by Alan Smale
“All right. Wait up there. Wait for just a moment.”
Great Sun Man and Sintikala were packing up the blankets, talking quietly. The braves watched Marcellinus through narrowed eyes as he approached.
“Sintikala. Great Sun Man. I have more to say.”
They stopped and looked at him.
“I have killed Algon-Quian. I have taken slaves. I attacked Cahokia. I brought fear to Cahokia. I did that, and I accept full … responsibility? For that. You beat us. That was … fate. That was meant to be.”
Kimimela steadily translated as best she could. Sintikala listened calmly and spoke through her daughter. “ ‘Cahokia never feared you. We pitied you. We knew you could not win.’ ”
Marcellinus swallowed. “I am sorry for waging war on your people. It was not well done. But now I am here for a purpose. I can help you.”
Sintikala was a statue. “Today, you say so.”
“I say so today and tomorrow, and winter and summer.”
“And if Romans come?”
“Romans?”
“She means another army,” Kimimela explained. “If more Romans come here, to Chesapica and then to Cahokia? If Romans come, then you will fight for Romans, against us?”
“No,” Marcellinus said.
The atmosphere was brittle. Sintikala cocked her head. The braves had their spears pointed at him, waiting for the word, but Marcellinus would not lie.
“I will not go back to Romans and fight against Cahokia. And I will not fight for Cahokia against Romans. I will try to help Romans and Cahokians make peace. I want no more fighting between Roman and Cahokian. Believe me.” He took a deep breath.
What he really wanted was to re-create Cahokia in the image of a Roman provincial city and for Nova Hesperia to be ultimately a civilized ally of Roma. But that would be an almost impossible idea to convey to Sintikala and Great Sun Man. He would have to work up to that gradually.
An uncomfortable gray area remained unspoken. The fact was that Marcellinus was arming and training Cahokians who might one day fight against Romans if this went badly.
He elided it in his mind. No solution was perfect.
There could be no doubt that the Iroqua were a more imminent threat than the Romans. Marcellinus had to make the best choices he could on each day that was given to him. No one could demand more of him than that.
He closed his eyes for a moment. “And as I have lost my Legion, all my Roman warriors, the new Romans may take me prisoner and kill me anyway.”
Great Sun Man and Sintikala were still silent, so Marcellinus spoke again. “If you want to make me slave, I will be slave. I agree that it is what you might be if …” He gestured back and forth. If our positions were reversed was much easier for him to mime than for Kimimela to translate.
“I will be slave. Either way, I help you now. And every day, I learn.”
Sintikala’s eyes drilled into his skull like a pilum. He stood and accepted it.
Eventually she nodded once.
Turning, the two chiefs walked away into the longhouse.
Unhappily, Kimimela watched them go. Marcellinus was surprised that she did not follow her mother. Then he realized that at no point during this long morning had Sintikala shown any affection toward her daughter. She had not leaped to Kimi’s defense during the tense moments with the warriors, had not spared her a compassionate glance during the most painful parts of the conversation. Marcellinus had shown Kimimela more care and attention than Sintikala had.
Someday he would learn more about that. But not today.
The braves still stood close by. Not knowing what to do, Marcellinus signed, Question? They bowed and pointed toward the main steps that led down the Master Mound.
More evidence that the Roman bow was catching on in Cahokia.
“Come,” he said. “Come, Sintikala’s daughter.”
Kimimela shrugged helplessly. If Tahtay took pride in his father, Kimimela’s feelings were more complicated.
They walked together to the edge of the mound and onto the steps, side by side.
“And so you are Sintikala’s daughter. And Sintikala is Great Sun Man’s daughter?”
Kimimela recoiled in surprise, perhaps even horror. “No!”
“Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”
Not “daughter of chieftain,” then, after all. Or was Sintikala the daughter of some other chieftain? Marcellinus gave it up. He had no more energy for the complexities of Cahokian society. He blew out a long breath and tried to relax the taut feeling in his shoulders.
Then, halfway down the mound, Kimimela tapped him on the arm and screwed up her face as if she’d chewed a lemon.
