by Alan Smale
Well east of the mountains, on rising ground of growing desert aridity, the Kicka River descended into a deep canyon. Guided by the Chitimachan, the expedition turned south, striking out across the high plains to converge gradually with the foothills of the Great Mountains where there were frequent streams of clear water. Although it was now nearing the end of November by the Roman reckoning and the Beaver Moon by the Cahokian, the daytime temperatures were rising again as they penetrated deeper into the southwest.
By Enopay’s best guess—and by now even Sextus Bassus gave Enopay’s estimates equal weight with his own—the expeditionary force was now a full eight hundred miles from the confluence where they had left the Minerva and thus eleven hundred miles from Cahokia.
“How much farther to the People of the Hand, Chitimachan?”
As usual, she stared at him as if he were a beetle before replying. “Not far. Two weeks, perhaps. Maybe less to the wide road.”
This was new. “The wide road?”
“Perhaps ten nights,” she said. “Although the Hand are all around us even now, and we do not see them. They will keep their distance, but we will see their marks on the rocks, feel their breath in our hair. They will send word ahead. They will be expecting us.”
Bassus nodded. “Good.” At Marcellinus’s expression he grinned wryly. “Well, we wouldn’t want to surprise them, would we?”
“Watch for snakes now,” the guide added. “On the rocks. Very poisonous. If you hear a rattle, a clatter, like a gourd? Jump away. Keep your four-legs away from them, too; I see no reason why the snakes would not bite them as readily as us.”
“Rattling snakes?” Shaking his head, Bassus spurred his horse, peeling off to take the message back to his men.
Marcellinus grunted. Snakes? Hidden warriors of the Hand? This wasn’t getting any better. Not at all.
As Marcellinus climbed the ladder up through the hatchway and back into the world, the bright desert sunlight stabbed his eyes, blinding him. An unseen hand grabbed his arm and guided him up onto terra firma.
His head pounded from the drums. He reeked of smoke. Yet he tried to keep his expression composed and beatific as if he had learned great things, been touched by the sublime.
He turned to help Kanuna, but the Cahokian elder had already ascended from the bowels of the earth to stand blinking by his side. The Chitimachan was clambering out behind him, stepping off the rude ladder and gingerly testing the ground beneath her feet as if surprised to find it there. The look of reverence on the translator’s face, at least, was not faked; she had been so captivated by the underground ceremony that she had largely failed to translate for Marcellinus what was going on.
It had not mattered much. The mythology of the People of the Hand was as transparent to Marcellinus as the folklore of Red Horn and the Long-Nosed God back in Cahokia, which was to say, not at all. The intervals of flute playing he had, however, enjoyed. Despite his tin ear, Yupkoyvi flutes seemed more melodious than the Mizipian music he had been forced to endure in Cahokia, Ocatan, and Shappa Ta’atan.
Sweat already drenched him, and the sun on his sore neck burned like a blade. “This is our punishment for complaining about Cahokian winters,” he murmured.
Equally aware of the hundreds of pairs of eyes fixed upon them, Kanuna nodded slowly as if Marcellinus had said a very profound thing. The Chitimachan prudently did not translate for their hosts.
Color surrounded them. Above flew the Macaw Warriors. Launching from the tops of the sandstone cliffs, the one-man craft resembled the Cahokian Hawks aside from the startling red of the parrot feathers that adorned them and made them glow impossibly brightly in the clear desert air. At any given time a half dozen Macaws might be swooping over their heads, buoyed by the hot air currents and the gentle breezes that blew along the mesa and provided lift.
Around the plaza’s edge were cages for real macaws, birds with wings of bright scarlet and yellow and tails of blue. Marcellinus had seen a similar bird only once before, at the Market of the Mud. Beguiled by the creature’s beauty, Kimimela had come close to losing a finger to its hooked and vicious beak. In Yupkoyvi the macaws were no tamer, but here they appeared to have a religious rather than a commercial significance.
