by Alan Smale
Jebei turned his attention to Bassus, recognizing him as a Roman officer by the red plume on his helmet, and looked at the blood that was still spreading around his chest wound. Giving the other huddled Roman troopers a cursory glance, the Mongol general then looked carefully at Mikasi and Hanska. Hanska he examined from braids to boots with an intensity that would have seemed perverse if it were not so cold. It was clear that he had rarely, if ever, come across a woman warrior.
It was a little uncanny to be studied as if they were animals or already dead meat. Marcellinus felt chilled. Even in the battle’s aftermath he could see the implacable ruthlessness of the Mongols. In those moments he understood their terrible reputation for ferocity. To Jebei Noyon, Marcellinus and the others were less than human.
Looking past the general, Marcellinus saw that meanwhile the Mongol warriors had ridden in through the gates of Yupkoyvi unopposed. The sounds of screams came from within. If the Yupkoyvi shaman-chiefs had hoped to preserve their people by opening the gates without further resistance, they were sadly mistaken. The Mongols lived by a different code. The People of the Hand had merely facilitated their own massacre.
Marcellinus swallowed with difficulty. What of Enopay? What of Taianita, the Chitimachan? Lying on the ground two hundred yards away, he could see nothing of them.
Marcellinus said: “We will need to carry my decurion to the Great House. Other men have wounds to be treated.”
The Mongol general stared at him again with that cold, dispassionate interest.
“Come on, man, the battle is over. Help us.”
Jebei raised his boot and drove it into Marcellinus’s shoulder, just above the arrow wound. Marcellinus bellowed and fell back, eyes streaming with pain.
Hanska glared. “Or just kill us all and get it over with. Add our corpses to your pile and our ears to your bag of souvenirs. Why not? Bastard.”
Jebei shook his head. He spoke in a guttural language the like of which Marcellinus had never heard before.
With dazed disbelief, Marcellinus saw Pezi and Taianita walking out of the gates of Yupkoyvi, accompanied by one of the Mongol horse archers. They drew up, and even more to his surprise, Pezi bowed deeply to Jebei Noyon, to Marcellinus, and to the almost unconscious form of Sextus Bassus. “Wanageeska.”
“Pezi.” The dizzy feeling of unreality swept Marcellinus again. He felt as if he might float away. He resisted the urge to laugh manically. “What now? Have you switched sides again?”
Pezi frowned and shook his head. “I think you have lost much blood.” He made a rather imperious gesture to Taianita, ordering her forward, and Taianita knelt by Bassus to examine his wound.
“I told them Taianita is a great healer and knows much.”
Marcellinus struggled to keep his face expressionless. Taianita was no Chumanee. She had some limited experience with battle wounds but knew little even of herbs, let alone of an injury as severe as Bassus’s. “Be careful with your lies, Pezi.”
“My lies may yet save our skins,” Pezi said. “You should bow and honor me even as I honor you, so that these filthy men see that we are both important and do not add our ears to their bag.”
“Sit up, Gaius.” Taianita tugged at Marcellinus’s arm, her young eyes lined with concern. “Sit up.” Without waiting, she started to ease tatters of his tunic from the burned gash in his torso.
“Obey her, Wanageeska. Let her see,” said Pezi, and Marcellinus relented. Perhaps if he could just breathe more easily his mind would not float away and he might make better sense of what was going on here. However, when he sat up, he immediately felt dizzy, as if his body no longer belonged to him.
Pezi bowed deeply again and addressed the Mongol general, first in the language of the Hand and then in Iroqua and a third language. Shaking his head he turned to Taianita, who tried a few words in Caddo.
The general stood impassive. He did not understand.
“Merda.” Pezi looked back at the gates. “We need the other man. The demon.”
Demon? Were not the Mongols all demons? Despite the tension of the moment, Marcellinus laughed with a slight edge of hysteria. He could not help it. None of this made sense. Was he delirious?
Perhaps the Mongol general saw Marcellinus’s laughter as disrespect. He stepped forward, his eyes murderous, and once again raised his boot.
Pezi boldly moved between Marcellinus and the general with his eyes lowered, raised his arms, and in the hand-talk of the Plains gestured, Back, stop, please, we talk, we beg, we beg.
