by Alan Smale
Above, the Mongol Firebird had turned. The light breeze was not in its favor and it seemed heavier than the three-pilot Cahokian Eagles, but it was making good headway back across the battlefield. The middle pilot was releasing more bombs, and they were falling away from the bird, one, two, three…Two ignited in midair, smoke bombs that gushed noxious black fumes and came to earth between the battle and the walls of Yupkoyvi. The third was a black powder bomb, yet another thunderclap, that exploded above Bassus and his men and showered them with lethally sharp shards of porcelain.
The effect was immediate. Legionaries jerked and flailed in their saddles, some tumbling off; their horses also reacted instantly as the shrapnel drove into them. Bassus’s horse bucked, throwing him forward over its head and down onto the ground. Astonishingly, the decurion managed to roll and come up onto his feet, shaking his head as if dazed but still holding his sword. Others, less fortunate, lay still and crumpled on the ground.
Even through the smoke that now wreathed the battlefield it was clear that the three Roman turmae were broken. Most of the men were down, maybe half of the Second Turma on the left still mounted but struggling to control their horses, cut off from the others.
“Romans, to me!” Bassus roared. “To me! Form two lines, back to back! Move, you slack bastards!”
Outside the gate below Marcellinus the troopers of the Fourth milled, its decurion still standing by his horse. From ground level he could not see all that Marcellinus could from his greater height. Either that or the man had just lost his nerve. His men seemed to be arguing with him.
Out on the plain most of Bassus’s cavalrymen were off their mounts, struggling to join up. Unmanned horses milled, some neighing in alarm and looking for a way to escape the field of battle, others wounded, staggering, dropping onto their haunches with plaintive and almost human screeches of pain. To Bassus’s credit, the Roman lines were forming quickly: perhaps fifty men in chain mail with swords and spathas, some limping, cramming themselves together into two close-order lines, back to back.
A defensive infantry formation worked well enough against horsemen if their ranks were protected by scuta, the long shields borne by legionaries. With the smaller ovals carried by the Roman troopers, it was a desperate measure.
The Mongols would not charge, Marcellinus was sure. They would merely back up and loose wave after wave of arrows into the mass of men. Mongol arrows could pierce armor if shot squarely and at close range. It would only be a matter of time.
But this did not appear to be the Mongol plan. The light horse archers circled, but half a dozen warriors were dismounting, men in heavier armor who bore not simple lances of wood and steel but long tubes of iron.
“Fuck it,” Marcellinus said. Bassus’s foul mouth was contagious. “Fire lances. Enopay, stay right here. Mahkah, you’re with me.”
“Eyanosa, don’t!” Enopay’s terrified voice followed him as he jumped down off the wall and ran for his horse. “Please, Gaius, no, no!”
Marcellinus forced himself to ignore the boy’s cries. “Pezi, Chitimachan: close the gates behind us and tell Chack and Chock that if they don’t defend the Great House, I’ll come back and tear them apart with my bare hands.”
—
Marcellinus swung himself up into the saddle. Just inside the gate, Taianita stood ready with spears. As he approached, she raised one to him. Marcellinus snatched it and tucked it into the leather scabbard behind the saddle. “Another, quick.” Taking the second, he held it under his arm uncertainly in the couched position, but it did not feel right; it was more of a javelin than a lance. He took it into his hand again, remembering Bassus’s posture as he had ridden out.
Marcellinus had always been a commander of infantry. A horse had carried him to battle on countless occasions, but he had always dismounted to fight. He would need to learn fast today.
Mahkah rode up and took a spear from Taianita. Hanska and Mikasi were not far behind him. The People of the Hand were still milling hopelessly around the plaza, there were no Macaws in the air, and Chack and Chock had disappeared again.
Nothing he could do about that. The hell with them. Marcellinus dug in his heels, and they rode through the gate together, out of the Great House and onto the battlefield.
—
“Ala Aravacorum!” Marcellinus shouted. “Fourth Turma, form up, three ranks!”
They surged toward him as soon as he burst out of the gate. Gods knew where their decurion had gone, for Marcellinus no longer saw him among them.
