Clash of Eagles

by Alan Smale

  The frame of the Eagle creaked alarmingly. In relaxing, Marcellinus had unwittingly pulled the bar closer to his chest and the Eagle’s nose had tilted downward. The lead pilot beside him glared.

  “Futete,” Marcellinus muttered again, correcting his error. These things were so damned sensitive. “Merda, damn …”

  The Master Mound was already a mile behind. To his left he could see the First Cahokian jogging north in formation; from this height they looked like a wave of silver. He hoped they would maintain discipline and sweep through the city, chasing out the Iroqua and preserving the lives of the Cahokian civilians who were still out in the open, unprotected.

  As they flew over the plaza in western Cahokia, he saw the Cahokian siege engines still being hauled laboriously toward the river, the Catanwakuwa thrower out ahead of the others, as ordered. He hoped they would get there before the battle was over.

  Then Marcellinus looked ahead to the Mizipi, and his jerk of surprise once again translated itself through the frame of the Eagle.

  Nine Viking longships sailed up the river a scant half mile from the southernmost reaches of Cahokia.

  Their carved dragon prows reared up over the waters; their square sails billowed. The decks of the longships bristled with warriors.

  On the Mizipi’s east bank, jogging to keep pace with the longships, was an immense Iroqua force of perhaps two thousand warriors.

  Marcellinus blinked. The longships were no mirage. He saw sails, oars, rudders, even the gleam off the copper cauldron used for cooking.

  Norse vessels, Viking longships, assisting an Iroqua attack. How was that even possible?

  They soared over the massed ranks of the Cahokians. Even from this altitude Marcellinus could pick out Great Sun Man standing on the Mound of the Flowers overlooking his army, arrayed in his chiefly regalia. The Eagle’s nose began to dip.

  Before they landed, Marcellinus needed a better grasp of what was going on. Where there were Norsemen, there must also be Romans. Mustn’t there? If so, as soon as he made it safely to terra firma, Marcellinus had to get out in front of the Cahokian army and try to talk to them.

  Even if they just cut him down where he stood.

  “Fly on!” he called out. “Fly over the giant canoes!”

  The lead pilot grimaced over at him. “Too close!”

  “We’re high enough! Go fast! I have spoken!”

  The Cahokians grunted and swung the Eagle into a shallow dive.

  The longships grew in front of Marcellinus with astonishing swiftness. Vertigo gripped him, and he had to force himself not to lock rigid with fear. Racing toward the prow of an enemy ship was terrifying. His order had seemed reasonable when he had given it—they would have only this one chance to see down into the Norse ships—but by the time they swooped across the line of the leading vessels, they were only three hundred feet over the Mizipi.

  He had only seconds to survey the Norse line. Leading the fleet upriver from him were three sleek, predatory fifty-oar longships, already using their oarsmen to turn broadside to fire arrows into the Cahokians on the bank. Before him was a drekar with a blood-red sail, one of the huge dragon ships that had struck terror into northern Europan coastlines for a hundred years until the Romans had brought the Norsemen to heel. Behind this drekar came another, then three agile thirty-two-oar Norse river raiders with yellow sails.

  Yet another dragon ship sailed behind them to bring up the rear. In its wake came a swarm of tiny boats, genuine Iroqua war canoes.

  The longships were stuffed to the gunwales with warriors. Marcellinus looked down into a sea of war paint and grim upturned faces. None were aiming their bows up at him. Rather, the men in the drekar were watching for liquid flame. Of course, the Eagle had none; it was too small to carry cargo as well as people. The enemies eyed each other balefully from their vertical distance.

  From their skin color and clothing, the feathers in their hair, even the stance of the man at the rudder, it was clear that the ships were crewed solely by Hesperians.

  No Norsemen. No Romans. Just Iroqua in Norse longships. Marcellinus did not know whether to feel relief or even more fear.

  Moored in place in the center of the drekar’s pine deck sat a siege engine, differently constructed from those of Roma or Cahokia but still easily recognizable as a ballista.

  The Eagle looped around into a tight turn. Marcellinus half closed his eyes as his nausea rose. The curve was so steep that it looked for all the world as if they would slide straight into the water.

