by Alan Smale
But Marcellinus had no time to look, for in front of them the Cherokee had dropped all pretenses and were charging. Badly outnumbered, Marcellinus and his four warriors nonetheless stepped forward to meet them.
Marcellinus was no knife fighter and no bar brawler, either, and barely missed being eviscerated in the first moment of battle. In twisting away from the Cherokee who assailed him, he stepped backward, tripped, and crashed painfully back over the port shield wall into the hull of the longship. The warrior jumped onto the thwart beside him and kicked at his head; Marcellinus caught the blow on his forearm.
A stone flew into the Cherokee’s cheek: Kimimela, defending her father from a distance. Then, of all things, an arrow flashed past a few inches in front of Marcellinus’s face and buried itself in the man’s thigh.
Marcellinus jumped up. One of the attackers had his hands around Isleifur Bjarnason’s throat but quickly released the Norseman when Marcellinus swung a punch at him. Marcellinus brought the hilt of his gladius down and broke the man’s nose, then dropped the sword altogether to grab his assailant and shove him into the Cherokee behind him. Both went over the side of the ship into the water.
A fast glimpse told Marcellinus that the Cahokians had the edge in the fight but also that the lead vessel of the People of the Sun had cast off and was headed across the narrow channel toward them.
Two more arrows in quick succession from Sintikala took care of two more attackers. For a woman who typically shot her enemies while piloting a Hawk, finding her target on a swaying longship was clearly child’s play. Beside her Kimimela was slinging stones into the fray with more enthusiasm than accuracy. Aelfric and Mahkah, fighting side by side, were battering men with a ferocity Marcellinus had rarely seen in them.
Now he saw why. Hurit was down and bleeding, and Dustu had been rammed back into the decking with a man on top of him—a man whose deerskin hood had been knocked aside to show that he wore no braids, and no tattoos either.
Marcellinus gaped in astonishment, blinking as the shock of it hit him.
Then he grabbed up an oar from the deck beside him and threw it like a javelin. It twisted in the air but struck the man a hard blow on the shoulder. Taking advantage of the distraction, Akecheta slammed his fist into the man’s temple, and he crashed down into the hull.
In his best Praetor voice, the one that had boomed over many battlefields, Marcellinus shouted in Latin: “Romans! Surrender or die!”
“Centurion! Order your men to stand down. First Cahokian! Any Roman who surrenders is not to be harmed further.”
Marcellinus strode down the center of the longship, gladius in hand, shouting his orders again in Cahokian, but already his effect on the fight was clear. Heads turned. Men stood, raising their hands cautiously. Cahokians stepped back.
One of the attackers—not, in fact, the one Marcellinus had taken for their leader but a broad-shouldered man who shoved his hood aside to reveal equally close-cropped hair—rapped out orders in a terse Hispanian accent. “Century! Break for orders. Weapons down, hands down, now! Damnation, Unega; tell the Cherokees to give it up.”
One of the Cherokee snapped out an order in a brisk soprano. Marcellinus did a double take. He had thought all the Cherokee warriors were men. The other braves froze in place as she spoke.
“Every man not on his knees on the count of three is dead,” Marcellinus said. “Yes, Unega, you, too. And centurion, order your allies to stand clear. One. Two.”
Half the attackers were already down. Unega called out again, and the Cherokee knelt with bad grace.
“Allies?” The centurion looked behind him. The Yokot’an Maya had stopped rowing now, and their ship was coasting up to the Concordia, not twenty feet distant. “Them? The Sunners are no friends of ours.”
The leader in the tall headdress at the prow of the Maya ship was hand-talking. Marcellinus did not take his eye off the centurion.
“They ask if we need help,” said Chumanee. “They come to assist us against the outlanders. They would be happy to take them and…kill them for us.”
All Cahokian eyes swiveled to look at the Romans.
“Make friends easily, do you?” Aelfric asked.
“Thank them and tell them we have it under control,” Marcellinus said.
Isleifur cleared his throat. “Offer them some beer tomorrow night? We seafaring types should stick together. A good chance to talk with them.”