Jebei Noyon halted, and his hands danced in a few quick hand-talk gestures of his own. Show respect. Kneel or die.
“Gaius? Straight face, no laugh, and kneel if you want to live.”
Taianita pushed at him roughly. Marcellinus struggled onto his knees, gasping at the pain. Pezi pushed his head down, almost into the ground. Marcellinus frowned at the dirt and pebbles beneath him, leaning against Taianita and trying to breathe.
Hand-talk? Was it so obvious that they had almost missed it and nearly died as a result? Perhaps there was no reason why they should have guessed a Mongol would know it, even a Mongol who had been in Nova Hesperia for several years.
“Ah, I see the demon,” Pezi said.
“Demon?” Marcellinus said into the ground.
They let him up, and again he was racked with so much dizziness that he thought he might retch. He closed his eyes, opened them, and saw he was bleeding again. “Pezi, what are you talking about?”
“A warrior chief from the northwest, allied with the Mongols.” Pezi was looking back toward Yupkoyvi. His movements were calm and assured, but knowing Pezi as he did, Marcellinus could see the deep fear in his eyes that he was trying to hide. “There he is. He is Tlin-Kit.”
An extraordinary figure was walking toward them from the direction of the Great House. Covering his head was a wooden helmet with a full face mask on which was carved the face of a demon. The mask had bright copper eyebrows and was decorated with what might be real human hair. He wore armor of thick animal hide, fastened with wooden toggles and decorated with small metal disks. As the man approached, they saw that the disks were all of a uniform size, with square holes in the center. “Jin coins,” muttered one of the legionaries.
Marcellinus would have thought Tlin-Kit a shaman if not for the thick wooden club with a wicked bone hook he carried in his right hand and the two severed Yupkoyvi heads that hung by their hair from his left. The heads knocked together obscenely, dripping blood. “Holy Jove.”
The same legionary spit. “Fucking barbarian.”
“Easy, trooper,” Marcellinus said.
The warrior pushed his helmet up as he approached, which had the bizarre effect of making him appear to have two faces stacked one above the other. He said something guttural.
Pezi bowed deeply yet again. “Tlin-Kit.”
Marcellinus had to admit that Pezi’s courage had grown. Anyone who could face fearsome warriors like Jebei Noyon and Tlin-Kit and calmly speak words in several different languages deserved Marcellinus’s respect.
Tlin-Kit spared Pezi only a glance, then surveyed the prisoners. He spoke again, and Marcellinus recognized it as rough and strongly accented Algon-Quian.
Pezi responded in the same language, bowing and gesturing. Jebei Noyon and Tlin-Kit talked in Mongol, and then the warrior from the northwest spoke to Pezi again.
Pezi drew himself up and spoke in Latin. “Here is Jebei Noyon, one of the foremost generals of the Mongol Khan. Jebei wants to know which of you two rules here. But I fear that he might keep that chief alive and kill the other. So I say to him: both of you, you and Bassus. He asks again, which? I say both.”
“Futete.” Bassus was sweating and breathing hard, his voice a faint wheeze. “Save Gaius. Let the bastard kill me. I’m done for anyway.”
“Be strong, Decurion,” Marcellinus said. “Mongols respect strength above all else.”
“Shit,” said Mikasi, and looked at Hanska. If only the chiefs would
be kept alive, the Cahokians were dead, too.
Jebei Noyon spoke again in his difficult flat speech, and the warrior Tlin-Kit again translated into his accented Algon-Quian, augmented with the hand-talk.
Pezi stared. He wiped sweat from his forehead and said nothing.
“ ‘You will not eat,’ ” Taianita said mechanically as she translated, her brow furrowed. “ ‘You will drink no more water than the drops that will keep you alive. Your wounds can weep blood into the rocks of this desert. You are not worth mercy. You…’ ” Her voice trailed off.
Marcellinus might have spoken, but it was too hard, and he did not want to risk antagonizing this Mongol general any further.
Pezi and Taianita were doing their best. For now, his life was in their hands.
“No, no,” said Pezi, and then repeated it in hand-talk, No, no, I beg. He fell onto his knees and began to speak quickly in Algon-Quian.
Jebei Noyon nodded to the Mongol warrior by his side. The warrior reached down and slapped Pezi across the mouth.
