by Alan Smale
None of them knew the river they were floating down. None had been there before. Enopay had glumly labeled it the Stream of Piss, and the name had caught on. Between Enopay and the Chitimachan, their best guess was that they were traveling parallel to the Kicka River they had ridden alongside into the west but two or three hundred miles south of it.
Three hundred miles south of the Kicka meant they were as much as six hundred miles south of the Wemissori. They had a long way to go.
—
“I’m sorry,” Marcellinus said.
Kanuna turned his head with difficulty. The elder looked twenty winters older than he had just a few short weeks ago: limbs weary, face lined, lips cracked. “For what?”
Taianita and the Chitimachan were poling. Enopay, on the far side of the raft, appeared to be asleep. Hanska sat staring downriver. Marcellinus handed Kanuna a water skin. “Drink. Even a little. I am sorry that I brought you on this journey and your grandson, too.”
Perhaps that was a shrug. “It is the Mongols who should apologize, and they never will. You? Your valor…” Kanuna’s face creased, and he gave a weak cough that nonetheless seemed to rattle around his rib cage.
“I beg of you,” said Marcellinus. “Today of all days, say nothing of valor.”
“Then I will say this. Take care of Enopay for me, Gaius. And…take care of Cahokia.”
“To the best of my small ability,” Marcellinus said, grimacing, “I will, Kanuna. You know I will. But I wish I could do it with you by my side.”
Kanuna coughed again. “When I saw your warriors coming…the first time, when the 33rd Hesperian marched on Cahokia. All that steel…it was the most terrible thing I had ever seen. Yet that was nothing. Since then, I have seen so much worse. Too many terrible things, Wanageeska.”
“I’m sorry,” Marcellinus said again.
“Never did I think I would outlive Great Sun Man. But now I find I am glad that he will be the first to meet me once this is over.”
Marcellinus stole a quick glance at Enopay, but the boy was still fast asleep.
“Nor did I think that I would see the end of the Mourning War with the Iroqua. Nor that my most desperate enemy might become my closest friend.”
Marcellinus gently squeezed the elder’s shoulder. “You are one of the best men I have ever known, Kanuna.”
“Ha. But as for those Mongols…” Kanuna shook his head almost imperceptibly.
“Don’t speak of them now,” Marcellinus said.
“Destroy them. Cleanse the land of their filth. And then send the Romans away from our city as well.”
It seemed impossible, beyond any rational hope. Marcellinus grinned and tried to make light of it. “If those are your last requests, you old fox, you set a high bar.”
“Bar? Perhaps.” Kanuna twitched his head again, not smiling. “But above all, Wanageeska: Enopay.”
There, Marcellinus certainly could agree. “Enopay. Yes, I will always look after Enopay. You have my word, Kanuna.”
—
Kanuna died in his sleep that night. His body was gaunt and emaciated, but his face was strangely peaceful, as if he welcomed the release. Marcellinus awoke to find Enopay sitting by his grandfather’s side, his face solemn.
“He is the lucky one,” Enopay said.
“I’m sorry, Enopay. And I’m doubly sorry that I brought you here.”
“What? If you had not brought me, I would not have been with him at the end.” Enopay tugged some of his grandfather’s gray hair from the back of his head—it took no more than a soft pull to free it—and tucked it into his tunic.
Marcellinus’s eyes were dry. None of them had the luxury of tears. Even though he had plenty of water to drink these days, his tongue still kept sticking to the roof of his mouth, and it hurt to swallow.
In death, Kanuna’s face looked calm and composed and somehow younger. He looked again like the man Marcellinus had met long before, had first smoked tabaco with in the sweat lodge with Great Sun Man and the others. The man Marcellinus had talked with long into the night about steel and wheelbarrows and the Big Warm House back in those long-ago days when Marcellinus had hoped he could benefit the Great City and its people, perhaps the whole of the land, with his Roman ideas. He shook his head.