“Question,” she said. “Wachiwi?”
Nahimana and Tahtay waited for them at the gates, looking relieved.
“Hotah not dead, then,” said Tahtay, straight-faced.
“Not today.” Marcellinus was about to explain, but the boy had already turned to Kimimela and asked her something. She shook her head wryly. Tahtay sighed and looked sympathetic.
To Nahimana, Marcellinus signed, Gaius is well. Thank you for coming.
Nahimana glanced at the unhappy children and said firmly, “Food.”
It was a good call. Marcellinus was starving.
And exhausted. It was not yet noon, but it felt like he’d been awake for a week. Facing Sintikala was tougher work than fighting Haudenosaunee.
Marcellinus hit his first major snag the very next day: he needed bricks to make a kiln and a kiln to make bricks.
It was frustrating. He had assumed that the Cahokians used kilns to fire their pottery. But they did not. Instead, they put their unfired pots and bowls into a hole in the ground; filled the hole with logs, sticks, and twigs; and lit the whole mess on fire. It worked surprisingly well—the Cahokians’ pots were beautiful, and their pottery making was a fine art—but Marcellinus could not easily make bricks in a pit, let alone steel. To make steel he would need a proper furnace and bellows, and a hole in the ground would not get hot enough or give him enough control over the process.
With Tahtay’s help he talked to a number of women who specialized in making pots but could not interest any of them in his project. They spent their days fashioning beautifully shaped and painted bowls and had no interest in putting that aside to make and fire hundreds of flat, boring slabs of mud. However, Cahokians rarely decided anything quickly, and it took a while for Marcellinus to realize just how lost his cause was.
As they walked home, dejected, from the western suburbs, Kimimela ran over to find out why they wore such long faces. Tahtay explained it to her. Kimimela turned to Marcellinus and said simply: “Boys like fire.”
“Well, yes,” said Tahtay.
Exit the craftswomen, enter the street urchins; by noon the next day Tahtay and Kimimela had rounded up a good thirty boys—and girls—who liked playing with fire and were eager to be in at the beginning of something important. Two days later brick production began in Cahokia, first in rough-and-ready ones and twos that often broke from not being heated evenly and then in the dozens, and it did not stop even though Marcellinus had enough bricks for five kilns within the week.
Iron would be the next problem, and it would take far longer to solve. After hearing Marcellinus talk of iron at some length, the elders had confidently assured him that there were caves just three days’ run southwest of Cahokia where you could get all the iron you could ever need if only you were strong enough to carry it back. However, since no Cahokian had previously had a real use for it and three days’ run in summer translated to a very long and cold walk in the winter, it proved difficult for Marcellinus to be sure that anyone truly knew where those caves were and impossible for him to persuade anyone to go there before the ground unfroze the next spring. In the meantime he pulled the iron fittings off the Roman wagons and also assembled sets of Roman tools—hammers, saws, punches, picks, files, and tongs, even an anvil.
He had plenty of broken Roman swords that could be be
aten into plowshares. Marcellinus was confident that once he had won the Cahokians over with the virtues of plentiful steel, getting them to bring iron for him to make more would be straightforward enough.
Turning his dreams into reality proved to be a lot harder. He started playing with his new forge, assisted by Tahtay’s warrior friend Dustu and by Hurit, the big-eyed tomboy Tahtay’s age whom the Cahokians had adopted from the Algon-Quian. However, he made such poor initial progress that he had to swear them to silence. Marcellinus had spent a lot of time with blacksmiths and metalworkers; he could forge, punch, cut, and weld iron with a reasonable degree of skill. But he had never before tried smelting, and it turned out that this art was much more complex than it appeared. Even with a fine brick furnace and a reasonable supply of charcoal, all he succeeded in doing was making the existing iron more brittle. New steel would be a long time coming.
In the meantime he created the world’s largest, clumsiest, and least efficient wheelbarrows.
