Clash of Eagles

by Alan Smale

  “Here we go.”

  With the utmost care, Marcellinus lit the candle wick from the twig.

  The candle flared. The flame leaped into the lantern, throwing their shadows back against the trees. Marcellinus held the lantern steady and talked to it as if it were human. “Please don’t burn. Please don’t catch on fire.” It didn’t.

  Already the lantern tugged at him. His hands were on either side of the cotton, and warmth flooded his palms. Marcellinus waited till he was sure, until he knew the light was well aflame and the first breeze would not puff it out. He moved his hands apart and let it go.

  The lantern drifted upward. It seemed to pause above their heads, to sway and gather itself, then rose again, faster. In moments it was thirty feet up, then fifty, above the trees and still going, a beacon in the night.

  The conversations from the campfires around them stilled. Anapetu watched it escape into the sky with the same calm, frowning care she devoted to everything. “Hmmm.”

  Marcellinus smiled. “Sky Lantern! Flying machine!”

  “It goes up fast,” Mahkah said.

  “Yes!”

  “Why?”

  “The air trapped inside it is hot. Hot air rises. Catanwakuwa ride that rising air, and birds, too. But when you capture it and hold it close inside a lantern like that … Up it goes.”

  Hurit watched its tiny flame still burning, high in the sky. “Perhaps doing it tonight was not clever. It brings Iroqua?”

  “We have guards. And if Iroqua are anywhere near, they already know we’re here.”

  The Sky Lantern soared until it was just a speck, hardly brighter than a star.

  “So, Anapetu? What if that lantern was bigger? Much bigger?”

  “More bright?”

  “Yes. And could lift more than a little lamp. More than a pot. More than, uh, a spear.”

  He looked into her face, waiting for her to understand.

  “More than a canoe. More than—”

  Anapetu’s eyes widened.

  “Yes? See?”

  Hurit objected. “But to carry a person …”

  “Yes, it would have to be very big.”

  Anapetu peered up into the sky. “Very.”

  Marcellinus had lost sight of it, too. Dustu had to point it out to them, and even then Marcellinus could glimpse it only by shifting his gaze slightly away from it. The wind at those exalted heights had pulled the lantern westward, and it had moved farther than he thought.

  They watched it fly. Soon it was gone, and they sat down by the fire.

  Ever practical, Anapetu said, “The very-big one. How do you get it down again?”

  Marcellinus hadn’t thought about that. “Snuff the flame.”

  Hurit slapped the ground, making leaves and twigs jump. “Bang?”

  She was right. Without its source of heat, it might return to earth alarmingly fast. “Then make the flame smaller? There must be a way. I’ll make it work.”

  “No,” Anapetu said.

  His heart sank. “What?”

  She gazed at him. “Give this to us, Gaius. You have your cohort and your iron and your bricks. Give this to the Raven clan, this thing … what, again?”

  “Sky Lantern.”

  “This Sky Lantern. To make the very-big Sky Lantern is the cotton and the wood and the plants and the flowers. You are not good with these things.”

  Marcellinus had not really thought of a giant man-carrying Sky Lantern as a project of plants and flowers. But Anapetu was probably smart enough to excel at anything she turned her hand to, and Marcellinus was spread too thinly already.

  “Also,” Hurit added, “you cannot sew without swearing.”

  Marcellinus laughed. “All right. Wonderful. But Anapetu, everyone, let’s all keep quiet about this for now. Because if it works, it might be very important for Cahokia. Perhaps the most important thing since the Catanwakuwa.”

  The thought was dizzying. After several seasons of merely re-creating things that already existed across the Atlanticus, he finally had invented something new.

  Who knew? Perhaps they would bury Marcellinus in the Mound of the Hawks, after all.

  If Marcellinus had harbored any doubts about Anapetu’s ability to do the task she had claimed for herself—which he did not—they would have been quickly dispelled, for it took her less than two moons.