Pezi recovered, sat up again, talked some more. Jebei Noyon said three words. They sounded dismissive. Tlin-Kit laughed cruelly and spit a short phrase in Algon-Quian. Then Jebei turned and walked away, his horse on one side and Tlin-Kit on the other. Pezi watched them go. Three Mongol warriors stayed, standing over them.
Marcellinus couldn’t bear it anymore. “Begging for your life, Pezi?”
Pezi wiped the blood from his mouth. “Begging for yours.”
“What? What did you tell them?”
“That you are important. That you have the ear of the Imperator of Roma.”
Marcellinus’s thoughts were coming slowly, as if swimming through mud, and for a sick moment all he could think of were the ears being hacked off by the Mongol horsemen. “What?”
Pezi clapped his hands abruptly in front of Marcellinus’s face, making him reel back in shock. “Wanageeska, wake up! I tell them that the Imperator of Roma is here in Hesperia, which they clearly know already, and that you know him. That you are valuable and should be kept alive.”
“Pezi, Mongols do not take hostages, and Hadrianus would not pay a bent sesterce to get me back.”
Pezi looked exasperated. “Stop arguing and thank me. For Jebei’s last words were to tell me that you Roman leaders and all the Cahokians, and perhaps the Romans that still survive, he will now spare and take to the Mongol Khan.”
Marcellinus’s heart lurched. “To the Khan? Chinggis Khan?”
“Of course. The Khan is far from here.” Pezi glanced at the retreating figure of Jebei Noyon. “The Arrow serves his chief. You may have information about Roma and Cahokia that his chief needs. So it is the Khan himself who will decree who lives and who dies.”
“They’ll torture us for information?”
“Mongols do not torture,” Bassus muttered with difficulty.
“Perhaps they do now.”
“Well. All I know is that we must now go to the plaza of the Great House.” Pezi looked apologetic. “I am sorry, Wanageeska. We may not walk, may not even stand. We must crawl there.”
“Crawl?”
One of the Mongols stepped forward and poked at Marcellinus’s back with his saber.
“We must crawl before the Mongols.” Pezi lowered himself onto his belly. “Crawl like the worms they say we are. I am sorry.”
“What about him?” Hanska pointed to Bassus, outraged. “How does he crawl? Fuck this shit…”
She put her hands to the ground as if to stand. Two Mongol warriors shoved at her, one kicking her ankles.
“Hanska, Hanska!” Mikasi was already down, shaking his head at her in warning. “Do not anger them. Please. Join me down here.”
“We will help Bassus between us,” Pezi said. “Hanska, if you are dead, you can help no one. Please?”
“Futete.” Hanska dropped onto the ground by Bassus’s side. “All right. Let’s go.”
—
It was an hour before they arrived at the gates of Yupkoyvi, easing the lead decurion along the ground between them with agonizing slowness.
Appearing gradually before them as they entered the plaza was a mound of corpses.
The Mongols were sweeping the Great House from end to end, marching through each level in groups of twenty. Many dozens of the Hand had tried to hide in the rooms, kivas, and storage pits of Yupkoyvi. Now they were being dragged out into the open air, there to be slain swiftly by a sword blade to the throat and their amputated ears added to the Mongols’ grisly collection. It was a systematic, heartless slaughter.
In addition, the Thousand-Thousand were stockpiling food, turquoise, obsidian, copper, furs, feathers, anything that might be of use or value. They seemed to take no pleasure or sorrow in their work. They were merely men following orders with a calm and chilling efficiency.
And there was Enopay on his hands and knees, too, his eyes red, his arms bloodied. “Fuck you, Mongol warrior! Fuck you!” Again he tried to rise; again the Mongol standing over him shoved him back down into the dirt with his boot.
The Mongols were slaying the women and children of Yupkoyvi with as little compunction as the men. Enopay was still alive only because he was Cahokian, and at any moment the hard-bitten Mongol looming over him could decide he was too noisy to be worth the trouble. “Enopay, stay down! I’m coming!”
“Gaius!” Enopay dropped to the plaza floor, put his palm up to his forehead, and stared wide-eyed. He obviously had not expected to see Marcellinus alive again. “Merda, merda…”
“Where is Kanuna?”
“Over there. I was trying to go to him. They struck him very hard.”