The Cahokian elders had dismissed Marcellinus’s wild claims for the wheel, and by and large they were right to do so. Without Roman engineers and the Imperium’s massive work crews of soldiers and slaves, the trading paths that crisscrossed Nova Hesperia would never be wide enough or level enough for a wheeled wagon. Nor did the continent possess the horse, donkey, ox, camel, elephant, or any other beast of burden capable of hauling human beings around on a regular basis. But that did not mean that the wheel was worthless to them.
The iron wheels on the Roman carts were half as tall as a man, and it took Marcellinus and his willing team of child labor several hours to unload the carts and then figure out how to unhitch the wheels from their axles. After that nightmare, it was relatively straightforward to strip planks off the carts and hammer them together to make the barrow part, in the process realizing that after bricks, axes, and hoes, the next items he needed to learn how to mass-produce were nails.
His first wheelbarrow was long and tall, and it took two men to lift it, steer it, and keep it stable against toppling. Two men or six boys, for Marcellinus had learned his lesson well and realized that the children of Cahokia had a much greater appetite for novelty than did the adults. In short order he had to make a second wheelbarrow the same size as the first, so that at the end of the day, when all the bricks had been hauled out of his furnaces and wheeled to central Cahokia, his teams of urchins could race the unlikely vehicles back and forth across the plaza.
The wheelbarrow races caused a sensation, but it was short-lived. Cahokians might let their eleven-year-olds tag along on battles against the Haudenosaunee, but they drew the line at letting them risk their necks in Marcellinus’s chariot races.
Nonetheless, the wheelbarrow lesson had been learned. Cahokians built mounds religiously but slowly; there were always several being built at any one time, and the rectangular mound over the mass grave of the warriors who had fallen to the Romans was still only waist high. Until now the primary method of earthmoving had been the basket, and building a tall mound could take years. A few words in the right ears and three more wheelbarrows were quickly made and pressed into service to haul earth.
Marcellinus could only imagine how quickly they might build mounds once he could make even better wheelbarrows. But a better wheelbarrow required a smaller wheel, which required a proper ironworking furnace to cast the wheel rims, not to mention thinner planks of wood and many more nails.
And that was just wheelbarrows, the smallest and most trivial invention that Marcellinus had in mind for his new community.
Arriving at the brickworks one morning, Marcellinus discovered that he had just missed Pezi.
“He wanted to come in, look around,” Dustu said darkly. “To learn. To be useful.”
Marcellinus had seen almost nothing of Pezi since they had returned to Cahokia after liberating Woshakee. “So?”
“I told him to go and drown himself in a borrow pit. He is interested in too much.”
Marcellinus shook his head, bemused. “He speaks languages. We might need him.”
“Huh,” said Dustu. “My fist speaks languages, too.”
Dustu was a year younger than Pezi but strong and capable. He already had his first warrior tattoo, from a skirmish with the Iroqua to the north. His hair was long and full and gleamed with deer fat, with feathers braided into it with a care that his casual nature belied. Marcellinus had seen him sparring with a gladius with Mikasi and Hanska as well as with Tahtay. If he was matched against Pezi, with or without a weapon, Marcellinus had little doubt who would be victorious.
“If you want to keep him out, keep him out,” he said. “But try not to damage him. One day he might be useful.”
“Others can talk to Iroqua,” Tahtay said.
“He also speaks the language of the People of the Hand.”
“And when do we need to talk to them? We cannot trust him. It is dangerous to trust people who speak out of both sides of their mouths.”
“Does he?”
Hurit propped herself up on one elbow and pointed at Marcellinus. “The Wanageeska was dangerous, and we kept him alive.”
“So far,” said Dustu. “And not everyone agrees about that, either.”
Marcellinus winced. “Let’s get back to Pezi. You can talk about killing me when I’m not standing here with you.”
Hurit stood and stretched. The two boys eyed her, but she held Marcellinus’s gaze steadily. When Hurit was older, she was going to be dangerous herself, and not just with a sword. “Ojinjintka says that Pezi wants to fly Wakinyan. What do you think?”
