Clash of Eagles (13 page)

Halting in front of Marcellinus and not meeting his eye, the warrior raised a chert knife.

Marcellinus tilted his head back, baring his throat. He would welcome whatever death was his due, and a quiet dispatch in the dawn was as good as any, but he would prefer the slash to be quick and sure-aimed.

The brave grabbed his hands and sawed through the sinew that bound him. When Marcellinus still didn’t move, the man pushed his wrists apart a little impatiently.

“Maybe I should stay here,” Marcellinus said.

The brave grunted and hacked away the sinew binding Marcellinus’s ankles. The older woman reappeared and quacked at him peevishly, dragging Marcellinus to his feet with only belated help from the brave. She only came up to his shoulder but was considerably stronger than she looked.

The woman’s hut was only a couple of hundred yards outside the gate, but every step sent shooting pains through Marcellinus’s legs and spine. He tottered like an infant, muttering in profane Latin and bleeding gently into the dust. Just as they arrived, the cramps in his muscles started to ease.

Outside the hut a much younger woman nursed her baby, bare-breasted and long-legged. She gaped at the Roman, then stood and strode away. The brave called after her, but the harsh set of her shoulders was answer enough: yesterday’s enemy was hardly welcome at their house. “I don’t blame you,” Marcellinus said.

The old woman returned bearing a bowl of water. Marcellinus bowed
his head to drink, but the woman’s shriek brought him upright again in short order. She gestured, hands flapping and braids bouncing, and he finally understood. Dipping his palms into the bowl, he splashed water onto his face and rubbed his hands together, did it again, and a third time.

The water quickly turned dark and bloody. Marcellinus touched his face more gingerly, trying to locate the gashes in his skin so he wouldn’t irritate them further.

The old woman slapped his hands away from his forehead. Startled once again, Marcellinus sat quietly as she dabbed at his brow with the corner of a small blanket that itself looked none too clean. Satisfied, she babbled another stream of words at him and emitted an explosive
psssht!
of disgust at his continued lack of comprehension.

Meanwhile, the brave pushed a smaller clay bowl of water into his hand. Marcellinus hesitated, wary of breaching etiquette again. The brave understood and gestured, lifting his hand to his lips.

Marcellinus drained the bowl in two large, painful swallows and held it out for more.

As the sun rose higher, Urbs Cahokiani came to life at its own speed. People moved slowly and dallied to chat with one another. Their motions seemed aimless to Marcellinus’s eyes. It was nothing like the purposeful bustle of the castra.

Braves and women blinked at him as they walked by. Children stared openly, and many would have stayed to stare longer if not urged past by their parents. Some people had started the work of their day while the air was still relatively cool. A man carved strips of meat from a deer hung up on a wooden frame, a dog at his feet hoping for scraps. Two women outside the hut opposite began to grind corn on a dish-shaped rock, glancing at Marcellinus covertly out of the corners of their eyes. Outside another hut a little farther away, a plump older woman turned clay in her hands, fashioning it into a bowl; the fired and half-painted pots by her blanket showed her to be something of a craftswoman. She had a colored blanket draped over her shoulders, but most of the other
Cahokians wore tattoos, body paint, breechcloths, and not a great deal more.

Marcellinus frequently glanced back toward the gates where he had spent the night, but no sudden consternation erupted at his absence from the pole, and no warriors came dashing down the steps of the mound to collect him. The Master Mound and the rest of the area inside the palisade seemed empty.

Of course, the warriors and ordinary folk of Cahokia were also awakening the morning after a ferocious and exhausting battle. A battle that Marcellinus himself had brought upon them. The paradox that he could be sitting eating some kind of corn mash in the morning light, unmolested and practically ignored in the middle of an enemy city he had just the previous day waged brutal war on, became even more acute.

And with that thought came another wave of delayed terror and nausea at the loss of his Legion. Marcellinus stopped chewing and swallowed hard.

He could casually eat breakfast on a morning like this? While the tormented souls of thousands of Romans still shimmered in the air around him?

The old woman reached out her hand in concern. Obviously his despair had shadowed his face, and how could it be otherwise?

Marcellinus stood abruptly.

