Clash of Eagles (16 page)

All right, then. He gestured
Question,
said “Sisika,” and followed it with the gestures for “Great,” “Sun,” and “Woman.”

“No,” they both said, still baffled, perhaps even offended, and then they reached the plaza.

Marcellinus had not seen Sisika since the evening of the battle and did not really know why he was inquiring after her; she had shown him only hostility, and he could have expected nothing else. But it felt important.

The boys had lost interest. Enopay yawned, and Tahtay bopped the smaller boy on the head. Campfires were being lit outside houses all around the plaza, and his interpreters abruptly ran off in different directions with a wave, leaving him alone.

Marcellinus set off again, then stopped and scratched his head, confused. In the end he had to go back to the Great Mound and then outward again to locate the hut in which he had woken up.

On finding it, he did not enter. He could not. He just stood there, time spilling around him, lost in thought, until someone walked up and tugged at his arm.

It was the young warrior he had first seen at the palisade gate and at the old woman’s hut. Marcellinus followed him blindly, and then the old woman was offering him a bowl of beans and some of the odd yellow and green vegetables these people ate that were all skin on the outside and only seeds and air within. Just as before, the younger woman sat outside the hut feeding her baby until Marcellinus appeared and then stormed inside.

He ate in silence, hating himself for having to subsist on handouts like any indigent living off the grain dole in Roma. Afterward he stood, offered thanks in mime, and hiked back to the Roman wagons. No one stopped him, and the wagons looked untouched when he arrived, their supplies still intact. He climbed up one of the wheels—how astonishing that these people, this whole civilization, did not use the wheel!—and sat on top of a wagon as the sun drifted slowly down toward the western river bluffs.

Somewhere on one of these two hundred wagons was a kit bag with his name on it, containing his spare clothes and the other limited possessions he had brought with him to Nova Hesperia. He had no idea which wagon it would be on. That was what his adjutants had been for, and they were all dead. It might take weeks to uncover it, and really none of its contents were relevant anymore. His old life was over.

Eventually he opened a wineskin and swallowed about a pint of the wine as night fell and turned the trees and the other wagons into silent silhouettes.

He trudged back into town past the house they had provided for his use and through the gates of the palisade. The pole they had tied him to had been removed, but he obstinately curled up there on the grass anyway.

The ground was too hard, and Marcellinus was not tired enough. The wine he had drunk hindered sleep rather than helping. He shivered.

He rolled onto his back and gazed upward. The skies had thickened with cloud, but it was not truly dark; the moon must be illuminating them from behind. By him rose the tall wooden stakes of the stockade.
Tilting his head away from them, he could look up the long slope of the Great Mound.

The mound was truly gigantic. Its base must cover a dozen acres. It was no mere lump of soil but an engineered structure of packed earth and silty clay, practically a pyramid. On a wet floodplain like this, the Cahokians who built it must have known something about drainage or it would have subsided. How long would it take even a legion to construct such a thing?

A figure loomed over him. Startled, Marcellinus sat upright, pulling a muscle in his side and sending shards of pain through the stitches in his leg. He expected a brave with a knife; he always expected a brave with a knife … but it was a woman, and not the one with the gray hair and the sore hip who fed him but someone young and lithe.

Women could be killers, too. Marcellinus scooted backward on his rump away from her. But the girl’s eyes in the night showed only disgust for him, her body language only contempt. She made a throwing motion, and a blanket landed on Marcellinus’s ankles.

And then she spit on him.

The wordless moment stretched between them, strangers, enemies, and then she turned and stalked off without a backward glance. At last he recognized her from this familiar act of walking away: it was the young mother who avoided him when he came to eat, that nameless woman full of loathing who surely must have been persuaded to bring him the blanket under sufferance, commanded by the older woman who must be her mother or mother-in-law.

She did not fear him. To her, and perhaps to all of them, Marcellinus was vermin, a war captive not even worthy of the sacrifice, fit only for the company of children who had been ordered to learn his language to communicate with future Romans. Marcellinus, a Roman Praetor and commander of legions, was reliant on the charity of a haughty, scornful, dirty people. He had no place here.

And even now Marcellinus could be slain at any time. Enough Cahokians had made their hatred of him very evident, and the young woman had worn a knife at her belt. If she had found him sleeping unprotected, might she have used it?

Despite his weariness, he could not stay here a moment longer. They were not even going to guard him? Fine. Then let them lose him.

Leaving the blanket where it lay, Marcellinus stood and walked out through the gates of the palisade, across the plaza, through the neighborhood of dark and silent houses on the other side, and on into the night.

M
arcellinus walked straight as a Roman road through the city, past the wagons, and onward. This was the way his army had swept into town, and it was the way Marcellinus left it, heading southeast. Due east technically would have been even more direct, but that route would take him through an area unknown to him: more neighborhoods, perhaps damp ground or marsh, and eventually the escarpments of the river bluffs, a challenge to navigate by night. This was the way his Legion originally had been guided into town by the Cahokians. There was a road that led through a break in the bluffs; this was the way he knew.

At any moment he expected braves to appear and bar his way, perhaps at the city’s edge. Surely someone must be watching him. What manner of people would let an enemy roam their city unguarded, with free access to their women and children? But no one came.

Let them try to stop him. He would walk around them. If they knocked him down, he would stand up and walk again. If they trussed him with sinew and carried him back, he would wait an hour or a day and then leave again. He would wear them down until they let him pass. Or killed him outright.

