by Alan Smale
She knew Marcellinus was there. He was sure of it. He had not known she flew by night—it seemed ridiculously dangerous—but she must have waited to land until she saw Tahtay depart.
Well, two could play at this night game. Marcellinus kept absolutely still and used all his concentration to try to sense where she was.
It was hopeless. He might have had bandages over his ears and eyes for all he could tell of her whereabouts.
The only credit he could take was that when her fingers grazed his arms, he did not lurch away in shock again.
He reached out blindly and found her. His fingertips coaxed her closer.
Softly, slowly, Sisika drifted into his arms.
Her hands slid up his arms to his shoulders and rested there. His fingers caressed the back of her flying tunic, coming to rest at her waist.
She lifted her right hand. Very gently, she touched his cheek. He could hear her breathing, smell the rich leather she wore and the intoxicating aroma of her skin. He had the feeling she was gazing into his eyes, but he could not see her face at all, not even the outline of her.
He leaned forward and down. His lips met the hard leather of her flying mask.
She giggled quietly. It was an oddly intimate sound that he had not heard from her before. Her hand slid behind his head, tugging him forward. He ducked lower and found the soft skin of her neck. He nuzzled her, kissed it, slid his lips down until they met the top of her tunic.
Lifting his hands from her waist, he felt for her mask, eased it up and away from her face, and found her lips with his fingers. She kissed them, an echo of the many times in the past he had kissed hers when she had placed them over his mouth to stop him from speaking. She squeezed his hand, kissed his fingers again, and for an instant he felt her tongue flicker across his knuckle, tasting him.
Once more he leaned forward. Their lips met. Her mouth opened. They melted into each other, gentle but purposeful. She pulled him in even closer, stroking his cheek. Her tongue felt like fire in his mouth, the taste and smell of her maddening him with their intensity. Yet he savored those long moments in the dark, their hands upon each other, close and warm, with wings over their heads and the solidity of the Great Mound of Cahokia beneath their feet.
He ran his hands down her sides again, over the supple leather. They both breathed more deeply now. Marcellinus swayed, for a moment unsure of his balance in the all-consuming dark, but she held him still. Her lips slipped away, and she laughed again, a young, delighted sound, as if she had no cares in the world and was thinking of nothing but him.
Now she kissed his shoulders and his chest. He caressed her bare arms. Her hand slid down his arm to his wrist, and their fingers twined.
Her lips found the scar on his arm where he had sworn an oath to her in blood years before, when they had faced imminent peril in Iroqua territory. She lingered there, exploring the scar with her tongue. It felt like a benediction, an affirmation, a rededication.
Marcellinus tilted his head back and felt the whisper of the air from the Hawks against his temples. For a moment there were no wars, no conflicted allegiances. Time stood still, and his life was very simple.
He found the ties that kept her tunic tight around her body and loosened them. His hands slid up under the leather, gliding across the warm skin beneath. He found scars and healed abrasions, the memories of bad landings and injuries sustained in fighting. With a shock that felt like lightning her hands were suddenly inside his tunic, too, rubbing up and across his stomach and chest and around to his back, tracing the shapes of his healed wounds, probing and kneading. As if they were medicus and healer as well as soldier and warrior, each of them traced the other’s violent history, blessing it, forgiving it. Marcellinus was gasping now with the intensity of the sensations that coursed through him; Sisika was silent except for her steady deep breathing. He had the impression she was concentrating intently, memorizing every detail of him.
His hands continued on their journey of discovery. Just once, greatly daring, he ran his fingers around the curve of her breast. She sighed gently, leaning into the caress.
Then her arms went around him, and she gripped him tightly and stopped moving.
Still she had said nothing, but her meaning was clear. Reluctantly, Marcellinus slipped his hands out from beneath her tunic and rested them on her shoulders. Her forehead rested against his chest. He buried his face in her hair and breathed deeply.
As quietly as he could whisper the words and still be heard, he murmured: “I love you, Sisika.”