  Marcellinus was out in the Cahokian farmlands with half a dozen throwing machines—three onagers and three ballistas—hurling giant rock balls and thick bolts of iron-tipped wood what seemed even to him to be impossible distances. In his absence his engineers had lengthened the onagers’ throwing arms and increased the weight of their oak frames. In only one case had they been too ambitious and snapped the throwing arm clean off. The new machines were harder to aim, it was true; at these tensions the twisted ropes behaved unpredictably, and the bucking of the onagers at the moment of launch sometimes threw the rocks erratically to one side or the other. There was really no question of throwing a human being until they had worked out the kinks. But in terms of sheer power, the machines exceeded Marcellinus’s wildest expectations. It was incredible to see a massive ball being laboriously rolled and lifted onto the cup of a siege engine and then watch it soar away into the middle distance. As for the ballistas, a wheeled crossbow of wood and metal thirty feet wide was a little frightening, with the loud snap of the wires and the huge darts speeding away so rapidly that they almost appeared to vanish.

  By the knowing looks his launch crew was giving him, Marcellinus could tell who was approaching without needing to turn and check.

  “Huh,” Anapetu said. “Impressive. Tomorrow you throw a house.”

  Marcellinus considered. The balls they were launching were far heavier than a Cahokian house. The trick would be preventing the house from splintering into a thousand pieces at launch.

  “Stop thinking about it,” she said. “I was not serious. But I need a heavy ball of rock, and I need you to see what we do with it.”

  “Already? So soon?” he said. “You’re kidding.”

  “What?”

  “Teasing. Joking with me.”

  Anapetu shook her head. “Pick up a ball, follow me.”

  In fact it took a reinforced wheelbarrow and four men to transport one of the massive two-hundred-pound balls. Marcellinus gave the order, and his men loaded one up and gamely staggered off in Anapetu’s wake.

  Anapetu had not, of course, done all the development by herself. With Marcellinus’s approval she had brought in her sisters Leotie and Dowanhowee, her daughter Nashota, and a squad of other trusted friends to help her with the sewing and Hurit, Dustu, and Tahtay and a half dozen of their young brickworks gang to fetch and carry. All had been sworn to secrecy, and besides, key aspects of how the cotton had been treated and the ensuing construction were known only to Anapetu and her sisters.

  Today any last vestiges of secrecy would be scattered to the winds, for Anapetu was leading Marcellinus and his crew toward the Big Warm House and a giant expanse of cloth stretched out on the ground next to it.

  The part Marcellinus had expected to be the hardest—getting so much cotton of the quality required—actually had turned out to be the easiest. The traders from south of Ocatan were very familiar with cotton and could acquire it in whatever bulk was necessary in exchange for furs and pelts from the Mizipian cities to the north. Anapetu and other Raven elders had masterminded a complicated three-way deal in which Roman bricks and iron went north and canoes’ worth of luxurious furs came south in their place, to then be exchanged for cotton from the southwest, and the haggling and dealing all got done in less than a moon.

  When there was something Cahokia really needed, problems melted away. It boded well for Marcellinus’s dreams of future Roman commerce. And he liked the exotic look of the furs he had seen. Romans might pay well for those.

  Still, Marcellinus had seen few of the Raven clan’s preparations firsthand, and this was his first sight of a fully constructed Sky L
antern bag. Even though he had helped with the arithmetic and the details of the design were familiar to him, the sheer size of what they had created was daunting.

  The process of inflating the bag had already begun. With the boys’ help, Anapetu had redirected some of the hot air from the furnace into a new trench that led out from the side of the house. Above the trench Leotie and Nashota were using sticks to hold up the very top part of the gray bag so that the hot air could blow into it. Nearby, Dowanhowee and two other women stoked a separate fire inside a feast-day cooking jar almost as tall as themselves.

  The warm air was certainly building up inside the bag, but seeing how much cotton still lay on the ground, Marcellinus doubted it would rise much farther. He hoped his clan chief was not about to be embarrassed.

  He murmured, “You’re very confident.”

  “Confident is bad?”

  “You didn’t think of making a smaller one first to try it out?”

  Anapetu smiled. “You think we did not make a smaller one first?”

  He gave up and let her concentrate.

