by Alan Smale
As a direct result, the days leading up to the Midwinter Feast also held the most nerve-racking event of Marcellinus’s winter: his first solo Hawk flight.
Marcellinus stood at the top of the Master Mound. The weight of the Hawk wing felt like pig iron across his shoulders. People flew wearing just this? Even now, it was hard for him to believe. He felt that he was two steps away from diving straight into the earth.
And maybe he was.
Behind him stood Sintikala. “It’s easy,” she said with the note of casual disdain that was as close as she got to encouragement. “You did it before. Just the same now.”
He had. As the winter had progressed, Marcellinus had begun at ten feet up the mound and then twenty, each time running downhill till the wing tugged him upward, kicking his heels impotently as he drifted down to skid on the snow at the mound’s base.
And then he had run from thirty feet up and had remained airborne for a dozen quick heartbeats, keeping the frame of the wing as rigid as possible before the ground came up to meet him. Although he had been convinced that his heart might stall with fear throughout the flight.
That very same day, Sintikala had pushed him into running into space from the first plateau of the Master Mound, forty feet above the level of the Great Plaza. On this flight Marcellinus had attempted a slow turn to the right, had almost lost control of the Hawk wing, and had twisted his ankle landing at a crazy angle, going much faster than he should have been.
Before his nerve could fail, the relentless Sintikala had insisted he jump off the mound yet again, damaged ankle notwithstanding. He had learned how to bank to the right and even to the left before his next, much tamer landing.
And today she demanded that he take the big leap from the very top of the Master Mound.
“No more play,” she said. “Be a man.”
“I can’t believe I ever wanted to do this,” Marcellinus muttered.
“Don’t think about it,” she said helpfully.
A cold breeze flowed from the south. Marcellinus knew that the wind would help him rise and fly even as the frigid conditions would push him toward the ground and keep the flight short. He also knew that the chilly weather was helping to keep the audience minuscule; down at the foot of the mound Demothi and two other men of the Hawk clan eyed him, with Kimimela bundled up beside them in so many furs that she looked spherical and only a scattering of other curiosity seekers on their way to the latrine or the creek or the Big Warm House pausing in hopes of seeing the Wanageeska topple out of the sky.
About as few spectators as he could possibly hope for. Though whatever happened, the story would flow around the city like magic.
He really had no choice. Honor was at stake. And he would rather die than earn any more of Sintikala’s scorn.
“All right,” he said. “I’m going.”
And he did.
Oddly, it was easier from higher up. He took a long run-up, wings bumping on his back. As soon as his feet left the plateau and the earth dropped vertiginously away, Marcellinus swung his legs back and managed to loop his left foot over the bar that held him up horizontally in the prone position.
He was flying the wing, not just hanging beneath it like a child. Presenting a flatter shape to the air around him made his slow banks right and left much smoother and more controlled. It was almost as if he knew what he was doing. And it was only when he pushed up the nose of the Hawk and his feet slid in the icy muck that covered the plaza, skating gracelessly to a halt back on terra firma, that Marcellinus realized he’d been cursing in a mixture of Latin and Cahokian for the entire flight.
His arms and legs quivered as if he had palsy. At the same time he experienced almost more terror than he had felt at the top of the mound, a disbelief at what he had just risked, and a strong sense of peace and rightness.
“Futete!” he said, ending his stream of invective.
Sintikala flitted down to land alongside him. Her Hawk wing rested on her shoulders as if it were part of her. She barely even skidded in the snow. “See?”
He had the exhilarated urge to hug her, but he knew it would not be well received. Besides, their wings might get entangled.
“Easy,” said Marcellinus, the blood still thundering in his ears. “You were right.”
“Again, then?”
“Not today.” He breathed. “I don’t think I’ll make a habit of it.”
“Ha. Tomorrow morning you will awaken and want to run out here and put on your wing.”
“We’ll see,” he said.