They were not forming ranks, but that was all right. Rattled by the Mongols’ seemingly effortless defeat of the first three turmae, many were terrified out of their wits. It was enough that they were grouping up behind Marcellinus and the Cahokians, enough that they were still hearing orders and had not been panicked into fleeing and earning Mongol arrows in their backs.
“To Marcellinus!” The troopers of the Second Turma who had become detached from their fellows galloped around in a wide arc to join the Fourth.
Marcellinus’s horse was cantering so jerkily beneath him that it was hard to spit the words out. “Spears up! If no spears, spatha! Weapons at the ready!”
Smoke wafted across them. Marcellinus could not tell how many men were still with him. His horse’s head was bobbing, eyes wide, even as Marcellinus dug his heels into the animal’s flanks. A horse took its confidence from its rider and the other horses it could see. As the troopers were on the verge of panic, the horses they rode were right on the edge of spooking, too. If Marcellinus’s horse refused, bucked, or—even worse—bolted, their day was done and that would be that, and Marcellinus himself might be lying on the ground with a broken back, defenseless against a Mongol spear or blade.
But the horse he rode was young. Perhaps it had never yet failed a charge and so had no memory of failure.
Marcellinus and the remains of the Second Aravacorum squadron bore down upon the field of battle at speed. The Mongol horse archers were swinging around to counter them but would not form a line in time. Arrows began to fly. Disregarding them, Marcellinus headed straight for Bassus and his men, who had now achieved a messy two-line formation in the face of the approaching fire lancers.
Marcellinus thrust his first javelin down at one of the warriors on foot holding a fire lance, and even as it lodged in the man’s chest, Marcellinus twisted his second javelin free from the leather cup behind him and raised it over his head.
The Mongol warrior staggered back three paces but did not fall. He touched the slow match to the Jin salt packet on his fire lance, and the lance ignited with a roar. Dazzling flame shot out of the iron tube, a deadly tongue of fire ten feet long.
Marcellinus’s horse leaped away from the bright flame. As he grabbed at his reins, the spear slid out of his hand and clattered to the ground.
The fire lance swung around and flared directly at him. He felt the searing pain of flame across his chest and shoulder, saw bright sparks. Then his steed reared, and all at once Marcellinus was in the air.
He crashed down to earth. All the breath was knocked from his body. All around him were boots and hooves. He instinctively tried to swing his spear around before realizing that he no longer held it. Shaking his head to clear it, Marcellinus dragged in an agonizing breath and drew his spatha.
He saw flame and swung at it. His spatha rang against the metal tube of the Mongol fire lance. Marcellinus shoved himself up onto his knees and swung again.
Thrust, don’t slash: good advice from Bassus to his Third Turma, and it became Marcellinus’s instinct now. The tip of his spatha went up into the Mongol’s unprotected armpit and through his shoulder. The man screamed. Marcellinus jerked the spatha out and away with difficulty and jabbed it forward again into the man’s groin.
The fire lance fell, still gushing flame. When it bounced on the ground, one of Bassus’s dismounted horsemen snatched it up with great presence of mind and jammed its bright jet of fire into the face of one of the Mongol cavalry horses
.
An arrow went through Marcellinus’s shoulder, fired at almost point-blank range. Marcellinus roared as the pain exploded in his shoulder, but he had no time to deal with it; he had to move. He almost made it up onto his feet before a Mongol boot thudded into his chest and a swinging saber knocked the spatha out of his hand.
He was under attack by two Mongol horsemen at once, and he had no weapon. He tried to grab at the nearer of the two to pull him from his horse, but a leather gauntlet slammed into his face with fearsome force. Once again Marcellinus felt as if he were flying, blue sky dazzling him.
The back of his head impacted the steel of Roman chain mail. Hands slid under his arms and hauled him up. Marcellinus found himself standing with a Roman cavalryman on each side, surrounded by Mongols on horseback and on foot. His fight was over.