In addition to the bright birds and the extensive use of their feathers, the people of the plaza were decorated with ornaments of turquoise and obsidian, with copper bells that jangled as they moved. Black and white pots provided an interesting but severe contrast.
The two Yupkoyvi shaman-chiefs who had preceded Marcellinus out of the underground kiva raised their arms in salutation, or praise, or something. Marcellinus bowed. The chieftain on the left, Cha’akmogwi, spoke, and the Chitimachan stood up a little straighter to translate. “ ‘You have come to the center of the world, and you have not come in vain.’ ”
Marcellinus bowed again.
“ ‘The spirits have spoken, and the shamans have relayed their words to us. We now speak them to you. The People of the Hand were present at the making of this world, and we will be here when the world ends. Many foes have tried to wipe the People of the Hand from the world, but they have not succeeded. They will not succeed now. We are still here. We will always be here.’ ”
Marcellinus wished he had a hat to keep the sun off his forehead or, better still, that he was sheltering indoors in one of the cool rooms of the Yupkoyvi Great House with the other Romans. Cha’akmogwi was only telling Marcellinus what he already knew, repeating it for the benefit of the people in the plaza around them.
Now the other chief, his brother Chochokpi, spoke. “ ‘You seek our aid against the Thousand-Thousand Enemies, and we shall give it. Together we will have success in war. This, the spirits have foretold.’ ”
Marcellinus nodded sagely and endeavored to look gratified.
“ ‘The Thousand-Thousand Enemies will be scattered back into the seas from whence they came, there to waste away and drown and die.’ ”
The Thousand-Thousand Enemies were the Mongols. The Yupkoyvi had heard much of them from refugees and traders from the west, although they had not seen them with their own eyes. The Yupkoyvi themselves did not travel. Why should they? They lived at the center of the world, and the world came to them.
“ ‘We have sent out our signals. The roads shine out from Yupkoyvi to illuminate all the land. Our brothers of the west and north will heed the call, and all of the Yupkoyvi will come to stand shoulder to shoulder with you against the Thousand-Thousand Enemies.’ ”
“All of the Yupkoyvi,” Kanuna muttered. “That’s a relief.”
Marcellinus elbowed him discreetly. The shaman-chief of the Hand was still speaking, and after a reproachful look the Chitimachan continued her litany. “ ‘And so we will summon our many-brothers from the mountains back here to the heart of the world to stand with the Kachada and his silver men and their many-brothers of the Great Mizipi River. If a mountain stands between us and our brothers, we will cut the mountain. If a river flows between us and our brothers, we will stop the river. We are the Yupkoyvi.’ ”
Chochokpi nodded and lowered his arms. Marcellinus, the Kachada, bowed again. By virtue of the ceremony he had just endured, he had apparently acquired yet another Hesperian name.
Off they went, the two chieftains of the Yupkoyvi. The crowd began to disperse, and Marcellinus at last relaxed his features and breathed out a long sigh of relief. He wondered if he would lose face if he disappeared into the Great House for a nap.
Smoke continued to gush from the hatchway to the underground kiva beside him. An unseen ventilation shaft drew in fresh air to feed the sagebrush that burned in the firebox, but the smoke could escape only the way the people did: up through the hatch. Down in the pit a stone slab deflected some of the direct heat, but it had still been stifling down there, surrounded by a hundred other people. It was a mercy that Marcellinus was not deterred by confined spaces.
They had spent the last three hours in this circular covered pi
t lit only by torches and the firebox in the central hearth. For most of it Marcellinus had sat on the masonry bench around its perimeter with sacred objects above him in wall niches. Occasionally he had stood or knelt as commanded. To either side of the firebox were square depressions covered by wooden boards that had served as foot drums. Behind the fire was the sipapu, a small hole that marked the entrance to the spirit world below, to the watery realm through which the Yupkoyvi’s ancient ancestors had first emerged to populate the world. That there was an identical hole in every kiva did not seem to daunt them—each sipapu was apparently the genuine, first and only sipapu—but Marcellinus had long ago given up on finding logic in superstition.