Kangee’s new baby was born early in the Crow Moon, with Nahimana, Chumanee, and Nashota in attendance. Men were both unhelpful and unlucky at such times, and it fell to Marcellinus to keep Takoda as far away as possible so he would not hear the screams and sobs of his young wife as she gave life to their second child. To do this Marcellinus had to enlist the aid of Mikasi and Hanska, since under no circumstances could the midwives tell Kangee that her husband was with Marcellinus. Kangee still despised the Roman with a passion, and never more so than during the erratic mood swings of her pregnancy.
Marcellinus’s first thought was that they should take Takoda to the baths. The man was already sweating so much that it seemed like a good idea to freshen him up before he greeted a new infant. Too late, Marcellinus realized that this meant he would see Hanska as naked as Takoda. Outside close families, women and men did not normally use the same rooms at the baths, but nobody was about to tell Hanska what she could and couldn’t do. By virtue of her skill in battle, she went everywhere a man did. He wondered if anyone would think he had set this up deliberately, and also realized he could never mention it to Tahtay or Kimimela.
For a simple soldier, Marcellinus was wryly amused to realize how complex his social interactions had become.
And so they sat, sweating in one of the caldarium rooms of the Big Warm House, with Hanska and Mikasi cheerfully insulting Takoda about his fertility and Marcellinus looking everywhere except at the voluptuous, muscular, tattooed, and very naked Hanska.
“I don’t know how you do it, Takoda,” Hanska was saying. “With a little pugio like yours? Most women like a fucking pilum. Take my Mikasi, here …”
Takoda cheerfully retorted in even worse taste, and Marcellinus flinched. He was no stranger to ribald humor, but it still knocked him off balance to hear such crassness from women. “So, Takoda. Changing the subject. I’m sure you’ve noticed that, uh, Kangee hates me.”
“We all hate you,” Hanska said cheerfully. “You work us too hard.”
Marcellinus glared at her, exasperated, then looked away quickly. Mikasi prodded his wife. “Insubordination,” he said carefully in Latin, a word Marcellinus had recently taught Mahkah in front of the whole cohort. It was news to Cahokian warriors that excessive familiarity with commanding officers was frowned upon. “Wanageeska does not like it. Remember?”
“Ah,” Hanska said. “Sorry. Go on, sir. Kangee hates you?” Marcellinus turned back to Takoda. “Is there something I can do? I would like to mend the injury between us. And the birth of a new child is sometimes a new beginning. Should I make a gift to her? Or something?”
Takoda was eyeing Hanska. She kicked his shins. “Look up, warrior. Answer the Wanageeska.”
“Cahokians died,” Takoda said. “Your Roman legion?”
“Yes, but the rest of you don’t hate me.” Hanska took in a breath to say something, but Marcellinus jabbed a warning finger in her direction without taking his eyes off Takoda, and she desisted.
Takoda shrugged. “Then, you were fighting for your tribe. Now you fight for ours. We adopt warriors from other tribes often.”
“The Romans did not kill anyone Kangee knew? Brother, uncle, friend?”
“No.”
Mikasi poured water over the hot stones, and more steam flooded the air. “You kill very few of us, really.”
“You should tell Kangee that the Wanageeska saved your life at Woshakee,” Hanska said to Takoda. “Make her gratefu
l to him. See?”
“But I didn’t save his life,” Marcellinus objected.
Takoda considered it. “Do you know that you did not?”
“Of course I know!”
“No. If we had fought the Iroqua for Woshakee without you, it would have been a different battle. Maybe in that battle, I not come back.”
“All warriors lie about battles anyway,” said Hanska.
“Tell no lies,” said Marcellinus. “Lies mend nothing. That’s not the help I was looking for.”
“Give her two more moons, sir,” Takoda said. “She will get used to you.”
“Ha,” said Hanska.
Takoda had told him the same thing long ago. “So, nothing, then.”
“She has dreams,” said Takoda.
Hanska, suddenly mute, looked from Takoda to Marcellinus and back again.
“Dreams?” Mikasi asked.