He had presided over one of the greatest Roman defeats in history. This was his Teutoburg, his Carrhae, his Cannae. Today marked his entrance into the pantheon of the cursed: Roman generals whose incompetence had wiped out their entire commands, legates who had failed so disgracefully that their names were held in contempt for centuries.

What would his father and family think of him now? His daughter?

At least those other blighted generals had had the decency to perish in their final wars. Publius Quinctilius Varus. Marcus Licinius Crassus. Lucius Aemilius Paullus. All had fallen in battle with their men. Why should Gaius Publius Marcellinus go on living with this dark hole at the center of his soul?

Without even a nod to his hosts he stepped away from their hut and strode blindly forward into the heart of the Urbs Cahokiani.

People moved out of his way. As he limped past house after house, Cahokians fell silent and watched him go, and still nobody raised a hand against him. It all blurred around him: white walls, golden thatch, staring faces, soil and sand underfoot. The sun, already beginning to burn his face.

Then there were no more people and few houses, merely the twin stenches of burning and death.

His foot bumped into a corpse, and he stopped.

Marcellinus stood at the edge of yesterday’s battlefield. A sea of broken bodies stretched out before him, Romans and Cahokians piled in a mass of slaughter. The stink of viscera wafted over him.

Marcellinus grunted and shoved up the sleeves of his tunic. He had work to do.

The Cahokiani had made a noble start on the grisly work the previous evening. They had at least dragged the bodies away from their Great Plaza and the huts that surrounded it. But the battle line had extended for hundreds of yards beyond that, and the melee had ranged far and wide as the Romans had scattered under the assaults of the Thunderbirds and the warrior horde on the ground.

A few dozen grim-faced Cahokiani were already walking among the dead, lifting the broken bodies of their warriors and carrying them reverently away from the battlefield. As each body was moved, a small swarm of flies took to the air. By the nearest stand of trees Marcellinus saw a neat line of Hesperian corpses, their smashed bodies straightened as well as they could be, their weapons placed on their chests. With much less care, another team of Cahokians stripped Roman bodies of arms and armor. Children carried blood-streaked swords and breastplates off the killing fields and added them to the growing piles of steel at the edge of the plaza.

The spoils of war. Marcellinus could imagine how useful the Roman weaponry might be when pressed into service against local foes. Perhaps he had already changed the balance of power in the region.

What of that? He put the thought aside. He cared nothing for tribal politics. If the Cahokiani wanted to go off and slaughter Iroqua with Roman steel, more power to them. He walked forward and bent over to pick up the body of the first Roman soldier he came to, a fine blond-haired boy with green eyes open in surprise, his face unmarred but his intestines a mass of dark blood and flies.

Someone seized him from behind. Marcellinus tried to react, but he was hampered by the corpse of his countryman and the dizzy ache of his own limbs. He sprawled backward onto hard Roman armor, the dead lad’s weight across his knees.

Above him stood a Cahokian warrior, his face still daubed with war paint. Spiral tattoos covered his arms and shoulders. He held a Roman gladius awkwardly in both hands, the point of the blade bobbing in the air scant inches above Marcellinus’s unprotected chest. From his belt hung strips of bloody hair, the scalps of dead Romans. His features were distorted, and a few drops of his spittle alighted on Marcellinus’s cheek.

Belatedly, Marcellinus realized that the warrior was screaming at him and had been screaming for some time. His fugue state of despair apparently had rendered him insensible to the sounds around him. Nor had he been truly conscious of the terrible, fetid smell of the battlefield that burst upon him now, flooding his nostrils. He rolled aside, spilling the dead Roman boy off his legs, and vomited onto the bloody ground.

He stood and took up the body once more. Again the Cahokian struck him down. Marcellinus tasted blood: fresh blood here where there was already so much. He thought of bearing his breast to the man. Thought of goading him, fighting back just enough to force his own death.

The brave pointed to the tattoos on his chest and arms, spit on the ground, pointed at the dead men around them, the jabs of his fingers rough and accusatory.

The sun blinked. Another brave had leaped over Marcellinus and seized the screaming warrior by the shoulders. More men arrived, shouting and gesturing, shoving at one another, some pointing at Marcellinus and snarling, others pointing toward the Great Mound. Marcellinus sat
up and wiped his mouth, put his head in his hands, and waited for the argument over his fate to be resolved.

