by Alan Smale
Another hand waved in front of his face. It was Marcellinus’s own. Terrified, he tried to turn from it, afraid his own body was attacking him.
The roaring abated, and the sounds of battle came flooding in. He was still gripped by intense pain, but his body was coming back under his control. Next to him lay Tahtay, now still, his legs oddly twisted. Above him stood three Cahokian warriors in a ring, facing outward: Takoda, Hanska, and Mahkah, fighting for their lives against the swarm of Iroqua that surrounded them.
Mahkah took a brutal blow to the shoulder from the massive Huron and fell onto one knee, half on top of Marcellinus and Tahtay, still fighting. Hanska lunged at the Huron with her gladius, and the warrior jumped back.
At last Marcellinus could move again. He rocked forward, braced himself on Mahkah’s shoulder, and shoved himself upright to take Mahkah’s place in the circle defending Tahtay.
Blood poured into the Roman’s eyes, but he could not even blink. Far above, even the sky was red. Nausea choked him, but he raised his sword to parry an Iroqua mace, then swung at the Caiuga who held it.
His vision blurred. Dancing and hacking and slashing, his Cahokian warriors were moving so quickly that he could no longer tell them apart.
And still, at his feet, Tahtay did not stir.
Rage filled Marcellinus. Where was the Huron? Where had the bastard gone? His head throbbed again in a wave of searing pain.
There. Coming in again from his left. Now that Marcellinus was up and fighting again, the Huron was cutting a swath toward him once more.
Despite his dizziness and pain, Marcellinus stepped forward to meet the Huron’s charge. Sword met club, but this time Marcellinus threw himself to the side so that his blade skidded down the club’s blood-slickened wooden haft to slice into the Huron’s wrist. At the same time, the warrior’s shoulder barged him, knocking him backward. Marcellinus stumbled and almost fell, slamming back into Takoda.
The Huron’s roar mingled in the air with Hanska’s battle scream as she came running in to defend them, gladius whirling. But Marcellinus was quicker as he thrust his sword deep into the Huron’s gut, twisted, and shoved again with all his might.
The Huron crashed to the ground, bleeding from his stomach and arm, but still he kicked out at Marcellinus, grabbing for his ax with his other hand. Marcellinus stepped aside, picked up the Huron’s club with both hands, and brought it down in a heavy blow on the man’s chest armor, crushing his ribs and driving splintered wood and bone deep into his heart. With agony contorting his face, the Huron died.
Marcellinus gulped air into his lungs and swayed. His own blood still flowed down his cheeks like tears. But around him was still the din of battle. He let the Huron’s club slip out of his fingers, picked up a gladius, and stepped back to stand over Tahtay and Mahkah, with Hanska to his left and Takoda to his right.
Then more Iroqua warriors surged forward toward them, and once again they were fighting for their lives.
By late afternoon the Cahokians had pushed the Iroqua forces back to the Mizipi, and the enemy retreated before nightfall. They had wrought their damage, dealt their humiliating blow. Fighting on for a second day to try to occupy the Great City and besiege the Master Mound would have been too costly; it was enough to bring the great mound-builder city to its knees and slay the cream of its warriors.
As the Haudenosaunee withdrew, they took with them Cahokian women and children, Roman arms and armor, and many Cahokian scalps. They burned houses and canoes and grain stores, and then their army marched south down the riverbank alongside their five remaining Viking longships. The Cahokian midsummer devastation was over.
Cahokia-across-the-water was a wasteland of destruction and death. Some neighborhoods of western Cahokia were burned to rubble, with few houses left intact. Central Cahokia had suffered significant damage.
Cahokia got little sleep that night. The city was alive with lamps. People moved through the streets to haul away bodies, knock down and quench the smoldering houses. Many mourned their dead; a frail bitter keening lifted on the breeze until the whole city was a single animal, moaning in pain. Healers moved quietly through the streets to help where they could.
Dawn broke, and now it was the older women of the community who walked the neighborhoods with bowls of gruel and beans and water, bringing food to friends, clan members, strangers, any who needed it.
