by Alan Smale
Painfully slowly, Hadrianus sat up. “He’ll need every advantage he can get. Jochi and Chagatai have always hated each other. Jochi is rash and showed his father too little respect. Chagatai is ruthless and unbending, hot-tempered. That is why Chinggis brought Chagatai here with him to Nova Hesperia, so that he would not go to war with his brother Jochi while the Great Khan’s eyes were elsewhere.”
Pezi thought for a moment. “The captains told me that because of this feud between the first two brothers, Chinggis wanted Ogodei as his successor. But Ogodei is now chief of the Jin and Song Empires, which are huge and grand. He has less interest in being paramount chief and conquering other lands. Many of the Mongol captains favor the fourth brother, Tolui, but he treads warily around Jochi and Chagatai. I think I have that right?”
“Yes.” Agrippa turned to Marcellinus and the tribunes. “So far, so good. Everything Pezi says confirms our intelligence, but that is now several years old. Who knows what has happened in the Mongol lands in the meantime? Chagatai must be keen to find out.”
“Chinggis wanted the Imperator of Roma dead, and all his generals.” Pezi ducked his head, almost cringing, in an echo of his fawning, submissive behavior of the past. “Wanted this above all else, to prove that he was the strongest, the Chosen-by-Heaven, the ruler of the world. But Chagatai thinks only of power and plunder. Freed from his father, he will leave to fight other wars.”
Marcellinus knew little enough of Mongol politics and personalities, but he certainly understood the logistics of Hesperian travel. “The timing would make sense. It’s late in the Flower Moon now—almost the month of Julius. If Chagatai and his Keshiks hurry, just a few strong men on fast horses with many remounts, they can get back over the Great Mountains before the snows come, then back to the western coast of the continent. Maybe even set sail, if they can. But if they delay, they’ll have to either overwinter east of the mountains until the snows melt in spring or take a long detour south…through the lands of the People of the Hand.”
Tahtay had been waiting to say something for some time, with gradually increasing agitation. Now he broke in. “But what if you are all wrong? You speak of what sort of man this Mongol is, or that Mongol, and how far it is to the edge of the land as if this were finished. But what if the Mongols turn and ride back to strike Cahokia?”
The Imperator gestured. “Gaius Marcellinus?”
“If they do, we will get there first,” Marcellinus said. “Forward Camp is a little over four hundred miles from Cahokia. At the Mongols’ best, if each of their warriors has several replacement mounts, they can travel eighty or ninety miles a day. That would take them a little over five days. But they cannot be at their best after two hard-fought battles. The men will be weary, and our Wakinyan attacks destroyed a number of their remounts.”
He nodded to Enopay, who cleared his throat importantly and continued. “But also there are rivers. If the army rides south, they must cross the Braided River and two other rivers before they get to Cahokia-across-the-water, and then cross the Mizipi to get to Cahokia itself. If they go north instead, they will cross the Wemissori and follow it, then cross the Mizipi north of Cahokia, and another river or two, and Cahokia Creek. For either route, all those rivers will add much time. The four-legs can swim, but then they are tired and must rest, and if the Mongols want to take their big weapons, the trebuchets and fire lances and Firebirds, they will need a pontoon bridge or lots of rafts. So, eight days, then? Ten? More?”
“And traveling down the Wemissori on the quinqueremes, with the current, if we hurry, we can be back at Cahokia in four,” Marcellinus finished.
Tahtay looked doubtful. “Your big canoes cannot take all your Roman and my Hesperian warriors and all their horses. We have not lost so many that everyone would fit.”
“The cavalry will come overland,” Marcellinus said. “But our ships can ferry them across the rivers. The Mongols have only the Tlingit canoes, too small to help much with a large force of men and horses.”
“And if the Mongols turn, we will know right away,” Enopay added.
Sintikala inclined her head. Her Hawks were keeping the Mongols under constant scrutiny, and flying far and wide over the whole area of Cahokia down to Ocatan and beyond to protect against any surprises. In Asia and Europa the Mongols were renowned for their lightning attacks, but it was much harder for them to appear out of nowhere when they could be watched from above and their progress could be assessed.
