Clash of Eagles

by Alan Smale

  The Iroqua outnumbered the Cahokians perhaps two to one, though the several dozen scrappy Woshakean women helped even the score. More important was the suddenness of it all: within two hours the Cahokians had arrived, neutralized the squad of archers in the copse, gained the high ground, set the palisade ablaze, and come over the top of it whirling weapons of steel, using a stratagem never before seen in Nova Hesperia.

  Up the shields and over the wall after Marcellinus had come twenty more Cahokian warriors. After that it had become more difficult, and the embankment of shields collapsed a minute or two later. The men left outside then formed a human pyramid, one man standing on two other men’s shoulders and helping to pull warriors up and over him, over the palisade. At the same time, Great Sun Man’s warriors raced down the slopes and hurled themselves into the fray. Then someone opened the gates—probably one of the Woshakean women or children, since none of the Cahokian warriors bragged about it afterward. That was the beginning of the end for the Iroqua.

  Just seven Cahokians had died, and none of them were members of Marcellinus’s First Cahokian Cohort. Marcellinus had led a charge over an enemy parapet and lost nobody, although four of his men had received deep flesh wounds, another man had a dislocated shoulder, and most of the rest had earned the usual gashes, bangs and burns, broken fingers, and broken noses. Many had twisted ankles from falling off the palisade on one side or the other. But Akecheta, Mahkah, Takoda, and Hanska were almost unscathed. For this low injury rate, Marcellinus was deeply and profoundly grateful to whichever set of gods had taken an interest in this frantic scramble for control of a minor city—by any civilized standard, really a rather small town—on the banks of a nondescript river in the middle of nowhere.

  Ninety-five Iroqua were dead in battle. The vast majority of the rest, including the Iroqua war chief, had claimed discretion as the better part of valor and escaped out of the eastern gate. Several dozen Cahokians and more than a few of the women had run after them, roaring and screaming, but terror had given the Iroqua wings, though not of any useful variety. They were quickly gone. Another score or so Mohawk warriors had been beaten unconscious or maimed in the fray; those men were summarily scalped and strangled where they lay by the women of Woshakee, eschewing the even more vicious and drawn-out retribution that was their right, and their bodies were thrown out of the town gate to be burned on the morrow.

  “Are you now glad that we brought the shields?” Marcellinus asked half an hour later.

  Great Sun Man grinned and shook his head. “Too heavy!” he said. “Much too heavy!”

  “Then maybe next time we’ll carry you home on one,” Marcellinus said. He knew the joke wouldn’t translate, but some days just making himself laugh was enough.

  More than enough.

  The bulk of the Woshakee houses were intact. It turned out that most of the Woshakee women and children were alive and unharmed. The Iroqua hadn’t butchered them, hadn’t even violated them.

  Perhaps that kind of venomous, systematic violence against women was a thing only civilized armies did.

  The men of Woshakee were all dead or had fled. The capture of the city had taken place in such turmoil that nobody knew whether some of them might still be hiding in the forests somewhere. Everyone hoped so.

  “And how did Tahtay like it, being a warrior?”

  The boy gave him a complicated look and didn’t reply.

  They walked through the narrow streets. Marcellinus was interested to see that here in Woshakee, where space was tight, the houses had been built in rows as neat and orderly as any castra or Roman town. It was a way of getting as many houses as possible inside the small compound defined by the palisade perimeter. Yet even here the central platform mound had its plaza in front of it, sufficient for the whole town to congregate. Smaller mounds flanked the plaza, only ten feet tall but still conferring status on the houses that topped them. Every house had its little plot for corn and beans, squash and sunflowers, now fallow.

  Compared with Cahokia, Woshakee felt cramped and provincial. Marcellinus was glad he lived in the bigger city.

  “Tahtay?”

  The boy averted his eyes as they passed a scalpless corpse not yet disposed of, his hand drifting up to cover his nose. “I did not fight. Mostly watched. Or not.”

  “I know. But you were here, risking as much as anyone.”

  “Yes.” Tahtay sighed. “Being a warrior is good. Seeing here, what Iroqua did. That is not good.”

  “Worse than what Romans did?” Marcellinus asked quietly.