—
Marcellinus and the men around him were captured. Other legionaries fought on, but the fire lances had done their damage. The Roman line was irredeemably breached, carved into small groups of three or four men, and the mounted Mongol warriors rode between them, slashing at the troopers and knocking them to the ground. One group of Romans had rallied and managed to pull three Mongols from their horses and stab them as they lay on the ground, but as soon as the Mongols saw that happen, they drew bows and shot a barrage of arrows at the helpless troopers from just a few yards away.
The fire lance closest to Marcellinus sputtered and went out, its black powder exhausted. Farther away two lances still spit their deadly fire. It blazed hotter and fiercer than any flame Marcellinus had seen before and was incredibly focused.
The men who wielded the lances seemed fascinated by them. Perhaps this was the first time these particular warriors had used their terrible weapons on human prey. Their faces were subtly different from those of the Mongols: they were Jin, men of the land that had birthed the dark powder, experts in its use. And now Marcellinus saw one of the men walk over to a fallen and injured Roman and apply the flame directly to the man’s head and shoulders, bathing him in its full blast. The Roman screamed and thrashed, but only for a moment. Soon shock and pain drove him into insensibility and death. As this lance, too, ran out of powder, the Jin leaned over to study the devastation he had wrought on the Roman’s flesh, his face showing only curiosity, as a shaman might look at an animal’s entrails to augur the future.
Right now Marcellinus could see the future, too. He could surely predict the calamitous destruction that would come about when such weapons were turned on Cahokia and the legions of Roma.
—
On the edge of the melee, Mahkah broke away. With a last slash at the Mongol warrior he was battling with, he wheeled his horse and spurred it into a gallop. One of the warriors sheathed his sword, snatched up his bow from the saddle holster, and nocked an arrow.
Hanska had been knocked off her horse but was still on her feet, slashing with the sword in her right hand, the hasta spear in her left held ready to thrust. Two mounted Mongols were circling her, looking for their chance to take her down. Now she hefted the hasta overarm and cast it at the Mongol who was taking aim at the fleeing Mahkah.
She was almost fast enough. The spear lodged in the Mongol’s thigh just as he loosed his arrow. He shouted in pain and spasmed, but even as the bow flew out of his grasp, the arrow was speeding on its way. It hit Mahkah in the left side of his back. Mahkah jerked and threw up his arms in an uncanny echo of the Mongol warrior’s reaction to Hanska’s spear, then slumped forward over his horse’s neck. A second Mongol now shot at Mahkah, but Marcellinus could not see if his arrow struck the young brave. Mahkah’s piebald steed kept going, still at the gallop, across the canyon.
Two other Roman cavalrymen also had broken out and were attempting to flee westward, bent low over their mounts. One of them was the hapless decurion of the Fourth Turma. Mongols pursued them, aiming bows and using their legs to raise themselves half out of their saddles. They shot, nocked more arrows, shot again. The decurion tumbled leftward off his horse’s back to be dragged across the desert floor by his stirrups until his horse slowed. The second Roman died in the saddle, his horse turning to look almost comically at the inert rider on its back. The Mongols cantered after the decurion to finish him off, sabers and clubs at the ready.
Mahkah’s mount had slowed to a trot but was well out of range of Mongol arrows. His body bounced up and down on its back, his arms now hanging on each side of the horse’s neck. Fully engaged rounding up the Roman survivors, the Mongols declined to pursue him.
He was probably dead anyway. “Shit,” said Marcellinus.
The first pain in his side grew suddenly even worse. His eyes closed in agony. In the very next moment the Roman cavalryman holding his right arm slapped him right in the same place. Marcellinus yelled in rage and thrashed to try to free himself.
“Christ, man, keep still,” the cavalryman said. “You’re on fire.”
It was true. Marcellinus had taken the blast of the fire lance to his chest. His armor had saved him from the worst of it, but the tunic under his arm had been burned sheer away, and at its edges it was now in flames.
With great effort of will and against all his instincts, Marcellinus forced himself to go limp. The men let him fall and threw sand and gravel on him until they quenched the flames.
He lay there panting, inhaling the reek of his own scorched flesh. For a moment logical thought fled, and all he could think was that he would never see a Cahokian hearth fire again.
Never see Sintikala again.
“Fuck,” he said, and at the same moment the cavalrymen standing over him groaned.