Her lips moved against his chest and her fingers against the skin of his arm: the same words, mouthed and in the hand-talk. I love you, Gaius.
He felt light-headed, a little dizzy. “Never leave me.”
I am always with you. Always.
Sintikala tilted her head back. “But I cannot be, Gaius.”
He kissed her cheek, her neck. “I want to stay with you.”
“But you are leaving Cahokia again. Your Imperator tells you to go.”
“I must. For a while.”
“To go where I cannot be with you.” She released him, stepped away. Marcellinus felt bereft at the loss of her; it was all he could do not to lunge forward and seize her again. “I do not want to be not there for you, Gaius. In the wrong place.” Her voice was heavy with sorrow.
She left the rest unsaid, but Marcellinus heard it anyway, the words she had spoken long ago after Great Sun Man had met his doom: When my husband was killed, when he needed me most, I was not with him, I was not there. Today-now, once again I was in the wrong place. Not there. It is my life, to never be there. To fail. And then men die.
She swallowed. “I cannot be there for you. You go alone.”
“I will come back to you.”
She said nothing. He could still hear her breathing, and so he knew she had not slipped away. “Sisika? Even while I am gone…I will always be with you, too. Because I love you more than my life. If you could see into my eyes…”
“I do not need to see your eyes, Gaius. Not tonight.” She took his hand, placed it over her heart. “Just come back to me.” Her voice was husky now. “Try hard.”
“I will,” he said.
“And I will fly. Always in the air. Always looking for you.”
He thought it was over. Expected her to back away, perhaps to disappear from the longhouse as effortlessly as Tahtay, but she did not. She stood still for several long minutes while Marcellinus treasured her nearness and tried to commit every detail of the feel of her to his memory for the long months ahead.
But then she stepped forward again, her strong body thumping firmly into his. He grabbed her like a drowning man. Their arms went around each other, and their lips met once more.
Again, time and war went away.
It was as much as they could do to get Kanuna to step aboard the Minerva. It was not the quinquereme itself that the elder feared, although the warship seemed daunting even to Marcellinus. It was more the prospect of sharing it with more than a hundred horses and mules.
Enopay, of course, was clambering around the decks with the gleeful expression that another boy might wear on walking into a golden palace and being told its glittering contents were his to keep. Enopay had adored the Concordia, and that was merely a Norse dragon ship. The Minerva was much more substantial, and Enopay had gone aboard shortly after dawn, well before the rest of the Cahokians, having begged the indulgence of the ship’s master. He had explored every nook and cranny and stepped off the galley only to help coax his grandfather up the gangplank.
“And so there are two hundred and seventy men who row,” the boy said importantly. “In the lowest layer of the hull there are twenty-three men on each side, paddling backward with the lowest row of oars you see sticking out. There is then a middle layer of rowers and a top layer. On the middle layer sit fifty-six men on each side, two to an oar, for those oars are much larger. And the top is the same: fifty-six more men and twenty-eight more oars.”
“Much worse,” Marcellinus said. “For down there all must row for hours at a time, and up here the air is fresh. Well,” he said, glancing at the mules, “somewhat more fresh.”
The quinquereme seemed overloaded. Four turmae of cavalrymen and their mounts took up a lot of deck space, and it was a high deck. “It will not tip over?” Kanuna said anxiously.
“Of course not,” Enopay said with the scorn of the young.
“Probably not,” Marcellinus amended. In fact, adding the expeditionary force to the oarsmen, the regular deck crew, and the marines of the Sixth Ferrata who would guard the vessel on its trip back east was stretching the Minerva to capacity. The ship’s master would have to balance the boat carefully, and the masters of horse would have to take pains to ensure that the beasts stayed where they were put.
For the moment he had more immediate worries. Once loading was completed and the galley was under way, Marcellinus arrived on the poop deck of the Minerva to be greeted by none other than Calidius Verus, Praetor of the Sixth, the general who had led the storming and destruction of Ocatan.