Enopay watched his grief. “You will help me bury him, Eyanosa? You, me, and Hanska if I can rouse her. Just us. Those who knew him longest, who loved him the best.”
“Of course, Enopay.”
They could not get Hanska’s help. She looked briefly aghast at being asked to join a burial party and put her hands over her eyes and sat as if carved in stone. They had to leave her and accept Taianita’s help instead.
They buried Kanuna in a shallow grave with a small mound covering him. A deeper burial would have been better and more appropriate, but they simply did not have the strength.
—
“Teach me to fight.”
Marcellinus looked up, but Enopay was not talking to him. Hanska was sitting on the riverbank, hugging her knees and staring out across the brown water. On the other side of the river in the middle distance was a Caddo encampment of two lodges with a dugout on the bank next to them. The inhabitants ignored Marcellinus’s group of survivors, showing no signs of approaching them.
Taianita and the Chitimachan were off foraging in the opposite direction. Marcellinus was sitting by Bassus, neither of them speaking. Enopay had returned from his own foraging trip with a pile of berries and wild turnips. He was directly facing Hanska, who was ignoring him.
“Teach me to fight,” Enopay said again. “Hanska? I need to know how to fight. And the Wanageeska will not teach me.” He poked her with his toe.
She stood and walked away to the water’s edge.
“Hanska?” Enopay got up and trotted after her. But when he reached out a hand to touch her arm, she shoved him away so hard that he fell.
“Juno, Hanska…” Marcellinus struggled to his feet, but Enopay hand-talked Be silent and stood again. “Hanska, I know why you are being like this. But I need to learn how to defend myself or perhaps I will die, too.” Enopay walked around Hanska, standing perilously between her and the water, and stared up at her. “Yes, I am small. Yes, of course I am ridiculous. I do not look like a warrior. All the more reason for me to learn how to become one.”
At that, Hanska looked down at him thoughtfully.
“Hanska?”
She grabbed his shoulders. “Shut up, boy. Stop talking. Leave me alone.”
She released him. Enopay swayed on the water’s edge, a hurt expression on his face. Hanska shook her head, looking neither sad nor angry, and walked away.
Marcellinus sighed, summoned up all his strength, and followed her.
—
She walked half a mile and then sat on a rock. Her head was still shaved at the sides in the Cahokian warrior style, but her hair was loose in mourning. It somehow made her look ferocious rather than vulnerable.
Marcellinus sat down beside her. “We need your help, Hanska.”
She ignored him, as usual.
“Hanska? I know you can hear me. It’s time to stop.” He took a deep breath, hating himself. “Or are you too weak to help us? Too feeble and broken?”
Finally she stirred. “Fuck off.”
Well, at least she was talking to him. “I’m sorry, Hanska.”
“You’re sorry?”
Her fingers flexed, forming fists. Marcellinus remembered Sintikala saying that she had killed people, some of them her friends, in her grief at losing her husband.
Perhaps Hanska would kill him. Nonetheless, he had to do this. “We need you. You’re our strongest warrior.”
Hanska looked around them very slowly and carefully, as if taking in her surroundings for the first time. “I see nobody here to fight. When I do, you can count on me. As you always do. For now…” She gestured in hand-talk: Go away. Fuck off.
Marcellinus looked at her and thought of trying to say something else. She had,
in fact, fought magnificently, but he could hardly talk to her of the moment when Mikasi had died.
Perhaps this was hopeless. He stood. “If you need anything, Hanska, ask.”
“I need nothing.”
Marcellinus left her to her grief. But the next night when they went ashore, Hanska disappeared into a small copse for a while and returned carrying several rocks and a few stout pieces of wood. The next day on the raft they were all maddened by the repetitious sound of her knapping flint and her occasional swearing as she threw one rock overboard and began anew with another, but by the middle of the second day she had constructed a hardy ax with a wooden haft and a stone blade. By the end of the third day she had made two more and had moved on to making short thrusting spears out of ash wood and bone.
