The Fire Islands

by Gilbert M. Stack

  “Eighty-eight,” Marcus repeated. Then he confided, “Two of my men in the black band are ill, but not so badly I can’t bring them with me.”

  “You really have all of your men fit for duty?”

  “Yes,” Marcus told him. He did not mention Makuahine Akela’s role in keeping them that way. “How many of yours are fit to march?”

  Julian shook his head. “I don’t know.” This concession horrified Marcus but he schooled his face not to show his reaction. “Maybe fifty give or take?”

  “Two-thirds?” Marcus asked. This time he could not completely keep his concern from showing.

  Julian put on a brave face. “It’s probably not really that bad. Some of those men are bound to be malingerers trying to keep from earning an honest day’s pay. But yes, I’ll be hard pressed to get more than three-quarters of my men to Keahi for our Praetor’s battle. You really should have stayed away from his wife.”

  “Me?” The accusation shocked Marcus. “You think I was sleeping with her?”

  Julian grimaced. “I’m not trying to offend you, but it’s common knowledge you—”

  “Common knowledge?” Marcus interrupted. He’d gone past shock to genuine concern. “Julian, I’ve never touched that woman! I don’t sleep with my superior’s wives. It’s not just good sense. It’s a matter of honor.”

  “But your raid on that pawn shop—” Julian argued.

  “Was to help one of my vigils regain his stolen property,” Marcus said. That was true, even if Marcus now understood it to be more than that.

  “That’s not what the legionnaires you arrested are saying,” Julian told him.

  “And what are they saying?” Marcus demanded.

  “That you came to the pawn shop looking for a woman’s hairpin—”

  “That was stolen from my vigil!” Marcus interrupted.

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?” Julian asked the question as if he couldn’t quite fathom it was possible that Marcus was telling the truth.

  “I admit that I leaped to the same conclusion you have when I learned that the Praetor’s wife had found her missing pin, but I had no knowledge of that when we made the raid and I still have no evidence other than a coincidence of timing to connect the two.”

  Julian shook his head. “I think I believe you, Marcus. But this makes what’s coming even worse. You’re about to be killed for another man’s indiscretion.”

  Marcus barked a short frustrated laugh. “Don’t count me out yet, Julian. My hand really is the best in the legion and we could go toe to toe with any other in Aquila.”

  Julian grunted. “For your sake, I hope you’re as good as you pretend.”

  Chapter Six

  Until You Kill Kekipi

  The Aquila castrum had broken into chaos as legionnaires unused to being called out on field maneuvers frantically struggled to find their gear and put it in order. They screamed at each other, beat their servants, and generally gave the impression that they neither knew how to don their armor nor to wield their swords.

  The great exceptions to this rule were the legionnaires of Marcus’ hand. Their vigils, having picked up on the previous days rumor that they would be moving out soon had held a series of inspections the night before so that now all that was left to be gathered was the food and other consumable supplies that would be needed on the march.

  Marcus noticed his men’s state of readiness with approval, but took no action that evidenced his reaction. Instead he found Calidus when he opened the door to greet the Tribune and ordered him to inform the vigils that they would have a briefing in thirty minutes.

  Calidus ran from the house to alert Severus and the other vigils, leaving Marcus to face the rage of his mistress.

  “You said you had no orders to march!” she screamed at him.

  Marcus did not have the patience to deal with her this morning. His Praetor had constructed a plan intended to kill him and his men and he really needed to take some time to think his way out of it. “Pack your things and go back to your mother’s house,” he ordered.

  “You’re throwing me out?” Nani screeched.

  “Until this later maneuver is over,” Marcus told her.

  “You mean until you kill Kekipi!” she accused.

  Marcus did not pick up on the heightening rage in her voice. “Or he kills me,” he muttered, foolishly turning his back on the woman.