Ojinjintka was the chief of the Wakinyan clan, an old woman who looked as if she might blow away in the breeze of a Thunderbird’s passing. Tahtay and Dustu both snorted. “No,” Dustu said. “Pezi stays on the ground where we can see him.”
“Maybe he just wants to help,” said Hurit. “To belong. He has already gotten himself adopted by the Deer clan.”
“Probably because he’s so good at running away,” Marcellinus said without thinking.
Dustu and Hurit gasped in disbelief. Tahtay looked around them quickly and then shook his head. “Wanageeska. We three here, we know that you speak lightly, but better not let a warrior of the Deer clan hear your words or you will find yourself eating them.”
“Of course. Sorry.” Marcellinus cleared his throat. Mahkah was of the Deer clan, and many other good men he knew. “That was stupid of me. Anyway. I brought Pezi here, and that may not have been wise, either. But I made a mistake once before in … disposing of someone who could speak many languages. Pezi can be useful as long as we keep him under control.”
Later, Marcellinus ran Pezi down in the neighborhood where they made adzes, bows and arrows, and other tools for peace and war.
“What are you doing here, Pezi?”
The boy shuffled his feet. He had the talent of looking guilty even when—perhaps—he was not. “If I want to eat, I must work for Cahokia. Here there are no words to be spoken. Perhaps working wood is not so hard to learn as other things. But no one will teach me.”
Marcellinus studied him and came straight to the point. “Pezi, you say you are from south of Etowah, and you lived in your village and in Etowah until the Iroqua captured you.”
“It is true.”
“Yet Ojinjintka says you do not speak Cahokian like a man of Etowah.”
“I try to speak it the way they all speak it. I have known many men of Cahokia. I know many languages. I grew up learning them.”
“And you know the language of the People of the Hand, who never came so far north as Etowah.”
“We fought them, my people of Etowah. You think I lie?”
Marcellinus looked at him appraisingly. “That’s the thing, Pezi. I don’t know. Anyway, why are you here? What do you want?”
“I want to live,” the boy said. “I want to be free. And I do not ever again want to be any man’s …” He made a coarse gesture.
Marcellinus flushed and looked away. He could not have
been a Roman commander without knowing of such things, but still they made him uncomfortable. “The Iroqua asked that of you?”
“Asked? No.”
“I am sorry, Pezi. That will not happen to you here.”
“I know. I just want to work so I can live here and not always be taken from place to place and war to war, and then …” Pezi shook his head. “What I can do is speak words. Perhaps I can learn to speak yours.”
“Latin?” Marcellinus had already considered it. The boy would undoubtedly be quick to learn, but Marcellinus didn’t have the time and inclination to teach him. He might have tried to persuade the children to teach him, but Tahtay had taken an instant dislike to the translator that had quickly rubbed off on Kimimela and Enopay.
Marcellinus had brought Pezi here, and he had to keep the boy out of mischief somehow. He sighed. “You want to learn to turn wood? All right. Let me talk to some people.”
What Marcellinus needed first and foremost was good axes. And because iron was so hard to work into steel, he turned to the idea of making bronze. Certainly there was no shortage of copper; the women wore disks of it in their ears, and the men around their necks. In the ceremonies Marcellinus mostly avoided, he had seen dancers wearing large beaten sheets of the metal. It came from the Great Lakes, far to the northeast of Cahokia, mined there in its natural form and shaped using cold hammering rather than smelting.
He already had tin. Tin was light and flexible and abundant in Europa; most of the Legion’s pans and cooking utensils had been made of it. Eventually he would need a local supply, but for the time being he mined his own carts and came up with thousands of tin pans, dishes, and spoons. It became another game for the endlessly useful children of Cahokia to ransack the Roman wagon train and separate out the tin.
Bronze could be made at a much lower furnace temperature than steel. For steel getting exactly the right measure of charcoal and air into the mix was crucial, but for bronze the proportions were more forgiving—one part tin to nine parts copper, a bit of care with the melting and mixing, and that was all there was to it. Before midwinter Marcellinus was turning out bronze ax heads and hoe blades by the score.