  “Much worse.”

  A woman walked by them carrying a grinding stone and hmmphed when she saw the corpse. Forthrightly enough, the Woshakee women were trying to put their city back in order, and the Cahokians were helping. Shortly, Marcellinus would return to helping, too.

  “You should have killed more of them,” Tahtay said vehemently. “Next time I will help you. Tahtay will learn how to kill.”

  Marcellinus wondered how Great Sun Man would have responded to this. But Great Sun Man was busy managing the refortification of Woshakee, talking to the clan chiefs, making sure the injured were cared for, and organizing squads of his men to evict the Iroqua dead, bring the canoes into the city, help prepare an evening meal, and set watches. Straightforward enough work, but Marcellinus knew from experience how any administrative task could take many times longer than it should, especially when half the men were wounded and everyone was dazed and inattentive after a fight.

  Tahtay looked up at him sharply. Marcellinus had not yet answered. But Tahtay’s future was not in doubt. “You will be a mighty warrior,” the Roman reassured him. “You are tall and strong, and your father before you is mighty—wait, what is this?”

  Two stout Woshakee women hauled a boy out of a house, one of them on each arm. The boy was squirming and crying for help in what sounded like a combination of Iroqua and Cahokian. He jammed his heels into the ground, and when that failed, he kicked the older woman in the thigh. The woman slammed her elbow into his head, and the boy went down.

  The younger woman put her knee on the boy’s back and looped a length of deer sinew around his neck.

  Beside Marcellinus, Tahtay watched with a sick fascination. With his last breath, the boy begged for mercy in fluent Cahokian. The woman tightened the sinew, and the boy’s cry became a gurgle.

  Marcellinus strode forward. “Wait. Wait!”

  The young woman’s eyes widened at the sight of Marcellinus. The boy gasped as she loosened the cord, then howled again as she put all her weight on him to hold him down.

  The older woman shouted at Marcellinus, hands on hips, her words tumbling out more quickly than he could follow. He took a prudent step back. “Tahtay?”

  “This boy, he was hiding under the floor in their grain store. He had a knife. He is Iroqua.”

  “Is he? He sounds Cahokian. Did he try to hurt them?”

  Tahtay and the woman babbled at each other, and Marcellinus knelt. The boy studied him through narrowed eyes and then said some words in an oddly inflected speech that was neither Iroqua nor Cahokian.

  “Now what did he say?”

  The boy switched back to Cahokian. “I ask where you come from. You are different.”

  “I am from the east, across the big water,” said Marcellinus, and the boy looked startled.

  He was tall and skinny but barely a single winter older than Tahtay. “Do we kill boys now?” Marcellinus said to the younger woman. “Do we?”

  “He came with the Iroqua as a speaker of words,” said Tahtay. “He stood by and laughed with the Iroqua as Woshakee men died. He did not fight, and he had no weapon. But he hid like a snake in the floor, and who knows what he would have done if he had not been found?”

  “I am not Iroqua,” the boy said. “My name is Pezi, and I am from Etowah.”

  “Etowah?” said Tahtay.

  “Ha!” The younger woman clouted Pezi over the head. Losing patience, Marcellinus pushed her off and helped Pe
zi to his feet.

  “Thank you,” said the boy. “I am yours.”

  “Etowah is a big mound-builder town,” Tahtay said. “It is far from here, far, to the south and east. It is not Iroqua.”

  “I am from Etowah. I was born farther south, nearer the Market of the Mud. I was captured by Iroqua from Tuscarora. I have been theirs for two years.” Pezi spit. “I am glad they are dead.”

  The Tuscarora, Marcellinus knew, were a tribe affiliated with the Haudenosaunee in the more southerly lands. Probably, many of the Iroqua who had harassed his legion early on the trek had been Tuscarora. “You speak Cahokian, and Iroqua, and …?”

  “The words of the People of the Hand. Not well. But men of that tribe would come to my village when I was young.”

  He was young now. Marcellinus shook his head.

  In Latin, Tahtay said, “I do not trust him, Hotah. Look at him. He would say anything to live.”

  “I am looking. I see a boy like you.”