  His ears barely heard the hiss of iron on leather as she drew her thin knife from its sheath, but he knew the sound and even as his mind screamed he was imagining things, his battle-honed reflexes inspired him to drop to the side away from Nani.

  A knife tore the edge of his uniform tunic without drawing blood.

  Nani hissed with anger and threw herself on Marcus, knife chopping down toward his chest.

  Marcus threw up his left arm to ward off the blow and punched her hard with his right fist.

  She howled in pain and fury and came at him again, but by this time Marcus had rolled into a crouch. He grabbed her knife arm, almost cutting himself in the process, and threw her hard against the wall. She bounced up again, but he had found his feet and she ran, throwing herself through the window before fleeing from his sight.

  Severus and Calidus found him standing by the window staring after her, trying to figure out what was going on.

  Chapter Seven

  Why Do You Keep Helping Us?

  “I heard about your woman,” Makuahine Akela told Marcus when he came to check on the packing of the food supplies that would sustain his men on the coming campaign. “You know she no good, right? She want to see the dark kings rule again and all you Aquila driven back across the sea.”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” Marcus told her.

  “Now you do.”

  Marcus could understand Nani’s reactions on one level. The dark kings had been horrors, but the Aquila legions were still invaders of her home. What he couldn’t figure out was why he had failed to notice this desire on the part of his mistress. Was he that blinded by her beauty?

  “Yes, you were,” Akela told him as if reading his thoughts. “All you men think about is how beautiful the girl is. I know. After all, I was once beautiful too.”

  “You’re still beautiful, Makuahine Akela,” Marcus assured her even though it wasn’t technically true anymore.

  “You are kind, Tribune,” she said with a hint of her usual smile. “That is why I will give you a gift before you leave me today.”

  “A gift?” Marcus repeated.

  The old woman pulled a thin cord from her pocket from which dangled a small bag. “I make you a juju—not too powerful, but if you wear it against your chest, those like He I Do Not Name have trouble seeing you.”

  Marcus hesitantly accepted the bag.

  “It not make you invisible, you understand? Only hard to see—easy for the eye to pass over. If you standing with six other men, power not tend to see you. It might give you a chance to get close to him.”

  Marcus pulled the cord over his head and stuck the pouch down inside his tunic against his bare flesh. In the eighteen months since he had hired Akela she’d had many opportunities to poison him and his men. This would require a little more trust in the old woman. But he did have a question.

  “Why do you keep helping us, Makuahine Akela?”

  She smiled, but it was a bleak forlorn expression. “When I was a little girl, the Iwakalua—you call them the Rule of Twenty—murdered my parents, my grandparents and all my family: brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins. I was very young but I still remember them. You Aquilans, you’re arrogant and sometimes you’re mean, but you aren’t dark like them.”

  Marcus bent down and kissed the old woman tenderly on her cheek. “I’m very sorry for your loss, Makuahine. I’m young enough that those battles between the Rule of Twenty and the royal line of Mokupani seem like ancient history to me. It never occurred to me that you might remember those days. Aquila was only trading with Mokupani way back then.” He to
ok her hands in his and looked straight into her eyes. “I’m going to do my best to kill this man who wants to bring back the bad old days. What the Rule of Twenty did—it’s like the Qing Empire in the northeast—dark and terrible, seeking to suffocate all that’s good and pure and free in the world. I’ll kill him for all of us if I can.”

  Makuahine Akela patted Marcus on the cheek. “I know you will. I told you before. You’re going to turn the world right-side-up again if you live long enough.”

  Abruptly she turned away from him. “Now off with you. I have work to do if your men are to eat on their march to put the nightmare back in its grave.”

  Chapter Eight

  Make War!