Marcellinus’s mouth twisted wryly. Cahokians set a lot of store by dreams.
“In her dreams there are more deaths, and it is you. You are there.”
“Really?” said Marcellinus.
Takoda shrugged. “You cannot do anything about dreams. So, nothing.”
“What kind of deaths?” Hanska asked.
“Battle deaths. More, I did not ask,” said Takoda. “Better not to know, because then you think about it too much.”
Marcellinus’s dreams were full of death, too. But they were dreams of the past, not the future.
The silence had gone on too long. Damn this Cahokian superstition; these people were worse than Scythians. “And you have all had dreams that came true, I suppose.”
“No,” Mikasi and Takoda said.
“I wish more of mine did,” Takoda added, his eyes straying again.
Mikasi laughed, and Hanska kicked Takoda again. “Stop it. Your wife is having a baby. Respect her.” To Marcellinus she said, “None of my dreams, either. My sister’s friend, though …”
“Well, there you are, then.”
“Two more moons, Kangee will get over it, sir,” said Takoda. “Maybe three.”
“Wanageeska?”
Wrapped in a fur cloak, Marcellinus peered at the thawing ice of Cahokia Creek, then back toward the Master Mound and down at the ice again. Now he straightened. “Sisika.”
“Call me Sintikala. What do you look at?”
“Distances,” he said. “For two reasons. First, we should extend the palisade out this far.”
She measured it with her eyes. The current palisade wall ran parallel to the creek, fifty feet behind them. Over it they could see the top of the Longhouse of the Thunderbirds. The sturdy new steel launching rail followed the line of the Master Mound up to its peak and jutted up into the air twenty feet beyond. “Why? We need a bigger longhouse now?”
“No, it’s because if we’re besieged, we need a source of water inside the fortifications.”
“What?”
Marcellinus explained. In Europa, nobody would dream of building a fortification without a source of water inside. Yet even with Woshakee as a recent example, Sintikala was reluctant to believe that Cahokia could ever be besieged, guarded as it was with Thunderbirds and Hawks, Eagles and Sky Lanterns, as well as the increasingly competent Cahokian army.
“You might be right,” he admitted. “But on principle …”
“But Gaius, if we are sieged, even if the palisade comes this far, the Iroqua will just shit in the creek.”
Marcellinus frowned.
“And the borrow pits?”
“Ah.” There, too, Sintikala was right. The Cahokian bottomlands were basically marshland for many months of the year. Even where they stood now the ground was mostly ice rather than snow. There were plenty of pits within Cahokia where they had dug the soil for their mounds, and the bottoms of those pits often flooded.
“And the second reason is a waterwheel,” he said quickly, and explained how the flow of the creek water could be harnessed to provide the power to grind corn. “But mostly I need bellows for the bathhouse and steelworks, and the creek is too far away from them.”
“Are you not cold?” she said.
He had to smile at that. “Freezing.”
“I think you are not as clever as you think you are. Come on.”
Giving it up, he followed her to the left around the palisade. Close by were the three mounds where she, Howahkan, and Kanuna lived. These were really intended to be clan chief houses, but neither Ojinjintka nor the head of the Deer clan, whose name Marcellinus didn’t recall, could manage the steps anymore and had moved into town with their families, leaving the mound houses to the more sprightly of the elders.
“I need to show you something,” said Sintikala. “Up there.”
At the top of her platform mound, smoke drifted out of the smoke hole of her house. Marcellinus hesitated.
“And I have tea of goldenrod. Better than the clover stuff that Nahimana makes.”
“I make my own tea now,” he said. “Bearberry, dewberry, sassafras.”
“Then no tea.” She started up the cedar steps, careful of the ice.
Marcellinus stayed at the mound’s foot, uncertain. “In your house?”
“Yes, in my house.”
“Oh.” His mind raced.
“I need to show you all of the land,” she said unexpectedly. “And I will not bring it out to you.”
“The land?”
“Yes. Great Sun Man told me to show you, and so I will. So, enough talk. Come up now. I have spoken.”