If Marcellinus was irritated by Lucius Agrippa’s insufferable attitude, that was nothing compared with his instant loathing for Praetor Calidius Verus. Portly and red-faced, Verus wore an air of being permanently nauseated by the “barbarians” around him. Marcellinus had difficulty remaining tactful even during the introductions. For his part, Verus made no reference to the lost 33rd Legion, Ocatan, or Marcellinus’s long sojourn in Nova Hesperia but greeted him in a strangely familiar way as if they were old friends who had been out of each other’s sight for only a short while.
Once the initial pleasantries were over, with Marcellinus wearing his forced smile like a rictus, Verus clasped his hands behind him and strode forward. “As instructed, I have two more guides and interpreters for you in addition to your own Taianita. I believe you are used to your word slaves coming in threes?”
Marcellinus did not respond. It would not have occurred to him in recent years to refer to Tahtay, Kimimela, and Enopay as word slaves.
Calidius Verus smiled thinly. “The first is an Iroqua youth who claims he once owed you his life.”
Marcellinus’s heart sank, his mouth dropping open at the same time. “Pezi is here?”
Verus nodded. “Truth be told, I begrudge his assignment to you. Young Pezi has been extremely helpful in our dealings with the Iroqua. He picked up his Latin wickedly fast, and his quick thinking a time or two has saved a great deal of bloodshed.”
“If it was his blood at risk, then I am scarcely surprised.”
Verus shrugged. “These redskins all place undue value on their own dirty hides. And Pezi is very candid about exposing the deceit of his people. Anyway, he speaks the jabber of the Handies, and so it appears I must yield him to you for the time being. Try not to damage him.”
Marcellinus bit his tongue and moved on. “Who else?”
Verus pointed. “Her. The young pussycat standing by the rail with the stick up her rear end is the Chitimachan. It’s the only name she’ll answer to. No idea what her real name is and don’t much care. Turns out she was stolen from the People of the Hand as a youngster and forcibly married into the Chitimachans, who run the Market of the Mud. Then, to add insult to injury, her trader husband used to take her with him back and forth to the southwest. So she’s to be your guide.”
There was certainly nothing wrong with the Chitimachan’s hearing; as soon as Verus spoke her name, the young Hesperian on the deck below turned to gaze up at Marcellinus, her expression dour. Nonetheless, she was attractive and slender, and Marcellinus was sure that the Chitimachan’s time among Romans had not gone easily for her.
“Belongs to one of the oddest of these native pagan cults. Babbles in tongues at night when she sleeps, but don’t be alarmed: she translates fast and fluently by day. Knows the trail and the lingos of many of the tribes along the shore of the Mare Solis. If matters go awry and you have to come back along the coast, she knows the territory like the back of her…Well.”
The Chitimachan was still staring at Marcellinus, unsmiling and severe. Her gaze seemed to bore deep into him, and yet again in Nova Hesperia, Marcellinus had the disconcerting impression that the Chitimachan knew much more about him than he did about her.
He had expected to be guided by Norse or Roman scouts or perhaps a grizzled old Hesperian backwoodsman. To learn that their expedition was in the hands of a guide as young and daunting as the Chitimachan gave him pause.
Verus was regarding him, perhaps amused by his silence. “Thank you,” Marcellinus said, stuck for something to say.
“Gaius Marcellinus. Sir…” Verus suddenly looked somber. “By all accounts, you and I once had a friend in common. A friend who spoke of you so well that I almost feel that we are comrades in arms and that some of the peculiarities of your past few years must be forgiven you. My apologies, but I wonder if I might prevail upon you to open a wound that might be somewhat painful.”
The Praetor’s patrician manners and circuitous way of speaking were already grating on Marcellinus. He was happy indeed that he would have to endure Calidius Verus for only a few hundred miles of river travel and not the trek across the Grass that would follow it. He forced himself to concentrate. “Sorry, what wound?”
“I speak of your First Tribune, back when you had the honor of commanding the 33rd Hesperian Legion.”