  It was closer to noon than to dawn when the legion finally stumbled its way out of the castrum and began its march west toward the mountain of Keahi and the Iwi Iwilei that spread out before it. The whole island was only ninety miles from end-to-end so in theory, had they started out early, they could have marched the distance to the great mountain in a single grueling day. But that did not account for the oppressive heat of the Fire Islands or for the need to take a somewhat meandering route as men were not winged like crows and able to fly over the barriers nature used to break up the landscape. It also didn’t consider the deplorable conditioning of Praetor Castor’s legion. There was neither genuine pride nor stamina in these men and they were angry that they’d been driven out of their semi-comfortable castrum to hike to the other end of the island.

  Marcus’ hand was a shining exception to the drab embarrassment of their fellow legionnaires. In his first months on Mokupani, Severus and Calidus had sniffed out the rare legionnaires who had been unhappy with the dismal standards of the rest of the phalanx and he’d bribed his fellow tribunes to swap men with him. Those Marcus couldn’t transfer away he had ground into compliance under Severus’ heavy heel. It had been very hard work until the first competitions had been held and his legionnaires had come to understand how high above their fellows they now stood.

  He still had to push them—a good commander always did—but the pride so necessary to a legion’s function had been reborn in the hearts of his men. So now while their fellows trudged and groaned in the smothering heat of Mokupani’s sun, Marcus’ hand sang marching songs and strode in time to the cadence looking as ready for the parade ground as they were for battle. And when Praetor Castor inspected his lines from his white horse and frowned, Marcus’ heart swelled with even greater pride. This cowardly impotent old man thought he could crush these legionnaires for the sins of his wife, but they were going to show him otherwise. Marcus’ hand was worthy of the legions of the ancient Republic. They would throw Kekipi’s warriors off their shields whatever their numbers and skewer than on their swords.

  The road turned around a field planted with sugar cane where the native Kanaka worked far harder than the sweating legionnaires complaining about their journey. They should have incorporated the natives into the Mokupani legion. They were better conditioned to the heat and had more resistance to the fevers. Castor had been forced to leave fully thirty percent of his already under-strength phalanx behind. What should have been nine hundred men marching to battle was barely five hundred of which fully eighty-eight were in Marcus’ hand. And Castor wanted to divide his measly numbers in a three pronged attack? If he went through with this madness, it seemed highly likely to Marcus that he and his other legionnaires would meet disaster before Marcus did.

  He caught a glimpse of the sunlight glinting off the golden eagle standard that led the column and he feared that the legion was not in sufficient condition to bring glory to that symbol of all that was right and noble in Aquila. He spit into the cane. How could any praetor let his legion fall into such disorder?

  The more he looked at his peers, the more he feared they were not up to the current challenge.

  ****

  “You can stop fortifying the camp, Marcus,” Tribune Festus announced.

  Marcus knew he was not keeping the astonishment off his face. For five hundred years, the legions of Aquila had established and fortified their camps by the same program. The walking camp was the simplest—built on a square design intersected by a wide main street and surrounded by a ditch with the dirt thrown inward to form a wall. In the center was the headquarters, called a praetorium even if the praetor was not present. Beside the praetorium was the quaestorium where the supplies were stored. Across the main street was a forum where business could be conducted and the ranks could be assembled. The legionnaires pitched their tents to either side of Main Street by cohort and hand with their officers’ tents closest to the street.

  Marcus’s hand had pitched their tents under the strict eye of Black Vigil Severus and immediately set about digging the ditch that surrounded the camp while their peers in the other hands and cohorts plopped to the ground and rested after the day’s march.

  The sight sickened Marcus but he did not have the rank to force the other officers to do their duty. After an hour or so, he noticed Lesser Tribune Julian kicking his vigils into activity and another row of tents began to rise. By this time, his own legionnaires were extending the ditch behind the not-yet erected tents of the other hands of their cohort.

  It made him proud. They weren’t even complaining about it, but taking a rather perverse satisfaction in this proof of how much better they were then their peers in the other hands.

  And now Tribune Festus brought him this. “Is that a suggestion, Sir, or an order?”