Next, Hanska made two practice swords out of wood and began to spar with Enopay. Hanska was showing signs of life again.
—
They had lost some altitude now, having descended from the high plains several days before. Once again, the temperature was rising steadily as they headed toward high summer on the prairie. By now the river had grown sluggish and meandering, weaving back and forth across the terrain, bounded by red mudflats. The lethargy of the river was not enough to propel the raft forward; between them Marcellinus, the Chitimachan, and Taianita took it in turns to pole the boat while one or two of the others paddled. The tedium of the landscape was such that Marcellinus sometimes would look up after what seemed like hours of sliding the long wooden pole into the water and shoving it hard into the sand and mud beneath it, sometimes pushing the edge of the raft under the water in his efforts to propel it forward, only to find that the terrain around him looked almost exactly the same as when he had begun his shift.
Few people lived along that river. Very occasionally they would pass a homestead. They did not ask for help, expected none, and for their part the inhabitants gazed at them until they were past. They were deep in Caddo land now. Taianita spoke the language, but the natives of the region did not look friendly, and neither she, Marcellinus, nor any of the others felt safe approaching them.
Conversation was almost negligible during the day. It was only in the evening when the foraging parties went out and the others effected repairs to the raft and their clothes that any discussions took place. It was a dour, relentless journey through a largely unchanging and inhospitable countryside.
Marcellinus found himself gripped by an overwhelming sense of frustration. The urgency of their quest was unmistakable: this was a ruthless race against time. Far to the south, Mongols under Subodei Badahur were advancing east to join their fleet and battle the Sixth Ferrata. Far to the north, Roma and the Hesperian League were preparing to face the twin armies of the Mongol Khan and his son Chagatai. Far to the west, on the other side of the Great Mountains, a vast territory Marcellinus had never seen was groaning under the Mongol rule of Yesulun, its people enslaved to mine gold for the invaders.
Up the Wemissori in Hidatsa and Blackfoot territory the Romans were on their own similar hunt for gold. Without the slavery, or at least not yet.
And in the meantime, Cahokia was still oppressed by Roman occupation. What would be happening there now? Was the Imperator really keeping Agrippa in check, or had it all gone to hell? Was Sintikala safe? Kimimela?
The alliance hung by a thread. Even if the Mongols could be resisted, Roma was surely still a huge threat to Cahokia and to the whole of the Hesperian League.
Marcellinus had spearheaded the first invasion of Nova Hesperia. Now he was hurrying to take information about its second invaders back to an allied army ranged against them.
And, if possible, preserve their own lives. Because if Marcellinus and his crew ended up behind the Mongol invasion line, their stay of execution might prove to have been brief indeed.
—
Individual homesteads now gave way to small villages of several lodges, a few families huddled together on the riverbanks living off small cultivated garden areas, rabbits, and the occasional buffalo. The Hidatsa and Blackfoot much farther north did not eat fish, and there was little sign that the locals here did either. On the whole river trip, the only people Marcellinus saw trying to catch fish were Enopay and Bassus.
The raft was floating through Caddo territory in earnest now, and Marcellinus constantly worried that its inhabitants might seek other prey. From time to time a Caddo band of six or twelve warriors might stand on the riverbank and watch the raft go by, looking at Taianita and the Chitimachan with hungry eyes. At the attention Taianita lowered her gaze, perturbed, and Marcellinus had her sit rather than draw even more attention by poling the raft. By contrast, the Chitimachan stared at the men contemptuously, perhaps chilling them with the ice of her stare. Hanska did not exactly brandish her ax, but she certainly made sure it was visible. Marcellinus and Bassus did the same with the wood bow and the blades, and everyone aboard the raft stared out confidently as if ready for anything. No reason for the people on the shore to realize these were the only weapons they owned or how weak and injured they still were.
—
The Chitimachan stirred. “I have been here before.”