  “Like me? No.” Tahtay paused. “He belongs to the women, and they want to kill him.”

  Marcellinus thought briefly of Fuscus dying at his feet. “Perhaps he belongs to Etowah. And good translators are useful. Great Sun Man should decide.”

  “We do not kill boys.” With no great enthusiasm, Great Sun Man agreed that Pezi should live and return to Cahokia with them.

  It was growing late in the afternoon. The Cahokians would sleep inside the palisade tonight and maybe the following night, too. Then most would return to the Great City, but others would stay here a few weeks longer, or perhaps even all winter if they chose, to lend further assistance. For any brave without strong family ties to Cahokia, Woshakee might represent an opportunity.

  Great Sun Man had offered the people of Woshakee safe passage to Cahokia under the war party’s protection so that they could overwinter there. But the clan leaders, who were all women and had all survived, spoke otherwise: it was their city, it was their home, and they would stay. They asked only not to be forgotten and for more good Cahokian men to come and visit them in the springtime. Otherwise, the inhabitants of Woshakee would take it from there.

  Marcellinus admired their resolve. Secretly, too, he admired Tahtay’s strength. Marcellinus himself had been a pretty tough kid at the age of eleven winters, but he had never been forced to experience a full battle against a numerically superior foe, had never witnessed a town bearing up in the aftermath of that bloody warfare, with menfolk slaughtered, homes wrecked, and enemy corpses littering the streets.

  Woshakee was still vulnerable, and Marcellinus did not feel safe even inside its wooden walls. The sooner they got home to Cahokia, the happier he would be.

  One of Great Sun Man’s warriors ran up and handed him a long band of rolled-up fabric. Marcellinus took it, uncertain. “This is what?”

  From there, the warrior hand-talked, pointing up at the ridge. For fly the Hawks. Look. Pull.

  Marcellinus tested it. When he tugged at it, it stretched, and when he let it go, it snapped back to its original length.

  “Interesting. Some kind of animal gut?” He didn’t think so, but no matter; he could study it further on the long paddle home.

  Perhaps they should take home one of the Iroqua Hawk wings, too. Marcellinus wondered if he should try to persuade them that it was worth the effort to find one in good condition and pack it up to carry it with them just in case the Iroqua had come up with some other innovation the Cahokians hadn’t thought of yet. Although he was pretty sure he could predict Great Sun Man’s response to this idea: “Cahokian wings, fastest and best!”

  The war party beached its canoes and entered Cahokia in triumph. Tahtay marched at the very front with his father, accepting the accolades of the Cahokians as if he had raised the siege of Woshakee all by himself. Behind them the other warriors hooted, howled, and danced their way into the city.

  Marcellinus left the preening to the others and walked in almost anonymously in the rear of the group with Pezi. He did nod to one person in the crowd: Chumanee, the healer, who was wearing a fine buckskin he had not seen before. Her hair was in one braid instead of two, and until she waved at him, he did not recognize her.

  She walked alongside him as the war party made its way to the Great Plaza and made a great play of scrutinizing his arms and legs. “You not wounded,” she said. “This very strange. You not at the battle?”

  Marcellinus grinned. “Oh, I was there. But this time, clever. See, few of the men I fought with have bad wounds either.”

  Marcellinus was inordinately pleased. There could be no better validation of the Roman methods and armor than this. And Great Sun Man had been much less curt with him on the journey home.

  “Perhaps you all run away,” said Chumanee.

  For a moment he was irritated. But Chumanee was just joking. She was not a warrior and did not know how insulting that suggestion was.

  And then they were at the Great Plaza, and the clamor of the cheering crowds drowned out whatever else Chumanee might have tried to say, and Nahimana was there, and Enopay, and then Kimimela came running at him screaming like a little girl, which she wasn’t quite, not anymore. Wachiwi appeared from nowhere and startled him with a hug, and Marcellinus gave himself up to the joy of the moment.

  He had never thought to have friends again, and now he had them. Those gods he didn’t believe in had smiled on him beyond any consideration of his merit or worth. He had gone from being the unluckiest Roman in the Imperium to being the luckiest Roman out of it.