He stood now on top of the kiva roof, a circular area leveled with rock, dirt, and juniper bark, held up from beneath by four large pillars. At ground level the Great House of Yupkoyvi surrounded him, massive and solid.
The broad plaza formed the center of a giant D-shaped structure that spanned several acres. Behind and around him was a tall semicircle of buildings or, more accurately, a single massive curved building of some five hundred rooms tiered five stories high. Several hundred feet in front of him was the high straight wall that enclosed the plaza, with only a single gate leading in and out. Another wall, running north-south, divided the D of the plaza into two halves.
The walls were constructed of the same golden sandstone as the cliffs that bounded the canyon. Many of the walls were three feet thick, with cores of sandstone rubble and outer veneers of facing stone, skillfully crafted, with plaster over much of the stone.
It was an almost unbelievable structure to find in the middle of a desert, yet it was just the most imposing of a dozen Great Houses in the Yupkoyvi canyon.
Monumental architecture on a grand scale, yet mostly empty. Many thousands of people could have lived in the vast warren of interconnected rooms. Only a few hundred actually did. Most of the rooms were stuffed with old weapons or tools or filled with trash. Some of the odd T-shaped doorways were blocked. Many whole areas of the house were decaying and unsafe, their roofs crumbling and falling in. The Yupkoyvi had raised no objection to the Romans stabling their mounts in the many ground-floor rooms that were otherwise unused.
For a sacred center, it was strangely profane. The Great House was broken and old, and it was the only one in the canyon that was still occupied at all.
“Your man approaches,” Kanuna said.
Sextus Bassus strode across the plaza toward them in tunic and sandals, somehow managing to look crisp despite the heat. Marcellinus stifled a sigh. Seizing the opportunity to escape, Kanuna ambled off to see Enopay, who was waiting in the shade.
“A success, then, was it?” Bassus did not look exactly elated. He took a subtle step backward; even in the open air, the sweat and smoke that clung to Marcellinus’s tunic were quite ripe.
“Success,” Marcellinus said sardonically. “We are now allies of the world’s first people, and at any moment thousands of mighty warriors of the Hand will converge upon Yupkoyvi to fight by our sides against the foe.”
Bassus shook his head. “This is a wild-goose chase, sir. You know it. I know it. We should go on.”
“The Imperator ordered us to make a treaty. That’s what we’ll do. Uh, could I prevail upon you…?” Marcellinus gestured.
Bassus handed over his water skin readily enough, and Marcellinus tilted his head back to gulp water and slake his parched throat as his lead decurion continued. “The Hand? Mighty warriors? Been hearing that for as long as I’ve been in Nova Hesperia, but…these people?”
Marcellinus looked around him. He did not see any true warriors in the plaza of the Great House either, aside from the ones they’d brought with them.
“They’re telling you what you want to hear,” Bassus said. “All primitives do it. The Handies here and your Cahokian chums, too, for that matter.”
It was hard to deny, at least about the people of the southwest. Marcellinus shrugged helplessly.
“I’m not even convinced these are the People of the Hand,” Bassus grumbled. “This is a shaman outpost. The embers of a dead culture. A washed-up people talking grand talk. There’s nothing for us here.”
“All the roads led here,” Marcellinus reminded him. Wide roads, too. Yupkoyvi was the hub of a wheel with many spokes: roads straight enough for a Roman to be proud of radiated out into the desert in all directions, the best roads any of them had seen in Nova Hesperia. They had ridden into the area on one. It was so consistently level that on the first evening several cavalrymen had gotten down on their hands and knees and dug into the road’s edge with their mattocks to see how it was made.
“Here or away.” Isleifur Bjarnason had appeared at Marcellinus’s shoulder. “But this canyon is the heart of the Hand, all right. They have information. They know things, mark my words. They haven’t told us all there is to tell.”
