by Alan Smale
She measured the distance, swung her heavy ax. It smashed into Chinggis Khan’s face, sinking deep into his skull. The strength of the impact knocked Marcellinus backward into the mud, the dead Khan lying across his legs.
All around them the Keshiks moaned, almost a keening sound, at the death of their beloved leader. The Romans and Hesperians stood silent. Perhaps they couldn’t believe their eyes. Pezi made a strange noise that might have been a cough or a short laugh, that he cut off quickly.
Hanska looked into the Khan’s ruined face, then calmly pulled off his helmet and brought out her pugio to scalp him. Her face was a mask; if anything, she looked thoughtful rather than exultant. Perhaps she had never expected to see the Khan lying dead. Perhaps she had never expected to survive this battle.
As she carved into the Khan’s hairline, the Keshiks ceased their keening and lowered their heads as if in prayer. One began to sob quietly. More blood poured onto Marcellinus’s chest.
Hanska stood and fastened the conqueror’s bloody scalp to her belt, then looked down to where Marcellinus sat, his muscles still quivering with the effort, shaken by the blows to his head, body, and arms.
She lifted the body of the Khan off him. “Up you come, sir.” Marcellinus held out a hand, and Hanska hauled him to his feet.
Instead of letting go, she pulled him closer and stared into his eyes. There he saw deep gratitude, respect, and sorrow. He nodded, and Hanska squeezed his hand and released him without comment.
Around them the struggle had abated, at least in the immediate area. The wind had picked up, but patchy smoke still swirled around them. Those Mongol warriors who could see that their leader had fallen were backing away, trying to withdraw without showing their backs to the Chernye Klobuki and the Polovtsians, who would kill them as soon as they turned tail.
Other Keshiks, however, were moving in to converge upon Marcellinus.
Shit. Did he have to fight yet again? He didn’t think he could. He was all-done.
Aelfric strolled to his side. “So, Praetor. That drink you offered me after I helped you kill Corbulo. Did I ever get it?”
“I don’t think so. Sorry.”
“Bloody typical. Yet here I am again.”
“Here you are again.”
Then they heard a single voice, wailing. Marcellinus turned around, almost irritated and still a little dazed, trying to figure out where it was coming from. One of the Keshik?
It was Pezi. Pezi was somehow standing, holding himself up by clutching the saddle of his horse, and he was weeping and wailing and crying out words in the Mongol tongue. Then he switched briefly to Cahokian and in the same wailing tone cried out: “Wanageeska! I am spreading the word that their Khan is dead. Put me on a horse! Do not leave me here!”
A dozen yards from Pezi a Keshik warrior smashed a Polovtsian cavalryman to the ground and jerked his horse’s head around. Seeing and hearing Pezi, he spurred his horse forward, heading for the boy. But Sintikala was faster, cantering her horse to Pezi’s side in his defense.
Again came Pezi’s voice. “Let them leave, Wanageeska! Give the Keshiks the body of the Khan and let them leave! Trust me, Wanageeska! Do it!”
“Trust him?” said Aelfric.
Pezi, once a coward and a liar, had come through at exactly the right moment at tremendous risk to himself. Marcellinus could not have defeated the Khan without the word slave’s courage. “Absolutely,” he said, and raised his voice. “Do as he says! Back up! Let them leave!” He repeated it in Latin for the Chernye.
The Cahokians and Chernye Klobuki withdrew together, away from the Khan’s body. The Keshiks walked past them to stand by their fallen leader.
Sintikala rode over to Marcellinus. How she had gotten her horse back, Marcellinus didn’t know; he had no idea where his own had gone. She gestured for him to climb up behind her, and he gave it a try, but with the arrow wound to his chest and the bruising to his arms and back, there was no way. “I can’t.”
She looked alarmed. “Will you live?”
“Yes. If you don’t make me get up there.”
Sintikala blinked. Then she got off the horse and put her arms around him for just a moment. He could feel her heart pumping hard. She was breathing heavily, chest moving in and out. He wanted to hold her, but it was too painful. “I love you, Sintikala.”
“I love you, Gaius. Let us do this. Hold on to me.” She put his foot into the stirrup and half pushed, half lifted him until he could get into the saddle, bracing himself on her shoulder.