  Marcellinus gulped. How the Iroqua had captured and mastered the Scandinavian vessels and brought them to the Mizipi: that could wait.

  For now he just had to figure out how to defeat them.

  “Enough,” Marcellinus said. “Good. Land.”

  The order was superfluous. As they shot back across the Mizipi’s east bank, the Eagle was dropping rapidly. Marcellinus’s heart jumped into his mouth as they swooped over the Cahokian line, seemingly low enough for him to have kicked their feathered headdresses. He cried out in alarm when the pilot put the Eagle into a skidding turn just a few feet up; the ground skewed and leaped up at him. Marcellinus let go of the bar and threw his arms in front of his face.

  They landed with a bang that Marcellinus could feel from his waist to his shoulders, transmitted through the frame of the Eagle. His pilot and copilot took the shock of it in their legs, grunting and swearing as they ran.

  Belatedly Marcellinus kicked his feet free and helped run the Eagle to a standstill. All three of them dropped onto one knee, gasping, the pilot giving him a reproachful look while the other Cahokian ignored him completely.

  Well, let them be as snooty as Roman litter bearers. Marcellinus had other things to concern himself with.

  He fumbled with the straps that held him to the wing. The nearest warriors ran forward and helped lift the Eagle off their shoulders. His hands and knees quivered as he stood and got his bearings.

  He was behind the Mound of the Flowers. The Cahokian army stood between him and the bank of the Mizipi.

  After enduring all that, now he had to run up a mound? Yes. Of course.

  Arriving on the flat top of the Mound of the Flowers, Marcellinus was startled by the magnificence of Great Sun Man’s war finery. In addition to his woven battle kilt and chest armor, the leather greaves on his legs and arms, and the fine feathered eagle headdress, the war chief wore full face and body paint and the glinting copper earrings of his Long-Nosed God.

  Still dizzy from the flight and his run up the mound, Marcellinus was swept by a feeling of unreality. “You didn’t dress up like that to fight my army.”

  Great Sun Man pointed to the Mizipi and the dragon-prowed warships that sailed ever closer. “These are Romans? Your people?”

  “No. They are Roman longships—I mean boats, giant war canoes—but they carry no Romans, no Norse, none of my people. The Iroqua captured them and learned how to sail them. And behind them, regular Iroqua war canoes gather like a swarm of bees.”

  “Just Iroqua?” Great Sun Man nodded in relief. “Then this is a good day.”

  “What?”

  “A good day. A mighty day we will sing of to our children and their children. For today we kill every Iroqua brave among them.”

  “… All right.”

  “I had feared they were Romans. Iroqua more simple. We will kill and kill, and then we will sing.”

  “Let’s fight first and talk of singing later.” Marcellinus looked out toward the Mizipi and up and down the Cahokian ranks and forced himself to concentrate.

  At last the fate of the Viking longships had been resolved. The Iroqua must have destroyed the Roman settlement at Chesapica, sunk the giant troop carriers, and stolen the longships. None had escaped to return across the Atlanticus to Roma. The news of the loss of the 33rd Hesperian had never made it back to Hadrianus.

  And it was not only the Cahokians who could innovate. In the two years Marcellinus had been in Cahokia the Iroqua h
ad made several giant leaps of their own. Far from foundering in the wake of Cahokian advances, the Iroqua had possessed leaders with the flexibility not only to see the future but to reach out and grasp it. They had spies to steal new ideas—throwing engines, siege tactics, organized military formations—and chiefs and craftsmen with the cunning to put those ideas into practice.

  It was no more than the Cahokians had done. The initial ideas had come from Marcellinus, but the Cahokians had raced ahead of him, implementing and improving them. A people who could fly were not about to be bamboozled into superstitious terror by ships or onagers.

  Once again Marcellinus had deeply underestimated the mental agility and skills of the Hesperians around him.

  And as a result, they now had to face Viking warships on the Mizipi.

