by Alan Smale
He did not need to. Taianita ran past him and clambered into the dragon ship, shaking like a leaf.
The rest of the Cahokians got into the drekar, the word slave still swinging her head around wild-eyed as if she expected a rain of arrows and spears. But behind them now were only warriors standing at ease and a chief raising a Roman gladius in a slightly menacing salute of farewell.
Marcellinus saluted back curtly. “Let’s go. Hurit, Kimimela, cast off. Akecheta, to the helm. To oars, everyone else.”
“Push off!” Akecheta repeated. “Row! One, two…”
Taianita sat in the gunwale, staring at the tall walls of Shappa Ta’atan. “Thank you and thank you and thank you…”
Sintikala pointed at the girl. “What is this?”
“Fuscus,” Marcellinus said, and looked at Aelfric.
The Hawk chief shook her head. “What?”
Marcellinus’s brain clouded. He reached over the side of the dragon ship for a handful of river water and dashed it into his face. “Paying a debt. More than one.”
Aelfric nodded.
As the drekar swung into the current, the Cahokians put their backs into the rowing. They headed into the bend, and Shappa Ta’atan slowly disappeared from view. Marcellinus eyed the banks, but so close to the city there were few trees. They would not be attacked yet. It would be too suspicious.
“Well,” said Aelfric. “Thank God that’s over.”
Marcellinus just shook his head.
The Briton frowned. “Not over?”
“Hasn’t even begun.” And in Cahokian he said, “Stay vigilant. Watch the river, watch the banks.”
There was a brittle silence. Eventually Mahkah said in disbelief, “They will come after her?”
“They will come after us.” Marcellinus stood so that they all could hear him. “Son of the Sun has sent a war party ahead of us, led by the chief of the Panther clan. They will attack us today on the river or tonight onshore. Son of the Sun wants our heads to send to Avenaka and seal their brotherhood as warlords of the Mizipi.”
The dragon ship swung in the water. “One, two,” Akecheta called mundanely to bring them all back to rowing in time.
“Futete,” Kimimela said. In the bow of the ship Sintikala shook her head and turned to stare downriver.
Marcellinus looked at Taianita. “Enjoy your freedom. You may not have it long.”
“Shit,” said Aelfric. “For this I gave up comfort, easy women, and all the buffalo I could eat?”
“Look on the bright side,” Marcellinus said. “Trees everywhere.”
—
Since the wind was favorable, Marcellinus had them raise the sail; he wanted to put as many river miles behind them as possible, but not at the cost of tiring out his crew.
He put Mahkah and three other men on lookout duty in the bow and stern, port and starboard. They cleared the sea chests to the sides and readied the shields in case waves of arrows came from the trees on the riverbank. They quickly stocked up with fresh water at a small creek with no trees nearby and long sight lines.
Despite those precautions, Marcellinus did not think the Shappa Ta’atani would attack them on the open water. The First Cahokian would see them coming literally a mile away. The Concordia could smash through any canoe in its path, and boarding the dragon ship from canoes in midriver would be fraught with difficulty unless Panther’s warriors had overwhelming force. It would be much easier to wait for the Cahokians to land, then assault them by night.
“Napayshni, Dustu: make a weapons inventory. Count swords, spears, bows, arrows. But quietly, so no one onshore would notice.”
Marcellinus looked at his carpenters and rope makers, who immediately looked nervous, as they always did when he paid attention to them. “Whatever the numbers, we’ll need more. Wapi, you others: look at our stores of wood. How many sharpened stakes can you make by nightfall? Do we have sinew?”
He scanned the terrain onshore: meadows and copses, irritatingly flat as always.
“Wanageeska?”
“What is it, Taianita?”
“What can I do? I want to help. To repay you.”
“You don’t need to repay me.” He appraised her. “Can you fight? Are you willing to kill braves of your own people, even men you may know?”
She met his eye. “I am not a warrior. But I will kill. Especially men who try to kill you and your people.”
“Very well. Tell me everything you know about Panther.”
“The animal?”
