by Alan Smale
Marcellinus looked at Enopay in astonishment. Enopay looked back at him innocently. “Howahkan said that. I only translate.”
“Not in front of the boy, Howahkan,” said Marcellinus reprovingly, and walked into the Big Warm House.
It certainly was warm, warmer than he had intended, and the air was stale. None of the thirty or so Cahokians who were sitting in there chatting seemed inclined to complain, though. “Question: Here, too hot?” Marcellinus asked.
“Much,” said Enopay, pulling his tunic off over his head.
“Not you … Ask them.”
The older folk were all happy enough with the humid, foggy atmosphere in the house. Marcellinus supposed Howahkan was right; when he was their age, perhaps a room like this would be exactly what he’d need to thaw out his old bones after a night spent huddling in a hut around a dying fire. For a moment he wondered whether he’d survive long enough to feel the cold quite that badly and whether he’d still be living here in this mounded city when he did.
“This is a good house,” Enopay was saying to Marcellinus, pointing at the graying Cahokian woman who originally had said the words. “Last winter, and last-last winter, many more people die than this year. This house saves our old and clever.” A man spoke next, and Enopay pointed at him. “Now we live longer to irritate our grandchildren. Eh? Eh?”
Marcellinus laughed, nodded cheerily to the creaky Cahokiani who were still conveying their polite thanks to him either through hand-talk or through Enopay’s good graces, and moved on. In the furnace room he gave instructions to the boys who were keeping the fire going that they could afford to work a little less hard. “Go for a swim or something instead,” he said, and they all cheerfully shouted “Brrrr!” at him.
“Come, Enopay,” he said. “We go foundry. Play with some iron!”
But Enopay pointed and said, “Daughter of chieftain.”
She walked across the plaza toward them, head down, arms wrapped around herself against the cold. The wind had picked up out of the east while Marcellinus had been in the Big Warm House, bringing clouds with it. It probably would snow again this afternoon.
“Ah. Off you go, Enopay,” Marcellinus said, and the boy grimaced and discreetly walked away.
Sintikala stopped and regarded him with those vivid eyes.
Marcellinus cleared his throat. “I say wrong words before. Your daughter is your daughter. I am sorry.”
A long silence fell. Marcellinus suspected that Sintikala could tell he was merely saying the words, was not really sorry at all, not for any of it. And if she brought out a blade again, Gods help him, Marcellinus would do his best to take it away from her, peace pact or no. He would not hurt her, but this could not go on. He eyed the ground to see where the snow was thickest, where footing would be the least treacherous.
“It is a good man who helps children,” she said, and his eyes swiveled up from the ground to meet her gaze again.
“Walk,” she added, and set off without waiting.
Marcellinus followed.
They cut off the corner of the Great Plaza by wading through the foot-high snow that separated them from the northward path to the creek. Marcellinus’s moccasins let in a little snowmelt, but early on this winter he had raided the wagons for some Roman-style leggings and his feet stayed warm. The leggings looked a little odd when worn with a Cahokian tunic. Then again, Marcellinus looked odd to the locals whatever he wore.
The trail led them by three tall platform mounds, obviously not grave sites since each one had a single house atop it. Sintikala pointed at the leftmost of the mounds. “I live there.”
“Oh?” said Marcellinus, and pointed back over his shoulder at the Master Mound. “I thought …”
Sintikala was shocked. “The longhouse? Nobody lives up there!”
Marcellinus had hardly seen her anywhere else. “Natural mistake.”
They came to the creek. It was frozen over for most of its width; only in the central few feet did open water still run, though in several places near the bank people had broken holes in the ice to collect water.
Sintikala turned along the creekside path. They were headed, Marcellinus realized, toward the charnel pit and the growing mound where a thousand years ago he had helped bury the Cahokian dead.
“Kimimela likes you,” she said. “So I won’t kill you.”
She turned, birdlike, and twitched her face briefly. Perhaps it was supposed to be a smile.
“Thank you.”
“And so, you want to know of my husband now?”