Marcellinus, too, walked the streets. His head throbbed with a slow, unbearable pulse. At the crest of every wave of pain he nearly passed out again. He coughed up black bile. He could almost hear himself blinking. Overnight he had drifted in and out of consciousness, occasionally dozing, only to be brought awake again by his pain. Now in the early light he could not rest, could barely force himself to sit for longer than a few moments. Even while the First Cahokian was still fighting, a team of Great Sun Man’s warriors had rushed from the Mound of the Flowers to claim Tahtay and bear him away. By their haste he knew the boy must be still alive, but where they had taken him, Marcellinus did not know.
Well after dawn, Marcellinus numbly followed the flow of people and found himself once again at the twin mounds on the south edge of the Great Plaza that Great Sun Man had brought him to months before.
The Mound of the Chiefs was open. The charnel house on top of the mound had been wrecked, smashed to splinters with clubs and then set aflame. A trench had been dug into the side of the mound, unearthing old bones that lay strewn on the ground where they had been thrown. An ancient feather cloak that once had lain in state in the tomb of one of Cahokia’s venerated rulers had been shredded. Fine black and red pots and other grave goods were smashed. The arrowheads and weapons, of course, had been taken.
The Mound of the Hawks had been similarly desecrated, and beyond it the Mound of the Women. That mound Marcellinus did not even approach out of respect and fear.
The Iroqua had dug up the Cahokians’ dead at their most sacred sites. The bones of the Cahokian ancestors had been plundered and defiled. The women the Iroqua had brutalized in life had been desecrated a second time in death.
No one attempted to tidy up the mess. The Cahokians preserved a respectful cordon around their mounds. Picking up the bones of their ancestors, purifying and reburying them, and reconsecrating the site would be tasks for another day and a most solemn ceremony.
Marcellinus turned away. These were not his ancestors. This was not for him.
In the East Plaza stood a corral of wood, hastily erected, surrounded by a contingent of Cahokian Wolf Warriors. Within the corral were several dozen Iroqua prisoners, many wounded and bloody, enemies who had not managed to escape from Cahokia and had been captured at the end of the day. They had started out defiant, but their resistance was shriveling from lack of food and water, their untreated wounds, and the grim inevitability of their fate.
They met his eyes, though. All these men knew of Marcellinus and recognized him. To the Iroqua, he was a strange and alien creature, his skin bizarrely tinted, his clothing freakish.
Marcellinus stepped up to the corral. He still had the sick headache, but he had no doubt that once he got over the corral fence he could slay many of these vicious barbarians with his bare hands before the Wolf Warriors could stop him.
“Gaius? Come away from the prisoners.”
He turned. She was dirty and battered, the Hawk war paint around her eyes smeared, but she was alive. “Sisika.”
She shook her head reprovingly, but when she reached up to his temple, her hand came away bloody. “You are hurt.”
Marcellinus almost laughed but swayed dangerously instead. “A little.”
“You should find a healer.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Kimimela?”
“Kimimela and Enopay are not harmed.”
He started to nod, but the pain and the ever-present blackness that lurked at his shoulder warned him to keep his head still.
“Tahtay …” he began, and then the lump that rose in his throat muted him.
In his fragility it took Marcellinus an age to climb the Mound of the Sun. Often he staggered and would have fallen if Sintikala had not held him up.
“Stop. Come no farther.”
Great Sun Man stood at the brow of the mound. He wore his full regalia of office: the kilt in its blocky geometric patterns, the sash and feather cape, a necklace of wolf’s teeth, heavy copper ear spools in the image of the Long-Nosed God.
Sintikala released him. Marcellinus swayed. “We … came to see Tahtay.”
“The shaman is here. You will stay away.”
“Shaman?” Marcellinus took another step or two up the long cedar stairs. “But Tahtay lives? He gets better?”
“He lives. Whether he gets better is in the hands of—” Great Sun Man made the hand-talk gesture that meant “gods” or “medicine.” Fortunately, it was a one-handed gesture, since he held his heavy chert mace in the other.