“Let them leave!” Marcellinus shouted to the Chernye, to anyone who could hear him. Damn, even shouting was agony with that accursed arrowhead still lodged in his rib. “Let…Futete.”
Sintikala raised her voice. “Let the Mongols depart to spread the word among their people that their Khan has fallen!”
“Exactly,” Marcellinus said. “Thank you.”
Taking the horse’s reins, Sintikala walked him over to where Pezi still howled. “Shut up now,” she said. “They’re going.”
Pezi peered up at Marcellinus. “You came for me. Thank you and thank you…If you had not, the Keshiks would have taken me. As the Khan’s servant they would have killed me to serve him in the afterlife.”
The Mongols were trying to lift Chinggis Khan’s body onto his horse, but the horse was resisting their efforts. Eventually they gave it up and raised him onto their shoulders instead. Grouping up, they walked eastward. From a safe distance the Romans, Chernye, and Cahokians watched them go.
“Once again you owe the Wanageeska a life,” Sintikala said.
Pezi’s face cracked into a grin that quickly contorted with pain. “Or perhaps the Wanageeska now owes me one!”
—
A battle spread over such a large area, broken into so many distinct parts and amid such confusion, could not be ended all at once. It took trumpets and dispatch riders on the Roman side and drums, signal flags, and post riders on the Mongol side. It took a giant wailing Mongol horn sounding from far back from the battlefield. It took the defeat of another two hundred Mongols and Jin on foot bearing fire lances, with substantial deaths among the centuries of the Third Parthica that resisted them. Other jaghuns, seeking revenge, attempted to drive a Chisel Formation into groups of tired Romans, but the news of the Mongol Khan’s death had spread among the legions, too, cheering them and stiffening their spines, and few of the vengeance attacks resulted in major Roman casualties. Other skirmishes and smaller actions continued until the end of the afternoon.
Marcellinus and Sintikala, the Third Cahokian, the Chernye Klobuki, and other remaining mounted regiments of Roma regrouped with the Third Parthica in the late afternoon. By then Pezi was draped unconscious on his Mongol horse, and Marcellinus yearned to be safely unconscious, too. For all his wounds, aches, and pains, he could have fallen asleep in the saddle.
But that luxury was not for him. Agrippa, the Praetorians, and several cohorts of the 27th had already left the field, clustered in a strong defensive formation around their wounded Imperator.
Agrippa had left the phased withdrawal of the rest of the army to its tribunes, but Marcellinus had no idea what orders the other Praetor might have given. He could leave nothing to chance. The remains of this bloody and smoky battlefield, strewn with the bodies of dead men and horses, now appeared to be his responsibility.
“Contact my tribunes,” he said to his Roman adjutants and Norse scouts once he found them. “I need reports from every cohort as soon as you can. Sooner.” He turned to Napayshni and Takoda. “You two: the same. Get reports and locations from Tahtay and Wahchintonka. And the Thunderbird clan. Does anyone know what happened to Chenoa’s Wakinyan? Any signals? And if you see Chumanee, I need her right now. Don’t send me a medicus. Send me Chumanee. Enopay, you’re with me.”
And later, to the tribunes of the Third: “Find the freshest cavalry. Collect your scouts. Break it to them that their day is not over. The Mongols might even now be sending jaghuns to flank us. I
don’t think so, but they might, and we don’t have enough birds in the air to watch for them. Send scouts west, patrols and skirmishers south and north. Find trumpeters to go with them.”
Marcellinus did not lead his troops back to Forward Camp. Once the Sixth had mopped up the fire lancers and chased away the last of the Mongol heavy infantry, Aurelius Dizala took command and retreated along with the survivors of the Third Parthica, conveying and safeguarding the Roman wounded as best they could. The Hesperian League—Tahtay, Akecheta, and the First Cahokian, along with the Wolf Warriors, the Iroqua, the Blackfoot, and the Hand—had chosen to return separately. Marcellinus wondered what they had talked about on their long walk home to Forward Camp.
Marcellinus and Sintikala finally withdrew from the battlefield, escorted by Aelfric’s Sixth Cohort, Hanska’s Third Cahokian, and the Ninth Syrian. On the way Kimimela found them, careering down to earth in front of them in an untidy and exhausted landing that snapped her right wing strut and made Sintikala shake her head disapprovingly even as Kimi ran to hug them both, half crying.