“The clan chief. I don’t know his real name.” Marcellinus’s mind churned. How would he handle this if he had a whole legion of soldiers under his command? Or even a cohort? How could he scale that down for his meager force of only a few dozen warriors?
He eyed the word slave again. “Can you run fast?”
Taianita looked at him uncertainly, but Marcellinus was already studying the sky and beckoning to Isleifur and Yahto. “And who recalls how high the moon was just after sundown last night?”
They had swords. Twenty spears. A dozen bows. More arrows than a dozen bows could shoot in the duration of any reasonable skirmish. A few clubs and axes.
What they could have used above all else was Roman shields, the rectangular steel-rimmed scuta forty inches tall that they had used in the testudo when they had besieged Woshakee many years before, but those were all back in Cahokia. They did not have a single one.
They would just have to improvise.
—
By noon Marcellinus had explained his plan to everyone. And by midafternoon his crew was giving a convincing impression of being drunk, with a great deal of laughter and tuneless singing. Isleifur took the helm and cheerfully steered the boat in a series of broad curves to the left and right, sometimes taking them completely out of the current to spin in the shallows or scraping them along the branches of a sunken tree. Toward dusk they struck the sail and allowed the boat to drift for a while, lying back and talking noisily of the joys of the Green Corn Ceremony.
As night fell, they pulled themselves ashore at a meadow on the western side of the Mizipi surrounded by trees and sloppily moored the boat. The adults roved into the nearby copses to pull together some dried wood for a big bonfire while the younger members of the crew ran around in a rambunctious mock fight.
After a light meal at dusk, they set about preparing their bedrolls for the night.
—
The scar from the calf wound Marcellinus had received on the Great Mound of Cahokia had chosen this night to itch unbearably. Marcellinus tried to welcome its help in keeping him awake. He could not move to scratch it.
Like Sintikala beside him and the others around them, he lay still, breathing regularly. The fire had burned down an hour earlier, with pots of water sitting forgotten on rocks in the hot embers and unburned sticks still jutting from it.
On Marcellinus’s right, the supine Mahkah faked a brief half snore. A signal. He had seen something.
Marcellinus’s hand closed around the hilt of his second-best sword under the blanket next to him. In the dimness of the moon he saw Sintikala’s eyebrow move once and knew that she was still awake.
He was damned if he could tell which direction the Shappan warriors were coming from. They should have arranged a more comprehensive set of signals…
Then came the first scream, which sounded like Hurit’s, followed by another that could only be from Taianita.
Marcellinus threw aside his blanket and rolled up onto his feet, then hopped. His left leg had chosen the most inopportune time possible to fall asleep. Beside him Sintikala sprang up, jumping closer to the fire to seize a long stout branch with a glowing tip. Mahkah was already up and running.
In the pale glow from the setting first-quarter moon, Marcellinus saw two Shappan war parties converging on them. The larger group came from the south, but the smaller group from the north was nearer. They were so close that it was a good thing he had been lying under his blankets fully armored in his breastpla
te, greaves, and helmet.
Seeing they had lost the element of surprise, the Shappans whooped, raising themselves from their half crouch and running full tilt into the camp of the Cahokians.
The first attackers tripped over the stretched-out sinews that the Cahokians had prepared, tied between low sticks, and half a dozen Shappan braves screamed in pain as they landed on the line of low sharpened stakes that the carpenters had prepared on the boat that afternoon and crawled around jamming into the ground shortly after sunset. The warriors behind leaped over them and began to spear the Cahokian bodies that lay closest to them, shadowy forms that had not moved yet.
Swearing sounded much coarser in the Shappa Ta’atani accent. There were no sleeping bodies under the bedrolls the Shappans were attacking. Closer to the fire Cahokians were still rising to their feet, clubs and fire-heated spears in hand, preparing to counter the Shappan attack.
From the southern group Marcellinus heard Panther snapping out orders but could not tell which shadowy figure the voice came from or what he was saying. Panther was using warrior speech, the language of the Shappan secret societies. Around Marcellinus to the south of the bonfire a dozen Cahokians were forming up, ready for the assault. From off to the west came more screams as the Cahokian girls and women ran pell-mell out of the camp.