Marcellinus looked at her, uncomprehending. Taianita, poling the raft and sweating, scanned the banks and shook her head. To Marcellinus and perhaps to her, the landscape was gently rolling grassland as far as the eye could see, the kind of terrain that so numbed Marcellinus’s senses that after a while it was hard to drag a coherent thought through his brain.
In the distance was a black smudge that might have been a buffalo herd. Unexpectedly, his mouth watered. Hard now to imagine that after the great buffalo hunt with the Blackfoot on the Plains he had gorged on so much meat that he had never wanted to see it again.
Another desultory river had joined them from the left a little while before, almost as still and lifeless as the one they were on. None of them had remarked on it at the time. Now the Chitimachan sat up. “This is now the Kicka. Many weeks east of where we rode alongside it before, but still the Kicka. We were on a tributary of it all the time. Now we will travel on it to the Mizipi.”
Marcellinus groaned, and Enopay plunged his head into his hands. This meant they still had hundreds of miles to go before they met the Mizipi. And the Kicka flowed due southeast for much of its length, and so they would be moving farther away from Cahokia all that time rather than toward it. The Kicka fed into the Mizipi halfway between Cahokia and the Market of the Mud, well south of Shappa Ta’atan. From there they would have to fight the Mizipi upriver all the way or trek along its banks on foot.
Taianita caught his eye and shook her head, and she was right. They were all perpetually hungry and exhausted. It was not the time to discuss the length of the journey still ahead of them.
Suddenly, Marcellinus realized the brighter side of this coin. “Signal stations.”
“What?” said the Chitimachan.
“The Roman way stations on the Line of Hadrianus. Any time now, we should start coming across them.”
And so they did, the very next day.
—
The Roman outpost was surprisingly substantial. It was a two-story structure ten feet across at the base set within a turf rampart, the whole surrounded by a V-shaped ditch six feet deep and eight feet across. The upper floor had a parapet around it. Marcellinus knew it for simple wattle and daub, sticks of willow or hazel covered in clay, but the thickness and evenness of the clay made it almost indistinguishable from stone.
Suspended above the second floor was a platform of wood held aloft by four stout timber uprights. Providing access to the platform was a ladder sheathed in a column of wooden planks for protection against arrows, and on its top was a large bowl that surely contained the contubernium’s signal fire.
They stared at the signal station from midriver for several minutes before going ashore. Somehow the military solidity of the structure was daunting. That, and the apparent absence of life within it.
“This is what you built
? These are all across the Grass?”
Marcellinus nodded. In truth such a watchtower would be quick to build for trained legionaries, but it looked alien here, deep in the wilds of Hesperia. “One every twenty or thirty miles along every river and in a line north as far as the Wemissori. They may not all look quite like this.”
“Shit,” said Enopay, and looked at Marcellinus in admiration as if he were personally responsible for building every one of them. The Chitimachan, in contrast, was stone-faced, no doubt perceiving the watchtower as an affront to her land.
“Shouldn’t there be a sentry?” Enopay asked.
“Of course there should.” A post station was not much good without vigilant sentries. “We built these to be staffed by at least eight men on constant watch.” This one might have held twelve or sixteen. Agrippa, or his tribunes or engineers, might have been leery of trouble from the Caddo.
Marcellinus’s hails were not answered, and however hard he stared, he wasn’t going to be able to see through the walls. “Hanska, you’re with me. The rest of you, stay on the raft. Be ready to cast off at a second’s notice.”
The warrior glanced at the fortlet without interest. “Nobody’s there.”
“We don’t know that. What if a Caddo war party attacked the Romans and they’re still in the area?”
“Then why would we go in?”
“To find out. Come.”
He expected her to refuse or ignore him. Instead Hanska shrugged, picked up her ax and slung a second one over her shoulder, and followed him up the slope to the signal post.
—
On the ground floor they found a rough table and chairs, a few bowls, and eight sleeping pallets. On the second were four more sleeping pallets and a sack of grain. Nowhere did they see any signs of a fight.
Hanska stooped quickly to touch the floorboards and examine her fingertips. “Some grass stalks. No dust.”