She was like a coiled spring next to him. Marcellinus cleared his throat. “No. He is not my concern. That is your life.”
“Yes. And so?”
Above him, the loaded clouds. Beside him, the Hawk chief. Within him, sour memories of long ago.
His wife, Julia, had found love elsewhere and eventually left him because of his long absences on campaign. Julia had poisoned Vestilia against him, and Marcellinus had never stepped forward to try to mend the breach between them. Now he never would.
For his whole adult life the army had been all-important to him. He had done his duty; he had put Roma’s fortunes above his own and in the process risen to be a tribune and finally a Praetor. But now his legion was destroyed and the wreckage of his family was ridiculously remote.
Marcellinus could barely put it into words for himself. He certainly could not explain it adequately to anyone else.
So he chose simple words. “Sintikala, I had a daughter once. I was often away from home, fighting battles. We grew apart, and now we do not know each other. She … despises me now. I was foolish.”
Sintikala nodded. “And so you say I am foolish.”
Marcellinus would have tried to smile, but his face was frozen. “Perhaps you are.”
She looked at him searchingly for a long moment. Marcellinus braced himself, knowing how quickly she could move. Any moment she could take his legs out from under him. He would need to lash out and counterattack immediately rather than trying to break his fall.
Eventually she said, “I will tell you something. Something Kimimela does not know. And if you tell her, I will kill you. It is for me to tell her, one day. Yes?”
No, he wanted to say. He was already out of his depth. But … Sintikala was ready to trust him with something. “All right.”
“My man was Cahokian, but he was half Iroqua.”
This was a surprise. Marcellinus felt questions on his lips but swallowed them and waited for her to say more.
“That is how I speak some Iroqua words. And my man wore Cahokian war tattoos and went in a war party to revenge on the Iroqua when they raided our homesteads upriver on the Mizipi, nine winters ago.”
Nine winters. “All right.”
“I was not there. I could not go.” She touched her stomach. “I had Kimimela, ready to be born.”
“And you should have been with your man. Fighting beside him.”
She looked at him oddly. “Beside?”
“… Above.” Watching over him, thought Marcellinus, and felt an odd, painful stab of jealousy.
“I was not there because I was here,” she said, as if lecturing a child.
“You could not be everywhere.”
“I had never thought to be a mother. I tried for two winters to be …” She stopped. “I could not. I am not a mother. I am a warrior.”
And that, at last, Marcellinus could understand.
Again she skewered him with her eyes. “You do not speak.”
“Because you are right,” he said sadly. “I did the same. I went where my duty took me. Thank you for telling me this.”
Sintikala nodded. “And now, you and me.”
“Us?”
“We have made crimes. You make crime on me. I make crime on you.” She was using the Latin word for “crime.” She must have asked Kimimela for it.
Sintikala went on. “Iroqua make war on Cahokia. Each Iroqua crime, we hurt Iroqua more. Each Cahokia crime, Iroqua hur
t us more. And again-again. Yes?”
Escalation. It was the definition of the Mourning War, a long, slow vendetta of blood between two nations, each side forcing the other side to mourn its dead again and again. Marcellinus had spent a long time talking with Tahtay, coming to understand it.
Sintikala stopped and faced him. “Iroqua, Cahokia … will not stop now. Mourning War always. I wish it was not so. But Gaius, Sintikala? Yesterday-and-yesterday …” She made a sound very much like a raspberry. “End. Finish. Behind. Yesterday. All-done.” Question: Agree?
She had reverted to a combination of simple Cahokian, Latin, and hand-talk, but Marcellinus thought he understood. The two great Hesperian nations had come too far in hatred ever to make peace. He and Sintikala had not.
“We make treaty,” she said.
It was more than he had anticipated. More than he had any right to expect from her. Marcellinus was moved. “I would like that.”
She frowned at him, unsure of his words, and made the hand-talk again for Question.
“Yes,” he said firmly. “Treaty.”
They walked again. Snowflakes began to drift from the clouds, alighting on the fur of Sintikala’s hood and the tip of Marcellinus’s nose.