Marcellinus allowed himself a wry smile. The screams came from Hurit, Kimimela, Chumanee, Taianita, and Hanska, fleeing westward into the night. He pitied any Shappan braves who were fool enough to chase them.
But a hundred yards to the south he saw at least eight Shappan war parties in their groups of six. These warriors had slowed their charge and were picking their way deliberately across the ground that separated them from the warriors of Cahokia, alert for further traps.
Now they found them: dozens of iron nails in the dirt, twisted and bent so that they would rest on a triangular base with their sharp points upward. Under cover of their earlier games, the younger Cahokians had scattered the caltrops, and now they effortlessly pierced the Shappan moccasins. Some of the men screeched and hopped, pulling out the treacherous nails from the soles of their feet and flinging them away.
Other Shappans raised their bows.
As the arrows began to fly, Marcellinus and Sintikala lifted up the flat square panels of pine decking they had brought ashore from the Concordia and knelt behind them. To their left and right the other Cahokians were doing the same thing. Shappan arrows thwacked harmlessly into the decking.
“Forward!” Marcellinus shouted, and the Cahokians began to advance slowly behind their wooden shields.
His Cahokians, including Sintikala, were all nearby; Marcellinus had not needed to issue his order in such a loud tone for them to hear it. But the order had been a signal to another Cahokian force farther away, and now the battle was joined. From the right a wave of arrows flew into the Shappan flank, and then a second wave. Akecheta and the twelve best archers on the boat, including Dustu and Wapi, had emerged from the copse of trees to the north and were piling arrows into the exposed Shappan flank, their targets well illuminated by the moon.
The screams of the women and girls had ceased abruptly, and now they heard cries in a very different timbre and the clash of weapons. Hanska, Hurit, and the others had turned to face their attackers head on, and at the same time Marcellinus’s second reserve of a half dozen warriors, led by Aelfric and including Napayshni and Isleifur, also had burst out of the trees to attack them from the rear.
Marcellinus almost felt sorry for them. But the largest group of Shappa Ta’atani, led by the Panther clan chief, were almost upon him.
Panther was commanding his men to jump past the nails. The chief was no fool. He had realized the iron caltrops were limited to a dark band of earth that ran to the south of the camp, near the stream. Marcellinus’s people would need to know where they were as well, and placing them in the grass would have reduced their effectiveness.
More arrows came from Akecheta’s archers, and some of Panther’s turned to shoot back at them. But by now Panther had recognized Marcellinus and Sintikala. He roared, and the rest of the Shappa Ta’atani threw aside their bows and charged.
Turning, reaching back, Marcellinus and five other men snatched up pots from the fire and threw them. The water in them was no longer boiling but was hot enough to startle and scald; Panther’s men might instinctively fear it was liquid flame, and indeed several of the nearest Shappan warriors dropped to the ground and rolled, crying out. The others kept coming.
Three Shappan war parties—eighteen warriors in all—had peeled off and were running at Akecheta’s archers, heads down behind their shields, ululating, furious. The five war parties that remained came for Marcellinus and Sintikala.
As Marcellinus and his men had been throwing water, Sintikala and the others had been bracing the deck planking with stout wooden poles. Now the mob of at least thirty Shappan warriors crashed into them. Expecting them to be held up by men and not braced with the weight of the world behind them, several of the Shappan warriors bounced back. If they’d planned to bull the Cahokians backward into their own bonfire by brute force, they were sadly disappointed.
The squares of planking had become field fortifications: four of them side by side, with four crew members behind each one. Two Cahokians held firm and aimed blows over the top of each makeshift shield while the other two stood in the gaps, hacking at the attacking Shappans. Beside Marcellinus, Sintikala was fighting with her ax in one hand and her stout fire-hardened branch in the other; Marcellinus was half aware of the screams of the Shappan warriors as she jabbed the smoldering tip into their stomachs and abdomens below the wooden armor that each warrior wore and then clouted them in the neck and shoulders with the ax.