Marcellinus looked at Sintikala. “Yes,” she said, and began making the hand-talk herself. The Maya officers nodded, and the Yokot’an longboat began to turn away.
“Name and legion, soldier,” Marcellinus said crisply. “Quickly now.”
The man faced forward at attention. “Centurion Manius Ifer, Third Century, Fifth Cohort, Legio VI Ferrata, Praetor Calidius Verus commanding. Sir.”
Marcellinus tried to keep his expression rigid, but inside his thoughts were churning.
He had imagined this moment countless times over the last five years. He had not envisaged anything like this.
Romans, not at Chesapica or Vinlandia, not marching in from the east, but here in the far south of the Mizipi Delta. Not a crisp steel-armored legion in battle order but a stealthy squad of pirates in Hesperian disguise.
Marcellinus did not know Calidius Verus, but every Roman soldier had heard of the Sixth Ironclads. “Where are you stationed?”
“Not here.” Ifer looked around him, and a cloud crossed his face. Ten of his Romans and eight Cherokee were dead. “Some help for my wounded, sir? And yours?”
“There could be more of them,” Isleifur said in Cahokian. “Ifer could be playing for time. We need to move, get away from shore, now. Let’s go.”
Sintikala gave curt orders to the crew. The Romans watched her nervously. They might not understand her brisk Cahokian, but her authoritative tone left no doubt that she was one of the leaders on the longship.
“You men sit nice and still now,” said Aelfric, “and we’ll do our level best to stop her from killing you.”
Half of Akecheta’s men had been scanning the shore with bows raised ever since Ifer’s Romans had stood down in defeat. Marcellinus doubted such a small group would have ambushed them in such a way if they’d had more men available; it would have been much easier to overrun them with the weight of numbers. Nonetheless, the altercation had drawn attention from the market folk. A little distance could not hurt, and night was not so far away. He looked at Ifer and said in Latin: “We’ll head out to one of the islands for some privacy. Your men can row us there.”
—
They ran the Concordia aground on a sandbank two miles upriver and split the Roman soldiers and Cherokee warriors into manageable groups to guard them. Four Cahokians were dead, members of the First Cahokian whom Marcellinus did not know well. Hurit, still bleeding from a cut to her head, was sitting in the bow with Dustu holding her. Chumanee had patched up the wounds sustained by the Cahokians and was working on the Romans. Two had broken arms, which she bound up as best she could. Three more had Sintikala’s arrows in their legs and shoulders, and several were unconscious. Hanska and Mikasi appointed themselves Chumanee’s honor guard to make sure no one tried to grab her and hold her hostage, but it was clear that no Roman had anything other than cooperation in mind now.
Ifer sat cross-legged on the sandbank with his hands bound. Akecheta stood over him with a gladius. Sintikala squatted nearby, her face furious, with Kimimela beside her to translate.
Ideally Marcellinus would have talked to the centurion alone, Roman to Roman, but it was clear Sintikala could not be excluded. “Why did you attack us?”
Ifer gestured at the Concordia. “Roman property, isn’t it? A dragon ship in native hands? Best take it back, we thought. Ideally we’d have waited for a better time, but for all we knew you might head out immediately. We couldn’t take the chance.”
Marcellinus nodded. “You were about to tell me where the Legio VI Ferrata was stationed.”
The cen
turion considered. “Am I addressing the Praetor of the lost 33rd Hesperian?”
“You are. I am Gaius Publius Marcellinus.”
“A pleasure to meet you, sir,” said Ifer, grim-faced. “And who else?”
Marcellinus couldn’t think of a reason not to answer. “Sintikala, chieftain and daughter of chieftain of Cahokia. Aelfric, formerly a tribune of the 33rd. Isleifur Bjarnason, scout. Akecheta…warrior of Cahokia.”
Aelfric smirked at that, but Marcellinus was not about to complicate things by announcing that as far as he was concerned, Akecheta also held the rank of centurion.
Marcellinus sat. “Ifer, I’ll be candid with you if you will do me the same honor.”
“And what of my men, sir?” Ifer said bluntly. “Why tell you anything if you’ll just slit their throats and drop them in the river anyway?”
“We will slit nobody’s throat,” Marcellinus said.