“Yesterday, I think you are Roman enemy chief. Yesterday-and-yesterday, here”—in her heart—“to me, you are … as Iroqua. You understand? But today-here I think you are not that man. Not the same.”
“I will always be Roman. But no longer an enemy, today or tomorrow. Never an enemy to Cahokia. Never an enemy to, uh, Sintikala. I have spoken.”
She halted again. They had not yet reached the mound of the Cahokian dead. “Good. We turn now, go back. Yes?”
He shivered. “Yes.”
They said nothing more until the row of three mounds came back into view. Marcellinus had a hundred questions, but he kept himself in check. This was the first time he had walked with her in peace and friendship, the first time they had been together without antagonism and distrust spilling over. He did not want any new misunderstandings to damage the moment.
“Wachiwi is your woman?”
Marcellinus flinched. “No. For a while, a moon ago or more, yes. Today-now: no.”
She frowned. “Wachiwi make good wife for Gaius.”
Marcellinus was at the same time startled that Sintikala had accepted him enough to urge a Cahokian wife upon him and alarmed at having his life so quickly mapped out for him. And she had called him Gaius.
“I think Wachiwi may not think so,” he said carefully.
The Hawk clan chief twitch-smiled again. “I think Gaius is good chieftain of men. Of children. But no-good chieftain of women.”
That was undisputable. He was silent.
“I will speak to Wachiwi,” Sintikala said.
He hand-talked No. “Wachiwi should choose her own husband.”
“Yes. But I will speak to her.”
“Sisika—Sintikala—I do not hurry to take a wife. Wachiwi is not right for me. If I take a wife, I will wait … make the right choice.”
They had reached the foot of the mound where she lived. Now she stopped and reached up for his chin with cool fingers, pulling his face around and down so she could see his eyes. Not for the first time, Marcellinus felt her gazing past his flesh and bone and straight into his soul.
His heart lurched. Too late, he tried to look away.
“Oh,” she said.
He cleared his throat. Sintikala had seen what Marcellinus still hardly dared to admit to himself: his growing attraction to her. He felt absurd, and his face flushed in humiliation.
“I am not for you,” Sintikala said. “Take Wachiwi.”
“No,” he said obstinately. “Not Wachiwi.”
She sighed. “Gaius, my husband is dead. I want no more husband. I am broken.”
“You are not broken. You are a warrior.”
“Many warriors are broken.”
That was true enough. She looked up at her house. It was snowing quite hard now.
“I will wait,” Marcellinus said.
“You go,” Sintikala said, pointing at the snow falling around them. “I go. I make food. Kimimela eats here tonight.”
“What?” Marcellinus said. “Really?”
“I am still not a mother. But I know how to train warriors.”
Their eyes met again, and for once Marcellinus read the message in hers. He smiled and nodded. “Kimimela will make a fine warrior.”
“Yes, she will. I have spoken,” she said, and began to climb. Although the slope of the mound was gentle, the new snow had made the wooden steps slick, and she had to climb with her hands as well as her feet. It lacked dignity, and Sintikala must have been aware of it, for she turned a third of the way up and waved him away with a shooing hand motion. “You go!” she said, and he grinned and turned away.
“Take Wachiwi!” she called after him, but Marcellinus walked on as if he had not heard.
The snow was falling thickly by the time he got back to his hut. All around him Cahokians were scurrying for home, pulling their door skins closed. Trails of smoke arose from Cahokian smoke holes near and far.
A large piece of fresh bark rested at the foot of his bed. He tutted; the children were supposed to keep their charcoal smearings on the schoolhouse table he had so laboriously constructed. He picked it up. On it, in the looped sprawl he recognized as Kimimela’s handwriting, it said, “Kimi thank Gaius.”
Marcellinus sat in his doorway for a while, watching the other huts appear and disappear in the swirling snow. Then he got up, put Kimimela’s piece of bark onto the shrine with his lares, and set about laying a fire for the long, quiet evening ahead.