… And still they didn’t kill him.

Morning gave way to afternoon. Marcellinus took no break, stopped for no rest, accepting only a bowl of water a woman halfheartedly held out to him around noon.

The charnel pit was a long walk off to the east, a shallow rectangular grave that already contained several hundred Cahokian bodies. At first Marcellinus wanted to protest, although he had no words to speak that they would comprehend: the grave was not deep enough, the dead would be defiled, the Cahokians’ dogs and other wild animals would dig up the corpses, human bones would proliferate through the area, disease would spread.

Then he looked around, and the answer became obvious. A mound would be built here over the valiant Cahokian dead, a permanent memorial to their sacrifice.

He nodded, spit the flies out of his mouth, and trudged back to the battlefield to hoist another corpse onto his shoulders.

But now, logical thought having restarted in his brain, he had another idea. He walked out beyond the plaza, back the way the Roman army had come, until he came to the carts they had hauled across the continent. The baggage train was still loaded just as he had last seen it; the Cahokiani had no use for Roman tents, and they needed none of the Romans’ dwindling supply of corn, hard cheese, and wine. There was no sign of the slaves who had hauled the carts across Nova Hesperia. Even the horses had disappeared. Whether the beasts had been freed by the Cahokians, escaped by themselves, or been slaughtered for their meat was beyond his power to guess.

Marcellinus had thought that the carts could be unloaded and pressed into service to ferry the dead to their final resting place, but once again he could not make himself understood. Unsurprisingly, the few braves nearby ignored all his gestures, and unloading a wagon and hauling it to the battlefield was quite beyond the efforts of one man.

He took a long drink of wine, unwatered. Its brackish, sour taste helped cut the gummy residue in his mouth and throat but sent a cloud of dizziness over him again. He clutched the tall wheel of the cart until it passed, took a second swig, and went back to work.

As a professional soldier, Marcellinus found it a little galling that so few of the dead bodies on the battlefield were Cahokian. As a human being, he felt oddly comforted.

For his dead Roman legionaries, there would be no memorial mound. The charnel pit dug for the Romans was a converted borrow pit out in the marshland, and their bodies were burned in batches once they had been stripped of weaponry and armor. Marcellinus was dourly content. They were just empty husks now, broken forms that his valiant men had no further need of. Better that they be burned and have their essence rise into the Hesperian air than rot in the damp earth. Their memorial would be in his mind, where it would loom greater than any grass-covered mound.

More upsetting than the burning of the corpses was the scalping. As Sisika had promised months before, the Cahokians often cut off the Romans’ hair, carving it whole off the skull beneath. Many of the legionaries Marcellinus doggedly ferried to the Roman charnel pit had the characteristic red band hacked out of their heads, in some cases blackened and stale, in others still weeping blood. It was also clear that many of the Romans had been strangled.

Aside from Marcellinus, the Cahokians had not spared the wounded.

By midafternoon all the Roman corpses on the battlefield had been stripped of their helmets and breastplates. At least Marcellinus did not need to perform that task. He did, however, find a pugio the Cahokians had missed, ground into the blood-soaked dirt beneath the body of a Hispanic auxiliary from Fabius’s Seventh Cohort. The soldier had been so comprehensively butchered that Marcellinus had almost left him where he lay for someone else to deal with, but perhaps the dead Roman’s blade was his reward for gritting his teeth and honoring the man’s sacrifice. Marcellinus slid the grimy dagger inside his tunic before dragging the auxiliary to his final resting place.

At day’s end they were still not done. Marcellinus trooped off to the broad and winding creek that ran just north of the city with the rest of the Cahokian workers and dipped his aching body into the water to sluice off the worst of the dried blood and muck. By now he received little more than dull, resentful stares from the Cahokians.

It seemed that outside the heat of battle none of them would even stoop to murder him. So be it.

Marcellinus stumbled and fell on his knees from exhaustion several times on his way back into the city. Today’s heavy exercise had reopened his wounds, and scabs of new blood now caked them. His stomach hurt, a hard knot of pain and emptiness at its center, but he could not have faced food even if any had been offered. He walked through the palisade gates of the Great Mound and curled up on the bare ground where he had awoken that morning, at the base of the pole they had bound him to. He was sound asleep well before sunset.