Bassus barely spared him a glance. The Norseman had never impressed him. “Sentiment blinds you.”
Marcellinus laughed. “Sentiment? Bjarnason? You don’t know him very well.”
“Certainly this must have been a great place once, but it’s played out now. There’s been no new building here for generations. These people are living on past glories because they don’t know how to do anything else.” Bassus gestured after the Yupkoyvi chieftains. “Chack and Chock want you to believe they’re big warlords of the desert, but they haven’t done shit to back that up the whole month we’ve been here. They’re selling you a bill of goods, sir. I’m not buying it.”
“This is still the center of the whole area,” Isleifur said.
“A hundred years ago. That does us no good now.”
“No, today. It’s still the hub. Information flows in here, and information flows out again along the great roads. The old women know a lot about the surrounding towns, even out to the coasts in the west and south. They’re getting all that information from somewhere.”
Bassus snorted. “Old women? Probably inventing it.”
“No,” Bjarnason said.
“Well, either way, we should go on.”
North of Yupkoyvi they’d encountered tribes that lived in houses built in alcoves in the cliff sides. The Romans had not even been able to approach those high fortresses, so perfect were their defensive positions; Marcellinus, Bassus, Kanuna, and the interpreters had climbed the ladders and steep rock stairs to speak with the elders. Those elders had sent them on here to the “center of the world where all roads meet.” On the way to Yupkoyvi they had passed other towns, of which Tyuonyi was the largest, with a ring-shaped building at its center, scores more houses spread out around it, and families also living in carved-out chambers in the hillsides beyond. But the people of Tyuonyi also had deferred to the masters of Yupkoyvi here in the sandstone canyon, and the Roman expeditionary force had moved along here.
It was not exactly what they had expected.
To the south and west lived yet more peoples, tribes that generations earlier might have lived in the canyon of the Yupkoyvi but now had villages and towns of their own, with new buildings and even more complex systems of canals and irrigation. But the lands of the Hohokam were five hundred more miles through the stark, sunbaked desert, half again as far as they’d already come since leaving the Minerva.
“We’re not going any farther. It’s here or nowhere.” It was all Marcellinus could do not to end the sentence with I have spoken.
“Yes, sir.” Bassus saluted with an exaggerated formality that verged on insolence and marched off back to his men.
“Always the verpa,” said Isleifur.
“He’s not wrong,” Marcellinus said. “Whatever homegrown empire the People of the Hand once had, I don’t think it’s here anymore.”
Macaws squawked. Frowning against the sun’s glare, Marcellinus felt frustration creeping into his voice. “But within living memory the People of the Hand struck across the desert into the grasslands. Son of the Sun went to Shappa Ta’atan in the first place to
help them fight the People of the Hand.”
“Can’t have been this lot,” Isleifur said. “Maybe some of the Handies to the north who were hiding in the mountains.”
“Perhaps.”
Bjarnason held his eye. “Empires rise and fall. Perhaps even the Imperium won’t last forever.”
Marcellinus gave him a look, remembering a conversation long before in which Isleifur had argued that in different circumstances the Norse might have commanded an empire of their own. But such historical second-guessing was pointless. “Not now, Bjarnason. It’s too hot.”
They walked across the plaza to where Enopay stood with Kanuna. “So what do you think, Enopay?” Bjarnason said. “Is this still the center of a mighty empire? Are we on the verge of a breakthrough?”
Marcellinus took a proffered water skin from Kanuna. It might take two more to truly slake his thirst. “Juno, Isleifur. You’re relentless.”
“If this was truly where the center of their Great House Empire used to be,” Enopay said, “then it must have gone for a walk down one of its own wide roads one day and forgotten to come back.”
“They have storehouses full of weapons here. Thousands upon thousands.”
“But not the men to wield them. In this House there are maybe five hundreds of people. The men of the Hand who fought with these weapons are long gone, Eyanosa. North, south, east…who knows? Spread out, lost, gone. And we should be gone, too.”