“We will remain here at Forward Camp a few days longer, Tahtay,” said the Imperator. “Regroup. Rest. Heal. Then, if the Mongols continue to retreat, we will start our own withdrawal.” He smiled. “Well done, Pezi. Well done.”
Pezi glowed. Taianita grinned.
Marcellinus and Enopay looked at each other quizzically. These were strange days indeed.
—
As they walked out of the tent together, back into the turmoil and havoc of Forward Camp, Tahtay wrinkled his nose. “This camp is a dirty hell. I would think it the most evil place imaginable if I had not seen war.”
Marcellinus checked around them. The tribunes had made haste back to their cohorts, and Enopay had stayed behind to talk further with Pezi and Taianita. It was the first time he had been truly alone with Tahtay since before the battles, and gods knew they had been through hell in the meantime. Had Tahtay forgiven him yet? He racked his brains for a safe topic. “I still can’t believe you pinned your sash for the Imperator of Roma.”
“I had no choice. And Enopay would have done the same.”
Marcellinus raised his eyebrows. “Enopay would crawl a thousand miles before he’d face a man with a sword in battle.”
Tahtay walked beside him companionably enough. “And for Enopay that is the right choice, because we need him to think, not fight. But I meant that his words were in my head when I pinned my sash. It is what Enopay would have told me to do. If the Imperator had died, what then of Cahokia afterward? Could I trust Agrippa or even Sabinus? I do not think so.”
At Marcellinus’s silence, Tahtay looked sideways at him. “And if I had not, Hotah? What if instead of pinning my sash and fighting for your Imperator, the war chief of Cahokia had run away or stood aside and let Hadrianus and his men burn? What would his legionaries and tribunes say then? That was not possible. I had to show dignitas, and virtus, and animus.”
Dignity, valor, and martial spirit. “You’re right,” Marcellinus admitted. “That’s exactly what Enopay would say.”
“And besides, I like Hadrianus. Of all the new Romans, he is the one I least want to see burned to a crisp or rotting in a hole in the ground.”
Perhaps that was not so hard to understand. Marcellinus had long ago noted the strange kinship between the war chief and the Imperator. They shared the loneliness of command, the responsibility of knowing that all eyes were on them all the time. Marcellinus himself knew something about that.
“And he and I swore an oath in blood to stand together against the Mongol Khan. You do not remember, you who love oaths so much?”
Certainly Marcellinus remembered that. But to this day he did not believe that the swearing of such oaths meant as much to the Imperator as it did to him.
Tahtay nodded. “The Imperator has my blood in him now, as I have his. That will help him heal. And perhaps help him keep faith with us now that we have stood by his side in battle.”
“I hope you are right,” Marcellinus said. “I really do.”
Tahtay stopped walking and poked a hole in the mud with his moccasin. “And when Roma leaves, you will go with them?”
“No,” Marcellinus said, shocked, and then: “You believe Roma will leave?”
“Of course. They have won their war here. Why would they stay?”
Marcellinus could think of a dozen reasons, but right now Tahtay’s first question was more important to him. “When I agreed to lead the Sixth Ferrata into battle against the Mongol Khan, it was on the condition that I would be discharged once the war was won. Tha
t I’d retire from the army, here in Nova…in Hesperia.”
Now that he had said the words, Marcellinus could not remember whether Hadrianus had in fact explicitly agreed to this. He frowned.
“Ah. You arranged all that with the Imperator, then?”
Marcellinus looked up quickly. “With your permission, of course, war chief. Always, I would work for my grain, for Cahokia…”
It was the paramount chief’s prerogative to say who could live in Cahokia and who could not. If Tahtay held too many grudges, Marcellinus could quickly become a man without a country. Again.
Tahtay stared at him long and hard, and then grinned wryly. “Of course. For if I said not, Kimimela would break my balls and my Hawk chief would never smile again for the rest of her life. Her smiles are rare enough even now. And then there is Nahimana, and Takoda, and Hanska.” He met Marcellinus’s eye. “But I had to ask, because you seem so…Roman again now. And also—I must admit it: sometimes I think Cahokia should be just for Cahokians, and Hesperia just for Hesperians.”