  As the bag rose higher, apparently by magic, Anapetu walked among the brickworks boys and gave more quiet instructions, lending a hand to hold up the fabric. The bag now swayed thirty feet above Marcellinus’s head, but it was starting to sag. “Huh,” said Tahtay.

  “Bring fire here,” Anapetu said, her voice at last betraying her tenseness. Her sisters manhandled the giant jar closer to the bag.

  Marcellinus could now see the opening at the bottom of the bag. Tahtay, Dustu, and the others held the opening up, though the part of the bag between there and the inflated portion still lay on the ground, frustratingly limp.

  Marcellinus held his breath. He knew what could happen to cotton that came too close to a naked flame. At any moment the giant bag might catch fire.

  “Anapetu …” he said, not quite loudly enough.

  A large crowd was gathering. Sintikala and five Hawk warriors arrived, keeping out of the way and looking on impassively.

  The wind caught the bag and sheared it sideways. Hot air spilled out and washed over them. The bag sagged further.

  “More fire,” Anapetu said, and winked at Dowanhowee, who produced a small pot and tossed it into the jar.

  With a roar, liquid flame erupted from the jar’s neck. Leotie and Nashota tossed whole logs in. Through the small holes that had been drilled into the jar’s sides, the fire was no longer orange-red but an almost incandescent purple-white.

  All at once, the tall bag puffed out. Somehow the cotton still had not caught aflame. Dark smoke billowed into the now-huge body of the bag … and gushed out of its peak.

  Marcellinus couldn’t help himself. “There’s a hole, Anapetu. The bag has a hole in the top!”

  “Of course!” Anapetu called back. “It needs one!”

  Then Marcellinus and the others watching ran forward, because the bag was fully inflated and bucking to be free. The weight of the log-filled jar was not enough to hold it down.

  “Wait!” Anapetu said. “Wait! Hold on …”

  They held it, straining. The boys had already rolled the rock into a strong canvas sling. Now they hooked the sling over the struts that held the jar in place under the mighty swaying Sky Lantern.

  “Let go!” Anapetu shouted. “All!”

  Everyone jumped back. The hot-air bag lurched upward away from them. It tugged at the sling that held the ball and bobbed ponderously back down. Several people shrieked in alarm.

  Hurit ran around the lantern, knocking at people’s arms, afraid someone would still be clutching on to the thing, but everyone was safely clear.

  Because the bag had risen again, and was rising still. Despite the mass of the jar and the rock ball, despite the bulk of the cotton fabric, which must itself weigh several hundred pounds, the lantern was going up with alarming speed.

  The crowd fell silent as it rose to fifty feet, a hundred, with the onager ball still swaying beneath it. The bag was higher than the mound now, and the wind was carrying the whole thing off in that direction, over the mound and north across Cahokia Creek.

  It was Sintikala who started the applause then, and soon the shouts and stamping of the crowd became deafening.

  Anapetu was oblivious to the din. She stared intently at the Sky Lantern.

  The liquid flame was burning out. The lantern had passed over the creek but was losing height, almost imperceptibly at first, but it was certainly coming down.

  Anapetu grimaced, and her forehead creased. “All right. Hurit, Dustu, Tahtay, Nashota? Let us go and get it.”

  The Sky Lantern’s first flight had been an unbelievable success. Marcellinus couldn’t believe that Anapetu was downcast.

  “Too quick.” She shook her head. “Only a hundred feet up? Only to the creek? No.”

  “It was brilliant,” he said. “Spectacular. Not forgettable.”

  “Too heavy.” She sighed. “I don’t know.”

  “It didn’t catch fire,” Marcellinus pointed out. “I mean, the cotton didn’t burn.”

  “That is the clever part. All the rest is just great big hard work. But we had to make many careful fires under the fabric, let special smoke rise through it. The smoke, um, blocks up the tiny holes in the cotton.”

  Whatever Anapetu had burned, the smoke had sealed the cotton fabric, making it less flammable and much less porous. “Very good.”

  “Much more work to do.”

  “Always. Of course. But not a failure. Right?”

  Only then did Anapetu smile. “Right! And fun to see it fly!”