Once she composed herself, she gave her report from the flying clans.
It turned out that Chenoa’s Wakinyan had made it to the Wemissori after all. Two of her Thunderbirds managed to fly across and land on the far side. Others came down on the near bank, but sufficiently distant from the closest Mongol mounted squadrons that they could cross the river in safety. One overly optimistic Wakinyan crew had tried to fly to the far bank but crash-landed midriver, and two pilots had drowned before they could be cut free from their craft.
Those drownings were the only casualties the Thunderbird clan had suffered in their whole day of war making. The Hawk clan was not so fortunate; Kimimela was brusque and imprecise about the numbers, but Marcellinus’s best guess was that they had lost perhaps two dozen Catanwakuwa pilots. Some had been forced to land behind enemy lines and had been killed instantly, and others had been shot down in dogfights with the Firebirds and Feathered Serpents. Kimimela had barely survived her own aerial battle with the Firebird. Several well-aimed slingshot pellets had forced the Firebird to lose height, and its pilots had chosen to fly back behind the Mongol lines rather than continue to fight her.
Others had, however, been saved. Five Hawk pilots had suffered disabling attacks to their wings at altitude. Cutting themselves free, they had drifted to earth under their Falling Leaf canopies. Four had survived unscathed. A fifth had broken both ankles in the violence of her landing, but at least she was still alive.
Kimimela climbed up on Sintikala’s horse behind her, and they cantered east to take control of the Hawk clan. After so long on the ground, Sintikala was keen to get back into the air before nightfall to see for herself where the Mongol forces were, find out whether any Hesperian forces were stranded, and see if she could determine where the Sky Lantern pilots had landed.
Once they left, Aelfric pulled in beside Marcellinus, and they led the last cohorts home.
“Whew.” Aelfric whistled. “This’ll be a tale to tell your grandkids.”
Marcellinus shook his head. “Kimimela doesn’t want children.”
Aelfric grinned. “So she says now. Ah, well. In that case you’ll just have to tell it to mine.”
“They will lay the Mongol Khan’s body in a great cart,” Pezi said. “They will carry him home in a long procession across the Grass back to the west, back to a ship, back to the Mongol land he comes from. And in that land there will be a kurultai.”
Tahtay shook his head. “A what?”
“A council,” Hadrianus said. “A powwow. To choose the Khan’s successor. Which, given the hatred and jealousy that Jochi, Chagatai, and Ogodei have for one another, will be no easy task.”
It was a meeting of the invalids. The Imperator lay flat on his couch, his stomach bound tightly in white linen. He was gray-faced and sallow, and his eyes were only half open. To Hadrianus’s left stood his chief medicus, an elderly Greek with a lined face who fussed over him and whom he was constantly having to wave away.
Not ten feet from him, lying in a wooden cot that two legionaries had carried into the Imperial presence, was Pezi, sometime word slave of the Iroqua, Cahokia, Roma, and the Mongols. Both of Pezi’s legs had been broken and were set and splinted with wood to keep them straight. Once again Marcellinus was in the presence of a brave young man who might never walk properly again.
Also crowded into the Praetorium tent behind the Imperator were Lucius Agrippa and his First Tribune, Mettius Fronto, both looking battered and bruised; Aurelius Dizala from the Sixth; and the First Tribune of the Third Parthica, Antonius Caster. Standing with Marcellinus were Sintikala and Enopay.
“The Mongol Khan will be buried at the place of his birth.” Pezi paused, trying to remember. “Khenti Aimag? The Onon River? A place of good medicine for the Mongols. Far-and-far.”
Marcellinus nodded. Central Asia was indeed a very long way from here.
Taianita sat by Pezi’s side, her face the picture of concern. Her past gratitude for Pezi’s valor on her behalf was equaled by her care for him now that he had been recovered. She had stayed with him while he was unconscious and had helped the legionary medicus do his work on the boy. As Pezi spoke, he occasionally glanced sideways at her, as if startled that someone like Taianita could possibly care whether he lived or died.
By now everyone knew that Taianita was for Tahtay, and Tahtay for Taianita. But Taianita and Pezi shared an odd bond: both had been word slaves for harsh, sadistic masters, and Pezi had spoken up for Taianita and almost died for it.