  Did he deserve it? No, absolutely not. But as Chumanee had once said, maybe one day he would.

  “It was a good fight. It was not enough.”

  The elders stilled and looked at him. Marcellinus began to speak again, but his mouth was dry from the smoke. They waited for him to stop coughing and drink water and begin again.

  For the first time, the chiefs and elders of Cahokia had invited Marcellinus into their sweat lodge on the Mound of the Smoke. Both names were well earned; the fire pit in the center of the lodge warmed the air almost to the scalding point, and only a small fraction of the smoke made it out of the hole in the eastern side of the lodge’s ceiling. As if that were not enough, from time to time one of the younger braves would pour a wooden cupful of water onto the hot hearthstones that surrounded the fire, adding a gout of steam to the air with a hiss and crackle.

  Even worse was the smoke from the red flint-clay pipe the elders were passing from hand to hand. Marcellinus did not know what it was, but he knew how to mimic the man who had held it before him. After he sucked deeply, his lungs filled up with fumes that had made his mind buzz almost audibly while at the same time making him want to throw up the venison and askutasquash he had feasted on not an hour before.

  He looked around them all again. The sweat lodge was circular, built on a frame of arched willow poles that formed a dome over them. Around him a dozen or so elders sat in a circle, stripped to the waist or simply dressed in tunics. Most were tattooed and scarified, although Marcellinus no longer found the sight of such damaged skin remarkable. Aside from the marks on the men’s bodies they displayed no signs of rank or insignia of office. Great Sun Man stood out from the others only by his relative youth.

  Tahtay was not there, of course, and Marcellinus keenly felt the lack. Here he had to rely on his limited Cahokian vocabulary and his slightly more extensive hand-talk.

  “Good to fight for Cahokia,” Marcellinus said. “For your farms, your people. But your farms, people are here. Woshakee was your city, now freed. Now we must go there. Strike Iroqua in their lands, in their center. Strike at Iroqua hearts.”

  He turned to Howahkan, one of the principal elders and the one who was paying the most attention to his ravings. “Look now. If my anger is with you—if, I say; I make story, I … compare. Yes? If my anger is with Howahkan, do I fight his corn? Do I pull thatch from his roof? No. My anger with you, my fight then with you.”

  Half of them got it. He had lost the othe
r half. Marcellinus struggled on. “Cahokia’s fight with Iroqua warriors, Iroqua nation, not with … family, women.” Suddenly the heat squeezed his chest, and he could not go on. Tears were flowing down his cheeks freely now and dripping to the floor. He ignored them; perhaps the men farther away might mistake it for sweat. “If my anger is with you, is it enough to keep you out of my house? Stop you kicking my dog, breaking my pot? No. My anger is with you, I come to your house.

  “Our battle is with warriors. With Iroqua chief, Iroqua city. We take fight there. To Iroqua city.”

  They laughed at him.

  Damn. Immediately crestfallen, Marcellinus bowed his head. “I speak too much, wrong words. I am sorry.”

  “No, is good,” said Great Sun Man. “Wanageeska’s heart is strong. Elders make laugh because Iroqua have no city.”

  “Shit,” Marcellinus said. “Really? No city?”

  “Small town, village, farm. No mounds. No big city.”

  “Huh.” Marcellinus yielded the floor, feeling stupid. How had that never come up before? Why had it never occurred to him to ask before shooting his mouth off in a council of the Cahokian elders?

  More to the point, how could you fight an enemy with no center, an enemy that was everywhere?

  Well, he knew that one.

  “Give me pipe.” He sucked the fumes greedily, and his mind sharpened again. “This is … good pipe …” They all laughed at him again with companionable good nature as he coughed and tried not to retch, and once more he had to swallow water to keep his gorge down. His ears rang like a bell. The nausea faded.

  So the mound-builder civilization of Cahokia was centralized … just like Roma. And the Iroqua were decentralized like many of Roma’s historical enemies. Of course, the traditional Roman way was to pillage and lay waste to the land, forcing the enemy to consolidate and form an army against them. But even if Marcellinus had the stomach to ravage Nova Hesperia to the north and east, he was pretty sure the Cahokians would balk.