  The very next week, they threw a Hawk into the air by using an onager. The honor of being the first falcon warrior to be launched went not to Sintikala but to a young warrior of the Hawk clan; this prodigy was skilled enough to unfurl his wings and fly stably from the regular rail launch almost as soon as he cleared the top of the Master Mound, not having to wait for the apex of his trajectory like Sintikala and the rest of the clan. As they were still not in perfect control of the onager during launch, such fast reactions were essential for success. They did indeed fire the warrior out over the Mizipi so that he would splash down into the water if the launch failed, but the precaution was not necessary: the onager fired, the “ball” that was the boy and his wing arced up over the river, and then the youth was flying, banking around over them a couple of hundred feet from the ground and hooting triumphant war cries.

  By Marcellinus’s side, Sintikala nodded in satisfaction. “Next, me.”

  “Now?”

  She grinned. “Not now. When everyone has gone away. I practice quietly.”

  As the young Hawk warrior streaked past them again and flared out for his landing, Great Sun Man walked up to them. “So, for Catanwakuwa, very good. How big engine you need to throw Wakinyan?” He laughed.

  “Wakinyan are different,” Marcellinus said. “For launching Wakinyan, we take the Great Mound with us when we march on the Iroqua.”

  The war chief smiled again and clapped him on the arm.

  “Perhaps not,” Marcellinus said. “I will think about it. But Great Sun Man, Sintikala? A Hawk is light and nimble, for one warrior. A Thunderbird is mighty, for twelve warriors. My question for you: How big might an Eagle be?”

  Great Sun Man frowned and shook his head, but Sintikala was nodding. “Large enough for two, three? I have thought of such a thing, too. But now … small enough for a throwing engine?”

  “Perhaps,” said Marcellinus. “Eventually. Let us talk more about this.”

  The weather quickly turned foul. Torrential rains gave way to deep snow and to a pervasive chill that kept that snow on the ground for many weeks, growing dirtier day by day. Cahokia Creek iced over and did not thaw. By the time of the Midwinter Feast the Mizipi had also frozen, though not reliably enough for the children to run and slide on it the way they wanted.

  Food was short. Marcellinus’s second winter in Cahokia was much more brutal than the first. Nonetheless, it was the happi
est time of his life.

  The Cahokia steelworks had entered full production, and every afternoon Marcellinus made the long hike over there. However vile the weather, he could rely on finding a large proportion of his budding force of forty or fifty steelworkers, blacksmiths, and engineers in training. In fact, the colder it got, the more people he found there, stoking the crucibles and blast furnaces. They were now turning out wheel rims by the dozen, long segments of rail to be welded onto the existing Wakinyan launcher, the parts for ever bigger and better siege engines, and two or three new swords a week.

  Marcellinus was working on a light metal frame that might hang beneath one of the Raven clan’s Sky Lanterns; this would provide a safer structure for the fire jar that generated the hot air that kept the lanterns aloft and support a secure wooden platform for a person to sit on once Anapetu could be convinced that they were safe enough to carry people.

  The brickworks was going full bore, with Dustu and its other leading lights experimenting with different clays and with adding small amounts of iron, chalk, and lime to the mix for strength and color. Whenever the weather permitted, Cahokian masons were hard at work adding rooms to the Big Warm House. Two more such houses were under construction, one in the plaza of adjacent western Cahokia and another in the burgeoning township of Cahokia-across-the-water—one for each of the three traditional centers of Cahokia.

  Marcellinus spent little time at either the brickworks or the building sites. Tahtay, Dustu, and the others ran the brickworks with little adult supervision and had achieved a more uniform brick-baking temperature and an almost perfect success rate. With many months of experience, the Cahokian foremen by now understood the mechanics of building walls, roofs, pools, and hypocausts better than Marcellinus did. This freed him up for more interesting projects elsewhere, although he sorely missed Tahtay’s company.

  With the test flights of the new three-person Eagle wing under way, Marcellinus had necessarily been spending more time with Sintikala. To be in her company meant also to be in the company of the ten pilots and fifteen or twenty carpenters, tanners, and other artisans involved in developing the Eagles, and most of their conversation was technical and businesslike; nonetheless, he thoroughly enjoyed working with her.