And then Pezi had risked his life once again. Attacking the great Chinggis Khan with a puny knife on the battlefield was one of the bravest things Marcellinus had ever seen. Pezi was as far from being a warrior as it was possible to get, yet he had acted without hesitation at a crucial moment. What must he have endured in the Khan’s service to provoke such a desperate gamble? Marcellinus had decided he would never ask.
Marcellinus was scarcely in any better condition than the Imperator or Pezi, beaten and banged up as always. When Chumanee had caught sight of him, she had merely nodded and gotten to work. She had carved the arrowhead out of his chest, thoroughly cleansed his wounds with her dark liquid, and painted them with her thick white salve before binding them up with Cahokian woven cloth.
For preferring Cahokian care to Roman, Lucius Agrippa had called Marcellinus a barbarian. Marcellinus, too exhausted to argue, had merely agreed.
Tahtay had somehow survived the battle without serious injury. The renewed gash in his leg had proved to be superficial, though his many bruises and blisters made him grimace. Now he stirred. “The Mongols have withdrawn. They spent last night in a camp thirty miles back. They have sent no flanking actions. Their army retreats undivided. Our scouts have spoken, Norse as well as Cahokian, and Sintikala and the Hawks confirm it.”
“They are all-done,” Pezi said.
“Perhaps we should continue to watch a little longer,” Dizala said drily.
“And we will,” said Tahtay. “For maybe they are just resting, as we are. Perhaps they plan to return to do battle with us again later.”
Pezi frowned. “Do Mongol riders hurry west, ahead of the main army?”
Since Sintikala showed no sign of responding, Marcellinus said, “Yes. Our Hawks and scouts have seen three jaghuns of Keshik riders galloping west, each with many remounts. They’re traveling fast.” So fast that the disgruntled Bjarnason and Stenberg had not been able to keep up in their attempt to shadow the group. But Sintikala had seen them, and Demothi and the others continued to watch over them as they rode.
“Then I am right,” Pezi said. “Chagatai will make haste to leave Nova Hesperia. He probably rides with that forward group. His armies will not be back.”
The Imperator nodded weakly. “I agree. But explain it to them if you would.”
Pezi took the beaker of water Taianita pushed into his hand, drank, and spoke. “Chinggis Khan is dead. His trusted Keshik bodygua
rds must take the news back to the Mongol heartland and the Khan’s other sons as soon as they can. And so Chagatai must go with them, to bend the Keshiks to his will, and shape how the news is spoken and heard once they get home.
“At kurultai, the brothers and their armies will meet. There, Chagatai must present himself as the man who helped conquer the huge realm of western Nova Hesperia and whose wife still rules it on his behalf. In addition, he must proclaim himself the hero who dealt the Roman army a mortal blow. Chagatai must recount this as his triumph. He must steal victory from defeat. Otherwise he is merely the son who could not prevent his father from being slain.
“And so Chagatai gains no advantage by fighting on. If he and the Great Khan had conquered the whole of Nova Hesperia, his claim to be chosen as Chinggis’s successor would be that much stronger. If he could take back gold and furs, that would help, too. But he cannot, and further glory and booty would take too long to acquire. He will leave.”
Agrippa nodded crisply. “By Mongol standards there’s little enough in Nova Hesperia to plunder. The gold is still in the ground, and there are no carpets or silks or fine glass, no rich nobles to fleece. If I were Chagatai, I’d certainly go home. Stake my claim to become the Great Khan and seek richer lands to prey on.”
“Leaving his army to follow behind in the command of Subodei Badahur,” Pezi added. “The army, bearing the body of the Khan.”
The other Romans were nodding, but the Cahokians were lost and even Marcellinus had to ask. “Pezi, are you sure?”
The Iroqua word slave took another drink and rubbed his leg. “I spent much time learning the Mongol tongue and talking with their captains. Ingratiating myself helped ensure my survival, I think. So I constantly talked and listened.”
Of that, at least, Marcellinus had no doubt.
“At the moment, the blame for the loss of so many men can be placed at the Khan’s door,” Fronto said thoughtfully. “And at Jebei Noyon’s, since he’s also usefully dead. Chagatai will claim the credit for rescuing as much as possible from a bad situation. Dealing a heavy blow to the legions and an injury to Roma’s Imperator against heavy odds. And two other leading Praetors are dead. All respect due, Imperator; that might play well on the steppes.”