  He tried to remember everything he knew about longships. It wasn’t much. He had only been aboard one briefly, one of the smaller river raiders, when the Norsemen had shuttled him from the giant Roman troop ship to the shores of Nova Hesperia. Never in his career had Marcellinus had any cause to fight a longship. He knew nothing of their weak points and precious little about any sort of naval warfare.

  “Great Sun Man, hear me. The Iroqua will shoot from the longships. The first two drekars—largest ships—each have throwing engines, ballistas, on board as well as their arrows and spears. The third ship may also. All of the longships have high sides lined with shields to protect their archers and oarsmen. Like floating palisades. You understand?”

  “We can make holes, sink them?”

  “Not today. In time we will think of a way, in case more come. But for today, their hulls are too hard.”

  “We can burn them?”

  “The wood of Viking longships is treated against fire. Their hulls will not burn, nor their sails. But the men inside, Great Sun Man, their skins will burn. We should bomb them with the liquid fire anyway.”

  Soberly, Great Sun Man shook his head. “Already the Iroqua have shot down one of our Thunderbirds, at your battle. We cannot fly low to drop fire on them.”

  “Great Sun Man, they cannot have expected your Thunderbirds to even make it as far as the Great River. Until this year the Wakinyan did not have such a range. This year they do. In this, the advantage still rests with you.”

  “Not for long. And spies tell them, perhaps.”

  “But we should try anyway. For if they beat us back and their warriors land on Cahokian soil …”

  “Yes, yes, yes. But for every Thunderbird that falls, the fighting heart goes from a thousand of my warriors. The Thunderbirds are more sacred than any man, more than even the memory of Ituha. If I fall, my warriors will just fight harder. But if another Thunderbird falls from the sky, they will panic, fearing that the gods oppose them. You understand?”

  “Then let’s not lose another bird,” said Marcellinus.

  “How?”

  “Wait. Let me look.” With an effort, Marcellinus tore his eyes away from the impossible longships and took in the rest of the battlefield.

  To Marcellinus’s military eye, from the raised perspective of the Mound of the Flowers, the story so far became clear in moments. The riverbank and the no-man’s-land between the two armies was littered with broken bodies, not all of them dead yet. A battle had already taken place here, the battle Marcellinus had heard from a distance while waging his own. In their first assault the Iroqua had fought to capture the east bank or at least occupy the Cahokians while their companion Iroqua war bands on the west side of the Mizipi had stormed and subdued Cahokia-across-the-water. Now, with the far bank secure, the warships could sail up the river with impunity without risking attack from both sides. The next wave of Iroqua would combine bombardment from the floating castles of the longships with the ground assault of the giant Haudenosaunee army on land.

  It was a good strategy. Already the Cahokians had been outmaneuvered. They faced an almost impossible battle.

  “We must fall back,” Marcellinus said.

  “Back?” Great Sun Man was incredulous.

  “Yes. If we stay here, we must defend against the ships on the river as well as the warriors from the south. If we withdraw to western Cahokia and hold the line there, the Iroqua must disembark the warriors and engines from the longships and form one army against us. A single battlefront. And the closer we can lure the Iroqua to the Great Mound, the better we can attack them from above with the Wakinyan. It will even up the battle.”

  “No.”

  “Great Sun Man, hear me. We have already lost the Mizipi.”

  “No. It is our river.”

  Marcellinus raised his eyebrows. “Today-now? It does not look like our river.”

  “The Iroqua shall not have the Mizipi,” Great Sun Man said obstinately.

  “Withdrawal is not cowardice, Great Sun Man. Why should the Iroqua choose a battleground to their liking? We should decide where we stand and fight!”

  “And I have spoken. Wanageeska, I have lost one of Ituha’s three Cahokias. I will not lose another. No retreat.”

  At last Marcellinus understood. Cahokia-across-the-water had fallen. Great Sun Man could not risk western Cahokia as well. And if they were forced back beyond western Cahokia, the sacred Circle of the Cedars would come within range of the Iroqua throwing engines. Any damage to that would be a further blow to Cahokian morale.

  Marcellinus looked around, reassessing.