Marcellinus eyed the mace warily. Perhaps he should find out more about Great Sun Man’s gods, after all. It might help him understand the man, for surely he did not today.
“Have …” Emotion almost unmanned him, and he swallowed and tried again. “Have other healers seen Tahtay? Healers who are not shamans?”
“You may not ask.”
“Great Sun Man …” Marcellinus spread his arms. “Let me come up and talk to you as a friend and as a man.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you came here leading an army against Cahokia.”
Hardly the response Marcellinus had expected. “Uh … You knew of that before today.”
“Because, after that battle between Romans and Cahokians, it was only my word that kept you from being bled and burned. Or strangled where you knelt, like your common warriors.”
Marcellinus’s fists clenched. “I had no common warriors. And this is old history, Great Sun Man, of many winters past.”
“Left alive, you changed us. Instead of bringing warriors and death, you brought your Roman ideas. And gained the same result. Death.”
“Great Sun Man—”
“I will tell you when you can speak again.”
After a moment’s pause, Marcellinus nodded.
Pitiless, Great Sun Man continued. “The steel you bring, the brick and the iron, the way of making war. All of those things. And so, a Mourning War with the Iroqua becomes a big war. A mound becomes a mountain. And today the ashes of Cahokia float down the Mizipi.”
Marcellinus stared, unblinking.
“All on my word. I did not listen to my elders, or to my shamans, or to Ituha. I was blinded, my eyes filled with the things you brought to Cahokia.”
“I will speak now,” Marcellinus said tightly.
“You will not. Because Cahokia is ruined, and my son is crippled, and you? Even you are broken and useless and no longer worthy. So hear me, Wanageeska: your warriors are no longer your warriors. You will not lead, and you will not give training. You will live, but only because your death would bring sorrow to some of my people. They are foolish, but I will not wound their hearts further. But you will stay away from the First Cahokian, and from me, and from Tahtay.”
If Marcellinus was exiled from all that he knew, he was as good as dead.
But Great Sun Man spoke the truth. Marcellinus had brought this upon them. The deaths of thousands of Cahokians and Iroqua. The sack and desecration of Cahokia. The maiming of Tahtay. All his improvements—bathing, steelmaking, teaching—paled into insignificance next to the evil he had wrought.
Besides, Marcellinus would not have argued back against an Imperator, and so he did not argue back against the war chief. Instead, he bowed.
He thought that that would be the end of it, that Great Sun Man would stalk away, but the chieftain said more. “Your longships that brought death to Cahokia. Your throwing engines that were used against us and brought our sacred Wakinyan tumbling out of the sky, your steel that brought the Iroqua here. That first night, when the war parties came and you fought them, I should have known that you had brought them, too. Before you, the Iroqua would never come so near. Our nations have fought before, many raids, but we were matched, we were equal. It is you who changed everything.” Great Sun Man laughed, a spiteful sound. “But when Ituha speaks, I do not listen, because I think I know better. I think I am wise for walking among my people. I think I am wise, keeping an enemy of Cahokia alive. I think I am wise, but I am not wise.”
Marcellinus broke his silence. “You are wise, and what you say is right. But I can—”
His head still bowed, he heard Great Sun Man step off the top of the mound and walk down toward him. Fear stopped his mouth then. Not fear of death, for Marcellinus did not fear death and never had. Rather, the callow fear that Great Sun Man would strike him on the head with the chert mace and that such a blow would drive him even further into pain and disgrace. Another blow to his skull might make a beggar of him, lying on a bed having to be fed and bathed, a burden to those around him. In comparison, death would be a blessing.
“Sorry,” he said.
Great Sun Man stopped on the step above Marcellinus, looming over him. Marcellinus waited for the blow or the dismissal, or to be picked up bodily and thrown down the mound.
“Tahtay’s skin no longer burns to the touch,” Great Sun Man said. “He will live in shame, for his leg is still smashed and twisted. Tahtay will never be a warrior, never be a man. Now go down and do not come back.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Marcellinus. He wanted to say, You are wrong, a twisted walk be damned, your son will always be a man, but he had used up every fragment of his goodwill.
