Clash of Eagles (12 page)

It did not come.

He heard no command, but his captors got off him, rising to their feet and looking around them and down to the plaza below. Cautiously, Marcellinus sat up to see where they were looking. The savages did not stop him, but the two who flanked him kept a watchful eye on him.

Down in the plaza some areas of fighting still raged, a last desperate effort by the few remaining Roman centuries to take as many barbarians to hell with them as they could. One of the fiercest pockets of resistance marked the distant area where the Fourth Cohort had been; Marcellinus hoped Aelfric was still fighting and would die well. Such pockets aside, the battlefield was a morass of downed Romans, charred leather, and blackened steel doused in blood. From this elevation it was clear beyond doubt that Marcellinus’s army was no more.

The 33rd Hesperian Legion had been utterly destroyed in a matter of minutes.

From the fringes of the killing ground, some Romans fled eastward. Marcellinus did not begrudge them their escape. For him there could be no future that way. Even if he could escape from the mound and catch up with the fragments of his Legion, they’d probably kill him. And then on the terrible march back to the Chesapica, the Iroqua would kill
them.

Two Thunderbirds had landed, one in a cornfield far distant and the other at the northern edge of the Urbs Cahokiani. The nearer bird was being carried back into the palisade by its pilots; from Marcellinus’s vantage point it looked like an enormous crawling insect. In the distant sky two other aerial bombers turned in formation and flew back toward the mound, their giant wings flexing in the invisible air currents. And in the air far above him, fliers wearing the individual wings still danced like dragonflies, wheeling and swooping in victory.

One of the small wings separated itself from the throng and spiraled down. It shot over his head at speed and looped around. Its pilot pushed up her craft’s nose to spill air and landed running along the plateau toward Marcellinus. Ribbons fluttered behind the wing.

The pilot shrugged out of her wing harness and laid the wing carefully against the slope of the mound. Marcellinus’s captors drew back to let her pass.

Sisika wore a light leather tunic that was haphazardly cut. Her falcon mask hung around her neck. In her hair she wore a band studded with eagle feathers. Her face was painted with swirling marks, a forked pattern around her eyes making her look even more hawklike. Back east she had not worn such marks, perhaps adapting to local customs. That had been bravery, he now realized: to come all that way just to see the Romans for herself.

“Chieftain, daughter of chieftain,” Fuscus had called her. Once again, understanding had eluded Marcellinus. Here on her home territory, Sisika’s poise and authority were clear.

Sisika squatted on her heels just a few feet away, staring into his face. Marcellinus tried to imagine how rough and uncanny he must seem to her.

“Sisika,” he said, and, feeling ridiculous even as he did it, he pointed at himself and said, “Gaius.”

She put her head on one side, birdlike, but seeing the harsh disdain in her eyes, Marcellinus did not smile.

Marcellinus was battle-torn and filthy. He had cuts on his head and burns on his arm from splashes of Greek fire. His leg was gouged bloody, and he had lost a chunk of skin from his shoulder, wounds he did not remember getting. But of all his men he had survived and was here, now, on the mound.

Soon he would be the only Roman left alive within the city. He was the farthest west any Roman had gone, buried deep in a whole new world completely independent of the Imperium.

Below, three braves walked in through the palisade gates carrying the Legion’s golden Aquila. It looked unharmed, down to the two plaques mounted on the pole beneath the eagle, the “S.P.Q.R.” of the Imperium and “XXXIII Hesperia” under that. Chattering excitedly, the braves began the long walk up the mound with their trophy.

Well, they’d won it fair and square; nobody could deny that.

As the braves stepped over the shattered bodies of Pollius Scapax and the nameless Romans who had fought alongside him at the last, the reaction hit him. Deep pain plunged through his heart and stomach at the loss of his Legion. And if these people chose to burn him and tear out his heart, that would be his just deserts.

Sisika stood, and with a final contemptuous glance she turned and walked away. As if it were a signal, the Cahokians pounced upon Marcellinus and dragged him to his feet.

Marcellinus did not fight back. He had rarely shown mercy. Let none be shown to him in return.

S
till, they did not kill him.

Marcellinus knelt at the top of the Master Mound of the Cahokiani, his head bowed. Sweat, blood, and dirt caked him, and the late afternoon sun burned his neck. Above him glowed the golden Aquila of the lost 33rd Hesperian, the shaft that held it buried deep in the soil of an alien land. Around him stood silent braves dressed in breechcloths and feathers. Tattoos, war paint, and scarifications adorned their brown skin. Like Marcellinus, some of the warriors still clutched battle-fresh wounds that dripped blood into the clay of the mound.

The warrior standing behind him held his gladius and pugio. At any moment Marcellinus expected to feel the steel of one of his own weapons pierce his neck. He had no objections. His will to live had drained away with the last of his adrenaline.

The hubbub from the plaza faded, leaving only the sound of the breeze that had helped the Cahokians soar high above his army and destroy it.

Not far away, a man began to speak. His words were incomprehensible to Marcellinus, but the man’s tone was that of an orator, and his powers of projection would have been the envy of any in the Roman Senate. Marcellinus raised his head.

Sisika stood close by, still clad in her leather flying tunic. Her falcon
mask dangled from her fingers, and her face was impassive. Perspiration lined her temples and the hawklike forked design painted around her eyes had smeared, but her chin was held high. Despite her obvious weariness, her stance breathed power and strength.