  The second of the drekars rocked in the water as the warriors on board fired their siege engine. The bolt flew almost too quickly to be seen, but the swath of destruction it carved in the Cahokian line was clear. The braves on the first drekar were still struggling to load their throwing engine, their oarsmen swinging the boat to bring it to bear on the Cahokians, but Marcellinus knew their position on the Mound of the Flowers could soon come under fire. Nothing he could do about that; a ballista bolt would fly at them too quickly to be dodged.

  Meanwhile, half a dozen Cahokian war canoes were racing across the water to engage the first three longships. He pointed. “Great Sun Man, order them back. Longships are too hard a target. We cannot throw away brave warriors like that.”

  Great Sun Man looked as if he wanted to push Marcellinus off the mound. “What? We must harry them. They are like a palisade. How else? Testudo?”

  Suddenly, Marcellinus had the solution.

  “No. Not testudo. Something even better. Instead of spending our warriors attacking their palisade, we’ll bring Cahokia’s palisade to them.”

  Marcellinus’s face cracked into a ferocious grin.

  The nine longships sailed upriver, floating forts that dealt death in surge after surge of burning arrows and ballista bolts. The Iroqua archers’ bows were able to fire farther and harder than the Cahokian bows, but the Cahokians were partially protected with Roman armor and, for some, Roman shields.

  Bolts from both drekars had come winging toward the Mound of the Flowers—one had even flown over it—but the moving, swaying longships proved to be a difficult platform from which to aim. Marcellinus thought it would be a lucky strike indeed if the Iroqua got their range.

  Disregarding them, he looked along the ranks of the Cahokian army below him, which seethed and thirsted for battle. He and Great Sun Man had to keep order. If Cahokian discipline crumbled in the face of the Iroqua onslaught, the day was over and Cahokia would fall.

  At long last the Cahokian siege engines arrived. The Catanwakuwa launcher remained behind the mound while a mob of Cahokians quickly manhandled an onager and a ballista alongside the Mound of the Flowers and a second ballista toward the Mound of the River. Ideally the throwing engines would have been brought to the crests of the mounds to enable a better view of the battlefield and longer range, but it was too late for that now.

  Below Marcellinus, the nearer of the Cahokian throwing engines bucked. Almost without stopping to position it, its crew had fired the first rock. Through sheer luck it plunged into the river only a dozen feet away from the prow of the foremost Iroqua longs
hip, and a cheer went up. Soon afterward, the second siege engine threw its bolt, which sailed high over the lead drekar’s mast and plunged into the river a good hundred feet beyond.

  Marcellinus ran down to assist them as they hurled rocks and bolts at the parade of longships. But these men were not Akecheta’s crew, and the range of the longships proved difficult to get. Missile after missile flew over the Viking vessels or fell short. At least the giant splashes were regularly dousing the Iroqua archers with muddy river water.

  Naturally, as soon as the throwing engines were in place, the Iroqua ground forces consolidated into a thrust to assault them. Most were beaten back by the massed Cahokians, but several hundred broke through to threaten their position.

  Marcellinus was fighting alongside men he did not know, and the situation was too fluid to wait for instructions from Great Sun Man high on the mound above. He appointed centurions on the spot and divided men into ranks. His voice quickly became hoarse from shouting orders, but soon he had a solid wall of warriors in Roman armor four deep in front of the throwing engines to protect them, drumming their pila against their shields to deter the enemy, and an array of more lightly armored skirmishers with bows and Cahokian spears out to each side in support.

  Many more Hawks soared into the air now, launching in quick succession from just a hundred yards behind him. Sintikala sped across the river a few hundred feet up, her Hawk skittering back and forth as she hurled pots of liquid flame into the trio of leading longships. Demothi and other birdmen swirled around her, less adept, firing arrows and throwing bombs and then dropping back to be launched again. Despite their altitude the arrows were coming dangerously close.

  At last, there came a pair of Wakinyan, thundering downriver barely two hundred feet above the greasy water. Beneath each swung a full complement of twelve Cahokians and sacks full of incendiary. The leading three longships did their best to scatter, but the third was caught in a deluge of liquid flame from the leading Wakinyan.