Marcellinus had decided that he would not idle away his days in captivity at the pleasure of barbarians. He would not be their tame language tutor. He would not keep the company of children, however engaging.
They could kill him or he would march through the night, sleep through the day, and eat berries until he was killed, starved to death, or made it back to the sea. And given the huge distance ahead of him and the savagery of the tribes in his path, the odds of his ever seeing the Mare Chesapica again were laughable.

This time there would be no horse to carry him. He did not need one. He had no duties and did not need to think. He was responsible for no one but himself.

He would not rest until dawn.

Marcellinus walked.

The wan light from the shielded moon was barely sufficient to light his way. For a while he walked by the extensive fields of Cahokian corn that fed thousands, the plants rustling quietly in the gentle breeze. Though well worn, the road he followed was Hesperian, not Roman; as often as not he found his foot dropping several inches into a hole or catching on a root. Every time it happened, he cursed silently and walked on.

Worse was the wooded area he came to next: copses of chestnut and hickory, oak, and birch. The crowns of the trees masked what little moonlight there was. Cahokians did not maintain their forest floors as free from brush and undergrowth as the Iroqua, and his legs were constantly being scratched and scored by unseen thorns.

He came out of the copse and crossed another cornfield, this one flanked by a cluster of four Cahokian houses arranged around a small head-high conical mound. The clouds were shifting, and the moon, long past full, was dropping toward the horizon. However, Marcellinus’s night sensitivity had improved, and now the growing darkness troubled him less. He tripped rarely now, taking the natural rise and fall of the land beneath him in stride. He picked up the pace when he saw the next stand of trees in his way.

Through to the other side of it, he saw no further Cahokian houses. A small field separated him from another stretch of trees. His mood lifted just a little.

He heard a faint clicking.

Marcellinus knew the sounds of animals and already had heard the rustlings of owls and field mice. He was familiar with the whisper of the breeze as it shifted the ears of corn. This noise was none of those.

He was currently walking into a small, shallow bowl of land; this close to the Mizipi floodplain the topography was all minor, yet he was clearly on a gradual downhill incline, the horizon lifting around him by a few degrees. There was nothing nearby any taller than a knee-high bush. He had seen no human beings since he had walked away from the plaza. Yet his senses told him someone was near.

The inhabitants of Cahokia were not night walkers. The Great City had slumped into inactivity just moments after the end of twilight. And out here there were no dwellings; no one would wander this far afield through insomnia or bodily needs.

Maybe Marcellinus had not left Cahokia behind, after all. Was he being trailed?

Then,
ahead
of him at the edge of the next copse, he glimpsed the faintest of motions.

It was not the wind in the brush, and Marcellinus did not think it was a deer. But he did not understand how any braves who were supposed to be following him had managed to get so far ahead or why they would need to unless it was to lie in wait and apprehend him.

Or kill him.

Reaching the lower limit of the bowl-like depression, he found the tiniest of streams flowing through it. He slid to the ground in a single movement, collapsing as smoothly as a dropped tunic.

Marcellinus had been walking southeast, so if he followed the path of the stream, his options were now to crawl north or south. He chose south solely because the four houses and the small mound had been to his right when he had walked past them twenty minutes before and because beyond them had been a more extensive stand of trees. To the north there was no significant cover within crawling distance, and eventually the Cahokian creek might block his path. Therefore, he crawled southward, but long before he came to trees, road, field, or houses he came across a pair of opportunistic bushes growing out of the side of the
gully cut by the stream and alongside them a deeper cutaway ditch. There he stopped and lay still.

Perhaps it had been suicide for him to try to leave Cahokia. Well, so be it.

Time passed. The moon set. And then they walked right past him, no more than twenty paces away, six braves in a line. One of them muttered something, and the Hesperian in the lead made a curt gesture, the hand-talk for “no.” Clearly, grumbling was not permitted on this expedition.

They looked to right and left as they passed him, all alert, but Marcellinus was doing such a superlative impression of a lichen-covered rock that none of them even paused for a second glance.

Marcellinus waited. Now what?

After two hundred breaths, he raised his head. Three more groups of braves were moving through the open area, six men per group. Behind them, nothing and nobody so far as he could tell.

Well.

Wearily, he placed his face down in the dirt. Opened his mouth to let the sultry water of the stream dribble into his mouth and cool his throat.

For long moments Marcellinus had no idea what to do. His mind was blank, his muscles quivering in reaction, his heart pounding. This was the last thing he had expected.

Pursuit from behind would have been no surprise. But these braves, two dozen in total that Marcellinus had seen so far, had not been on his trail. They probably had not even seen him. Because they were heading in the opposite direction, heading toward Cahokia from the east.

And over the last few days, even Marcellinus’s tin ear had grown accustomed to Cahokian consonants and the natural rhythm of their speech. The words muttered by the passing warrior had had a different cadence altogether.

Stealthily, Marcellinus pushed himself up onto his hands and knees and made ready to hunt the Iroqua war party.

Back toward Cahokia he went, toward the city where he was neither a guest nor a captive, ignored rather than honored, and absorbed with
condescending ease. Back toward a life he had forsworn just hours earlier.

On reaching the edge of the cornfield, the group of Iroqua stopped and huddled. Marcellinus used the extra time to skulk across behind them, closer to the trees. He still would not get to the houses before the Iroqua did but would perhaps at least be near enough to raise some kind of alarm.