As with Great Sun Man’s house and all the other houses of clan chiefs or elders on platform mounds, Sintikala’s house was surrounded by a low palisade with a gate. Passing inside it felt like entering enemy territory.
Sintikala had no garden. She did not have the time or the need to tend her own corn. Instead, the area inside the palisade held an outdoor fire pit, long unused in the dead of winter; a pile of discarded Hawk struts, pieces of wing material, cords, and straps; and, to his surprise, a low kiln.
He pointed. “What’s that for?”
“Pots,” she said. “What? Yes, I make pots.”
Kicking off her boots, she walked into her house. Marcellinus followed.
The other homes Marcellinus had been in were those of common folk: Nahimana, Akecheta, Mahkah. All those homes had been almost as sparsely furnished as his own. Sintikala’s hut was sumptuous by comparison. Its inner walls were lined with shelves, and each shelf bore black and red pots and jars, and baskets decorated in a riot of colors. Against one wall was a swath of cotton fabric and a roll of what looked like deerskin, perhaps wing material. Clothes—everyday tunics, furs, tanned leather flying clothes, and bright ceremonial garb—lined the wall to his right. On her table was another pot, still only half made, with the angular representation of a falcon head and wings etched into it. Beside that was a pile of bark inscribed in charcoal with Kimi’s round finger-talk, giving Marcellinus the sudden conviction that Kimimela was teaching it to her mother.
Sintikala’s bed was high off the ground, almost head-high to Marcellinus, with a ladder she could use to ascend to it. The blankets were red, the colors and designs of the western folk of the plains.
She knelt in the center of the room and coaxed the fire in the hearth back into life. As the wood and dried corncobs caught, she placed a pot of water over it on a triangular metal stand.
That, at least, he recognized. “My steelworks is good for something, then.”
“Yes,” she said. “Good for throwing engines and this, uh, fire stand. Not good for Catanwakuwa.”
“We have mastered the wire making now. Soon we will strengthen the wings with single thin strands. And wait till you see what I have planned for the Wakinyan.”
“No tea?”
It smelled good. “Yes. I want tea. Thank you.”
She threw off her fur. Beneath it she wore a short deerskin tunic. Her hair was wet, and she wiped it with a blanket, leaving it endearingly messy.
Marcellinus
tried to concentrate. “And so, the land?”
“Soon,” she said. “Tea.”
Heat filled the room as the fire took off, blazing against the bottom of the water bowl. Marcellinus took off his own furs, aware of how ragged his tunic and Roman leggings were. Busy with casting metal, he had not bathed for two days. It was a good thing the goldenrod tea was so fragrant.
“Many times you have asked about the People of the Hand, and Etowah, many other things about the tribes here in the land. Great Sun Man has often told you to ask me about it. You have not. Why?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
Sintikala poured tea into wooden beakers, blew on her fingers again, and held them up to the fire. “You need to know things, Gaius. You are no good to Cahokia if you will not learn as well as teach.”
“I have learned a lot,” he said. “But the truth is that you are often not easy to talk to.”
“You are not, either. But still I try. For Cahokia and my daughter.”
“Then I will try harder.”
She sat by the fire at his feet. For any other woman it would have seemed a subservient position. But Sintikala was sufficiently powerful and unselfconscious that he doubted that it even occurred to her.
She held out a beaker of tea. He took it and sat. “Sisika? I think you are the one person here who has always told me the truth, all the time. Even when it was painful or uncomfortable.”
She nodded as if that were obvious. “Great Sun Man knows much and keeps many secrets, as he must. Your warriors and the children want to be admired.”
He cleared his throat. “The tea is very good.”
“But not as good as your tea?”
He smiled. “Perhaps not.”
She shrugged.
“So,” he said. “What do I need to know?”
She got to her feet and half grinned. Marcellinus had no idea what to expect, but for some reason he found himself grinning, too. “You are ready?”
“Yes. Show me the land.”