  Festus looked away and gave every impression of being embarrassed. “It’s an order, Marcus, straight from the Praetor. He says there is no threat here and thus no reason to waste our energy constructing fortifications that will not be needed.”

  “Tribune?” Marcus couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “We are in the field to take the fight to a rebel who has, at minimum, hundreds of men under his command. And word of our intentions leaked a full day before we received our orders. Kekipi knows we are coming! How can we possibly justify not fortifying this camp?”

  It definitely was embarrassment showing on Festus’ face. “I, um, actually made that point to the Praetor but he overruled me.”

  “I…see,” Marcus said.

  “He, um, it doesn’t actually make a lot of sense, does it? The whole reason we’re coming out here is that he’s angry at you, but at the same time he doesn’t take the threat very seriously.”

  Marcus sighed. “I didn’t sleep with the Praetor’s wife.”

  “I know that,” Festus sighed. “It was young Janus.”

  When Marcus stared hard at him, Festus shrugged. “I do have eyes. The two fools haven’t actually been particularly discreet. Unfortunately, there’s no good way to let the Praetor know that, and there’s a lot of danger in it. She’s, um, gotten to know a lot of the officers, if you see what I mean.”

  Marcus found himself gaping at the Tribune. “Lots of them? Why didn’t I know about this?”

  “Because for all your truly excellent qualities as an officer, Marcus, you’re amazingly blind to the political and social aspects of being in command,” Festus told him. “It’s a glaring weakness that had I been a better Tribune I would have worked with you to fix. You don’t take women seriously. And you made a major enemy out of the Praetor’s wife when you rebuffed her advances when you first arrived in Mokupani. She’s been waiting to pay you back for that insult, and she used the hairpin to manipulate her husband into taking his revenge.”

  Marcus forced himself to close his mouth. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “Now I’ve been thinking hard on this since Praetor Castor first hinted about this expedition and I’m afraid I’m not going to be a lot of help to you. But I don’t want you to lose heart because your men really are proper legionnaires. If we didn’t know that before, we do now. Look at them, building the fortification when half the legion hasn’t yet started erecting their tents. So forget the political game and do what you do best. Make war! It seems obvious to me
that the Praetor is walking our hands into some sort of ambush. Make war! Smash the shit out of the Kanakan bastards and keep going. Take the best the Praetor can throw at you and grind it under your heel. He won’t love you more for it, but you’ll come out stronger for the triumph.”

  Festus looked around with sudden furtiveness as if he didn’t want to be caught building the morale of his subordinate officer. “Now get your men to stop working and conserve your strength. With any luck, we’ll be at the mountain, Keahi, tomorrow. Then the real work will begin.”

  Chapter Nine

  Let’s See What We Can Do To Restore a Measure of Surprise

  It was two days before the legion reached the edge of Iwi Iwilei, and it was not mid-morning or even noon when they arrived but two in the afternoon. The proud legion of Aquila looked bedraggled and grumpy after their march and in no way presented the image of a serious fighting force.

  The Praetor called the officers for one last meeting, assigning his cohorts to each of the three arroyos and set them loose to begin reenacting the first Battle of Keahi when the legions had crushed the Rule of Twenty forty years before. Marcus returned to his men and led Festus’ cohort toward the central arroyo. It did not escape his notice that neither of the other two cohorts seemed in any particular hurry to get about their own missions.

  There had been no natives—not a single one—in sight since high noon and this broken ground with the white shards of bone littering the landscape had never been cultivated or lived in. The black rock that formed Keahi was broken here or there with creeping green, but for the most part it remained as barren as the mass of bones that covered it.

  Marcus had been here before.

  Six weeks after taking command of his hand, Marcus had forced the men on a training march which largely duplicated the journey they had just made with the full phalanx. His troops had performed far less well on that first journey, but the week they had taken to explore the arroyos would serve Marcus well now. He knew what was coming, and as the men approached the wide entrance to the long and winding gulley, he called his vigils to him and told them what he wanted.