This was the first time Marcellinus had seen Sintikala fight in earnest. Her strength and anger were impressive. In the moments he had left for conscious thought, he was grateful he had never had to fight her himself.
Those rational moments were few and far between now as the battle rage swept him, as it always did in moments of extremity. Banished by Avenaka? Betrayed by Son of the Sun and now attacked in a night ambush by a much larger force? He let the fury fill him, that almost berserker strength, let it drive him forward and guide his arm.
As if the rage had sharpened his senses, he now saw Panther clearly, twenty feet to his left. The warrior chief had taken position at the edge of his battle formation as centurions and other field leaders often did and was in bitter hand-to-hand combat with—who was it, Yahto?
Men were running in behind Marcellinus now; with a fractured glance he saw with relief that they were Cahokians who had polished off the smaller Shappan group that had come in from the north. The trip wires and sharpened stakes on that side of the camp had done their work well. Six men, seven…
No time to calculate the odds, but the Cahokians were still outnumbered. Only the surprise assaults by Akecheta’s archers, the distraction of the fleeing women, and the use of the deck planking as a makeshift defense had kept them alive this long.
Cahokians were falling now, overwhelmed by the superior odds. Marcellinus had to go for the Shappan leader. He had to take Panther out and hope that the resulting loss of morale would turn the tide in his favor.
He crashed through two Shappan warriors, sending them sprawling. Yahto was fighting valiantly but being pushed back by Panther’s greater weight and reach. Now he slipped, almost tumbling into the fire. Panther leaped forward and swung a vicious blow with his club. Yahto spun in the air and crashed heavily to the ground.
Marcellinus almost managed to slay Panther then and there, roaring in from the Shappan warrior’s left. Panther leaped and swung again, his chert-studded club rising toward Marcellinus’s crotch.
The Roman jumped left and kicked at the campfire. Sparks and embers sprayed into the air around Panther.
It did not stop him. The Shappan clan chief was fast, whirling and snarling like his namesake.
Marcellinus had no time to
raise his sword in a parry, and Panther’s long club would have smashed it away anyhow. He had to drop, fall sideways away from it, roll on the ground. It was about the most dangerous thing he could have done, but the alternative was to accept a crushing blow or fall into the glowing fire.
Panther lunged. Marcellinus swung. The club glanced painfully off Marcellinus’s shoulder. His gladius slammed into solid wood and stuck fast. Marcellinus had crashed into the upright deck planking.
The planking was held up by a pilum. Marcellinus reached around behind him, pulling a muscle in his shoulder, and his forearm met the spear. Rising to his knees, he shoved at the deck planking, and it fell away.
He grasped the heavy spear and yanked it out of the soil with both hands. He barely had time to raise it quarterstaff style before Panther’s brutal club swung down again.
Parrying the blow almost wrenched Marcellinus’s shoulders from their sockets. The pilum bent in the middle. Before Panther could pull the club away, Marcellinus twisted, pushing up with his stronger right leg, forcing the club to the left.
If the chief had released his hold on the club immediately and barreled into Marcellinus, he might have won the day. But instead he stepped back, jerking at the club to free it, and Marcellinus rushed forward in a barely controlled attack.
Marcellinus’s helmet slammed into Panther’s jaw. Releasing the bent pilum, Marcellinus reached for the chief’s throat, but his hands slipped on the man’s sweat, and instead he went for Panther’s eyes.
Panther dropped the club, swung his fists, missed. Marcellinus grabbed the chief’s hair with one hand and forced the other fist back under Panther’s chin.
It was the first time he had ever tried to break a man’s neck with his bare hands. It was harder than he had expected. Meanwhile Panther was kneeing him and reaching for the dagger in his belt.
If Panther got that dagger, Marcellinus would be gutted like a fish. He tugged backward with all his weight, pulling the other warrior off balance.
They landed in the fire, kicking up ash and smoldering sticks. Marcellinus still clung to Panther, twisting and squeezing with all the strength he could muster.