out of Woshakee and turn this into a melee. He hoped that they would not think quickly enough or move quickly enough to do so. There was no gate in the stretch of wall the Cahokians were approaching. The main city gate was on the northern side, the inland side, and the archers of Great Sun Man were bombarding it. The scouts had told of another, much wider gate on the river side that gave easy access to boats in happier times. That gate was currently unobserved by anyone in the Cahokian war party. If warriors came running around that corner, Marcellinus would get half an eye blink’s warning and then be in hand-to-hand combat, his men clustered tightly together.

  It didn’t happen. The prow of Marcellinus’s testudo ground into the palisade and flattened. The men at the back dropped onto their knees, deliberately this time; those at the front held their shields up higher, and the testudo became a triangle with its long edge up high against the palisade and a slanted roof. Rocks, pots, and grinding stones hailed down on them thick and fast, their clanging raising a racket over which he could not shout orders, but the First Cahokian had retained enough presence of mind to remember what they were supposed to do next.

  Seven men and a woman with axes of steel and chert wormed their way forward under cover of the shields and subjected the wall in front of them to a barrage of blows. Wood chips and splinters flew, and for a heartening moment Marcellinus thought perhaps they were under more threat of injury from shards of wood than from the external danger.

  Then the external danger changed with a loud splash. The Iroqua had hurled a cauldron of boiling water down over the testudo. Men screamed.

  Marcellinus screamed, too. “Hold firm! Hold firm!”

  A second giant splash sent scalding water across Marcellinus’s forearm. Above him, shields wavered. Akecheta drew his pugio and waved it, shouting and snarling. Marcellinus had no doubt that his centurion was threatening to slay any man who let his shield drop. And in truth the boiling water was no threat to the formation; its value was more psychological. Battle in such cramped quarters was not to Cahokian taste. Under this wall of steel, his warriors had no idea what might be coming next.

  And come it did. Heavier objects crashed down on the shields, bowing and buckling some of them even as the men held them high. But the First Cahokian stood firm.

  Now came the hot flare of fire from the Cahokians themselves.

  “Step left!” Marcellinus shouted. All he could do was point and bellow. “Left-left-left-left!”

  They did it in some semblance of coordination just as the foremost Cahokians hurled liquid flame into the broken wood of the palisade and it exploded right in front of them. That made everyone else move to the left a lot more quickly, especially those men perilously close to the splash zone, but they still managed to keep the formation.

  The wood burned. Hacking away the top surface of the palisade had removed whatever protection the Iroqua had applied. A whole band of wood twenty feet wide and a foot high caught fire in an instant.

  Marcellinus had no real hope of breaking through the palisade. Wood took a long time to burn, and it was clear the testudo formation would survive only a few more moments. But now the psychology of the situation was reversed: the Mohawks’ protective wall was aflame, black smoke billowed upward, and they heard the bang and splash as the Iroqua diverted their panicked attention to deal with the new threat.

  “First Cahokian, attack!”

  “Attack!”

  Either they would remember, understand, and follow him or they would not. He had no time left for doubts.

  Marcellinus roared like an arena lion and raced out from under the protection of the massed Roman shields. He had to duck as the rear end of the formation was already dropping; still he caught his helmet a glancing clang as he exited.

  After the cramped space in the testudo, to be out in the open air was almost a blessing. It was less of a blessing that he appeared to be alone. He caught the merest glimpse of the larger Cahokian force up on the hillside staring down at him in stupefaction.

  Then Marcellinus spun, still bellowing his war cry, and ran up the shields.

  The Roman shields formed an inclined slope, an embankment that stopped four feet shy of the top of the palisade. A dozen Iroqua faces painted in purple and red ocher gaped over it at him, showing pink mouths and white teeth. The shields bobbed under Marcellinus’s sandals, but he kept his balance, did not need to drop a hand to stay upright. Gladius in hand, he surged up toward the foe.

  He was no longer alone. Akecheta ran up the shields next to him, and behind Akecheta came four other warriors of the First Cahokian, the tallest and fiercest, the best fighters in the best armor, the ones most likely to survive a frontal assault on the enemy po
sition. Mahkah was one of them, howling like a berserker.

  Marcellinus shoved his gladius into a Mohawk mouth and through the neck beyond, snatched it out again as the man fell, and whirled the edge of its blade into the shoulder of the enemy warrior next to him. By his side Akecheta’s studded club crunched down, making a broken egg of an Iroqua skull.

  Marcellinus teetered at the very top of the inclined testudo. Over the palisade he saw that the ground of the city within was swarming with Iroqua. They ran between houses, bunched up into units. Every man was armed, and every woman as well, and there were far too many of them.

  No time to fear. No time even to think. A Mohawk club was swinging toward his head. He decapitated the Mohawk who wielded it with a roundhouse swing of his gladius and vaulted over the palisade. On its inner side and four feet down, a narrow walkway lined the wall. Marcellinus landed well, took an arrow on the chest plate, and raised a steel-greaved arm in case a second arrow was winging toward his face.

  Akecheta landed with him, and another Cahokian beyond the centurion. Nobody came over on Marcellinus’s left side; a Cahokian warrior tried to make the leap but tumbled off into space with a squawk. Another man replaced him, almost falling the other way six feet onto the ground inside the Iroqua-held city. It was Mahkah, eyes wide and teeth bared; Marcellinus grabbed and steadied the youth, then spun him around and pushed him unceremoniously toward the Iroqua who was running at them along the walkway. Mahkah met him ax to ax with a howl of sheer hatred, and his second blow drew an arc of scarlet blood from the Iroqua’s neck.

  The women inside the city were armed, but they were not Iroqua. Taking their chance to rebel against their captors, they assaulted the Mohawks right and left with adzes, pots, even grinding stones. They were able to snatch up only the occasional ax or club, but the confusion they created in the Iroqua ranks was immense.

  Marcellinus swayed. Directly beneath him were three Iroqua braves. It was a toss-up whether he would get his knees cracked with a club before or after he was hamstrung with a bronze ax. Bronze, he thought. Where on earth did they mine the tin? Then he ran the eight short feet that separated him from Mahkah and flung himself past the young brave into space, rolling to his feet on the ground inside the city and slashing, parrying, kicking, killing.