After another uncomfortable silence, Marcellinus checked around himself again for eavesdroppers and said: “I agree. And I also agree that Roma must leave. Whether they wish it or not.”
It was their last evening on the Wemissori. The next day, the leading ships in the Roman fleet would arrive back in Cahokia.
The galleys did not sail the river by night. The risk of holing a ship on a submerged tree trunk or rock, running aground, or sticking firmly in the river mud was too great. Even if night travel had been safe, the vessels were so crowded with Romans and Hesperians and their weaponry and supplies that there was no room for everyone to lie down. Instead they moored along the bank at dusk, and the Roman cohorts threw up makeshift field fortifications in a line parallel to the shore: a shallow berm studded with sharpened stakes, with a deep ditch beyond it. The Hesperians politely asked whom the Romans were protecting themselves against—they were at peace with the Iroqua, Blackfoot, People of the Hand, and the other tribes that had departed from Forward Camp days before, presumably heading back to their homelands, and the Mongols were even farther away and still making haste westward—but old Roman habits died hard, and no tribune or centurion would allow his men to sleep unprotected.
It might have been better for Hadrianus to have remained in his stateroom on board the Providentia, but he would not hear of it: as Imperator, he slept among his men. And so his Praetorians had carried him ashore on his litter and installed him in his Praetorium tent, where he sat up and dined with Marcellinus, Agrippa, and the lead tribunes of his three war-battered legions, with his Greek medicus flickering around behind him like a fussy ghost.
After dinner Marcellinus went to stand outside the tent, looking out across the Wemissori past the great warships that loomed along the bank.
Cahokia was near, and Marcellinus was craving their first view of the Great City. Approaching from the north, they would first see the Circle of the Cedars poking up over the tree line and then the longhouses on top of the Master Mound, all wreathed in the smoke that rose from the hearth fires of the city.
He would be home, but Sintikala would not. The ships of the Roman fleet were spread out along the Wemissori. The Providentia, the Clementia, and the smaller ships of Roma and Cahokia had left first with the Imperator, the wounded, and as many other legionaries as they could take. Loading the Minerva and the Fides with the Hawk, Eagle, and Thunderbird craft had been a task left for last, as it was more careful work that could be achieved more readily once almost everyone else was out of the way. It might be two or three days before Marcellinus would see Sintikala and Kimimela again, and he was less than happy about that.
Not that he had much time at leisure. These were his last days as a Praetor, and his pride was driving him to do all he could to ensure that he was leaving the Sixth Ferrata—his last ever Roman command—in as organized a shape as possible…
He shook himself, dismissing such woolgathering. There was serious work to be done tonight. The imminent meeting between Tahtay and the Imperator would be critical for Cahokia, for Roma, and for Marcellinus himself.
Yet despite the risks that might lie ahead, Marcellinus found that he was looking forward to it. He wanted all this to be over.
Soon he saw the war chief threading his way between the Roman campfires toward him. As Tahtay arrived in front of the Praetorium tent, neither of them said a word. They hardly needed to.
Tahtay nodded to Marcellinus. Marcellinus nodded back. Then the Imperator’s Praetorians pulled the tent flaps aside, and the two of them walked into the presence of the Imperator.
“Ah, Tahtay.” The Imperator raised a hand in greeting, then allowed it to fall back down beside him. Even at that easy movement, his medicus frowned. “Forgive me for not arising to greet you.”
“You look better, Caesar,” Tahtay said courteously.
“I…” The Imperator coughed, and his face creased in sudden pain. They waited patiently for him to recover. “I offer you wine, although I am afraid I am not permitted to join you just yet.” He tilted his head, indicating the medicus, who sighed.
“Not tonight, sir,” Tahtay said.
“Then sit, sit.”
Marcellinus did so, but Tahtay remained standing. “Tomorrow we will be back in Cahokia,” he said. “And so tonight we must speak of the future of the great alliance between Roma and the Hesperian League. We would not want any mistakes or misunderstandings at this late date, after our friendship has survived so much.”