Marcellinus blinked and raised his gaze to look back at the Great Mound, the Sky Lanterns above it, and the traces of the river bluffs visible beyond it to the east, now all falling behind them as the warship battled the Mizipi current upriver. “Ah. Corbulo. Of course.”
Verus shuffled his feet. “Lucius Domitius Corbulo was a good man and an excellent officer. We served together in Germania, he and I, and a more courageous soldier or better dining companion I never had the pleasure of meeting.”
“Corbulo had many fine qualities,” Marcellinus said.
“We served together. Bloodied our gladii in many a battle and wenched together in many dark alleyways afterward.” Verus stood shoulder to shoulder with Marcellinus now, gazing out over Cahokia but obviously seeing another time and place entirely. “We lost touch when he was sent east to Sindh. I had always planned to bring him on as my own First Tribune when the Sixth was redeployed to guard against the Mongol incursions, but you’d snapped him up for the Hesperian in the meantime, and who can blame you? I’m glad you had such a man by your side.”
“Quite.” Marcellinus swallowed.
“When I heard the 33rd had perished, my first thought was for Corbulo. Such a waste.”
Did Calidius Verus have a tear in his eye? Marcellinus tactfully looked away. “A waste indeed.”
“Gaius Marcellinus, if you would…How did my old friend meet his end? Did he die well?”
Corbulo had found Marcellinus wanting as a Praetor and had led an attempted mutiny against him before the battle with Cahokia. He might even have instigated an earlier attempt on Marcellinus’s life in castra during the long trek across Nova Hesperia.
In turn, Marcellinus had slain him.
Would Verus want to hear that his good friend had perished at Marcellinus’s hand? If Marcellinus revealed this bald truth, what might Verus do?
“Corbulo died fighting, as he would have wished. He was always a fierce soldier and a cunning strategist. He…brooked no retreat.”
Verus nodded. “You were close by when it happened?”
“I was, sir. It happened not far from here, just to the south of Cahokia. But I am afraid I can tell you no more.”
Marcellinus stared stoically at the trees across the river, waiting for the inevitable next question. He felt Verus’s long gaze upon him.
“Very well,” Verus said eventually. “I thank you for your candor.”
Th
e Praetor patted Marcellinus on the arm, the fleeting touch of a comrade in sorrow, and walked away across the deck back to the helmsman. Marcellinus frowned out at the waters and glanced down at the ranks of oars beneath him, moving back and forth in perfect synchronization. And finally, unwillingly, he glanced back along the deck.
Maybe it was best to get all his unpleasant introductions over at once.
—
The Chitimachan was young and wiry and wore her hair in three braids. Perhaps twenty-five winters of age, she sat with her back straight and her hands clasped. Odd swirling tattoos lined her arms and shoulders, and she wore a fur tunic despite the moistness of the day. After all, where she had grown up it was even hotter. Marcellinus greeted her in Cahokian, and she responded in flawless Latin while examining him carefully from top to toe.
Her fellow translator had come back to join them and now bowed to Marcellinus in the Roman fashion. “Wanageeska. This is a pleasant surprise.”
The youth was taller and broader in the shoulder and met his eye with a boldness rarely shown by the boy he used to be. “Surprise?” Marcellinus said. “You did not know you were assigned to me?”
“Guide a squadron of Roman horse to the People of the Hand,” Pezi said in Latin, and then reverted to Cahokian. “That is all I was told. But I am happy to serve a man I already know to be brave and resourceful. Perhaps I may even return alive from the desert of the madmen.”
It was somewhat galling to discover that the friendlier of his new interpreters was a boy he despised. “Pezi, the last time I saw you, beneath an Iroqua stage, you sneered at me and threatened me.”
Pezi nodded, not embarrassed. “You sent me to the Iroqua. Once among them, I had to serve them. They ordered me to interrogate you. How would I have fared if I had refused, if they had thought I was your spy?”
Calidius Verus was watching them from the rear deck. Marcellinus bit back a sharp retort. “I merely sent you with a message.”