“So you’ll free us?”
Sintikala shot Marcellinus a vicious look, but he was hardly about to slay a few dozen men in cold blood just to placate her. “We will not harm you further if you cooperate. Whether we release you is still to be decided.”
“Are there more of you? Of the 33rd?”
Marcellinus grinned. He could see something of Pollius Scapax in the gritty resolve of this centurion, and in that moment he missed Roma and the tough, no-nonsense men of his legion. “We’ll discuss that later. Now, where is the Sixth Ferrata?”
Ifer stared hard into his eyes and then shrugged. “All over the place.”
“Come on, Ifer. Tell me or I’ll walk away and leave you to Sintikala.”
Ifer did not have to think about it for long. He began to draw in the sand with a finger. “This is north. Here’s us, where the big river spills into the sea. Here’s the eastern coast of Nova Hesperia.” He paused. “You know the lay of the land around these parts already, yes?”
“Assume I don’t.”
“Very well, sir. The coast continues downward in a long spit of land many days’ sail long, a gigantic…peninsula, I suppose, marking the eastward edge of the big gulf we’re on the edge of now. The coast does something like this. The gulf curves around, and the Sunners are from way down here, on the southern side of it.”
Marcellinus affected a confident lack of interest, but he was experiencing the same feeling he’d had when Sintikala had shown him her giant map of northeastern Nova Hesperia. Such a huge continent. And now, against all expectations, the Romans were opening up the southeast.
“And the Sixth?”
“The Sixth Ironclads have established two fortresses. Our first is here, at the end of the peninsula. The main one is halfway around the coastline between there and where we sit now.”
“Gods,” Marcellinus said involuntarily.
Aelfric’s eyes narrowed. “Really? News does travel in this land, soldier. Why isn’t this the talk of the market?”
“Roma can travel softly if it pleases. We set up in sparsely populated areas. Didn’t take slaves. Longships and quinqueremes have been up and down the east coast for the past couple of years. The Norsemen helped us make friends with the Cherokee, and they’ve been invaluable. In return, we may have helped them settle a local dispute or two with their neighbors.”
“Exploratory forces,” said Marcellinus. “Small, stealthy groups, blending in. No fuss.”
Aelfric grunted and stretched out his legs. “Hadrianus has gotten smarter since our day.”
“You made him smarter,” Ifer said. “Losing a legion so completely that it takes him a year or more to even find out how, that’ll get Hadrianus’s attention every time.”
There was an uncomfortable silence, broken only by Kimimela quietly translating for Sintikala and Akecheta. Marcellinus looked down at the sand.
“I meant no disrespect,” said Ifer. “This country’s a hard nut to crack. I know it. Praetor Verus knows it. Hadrianus, too. Pity we had to find out the way we did.”
“And how long have you been here?”
“Me personally? Over a year,” Ifer said.
Marcellinus’s jaw dropped. He glanced over at Aelfric, who looked as startled as he did.
He stood and stretched, wiping sweat from his forehead. “All right. Let’s go back five years and begin again from there.”
—
Hadrianus had gotten off to a quicker start than Marcellinus had dared imagine. A few dozen survivors from Marcellinus’s garrison at the Chesapica had escaped the Iroqua assault in a single longship and had made it as far as Vinlandia before the winter closed in and made sea travel too dangerous. The next spring they had sailed on to Graenlandia and then to the coast of Caledonia, where they had made contact with the Legio XVI Flavia and been whisked south to Roma.
By the end of the second year, while Marcellinus had been traveling to Ocatan and developing the Sky Lantern, Hadrianus had already suspected the loss of the 33rd Hesperian and had dispatched a small fleet of Norse ships to probe the eastern seaboard of Nova Hesperia further to gather more intelligence. From traders and scouts they had confirmed the destruction of the 33rd. During the third year the Norse had mapped the coast, the southern peninsula, and the great gulf beyond.
Meanwhile, the Legio VI Ferrata had been pulled back from peacekeeping duties in Syria and Arabia to train for their new mission. Hadrianus had chosen wisely this time: the Sixth Ironclads were fierce and battle-hardened, having been dealing with insurrection from the shahs and mullahs for some time. And there, too, as Marcellinus now remembered, separate cohorts and smaller units of the Sixth were well known for their ability to act independently.