The Mizipi burst its banks in the Grass Moon, flooding the low-lying plain that surrounded Cahokia. Briefly the Mound of the Flowers and the Mound of the River became islands in the muddy flow, forlorn and oddly rectangular. On warm days children Enopay’s age swam out to the Mound of the Flowers and scaled it, running or rolling down its shallow slopes to splash into the waters at its base.
Not Enopay himself, of course. Enopay was busy at his studies, writing and figuring.
Meanwhile, many of the adults were busy stripping and rebuilding their homes. The Cahokian huts lasted about ten winters at most before they grew rotten and drafty. Tearing down houses and building them up again was a communal activity that appeared to happen randomly to Marcellinus’s eye. Randomly but efficiently.
After the rebuilding came the renewal ceremonies and ritual purifications. For several days, Cahokia was alive with prayers and tabaco smoke as well as the happy shouts of children.
Having dealt with the homes that needed repair, the Cahokians turned next to their mounds and the Great Houses that sat upon some of them. Using a combination of mud and finer clays, they built up the tops of the Master Mound, the Mound of the Sun, the Mound of the Smoke, and many others. It was, as Great Sun Man had promised, a “big time of building and making new.”
The wheelbarrows helped with that, of course.
“If Iroqua have no city, if Iroqua are not mound builders, then Iroqua have no Wakinyan.”
The elders nodded as if Marcellinus had said a very wise thing, which meant they were humoring him.
“Only Cahokia has Wakinyan,” said Matoshka. In the damp heat of the sweat lodge, sitting right next to him, Marcellinus could smell the rancid bear fat that the old warrior smeared into his hair. He took a long pull of the tabaco pipe, sucking the smoke deep into his lungs. It burned a little as it went down and it still made him cough, but after every puff his mind sang. It seemed that the more of it he smoked, the better he understood Cahokian and the less the other odors of the sweat lodge perturbed him.
“No other mound-builder cities have them?”
“No other. We make them here. We keep them here.”
“Good,” said Marcellinus. “Good. But why do Iroqua have no city? Why?”
He looked around him. Two of the elders were nodding off, but the rest wer
e all with him. “Kanuna?”
In his late fifties, Kanuna was the youngest man there after Great Sun Man and Marcellinus himself. Respect for the more senior elders often muted Kanuna, but his brain was sharp and he had traveled farther up and down the Mizipi than most Cahokians. Kanuna rubbed his ear and said, “Those are the wrong words.”
“Why wrong?”
“Iroqua villages are small, and they move them often,” Howahkan interrupted. “Clear land often. Twenty winters, long time for Iroqua village. They are north, and their corn does not grow in big fields like here.”
“They move when their land grows …” Great Sun Man hand-talked a gesture that literally meant “old bread,” which Marcellinus took to mean “stale” or “bad.”
“But you do not,” he said.
“We have the river mud,” Kanuna said. “And we move the crops from field to field. Today corn, and next spring sunflowers. Then maybe tabaco. And some years, nothing in the field, for the earth to rest.”
“Cahokians are wise with the land,” said Great Sun Man.
More important, Cahokia also had a river that burst its banks every spring and spread a rich and fertile silty soil across the whole bottomlands area. Marcellinus resisted the urge to tell them about the Nile in Aegyptus and the Indus in Sindh and the early flush of the civilizations that grew up around those rivers. It was the Iroqua’s loss that their land did not include such a river.
“And that is why your words are wrong,” Kanuna explained. “The right words are, ‘Why does Cahokia have a city?’ ” He raised his eyebrows and smiled.
“All right,” said Marcellinus, eager to avoid getting into a long discussion of the wisdom of their fathers’ fathers or, worse, off into some irrelevant creation myth, either of which could easily happen when the old men got to sweating and smoking. Their forefathers had chosen to build Cahokia here for a reason, and they obviously had executed their plans with precision; the mounds and plazas must all have been laid out at the same time to be so regularly aligned. Cahokia was a planned city. “Good, good. But if Iroqua have no cities, how do they talk? They are one nation; they are Haudenosaunee. A league, a treaty. Five tribes, all agreeing?”