Instead he said, “I commend Akecheta and Mahkah to you. Akecheta, you have already seen as a bold leader. Mahkah is quick and canny in battle and thinks well on his feet. He fights nobly and selflessly. And he is a good judge of men; although young, he would have been my next centurion. Use both warriors well, I beg you. Use their bravery and skill. Do not neglect or waste them merely because they were friends of mine.”
Dry-lipped and dry-eyed, Marcellinus turned to begin the long walk back down the Mound of the Sun.
“Stop,” Sintikala told him.
Marcellinus stopped. In the intensity of his words with Great Sun Man, he had forgotten she still stood a few steps below.
Now she spoke past him to Great Sun Man. “Let the Wanageeska see Tahtay.”
“Go away,” the war chief said. “I have spoken.”
“Please,” said Sintikala. “Please, Mapiya.”
The breath caught in Marcellinus’s throat.
She had continued to speak after she had been dismissed. Mapiya must be Great Sun Man’s true name, which Marcellinus had never heard.
He also had never heard Sintikala plead with anyone before.
Great Sun Man turned and walked up the steps. Marcellinus closed his eyes, overwhelmed. The moment expanded. The breeze blew cool on his neck.
From above, Great Sun Man said, “He may come up.”
Taking his arm, Sintikala helped Marcellinus up the remaining stairs. Great Sun Man did not wait but strode on.
On the first terrace Tahtay lay on a mattress of twigs and straw out in the cool open air where the gods could look down upon him. He whimpered softly in delirium. The blankets that swathed his right thigh were dark and bloody.
Two women held Tahtay still and stopped him from dislodging his bandages. One was Chumanee, the healer. The other, from her features and the way she cried gently, could only be Tahtay’s mother, Nipekala. Behind the rough bed the shaman, Youtin, murmured and shook a turtle-shell rattle.
Huyana, Great Sun Man’s first wife, sat on the steps that led up to the peak of the mound with her head in her hands. Marcellinus remembered that Huyana was childless, perhaps making Tahtay the closest thing she had to a son.
Marcellinus hung back. He could do nothing for Tahtay, and he did not wish to disturb a mother’s sorrow or
a shaman’s ritual. His presence could only distress Nipekala, who surely had to know how he had failed to protect her son.
“He will live,” Sintikala said quietly. “He is calmer now.”
Marcellinus knew of no legionary medicus who could assess a wounded man’s chance of survival from twenty paces. She was guessing, and he tried not to hate her for the desperate hope her words gave him. “You’d better be right.”
Sintikala placed her hand on his breast and tried to look up into his face. “You will not lose him.”
Marcellinus could not meet her eye. “Take me away from here.”
He had raised his voice, and both Chumanee and Youtin glanced around. The shaman made the whisking motion with his hand that he often made on seeing the Roman; whether it was a gesture of dismissal or some attempt to avert the evil eye, Marcellinus had never bothered to find out. But surges of anger and nausea rocked him, and Sintikala grabbed him again. “Come.”
In holding Marcellinus up she had jolted him, and the pain in his head and spine was excruciating. He sagged onto her and managed not to cry out only by biting his tongue.
Sintikala pushed back. “Gaius? Stand up.”
“Let me die.”
“Do not be stupid. Come. You must rest.”
He stood upright, his hand on her shoulder. Once again Chumanee, Youtin, and Nipekala had their attention focused on Tahtay. Only Huyana watched Marcellinus and Sintikala as they stepped back off the plateau onto the endless stairs.
In the morning light, Enopay walked in the wreckage with his bark and his charcoal, a child amid devastation.
Not so long ago Tahtay had held his hands over Enopay’s eyes to shield him from the horrors of war. Now Tahtay lay on the Mound of the Sun, struggling to live, while Enopay walked the battlefield and wrote down the names of the dead.
This time no one had come to bring Marcellinus food in the dawn, but once again he had felt compelled to return to the killing fields. He had not known what to expect. He certainly had not expected a small boy to be performing a census of the slain.