Glancing left, he saw the gates of Yupkoyvi creaking open even as he heard Enopay’s voice cracking as he shouted, “No! Close them, idiots, close them!”
Cha’akmogwi and Chochokpi chose not to take their orders from a Cahokian boy. Yupkoyvi was surrendering without a fight, and it was only now that Marcellinus realized that since the Firebird had launched, he had not seen a single Macaw Warrior in flight.
—
Mongols on horseback moved around the battlefield. Where they found a Roman trooper down and wounded, they speared him from the saddle, driving down into the man’s throat with all their weight until he was dead, robbing the wounded of life without even troubling to dismount. Other Mongols walked amid the devastation. As they came to each dead Roman, they knelt quickly, sliced the right ear from the corpse, tossed it into a rough hemp bag, and moved on to the next. Trophies of war or merely proof of their victory?
Mikasi grunted. “Hotah? Here.”
Marcellinus turned his head. Sextus Bassus was down. His helmet was off, and he had a bad cut up his cheek and across his forehead. His right arm was terribly burned and blistered, and he was holding it straight, not moving it; the remains of his tunic stuck to the wound, and a sickening smell of cooked meat wafted on the air. Worse, his breathing was noisy and belabored, his breastplate cracked across, a huge gash in the chain mail beneath.
“Shit. Get his armor off.”
Blood bubbled at the corners of Bassus’s mouth. Mikasi looked sorrowful. “Hotah, Bassus is already dead.”
“Do it.”
Mikasi unbuckled the remains of the decurion’s breastplate and drew it aside gingerly. “There is a hole.”
There was indeed a deep and messy hole in Bassus’s chest. As he tried to breathe, blood and bubbles spilled from it. “I see it. Help me get the chain mail away from it. Don’t rock him, don’t touch the hole. Bassus? Can you hear me?”
The decurion narrowed his eyes and panted. Blood frothed from his chest again.
“It is bad,” Mikasi said. “Bassus now breathes through his ribs, not his mouth.”
Marcellinus looked back at the wide-eyed cavalrymen lying behind him and tapped the boot of the closest with his fist to get his attention. “Soldier, rip the sleeve off your tunic. Give it to me. Quickly now.”
The trooper did so. Very carefully, wrestling all the while with his own pain, Marcelli
nus lay the sleeve over the sucking wound and held it in place. More blood spilled from Bassus’s mouth, but his anguished expression eased and his eyes met Marcellinus’s. In moments, however, his discomfort seemed to increase and his eyes lost focus again. Marcellinus eased his pressure on the wound and felt a little air escape.
Marcellinus was no medicus, but he knew what his eyes were telling him. “Mikasi, Hanska: take over here. Let the air out from his chest but not in. Release the pressure every few moments. And clean that blood away from his mouth. D’you see?”
“Yes.” Mikasi took over.
“Noyon,” said one of the cavalrymen.
The Mongol general was approaching on foot, walking his dappled horse between the bodies of the slain. He was almost a head taller than the other Mongols, a lean, strong-looking man in his forties. His armor of yellow leather hung easily on him as if he had been born to it. He stared at Marcellinus and his captives with a cold and malevolent gaze, as if he would like nothing better than to rend them limb from limb with his own hands and leave their bodies to decay in the dust of the desert. He looked like a man without a soul, a murderous machine.
Daunted, Marcellinus looked at Jebei’s horse instead, which was much less imposing. Small by the standard of the Libyans and Hispanians favored by the Romans, the general’s mount was stocky, its mane tangled, its tail long and unkept. The Mongol horses were ugly beasts, but they were certainly hardy.
The general arrived. He stared at Marcellinus, who met his eye again. Jebei Noyon’s gaze then lowered to take in the burn in Marcellinus’s side, the hole where the arrow had passed through his shoulder, and then down at his right leg. It was only during these moments of inspection that Marcellinus realized that indeed, at some point in the battle he had received a bloody slash in his calf in almost the same place he had been injured in the fight on the Great Mound the day Great Sun Man had died. The pain of the leg wound had been masked by the agony of his burn.