Tahtay’s expression and tone were pleasant enough, but Marcellinus knew the war chief well enough to see the iron resolve that lay beneath them and the restless energy that churned within him.
“You and I, Caesar, we swore a blood oath,” Tahtay continued. “We vowed to do everything in our power to help each other destroy the Mongols. That, we have done. That slate is clean. Our debt of war is paid. Is it not so?”
The Imperator stirred painfully, but his voice was as strong as ever. “It is so, Tahtay.”
“And so, when we arrive in Cahokia, what then? What next?”
Hadrianus half smiled. “Then, of course, my army must be resupplied. You promised me corn, Tahtay, and my legions will require all the corn in your granaries. In a month or so you will harvest new corn from your fields to replace it, no? And we will also need beans, askutasquash, and whatever dried fish and meat you can spare for our journey.”
“Your journey home, Caesar? Out of Cahokia, then, and back to your own land?”
“Yes,” Hadrianus said. “Back to Roma.”
“All the legions, Caesar?” Agrippa ventured.
The Imperator smiled. “You would prefer to stay, Lucius Agrippa? Perhaps as a general of a garrison in Cahokia, attempting to enforce the peace here with a limited number of cohorts? Or leading an expedition back up the Wemissori for gold?”
“No, Caesar,” Agrippa said, taken aback. “Those would not be my preferred choices.”
Hadrianus looked back at Tahtay. “I will be quite candid with you, Tahtay, for you have earned it. The Cahokians and their allies have served us well. We have too few legions to hold a territory of this size, and those legions are beyond weary.” The Imperator’s voice came stronger now. He seemed amused at the surprise on Tahtay’s face. “It has been a long campaign, and these legions are needed elsewhere. Like Lucius, there are few among my Romans who would welcome an even more extended posting here in the bowels of Nova Hesperia.” He glanced pointedly at Marcellinus before continuing.
“And so we will fall back: some of us to the south aboard our ships, others on horses and mules to the east. Now we are confident that the Mongols’ retreat is permanent, I have already sent the Polovtsians ahead along Marcellinus’s road back to Chesapica. The sturdiest of our infantry cohorts and the other cavalry will be on the march just as soon as they are resupplied at Cahokia. The rest of us will be on our way a day or so later, riding the Mizipi south. With vigorous rowing the fleet can be at the Market
of the Mud in little more than a month and then out into the Mare Solis. Then up the coast and across the Atlanticus just as soon as weather permits.”
“That is good news. And I wish you well on your journey, Caesar.” Tahtay stood back and shot Marcellinus a relieved look, but Marcellinus’s eyes were on Lucius Agrippa. The Praetor seemed altogether too calm, and the conversation between him and the Imperator felt staged. He waited.
Hadrianus nodded in thanks, and his eyes narrowed. “However…”
Here it came.
“By the terms of our original treaty, I promised you that Cahokia and Ocatan would be free and independent cities within Nova Hesperia. In return you promised me corn, guides, and gold. Corn and guides we have received in abundance. But I see no gold.”
Tahtay stood, speechless.
The Imperator’s tone became quiet, conciliatory. “Pinning your sash was brave and noble, Tahtay. We will not forget your loyalty and valor on Roma’s behalf, and that is why we will honor our agreement in full. We will pause in Cahokia to load our corn and then be gone. But we must also have gold, and you must provide it if you wish to keep your lands free of Roma.”
“But since then we have fought by your side. Helped you win a war we knew nothing about when we made our treaty. That counts for nothing?”
“It counts for a great deal. But if my legions had never come to Nova Hesperia, what then? Without us, Cahokia would have fallen to the Mongols. By now this entire land would be groaning under the Mongol heel. We fought so that you might be brought into the light as Roman subjects rather than toiling in the darkness as Mongol slaves. I am sure you will agree that allying with Roma was the better bargain. But now Roma must be paid for the blood it has spilled on your behalf, and that payment must be in gold.
“By the time of the Midsummer Feast next year, I am confident that your Blackfoot and Hidatsa friends can deliver enough gold to our garrison at the Chesapica to fill a drekar. If so, then I believe I will be able to satisfy my senators that there is no need for Roma to march into your lands once again.”