Yes, Kanuna was sprawled out on the ground some hundred feet away, his face covered in blood and his arms and legs untidy, like a broken doll.
“Kanuna!” Heedless of the danger, Taianita pushed herself up and made as if to hurry across the plaza to the stricken elder.
A Mongol grabbed her by the hair and yanked her back. Taianita resisted, trying to kick him, but the Mongol warrior swung his elbow into her jaw. She fell over Marcellinus’s legs and went down hard, unconscious. The Mongol bestrode her, studying her, his saber in his hand and his eyes cold.
From the ground Pezi started talking quickly in Algon-Quian, although this Mongol could not possibly have understood. Pezi ducked his head, bowing repeatedly. The warrior kicked him, looking disgusted, but left Taianita where she lay.
Enopay covered his face. “No, no, no, no…”
Marcellinus crawled to the boy as quickly as he was humanly able, tearing whatever skin was left off his forearms and knees and leaving a trail of blood across the plaza. “Enopay, hush, be still.” He wrapped his arms around the boy, and Hanska and Mikasi crawled to them and held them both, in the dirt under the baking sun, as the Mongol soldier loomed over them with his deadly spear in his hand and the massacre of the Yupkoyvi continued around them.
They rode out of Yupkoyvi the next morning. At the head of his jaghuns rode Jebei Noyon, the Arrow, sitting tall and proud. Once more he wore his resplendent yellow leather armor, and beside him a Mongol standard-bearer carried his spirit banner, a pole with a long fringe of jet black horsehair hanging from a circle of steel.
Between the two jaghuns rode the prisoners, lashed to the saddles of captured Roman mules. With Marcellinus were Sextus Bassus, Hanska, Mikasi, Enopay, Kanuna, Pezi, Taianita, and the Chitimachan, and behind them the two chiefs of Yupkoyvi, Cha’akmogwi and Chochokpi. Taianita had regained consciousness but was still groggy, nauseous, and sullen. The Mongols had killed the remaining rank-and-file Roman soldiers the previous nightfall after all, and so these were the last survivors of the massacre in the valley of the Great Houses, the only men and women who remained.
Marcellinus was sure they were living on borrowed time. They had little of use they could tell the Great Khan, nothing to barter for their lives. They would be curiosities, exhibits to show off Jebei Noyon’s cleverness, along with the nauseating sacks of ears of the d
ead that enumerated the magnitude of his slaughter and were now being carried on either side of a Mongol packhorse, blood seeping through the hides.
Behind the second jaghun came the other spoils of war: the fifty or so Roman horses that had survived the battle intact and the remainder of their mules, bearing the spears, turquoise, furs, feathers, and food of the People of the Hand.
As ordered, Isleifur Bjarnason had vanished. At any moment during the ravaging of Yupkoyvi, Marcellinus had expected to see the Norseman’s bleeding body tossed out of one of the T-shaped doorways, since he probably would have fought to the death to resist capture. It did not happen. Unless his corpse already lay hidden in one of the Mongols’ piles of bodies, Bjarnason had evaporated into the air, as he had on many other occasions.
As the day wore on, some of the Mongol warriors galloped ahead in pairs or in fours. They were scouts and skirmishers, moving quietly into the lands ahead, hunting for possible threats and potential victims. In midafternoon the jaghuns came upon a small native village by a river, three lodges that had each contained a family. The inhabitants now lay freshly slain with their bodies piled carelessly on the ground and flies buzzing around them. The Mongol outriders took no chances.
From the desert plains of the Hand they traveled north day after day, then up into the foothills of the Great Mountains, where the air was cooler and there were many streams. Jebei Noyon was as good as his word. The prisoners were allowed no food and drank only water. Toward the end of a week’s traveling, when they were all so weak that they could barely stand once they were cut loose from the mules, the Arrow allowed them each a handful of dry corn and a strand of some tough and salty dried meat that could only be horseflesh. Taianita would not eat hers and gave it to Bassus.
Remarkably, the First Decurion had not died. Jebei Noyon had assigned a warrior to ride with him and dress his wound. Bassus got food when the rest of them did not. But as Bassus strengthened, Kanuna weakened. Asleep on his mule much of the time, too weak to talk, he seemed to have lost all interest in living.