Beyond her stood the much taller figure of the man who was addressing the crowd. He wore a headdress adorned with eagle feathers and a woven kilt in blocky patterns. His chest was bare and muscular, and around his shoulders was a short feather cape. From his earlobes hung pendulous copper ear spools crudely fashioned into the shape of a human head. He carried a mace of chert and stood so still that if it were not for the movement of his mouth as he spoke, he could have been fashioned out of rock himself.

The man stood at the very edge of the plateau, proclaiming in a sonorous baritone that seemed to roll down the face of the mound and wash over his people. Even so, it was miraculous that such a large assembly could hear him. The Great Plaza had to be fifty acres in area, but the sea of Hesperians all appeared to be following his words. Marcellinus glanced to the right and left and only now saw braves on the lower plateau of the Great Mound gesturing in big sweeping movements, eloquent motions of a sign language that conveyed this chieftain’s meaning farther than his voice could reach. Along the sides of the plaza and far beyond, other braves took the gestures and repeated them, spreading the words so that all could share them.

The crowd was enthralled. Every face was upturned. The chieftain of the Cahokians commanded absolute attention from his people.

Marcellinus wished he could understand what they were hearing. Clearly, he himself was the object of much of it; the chieftain would occasionally lift an arm and point at him.

He also wished he could stand, but only because of the pain in his knees and legs. It should have been ignominious for a Roman Praetor to be kneeling at the beck and call of a foreign army, but Marcellinus was beyond that. Stoically, he took the shame as his due. He was, after all, defeated.

The chief’s voice built to a crescendo, then stopped abruptly. He
made another sweeping gesture toward Marcellinus while still facing out over the mass of his people.

From behind Marcellinus came the familiar ring of steel. Above him, he saw the glint of a blade. The warrior had raised Marcellinus’s sword over his head.

An expectant silence fell. Sisika turned slowly to gaze at him.

Unable to meet her eyes, Marcellinus looked out beyond the crowd to where the sun sank over a great brown river and wide fields of Hesperian corn. Plumes of smoke rose from the thousands of huts that made up the Great City. Mounds, some truncated pyramids of earth topped with a house and palisade and others conical and unadorned, dotted the landscape as far as he could see. Away to the east, the golden rays of the sunset illuminated the pale face of the low landlocked river bluffs that marked the edge of the immense Cahokian floodplain five or more miles distant.

If Marcellinus did not look down into the fields of death beyond the plaza, he might have imagined that nothing in particular had happened this day, that this was just another glorious evening deep in the heart of a new continent.

If these were his last moments on earth, he wanted above all to feel at peace.

The killing stroke did not come. The silence extended. The chief held his position, his hand pointed toward the Roman. Nobody else spoke. No ritual was being conducted here. Marcellinus was still breathing.

A broad shadow swept the plaza as the sun set, and as if they had been freed from bondage, a mighty howl burst forth from the crowd accompanied by the rattle of wood against wood, wood against steel, steel against steel. Thousands of Cahokiani were beating captured Roman weapons against Roman armor in a deafening cacophony.

“Holy gods,” Marcellinus said aloud, awed at the din. He looked up.

Above him, the Roman standard still gleamed. It wounded Marcellinus to see the Legion’s eagle captured. But the loss of a golden bird was nothing to the loss of three thousand men, his command, and his world.

It was as if the Cahokiani had been waiting for him to move. The brave stepped past him and laid his gladius and pugio on the ground by his side at the standard’s base.

Marcellinus’s legs had stiffened. The brave grabbed his arm and pulled him up onto his feet. Sisika and the chieftain were already walking toward the huge longhouse that capped the mound. Marcellinus took a few steps after them.

Braves in falcon masks converged on him, turning him around firmly. Marcellinus did not resist as they ushered him down the steps of the mound and tethered him to a tall cedar pole.

Marcellinus awoke at dawn lying on the ground, his body stiff and aching. His eyes were stuck shut, and with his wrists lashed together it was hard to raise his fingers to rub the sleep out of them. He felt a tacky dampness at his shoulder and leg where his wounds had reopened and a fierce throbbing pain along his arm from the Cahokian liquid flame.

They had bound his wrists and hobbled his ankles with a fine sinew that cut into him when he moved. A short rope held him fast to the pole of red cedar that stood just inside the open gates of the palisade, the same gates he had run through the previous day, near the battle’s end.

With some difficulty Marcellinus rolled onto his back and peered up the steep slope of the Master Mound. He saw no one.

He grasped the pole and levered himself to a sitting position. Through the gates, the early sun lit the straw-thatched huts, turning them golden. Native men and women walked back and forth between them, rubbing their eyes. Marcellinus rubbed his own eyes again. The Cahokiani were a people who in the heat of summer did not wear very much. Many of them were clad only in breechcloths—and some in even less.

A woman limped past, her long gray hair in braids. She was dressed more modestly than the younger women in a fringed tunic that might have been deerskin. Her hip clearly troubled her, for she had a rolling gait and rubbed her hip bone and grumbled as she walked.

Seeing Marcellinus, she stopped dead in her tracks. Her expression
hardened. Pursing her lips, she turned and hobbled back the way she had come.

Moments later a grim-faced brave walked through the gate. His head was shorn at the sides, leaving a sharp spiky crest of hair that jutted up from his scalp and hung down his back in a long braid. His shoulders were decorated with dark feather tattoos, and a jagged pattern of blue and red war paint adorned his chest, smudged where he’d slept on it. The stink of battle was still on him.