The first half of the Sixth had sailed for Nova Hesperia in the middle of the third year, the summer Cahokia had been sacked by the Iroqua. Well before Marcellinus had set off on his trip to make peace with the Haudenosaunee, a crack Roman legion had been setting stakes and building its fortress among the tribes of the Calusa at the foot of the Hesperian peninsula, far to the south.
It was a sobering thought. And all Marcellinus’s careful preparations—the lines of signal fires, the letters in Latin for the Powhatani and other Algon-Quian tribes of the coast—appeared to have been circumvented quite by chance.
Ifer had arrived with the second half of the Sixth and helped construct the second fortress. Even before that fortress was finished, Calidius Verus had begun sending out his forces to explore the territory.
“And what ships does the Sixth Ferrata have?”
“Big transports, quinqueremes, longships. Little Norse knarrs to ferry cargo around.”
“How many quinqueremes?”
“Couldn’t say, sir.” Ifer held his gaze.
Marcellinus nodded. Fair enough. He wouldn’t have answered a question from Ifer about the details of Cahokian military strength, either.
“But you came equipped for river travel,” Aelfric said. “Because those quinqueremes must roll like a bear on the open Atlanticus, and you wouldn’t have brought ’em here otherwise.”
“I suppose,” said Ifer. “I came on a big transport myself, and those things roll like holy Hades.”
“I remember,” Marcellinus said.
Through the inland travel of small expeditions like Ifer’s over the last year, the Sixth Ironclads of Calidius Verus—and thus Roma—had learned that the occasional trinkets of Hesperian gold came by way of the Yokot’an Maya and their sister peoples. They knew that the mighty Mizipi River that spilled out into the gulf was a thousand miles long or longer and reached up through the heart of the mound-builder culture. And because cities like Cahokia and Shappa Ta’atan were renowned all up and down the Great River, the Romans knew of them, too.
They knew that Cahokia was the mound-builder city that had annihilated the 33rd Hesperian. And they knew that the Cahokians had done it with flying machines and liquid fire.
What Calidius Verus did not know, at least as far as Ifer was aware, was that Marcellinus himself had survived.
Sintikala paced, anger still dark
ening her face. Kimimela came and stood by Marcellinus, staring at Manius Ifer with a troubled expression she did not try to hide. Ifer glanced at her and Marcellinus and back at the Concordia, where the Cahokians and his Romans sat patiently in the late sun with their hands on their heads, guarded by the First Cahokian with swords drawn. “Well? Have I said enough to buy my men’s lives?”
“You have,” said Marcellinus.
“And what of your story, Praetor?” Ifer asked idly. “A tale for a tale. How did you live? How did you manage to get yourself in so good with these Cahokians?”
“No.” Sintikala strode forward, evidently understanding enough Latin to follow the conversation. “That story we will not tell.”
Ifer looked at Kimimela, but she did not translate for him.
“We kill him,” Sintikala said. “We kill this man and all the rest of them. We leave them here dead on the sand, and we sail for Cahokia. Today.”
Marcellinus looked at Ifer and then at Sintikala. Keeping his face straight and speaking Cahokian, he said, “Kill them? Why?”
“You heard him. His chieftain does not yet know that you live. In time, the Romans will come to revenge themselves on Cahokia for your lost legion. For now, they are more interested in the gold of the People of the Sun. But once they know you are alive, they will stop at nothing to get you.”
“Divert a whole legion on my account?”
“Once they learn you are in Cahokia, they will set out tomorrow with no delay.”
Aelfric shook his head. “They might send an envoy. Not an army.”
“They’ll find out anyway,” Marcellinus said. “I’m not invisible. It’s surprising they haven’t heard already. They just need to hear the right story, ask the right question.”
“But the later they know it, the better. We must prepare.”
Marcellinus looked around him. “Anybody else want to massacre a few dozen unarmed men?”
Sintikala looked venomous. “You were happy enough to slay Shappans. You would spare Romans just because they are like you?”